 52, so just short of 11 minutes or so before 11 a.m. Sharon will let us know. I feel certain we need to be wrapping up, but it sounds like we can go just a little bit longer if there's interest with this discussion. There are a couple of questions that are already on the table I want to put to people. I also want to make sure that John Breving, who is the director of our D.R. Scholars Program, if you're interested, can jump into this conversation. Gary Commiskey, one of the faculty talking about the Roosevelt children, so if you have thoughts, make sure you do. And Greg, where are you? Greg Nguyen, who's on the executive board of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, but a collector of Roosevelt, and somebody who's done a lot of work on Roosevelt, some are not exclusive just to the people who are up here, but there were a couple of questions that came up that Dr. Martin decided would be best left to this discussion. One was about tension in the Roosevelt family. The myth is, of course, that Alice was the rebel and the others less so, and the question was, did any of the other children resist the family pattern or the Roosevelt's very strong opinions about family and about what children in the Roosevelt family should do so that there's no one left to weigh in on that other rebellion against the Roosevelt. He lost. Well, certainly raising the six children, they were moments of pushing and pulling, as one might understand, in terms of full scale rebellion, I think Alice is really far ahead of her siblings and resisting them, but there certainly are little moments, and I think Archie is the most alienated from the family story, and his memoirs are full of grievances and anger at getting left behind the church when everybody else and being kind of the dumb child, and so he resisted that, and I think he also moved to the right of his father politically quite a bit. That was the former rebellion to be a member of the John Birch Society when his father was basically a local Republican, and at times a bull loser, which is even farther left of the Republican party at this time. So those are rebellions of sort. Ethel was not rebellious and kind of kept her father's faith and the family's faith by saying he's that more hell than being a good daughter. Kermit, you know, bringing himself close to death, so that's not really rebellion, that's more self-destruction. Anyone else just jump in at any point if you have thoughts? The other question that came up was about TR and Edith and about different parenting styles or tensions in the marriage, but it came out of the notion of the possibility that they had different parenting styles. And I think opinions on Edith are very pretty dramatically. Some people think that Edith was the ideal mother and the ideal mate for Roosevelt. Others believe that she was a very stern and at times cruel parent that she said biking and sarcastic things. Can you all reflect a little bit about the Edith-TR relationship and Edith as parent? Okay. Well, with Edith and TR, yes, they did have some difference of opinion about how to raise children. Edith thought TR was more permissive that he'd take the kids out for a picnic and bring them back covered with mud. And then she'd have to deal with the aftermath with clothes. So I think his kind of sailing in and playing with kids in raucous ways made it hard for her. When you have six kids, you have to have some sort of order even if you have a servant. And so for her, he was a permissive, wild parent and she tried to maintain regular routines in order to become a household. She did express some criticism of how hard she was with Ted and the fact that Ted had these headaches and was really driven by his father and Edith does express some opinions, at least in my book. And some examples of her wishing that TR hadn't really pushed his son quite so ruthlessly as he did. So I think generally, no two parents with James said no two parents are alike in terms of children. I've never known two people who would agree about everything. So they loved each other, they got along. But Stacey Cowley has a different opinion here. I do, and I certainly agree that Edith was actually a sort of traditional reversal. She was probably more of a disciplinarian than TR was. She's there. Yeah, I have to say that while TR is not there, these absent, lots of parents travel with business in these days now and I'm not sure that that always cuts down on your effectiveness in the household. There are stories that say, well, not just with his own children but with his cousin's children going on some of these long-rowing adventures around days with his cousin's families. There's one great incident where apparently it was very hot and all the kids were bored. All the parents were sort of sitting around resting after the rowing. And so TR said, take the kids on a hike and he tromped off with nine or ten kids and they all wanted to go swimming. And since it was a mixed group, TR thought he'd be improper for them to take off their clothes and go swimming. So he let them go in the water and they all got all their clothes on the wet and came marching back, and I guess Edith ruined, or Alice ruined, the wolf that had been in her pocket and stained her dress red and all of the cousins and Edith were disapproving of this later. And Ted convinced her that the children came to TR that evening because Edith was going to dose them all with castor oil because he was worried that they'd be getting sick or chill and they tried to get TR to intervene and he said, sorry, guys, I'm lucky I'm not getting a dose from castor oil. So I think there was, here are my neurones, dudes. There are certain examples of TR being the more indulgent parent. There's a story, the only time really that he ejected that we know about, the children at dinner, the youngest children sat near their mother and the older children sat near their father and as another child they were joined at the table, everyone moved to a spot. But TR overheard a conversation between Edith and Archie and they were both there one night and Edith was saying basically, no, you were misbehaved today, you were bad, you cannot sit next to me at dinner, you have to sit next to your father. And TR was upset that somehow sitting next to him was regarded as punishment. But so I think Archie once said that mother took no prisoners. I think that Edith had a very strong personality and she wasn't afraid to express it or sort of act in her own defense. So I think in terms of discipline and raising, I think she would have the dominant influence anyway within her definition. Pardon me for one minute. Alright, she won't let me. I already want to know. Okay, so let me. Alright, so first I would like to congratulate all of you for being here during this symposium because you are what educators like ourselves call lifelong learners. And it is an amazing and wonderful thing to see all of you here sticking out for the last day and listening to us asking such great questions. And so the real joy in a symposium like this for me is interacting with you and hearing your questions and so I just want to say thanks to you and thank you to those of you. And part of what's exciting about this kind of proximity to the scholars is that you learn what's behind some of what we do that you wouldn't get no leave only due to your narratives. So I want to tell you what I thought was very illuminating a bit of wisdom from Kathleen Dalton that I heard that she said to me a year ago when we were out in your own territory suddenly in TR's birthday. And if you've read my book you know that I kind of have to take Alice's side on Eden because I'm Alice's biographer and after all I came to look at TR through Alice's eyes. In fact, I wrote that first book on TR while I was in middle working on Alice so that I could better understand TR because I only knew TR from Alice's perspective which is you got it in that kind of one-dimensional perspective. So I don't have very many good things to say about Eden in my book, at least until Alice is launched and is out of the house when their relationship becomes much closer. Meanwhile, Kathleen Dalton, if you read her extraordinary biography of TR, has some tough words for Alice, you know, and she really likes Eden more than you would think I like Eden in my book. So, and there are other historians who have, you know, come out on either side of the Eden if it was great but misunderstood and she wasn't all that tough. She just had a lot of work, you know, and she always had the kids and TR, you know, buggered off to wherever. And meanwhile, you know, then, well, here's what Kathleen said. Do you want to tell them? I don't really know what you're talking about. Oh, right. That's a big deal. It was really eye-opening. Okay, so what she said was, look, Stacy, I could sympathize. I could empathize with Eden because I had a teenage daughter. When I was writing this book. And my teenage daughter was giving me, not as bad as Alice, but giving me bits. And so my sympathies were completely related. She said, meanwhile, you started Alice, writing Alice, reading Alice, when you were not that far removed from Alice's age when she was her daughter. So, of course, you're going to take Alice's side on this. And I think that was really, you know, we wouldn't put that in our books, but I think you, as like-long learners, might appreciate this insight into how our books get shaped and how scholars write what they write, even though we look at the same documents. So we can't even, you know, there's just things in objective history, right? But I thought that was really good insight. And we've been friends for many years, so... We were talking about this. I mean, it's been my friend's factor in my role model. We're much more friends. I owe a lot to Kathleen. I want to ask you all a question about this, and it's a great moment for me to deal with. I put a question that I puzzle over for a long time. You know, somebody quoted yesterday that a diplomat said, if you want to understand President Roosevelt, you just need to realize he's about a six-year-old child. And Edith frequently says, he's my fifth or sixth child, depending on how you do the counting and so on. I want to ask you to sort of talk a little bit about TR as a lifelong child, if that makes any sense. Is this true? I mean, is this part of the Roosevelt mythology and that a lot is made of this, but it's really not a very useful way to talk about him? Or could you argue, there are accounts of great men and women whose primary parent was cut off during their adolescence and Thomas Jefferson's father died when he was 14. George Washington's father died when he was 12, DR's father died when he was 20, and what the Eric Gareksons of the world always say about that is that a person whose parent dies before they're fully formed locks in that parent as an idealized parent and gets stuck in certain ways about maturing into a fully integrated adult human being, and that this can be really good because it unleashes Jeffersonian energies, but nevertheless, there can be a sort of paralysis of some sort that comes. What is it about TR that makes him a lifelong child, or is that the right way to look at it? And what are the implications of that, not only for his being a parent, but also for his role as the most strenuous president in American history? So who wants to start in on that? Oh, I don't buy that. I mean, that goes back to... What's his name, Chesley? He wrote that. Oh, Chesley. Wasn't Chesley? Yeah, this is that six-year-old theory that I think, oh, come on, if you're in a part of a relationship, which one of us hasn't talked about something like that about your spouse? I mean, something like that, okay? But they were famous and they got written down, and remembered, and so we made much of that. And historians we selectively pick, you know, because we can't put everything in our books, maybe 9,000 pages long. But I don't buy... I've never bought Chesley's theory about Roosevelt as the internal child, because I, just to say it simply, I don't see how anybody who accomplished what he accomplished in diplomacy, in politics, in nearly every field in his life could do that and still have a mentality of six-year-old. And I understand, you know, I've got a therapist friend who says, most people never evolved past five years old, okay? But I just... I think that the man had a lot of favor and a kind of a happiness about him, but I don't put that down to being an internal six-year-old, which I take as a pejorative. Oh, this is it. Wasn't this a shtick? I mean, he's the youngest guy with everything he does. Yeah. And you can... I was the youngest guy in my department like 10 years. It's pretty fun being a young guy. You know, this is a very minor thing. But he had no attention span apparently either. That seems to me he bumps his ground quite a bit. I don't mean that you reply, but it's a kind of a beaker to me. It's a course to see, like, which has certain elements of being a child, as opposed to, you know, but more clearly, like being a boy. And what Hollywood described as a boy is that this is somewhat unlike how a man should be. And he doesn't have to act like a child and have some of that joy of being a child. I think in politics it's shtick. You know, this is what he is. He's a young guy doing his important thing. But he's not an expert. I... I... There's no way, Pete. I was a kid forever. I mean, come on. That's just great to talk. One of the things that makes me crazy... Tiara never gets it. The beans... Tiara's a really smart guy. It's not that he has a short attention span. It is that he is literally smart enough to balance five and sixteen minutes at a time. You know, there are sorts of stories from this ballet or from people traveling with him. T.R. read probably a book every day. He read two books. Sometimes he always traveled with two or three books and in a train trip would read all of them. There's a story about Ellen Wister coming to the Stagmore Hill and handing T.R. his new book at Bedtime. And in the morning T.R. handed the book back to Ellen and Wister said, oh, well, that's for you to read. And he said, oh, he read it. He read it in that evening. And T.R., he didn't have... What do they call it? Ingenic memory? Not a photographic memory. He could literally read and remember things. And he could recite passages of books back. And one of the reasons that memorizing poetry was such a pleasure for him is that he could actually remember it with a whole lot of effort. He was not an eternal child, but he was, you know, and I'd like the station to comment about you guys all being lifetime learners. I really think T.R. is sort of the ultimate lifetime learner. The thing that is always fascinating to me is that he stays interested in new things. He doesn't sort of hit a point in his life where it's like, oh, boy, when I was a kid, you know, we did it this way. He's interested in the new things. He reads new poetry. He goes to the Cuminism, to the Armory Show, and does a review of Cubism paintings. And he's, you know, quite honest. He says, I don't understand it all, but I like some of it. But he's actually open to some of that. One of my favorite stories about T.R. is in 1917, with Florida, to Punta Cordo, with a friend of his who had made a fortune and had retired, become an amateur theologist. And these two self-described old men, went out in rowboats on Tampa Bay, and they speared manta rays with harpoons. I mean, these guys are nuts. What are you doing out there? But we have this wonderful album of photographs from this devilfish hunt. And, I mean, we're talking about guys and rowboats dragging manta rays onto shore that are bigger than the boats are. You know, they're lucky they didn't get killed or at least knocked into the water or something. And T.R. very proudly brought home one of the harpoon books that had been bent. It hadn't actually, he apparently didn't get his harpoon into the ray because it bent. It literally is like a sea if it bent so far. But, you know, he's 58 years old. It's two years before his death. And he's still curious enough to go down to Florida and to see what his friend is doing firsthand. So, yeah. We never call him Joe, like they say in my book. We do usually say, he was nuts. It's just crazy. Well, I want to get to know this as well. Before you go, I would agree with Amy about the degrading of Roosevelt's intellect. And I think it comes from, I mean, there's a lot of us not taking him seriously as an intellectual. I think it's a terrible mistake. You look at what he wrote. You look at what he did when he was in Germany in 1910. He lectured at German universities in German on German literature. Try that. This is an extraordinary man. I think one night there was a woman from Hungary at the White House. And he talked through the evening with her about Hungarian literature. I don't even know. I can't even see a Hungarian author. This is a man who read widely in European culture classics through five languages. He wrote 150,000 letters. More than 30 books. Some of them are extraordinary books. But also, I mean, I think because of this, it's probably because his life is so strenuous and hectic that the ashes sort of gets in the way of the contemplation. There are times when you literally wonder when did he read those books a day? If you're hiking, jumping, killing bears, wrestling with the children, cleaning up after spitballs in the White House's art gallery, when do you read the book a day? So that's probably something I'm exaggeration about his reading habits, but he does seem to be able to do it when he wants to. But I just want to make one complaint against Edmund Morris. I like Edmund Morris's first book a lot. And his second book quite a bit. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex. But he's a snob about Roosevelt's intellect. And he goes out of his way in his biography to the little Roosevelt intellectually. He says his books are Pablo and they're sloppily researched, which sometimes they were. And that he is a worker of platitudes rather than a serious intellectual. I think that Morris has done damage to Roosevelt's reputation as an intellectual by making too great a criticism of his life as a man of latter school. Well, I agree with you about what Edmund Morris says about a TR as a writer and intellectual. I think TR was extremely bright and was taken very seriously. He was president of the American Historical Association and wrote important histories. I mean, they were celebrations of military might and fighting men. And that's definitely gone out of style in terms of what historians think matters. And so a lot of historians criticize him. But he wrote literary criticism and he wrote all kinds of... He was a broad-ranging, serious intellectual. There's just no question about that. So I agree with you. And, well, do you want me to come in? It's about six months. My only comment about that is I certainly agree with what's been said. But I just gave a talk about TR and John Muir and the trip they took together. And one of the things that these two men had in common was a lifelong sense of wonder. And they bonded about the beauty of the giant sequoias. And TR had more placefulness in him than John Muir. And so I think the placefulness and the sense of wonder that TR never lost, although he did have some periods of despair and depression later in life, especially. And periods in his youth where he was kind of lost trying to figure out his direction. So it's not as if he's exuberant every moment of his whole life. But I do think the sense of wonder and the placefulness are really odd enough for a politician at that time and his high energy that that's why people say he was a child. Because he would often say, oh, you know, let's stop this meeting, let's go to the Rock Creek Park. And that a lot of politicians wouldn't do that. So I don't think he was a childish. It's my last chance to be a boy. He doesn't talk that way. He has a persona of boyish exuberance. I think he could be a child of life. You know, when TR was starting in Marfield, he was there, you know, waiting for work. And yet people continued to come and want to meet with them, politicians or government officials or something. And there were plenty of occasions where there was a famous meeting with John Burroughs, who was a viewer, cashier. And he brought up some members of the legislature to talk to TR about it, the conservation issues. TR amendment to Pontorin just said, I can't stay inside anymore. It's a beautiful day. Let's go for a walk. And, you know, they discussed their issues. When he dragged them all over to Saigon Marfield, you know, he showed them an apple tree that he climbed in the day before and put a baby bird back in the nest. And things like that. But, you know, as much as anything, a lot of times he just had to get out of the house as poor, you know, because it was vacation, basically. I was just going to comment. Have you read K. Redfield James's book about exuberance? K. Redfield James's about exuberance. Yes, you talked about it, and I think that's good. Well, I mentioned her earlier book in the footnotes of my book, which is that I think there's enough evidence to say that as a young man, he may have had a sort of blue disorder that's related to elation. People don't understand about mental health, which is that one out of three families have some kind of mental health issue. It's very common, and blue disorders are quite common, so that if you know people who are bipolar or manic or obsessive, if you watch the television program, Monk, you know that obsessive get-pulsive is an extreme case. But they are, I'm sure, the people in this room with blue disorders. I just have to tell you that, you know, I have college roommates who have written about it, obsessive and compulsive issues that they have, and it's very, very common. So it doesn't mean that you're crazy, which is I realize that's not a political word that we're using here. But as a young man, he had these rushes of energy and kind of a passionate, you know, high energy, intense energy times, but he learned to control it. And certainly, Edith helped him with that. And this is from Henry Cabellage. You've got to keep these moods, these high moods under control. So I think Kaye Jameson's, the person to read about the variety of moods that people captured by. And I think TR got a handle on it. So I think he was under control. Kaye Redfield Jameson exuberance, she also wrote Night Falls and Fast, which is about suicide and extraordinary chapter on marriage. Now the theme of the playful six-year-old that's nuts. Would it be appropriate that everyone have to do at least a short game of point-to-point on our audience today? Uses gets one dose of coffee on castor oil. We take fish oil now instead of castor oil. It's healthy. What we have to talk about is, who would have called, you know, would have called him TR? Who would have called him T-E-E? We haven't talked about like, what would Edith have called T-E-R-O-N-O. When did they start using TR as an initial? We haven't talked about Arthur Rand up here, what his, you know, grandchild would have built him out. How do we get to call TR? What are the names? T-E? T-R, Teddy, etc. It's fairly clear that his ranch hands called him Mr. Roosevelt. TR was a ranch man. He was not a cowboy. And, you know, while the cowboys were sort of doing heavy lifting, TR liked to go to rodeos and such, but he also spent a lot of time riding on prairie and hiking. Should be things. Within the family, his nicknames were Tee and Tee. Tee is a little boy. Tee, similar to his father, there's a story that after his father died, he asked his family to call him Theodore. That, you know, he did take his father's death very hard, and he writes in his diary that he hopes he can do something in his life to honor him. And the first sort of little step he took was to ask him to be called Theodore. But Alice called him Teddy. Alice called him Teddy. Alice called him Teddy. Alice least called him Teddy. And other people calling him Teddy, he did not care for. And after her death, you know, he had called him Theodore, which he known him all of his life. And, you know, he was probably darling also. But friends called him TR, or they called him Colonel. They did not call him Teddy. He came to terms with Teddy. He was so widely used that although he didn't like it, he eventually just shrugged it off. Crowds called him Teddy. Crowds called him Teddy. But, I mean, within the sort of family or the circle of friends, you could judge where you stood. If you were still calling him Teddy, you wouldn't know how close you were. So on any given evening, when either the TR are reading books, or she was in the car, or perhaps she said Theodore, the name of the fashion between them, and what would he have been? Edie and Edith. We don't say Teddy is anyone. George, please. A couple of points to throw in here. Just to tell you what happened. He did sign his name TR on occasion. He did use the initials TR. More often than not, he hates. I never used them really formally. He did use also Theo Rosso Jr. reports until his father died. That, in fact, he published summer birthday on Arondacks as Theo Roosevelt Jr. But to the point where we're talking about boyish qualities, I agree with Edwin Morris. It makes much of the boyish aspect of the TR personality. I agree with the panel. He's far more sophisticated than that. I think Edwin Morris is right to some degree with TR's literary pursuits. I agree 100% that he was an academic. He's an intellectual. Some of his writing is just not the part. He wasn't a hat. But remember, he did write to make money. Some of his stuff is just not as good as perhaps. Other stuff is brilliant. If you look at read the preface for the introduction of book lovers' Holidays in the Open, which was done in 1916, which for one thing is a great title of book lovers' Holidays in the Open. I think it's probably one of his best books. The introduction to that book is extraordinary. There's just two pages of just great prose. The second thing is I think Professor Galton had a chapter in her book called The Sensitive Plant. He made much of TR's sort of masculine verbato. But he can also do his feelings here. He was very sensitive in that regard and I think her chapter was titled that after a quote that he made of him where she called him the sensitive plant. I think we see that at times. He was very easily scolded. Edith was of course good at it. L.U. Group was another good one that I could sort of scold him and get away with it. But he was able to get his feelings hurt. We see that in a lot of ways throughout his life. Also some of the tragedies he dealt with as well where he puts a lid on it and he will yield them again. I think the summary has sort of why did Theodore give up Junior? And why is Ted Junior and not Ted Roosevelt the third? I think it's just sort of I don't think it was a conscious decision. Theodore President gave up the Junior when his father died and when he became the living senior Roosevelt. Ted just because there was so much publicity got identified and it was Ted Junior. It was Ted Roosevelt Junior and that just always stuck with him. Interesting thing about the number in the family is that Theodore Roosevelt the President then sort of erases his father's existence and he becomes Theodore Roosevelt Theodore Roosevelt and then his son becomes Ted Junior TR2 and then Ted's son is TR3 as if there hadn't been a big debate. That's what's so odd is that when you have a really famous president you start counting the theaters from the famous theater No, there's TR4 but he pre-sets the family line. Well, there's TR4 Go ahead. I've heard in college that they have this thing that they have to do with this big sequence. You know, having these near-death experiences makes you take life much more seriously today and since those asthma things happened to him he was young and a young man I think it was a legend I'm just wondering Through all of his asthma making him a strenuous advocate and a strenuous man I think that's entirely plausible that embracing life and the enjoyment of your day but it is true that he was also taught that he really told his children is your duty not to whine and to embrace the life that's given to you and to embrace every day and to live life constructively so it was a learned experience but I'm sure there's probably a psycho-dynamic thing to do You certainly know people who've had near-death experiences often they're different from that. I'd like to go back to the desertion or abandonment of his daughter I don't agree with that at all that's been run up several times go back to 1880s and what would a father have done preserving or abandoning his daughter he left her on the sidewalk and he didn't the sister was very capable of taking care of her I'd like to explore that anymore does that bother me we've heard several people talk about TRM and his daughter after the death of his first wife and whether that was an abandonment or an entrusting or whatever but she'd like us to clarify that Abandonment is the word that I use in my book but I did not write and I do not believe that Theodore Roosevelt abandoned his daughter in that traditional sense that's not all that I wrote what I meant was that for Alice the perception for Alice that and not necessarily when she was a very young girl but when she was older and couldn't make some sense of this that Alice had been abandoned by her mother who died through no fault of her own her father abandoned her to go out west and take care of his own grieving but left with the sister so not abandon her on the sidewalk then her aunt abandoned her when instead of staying around to help Alice make the transition to life in the theater she went abroad for many good reasons but she wasn't there to help out and then Alice would face other abandonments in her life later Nick Longworth abandoned her to women and alcohol and so forth so I see this abandonment as a kind of theme that runs through Alice's book but I hope to high heaven I do not overplay that card and I never intended to fault Alice Halfway-Libosville nor default Bami nor default TR for what Alice may have perceived as abandonment later in her life and you know I'm a historian so I hope I never decided to start with context and while children didn't get sent on working trains out west and so forth and while I know there was real abandonment in 19th century and 19th century America Alice never faced that kind of physical nor even necessarily that kind of emotional abandonment because she grew up in an intact family and she was a step child but she was a much loved half sister and step child and you know I know Edith cared about her I know Edith loved her I just know that they were like they could be like oil and water so I never intended to say okay I don't think that I wrote this I think that I wrote that and so the shorthand maybe gets translated and I did not ever mean from the adult's perspective that they willfully, purposefully ignored or abandoned Alice I was trying to as a writer understand her psyche and all I can say about this is the only people who've ever made note of the psychology in my book I had two comments from two different people wrote me letters and one woman wrote and said there is too much psychology in this book drives me crazy and the next that I got the next week was why is it not more of an attempt to understand the children's psychology which made me think the big guy hit the right knee sure how are we doing okay Alice can ask for the privilege of the last question but we'll take two more alright so next this is sort of changing the topic a little bit but I wanted to reflect more here a little bit about your analysis of reflections as we drive up to Ellicorne Ranch about this the Dakota Territorial Native American Culture and what TR's perception of Native Americans was what taught this family about the closure of the frontier and Native American culture in general TR on Native Americans as I looked at that wonderful exhibit about the Edward Curtis photographs of them TR children Edward Curtis has been criticized for the way he recorded the photographs of the lost native natives of the west but TR and Curtis are part of an early 20th century beginning a step away from the post-custer really genocidal attitude so TR doesn't have a really great policy but he has some people he sends out as performances and book by William Haynes about this but it puts him in a somewhat more favorable light than we really understood but if you read One in the West or Trips of a Ranchman you're not going to get very nice things said about Native Americans so I can honestly say that I can't think of anything that I mean to have Navajo rugs in Zagmor Hill and there's a sense that TR Leighton Life did go to the Hopi he studied and wrote about snake dances and had the glimmering of an anthropological appreciation of Native American culture later in life but maybe if he lived longer that would have been on his agenda but I have so many feelings about considering him a real friend of the Indian because of his writings but some people do consider him a reformer William Haynes would be the person to to ask Peter Rochon was surprised at the idea If I can just add something to that even as early as the 1890s when he was civil service commissioner he did make a trip through the Indian reservations in the West and published a report that while not what we would consider by today's standards to be necessarily favorable did endorse more positive treatment of the Indians on the reservation in fact that was actually printed by the Indian Rights Association in Philadelphia that were proponent to Indian efforts he addresses this question in The Rough Riders 2 and says that he likes this Indian and that Indian but not Indian this very much and not tribalism very much but in Winning of the West he makes extremely stark statements about the righteousness of the Indian wars and the sort of Kipling-esque statements about the white man's burden the necessary righteousness of the crime of Anglo-American culture over the Native Americans but it's a very complex subject there's no easy way to talk about T.R. Indians and the white really wild thing that he said is often quoted out of context I want to say that the only good Indians of that Indian was through 9 times out of 10 and I wouldn't be too sure about the 10 that's a really awful statement it has taken way too far out of context because it's a complex subject and he had a considerable intercourse with Native peoples when he was in North Dakota and writes it for soon they thought it for that period you can't brand it easily in any single direction well and like everyone I think we have to do a concurrency of accepting that T.R. grew intellectually and changed and so at different points in his life he will have different aspects and different thoughts on this I'm a little kinder a little less tough on T.R. and Native Americans in my little book than I think Kathleen is but she's right as well the other point too is that T.R. theoretically tends to be different than T.R. personally you know he has similar issues when you talk about race relations and T.R. and yet person to person he had black friends who came to Sadmore Hill he employed James Ames as a valet on his famous 20th marches he had actually defended James Ames's father who worked for the DC jail system supervised prisoners who were out cutting the grass in Rock Creek Park and he would stop and talk to them and see how the day was going and it was actually the father who said my son is looking for a job and T.R. was like all of a sudden at the White House you know I had a terrible job for we need a babysitter or I started sporting for the Roosevelt and it's T.R.'s one-to-one interactions always show them a better light than these theoretical discussions the trips he made as president when he did stop in the west at some of the reservations he's concerned, he sees it as his responsibility as president to try to improve the life of this group of citizens' lives I think he does write later sort of a melancholy about the passing of the great tribes and how the descendants have to learn a new way of life but he also felt very clearly that they needed to learn a new way of life he was thoroughly assimilated in his policies we've got time for one more to get it explain the how the bad blood between T.R. and T.R. started how did the bad blood between the T.R. and Long Island line get started and where is it there's one simple incident in 1920 when Ted Junior was running for governor against Al Smith Franklin Roosevelt was polio he can't go out on campaign and somebody asks Eleanor Roosevelt to take his place and she'd done it around the state a couple of times but she showed up somewhere of stake they had made a float and they had made a float with a big giant teapot that they would somehow raise to have little smoke signals coming out of the teapot referencing the teapot dump scandal implying that Ted had somehow benefited from ripping off the government and Alnarn in a real bad choice decided she was willing to climb up and ride on this float needless to say the Oyster Bay Roosevelt were more than just a little offended by that and that really is sort of the big split talk about a group of people holding the grudge for a long time that they did you know it's interesting because you know Franklin was always Democrat and his father was Democrat the family had sort of peacefully coexisted until until that incident I think in 1912 Franklin publicly said that he was supporting TR because he was more of a Democrat than Woodrow Wilson was so yeah, that damn float and that just really okay it was 1920s, 1924 and FDR didn't support TR in 1912 he supported Wilson sorry it needs to hurt you there but the T-Bot Dome thing happened in 1922 minor facts I'm sorry to but the families were close for a long time and even after the T-Bot Dome incident Kermit remains friends with FDR and the FDRs in the White House and they maintain some relationship with Eleanor it's a split but it's not a complete breach but Edith is bitter about what happened with the T-Bot Dome and she's mad that Kermit remains friends with FDR there is a news report when Edith was in the Philippines visiting Ted and one of the newspaper reporters said there's news reports saying that Kermit is out sailing with FDR and apparently Edith actually answered and said it's because his mother's not a mother I know the wish of that time but if you really I tried with my chapter in Alice on the relationship between Alice and FDR and ER to sort of tease this out so there's a whole series of examples of the bad love between them there if you're interested Thank you First of all, thanks I wish we could just spend the rest of the day doing this and still go on for the Elkhorn I love it when scholars are on a panel and you can throw anything you want at them and somebody plays with it and somebody made me disagree it's important to realize there's no settled narrative that history is a series of perspectives and each generation has its own way of seeing and scholars don't always agree with each other even about facts sometimes and certainly how to read documents and it's important for all of us to realize that history is a series of negotiations rather than a final narrative that can ever be agreed upon by all of us so I love this I wish we had 3 more hours