 wonderful speaker for you today. Theodore Roosevelt scholar who spent over 27 years of her professional career researching the life of Theodore Roosevelt and other topics of historical interest. Dr. Kathleen Dalton comes to us today from Andover, Massachusetts, where she serves as the Cecil F. E. Baycroft instructor of history and social studies and co-director of the Brace Center for Gender Studies at Phillips Academy. Educated at Mills College and John Hopkins University, Professor Dalton has been studying Theodore Roosevelt's life for most of her professional career. She has taught at Boston University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and American American University. She has held prestigious scholar fellowships, two of them, one from the Gilder-Lurman Institute of American History, and the Charles Warren Center for American Studies and American History at Harvard University. She has published several books, but many of you are probably familiar with A Strenuous Life, praised as the best one-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt by the Library Journal, the New York Review of Books, and our own Clay James. In his review of A Strenuous Life, James McGregor Burns had this to say, at a time when we yearn for great moral leadership and conviction, Kathleen Dalton brings back a man who marvelously embraced these qualities and a continually dramatic account told with skill and grace. Ladies and gentlemen, please extend a warm North Dakota welcome to Kathleen Dalton. Okay, one of the things that I realized that it's good to talk about what you care about, and one of the things I really have cared about is being a history teacher, whether it's on the university level or the high school level, and one of the things that I've worked with my students on over the years is trying to look critically at sources, and I'm sure that this is something you've heard from your history teachers, which is don't turn in any papers with Wikipedia as a source, because even though it is democratization of knowledge, it is often plagiarized, did you know that, that people take encyclopedia articles and then turn them around and put them in Wikipedia, and the onions, I'm just telling Greg with this, that the onion has a satire of the American Revolution as interpreted by Wikipedia, and that is 500 years ago, 40 people started the revolution. The onion is a humor journal online, and it satirizes Wikipedia as an unreliable source of knowledge, and I have a nephew who's a very bright kid who's now a Turkish studies specialist for the federal government, and one of the pranks that he did as a high school student was to post false things that Herman Melville had written on Wikipedia to see how long it would take for them to notice false knowledge, because it's unmediated, and so people will put things up on Wikipedia, including some of my students, often take the material and just either plagiarize it or invent it. So let me just say, yes, it's good to have internet, and yes, we live in a revolutionary age, but one of the reasons to be educated, especially person to person, and one of the reasons to have a history education is to look very seriously and critically at your sources, and one of the first things you learn in graduate school, and I'm sure that's true here, for a master's degree students in history, some of you have met, is to consider your sources, and always look at the, you get a primary document or secondary document, primary, eyewitness, secondary, is a book written about an event after it's happened, and students can do this, anybody can do this, look at when it was written, who wrote it, try to find out why, and look critically at some of the things that are said in that book. One of the things you can, I don't know if you have Barnes and Noble out here, many malls have them, what do you do? Okay, all right. I had some, when I went on a book tour after my book came out, I had the misguided assumption that local bookstores would be more erudite and knowledgeable than the big corporations, and that I was sort of anti-corporate in my attitudes towards the book business. Well, one of the things I learned, in fact, was that yes, what gets put out on the tables at these big corporate bookstores are, there's a bribing system that publishers use, product placement, publishers pay to have these tables, and so that what's out on the table when you walk into a big corporate bookstore is not necessarily quality goods, I know I probably don't need to say this, but I think for young students, you're just trying to, you're trying to figure out what's valid knowledge, what is truth, what is reliable. We live in an age where we're bombarded by a huge amount of information, and information is not knowledge. Information is stuff you get from the internet, some of it's completely worthless, and I just have to say, I've had students turn in term papers, we all require term papers, where they got all of their information from an extremist political site where they claimed to have invented documents that FDR planned Pearl Harbor. Okay, not true. Okay, FDR did not plan Pearl Harbor. There's evidence that the United States had broken the Japanese Code and that some people in the United States government had a clue that the initial attacks when we're gonna be all over the Pacific and possibly Pearl Harbor, but if that knowledge was not at the White House, there's just no evidence for that, except on the internet, and students tend to look at the internet uncritically because technology is seductive, it is so exciting, and it's one of those things that, you know, I'm delighted and I'm thrilled to be here when you're on the, you know, kind of this take-off moment with your digitization project, and I just want to say the difference between your digitization project and what most of internet is, is that this is reliable scholarly use of primary sources, and students will be able to look at these things as primary sources. This is serious scholarship going up on the web, and I hardly endorse it, and I believe in it, and I think it's a wonderful thing that you're doing. Internet, again, is addictive, and let me just say, somebody who has raised two children who are at the stage of being tired of hearing what I have to say, it's addictive, and a lot of people can't let go of internet, and yet it's really important to step back and say, okay, what are the forms of judgment that I need to use in seeing what I'm looking at? Am I being persuaded by somebody who's put some stuff out to try to tell me falsehoods? Because there's a lot of false information there. So again, the first thing you learn in history graduate school is to consider your source, and I would argue that one of the reasons to study history, to do graduate work in history, and other fields were not the only field, although sometimes I feel that way, that in fact, learning how to judge a source critically is one of the most important things that you can do as a citizen. We're all going to have to judge politicians. We all do judge politicians all the time. Looking at different sources of information, good to read both sides of the political spectrum, and to go deeper than what news programs will often have you say. So one of the examples I can give you about considering the source is Theodore Roosevelt's Strenuous Life speech, which many people look at as a document of, am I getting some feedback here? I'll step away. Theodore Roosevelt said, and we've brought this up before in the symposium, that he gave this stirring speech, which was his address to an American society at an age of industrialization, where most people weren't doing manual labor anymore, and where they had more leisure time and more wealth than they'd ever have before. And he addressed Americans with this famous speech that historians have studied for decades, and it's, he said, it's not the doctrine of the noble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife. So he was urging people to continue to embrace activity and energy and purpose, even if they weren't having to plow the field so much anymore, or they weren't having to build their own houses, that a modern industrial society would bring more wealth and comfort. But the people shouldn't sit around all day. That's certainly a message that he gave his children. He said, we should not be content to rot by interest in a noble ease within our borders. Now, how you read that primary document depends, in many ways, on your own perspective. One of the things that's been interesting in his strenuous life speech, he argues that America has to look beyond its own borders. And as many people know, he was an imperialist. He believed that the United States should, after it won the Spanish-American War, take in the Philippines, where we go back in Cuba, at least temporarily, and bring them into that American system, be a little bit more like European imperial powers. Now, he moderated those beliefs, but often foreign policy historians will look at the speech as TR's expansionist foreign policy. This is the first step down the road to Vietnam, or this is the first step down the road. Now, that's one way to interpret this speech. I think TR didn't have, I think he didn't have Vietnam in mind. I think he had, you know, he couldn't see the future. He was not a worldwide interventionist. He was much more of a regional, he was much more interested in having an American sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. He did believe that America was going to get involved in World War I, but he wasn't a fight every war, every time, kind of a politician. Other people looked at the speech and said, it's TR trying to get Americans not to embrace rambling commercialism. He uses that phrase, rambling commercialism. He was arguing in many ways to say, okay, we've got this industrial revolution, we've made ourselves the most successful industrial nation on earth by 1900. And in fact, it's time for us to think about other things as well. What kind of a country are we going to be? Are we going to have a humane way of life within our borders? I have looked also at that speech and one of the things that historians can do is ask different questions of your material. I ask the question of, well, who does this man hate most? And nothing that the other interpretations of this genuine life speech aren't valid and don't have good points. But I found this quotation that TR had made when I was doing research at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace in New York. And in a newspaper interview, he called rich playboys cootie of the body politic. And I often have looked at this speech and taken that quotation, which is he hated rich playboys who he had grown up with. And he thought it was going to be terrible for America if they were going to be led by the sons of J.P. Morgan or the sons of all of these robber barons. And that those children were not people of high moral purpose. And so I would argue that one of the subtexts of this genuine life speech, yes, there's American expansion, yes, there's people should be physically active. TR was a very enthusiastic defender of physical fitness. But there's also a moral tone to this speech, which is don't be like these horrible playboys he grew up with. One of the things that is in my book is TR as a moralist. And people in this room, I'm sure, have very different religious views and very different moral views. And one of the things that I saw in TR was a consistent thread of moralism. And some historians have looked at that and said, well, that's not a particularly appealing side of TR. I sort of liked it. I've always liked those WCTU ladies with the access that would chop down the bars in the late 19th century. I think those people are really fun. And the Victorians who put little doilies on the panel legs so people wouldn't see naked legs. The prudes and the Victorians have always seemed to me to be trying to tell us something in the sense that they were worried about the morality of their age. And some, they look prudish to us and they look uptight. But they were people like us who were looking at their times. They didn't know where the future was going to go. And their concerns were largely about, you know, there's drink, there's sex, there's smoking, there's lack of family, loyalty. There are all kinds of things like that. And TR was Victorian. And you can read the Stradinous Life speech as a primary document. And because of what I knew about Victorian society and concerns of other people, I spent some more time talking about TR as a moralist. And I hope respectfully, I hope I was as respectful of his moralism because it was very much of the Victorian age. He was very much a creature of his age. And that is the famous story, well I helped make it famous, where TR at the end of his life works in a magazine office. He becomes an editor after he's president. And it's a great moment. The boys, the young reporters in the office, the magazine writers, like TR, this famous ex-president. And they say, come have a drink with us after work, TR. And so they're, you know, he was a sociable guy. And so we went for a drink with other magazine writers and newspaper writers. And this is in the teen. So there's a little hint of the roaring 20s coming in with this younger generation of men. And they start toasting. And they toast, take a few drinks. And TR hears one young man say, here's to our sweethearts, our friends' wives. Well, what does TR do? What would a Victorian moralist do in this kind of social setting? Well, TR punched him out. And you know, there's a part of me that, you know, okay well hitting people in public, I can't ever, I don't ever say that I encourage you to do that. Don't try that at home. But there's something tremendously appealing about TR feeling that that kind of cynical, yes I'm going to sleep with your wife and that kind of immorality that was in the social group, that somebody's going to have to stand up against that. Somebody should. And you shouldn't just always get along with what people are saying in this social setting. And so that's TR being a moralist. And so I guess one of the things I think I've said that other people haven't said so much about TR is that he had, moral issues were really important to him. And he had mixed feelings about easy divorce. Now I personally think the reason to liberalize divorce laws in the early 20th century was that there were a lot of women who were getting beaten up and had drunk husbands and they needed to go out and have the right to get a divorce. So that's my position. His position was a lot of his rich friends were going to Reno. Nevada had liberal divorce laws and then they were marrying for six weeks or two months and they were rich people who were just treating divorce as something cavalier. And he thought marriage was a serious contract with another person that was lifelong and that shouldn't be broken. Now so he and I certainly have different positions on that but his moral concern was that people were treating human commitments lightly. And that was one of his concerns and that's a story of TR's character that needs to be told. I think that's part of TR and the family. There's another issue with TR and that is he believed that wife beaters should be whipped in public. Okay so this is a guy who's not your average politician but that's again part of the story of TR as a Victorian moralist and part of his character I started to see the threads where he is very deeply offended by some of the moral changes he sees in his time. In fact his children laugh at him because they were part of a New York society where people would go to nightclubs and hear singers and that was coming into Manhattan as part of the recreational options in the early 20th century and his children all you know they all drank and they all went to nightclubs. Theodore Roosevelt never really understood what a nightclub was. He called them night restaurants and you know his children just you know laughed at him because he was so old fashioned but he was who he was. I mean that punching out a fellow for making that statement is very much who TR was. He you know one of the things that held my interest for 27 years is that Theodore Roosevelt had so many sides. He was an advocate of American art and the appreciation of American art. America was a cultural colony of Europe up until the 20th century. That's hard to believe. I always tell my students when we study the American Revolution and the early national period America was a weak power. Face it. Face it. We were once a weak power. We were once a little colony. We were once a place where you couldn't get a good advanced education. It's hard for us looking at a time when America it has been strong for a long time just had excellent education for a long time that TR lived in a day when American literature was not taught as a worthy subject in many universities. He was part of a movement to get people to take seriously American writers Hawthorne Melville Whitman. Now Whitman seems a little risqué for TR but TR accepted the great American writers and he wanted Columbia to teach American literature. He wanted Americans to be able to do graduate work in America and not have to study science in Germany which they did in his youth. He wanted America to be one of the serious countries in the world. Now nationalism can take ugly forms. Anybody who studied history can see that nationalism around wild can get us into horrible trouble. The most nationalistic example of the 20th century German nationalism and the Nazi movement but I think TR's nationalism for the most part was pretty good for America. Much of it was not all of it. His nationalism was sympathetic to the advancement of science, sympathetic to the growth of universities, sympathetic to American literature recognize is it an important world literature American art. He was friends with artists like Frederick Remington who he loved and he he wanted America to be taken seriously as a country. Now clearly he he he got his wish although it was mostly most of this happened during his lifetime but also after he he died. TR was a nationalist in the sense that he also wanted America to be like the serious European countries that took care of their poor people and that was a very patriotic issue for him what we call Social Security today. He defended that before many Americans would step up and say Social Security was an idea. England and Germany had that before the United States did and America was late to provide any kind of welfare state or help for poor families very slow. One of the things that you all probably know that there was tremendous hostility between Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt during the last years of Theodore Roosevelt's life and sometimes at historians conventions they'll pit the Wilsonians against the Rooseveltians and usually you can get a pretty good argument. I got invited to a Woodrow Wilson convention a few years ago and I was I was the only Roosevelt person there and I um one of the things that has always bothered me is that Woodrow Wilson had Princeton because he was president of Princeton Princeton funded research and had a professor who did research, Arthur Link defended anything that Woodrow Wilson did for a very long career and most of the major American historians who are specialists in the early 20th century were either trained by Arthur Link or in some way touched by Arthur Link. Now Theodore Roosevelt didn't have that institutional ballast and so his memory Harvard never really did anything for him and they they have other presidents who went there so they didn't take him very seriously so there's never been a place where TR could call home and it's it's great that maybe Dickinson is willing to to take on TR and to become the TR center that Princeton is for Wilson but one of the things I like to tease my Wilson scholar friends about is that they often defend Wilson in fact one of them has just written a Wilson biography that will be out soon and I'm sure it's a shameless defense of Wilson. An articulate and well researched but shameless defense of Wilson because that's what Wilson scholars do most of them but it's one of the things that strikes me as different about Wilson was a great man and the League of Nations and his conduct of World War I was really historically important so the fact that we have a United Nations today and that we have a serious place the United States has a serious place in world diplomacy Woodrow Wilson deserves some credit for that although TR also deserves some credit but one of the big differences between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson is that Theodore Roosevelt looked into the future and said okay we're going to have corporations the government it's just going to happen and it's going to be good for the economy government's going to have to do some regulation and we're just going to not be able to go back to an era of horse and buggy small businesses it's just not going to happen why would you go back to the economy of 1800 why would you you wouldn't unless you were you know Woodrow Wilson campaigning in 1912 so TR argued for facing our modern America with energy with the strenuous lives with enthusiasm and courage but he also argued that the keystone of American nationalism had to be what kind of a humane society we created in the 20th century and so I think he was much more sympathetic to social security unemployment insurance he was more sympathetic to women's suffrage than Woodrow Wilson which seems like we look back and we think why were they so slow about this but TR was a man who embraced the modern age and wanted to accept it with energy so let me stop here and I'm delighted to have been invited to this symposium I hope you will have many years ahead of being the the Princeton of the west in the sense of this is the base that this is the home base that TR has always needed he always needed an academic base to have knowledge gathered together and to be a place where scholars could come and talk about this very very important president and I wish you well in this exciting journey thank you