 Please extend a warm North Dakota welcome to one of the most prolific Historical commentators today dr. Douglas Brinkley Well, good afternoon. I won't go on too long here. I thought it was a terrific morning really strong talks. I was Feverously taking notes and I I want to thank the speakers this morning because this is I think when I've talked to Clay About this What you guys are doing here at Dickinson? It doesn't help anything to just celebrate presidents and say, you know You know, TR was great or Lincoln's great or Washington's great It's important to learn why they were so important, but we need to have rigorous Academic and intelligent looks at what these people really are and I thought Dealing with Daniel Boone and with Theodore Roosevelt on this morning in our two two talks were really eye-opening Experiences and it's going to enhance us and I want to encourage Dickinson say not just to keep doing Theodore Roosevelt But periodically come back to this topic of conservation. I know there are environmental historians here that have visited And it'd be nice to know that Dickinson is staying engaged in environmental history and Every three or four years You know comes back at this. I think it's a very anybody hearing The morning's talk about Reclamation versus preservation and the contradictions of that boy. It is fundamental To ourselves as a nation right now. I've been and looking at our Political economy and I think these contradictory sides of Roosevelt do tell us a lot about our country today And so it would be a great springboard to continue that. I'm supposed to talk about the American spirit And their course like Thomas Wolfe used to say there are a billion forms of America And and one of the reasons I did this magic bus trip in that at one year I've used ethanol or not ethanol Natural gas on two buses and went about 16,000 miles went all the way up to Alaska bringing about 30 college students they would earn college credits living on the road be like Dickinson students here Saying for this semester. I'm going to study American history and literature on the road and off We would go part of the reason we did that was believing the classroom can be be confiding That like Francis Parkman I mentioned to President Roosevelt loved his book the Oregon Trail. There was a part of it is getting out and seeing these places It's pretty hard to want to write about Yellowstone and not go to Yellowstone Or write about the Badlands and never seeing the Badlands This obviously is difficult if you can't afford it if you're a College student wanting to write about something could be antitim in the Civil War You don't have the money to make your way out to Maryland and Pennsylvania and poke around I know that's hard, but I'm a big believer in history by going and seeing things Getting on a train getting on a plane driving to it. You learn a lot from the locations You know that you go to and in that regard I think it's almost impossible to write about the Edo Roosevelt in a serious vein If you're trying to understand the man Without coming here to the western edge of North Dakota and spend time in the Badlands and understand What it was that spoke to him so greatly It's not hyperbole to say that TR loved this part of the world and a lot of it is Because he saw that this was a he liked the spirit of the people of North Dakota Many ways and when I've recently was reading his letters one of the great things about Theodore Roosevelt Scholarship and it'll sue me online due to your Theodore Roosevelt Center here But TR was it just wrote letters non-stop now some of these he dictated to stenographers And then he would give it a quick proof read so I was asked this morning is it just exuberance? How could TR have done so much? He had learned to speak in full in full paragraphs There would be not a you could not a get a different person in this regard and in the realm of rhetoric than our current president Bush and Roosevelt were very set because Roosevelt's a mind and I think he came from reading so much good literature He spoke in these kind of senses now He often would ramble in his sentences and in fact in his writing he used semi-colons all the time almost drunk with semi-colons Kurt Vonnegut who was a friend of mine and just died recently and I did the last big profile of Kurt Vonnegut for Rolling Stone but Vonnegut used to say that the we had talked once about Roosevelt and semi-colons and he said There no need he believe he was a belief that there was no need for the semi-colon that it was showing off That a semi-colon was the symbol of a show-off That really you can just end the sentence you didn't need that semi-colon there And in Roosevelt if you read any of his books sometimes he'd go on for pages using a semi-colon in a in a in a kind of overflowing Unnecessary fashion, but beyond that he went one of the things that he could do is really give speeches And can't come up with the original ideas One of them has the problem with Roosevelt and the American spirit is And what he represents more than anything TR was a nationalist And he believed in what he saw as American greatness and destiny now What would different made him different than some kind of crazed jingoist in this regard is he was deeply steeped in world history and the classics, and I'm not saying this in a superficial Well, I mean he absorbed world history So he really was a believer that the United States's moment in history was upon us Following the Civil War at the beginning of the 20th century and that we were destined for this historical greatness in that way and It does have a reason for his conservation. He would beam himself into the future a lot He would think about what America will look like a hundred years from now or 200 years from now and he really believed in Expansion and the seed of shining sea The fact of the big manavee that he wanted was what his sign or the two countries he admired were Britain and Japan And he saw them because of Alfred there Mahan a great naval strategist sea power and history and Roosevelt Corresponded with these people he loved all the great intellectuals that he liked he learned how to strike up Relationships with and there's a great correspondence with Mahan But he sees that Britain can protect itself as an island and Japan could protect itself And that they both had were able to impose their leadership in their regions Japan obviously in Asia and Britain in Europe and through much of the world great Britain Um he in he So keep that in mind for one thing at least one of this United States to not just be a power a great power He wanted it to be the great power. I Think people underestimate the historians that I've read of Roosevelt's general dislike of Europe It gets built up a lot because he goes over there And he gets along famously with European leaders and has many smart European friends But he has an inferiority complex and I think as we heard today. I mean there was that, you know, Roosevelt's Inferiority complex about Europe was something look Let's put it in that time frame. I mean the big question when you talk about the American spirit is Emerson's question What is an American? What is it? Most of you here that are American advice ran into you in a I mean sometimes you can get a visual of what somebody is That's American by the way. We dress and things and you could spot them out But TR It's a follow this train of thought and it's something that preoccupy Walt Whitman who Roosevelt was a Slavish admirer of and two of his books he quotes Whitman And Whitman's vision of this rolling prairies and the West He connected Roosevelt that our exceptionalism What makes America exceptional was was tied into the land and the rivers and the two C's and our Bigness he always wanted Canada He wanted to take Canada. He was so ticked off that we never figured out a way to get Canada I read an article actually the theater Roosevelt Association and a guy did a a An article about Roosevelt disliking in this is the contradictory Roswell. He disliked Canada so much. He wanted to take it over The truth is he loved Canada so much. He wanted to take it over His closest friends were Canadians when he went up to Maine with Bill Seawall who came out here and lived Roosevelt as a college kid has this transformative experience When he goes to Maine and he's with these rugged outdoor types no real education but could read the land and read nature and When he's with Bill Seawall up there, this is when he gets infatuated with moose because of their girth and the size of the horns and these gigantic animals that That he became so fond of and identified with and it wasn't so much hunting with these guys Although that's what they were doing, but they would go on with snowshoes up in the Maine the worst conditions and what shocked Seawall this out Outdoorsman was how this kid sickly looking not very tall Didn't look like an outdoors guy. Although he had been weightlifting at Harvard was kind of out enduring them um Roosevelt's sense of will I don't know where he gets it from I mean it's it's and I guess that's history. I mean I don't want to be like Nietzsche or something and say about wills to power and It you know other people much smarter than me have grappled with this But he could somehow find I I recently Broke a story for on Lance Armstrong the uh And I spent some time with Lance. I'm living in Austin and he's down there And I broke the story he's going for the tour de France this summer And he's got the you know, he had 13 tumors on his lungs he had two on his brain and he had To um lost a testicle to cancer And this guy's going again at 37 to win the tour de France only an idiot wouldn't bet on this guy winning this summer Spend a day with him. He's got this kind of inner Will that's comes from somewhere that the average person or even the above average Person can't quite understand what what it is Um, there's some windows we have of rosa belt his fear of being a feat and being a weakling There's a famous I milked this probably too much in my upcoming book, but it's called the mooc moose lake Or moose lake incident But tr gets off a train up in the wilds of maine and remember the north woods of maine was really wild in the 1870s You could get off at a railroad depot and name a mountain after yourself People did that, you know, I'll nobody named that one. I'll name it and these kids beat him up and hazed him And um, he said never again. Am I going to be the picked on one? And the same thing happened when he went to europe with his arsenic And all of his little kits with scaffolds to do his taxidermy on his birds That was his infatuation on his father had encouraged it Um as a skill in the but he was obsessive about his taxidermy and he gets off in liverpool Dressed like the little dandy and all the kids the liverpool working kids shout taunts at him And he writes in his childhood diaries that you know, I they're making fun of me They're making fun of the way I look the way that I am And you start seeing in roosevelt a way of using hunting And the outdoors as a way to develop himself I mean, there's a it be I think when we talk about parks and monuments There's a selfless side to wilderness. It's oh my god. He loves it so much. So he saved these places But it was deeper than that for roosevelt the he The combination of the gun and the hunting mixed with the health aspects of the asthma which I mentioned last night the outdoors And his work out his father got him weights and he started weightlifting and building Nobody in 1901 or two or three or four or five when he's president And he's in rough towns in oklahoma in texas. There wasn't a man That didn't think roosevelt was One hell of a tough guy He spent his whole life wanting that result um Yet He was a deep intellect and that combination is unusual a real deep intellect with this guy And he was so clever on people. I mean his in young somebody asked today a great question That's hard to answer What would what would theodore roosevelt tell you to do with conservation today? There's one answer obs be observant t r believed in exact observation of birds wildlife Prairie grass he was part of what the autobahn early bird counts What do you you're in a great state of north dakota and he would say count if you see quail count them if you go out Make your sightings report them. I think that's part of roosevelt's legacy greatly to admire Because it's um, it's the core of us living in harmony with nature is to start appreciating it In order to just want to save a bird species you're going to have to appreciate it He loved the pelicans that he saw here White pelicans mainly but he used to encounter pelicans here in in um In north dakota and would trap follow that they would end up in florida He got affectionate to some of these animals There I thought when edmund morris the great biography of theodore roosevelt As you all probably know wrote the rise of theodore roosevelt and theodore rex I thought he maybe was stretching it a tad when he would talk about roosevelt's ability to decipher any bird that he heard Because his eyesight was so bad. So some great birders had this visual roosevelt could see blurs Now he lost his glasses once and he kept a second pair of glasses Be from he went birding one day in upstate new york and they ran and they saw A bird that was rare and he stumbled lost his spectacles and he was blind And so he always carried a backup pair When he was campaigning in milwaukee as the bull moose candidate the bullet that pierced him And he used to have the shirt in madora and you might still have it there in national park services still there And um, you know, there was also a spectacle though. These were his bird Spectacle cases because he wanted the to get the exact observation. He carried his backup bird glasses with him That when the bullet pierced his chest, but he constantly preached Detailing what you see in your own backyard He got a lot of this from Living on the east coast and becoming enamored with the roe and emerson, but particularly john burrows Burrows was of course a great naturalist at the backyard. He would write long essays on the common robin or a sparrow or You know, you see in that sense that he would you know Of burrows and if you haven't read john burrows any of you here If you want to know something to understand roosevelt and naturalism burrows is a vastly underappreciated american figure He wrote book after book after book roosevelt used to go down to the tenement slums of new york and hand out john burrows books to the kids In in tenement houses and and burrows had great problems with new york city The teeming metropolis the fact that the pollution and things were starting to head into the into the city roosevelt as a new yorker And after and could defines himself as a new yorker not a new englander Um, it was very proud of his state's natural assets um I mentioned yesterday, but as governor he Creates the movement to save the palisades Um, he wanted the cliffs. He wanted people to enter new york harbour Seeing it as magnificent He wanted new york to be the greatest city in the world and if you lose the cliffs you lose it It's part of it's a aesthetic bragging right He kept seeing these europeans and he wanted to believe american cities and bays were as spectacular as the best ones in europe but he also Has a great interest as I said in niagara falls the cat skills in his environmental record as governor of new york What the state had never seen anything like it and he begins Trying to ward off timber companies um big businesses that want to um Impune the integrity of the cat skills in adirondacks He gets involved with a deer repopulation program because they were all shot out of the adirondacks um But one of the the problem that you have to grapple with with roosevelt on environment is whether you're a hunter or a non-hunter um In a visceral way um Today this we heard You know about this notion of you know watching the shooting of an animal and they collapse and they're bleeding And somehow you feel good because you get the head of that um, and it today's modern environmentalist Um, it's a um to many of them. That's anathema to their view of what will what animal is why would you want to inflict hurt? Roosevelt's view was that that was put you a that you and I don't have the time to get into it It's a deeper comp, but he felt it puts you closer with the animal Um that it's actually the hunter. It's actually it learns more about the species respects it more Hence his curiosity at poaching Probably there's one thing all people in the environmental movement would agree to roosevelt about roosevelt I would think is this is almost an ad at one point when somebody poached in yellowstone Roosevelt says i'm going to go and shoot him in the in the face Is his response He believed from the old sportsmen ethics of europe and that you had to have hunting license hunting roots of sportsmen's And these hunters were the early some of the early And the sporting magazines were some of the early conservationist Efforts in the country came from hunters today by and large we it's more from people birdwatching Or from people that love nature for nature's sake or people that understand habitat and ecosystems And in that way roosevelt comes to us kind of antiquated In many ways his type of conservation. I think's more understood in red states than blue states if you'd like today um But roosevelt felt and i think it's key is always trying to find how to be an american I've never seen a moment where this guy wasn't promoting the united states Every letter every article and if he had an intellectual edge to him He loves seeing great american poetry or great american book now whether his judgment was great in a critical way is a different issue But what he thought was oh my god, we got a great playwright. Oh my god, our philosophers are better than the europe We've got the you know our swamps are much more dramatic It could be anything is again as long as it had an americanization side to it He parlayed that with it happened to be a love of his was naturalist roosevelt was a first race Ray naturalist of that era He was not a man of of the detail of of me I don't want to pretend he's of the caliber of a john murr But but he was in that ball He could play ball in that league with the really handful Of outstanding naturalist of his day It was a very big accomplishment and it didn't come out like politics did he felt he had to get engaged in politics It was the one side of the guy that it's from childhood to death I don't want to call it a hobby because it was more but he just loved it I could tell you anecdote after anecdote in the middle of peace negotiations with the japanese war He's got frank chapman and william dutcher of the american ornithological union. He's canceling state meetings on international fairs to talk about bird sightings He would he got very he was just what you would think of today So all i'm suggesting is the hunting side's one side and there's this bird watching side. That's another side And ironically it gives both sides of temerate today's Environmental movement or naturalist an aspect of roosevelt they can like I think that was a point of the this contradictory which seems to be the theme here this contradictions Constantly with roosevelt that there's not a whole man there There they're both of these sides and you can pick and choose as you please Dimensional as they said spin him or you could find what you want on and That's a native genius because he kind of understood the american mind Roosevelt liked everyday american people They used to laugh at him henry adams And john j who he ended up loving and as clay mentioned But that's set the hey adams set they all made fun of tr Here he comes and a part of they made fun of him was his over exaggeration of the american west Oh god, we got to have a meeting now roosevelt's going to tell us about pike's peak and Roosevelt really believes daniel boone and zebulin pike were really great not just backwood's hucksters In that regard he was selling western history to an early generation along with frederick jackson turner In his concern of it today western historians the new western historians can Pick holes in everything roosevelt says it's oh my god. Look at this But he was promoting western history when people weren't promoting what he picked it up from parkman And roosevelt used to say as parkman did i'm right parkman's great works on the french and indian war and in um in you know canada Lake champlain et cetera on um malclam and and wolf and all of those books of his he used to say i'm Doing the history of the american forest. That's what parkman actually said um roosevelt's love for parkman knew no bounds And he you know parkman went blind and was um, you know could had to dictate things and was trying to do all these Writings and he wanted to be the francis parkman of his generation and he believed that henry adams who wrote on the jefferson administration Brilliantly and hay are these guys that were reflected that they didn't get the west That i own that In the amer in the historical community roosevelt felt he was the heir apparent department and that he's the one who understood this region Why none of these other other? turkeys did And the west was because it's where roosevelt felt the americ the real american spirit lay His he did not find it in he won very telling letter. He does say You know i've gone to these colleges in new york and the american spirits alive there I've met these kids and then he rattled off like 15 People in new york and new england that were great americans But he would find everybody in these towns in the west great americans From to picas to dickensons to you know, um fresno's to san antonio And it it became his obsession with him the west and i think if he could so i think he was Where the conservation and reclamation come together Is roosevelt wanted to create this society? In the west that had teaming cities, but weren't failed cities one of the things He's always negotiating with the japanese about and he writes Japan doesn't have the slums we have That we need to learn from the japanese against slums that they the japanese roosevelt said bring nature Into their daily existence now if you he went to tokyo and parts of the day i'm not sure he'd say that He was romanticizing japanese cultures relationship with nature and the warrior like samurai Of the japanese that it's kind of unusual combination they had i think Ultimately roosevelt thought that the when he went to san francisco. He said it's shifting that the country's powers on the pacific coast He never liked tomas jefferson That could not stand jefferson Although he said jefferson did one great thing in louisiana purchase which he because he said jefferson's genius What he saw that the mississippi river was the spine of the nation So roosevelt's interest in our region. We're talking about the great plains and the rocky mountains and the pacific Are are incredible To show you how fickled though tiara that became a topic today could be and how how easy you could could flip him Do you know he was very opposed as a naturalist to what they called? He was called a lumpur as a naturalist He only believed there were a couple of kinds of coyote or cougar or elk in the united states I won't pick each one that there were three or four different species where dr. C heart miriam thought there were 12 And roosevelt and miriam have huge fights over this roosevelt liked because roosevelt always wanted in nature simpler Classifications for everyday people. He was very big on field books of birds in every home Every americans should know their backyard mammals So he didn't want darwinism to get so complicated So it was kind of a darwinian debate between miriam and roosevelt But they held it at the cosmos club in new york and roosevelt miriam had the evidence on his side But roosevelt overwhelmed him with presentation And so he probably came out the winner tiara in this little debate, but miriam held his own Miriam very cleverly. This is how well dr. Miriam knows roosevelt is out in washington And that's when he writes tiara. Well, I found a new kind of elk And i'm calling it the roosevelt elk And tiara is in a quandary intellectual. He's got a choice to make Do I embrace that there is such a thing as the roosevelt elk the lord? He always called elk lords the lord of the pacific northwest And lose my and so do I brace elk and lose my intellectual position? And you know or what do I do? Well, he chose the elk He chose himself To be memorialized and I don't when he went literally there was probably no bigger honor roosevelt wanted than to be in You know, everybody was naming a specie after them and him to have a great elk He went that route miriam knew how to push his button and and uh, I tell you that just to The I think what we don't understand is a general public. I'm I know some of the scholars here too But look this was some the west still You know if one's going to take this notion of the closing of the frontier which all the new west historians have kind of blown Frederick juxtapes and turn her out of the water, but this notion that 1893 Or 1890 census something happened in the west that basically the native americans have largely been pacified You start getting reservations territories last territories are on the march to statehood um, you know, there's a there are a lot of holes in that but I think psychologically If you're saying that the west was closed, which roosevelt believed the question was doing the carving. What's it going to look like? What's this west going to look like now? And roosevelt wanted to encourage the settlement of it and in those ways They the non thinking of the water issues of the building of this many dams and reclamation projects well well intention And and had positive aspects and still do By and large was probably the biggest mistakes roosevelt made as some of his reclamation the overbuilding Of the west which is a problem we're dealing with in phoenix's and los angeles and where's the water going to come from? and so I think um That that you have to look at that as a as a problem on the other hand While astegner one of my favorite writers once wrote a book about western cities saying that they were the future of america We're in these western-sized cities like dickinson where I live in austin, which we're getting too big now Or boulder or eugene where you have a smaller sized city with a lot of nature access That's not destroyed in a lot of reserves around you That was roosevelt's vision for a lot of those places in the west They model towns for that that he he saw the the problem was his big reclamation projects Over brought people over used the water and kind of he sabotaged his own his own model One thing historians never do is do what ifs like what would have roosevelt was alive today? What would he do? We don't know But I'm willing to make a venture with you here on the issue raised on the table um this morning about anwar The roosevelt would have been opposed to the drilling up on anwar um And that the fact that I feel that strongly after after living with it Roosevelt never liked the first off roosevelt never liked oil He didn't like the automobile When he was president he stopped that guy had had a couple of hand raised buffalo And they were letting the buffalo run on their property and they do this now in texas with exotic pets They bring in african pets let them run on these ranches and they would take cars and go after the animal and shoot them Roosevelt ordered federal troops to the ranch to stop the killing of the buffalo on the ranch He always had a romantic vision About wildlife and wilderness as himself as the man on the horse with the rifle I use recently collaborated with bob herbert of the new york times the columnist And in fed him some documents the roosevelt Turned back all oil money from standard oil when he ran for president in 1904 not wanting to be Trapped with the oil lobby. He challenged the railroad lobbies a great deal of his life Including as I mentioned stopping the segregation of yellowstone park Roosevelt as a wilderness warrior was not afraid to stand up to these companies Which is more than many people do today And he would have had a great appreciation for alaska the arctic There was an arctic polar explorer named the roosevelt that he was very excited about And is his if you read the bulk of his writing I think he would understand the sanctity of a wildlife refuge where This space mattered The worst argument on a place like anwar. I believe if people say there's nothing there You know That's like saying there's nothing in a swamp like they used to say or there's nothing in a desert I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding of an ecosystem And so I don't I think on that issue roosevelt would be um wanting to preserve wild alaska And that's my final point Wild Is roosevelt's favorite word? Now he talked about unmarred beauty. He talked about heirlooms being passed He was Perfectly believing that and this is where turner's frontier thesis kicks in that you need Psychological valves for of wildness wilderness areas for wilderness sake Not that the country had to be girded with them Not that you didn't build a los angeles or build a phoenix But you had to have these places Because it was part of the strenuous life It was part of the sense of re a kind of re Injuvenating of the american spirit Because he believed in the historicism of the wilderness building the american character And if you took away the wilderness you lose the american character And you lose the american spirit and you get developed and built up like europe Roosevelt couldn't believe that he climbed to the top of the matterhorn and he didn't see a ram They killed all the wildlife off the it's gorgeous They're beautiful swiss chalets. He stayed at a hotel. He went to the top spectacular views He joined the alpine mountainous club and all and he writes that there's no wild there's no wildness about it And they took away the wildness So I think the an aspect to keep in mind about the roosevelt american spirit is how do we today not for our generation Obviously from a financial point of view Getting minerals and I mean in night two when he stopped the mining of the grand canyon 1906 Obviously There were some economic benefits for people living in arizona territory out of the zinc out of the copper out of the abestos But roosevelt's constantly telling people you've got to do public policy for future generations unborn And way in the future it gets back to him thinking about america a thousand years from now I don't know a single president in american history That's taking a shellacking Because they did too much for our national park service international monuments and for and for preserving They're going to be regional hatreds of those linden johnson did this or that by and large presidents get upward and bill clinton knew this When clinton's I don't know if you know the story but secretary of interior bruce babbitt I put on a sheet of cards. It's not an apocryphal story He put theodore roosevelt Enlisted all these places that roosevelt saved Others card bill clinton Like two And bill's like what are you? Why don't you say well you want to be with theodore roosevelt? Babbitt used tr to get clinton to do stuff because clinton was smart enough to know legacy-wise You know, you're not going to hurt you You're saving part of you might take political cost at the time But from a long lens of history and we're talking about a planet Shrinking talking about resource management on a global level. We're talking about climate issues. We've got huge issues I don't think any president in the past that kind of really did a lot For conservation's taking a beating in history for doing it And and yet the currency of the moment It's that problem of what's the economically right thing to do we talked this morning about hatch hatchy I find it it to be the great great a great blunder on roosevelt's Presidency I've had to ponder it because so much of what he thinks Would lead to an opposite conclusion and he had to make the decision for the economic Decision of the moment, which was the san francisco earthquake. It devastated san francisco There was mass homelessness there and that there was this movement in it's not an excuse But he was doing what was expedient for the people alive at that moment and that's what most politicians do you have to however great Politicians think about future generations and it takes a different kind of leadership to think about the future In a positive way. It takes a few great ones Roosevelt with a lot of black eyes here and there Had that ability to project in a way that I think we all should be grateful for because I do find our Land system in this country when we look at all things america's done since the civil war abolition of slaves I think the creation of our national parks And our preservationists with all of its inherent flaws and mainly are not properly funding them Not properly maintenance thing them of not being doing more, but we've got an accomplishment here You want to do triumphalist history? I think the fact that we've went in and saved a lot of these places is great The challenge is going to be it doesn't Just because you save the everglades doesn't mean the everglades is gonna is is uh Going to be here forever if we don't if all of the incursions of civilization And development puts on these special places they'll collapse That you know and that's I think the challenge where roosevelt can be a positive force here is Not to say here's what roosevelt did. He didn't have the advantages that we have of so many things Let's be honest. They didn't have dna readings and banning on birds feed and video flocking migrations The zoologist and ornithologist shot birds to study variations of them. That's what they did back then To make the leap that today roosevelt would be shooting birds To stuff it's or he was enough of an ornithologist that he would have evolved I believe out of what were the habits of his day, but if you put roosevelt in his time For night his president 1901 and 1909 He had the most sophisticated view of the need to preserve american special spots As any person in politics It does not mean he had his advanced view as john murr Or or john burrows not saying that but you got to deal with people in the political realm roosevelt was the most advanced and so I think It's it's a reason to honor him at a conference like this on conservation For for being in the game Um for making a lot of mistakes and making a lot of calls right I mean and you can chair pick them you could say hetch hetchy mistake grand canyon got right and you can go around the board Um and and and do it But I I particularly think on the preservationists around roosevelt and birds And is believing of the beauty of birds and their noises And and that fact that he could close his eyes and tell you what the bird is was it sound There are only two people i've ever written about that had that gift henry ford For all of his anti semitism and problems he had ford's genius He could walk in and hear a machine tilt his ear and tell you what wasn't working He had an ear most of us don't have an ear for mechanical sounds roosevelt had an ear for birds Uh when it's not hyperbole when he says the sound of a you know of a Metal arc is more beautiful than a brahms symphony This is not bs from roosevelt. This is how he feels Um, he was spiritually moved By by bird sounds and the fact that he didn't just rest at that henry ford was a bird lover too And his and went to congress the only time henry ford went to congress to fight was to say birds while his industrialization Was what was undermining it so they these are complex things But roosevelt's the american spirit for theater roosevelt was tied to wilderness We can define wilderness and a hundred different everybody's difference of will an alaskans view of wilderness is going to be different than a manhattanites view of wilderness And this is you know robert gnash and others have talked to me There's no one definition of wilderness for us But what how roosevelt interpreted it was open space With wildlife with the feeling of early dawn of man Where man and nature were in some kind of harmony? He did not think that should run american society He didn't want to go backwards. He was not a luddite But he felt that we had to have buffer zones to access that that a manhattanite Had to get into it in many ways. It was an elitist view even though he would say the lands are for the people Only people that can afford to take a journey up to glacier You know, it's a certain type any rate I want to tell you that i'm gonna end because i think i'm going on too long here But i think that the just to keep if i had to sum up roosevelt and the american spirit It's the value of wilderness. Thank you