 I just want to take a few moments this morning. We have a wonderful morning. What I really want to do is to make sure we get plenty of time to get our four visiting scholars from elsewhere to come up and sit here and take your questions and get into a kind of informal discussion about history because, you know, it's great to have people from distinguished institutions come out and lecture and we're so privileged to have that joy here at the Roosevelt Center. When you get to see them talking amongst themselves in a casual way and disagreeing but respectfully and really showing us that history is not a settled narrative but it's an ongoing dialogue. It's a negotiation about the past. That's really important. It's not to think that there is some sort of a final narrative lying on anything. The history is up for grabs and that scholars who have plowed much the same ground can disagree pretty considerably about some important issues but they do it playfully, usually, and with mutual respect for each other's hard work and so I want to make sure we get plenty of time for that. But I thought it would be fun to start Valerie. The neighbor is going to come up in a short time. We're going to talk about how TR got out to Mount Rushmore, which is sort of an interesting story and Valerie is going to take the lead on that. But I thought I would just start by sort of setting the table this morning and talking a little bit about how early in his life Roosevelt was predicted to become the president of the United States. It's a really interesting story because if you think about it, I mean to say a couple preliminary things about this. First of all, one of the things you have to really watch for in history is what might be called the inevitability of retrospect. We know how the story came out, but they didn't know how the story was going to come out. And so I'll give you two quick examples. When we think of World War II, we think of the Battle of the Bulge and in the history of World War II we say, well, it was Hitler's last attempt to break out and it was doomed to fail and here are the reasons why. But of course at the time that wasn't so certain and everything that I read suggested that Hitler had a little bit more gasoline. That battle would have at least lasted a great deal longer with more loss of life. Or we think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the inevitability of retrospect, but when the first test of the atomic weapon occurred on July 16, 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer predicted that it would fail. If it had failed, the whole history of the end of World War II would have been quite different. Or just a third, with the inevitability of retrospect, we assume that Thomas Jefferson was the inevitable author of the Declaration of Independence, but it almost didn't happen. Jefferson was so diffident that he did not put himself forward and he was such a homebody that he lingers back at Monticello until very late in the second Continental Congress and they kept wondering where he was and he finally turned up very late in the game and they still gave him the opportunity as a young, relatively untried, Virginia radical to write this document. So when we look at it, we think, well, of course, it's Jefferson, but he nearly lost that assignment because he was dilatory. And so it's really important to remember how contingent history is and how things only gel when they gel. So let me just quickly look at it. When Roosevelt was first predicted to be president, I was talking to Professor Perry Arnold about this just before or after his talk the other night and I said to him, if Roosevelt hadn't become vice president and McKinley hadn't been assassinated, do you think Roosevelt would certainly have become the president of the United States in 1994 or 1998 or at some point? And he said no, it's far from clear that he would have been president of the United States and there were lots of reasons for that. He was a maverick, he was young, he had not paid his dues with the old stalwart Republican guard, he wasn't seen as a completely reliable party man. There was this streak of impulsiveness in his youthful character and so it may be that if McKinley had not been assassinated, Roosevelt might not have become the president of the United States. It's far from inevitable. And yet from a very early time in his life, it was predicted that he was presidential material or that he might become president. And interesting, I was talking to Amy about this. Some people had sort of reckoned about this earlier but really the first time that it was boldly stated that Roosevelt was going to be president or could quite likely be president was here during his time in western North Dakota. And I'll give you the anecdote in just a moment. I want to just go through a couple of earlier ones very quickly. In 1881, he was elected as the, he was born in 1858. So in 1881 he was elected as the youngest member ever up till then of the New York State Assembly. He served three terms and Puck, the magazine, Puck, the illustrated magazine, and by the way we now have a set of it digitized at the Roosevelt Center in Dickinson thanks to the Library of Congress. Puck said this of him. In a kind of Puck editorial. Be happy, Mr. Roosevelt. Be happy while you may. You are young. Yours is the time of roses, the time of illusions. Bright visions float before your eyes of what the party can and may do for you. We wish you a gradual and gentle awakening. You are not the timber of which presidents are made. That's 1881. He's just 23 years old. And he said later, I rose like a rocket. But he's already in his first term as a New York State Assemblyman, as a 23-year-old already being debated a little bit about whether his presidential material and Puck tells him in no uncertain terms, you are not. That's 1881. In 1883 he came here for the first time. He arrived here on September 6th, 7th. Came in later than night or the 6th early in the morning of the 7th and arrived, not here, but just across the river. So when you get out today, if you cross the river over to the other side, that's where the village of Little Missouri was. And that's where he came to it. Two or three in the morning on the night of 6th, 7th, September 1883 to kill a buffalo. There was no depot. There was no crew. They just stopped the train. He got off with a duffel bag and a rifle and he dragged it across the prairie to something called the Pyramid Park Hotel. He banged on the door. It took a long time for the intoxicated proprietor to open the door. Roosevelt said, I should like a room. And the proprietor said, there are no rooms. But there is a, what he called, a corral up on the second floor where there are 14 cots. One of them may be empty if you want it. It's two beds. And so here this New York proficient, the other Roosevelt, got his first taste of the West by sleeping in a room with 13 people he called the Ruffians. He went down to a ranch south of here to Head Quarter for his buffalo hunt. It was the Gregor Lang Ranch. It's about 40 miles south of the Madura. If you've been down to that part of the world, it's just north of Marmot that's in the mouth of the little cannonball creek. It's a very remote place. It's actually a ranch that's owned and operated by John and Mickey Brown. And the footings of the Gregor Lang cabin can be found, or at least one of them. He Head Quartered there for a couple of weeks. And during that time he would go out by day. It was weather much like this, only rainier rather than snowy. But the prairie was covered with muck and gumbo and his guide Joe Ferris said, there's no way you're going to get a buffalo. You should just quit. But Roosevelt wouldn't quit. And they went out day after day. But at night they would come back and Roosevelt, Joe Ferris would go to sleep. He was exhausted. Roosevelt would stay up talking to Gregor Lang about politics, about ranching, about the West, about the prospects of this country. And after about six days of this, Roosevelt said, you know, Mr. Lang, I should like to invest in the cattle business. What would you recommend? And Lang suggested that he could talk to a couple of other ranchers, Sylvain Ferris and W.A. Merrifield, and that they might help him. And that's exactly what happened. That's how Roosevelt, on that first trip to the Badlands in 1883, decided impulsively to invest in a ranch, the Maltese Cross. And that was a great project for $14,000. It had a very sizable amount of money to invest in the first of what would be two ranches. But as he left after this two-week stay with the Langs in this hunting period, Gregor Lang was an immigrant from Scotland who was here managing a ranch for a wealthy Englishman. Gregor Lang, when Roosevelt left, turned to his son Lincoln and says, there goes the most remarkable man I ever met. And he went on to say he predicted that we would hear great things about this Theodore Roosevelt. In 1886, a couple of years later, Roosevelt arrested the boat thieves up near Sherry Creek near the north unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The thieves had stolen his boat instead of just letting them go. He decided to chase them down and arrest them. He built a boat in order to follow them through a blizzard. He finally caught up with them. He had three desperados now on his hands and he couldn't get them to Bismarck and Mandan to turn them into the law. So in desperation, he finally decided to march them over land from Kildere, North Dakota, from the Diamond Sea Ranch at Kildere about 40 miles over that gum boat, Badlands Country, to Dickinson to the sheriff. And he did it. It was one of the great adventures and ordeals of his life. He went sleepless for three or four days. He couldn't tie up. He was all alone now. He'd send his ranch hands back to the ranch. He was all alone with these three desperados, one of whom was known as redheaded Mike Finnegan. And at night he couldn't tie them up because he was afraid they'd get frostbite. So his humanitarian instincts were out of war with his law and order instincts. And so since he couldn't tie them up, he made them take their boots off so that they couldn't run away. But he had to stay awake and act himself awake in typical Rooseveltian fashion by reading a book. He happened to have with him a copy of Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, one of the longest books ever written. And he had just been translated into English and he read it out loud with the boat thieves for days, stopping, he said, from time to time to engage in the literary criticism because he wasn't really a fan of this Tolstoy because Tolstoy, after all, wrote about adultery. And he finished the book. He actually read Warren Beath or Anna Karenina cover to cover for the boat thieves and then he ran out of book. And then that even more and probably he turned to redheaded Mike Finnegan and said, I say, old chap, you don't have a book, do you? And Finnegan had one. It was a dime novel about Jesse James and so Roosevelt said, let me borrow it. I'll return it after you release from the penitentiary. And then he read that out loud to the boat thieves and so whether all of this is strictly speaking true we don't know, but this is the account he wrote of it and Finnegan later became a kind of friend of Roosevelt's and we have the document in the Roosevelt Center of the letter that Finnegan eventually wrote from the penitentiary for Roosevelt saying that if he had known that it had been Roosevelt's boat he wouldn't have stolen it, thank you. But while he was in prison he had been reading Roosevelt's writing that he found him, quote, fascinating friendship with him. Anyway, when he got to both things finally to Dickinson he was as tired a young man as you could possibly imagine and his feet were all torn up from all of this madcap hiking across the plains and so he was walking down the street of Dickinson which was then just a forlorn little cattle village, some of you I suppose may think it remains that, but but he was, I always I gave this talk recently and it was about the agrarian vision and I reminded this audience that in North Dakota, and this is really true for our guests from elsewhere, in North Dakota I grew up in Dickinson, a town then of 12,500 people and the fact that I grew up in Dickinson is held against me from an agrarian point of view, that's regarded as an urban situation in North Dakota. This would not be true in any other state but if you come from a megalopolis of 12,000 people you're discredited from an agrarian point of view here, that tells you how puny we really are. Anyway, he gets his feet are all torn up and so he's walking down the street and he comes to the first gentleman he sees and says, can you point me to a doctor and the person that he has chosen turns out to be the doctor Dr. Victor Hugo Stickney and Stickney says I'll take care of you, so Roosevelt goes off to his doctor's shop gets his feet bandaged and repaired a little bit and then he goes off to a meeting that night of the Little Missouri cattle association here, but when he this was Dr. Victor Hugo Stickney's account of Roosevelt he says he was all teeth and eyes but even so he seemed a man unusually wide awake you could see he was thrilled by the adventures he had been through he did not seem to think he had done anything particularly commendable, but he was in his own phrase, pleased as punch at the idea of having participated in a real adventure he was just like a boy and then he goes on to say to his correspondent we are going to hear amazing things about this man in the future who those aren't precisely predictions of the presidency but they're predictions of something stellar and Perry Arnold said the other night you know it would have been possible that Roosevelt would have just been an imperial land baron like so many others out here at one point after the death of his wife Alice he thought he might live here permanently and leave New York behind and he said he might when North Dakota finally became a state he might wish to run for the senate or be governor or something so he could have had a very interesting mid-level career it would have been much more likely but if he had let's just assume for a moment that he had become a senator from North Dakota or he had never risen very high he had risen to some mid-level in American life it would be a very different story not just because he wasn't president but that sort of interesting and peculiar character set impulsiveness the heroic element the romantic element the quest for adventure the physical capacity of Roosevelt all those things I hope you agree with this all those qualities that make him so magical as a president maybe the most unusual president in American history from that perspective would have been less interesting had he been a senator we would have found it easier to dismiss that set of qualities as he had he been a senator that he was a wild eccentric or an impulsive maverick but when you get to be the president with that set of qualities it changes the equation pretty considerably it makes what could be a deficit character set in some respects become a magical character set because it's so out of character for the presidency if you think of a presidency like Warren Harding or Calvin Coolidge or Rutherford B. Hayes they're stayed they're in bodily body control they're sedentary people they're people that are characterized by self restraint and then here's this cowboy maverick that's part of what I think put him on Rushmore Welty on the basis of that meeting that he had the stick knee in the middle of 1886 the stick knee invited Roosevelt to come give the 4th of July address in Dickinson that year so just a few months later the first ever 4th of July celebration in Dickinson and I told you a little bit yesterday about what our plans are and the sort of commemoration of that we found the place where this occurred so Roosevelt does come and here's the story he's in Medora about 35 miles from Dickinson he comes in that morning on the train but there's no passenger train so he comes in on the freight train in the morning with a couple of pals but also including a frontier journalist from here Arthur Packard who had created the wonderful newspaper here the Badlands Cowboy and so Packard is about the same age as Roosevelt he's a graduate of the University of Michigan the Badlands, they're both intellectual so they become close friends out here and Packard travels with Roosevelt on a freight train from Medora to Dickinson for the 4th of July celebration and there's a long and interesting account of that celebration there were parades and there were bands and there were several speeches Roosevelt gave the Senate of two patriotic speeches the presiding officer of that 4th of July celebration was a man named Western Star that was his actual name and he was the sheriff the sheriff Western Star that was almost too good to be true and maybe is but he was the presiding officer so then Roosevelt gives that speech in which he says like all Americans I like big things, big parades and so on that kind of over the top this country is magnificent speech and he has a life shot of it as they are going back to Medora this time he and A.T. Packard are on a passenger train freight train to Dickinson passenger train later that day back to Medora all the way Roosevelt is all hepped up from his speech and so he's talking to A.T. Packard about government, about civil service reform and about their navy we can't have corruption and there are many problems that this country must solve and you just have this picture of him just jabbering the whole way from Dickinson to Medora and finally Packard says to him he says if you continue along these lines you will become the president of the United States this is July 4th 1886 Roosevelt is still in his 20s Packard says if you continue along these lines you will become the president of the United States and then Packard wrote about this letter he said he gave me the impression of having thoroughly considered that matter previously and have arrived at the same conclusion so this is 1886 Packard, I think she's going to do this heroic thing and Roosevelt has already long sense of assimilation of that but Roosevelt replies to him if your prophecy comes true I will do my part to make a good one so there we go the first certain prediction that we have in Roosevelt becoming the president of the United States was July 4th 1886 in western North Dakota by a frontier journalist and the prediction turned out to be true here just a couple of others it's one little scene I want to show you from 1895 when he's the US Civil Service Commissioner but in 1901 William Allen White of the Emporia Kansas Gazette wrote and now he's just our Vice President he says there's no man in America today whose personality is rooted deeper in the hearts of the people than Theodore Roosevelt is more than a presidential possibility in 1904 is a presidential probability is becoming the American of the 20th century when he was just back from Cuba after his heroics there Thomas Platt was considering whether to promote Roosevelt for the governorship of New York Platt who was a very very very true politician said of Roosevelt if he becomes the governor of New York sooner or later with his personality he will have to be the president of the United States I am afraid to start this thing going gosh and he did start this thing going and Roosevelt did move quickly thereafter into the presidency when he was the New York State Police Commissioner his closest friend Henry Cabot Lodge Lodge really was his patron he managed Roosevelt's political career he was his deepest promoter until at least 1912 when they broke over the Bolmous campaign but Lodge said to him when he became New York Police City Commissioner in a much more knowing and restrained way he said to Roosevelt quote the day is not far distant when you will come into a large kingdom and so he too is predicting that Roosevelt will certainly rise much higher than New York City Police Commissioner I'll just close this with one more this is a marvelous moment when Roosevelt is the New York City Police Commissioner the president of the commission he's doing with that job what he does with every other one he's making it a heroic job rather than a mild bureaucratic administrative one and two of America's greatest journalists reformist journalists Lincoln Stephens and Jacob Rees Jacob Rees is actually Danish I'm sort of on the beat on the assignment in New York and they are young protégés or disciples or admirers and they come to see him every day to hang out and be with this man of destiny and Jacob Rees actually becomes a very important figure in Roosevelt's life because he introduces Roosevelt to the world of the slums and the tenements and if you remember Rees wrote that extraordinarily important book about the cities of the other half lives using a pioneering new technology the flashball to be able to take pictures inside these dank and gloomy tenements and that book changed Roosevelt's life in fact he got a copy of the book that Rees sent to him and immediately the next day went to Rees's office and left a card saying I'm Theodore Roosevelt and I'm here to help and they became good friends and Lincoln Stephens was another huckraker a term coined by Roosevelt and they used to come as young men to be with this other young man Roosevelt at the police commission headquarters and here's the scene if you know the story of Roosevelt this is 1895 you've read this before they decided one day having read something in the commercial advertiser that Roosevelt might be regarded as a possible next president after Cleveland they decided to come in and tease Roosevelt and so Lincoln Stephens and Jacob Rees come into his office and say so Commissioner Roosevelt isn't true that you have the ambition to become the president of the United States and here's the account that Stephens wrote about it Roosevelt jumped out from behind his desk fists clenched teeth bared and he seemed about to throttle Rees and me don't you dare ask me that Fiar yelled at Rees don't you put such ideas into my head no friend of mine would ever say a thing like that you calms down a little he came back up to Rees he put his arm over his shoulder and this closer and said you must never either of you remind the man that worked on a political job that he may be president it almost always kills him politically he loses his nerve he can't do his work he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility I for instance, I am going to do great things here hard things that require all the courage, ability and work that I am capable of but if I get to thinking of what might he stopped he held us off and looked into our faces with his face screwed up into a knot as with lowered voice he said slowly I must be wanting to be president every young man does of course but I won't let myself think of it I must not because if I do I will begin to work for it I'll be careful, calculating cautious in word and act and so I'll beat myself again he looked at us as if we were enemies then he threw us away from him and went back to his work go on the way now he said and don't you ever mention that don't you ever mention that something to me again isn't this interesting that here's this man and I want, when Perry comes back up I wanted to talk about this it's not inevitable that he would have become the president in the United States but he did become the president in the United States and more than any other figure I know from our history there were people predicting it from a relatively early age when he was in his 20s and as we said before he became the youngest president in American history at 42 years and 322 days if you think about figures like this how many people in the history of the presidents have been predicted to be president well George Washington but that doesn't really count because the country was very young man but do you think Dwight Eisenhower was predicted to be president from his 20s no, Jimmy Carter certainly not George W. Bush no, James Madison no, Warren Harding you could make a list of almost every president that there was no prediction that this was going to happen that life reached some sort of a crossroads or some sort of a heightened moment and then things changed Dwight Eisenhower was a war hero people come into the presidency for lots of reasons the closest you could come in my life and I suppose would be John F. Kennedy but as you know his father predicted his other sons Joseph Kennedy was to be the president of the United States this is a very unusual thing the presidency is largely a political accident and most people who wind up there have paid their dues in all sorts of non-descript ways for a very long time and then suddenly there's an effervescence that leads them into that office but Roosevelt, at least since 1881 and maybe sooner his sister Karine says that even as a child they sort of said, oh he'll be president this is of all the presidents on our history I think this is the person who was predicted to be president from the earliest age and yet he came in through the back door and our imminent political scientist says he might not have been able to come through the front entrance so we'll let that be the start of the conversation we have here in a minute