 you're in for a great couple of days. This is the fourth of our symposia. I think it's going to be the best. We have an extraordinary cast of nationally recognized presenters and scholars who will be speaking to us over the next two days. I'm going to introduce Kathleen Dalton in just a moment. It's such an honor to have Kathleen Dalton here. I've been a big, big, big fan of her work for many years. And as you probably know, she's the author of The Strenuous Life, which is, to my mind, the best one-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt. I'll come back to that in a minute. But first, just quickly, to get us oriented, Quentin on the left, TR next to him, standing up, Ted Jr., seated Archie, the famous Alice Roosevelt Longworth, then Kermit, then Edith Roosevelt, and then Ethel. We'll be talking about each one of them in the course of our deliberations over the next couple of days. I want to just quickly follow up from what Dr. McCallum said. I don't want to take much more time because I know that you've come here to hear the great Kathleen Dalton. But I want to talk just a little bit about what the digitization of Roosevelt means. Some of you won't have the chance to come back tomorrow. We've undertaken to digitize all of Theodore Roosevelt. And if we'd known when we started what that actually meant, we might not have started it. Because it's a huge thing. Roosevelt's the writingist president. He's probably the readingist president. The archive of Roosevelt in the Library of Congress alone is vast. And so we had the notion a couple of years ago that we would create a virtual, national Theodore Roosevelt presidential library in Western North Dakota. And we approached Senator Dorgan, who was interested, and he got us the seed money to pay the Library of Congress to begin this task. The Library of Congress came on board as a partner. They bring to this about 600,000 items of Roosevelt Tiana. Then we approached the National Park Service, our friend Valerie Naylor, the superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, competed successfully for a Centennial Challenge Grant. And so now we're digitizing everything that's held by the Sixth Principal National Park Service, Roosevelt-related sites, beginning with our own Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Dr. James Hudson of the Library of Congress, who's been our friend and advisor, said, well, if you're going to do this, you ought to really strive to be comprehensive. And to be comprehensive, you need Harvard too. And so Dr. McCallum and I went to Boston and had a meeting with the library staff at Harvard. And we were pretty sheepish because it is, after all, Harvard. And we sat there, the two of us, in a room of six very distinguished professional librarians, and they said, tell us what you have in mind. And Dr. McCallum said, well, we represent a small regional university called Dickinson State University. And they said, we haven't heard of that. And I gulped and said, well, we're from a place called North Dakota. And they said, well, we have heard of that. So we managed to make our case. We left with low expectations. And just this last week, we received a letter from the director of library services at Harvard University saying that they fully intend to cooperate fully with our digitization and we'll be able to provide about 100,000 items of Roosevelt the honor for us. Imagine our surprise. We're delighted that this is happening and we now are in some danger of creating the world's most comprehensive Theodore Roosevelt site. What does that mean exactly? It means that if you wanted today to get access to the materials at Harvard, you would have to get out on airplane and fly to Boston. You would stay at an expensive hotel. You would go over to Harvard. They would credential you. You would ask for a file. They would bring it out. You would look through it with somebody standing over your shoulders. You could spend days, weeks, months and years there without exhausting what they have and the expense would be astronomical. The same at the Library of Congress. The same almost anywhere you might go. When we are finished in about five years, you will be able to be in your bathrobe, in your house, in a hotel room, in a public library, at a museum, at the National Park and through the World Wide Web not only have access to everything in the Library of Congress, but you'll have access to everything at Harvard and you'll have access to everything in the National Parks. In some limited way, what we are producing will be better than Harvard because we'll have Harvard end the Library of Congress. And it will not only be all there free 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, but more importantly than that, it will be searchable. It's a revolution. And who would have thought that this small regional university would be able to do this? It's the most extraordinary thing that I've ever been involved with in the course of my life. We're thrilled and we want you to stay tuned. We're looking for volunteers to help us do this. We're looking frankly for money to help us pay for this. We're working for more partners. Once we have all that the Library of Congress has and all that Harvard has and all that the National Parks Service has, we still only will probably have about 80% of Roosevelt. And we'll cast the net wider, but stay tuned. And if you could come tomorrow, I urge you to come for all of it of course, but at 3.30 p.m., we're going to be showing the repremiere of a film made in North Dakota in 1919 by Herman Haggador, who was the first and great director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. He came here in 1919 to interview Roosevelt's contemporaries and to look at the landscape that shaped Theodore Roosevelt and he produced a 30 minute documentary film. That film has been languishing in the vaults of the Library of Congress for more than 50 years. And in this process, we discovered it and unearthed it and digitized it. It arrived just three days ago, I looked at it. My expectations were high, but I was literally overwhelmed by the sheer magnificence of this film. This, if you could come tomorrow at 3.30, you're going to see something that will amaze you. I believe that this instantly becomes the most important visual document in Theodore Roosevelt studies related to the Little Missouri River Valley of Western North Dakota. So come if you can. This film alone indicates what we're doing and it's just the first of what we assume will be scores of maybe even hundreds of new discoveries in the world of Theodore Roosevelt. So stay tuned. I think you understand just how thrilled we are by what we're able to do here and we need lots of help from our scholars, from citizens and from donors. I now have the great pleasure of introducing Kathleen Dalton, the Cecil F.B. Mangrift Instructor of History and Social Science at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. She's also the co-director of the Brace Center for Gender Studies at Phillips Academy. In 2002, she published The Strenuous Life, this extraordinary one-volume treatment of Roosevelt. She holds a BA from Mills College in California and an MA and PhD from the Johns Hopkins University. Her specialty is U.S. Cultural, Social and Political History Post, 1861. I want to just quickly recite two things from Roosevelt here, or rather read them. First, the source of her title, The Strenuous Life. Roosevelt gave his speech in Chicago in 1899 and later was incorporated into a book published in 1900 and here's what he said. I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife to preach that highest form of success that comes not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil and who out of all of these wins is the splendid ultimate triumph, The Strenuous Life, but even more important to her book. The book one writes depends upon the lens one wears and what I find so remarkable about Kathleen Dalton's study of Roosevelt is that she has worn a family lens and in a certain degree a womanist lens and by wearing that lens she has seen things that other Roosevelt biographers simply failed to see. Her book is the most complete Roosevelt biography in that it covers the most ground. There's always a problem in Roosevelt's studies. If you spend too much time on the private, as say Herman Hegedorm did in the Roosevelt family of Sagamore Hill, you do injustice to the public achievement. If you spend too much time on the public achievement, you give short shrift to the family life. Kathleen Dalton has managed to balance those to produce this extraordinary piece of work which I hope you will buy and she will gladly autograph after the program. But here's what Roosevelt said about family which I find so compelling and which in a sense sets up our entire discourse over the next couple of days. He said, there are many kinds of success in life worth having. It is exceedingly interesting and attractive to be a successful businessman or railroad man or farmer or a successful lawyer or doctor or a writer or a president or a ranch man or the colonel of the fighting regiment or to kill bristly bears and lions. But for often flagging the interest and enjoyment, a household of children if things go reasonably well certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison. Our work this next couple of days is to determine whether things went reasonably well. Please welcome Kathleen Dalton. Well, I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for that very kind introduction and all of us. And I just have to say that Theodore Roosevelt at the end of his life when he looked back on many of his struggles, some of the things that he wanted he didn't get. He put together his papers for the Library of Congress and it was one of the things that he thought was important because he was a historian. Self-taught, but he wanted people to read his letters and his public papers. And who knows what he would say looking down from us but down upon us. But I can't imagine he wouldn't think this was an absolutely wonderful development to have his papers digitized and to have it open to the public so that more Roosevelt studies could be conducted and to have it open very broadly. I spent 27, I just have to say my career is not a particularly good example to young scholars in the sense that it took me 27 years to write my book and I did go to the hotels and I did sleep on friends' floors and I did put together friends help me with the archival work but I went to archives in America and in England and I spent a lot of time trying to do what you're gonna make very easy and I think that's a great thing. I wish there had been a digitization project when I started my book but anyway. Let me, I want to talk tonight about Theodore Roosevelt and family and to start out partly by looking, asking a question that animated my book and that is, it's almost an unanswerable question but how did a family produce one self-pitying, self-indulgent alcoholic, that is Elliot Roosevelt who was Eleanor Roosevelt's father, Theodore Roosevelt's brother and a self-confident, multi-talented, expansive personality like TR? And that's a tough question. I have some other tough questions for you to think about. TR is, this picture which was put together by the Theodore Roosevelt Association in its early incarnation, gives you a little bit of a flavor of what TR, he lived many lives. They were all strenuous but it was not always easy to be him but he had a tremendous sense that every day was to be used to the fullest. He wrote more than 30 books. He became a respected scientist who scientists pulled into debates about protective coloration and other scientific issues. So biologists and other people took him very seriously. He was a historian of note, a literary critic. He even wrote some art criticism. He was an editor, a magazine writer and many of you know who've taken history courses. He invented the modern presidency. That's, you know, for a list of accomplishments that's really major. He started trespusting. He fought for, although did not originate the idea of federal government regulation of impure food and drugs. So I say to my history students, well if you didn't die of poison when you went to the drug store yesterday, thank TR. And if you didn't eat putrid beef and die of poisoning, thank TR. He argued also in 1912 that the United States for nationalist reasons, that is because of national pride, if we want to be a real country and take care of our people and be good to our people that we should imitate European countries. That is to create a federal welfare state. Unemployment insurance, which we take for granted today, that means if you're out of a job for a certain period of time, you get unemployment insurance, old age pension, which is something that's tremendously important, social security. He did not win it in his lifetime as you know, but he was in many ways the grandfather of social security in America, FDR. His fifth cousin did win it in a time of national emergency. But I think it's really important to remember as we look at this picture of this many-sided man who helped explore a dangerous river in the Amazon who collected a lot of large mammal specimens for the Smithsonian, who did all kinds of amazing things. That he's also the grandfather of many of our social programs that we take for granted today. He talked about a World League of Nations before Woodrow Wilson, which is, today we have the United Nations and nobody can quantify exactly how many wars have been prevented, how much diplomacy has been accomplished by the United Nations, but he was one of the advocates for more dialogue and he certainly was a very important diplomat who put America on the map, the world map as a diplomatic force, as a third-party negotiator in the Russo-Japanese War. Did I mention that he was the most successful third-party candidate in American history when he ran as a Bulmus party candidate in 1912? He came in second. It's his relationship with the press and the people, his shaping of public opinion, he called the presidency the bully pulpit. And so modern presidents tend to look at TR, whether they're Republican or Democrat, and say he helped move public opinion by giving speeches. He couldn't get Congress to do what he wanted. Many presidents can't, but he found ways to make the office more vibrant by being persuasive, by being able to speak to the people, by being able to convince them and to plant new ideas. So that's prelude for this question, which can we look at TR's childhood to find there the roots of greatness in him and decay in his brother? Let's see if I can get this to work. Okay, there we go. This is grandfather, this is his grandfather, CVS Roosevelt. Now one of the things about TR that's really important to remember is that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was born into one of the richest families in America. He was born in 1858 and his grandfather was listed as one of the millionaires, Dutch descendant. And CVS had a big house on Broadway close to where TR grew up in Manhattan. And CVS was a businessman. His family had been in hardware, banking, real estate, importing plate glass for windows and mirrors at a time when America was building a lot. And clearly being born upper class opens up choices. I sometimes think that instead of my grandfather, the son of a Norwegian immigrant coming and being a wheat farmer north of here, that it would have been nice if my grandfather had been like CVS. But anyway, inheritance doesn't necessarily solve all problems. And that's certainly true, which is class advantages don't explain everything. Because if all you have to do is look at the people in TR's class who he grew up with, they drank, played polo, rode to the hounds, and mostly were fairly inconsequential human beings, including his brother. His brother was typical of that class and that time, which is to say that their lives amounted to satisfying their appetites and they spent their money. And that's pretty much what you could put on their tombstone. Not so with TR. So when we see TR's life, you can explain some things by saying, yes, he was a privileged guy who had a family that certainly gave him a lot of opportunities. On the other hand, it's character that counts. And I think character is really the key to who TR became. One of the things is this is a picture of a typical 19th century middle class, upper middle class child. They dressed boys like this in that time period. So there's not cross dressing in the TR family. I just want to reassure you, I would have told you that in my biography, but it didn't happen, except in amateur theatricals occasionally. But anyway, character, okay, where does the character come from in TR's life? Well, the character comes from his life and death struggle with childhood asthma. Some of you in this audience have asthma, I have it. Today you get your puffer, you have your nebulizer, you can be hospitalized. There are things that they can do to prevent asthma deaths, although it helps to listen to your doctors. If you listen to doctors in the 19th century, they would say, smoke a cigar, get a change of air, have a mustard plaster. So TR didn't have great medical care for his very serious asthma as a child. He almost died several times. Now what significance does this have? Well, the family organized itself totally around his care and he became the center of attention. Some of you may have heard the saying, Theodore Roosevelt wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. That's what his children said about him. Well, yes, he was a person who liked to be the center of attention. His family created itself around his needs and that was what family life was to him. It was a group of people organized around his needs. Now, many of you can observe families around you and you can look at them and see how they function. Often there's a star in the family and then there's a family dog who can never do anything right. We find that in family after family. Well, guess who was the star of his family of origin? He had an especially close bond with his father and that was another benefit, which is that his father, children learn by example and whenever we talk about how to raise children, my one thing to say to other parents is the children are watching. The children are really watching and children pick up manners of speech. They pick up alcoholism. They pick up lying. They pick up integrity. They pick up reading of books and that's something to ponder before you reproduce. It's the little people watching you and my pediatrician said to my husband and me, be careful if you swear in front of the children because they will copy you and it's frightening that everything you do matters. The was an extraordinary man. The son of this businessman I just showed you, he was not satisfied making money. He didn't think it was enough for him. He was very concerned about other people. He was a liberal Protestant and that means that in the late 19th century he believed in the social gospel. That is, if you believe in Christ, you show your faith by helping the least of these. That is the poor and that that's, it was his definition of Christianity and he was involved in many, many good works. Among them, some of them you may have heard about, the Children's Aid Society took poor children who were either abandoned by their parents or neglected by their parents and sent them west to work on farms. PBS has done a documentary about that. Newsboys Lodging House, a lot of children worked and didn't have a place to sleep because they were homeless. The Newsboys Lodging House gave them a place to sleep. The Young Men's Christian Association in the 19th century was a way to get free exercise. That the muscular Christians who supported it believed that sin, that is sexual sin or drinking or dishonesty would be reduced if you exercised and came to pray in a Christian environment. Fee, that is Theodore Roosevelt Sr. was also a political crusader who fought corrupt bosses. He was a Democrat who started, he was not an abolitionist, you'll read that in some books and that's not true, but he became a strong supporter of Abraham Lincoln and became a friend of Abraham Lincoln. And so this is a very admirable man who made his life count for something other than his own pleasure. So TR was blessed with an example of a man who he admired tremendously, he said in his autobiography, TR wrote, he was the best man I ever knew. So TR wanted to please this admirable father who was kind to him, would stay up with him when he had asthma, who would give his life for his son. And he wanted to have a family like this, the family that this man created. He wanted very much to be a good family man like his father. So that bond, more than class privilege, that bond with this admirable father was quite telling in TR's growing up. This great father also bought him books and got him taxidermy lessons, let him create his own museum, collect animals, go camping, do whatever you need to do to follow your intellectual interests so that TR had tremendous support and individualized tutoring and a whole lot of interesting talk in this wonderful family. Now this is his uncle who was a conservationist in the 19th century who Uncle Robert cared about fish protection. He liked to fish and he noticed the fish were dying because people were dumping things into streams. So this is another example, although TR and Rob were not as close as TR and his father, this is the uncle who got TR his first gun and encouraged his love of nature and his fonders for conservation. And they remained friends for the rest of his life because what happens is TR senior dies young. Okay, now this is another debatable person in TR's life. David McCullough wrote a book in which he describes her MIDI, TR's mother, as the model for Scarlett O'Hara. I think there's almost no evidence to think that that's true, but it's fine if David McCullough thinks that. MIDI, her letters show that she had a great sense of humor. She was a southern belle from Roswell, Georgia and she was very warm towards people. I'm sure that TR's love of storytelling comes from his mother. She was a fun person to be around. People love to come and socialize with her. Sarah Delano Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's formidable mother when FDR was a baby would invite this distant relative, MIDI, up to Hyde Park to spend a week with her because MIDI was fun. MIDI was lively and MIDI knew the gossip. She was very charming. A lot of people liked her. But what children need from their mothers and fathers is care and attention. Now, during the Civil War, she was a Confederate supporter and she let it bother her, understandably perhaps, that she was in the middle of very strong pro-union Roosevelt's and she stopped going to family gatherings during the war. But over the years, she became one of those classic 19th century women who, if they don't wanna do something, they say, I have the vapors, I have to go upstairs. And so she did that. She was an invalid. And when I was doing my research, I found a very dim letter book of letters that Theodore Roosevelt Sr. had written. And they provided evidence we never had before, which is that Theodore Roosevelt Sr., despite the fact that in the 19th century, the expectation in an upper class family was that the husband would deal with money and outside work and the wife would run the children and manage the household and hire servants. MIDI didn't do that. And for many years, he ordered the coal. He ordered the sparkling water and the food and hired and fired servants while still keeping up his business life. MIDI was very obsessed about cleanliness. And so she took to her bed. And finally, she got disgusted with her helplessness and turned over the reins of the household to his oldest daughter, who the family called Bami. And Bami was a super competent person who ran the family and the household and managed very well. So what we can say is that children can learn from their parents' examples, but they can also learn about what they don't wanna be. TR hated invalids. There's just no question that we have significant proof. He hated invalids. He didn't have much sympathy for sick people. He thought it was a matter of willpower. Guess who he's blaming for her illness? And that's his mother. He didn't really like her too much. She was fun, but he always judged her harshly for this vapor's routine. Fortunately for TR, when he was a small child during the Civil War, and his mother was lapsing into invalidism, and his father was away enrolling troops in an allotment system, basically a way to send their pay home. His father didn't enlist because his mother was a Confederate sympathizer, and she just couldn't believe that he would ever consider fighting against her brothers who were in the Confederate Army and Navy. So during the Civil War, when the family was divided about which side to support, Midi's mother moved in to help her because she was not coping well with the children. So we can say that TR was not neglected during the Civil War because he had this nice southern grandmother who was very kind to him and who would take care of Midi and who would take care of Theodore and who would take care of Bami and who would take care of Elliot and who would take care of Corinne. And that was good. It's good for children to have attentive adults. And Annie, Midi's sister, also came in and lived with them and tutored Theodore and his siblings. And she endured as a loving friend who would support TR later in life. In fact, it's Aunt Annie, for those of you who follow Eleanor Roosevelt's biography, TR's niece, Eleanor Roosevelt, was neglected by her parents very badly and sometimes Aunt Annie would step in and take care of Eleanor Roosevelt. So this is a good aunt to have. What we get is TR is growing up awkward, not having attended regular schools very much. And he is very much marked by privilege and insularity, but he learns how to deal with a larger world slowly. And clearly he needs to learn how to cope with a larger social world. This is his brother, Elliot. And on the right hand side, it's Corinne, his younger sister, who adores him. And then it's on the bottom, Edith's carol, who's Corinne's best friend. And TR's very close childhood friend who loved to read books with TR. And it was a good companion to him. What happens to TR I'll put very shortly because I don't wanna go on too long. I have a lot to say still. TR's original family encouraged him to aim high. And one of the things that his father did was to say to him when TR was an adolescent, little bit younger than this picture, throw off your invalidism, exercise, make your own body, make your own character. It's time for you to get hold of yourself. So TR turns to camping, hunting, hiking, running, rowing, everything, boxing. He never holds still. And the implication in this meeting between the and his son is that this wonderful father would be deeply disappointed if TR didn't rise to the occasion and throw off his asthma. TR does rise to the occasion. In fact, some people would say he over-exercised. He was always exercising. He almost nearly killed himself a few times. He was told by a doctor at one point that he had heart trouble. What does he do? Anybody know? Climbs the Matterhorn. That's his response to medical advice. Don't try this at home. Okay, so this is a person for whom exercise and the outdoors, he believes that they saved his life. And when sea dies, the family becomes even closer. So when we look at the meaning of family for TR, it is the source of love and support and just all kinds of practical help. The family had to take care of many. The children were much more sensible than she was. They let her stay in the house. And TR figured that he would become a scientist because that was where his academic interests took him. Well, he had to revise his plans because he fell in love with a woman who didn't especially want him to go off to Europe to study science, which is where most scientists studied. American scientists had to go to do graduate work in Europe at that point. This Boston beauty, Alice Lee, was not interested in TR at first. She had many beau, but he courted her by befriending her brothers and sisters, by making friends with her uncle, by showing up, and just by being persistent, she finally realized that she had fallen in love with him and agreed to marry him. They married very young, not young by 19th century standards, but young by our standards, and he married her just as he graduated from Harvard in 1880. He thought he might want to have a political career too, but he gave up the idea of being a scientist and ran for the New York State Assembly, studied law. She died tragically right after giving birth to their child. She died of Breitz disease. And it's that point that brings TR back to the Dakota Territory, where he'd already fallen in love with the hunting possibilities and the rugged territory. And it's here that he comes to the Dakotas to grieve and to establish his two ranches. This is a sad period in his life, but it's also a period where he realizes that the world's not made up of just rich people in New York. He learns a lot about life from the settlers in the Dakota Territory. He brings some of his main woodsmen friends to help him run his ranch. He learns how to rope cattle. He learns how to stay out in freezing weather. And he is a good neighbor. People at first thought he was an Eastern snob, but they were wrong. He was somebody who would organize funerals for people who died, who would look out after his neighbors, who advised a young man he saw growing up, don't grow up to be a drunk. It's not really a good adult career. He took an interested people and was sociable and kind and cared for them. So people here turned out to be some of TR's fiercest and most loyal friends. Whenever, later on when he was president, he'd send a cable out to his various Western friends and they'd show up to see him because they knew him when he was a young cowboy. And what happens to TR in the next stage? I'm not here to talk about his Western career, but his family. And this is Bami, his older sister, with his daughter, Alice. Now families often help each other get through life and this is a case where Bami took care of his daughter while he was in the Dakotas. And she also had some of his ranch hands look after him because she knew he was depressed. That's not the word they would have called it in those days, but she knew that he would take too many risks and he was in a very low-spirited stage. What Bami did for him that was really important is she kept up his political ties. She helped build Sagamore Hill for him while he was trying to figure out what next. And that's his beautiful home on Long Island. It's a national historic site and anybody who loves TR has to go there. And she kept house for him when he would come east and have political parties. And one of the things that political wives did and still do, which is to make political connections for their husbands, to keep up good relationships with a lot of people. And this is TR and his lost soul phase of life. He wrote a lot of histories, the life of Thomas Hart Benton, for example. And he was still very productive but he needed to rebuild his life. And Bami seems to have helped him with that. Not only did she befriend his friend, Henry Cabot Lodge, who was a politician from Massachusetts, who adopts Theodore Roosevelt as the rising star of the Republican Party. He saw greatness in TR and helped him plan his career. And Bami cultivated the friendship and helped TR imagine great things. Lodge planned to make him a senator. He lobbied to get TR his first government jobs after the New York State Assembly. Civil Service Commission, the New York Police Commission, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. TR got to be McKinley's vice president because of Lodge. This was a friend to have and Bami certainly helped him. Bami also allowed that TR thought he shouldn't remarry because many Victorians believe that you should just marry once and it should be forever. And if your spouse dies, it's over for you. But Edith, his childhood friend, appeared in Bami's house and TR realized that this is the woman he loved before he met Alice and that she was the right person for him. And believe me, she was the right person for him on many levels. She had stamina for being a political wife that Alice Lee didn't have, although Edith was older and more mature, had had a harder life and was much more of a stoic. She was prepared for her husband to go out on long hunting trips. She was prepared for him to be bad about money. She was prepared for the fact that his two sisters adored him and really had a special relationship with him. And when the two sisters would arrive, Edith was kind of shunted to the side and there was not much she could do about that. Edith also tolerated TR's tendency to orate. That is, he was a big talker and she made fun of him for it and she had a good sense of humor about some of his egotism, which was fortunate because that was a part of living with him. Now one of the things they did is that they tried to continue the very exciting and interesting family life that they had known together when Theodore Sr. created fun theatrics for them as children. They created a life at Sagamore Hill that was full of fun and games. It was a working farm. They had a swimming hole that children could sail. They could hike. They could collect little animals and bring them into father's study. Edith would encourage them to recite poetry. Both parents read to their children. They had six children, including Alice. And it was in many ways an exuberant and wild family life. This is a picture of TR teaching children to play football. And so the raucous games and obstacle races where you would go out into the neighboring fields and the rule was you couldn't take the easy way over an obstacle. You'd have to climb over it or walk through the swamp. The part of the challenge was leading the strenuous life. Edith and Theodore's marriage is of great interest in many ways because it's two different personalities. He loved to go hunting and was out into nature. She was much more a homebody, much more a Victorian proper lady. He would always promise her that he told her many times that he wouldn't take any more long hunting trips. And she knew this was not gonna ever happen. She wrote, Edith wrote to her sister in 1905. TR says he will never take longer than two weeks hunting trips again. This remains to be seen. 1909, he leaves after his presidency and he leaves in March 1909 and he doesn't see Edith for a whole year. And so in many ways, TR probably would qualify as a little bit of a bad husband because he forgot her birthday. He was really bad about money. He let her handle it all. Although he didn't, if you're thinking about bad husbands for getting a birthday, it's probably not a major issue. But the other woman in their marriage were big animals. That is large game that he wanted to hunt. So I guess it could have been worse. She also didn't like the political sociability as much as he did. So they go to a party together in Washington, D.C. And she get tired of talking to people. She wanted to go home. She had six children and a big house to deal with. And so she'd just leave and she'd leave the party without him. And she wrote her sister and said, I told him I certainly would not hunt him up and hound him home for all the women in Washington would say I was a jealous wife. In fact, she knew TR liked to stay up late and had a lot of energy and like these parties. The same thing happened to Eleanor and Franklin by the way, which is that Eleanor would leave parties before her husband and he enjoyed the sociability of politics more than she did. Edith reflected on one of the difficulties she had as a political wife, which was that she was insecure about her looks. And there were a lot of beautiful, well-dressed women in Washington society. And she wrote again to her sister and said, tomorrow is the day I dread and I will be glad enough when it is safely over. I'll wear a yellow dress and I fear it will not be really pretty. So she really wasn't up to being a society hostess, but she did the work and she put up with many of the demands of life with TR. The family life they created was really, really fun. And so when they were in the White House, they were quite famous. A lot of newspapers did articles about them and the children, the boys would roller skate on the White House floor. It happened to be a wooden floor. They helped ruin the floor. They would bring a pony up in the elevator to see the sick brother. They would throw snowballs at the policemen. And so they were a pretty wild White House family. And it was difficult at times to be a White House family. Once TR was preoccupied a lot of the time. I'm gonna skip ahead so that we can move on here. In the past, sometimes I'll talk about the difficulties of Edith's having to wait to hear if he was killed in the Spanish-American War. And her letters during that time period are very poignant because we know now he got away with going to the Spanish-American War and charging up Kettle Hill and risking himself and having bullets graze his hand. But she didn't know if he wasn't gonna be killed and she planned to go to Tampa or go to Cuba if she had to to take care of him because that was a very badly organized war. So again, it was not easy being married to TR but the two of them made quite a marriage out of it and made a very exciting family life for their children. Now TR took much of what he believed about family life and turned it into a political philosophy so that when he wrote about the welfare state and what the national government should do to protect families, it was very much colored by the fact that family life had meant everything to him and he had very protective feelings about his wife and children and he believed that to be a good man and a good citizen you should have a protective attitude towards children. In 1911, he gave a speech that is very famous but which is hard to get a good newspaper report of. It's called The Conservation of Womanhood and Childhood and it is a response to the Triangle Shirtways Fire. Some of you have studied this, I suspect. The Triangle Shirtways Fire was a New York factory, Shirtways Factory, young women worked in the factory and their doors, the exits were locked because the supervisors thought they would go out and smoke on the fire, the fire exit. And so they were locked in, a fire started and over 100 women were incinerated. Many of them jumped out the window and were impaled on this horrible fence that was sticking out and this shocked New York into realizing that there were many factories in New York with unsafe workplaces. And that industrial capitalism in its early stages, it's the free market gone wild, cramped people's lives and destroyed people's lives. So TR's response to that horrible Triangle Shirtways Fire was to give this speech in which he said, a good country provides safe workplaces for its women and children. A good country will not let children work in factories. That's not what childhood and family life should be. Family life is something that everybody should be able to have. People shouldn't be paid so little that men can't be good fathers because they work such long hours. So family life is the center of the speech. And one of the most compelling stories that TR tells in this speech is about Alma Whaley, a Southern child laborer who because of the poverty of her family, she had to work in a cotton mill since she was aged 10. She worked a 10 hour day, six days a week. She and other child laborers decided life was hopeless, that they'd never get out of poverty. So they made a suicide pact and the group of them drank carbolic acid and died. Now, TR told this story for an emotional effect, which is that in 1911, he felt very strongly that Americans were misguided about their nationalism, their nationalism required them to take care of families. And therefore, that's the reason he supports women's suffrage because he believed women would vote more often to help poor women who are abandoned, to help children, to ban child labor, and to make workplaces safe. One of the things that we have discovered in recent years, I'm friends with a woman who just wrote a biography of Frances Perkins. I found, and then she found some more, that Theodore Roosevelt was very good friends with Frances Perkins. Anybody know who Frances Perkins is? First woman, cabinet member, secretary of labor, and the mother of social security. So if you ever cash a social security check or an unemployment check, thank Frances Perkins and Theodore Roosevelt, FDR too, but, and let me just say that I shouldn't end my talk on such a happy note about the Roosevelt family life because even though it inspires TR to a kind of broad political thinking, and he certainly thinks harder about family life and how to protect it, and how the federal government should protect it, how state government should protect it, and until the end of his life, family is clearly one of the most important things for him. We see that at the end of his life, he's a loving grandfather, and at the very end of his life, he, his family means everything to him. But I shouldn't end my talk before telling you about a little bit of a dark side to TR's family life. And that is, as a Victorian man who had fought hard to build his own body, who hated invalids, he was extremely intolerant of any weakness in his children. There's a famous story of his daughter, Ethel, who was late in life, one of the people who saved Sagamore Hill. She, on her way to a Theodore Roosevelt Association meeting, accidentally slammed her hand in the car door, and she said to her relatives, you go ahead, nothing's wrong, I'm just gonna stay here for a minute. And that's a classic Roosevelt behavior. It's a classic TR family behavior, which is to deny weakness, to hide illness. And TR said, on more than one occasion, that he raised his sons, in particular, he said, and I quote, I want my boys trained to be hearty, self-reliant, positive men, rather than see them grow up namby-pamby weaklings. I would rather have them put to death. Well, gosh, they had to enlist in World War I. One of his sons was killed, Quentin was killed in World War I. TR felt responsible and sad about it, but he really believed until his dying day that no man was a good man unless he served in the military. And this is one of those things, during the symposium we can talk more about family life as the Theodore Roosevelt family practiced it, and family life in more general terms. Clearly there was a conversation always about family life. I've just been teaching about Republican motherhood. The founders of the American Republic believed that you could not have a democracy unless you had families where mothers and fathers, but mostly mothers, taught their children to be literate and conscientious citizens, and that democracy and family life have always been connected in American political thought. So let me just leave you with that. TR wasn't the perfect father. TR was a very tough father, but his kids had a wonderful childhood and for him family was at the center of everything. Thank you very much. Thank you, we have a little time for questions. Could we bring up the house lights please? I'm gonna move away and turn on the FM mic here in a minute. Kathleen, let me ask you a preliminary question before we turn to the audience. You said early on something that I found very intriguing. You said that a family was for Roosevelt. I hope I'm quoting correctly. A group of people organized around his needs. Why don't you unpack that statement a little? This sounds pretty egotistical and if a family's organized around his needs, there are others surely whose needs are not getting met. Well, thank you very much for asking me to unpack that. I think you can say, you know that from my biography of TR that I have a pretty high opinion of this man, but there's just no denying that his family of origin, C and Middy and his brothers and sisters, doted on TR, he was the person who was the bright star who was gonna have tremendous potential. He was the favorite child. In fact, his father did say that to him before he died. You're my favorite child. When TR married Edith, it's clear that she helped organize the family around his needs. Therefore, her needs were not often met. She worked really long hours and was frazzled often, six kids and fairly permissive raising of these six kids. And there are stories about the Roosevelt family being so focused on TR's political career or TR's book or TR's conversation or TR's friends. On one occasion they went to church in Oyster Bay and they came home and where are all the children? They left one of them at the church and that was usually Archie. Archie was the family dog. He was the one who they said, quite overtly, you're not as bright as the other ones. Now, we know today that that's not something you should say to children, you might think it. But he was the dim bulb in the family and he knew it and they told him that. So Archie becomes a fairly embittered, older person. And so there was some neglect, but it's clear that TR was the shining light of his sister's lives too. And some people argue, I think Betty Caroli who's gonna talk later in this symposium does a very nice job of dealing with TR's sisters. Very extraordinary women in their own right but their lives were organized around TR and his advancement. Bami drops everything for him. She gives him her house, she loans him money, she helps him politically. So TR understands family as the Greek chorus, the fan club, the people who stand there saying, Ray, you're great TR, how can we help you? Now, that's not how everybody experiences family life. So yes, he's a negatist. There's no doubt about it. Other questions, please raise your hand. I'll try to get to as many as we can. Speak up, please. I'm gonna ask you. Okay. The fact that his father, everyone who lives here in the Civil War, does not attack him in the grove in the central hill? Yeah, how important is it that his father did not serve in the Civil War and TR's great self-emphasis on being in war for himself and his children? Well, when asked about that very question, when Alice Roosevelt Longworth, his beautiful daughter, his older daughter, was asked, was TR's glorification of war and his desire to fight and his honoring of the military career path related to his own father's failure, she said absolutely it was and his sister Corinne and other relatives said yes it was. But in my book, I would say in the 19th century, the Civil War heroes were very much admired by everybody, whether your father fought in the Civil War or not. And so that many people enlisted in World War I, wanting to be the brave people who defended the nation. And so for more of American history than not, war heroes have been our honored heroes. So it's not a strange thing at all, it's pretty normal for his time for him to feel that way. He may be an extreme case, but I don't think it's a psychological explanation that we need here. I think a lot of other men felt that way. The thought is that after his heroics in the Spanish-American War, he had somehow evened the families down. Well, and he did say that it was a great day of his life. And certainly he did archy-remembered hearing his father complain about thee not fighting. And so the children knew that TR looked down on his father for this one great mistake. So certainly it was important for TR. TR wasn't gonna stay in Washington and help run the war as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He wanted to be in the war. It meant a lot to him. He wanted to be in World War I as well. If he looked down on his father for that, then surely he also looked down on his mother for keeping his father home. Yes, yes. Other questions? Yes, here, speak up. One of your She-San presentations, you mentioned that TR is not a man of our times, but he is a man of his times. And I think it's easy for us to be very critical of his shortcomings as a father. Would people of his times been as critical as we are? That's a great question. We're critical of TR sometimes, but if you put him in his own time and place, how does he fare? Right, and I think that's a really important question. In his own time, there was not much expectation that men would be involved in child rearing except as disciplinarians. So he was above average as a father in his own time. In fact, he was a very involved father because he spent a lot of time at home and he taught his children to ride. He taught them football. He spent a lot of time with them. So I think for the most part, he was a great father. He loved those kids and he played with them and he read to them. In Eleanor Roosevelt's memoir, she remembers going to see Uncle Theodore and he grabbed her and gave her such warm hugs. Nobody was nice to Eleanor Roosevelt as a child. She was a terribly neglected child, but she remembered Uncle Theodore reading her poetry in the gun room, hugging her, also throwing her in the water and telling her sink or swim, but still he was involved. So yes, I really believe that we shouldn't, racial issues often come up when I talk about TR. Things were different in his time, very different. Things that would be unthinkable today were commonplace then. Good question. Another question. I'm missing, yes, over here. Can you illuminate the childhood sweetheart, Edith, that there's falling out and later they reconnect? Well, that's a good question. I've seen every document related to this incident that exists, I believe, and they evidently had a misunderstanding at some time and went away from this encounter angry. Later on, Edith said that TR had asked her to marry him in those days. This is before he met Alice. Now, maybe that was her pride saying, oh, well, I was his first choice, but there was some kind of fight that went on because she clearly was the person who most understood him as a child and who was very much on his wavelength. They really understood each other and were deeply fond of each other, and I think a lot of people assumed that they would get married. There's some documents that say that because Edith's father was an alcoholic and viewed as a kind of a downwardly mobile loser, that the family would disapprove of the marriage and so TR might have looked elsewhere. I never found any corroborating evidence. So it seems to have been some kind of fight, but we don't know very much about it. Other questions? Yes, here. I'm from Roosevelt, I'm a family, a dynamic, so I'm centered around the yard in this case. We could also have a great deal of fun. There's any sort of paradigm ruling yardstick or other residential families or leading up to residential families. For example, a young woman parked eloquently, spoke eloquently of Edith's mother, saying that her mother, or West Island, rivaled her mother. Rival actually is a big game of, we may not be able to hope it, I am not talking about myself, well, at least it's saying about the father of my father in bed and I hope it's okay to have one of my rival stories once. So the question is about being a first family, being a national exemplar of Roosevelt as a model for other first families. Well, TR was looked at as, he talked a lot about family life and preached a lot about it from the White House and I think people looked at him as a model family man in some senses and certainly Franklin Roosevelt who idolized TR and Eleanor, who loved him as her kind uncle, were people who watched everything he did. They were from a different political party but they would come to the White House and certainly Edith and Theodore were models for them and when Franklin Roosevelt started his time as president, he said, I want things to be like they were when Uncle Theodore was president. So clearly it's a compelling model. Now that's not to say that Franklin, Franklin was worse than Teddy as a husband because it wasn't just big game animals that were the other women and I think with John F. Kennedy, it's clear that the Kennedys certainly had read about Roosevelt family life and in some senses copied them. Alice Roosevelt Longworth believed that the Kennedys jumping in the swimming pool, the 50 mile hikes that were popular under Kennedy, the physical fitness. The really revival of this strenuous life under the Kennedys was copying TR. Now I've never heard any of the Kennedys comment on that but it's clear that Alice, I mean they did a lot of the same things that TR did. Pablo Casales comes in plays for Edith and Jacqueline Kennedy. They're all kinds of things, the artists and writers in the White House, very much more, TR and the Kennedys are very much more alike than somebody should write an article about it because there's a lot of similarities. So TR, various biographers over the years have written about TR's life and every time a compelling biography comes out, there's kind of a renewal of TR interests and so he's still very much alive in the White House. People certainly know about him. Let's do a couple more. We're almost out of time, Shaila. In Dave McCulloch's book, Morning Gunn's First Pack, he seems to indicate that Bami did a lot more raising of Alice than Edith. How much of that young girl's life did she spend actually with Edith? How much, how big a role did Bami play in raising Alice and what role did Edith play? Okay, well just think of it chronologically in simple terms, Alice is born and her mother dies in 1884, Edith takes over in 1886. That's two years, okay? So Bami has her for two years but always maintains a close relationship with her and Alice also goes to visit her Lee grandparents who are very wealthy bankers and they buy her anything she wants and they let her jump on the sofa and they pretty much give her free reign and Bami also gives Alice free reign. So ask Stacey Courtery about this because I think she's not gonna tell you that Alice was spoiled but that's what I think. I think Alice was, I think Bami spoiled Alice and I think Edith was severe but I think she was faced with a growing family and a child who wasn't that easy to deal with. So, Alice wrote about this later on with a resentment towards her stepmother but in fact the letters show that Edith was pretty conscientious and pretty kind although she was critical of her children. She would say kind of a surrogate things to them so. Let's do one more. Yeah, the effect of TR's disappearance for those two first years. Right, right. Is this abandonment? What are the psychological effects? How do you read that? Okay, well I think that's in again we should look at it in those times. In the 19th century fathers would not be very involved with any children under the age of two. Dads did not change diapers I promise you in the 19th century unless it was a very unusual circumstance. So psychologically two years of being in the West sometimes he showed up for her birthdays. I don't think he's a horrible monster for coming to the West. He needed it. He was trying to get himself together. So she made out to be a neglected child in her books about her father. Now part of the problem with Alice's books is that she didn't especially like the sun shining on her father and the family and it's hard to be a child in a family with such an egotistical father. And so her books do complain a lot about her father but she adored him and I don't think it's a gross case of child neglect especially because she had excellent care and women would have been the people who would have been giving her excellent care anyway. And her childhood was much more supervised and well loved. She was much better loved than Eleanor. I mean Eleanor was really neglected by these kind of frivolous society people and Alice got the good childhood comparatively speaking. So I don't know. I think David McCullough is a little hard on TR about that. She was jealous of Eleanor because TR made it clear that he approved of Eleanor. Eleanor read good books. She worked in the tenements. She was unselfish. She kept up with public issues. She didn't care about being the most beautiful woman in the room. She was nice looking as a young woman but that wasn't what she was invested in. And so Alice knew that her father thought Eleanor was the right kind of woman. She was very jealous of Eleanor always. So, but ask Stacy about that because you're gonna get a different answer. She's going to be here tomorrow morning. We'll be here. There's a morning keynote and with any luck she's actually in the room. She's the late Denver. She's super. So we'll be good. Let me ask you a question and a half but Sharon come on up. I know you have some program announcements. There'll be a book signing afterwards but let me ask you this big question and then an easy one. TR's not only a family man, first in his birth family and then in the family he created but he also has wild elaborate theories of family. Is he extrapolating from out of his own experience or where does he get his philosophy of family that he spoke so often in so many places? Well, one of the things I didn't talk about was race suicide and he gets the theory that a fighting nation needs to have enough children to replenish itself from political theory that's floating around. Other countries believe that. So he urged women not to be childless to have children. So he disapproved of families that didn't have children and so this is very much an idea of its time. Where he gets the conservation of womanhood and childhood theory is very much from the social workers and the reformers of New York who he's very close to. So it's the Francis Perkins, it's the Maud Nathan, it's Francis Keller and some of the people I write about in my book. He believes that family is one thing that everybody should have a family, everybody should be married. He'll make an exception for these people like Jane Adams, settlement house workers who are doing exceptional things and it's those women who urge him to think about what the government can do to help families survive and so it's kind of a two-sided theory. The government should help families have a decent life and so he's very much an advocate of the welfare state and he gets that from them and then this race suicide side of his personality that I chose not to talk about. But on the subject of race suicide, his daughter Alice heard of a man, a couple who had had 20 children in 25 years and she was of course grossed out by this and she said, oh father would love that. Well, he thought, well also there's an ethnic prejudice side to the race suicide which is he thought that college educated people should reproduce more and that poor immigrants should maybe stop reproducing so much and he didn't come out and say it that black people shouldn't reproduce so much so he thought that the right kind of people should reproduce so that is a racial theory that has some similarities with some very ugly racial theory that's eugenics and things that the Nazis pick up later so I think it's one of the least admirable ideas floating around TR's mind. Here's the easy question, 27 years to write Theodore Roosevelt, Australian US Life, what are you working on now? I have been working on for the last, when I was working on TR my husband would say, stop doing research, you really like doing archival research and some days I wouldn't tell him that instead of writing I was gonna go back to the archives and one day I went through a diary that was just released and I found this diary and it was a friend of TR's who went to Sagamore Hill and spent a day with him and I started reading the diary and it turns out that this woman is FDR's second cousin, one of Eleanor Roosevelt's best friends and she kept a diary almost daily. Her husband was ambassador to Mussolini and very involved in the New Deal and she kept a daily diary for 60 years and I have exclusive permission to publish it although I haven't found a publisher yet and I'm gonna write about Eleanor and Franklin and this woman Caroline Phillips and her husband William Phillips who was under secretary of state and in the OSS and very involved in FDR's policy. So it's still a Roosevelt project but it's the other Roosevelt's, so. Don't go away and don't you go away, we have some program announcements for first, what a great beginning for St. Paul's.