Episode 12: The Literary Life of Theodore Roosevelt

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Tom Bailey and Catherine Joslyn, welcome to the Talk About Teddy podcast.

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Oh, it's good to be here.

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Thank you for inviting us.

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We're very happy to be with you.

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thanks for making this time.

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Appreciate it.

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Been looking forward to this for some time.

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as you are well familiar, there are thousands of Theodore Roosevelt books, biographies out there written on any number of aspects of his life.

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You have collaborated on this, look at Roosevelt as an intellectual.

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I was curious, how did you come to write this book? What sparked your academic interest in Theodore Roosevelt from a literary perspective? Have Well, I'm a literary scholar and, and I started, uh, with, I've done a lot of work on Edith Wharton.

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as you may know, Edith Wharton grew up along with T.

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D.

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Roosevelt in the Gilded Age in Old New York.

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They come from similar families.

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And then I went on from that, um, I was looking for a person who wasn't known as a literary figure, but was a literary figure.

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Uh, so I wrote about Jane Addams, the Settlement House founder, who founded Hull House in 1889.

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And she has, you know, a dozen books.

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And, um, of Youth in the City Streets Everybody Should Read.

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And, uh, so I worked with her for a while, um, and I tried to figure out how to talk about somebody who wasn't usually talked about as a literary figure in American literature.

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And then I thought, after I did that book, I thought, well, maybe I should do a boy.

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And so, I thought, oh, what boy would you choose if you were, I'd, you know, done Theodore Dreiser and such, but what, what man links Edith Wharton with Jane Addams? And I thought, okay, I'll try for that.

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And the truth is, I came up with Theodore Roosevelt.

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he had grown up in old New York with Edith Wharton, shared her political ideas all the way through his life.

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And, uh, but he wound up at the Bull Moose convention, a progressive.

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And therefore he asked, Jane Adams is the first woman to ever speak at a national conference and she seconded his nomination, because he had become a progressive.

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So I thought, okay, well, I can link the one woman with the other woman.

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with And I'll just do Theodore Roosevelt, like, like, like that would be simple.

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And then I went and got his books out, and I realized how many books were there.

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And then I did what I sometimes do when I'm in trouble.

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I called downstairs to Tom, and I said, Tom, I have a project I'm working on, and I wonder if you might like to work along with me.

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And I said, yes, because I'm always supposed to say yes, you know, when I get the call, the desperate call.

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So I said, yes, and I didn't know what I was getting it for either.

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And then we went to Harvard and we started dealing with the wonderful people at the Harvard library.

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And they said, they said to us, this book needs to be written.

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Nobody's had the, sheer plot, courage, courage, well, courage, I suppose that's a word for it, the sheer courage to undertake it because there's so much and, and then they started bringing out these books and piling them up on the Carol that they've given us.

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And it came to us something like 46 or 47 books.

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And we had read some already, but we started in and we plowed in and, awful.

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A lot of reading had to be done before we could start writing and then Wow.

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or four years work, and then we split it up So I was doing the stuff as the boy, and uh, we went to the Houghton Library.

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And now if you, if you want to get things, the Dickinson State is digitizing the stuff.

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But also we went to the Library of Congress, and we read the papers.

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And I was really interested in the kid.

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So I said, Tom, why don't you take the old guy? You know, why don't you get him later? So, uh, Tom picks him up sort of after the president.

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Well, during the presidency and afterwards, I was, an English teacher and a literary scholar, although not as successful as Catherine and I was, At the time, I just finished up a stint as Director of Environmental Studies at Western Michigan University.

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So I knew about John Muir and I knew about John Burrows and I knew about the the Homestead Act, and I knew about all the conservation stuff that Roosevelt was so interested when he was president.

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Right.

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And I hadn't read.

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the Africa book, nor had I read the wilderness book.

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When I read those, I was very excited that I knew this was a real, project.

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It had meat to it and it was important by its very nature.

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And we were delighted then to work on the writing of it for two or three years.

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Right.

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So what would happen is I would do this stuff on the little boy in the morning and Tom would barrel into this man in, in the morning, and we'd come down for lunch and I'd say, you know what a wonderful kid I have.

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You know, I, I could expect a lot from this boy.

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He's sensitive and he's smart and he cares about language.

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And Tom would be all grumpy and he'd say, I don't know.

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Where does he get these? political ideas.

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And so, so it was a weird disconnect.

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Well, you know, his, his tone is so admonitory, right? It's, it's a wonderful tone, and when you get used to it, it's very compelling, but it doesn't fit with the modern sensibility very much, right? you write that he spent, he had this life spent filling each moment with language.

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Um, so Catherine, you worked on him as a, as a youth.

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I was going to ask you, what were some of these habits of, of youth that, uh, that led to this? Life of words, he was taught to write letters.

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And as soon as he could figure out letters, he wrote letters and then he got excited about writing itself.

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And he would come up with, he'd give, um, he was already doing plays, and he'd have the names of all the journals, with all the names of the characters.

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And then, like, who was that supposed to be for? Everybody knew who the characters were.

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So he was already writing for an audience he might not have known the audience he would have.

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But, um, so he would write journals, and he would, Draw pictures.

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Um, and he, put pen to paper every day, uh, in this really wonderfully earnest way.

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Yeah.

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And his parents traveled around a lot and the kids usually stayed home or they went with one parent and not with the other.

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And, and Theodore wrote all these very charming letters to his mother.

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They're just lovely.

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And he wrote, a different kind of letter to his father, who was a different kind of an audience, right? And they were charming in their own way, right? and he read all the time.

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Had had the access to that wonderful library.

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He, he was nearsighted, you know, and so he could, he was reading, but he was writing and the question is all along, who's he really talking to? Um, and he has in mind this wider, uh, audience, even as a child.

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And you were interested in his early interest in nature.

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Yeah.

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I was going to ask to what extent that early in nature interest, would later influences literary life.

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he would go out and he would, he was interested in birds.

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He was really a faunal naturalist is what he was.

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And, uh, but he went to go out and sit.

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carefully, and he didn't know about his vision problem, and he would listen to birdsong, and then he would try to craft the birdsong, so that he could remember it, and he would do journals on birds, and then he he had a collection of birds that he would capture, and of course kill, and got Transcribed And then he would measure everything in the bird, uh, to understand it better.

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And you can still see those birds at the museum of natural history in New York.

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His father had been one of the two donors to start the museum.

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And the second acquisition was this, museum of Natural History, and you can go there as a scholar.

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We did it, and they'll open the drawers and the very birds that he worked with are there, are right in front of you.

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Right in front of you, right.

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And he studied taxidermy with the guy who had been taught taxidermy by John James Audubon.

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He, he could see up close cause he was nearsighted.

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So he could read and he was a really remarkable sketcher.

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So his sketches of birds and mice and stuff are on the one hand, utterly charming, straightforward.

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Things that he did, and on the other, extraordinarily carefully observed.

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So when his daddy finally heard it out, there was something with his eyes, and they got him glasses.

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He walked outside Fifth Avenue, and he looked up at the trees, and there were leaves on the trees.

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He could see, and that really, Not maybe it didn't drive him away from books of language, but it drove him outdoors in a new kind of a way.

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Right.

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And it made his interest in the natural world so much more vivid.

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When he was 14, I Yeah.

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my wife talks about having that same experience as a kid, uh, not getting glasses until, you know, later in childhood and then looking up and.

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Understanding you can literally see the individual leaves on trees.

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And what I just took that for granted as a kid, but, uh, yeah, it was a revelation to her.

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So, 14, I think, and he got a gun and then he got the glasses.

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I think we were then they went to Egypt.

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Right.

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Yeah.

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And so yeah, the whole right.

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pretty literally.

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So, he was interested, he was fascinated, by uh, every part of the birds he was studying, what they sounded like, and then to open them up and figure out what How they were built and what they were made of, he was fascinated by that study.

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first book that he writes, he writes later, uh, when he's, um, in it's in 1877, uh, The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks.

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And he, goes through and then tries to, put that bird that he was seeing and, and feeling and touching, and dealing with into prose.

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Want me to read a piece? Oh, certainly.

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Loved that.

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Okay.

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So this is, about the, the hermit thrush, in this birds of the Adirondack and she, he's with a friend.

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We read by our own success.

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We at last turned homeward.

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When suddenly the quiet was broken by the song of a hermit thrush.

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Louder and clearer it rang from the depths of the grim and rugged woods, until the sweet, sad music seemed to fill the very air, and to conquer for the moment the gloom of the night.

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Then it died away and ceased as suddenly as it had come.

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the song would have seemed less sweet in the daytime, but uttered as it was with such surroundings, sounding so strange and so beautiful amid these grand, but desolate wilds.

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I shall never forget it.

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It's wonderful.

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How old was he when he wrote that? Ha, ha, ha.

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he's, let's see, it's since 1877.?

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He's, uh, 19? He's in college, yes.

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He's in college.

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Listen, if we could get our college kids to write this for us, that would be terrific.

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It's just beautiful, but you, you understand how many millions of words he's read to acquire that kind of vocabulary.

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so you write early in the book, that, uh, quote, the boy read without prejudice or squeamishness.

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Uh, I was going to ask if you could talk about some of this really diverse childhood reading, uh, that he did and maybe how that influenced him as well.

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well, I said Squamish um, he read along with his sisters.

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And it didn't matter to him whether it was a book for girls or a book for boys.

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That's what I mean with that squeamishness.

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he would, even at the end of his life when he was asking, as he was dying and he was asking for books, he was asking for books written by women.

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Books you wouldn't, that would surprise you.

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a romance novel, for example, so he, that's what I mean.

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He read without prejudice or squeamishness of whatever was out there for the family to learn.

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He wanted to learn and he read the main read.

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He read all the child's literature.

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He always read.,

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he's a omnivorous.

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reader who doesn't make prior judgments about what he's reading.

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Yeah, it's just very open minded, even as a, as a kid, uh, and that just continued the rest of his life, it seems like.

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Well, you open your book with this, uh, what I think is just a really telling line from TR's autobiography that, that really gets to the theme of your book.

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I have always had a horror of words that are not translated into deeds of speech that does not result in action.

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Uh, you're right that Roosevelt made little distinction between thinking and saying.

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Or saying and writing, or between writing and doing.

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I was going to ask if you could talk a little bit about that idea.

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If words are important, and if words have meaning, and if words have power, and you can get into a situation where you have power, then your job is to use the words.

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and he certainly does that by the time he gets to the presidency.

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but, often when we're talking about, writers, we think of them sort of divorced from the world, of the physical world that Roosevelt lived in.

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of the gun and, of the long walks and of the, hunting trips on the sound in bad weather, uh, we think of them as sitting somehow in a room someplace, uh, and, and, and writing and imagining things.

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But for Roosevelt, the world, the physical world and the intellectual world and the scholarly world and the literary world were way more one than I think with most people.

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That's interesting.

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I like the way you put that.

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Not, not just words, but deeds as well.

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Right.

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Right.

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So when we talk about, uh, right? And he knew how to give a political speech that was packed with power.

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It was often repetitive and it was often simple.

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He said platitudes and iteration are the, the substance of a political speech.

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Platitudes and iterations, right? Say it in the simplest straightforward language you can invent and then say it again.

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And perhaps.

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Later, say it again, right? He wanted that language to make an impact on his listeners.

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The language they used to him or wrote to him made an impact on him.

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And especially when he was president, could call up his But he's in the Republican party and say, we need new law.

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It has to be language and it has to, has to do things.

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And he was a brilliant legislator for that very reason.

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It seems because language.

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And action goes so much hand in hand.

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And if there is power in the letter of the law, it's because it's well written and it comes from important sources, not just words, but deeds, And not just words, but binding words, legal words, new laws, ideas.

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But we'll get to that later when he starts doing the national parks and the national reserve.

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turning, deeds into words, then as well, uh, I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about his, experiences in, in action and adventure that, uh, Become the fodder for so many of his books, so could you talk a little bit about that, about how he turned these real life experiences into, uh, publications? So, everybody who knows Roosevelt knows that he lost his mother and his wife on the same day on Valentine's day.

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That's when he went to the Dakotas.

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And, and he became a rancher.

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he left his baby, he with his sister, and he went out there to try to figure out ways that he could heal.

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and it, it worked for him to be in that physical, natural world.

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and he turned that into a couple of books.

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And those books about the Dakotas probably are the place to start.

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He, he created characters.

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Uh, he had this, this wonderful story that he told about someone had stolen his boat and was going to go down the river after the boat.

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And he was, um, it was cold and there was a storm and he couldn't stop reading Anna Karenina.

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And so you have this kind of wonderful and very human story.

183
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Where his life comes together with the natural world.

184
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The other story was, is about killing the animals.

185
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And I think that book is about how you deal with death.

186
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Um, he had known that people who are living can suddenly be dead.

187
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And so, He went out, I think, kill the animals to understand death, or the, that boundary between life and death, and he writes those stories also.

188
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Right, it's lovely stuff.

189
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It's lovely stuff.

190
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He, he writes beautifully, as we've seen and heard, he tells a story that's really quite compelling, and it pictures, In a very real way, his movement into full manhood and from grief, yeah, They thought, the people out there in the Dakotas, as you might imagine, thought him a bit of the dude, right? So did Walt Whitman.

191
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But, right.

192
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Quickly convince them that they better not mess with him, That he was, could hold his own and he loved being there.

193
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He loved it.

194
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He loved the masculinity of the whole thing.

195
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He loved the hard work.

196
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what did he say to his sister Corinne I'm just home from 14 hours in the saddle.

197
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And I'm just writing you this quick note.

198
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I'm going to go get in the bathtub soon.

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Right? I mean, he did have a bathtub.

200
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He did have a bathtub out there.

201
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Right? Right.

202
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it.

203
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He sent Can only endure so much hardship.

204
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You, you probably, you probably have talked to other speakers about this, but there was a question about where to put his presidential library and it's now going in.

205
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You probably know more about it than we do, in, uh, Medora.

206
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And so, for people who are interested in studying, Roosevelt, you can read him, you can read his books, you can go, you can go out to the ranch.

207
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Um, and you can see with your own eyes.

208
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Right.

209
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That's a Yeah.

210
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for me.

211
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The Badlands.

212
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Well, depending, I suppose, on your taste in nature, but I loved being in the Badlands and I loved being on the Little Missouri River.

213
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I thought that was just perfectly splendid.

214
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And it lets you understand something about Roosevelt Yeah.

215
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most writers.

216
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If you go to where they lived and where, where they were shaped, man, it really, really lets you understand them in a different kind of a way.

217
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Yeah, he's where he said the romance of his life began again, I guess, really, and he seems to have never had an experience that he wasn't willing to turn into words then, uh, and into publication.

218
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so, I mean, if you think of him as a war correspondent, uh, he goes off, uh, to Cuba and, and you get the Rough Riders out of that.

219
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He, um, anything he did, he wrote about, he, he took some ribbing for this, you know, he put himself in the middle of the action.

220
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He wasn't above doing that, as you know.

221
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And, the humorous, Peter Finley Dunn, had, a character, Mr.

222
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Dooley.

223
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Mr.

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Dooley, who would comment on Tiddy Roosevelt, what Tiddy Roosevelt said.

225
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The idea that they had to order more eyes for the book.

226
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And I think I said at one Yeah, took.

227
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23 of the offending pronouns to get him up the hill and another 23 to get him down.

228
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Um, um, that's great.

229
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and he's in the scene.

230
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I, I kind of adore him cause I, I still adore that little kid.

231
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Uh, but there he is and he's in, he's in the natural world.

232
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He's on the biggest hunt he's ever been on.

233
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He will in fact kill a Spaniard.,

234
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It was, um, for him, his top military moment and as a writer also, uh, it's about this idea of action into words and words into deeds and, uh, so that that war it was a good place for him as a writer, uh, to, um, to continue these sagas.

235
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It's sort of a variant on his hunting tale you know, he wrote it when he got home and it didn't take him long.,

236
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Writing for Scribner's magazines first, right.

237
00:22:29,667.204 --> 00:22:32,107.205
that was typical of writers in his day.

238
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Edith Wharton did that.

239
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Certainly Jane Addams did that a lot to make money.

240
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So then he would collect the articles into books, uh, and make money two and three times.

241
00:22:42,417.204 --> 00:22:42,627.204
Yeah.

242
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That was his bestselling book.

243
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Rough Riders, Apparently, a million copies had been sold of that book, right, so he was.

244
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Always writing for money, right? he Earning his real living as a writer then.

245
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right.

246
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Yes, that's right.

247
00:23:02,512.204 --> 00:23:03,42.204
That's right.

248
00:23:03,142.204 --> 00:23:13,922.204
Well, and that's a nice, that's always been a nice metaphor, isn't it? I'm earning your living, right? He, he was, he was living his living and earning it all at the same time.

249
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That's really nice.

250
00:23:15,402.204 --> 00:23:24,322.203
we talked a little bit about that in magazines, that process of dual publication, I guess you say that was a little more common.

251
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It's not not as if TR invented that No, but it certainly he profited by it.

252
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Yeah, In the book about Africa and the book about Brazil, what he did then was writing the book while you're living it.

253
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Those weren't essays that he then later collected.

254
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Those were essays he was writing on the spot.

255
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And it put him under Really terrific pressure if you stop to think about it, right? As I say in one passage, what if none happened, right? He's got to write something, he's got a contract, he's got a contract with Scribner.

256
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They're paying him a lot of money to write those chapters, and they're publishing them, and they've got a contract beyond that, that they're going to put those chapters together into a book in exactly the order that Roosevelt has written them, with no serious editorial changes and he's doing it at the end of a long exhausting day in the wilderness somewhere.

257
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I mean, it's, it's really quite daring, uh, notion of how you write a book.

258
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And he never missed a deadline.

259
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And he never missed a deadline.

260
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never missed a deadline.

261
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were there on time.

262
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were ready to put into typeset, right? There were very minor editorial changes that needed to be made, right? I mean, that's not only of his imagination, because he was was imagining how all these experiences, as he was living them, would fit together.

263
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and his as a writer and his sense that he was going to have an experience that was worth making a book about.

264
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And I think both those two books, the the Africa book, And through the wilderness.

265
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If you were going to read something as a contemporary reader, both those books would be interesting to do.

266
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Yeah, as you said, it's a, it's a very daring way to write, almost without much editing, right? You're just putting it straight into serialization.

267
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And, I think He wrote out everything longhand, right? Uh, Mm hmm.

268
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He wrote on a triplicate.

269
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He had a, you know, there was a white cover and a blue cover and a yellow one and he wrote with a pencil so he had to press hard.

270
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Then he'd send them off and a yeah, take him to the nearest port, send them on the ship and he would keep yeah.

271
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copy and the white copy was for the printer and the blue copy, the middle one was I don't know.

272
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in a separate package, so that if something got lost, they'd still, they'd still, uh, one good copy, and he always kept a copy of himself, and now they're gone.

273
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We can't find them anywhere.

274
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It would really be fun to get your hands, I mean, as a literary scholar, that would be really fun to Oh my.

275
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Yeah.

276
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Oh, right.

277
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Yeah Yeah, I was gonna, ask if you could, discuss Roosevelt as, as the historian, writer.

278
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What I was amazed with Rosamond is that of course, he had the archives in New York.

279
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before him, but he also looked for other treasure troves of letters and a lot of the research that he was doing was very much like the research we did for his book.

280
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That is to say, he was trying to learn as much as he could learn from the papers still available.

281
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He was scholarly in that way that we don't usually think of him that way.

282
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and then his stories about the West, as you know, feature the Boone and Crockett types, the men who came across the country.

283
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his idea was that all these people who had come from Europe and they'd come from different backgrounds, when they got to the American soil, they become Americans and that there's an American voice and he's interested in those people who develop that voice and who lead that path.

284
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Yeah, really, that, the whole theme of winning in the West, uh, that, that frontier spirit is what made us Americans, The way he put himself into the story is that at some point, some points, he would have footnotes.

285
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he would be talking about something that was happening in 1769.

286
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And he started writing footnotes from 1883.

287
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but yeah, all of a sudden he would just show up in these things, he's an interesting character in that way.

288
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He, he, he doesn't mind being in the story and, um, and all these stories about the West then validate his move to the Dakotas and what he was doing in Dakotas that, uh, the, the history leads to, um, I don't know if all roads lead to Theodore Roosevelt, but, um, but the, but the histories lead to a figure very like the figure he meant to be.

289
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And it's important to remember that in Roosevelt's winning of the West, it's not the West.

290
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It's not North Dakota and it's not Montana.

291
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It is, trans.

292
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Appalachian West.

293
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And he loved it.

294
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We looked at some of the manuscript the book that's available in the Library of Congress his revisions are so typical of him, right? Most writers when they revise, cut, you know, eliminate.

295
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Roosevelt, And so he'll have more sentences and it'll go around on the back and there's still more sentences.

296
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I don't know how the editors ever put it together, but in a life of language.

297
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He didn't believe in wasting any.

298
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I'll tell you that for sure.

299
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addition not subtraction.

300
00:29:37,142.2655 --> 00:29:37,742.2655
That's how you write.

301
00:29:37,742.3655 --> 00:29:38,262.1655
Yeah.

302
00:29:38,783.2655 --> 00:29:39,73.2655
Accretion.

303
00:29:41,508.2655 --> 00:30:18,232.2645
Let's get this bigger, right? Well, you talk a little bit about, when he was researching the, uh, the winning of the West, that there was, uh, one historian by the name of Draper who had collected a number of, Antiquarian, sources, source information here, you had the ability, you know, in those days to literally monopolize the, the source material and Roosevelt goes to, try to, get access to some of this stuff and, and, uh, Draper refused to share it with him, um, because he was waiting until he had all of the facts.

304
00:30:18,722.2645 --> 00:30:24,162.2645
Uh, in front of him, he couldn't, he couldn't put the story down until he had the complete set of facts.

305
00:30:24,162.2645 --> 00:30:40,573.2655
But how did, uh, how did Roosevelt differ from that? Well, I might be the person who doesn't want to give him up until I get all the dots and all the T's Anyway, um, the Roosevelt wasn't so interested in that.

306
00:30:41,173.2655 --> 00:30:43,963.2655
He wasn't, uh, kind of pedant in that way.

307
00:30:44,103.2655 --> 00:30:46,203.2655
He didn't mean to do each thing.

308
00:30:46,433.2655 --> 00:30:50,403.2655
He got into something and it grew for him and it became a story for him.

309
00:30:50,723.2655 --> 00:30:56,163.2655
So he didn't want this guy sitting on papers that could be used to tell a bigger story.

310
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and.

311
00:30:56,973.2655 --> 00:31:02,753.2655
One of the things he didn't like about the guy who was hoarding the papers that you couldn't be fussy.

312
00:31:02,753.2655 --> 00:31:04,513.2655
You had a story to tell.

313
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A big narrative.

314
00:31:06,273.2655 --> 00:31:13,323.2655
And, and that stands behind the energy of all of his later books, it seems to me.

315
00:31:13,673.2655 --> 00:31:14,883.2655
That compelling narrative.

316
00:31:15,133.2655 --> 00:31:30,893.2665
urge to tell the story by using the facts that enhance the story and maybe leaving the others out or acknowledging them but not getting tangled up in, as Catherine was putting it, pedantry.

317
00:31:31,197.4665 --> 00:31:32,197.4665
Yeah, that's interesting.

318
00:31:32,867.4665 --> 00:31:47,757.4665
That makes me think of why he also didn't pursue, uh, a major at Harvard as a, uh, as a naturalist because that whole field was moving into the, the close to section and what he called the microscopists.

319
00:31:48,127.4655 --> 00:31:52,977.4665
Uh, and so he, he desired to be more of a general field naturalist.

320
00:31:53,7.4665 --> 00:31:56,587.4665
Uh, and so I guess his, his feelings about history are no different.

321
00:31:57,198.4665 --> 00:31:57,668.4665
That's right.

322
00:31:58,348.4665 --> 00:31:59,818.4665
And that's a bigger canvas.

323
00:32:00,138.4665 --> 00:32:06,338.4655
But yeah, to work on a microscope, just wouldn't have suited a personality like that.

324
00:32:06,608.4665 --> 00:32:07,828.4655
I can't even imagine.

325
00:32:08,148.4665 --> 00:32:11,88.4665
He was a guy who was still trying to, he just figured out his glasses.

326
00:32:11,428.4665 --> 00:32:14,588.4665
But I think looking under a microscope was not of interest to him.

327
00:32:15,637.4665 --> 00:32:29,197.4655
Uh, you quote maybe it's a passage from history is literature, but he says the writer must possess the power to embody ghosts, to put flesh and blood on dry bones, to make dead men living before our eyes.

328
00:32:30,898.4665 --> 00:32:34,738.4665
Yeah, that's pretty much the heart of history as literature.

329
00:32:34,738.4665 --> 00:32:35,738.4665
Right there, right.

330
00:32:36,733.4665 --> 00:32:39,397.4665
But again, that makes him, we were That's good stuff.

331
00:32:39,413.4665 --> 00:32:43,93.4665
a literary figure, like would he have been a literary figure if he hadn't been president.

332
00:32:43,543.4665 --> 00:33:00,583.4665
Um, he, people who write literature care about that very thing, about, uh, bringing people to life and, and making life, uh, recognizable and, um, that, that you can have a relationship through language, with worlds quite beyond what you can see.

333
00:33:00,818.4665 --> 00:33:01,458.4665
for yourself.

334
00:33:02,337.4665 --> 00:33:12,507.4665
Well, uh, moving on to different aspects of him as a writer, uh, you, you note that, that Roosevelt produced 15 volumes of essays.

335
00:33:12,627.4665 --> 00:33:27,68.4665
Uh, I was going to ask if you could maybe talk about TR as an essayist, uh, political philosopher, nationalist, polemicist, uh, how is, how is that different from some of his other writings? But he's writing all the time, of course.

336
00:33:27,358.4665 --> 00:33:33,888.4665
But what irritated him is that somebody would write to him and say, want you to write a political essay.

337
00:33:34,498.4665 --> 00:33:36,888.4665
he calls his writing socio political.

338
00:33:37,313.4665 --> 00:33:56,43.4665
And so when he sits down to write, he doesn't want it to be, um, something expected or assigned, uh, he wants his mind to move as it could move so wonderfully well over a variety of, of issues, and his.

339
00:33:56,338.4665 --> 00:34:23,218.4665
Political philosophy and his theories of history and whatnot are all much of a piece, He sees politics as the art of the possible, and he, has things he wants to get done, and he explains how they might get done in his writing, right? A good speech to go and read if people want a speech to read is his Osawatomie speech.

340
00:34:24,168.4675 --> 00:34:42,828.4665
his words are still relevant, he was so good a politician that his ideas are still carried from venue to venue and, and revered and admired, um, in ways that might please a modern reader, might interest a modern reader, depending on your politics, of course.

341
00:34:44,818.4655 --> 00:34:50,883.466
But we take Roosevelt seriously as a political thinker and as the builder of a party.

342
00:34:50,923.466 --> 00:34:57,103.466
And as the rebel who led a third party candidacy, right.

343
00:34:57,533.465 --> 00:35:00,363.466
Some really brilliant ideas, right.

344
00:35:01,172.466 --> 00:35:23,272.466
His political writings and those essays, establish as a kind of baseline those ideas, and he works them out, and he works them out, then he turns them into political speeches, which, as I say, with platitudes and iterations.

345
00:35:24,2.466 --> 00:35:28,272.466
Say it in the simplest possible language, and then say it again.

346
00:35:29,446.466 --> 00:35:39,356.465
Then many of those ideas from Masuwatomi and then the progressive campaign are put into deeds, but it took another Roosevelt to complete some of those deeds, I think.

347
00:35:39,537.466 --> 00:35:45,797.466
Some of those deeds, right? Yeah, but he had the right idea when he talked about the malefactors of great wealth.

348
00:35:45,917.466 --> 00:35:56,107.466
Um, that's a, that's a powerful, uh, metaphor even today as we try to figure out who, who does the work and who makes the money.

349
00:35:56,257.466 --> 00:36:07,637.466
He was very interested in things like that and in fair play and, um, you know, how you tax people and how you work people and how you pay people, even how many days you work.

350
00:36:07,827.466 --> 00:36:08,777.466
A week and such.

351
00:36:09,137.466 --> 00:36:10,197.466
That's Square Deal.

352
00:36:10,227.466 --> 00:36:12,247.466
Yeah, he's very modern in that one.

353
00:36:12,537.466 --> 00:36:20,947.466
I did ask Jacob Reese, remember, who wrote, allow the other half lives to take him into New York and to show him what was happening.

354
00:36:21,387.466 --> 00:36:31,972.366
And he built law out of what he saw about the, the immigrant labor and the, uh, close quarters and how people managed to live just in a.

355
00:36:32,102.466 --> 00:36:33,132.466
a basic life.

356
00:36:33,562.466 --> 00:36:37,952.466
Um, and he was a man, let's remember, who inherited money.

357
00:36:38,202.466 --> 00:36:42,402.466
He came as Edith Wharton did, and Jane Addams too, from inherited money.

358
00:36:42,632.466 --> 00:36:45,82.465
They weren't people who had to work at all.

359
00:36:45,902.466 --> 00:36:49,682.466
and what's amazing about him is that he takes his work seriously.

360
00:36:50,692.466 --> 00:36:52,322.466
and he works all his life.

361
00:36:53,372.466 --> 00:36:57,58.467
And was willing to learn from those experiences and, and, Yeah.

362
00:36:57,72.467 --> 00:36:58,302.467
and adjust and apply it.

363
00:36:58,528.467 --> 00:37:22,743.366
And learn from writers like Jacob Rees, right? Or as you look at those writings, uh, as we were moving towards the First World War, uh, I think you said he, he was becoming increasingly strident, uh, and bullying from the pulpit, I think is how you, you put it, one of the historians we read characterized that period of his life and his writing as curdled charisma.

364
00:37:23,393.466 --> 00:37:23,723.466
Right.

365
00:37:23,783.466 --> 00:37:26,263.466
And that's a pretty good metaphor.

366
00:37:26,263.466 --> 00:37:35,853.4655
It seems to me his good nature and his humor had pretty much vanished out of those writings.

367
00:37:35,853.4655 --> 00:37:36,263.465
Right.

368
00:37:36,553.466 --> 00:37:42,253.466
He sent one of the war books to Edith Wharton and he signed it from an American American.

369
00:37:43,223.466 --> 00:37:43,833.466
and that.

370
00:37:44,173.466 --> 00:38:09,303.466
We haven't, we haven't touched on that, um, idea, but I don't know when we've had a president who's worried, uh, who, who has worried himself about the, the nature of our, um, of our culture and our literary voice and the way that he has but he said, if when we're, when we're writing, we're copying, Europeans, Henry James can write like a British or a big deal.

371
00:38:09,303.466 --> 00:38:10,733.466
He's not an American writer.

372
00:38:11,83.466 --> 00:38:11,823.465
And he's the only person.

373
00:38:11,923.466 --> 00:38:15,623.466
President, I know who cared about defining American literature that way.

374
00:38:16,403.466 --> 00:38:22,223.466
And so, um, when he said he was an American American, he meant I'm not a British American.

375
00:38:22,223.466 --> 00:38:23,533.466
I'm not a French American.

376
00:38:23,783.466 --> 00:38:24,933.466
I'm not a Dutch American.

377
00:38:25,23.465 --> 00:38:28,413.366
I'm not, no, am an American American.

378
00:38:29,212.466 --> 00:38:29,552.466
Right.

379
00:38:29,672.466 --> 00:38:39,342.466
And if you're still trying to, basically just, Ape some of the, uh, the, the European tradition still, then, then you're, you'll never be a great writer.

380
00:38:39,978.466 --> 00:38:40,248.466
right.

381
00:38:40,248.466 --> 00:38:40,488.466
Yeah.

382
00:38:40,498.466 --> 00:38:45,68.466
He even said to Edith Wharton, who was trying to write a novel of manners about America.

383
00:38:45,388.466 --> 00:38:47,738.465
He also said to her, do New York.

384
00:38:47,798.466 --> 00:38:48,938.465
That's where the power is.

385
00:38:49,728.465 --> 00:38:57,698.466
so he was even advocating for Edith Wharton to write the American, the American language smack of the soil.

386
00:38:57,728.466 --> 00:38:58,588.366
That's what he said.

387
00:38:58,588.466 --> 00:38:58,968.466
Right.

388
00:38:59,78.466 --> 00:38:59,418.466
Yeah.

389
00:39:00,128.466 --> 00:39:00,478.466
Right.

390
00:39:00,508.466 --> 00:39:05,688.466
It should arise out of our, uh, out of our cultural life together.

391
00:39:05,998.466 --> 00:39:08,898.465
And in that his language.

392
00:39:09,108.466 --> 00:39:20,538.465
Although of an entirely different sort most similar to probably to Walt Whitman's and to that vision of American openness to new experience and new things.

393
00:39:20,558.466 --> 00:39:20,938.466
Right.

394
00:39:21,268.465 --> 00:39:23,398.466
And they admired each other.

395
00:39:24,238.4655 --> 00:39:26,138.365
admired each other.

396
00:39:26,138.465 --> 00:39:29,488.466
Yeah, he said, you know, Whitman, the Dante of the Bowery.

397
00:39:29,538.466 --> 00:39:29,958.466
Right.

398
00:39:30,648.466 --> 00:39:36,88.466
He can take Yeah, life in the Bowery and turn it into poetry and real language.

399
00:39:36,88.466 --> 00:39:36,438.466
Right.

400
00:39:36,848.466 --> 00:39:41,488.466
that we have nothing to be ashamed of in, in our own traditions.

401
00:39:41,528.466 --> 00:39:42,58.466
Right.

402
00:39:42,114.6285001 --> 00:39:43,754.4285001
right, exactly.

403
00:39:43,754.5285001 --> 00:39:45,94.5285001
Exactly, right.

404
00:39:45,708.466 --> 00:39:53,798.4655
could we look at Roosevelt as a correspondent? Uh, it's, I think, a very conservative estimate that he wrote 150, 000 letters, in his lifetime.

405
00:39:53,848.4655 --> 00:40:10,664.5280001
what does all this correspondence tell us about him? And I was going to ask if, uh, if you had some selections from his personal correspondence that That kind of give us some insight into, uh, Roosevelt as a, as a writer, They are lively and pointed.

406
00:40:11,69.5280001 --> 00:40:21,799.5280001
and beautifully written and they have the wonderful sense that they're being dashed off, right? He doesn't go back and rewrite and straighten things out.

407
00:40:22,549.5280001 --> 00:40:32,189.5280001
I always tell my students is that reading, uh, reading a volume of letters is as rewarding or more rewarding than reading a novel.

408
00:40:33,39.5280001 --> 00:40:38,999.5280001
Uh, because when I was working with Jane Addams and she was writing to Tolstoy, he was really writing, they were really writing to her.

409
00:40:39,309.5280001 --> 00:40:41,119.5280001
They're real people in the letters.

410
00:40:41,529.5270001 --> 00:40:47,169.5270001
And I, I, maybe I'm strange, but I can get quite excited about a volume of letters.

411
00:40:47,589.5270001 --> 00:40:49,679.5270001
it gives you the satisfaction a novel gives you.

412
00:40:50,149.5270001 --> 00:41:20,604.4265001
That you have characters and they're talking together and they're talking about real things, I have well here's here's an example the president had asked him to be the official American representative at King Edward, the fourth funeral, he got to England for the funeral after he had been around and talked to all the kings and queens and made his speeches at the Sorbonne and in Berlin and in and in Stockholm.

413
00:41:20,764.5265001 --> 00:41:31,954.5275001
When he accepted the Nobel Prize, he came back to England and he was invited to GM Trevelyan's house where there were lots of people around and he talked.

414
00:41:32,959.5275001 --> 00:41:37,259.5275001
About his trips and Trevelyan said, that is so interesting.

415
00:41:37,569.5275001 --> 00:41:40,499.5285001
You need to write all this down to me in the letter.

416
00:41:42,259.5285001 --> 00:41:46,829.5285001
Roosevelt said, okay, I've got some things to do when I get home.

417
00:41:46,829.5285001 --> 00:41:52,149.5275001
And he went home and he sat down and he wrote Trevelyan a 50 page.

418
00:41:52,639.5275001 --> 00:41:54,729.5275001
Letter about.

419
00:41:55,299.5275001 --> 00:42:06,899.5275001
His adventures Europe and and detailed the sociology, the economy, the militarism of all these cultures.

420
00:42:06,919.5265001 --> 00:42:12,939.5270001
It's really a brilliant letter and then he signed it off and said, Thank you, George.

421
00:42:12,939.5270001 --> 00:42:13,619.5265001
Here it is.

422
00:42:13,669.5275001 --> 00:42:14,539.5265001
You'll like it.

423
00:42:14,539.5265001 --> 00:42:16,119.4275001
Right? But he hadn't.

424
00:42:17,69.5275001 --> 00:42:23,869.5275001
fun of anybody and that letter, right? And so he turned to another friend of his American.

425
00:42:23,949.5275001 --> 00:42:27,199.5285001
He said, I'm going to tell you what really happened at the King's funeral.

426
00:42:27,819.5285001 --> 00:42:28,319.5285001
Okay.

427
00:42:29,499.5285001 --> 00:42:31,179.5280001
what follow our T.

428
00:42:31,179.5280001 --> 00:42:31,329.5275001
R.

429
00:42:31,329.5285001 --> 00:42:40,779.5285001
's observations on the funeral dinner, which he describes in high comedy with an American sense of the absurdity of rank and royalty.

430
00:42:41,199.5285001 --> 00:42:47,499.5285001
A virtual wake, Roosevelt designates it, because I hardly know what else to call it.

431
00:42:47,849.5285001 --> 00:42:55,869.5275001
As soon as I entered the room, the Bulgarian Tsar came up to speak to me and thank me for various things I had done for the Bulgarians.

432
00:42:56,139.5275001 --> 00:43:10,629.5285001
He's a very competent fellow, but at the moment, at the moment, all the other sovereigns were angry with him because he had suddenly christened himself Tsar instead of King, which they regarded as bumptious.

433
00:43:11,354.5285001 --> 00:43:19,874.5275001
Moreover, he had had an intricate row about precedence the Archduke Ferdinand on the way to the funeral.

434
00:43:21,124.5285001 --> 00:43:32,34.5285001
The Arch, uh, Roosevelt delights in adding that Squabble was as complicated and involved and utterly childish as the rows.

435
00:43:32,814.5285001 --> 00:43:37,104.5285001
Washington, and then the scene changes only slightly.

436
00:43:37,434.5285001 --> 00:43:54,744.5285001
While I was talking to the Tsar, the Emperor suddenly walked up to us, thrust himself in ahead of the Tsar, turned his, in ahead of the, of the Tsar, his back square to him and said to me, Roosevelt, my friend, I want to introduce you to the King of Spain.

437
00:43:55,904.5285001 --> 00:44:02,434.5285001
With a sudden, ferocious glance over his shoulder at the Tsar, he's worth talking to..

438
00:44:03,644.5285001 --> 00:44:06,934.5285001
The unfortunate Prince Consort of Holland was at the dinner.

439
00:44:06,934.5285001 --> 00:44:13,784.5295001
He came up and began to talk with me, but the Emperor pounced on me again for some purpose, paying not the slightest attention.

440
00:44:14,244.5295001 --> 00:44:25,224.5295001
Heed to the wretched Prince George, who drifted off in fat meekness, King of Denmark, a nice old boy, introduced me to his brother, the King of Greece.

441
00:44:26,89.5295001 --> 00:44:27,889.5295001
Also a nice old boy.

442
00:44:29,169.5295001 --> 00:44:33,599.5295001
Oh, so it just flows like that and that is really great great comic writing.

443
00:44:33,599.5295001 --> 00:44:47,129.5285001
It just is And and and you can can see the twinkle in his eye as he's at this Incredibly stuffy funeral having some fun with it.

444
00:44:47,439.5285001 --> 00:44:52,389.5285001
I just love it You know, that's those I would say that as an informal correspondent.

445
00:44:52,519.5285001 --> 00:45:02,833.466
He's at his absolute best as a As a readable writer for us, right? that way, it really shines through, uh, in writing like that.

446
00:45:03,244.5295001 --> 00:45:04,174.5295001
Doesn't it? Yeah.

447
00:45:05,3.467 --> 00:45:14,883.467
Uh, I was going to ask if you could talk a little bit about any of those relationships, uh, with other authors, uh, and even journalists and how, how we got along with other authors.

448
00:45:16,784.5295001 --> 00:45:17,804.5295001
He, and he was.

449
00:45:18,124.5295001 --> 00:45:23,14.5295001
Not friends exactly, but he was an acquaintance of Mark Twain.

450
00:45:23,724.5295001 --> 00:45:25,544.5295001
was an acquaintance of Henry James.

451
00:45:25,604.5295001 --> 00:45:27,584.5285001
He was an acquaintance of Henry Adams.

452
00:45:27,834.5295001 --> 00:45:37,339.5295001
Both Henry James and Henry Adams had real reservations about his, his, uh, Not his writing, but his public persona.

453
00:45:38,589.5295001 --> 00:45:46,869.5295001
admired him, but he was so much different politically, and so much older, they couldn't really be friends.

454
00:45:47,739.5295001 --> 00:45:53,789.5295001
He was very good friends with Owen Wister, the writer of, uh, The Virginian.

455
00:45:54,599.5285001 --> 00:46:04,229.5295001
Uh, and the, and, and Wister was taking, I think this is, much literally true.

456
00:46:04,519.5295001 --> 00:46:13,359.5295001
He was taking the kinds of storytelling that Roosevelt had done about the West, and he was turning it into long narratives.

457
00:46:14,549.5285001 --> 00:46:21,569.5285001
Everyone agrees that Owen Whistler invented the Western as a genre, which then became the Western.

458
00:46:21,799.5295001 --> 00:46:45,29.5295001
genre in the movies, and so you can literally kind of trace it back to Theodore Roosevelt's experience in the Dakotas, right? That that's sort of the seed I think all this wonderful American mythology, uh, got its roots, He got, uh, Owen Wester to, he wanted him to change a scene in the book.

459
00:46:45,824.5295001 --> 00:46:56,724.5285001
And it's Ernest Hemingway, I think, when he found out about that was quite irritated some that he would go in and try to make it a sort of nicer story than it was.

460
00:46:56,894.5295001 --> 00:47:02,534.5295001
And Owen Wister had been classmates, not in the same class, but they'd both been at Harvard at the same time.

461
00:47:03,444.5295001 --> 00:47:07,944.5285001
Owen Wister was a freshman when Theodore Roosevelt was a junior.

462
00:47:08,504.5295001 --> 00:47:09,854.5285001
but they all know each other.

463
00:47:09,904.5285001 --> 00:47:11,484.5305001
That's a, that's a good way to put it.

464
00:47:11,534.5295001 --> 00:47:15,34.5295001
You know, Edith Wharton called Owen Wister Dan Wister.

465
00:47:15,714.5295001 --> 00:47:18,744.5295001
when her play was supposed to open in Detroit, he was going to go with her.

466
00:47:18,954.5295001 --> 00:47:20,954.5295001
So there are all these letters that you can find.

467
00:47:20,954.5295001 --> 00:47:21,24.4295001
Edith Wharton.

468
00:47:21,184.5295001 --> 00:47:25,154.5295001
sort of behind the letters, if you know the relationships that there are.

469
00:47:25,494.5295001 --> 00:47:30,44.5295001
And that's, uh, and so we found interesting things in those archives also.

470
00:47:31,524.5295001 --> 00:47:41,548.467
Oh, and Worcester, later, how Roosevelt grafts himself into that Western story, that frontier story with his own experiences.

471
00:47:41,794.5295001 --> 00:47:42,74.5295001
there.

472
00:47:43,164.5295001 --> 00:47:46,634.5295001
No, he is the Worcester story, yeah, that's right, that's right.

473
00:47:46,854.5295001 --> 00:47:52,234.5285001
Yeah, we had started to talk about this before when we were talking about winning the West.

474
00:47:52,304.5295001 --> 00:47:59,864.5295001
Um, and I was thinking also with, with that story, with the rough riders of, uh, Finley, Peter Dunn, uh, the satirist, Mr.

475
00:47:59,864.5295001 --> 00:48:08,144.5295001
Dooley, how, how Roosevelt had this way of disarming his critics, um, with engaging them.

476
00:48:08,460.5920001 --> 00:48:18,90.5920001
That is such a good point because we live in a culture where everybody is angry right away and there doesn't seem to be any bridge across the anger.

477
00:48:18,530.5920001 --> 00:48:23,470.5910001
Uh, but what happened when, uh, finley Peter Dunn? Finley Peter Dunn.

478
00:48:23,690.5910001 --> 00:48:23,820.5910001
Mr.

479
00:48:24,150.5920001 --> 00:48:24,290.5920001
Dooley.

480
00:48:24,310.5920001 --> 00:48:24,920.5915001
When Mr.

481
00:48:24,920.5915001 --> 00:48:42,930.5900001
Dooley got done with him, I mean, everybody was howling And so what he did was instead of getting angry is he wrote to Don and he said, well, you've given my family, you know, a great deal of enjoyment, uh, laughing at me, making sport of me.

482
00:48:43,230.5900001 --> 00:48:46,440.5910001
And I think now you have to pay me back.

483
00:48:46,710.5910001 --> 00:48:50,130.5910001
And I think you need to come to the white house to dinner, to dinner.

484
00:48:50,320.5910001 --> 00:48:52,10.5910001
And so he invited him to dinner.

485
00:48:52,230.5910001 --> 00:48:56,520.5915001
And they laugh together because he's put himself too much in the book.

486
00:48:56,580.5915001 --> 00:49:08,760.5915001
And what Dunn's character says is, well, if If Tiddy had done it, and he'd done it all by himself, I think he should just have called it Alone in Cubia, which was wildly funny.

487
00:49:09,90.5915001 --> 00:49:11,359.5290001
And Roosevelt, even though in Cuba.

488
00:49:11,880.5915001 --> 00:49:15,730.5905001
knew it was funny, and then he could turn the joke around.

489
00:49:15,800.5915001 --> 00:49:28,330.5915001
And, I think we would have a lot to learn from a political environment where you're a strong enough figure that you can be laughed at and mocked and then you can then you can then you can invite the guy to dinner.

490
00:49:28,330.5915001 --> 00:49:29,480.5915001
Right? Yeah, I think that's right.

491
00:49:29,600.5915001 --> 00:49:33,300.5925001
Another thing is that he is all his writing.

492
00:49:34,370.5915001 --> 00:49:48,40.5915001
In one way or another, it's about character, human character, and he insists that people have to have a strong character, which is what he has.

493
00:49:49,210.5915001 --> 00:50:00,160.5920001
He is enormously, good natured, he's forgiving, he's open, uh, willing to be criticized.

494
00:50:01,275.5920001 --> 00:50:04,455.5920001
He's willing to criticize right back if that's what happens.

495
00:50:04,475.5920001 --> 00:50:09,125.5920001
It's quite a remarkable human personality that he is possessed of.

496
00:50:09,395.5920001 --> 00:50:24,215.5910001
Yeah, his first work from the Badlands hunting trips of a ranchman, Yeah, that's his first attempt at really at Hunter naturalist literature and then it's criticized by George Berggrenell, the editor of Forest and Stream.

497
00:50:24,345.5910001 --> 00:50:32,25.5910001
And so rather than, than just being prickly about it and, and, uh, saying, well, I'll never have anything to do with him.

498
00:50:32,35.5900001 --> 00:50:33,955.5910001
He goes right to his office and.

499
00:50:34,205.5910001 --> 00:50:43,131.6535001
And confronts him on it and they become fast friends and form Boone and Crockett club together, It's, it's quite remarkable.

500
00:50:43,191.6535001 --> 00:50:52,811.6535001
Right? Uh, right? a book there or two or three to deal with that friendship would be a really intricate kind of a study, I think.

501
00:50:53,445.5910001 --> 00:51:05,596.6535001
Has there ever been a president that, that was so widely read or deeply read? Uh, you know, as Roosevelt, I wonder, I,, Roosevelt had remarked that, I'm a part of everything that I've read.

502
00:51:05,686.6535001 --> 00:51:13,626.7535001
And I was going to ask you about his reading habits, uh, about, how he read, what he read, his thoughts on, on these required reading lists and that sort of thing.

503
00:51:14,927.8160002 --> 00:51:41,217.7160002
Right, well, you know about the 10 foot library, and he thinks anybody who's stupid enough to think that if you read 10 feet of books that somebody else has chosen, that you're educated, that an education starts with, I love to say this in my classes, education starts with one book, and then you, then fill in the rest of it, people talk about him as a speed reader, or he could, he could look at something, have photographic memory.

504
00:51:41,457.7160002 --> 00:51:46,987.7160002
What I can figure out from what we were doing, is he read as everybody reads at different speeds.

505
00:51:47,407.7160002 --> 00:51:52,97.7160002
And so sometimes things he could, political things, he could pick up and, and know.

506
00:51:52,827.7160002 --> 00:51:58,737.7160002
But, he was also interested in, reading slowly and savoring things.

507
00:51:59,417.7150002 --> 00:52:02,137.7165002
And, he would read with his family in the evening.

508
00:52:02,137.7165002 --> 00:52:15,247.7160002
I don't know if, what families do that anymore, but you take your favorite scene from a book and you read it in the evening together he read, Without, as I say, without squeamishness or prejudice, he read everything he picked up.

509
00:52:15,477.7160002 --> 00:52:24,337.7155002
When he was on the train and he'd stop at a newspaper stand, he read all the newspapers every day, but he would pick up every magazine.

510
00:52:24,337.7155002 --> 00:52:28,597.7160002
You know how you try to pick, oh, do I do this magazine or that magazine? He picked them all up.

511
00:52:29,37.7160002 --> 00:52:31,267.7160002
And then he'd read them, uh, during the day.

512
00:52:31,447.7160002 --> 00:52:35,977.7160002
He had this habit of tearing the pages when he was done with them, so he'd know, I guess, what he'd read.

513
00:52:36,427.7160002 --> 00:52:39,767.7160002
And so the floor would be just a mess in papers when he got done.

514
00:52:40,387.7160002 --> 00:52:46,587.7160002
Some people thought that he treated the Library of Congress as his own personal library.

515
00:52:46,977.7160002 --> 00:52:56,657.7150002
And he would write to the librarian and say, send me books on Irish myth, send me books on Hungarian poetry, send me books on so and so and so and so.

516
00:52:56,927.7160002 --> 00:53:01,847.7160002
And then he'd write back in, oh, 10 days or so and said, I've read all those.

517
00:53:02,57.7160002 --> 00:53:03,497.7160002
I'm having them sent back to you.

518
00:53:03,507.7160002 --> 00:53:04,977.7160002
Send me some more of these..

519
00:53:05,777.7160002 --> 00:53:13,157.8160002
He often read when he was having a really hard time in the White House, he spent a lot of time escaping into books.

520
00:53:14,7.8150002 --> 00:53:18,547.8150002
he said at one time, I think reading sometimes is almost a disease to me.

521
00:53:18,597.8150002 --> 00:53:25,597.8150002
I'm, it's an, it's obviously a neurotic response, right? But, It all gets stored here.

522
00:53:26,57.8150002 --> 00:53:33,942.7150002
And he was fascinated by the world of books and he could.

523
00:53:34,832.8150002 --> 00:53:50,342.8150002
Read them, and if he had read carefully, he'd retain them, so that when he was making the, the tour of all the kings after he came home from Africa, he, he went to Hungary and impressed everybody there with his knowledge of Hungarian poetry.

524
00:53:50,602.8150002 --> 00:54:01,792.8140002
He said, I've never thought knowledge should or reading should be useful that it came in handy to me when I got in the Hungarian court and I could talk about Hungarian poetry.

525
00:54:02,52.8150002 --> 00:54:12,252.8150002
I suppose that the central notion about all that is The, pigskin library he took with him to, uh, to Africa.

526
00:54:12,872.8150002 --> 00:54:15,112.8150002
His sister gave him the books.

527
00:54:15,842.8150002 --> 00:54:18,372.8150002
she asked him what books he wanted to take with him.

528
00:54:18,372.8150002 --> 00:54:21,172.8150002
he told her she had them trimmed and bound in leather.

529
00:54:21,192.8140002 --> 00:54:24,452.8150002
She had them put into a, an aluminum case.

530
00:54:24,502.8150002 --> 00:54:25,892.8150002
It's really quite beautiful.

531
00:54:25,892.8150002 --> 00:54:26,842.8150002
We saw it at Harvard.

532
00:54:27,712.8150002 --> 00:54:28,112.8150002
Right.

533
00:54:29,352.8150002 --> 00:54:41,642.8140002
And it was Cervantes, And Walter Scott, and Mark Twain, lots of Twain, lots of Robert Browning, lots of Keats, 50 books.

534
00:54:42,22.8140002 --> 00:54:47,872.8120002
And they were there for 14 months in Africa, and after 10 months, they got to Nairobi.

535
00:54:48,72.8120002 --> 00:54:53,192.8130002
And he was delighted to get to Nairobi, because they'd already read all the 50 books.

536
00:54:53,627.8130002 --> 00:55:04,717.8120002
While they were hunting every day they went in and they bought 14 more, and he was very suspicious of somebody who said, you have to read this book.

537
00:55:04,767.8130002 --> 00:55:10,11.7930002
No, some books are good for other people and some are for me, some I find my own way.

538
00:55:10,11.8930002 --> 00:55:10,771.7930002
All right.

539
00:55:10,811.7930002 --> 00:55:14,491.7930002
And you should do, if you're well educated, you will.

540
00:55:15,491.7930002 --> 00:55:32,841.7920002
He had a table in the entryway of the White House, a very small table, he always had a book on it, because while he was all dressed up to go out to dinner, he would have to wait there for Edith he'd pick that book up.

541
00:55:33,156.7920002 --> 00:55:38,156.7920002
And he would stand there and read so he wouldn't miss a minute.

542
00:55:39,656.7920002 --> 00:55:44,406.7920002
And when she'd come, he'd put it down, put it back on the table, but it was always there.

543
00:55:44,776.7920002 --> 00:55:47,986.7920002
But when he was out in the car and driving around too, he would be reading.

544
00:55:48,346.7910002 --> 00:55:50,976.7900002
So, had a life in language.

545
00:55:51,66.7900002 --> 00:55:51,726.6910002
That's true.,

546
00:55:52,576.7910002 --> 00:55:53,781.7910002
I came across a quote.

547
00:55:53,781.7910002 --> 00:56:00,261.7910002
He said, the books are almost as individuals friends, um, which is beautiful way of looking at it too.

548
00:56:00,472.8535002 --> 00:56:02,312.8535002
There, yeah, that's a wonderful way.

549
00:56:02,682.8535002 --> 00:56:06,272.8535002
And he'd come back to certain writers in the way that you would come back to friends.

550
00:56:06,972.8535002 --> 00:56:20,562.8525002
We were talking the other day about Clay Jenkinson and I came across something he wrote a little while back about,,, Edmund Morris, uh, speaking at a conference, I think in the early 2000s.

551
00:56:20,582.8535002 --> 00:56:21,572.8535002
And he made the comment.

552
00:56:21,572.8535002 --> 00:56:25,922.8535002
I wonder if you Yanks will ever have another president who can write like this.

553
00:56:26,518.9160002 --> 00:56:30,558.9160002
Uh, which is a great statement.

554
00:56:30,844.9785003 --> 00:56:32,114.8785003
That's sweet.

555
00:56:32,114.9785003 --> 00:56:32,674.9785003
I like it.

556
00:56:32,748.9160002 --> 00:56:33,148.9160002
Yeah.

557
00:56:34,128.9160002 --> 00:56:41,538.9150002
So TR was always, um,, you observe that he was always thinking about the, the place that he might have in American letters.

558
00:56:41,588.9160002 --> 00:56:47,508.9160002
And that if he'd never been president, that he, he might well be remembered as a literary man himself.

559
00:56:47,748.9160002 --> 00:56:54,788.9160002
Um, so where do you see TR fitting within this American literary tradition? Yeah, I think I made that comment myself.

560
00:56:55,128.9150002 --> 00:57:11,689.0170002
Well, you know, when you're teaching classes and you're looking for a roster of people to have to educate your students, I think he would fit neatly into a syllabus that would feature any of the turn of the century writers.

561
00:57:12,339.0170002 --> 00:57:23,99.0170002
You could slip A book in, um, and you could talk about what the political world had to offer literature, or I would teach literature that way.

562
00:57:23,399.0170002 --> 00:57:33,919.0170002
So that you typically think of teaching a literature class, it's poetry and it's, uh, it's fiction and plays and such, but it seems to me that non fiction has its place.

563
00:57:34,574.0170002 --> 00:57:47,624.0170002
and I would emphasize if I were back in the classroom, I would emphasize his environmental writing,? And I put him in my course in environmental lit, I'd have some of the chapters of some of those books for the students to read.

564
00:57:47,914.0180002 --> 00:57:54,484.0180002
So they'd understand where their conservation values come from, right? Because.

565
00:57:54,964.0180002 --> 00:58:14,394.0180002
That's the continuing importance and validity of Roosevelt is in the shaper of national value system, right? And he had an enormous influence on that still does and is still relevant in that way.

566
00:58:15,262.9555002 --> 00:58:30,737.9555002
so at the risk of prescribing a book list, I was going to ask you if you had recommendations on, which of TRs writings you would point the, uh, the modern reader towards for pure literary enjoyment.

567
00:58:32,264.0190002 --> 00:58:34,894.0190002
I think the ranch stories are a good place to start.

568
00:58:35,644.0190002 --> 00:58:39,774.0180002
As I said, I think the Osawatomie political speech is a good place to start.

569
00:58:40,484.0180002 --> 00:58:43,814.0180002
I think the essay, uh, history is literature.

570
00:58:44,349.0180002 --> 00:58:47,549.0180002
What he says about the importance of good writing is something we all need.,

571
00:58:47,549.0180002 --> 00:58:48,979.0190002
and I would say.

572
00:58:49,239.0190002 --> 00:58:58,787.9565002
to read the book lovers holidays in the open is his last real Yeah.

573
00:58:58,788.0565002 --> 00:59:00,427.8555002
Yeah.

574
00:59:00,699.0190002 --> 00:59:01,649.0180002
an elegant.

575
00:59:02,139.0190002 --> 00:59:33,609.0200002
And very interesting book with one of the very best prefaces or introductions that he wrote that book would be nice and then if you wanted to read one of his long nature writing adventure stories, through the Brazilian wilderness be the one I would say, and you could read it with Candace Millard, and Joseph Ornig at the same time, right, because his version of adventure is so much different than theirs.,

576
00:59:34,189.0190002 --> 00:59:41,229.0190002
But there's one part of his autobiography called in indoors and outdoors, outdoors and in outdoors and indoors.

577
00:59:42,349.0190002 --> 00:59:45,239.0190002
Uh, and I think that that's a good place to start too.

578
00:59:45,849.0190002 --> 00:59:47,429.0190002
There's some beautiful prose in there.

579
00:59:47,735.0815003 --> 00:59:48,745.0815003
There really is.

580
00:59:48,795.0815003 --> 00:59:53,435.0815003
We went to Sagamore Hill and that's, that's the indoors in that book.

581
00:59:53,915.0815003 --> 00:59:55,915.0815003
And it's, it's a wonderful place.

582
00:59:55,915.0815003 --> 00:59:57,255.0815003
Maybe that's what I'd say.

583
00:59:57,515.0805003 --> 01:00:02,825.0815003
Go to Sagamore Hill and stand there and look at that study and then look at the whole thing.

584
01:00:03,65.0815003 --> 01:00:09,175.0815003
And then start reading because you'll, you'll find him as fascinating as that house.

585
01:00:09,675.0815003 --> 01:00:11,725.0815003
There'll be things you don't expect to find.

586
01:00:11,735.0815003 --> 01:00:12,515.0805003
They'll be wonderful.

587
01:00:12,515.1805003 --> 01:00:28,274.0185002
Yeah, Um, could I perhaps ask you to, close the episode here with reading, from the last page of your own book, A great man had died, and the world knew it.

588
01:00:29,44.0185002 --> 01:00:34,214.0185002
Accounts of that death, the funeral, the posthumous tributes are well known.

589
01:00:35,24.0175002 --> 01:00:40,64.0185002
Here we note Roosevelt's loss to the literary world that he so dominated.

590
01:00:40,484.0185002 --> 01:00:42,34.0185002
He was a man of letters.

591
01:00:42,169.0185002 --> 01:00:55,429.0185002
of language, a spokesman for the human imagination, expressed in words, a tireless reader of those words himself, a believer, finally, in language in all its forms.

592
01:00:55,889.0175002 --> 01:01:01,679.0185002
In his world, words, as he insisted until the end, always led to action.

593
01:01:02,49.0185002 --> 01:01:05,779.0185002
And action well taken, always led to words.

594
01:01:06,459.0185002 --> 01:01:07,159.0185002
That's wonderful.

595
01:01:07,659.0185002 --> 01:01:08,129.0185002
Thank you.

596
01:01:08,649.0185002 --> 01:01:10,612.9560002
Wish We could do it as Roosevelt.

597
01:01:10,622.9560002 --> 01:01:13,607.9555002
But ha ha.

598
01:01:13,657.9555002 --> 01:01:16,47.9545002
I'll let you work on that for our next episode.

599
01:01:19,184.0170002 --> 01:01:19,674.0170002
Sweet.

600
01:01:21,304.0180002 --> 01:01:22,384.0180002
Thank you so much.

601
01:01:22,384.1180002 --> 01:01:23,690.0805003
I Oh, you're welcome.

602
01:01:23,780.0805003 --> 01:01:24,170.0805003
Yeah.

603
01:01:24,210.0805003 --> 01:01:24,590.0805003
Yeah.

604
01:01:24,840.0805003 --> 01:01:25,170.0805003
Good.

605
01:01:25,350.0795003 --> 01:01:26,130.0805003
Good afternoon.

606
01:01:26,334.0180002 --> 01:01:29,34.0180002
really appreciate you taking the time to chat.

607
01:01:29,715.0805003 --> 01:01:30,105.0805003
Yeah.

608
01:01:30,175.0805003 --> 01:01:30,375.0805003
Yeah.

609
01:01:30,375.0805003 --> 01:01:30,975.0805003
It was fun.

610
01:01:31,75.0805003 --> 01:01:32,65.0805003
Pleased to be with you.