Territorial politics of wyoming. I encountered gracious and wellinformed experts in the sources that i was seeking and their goals seemed to be to make my work and research as productive and rewarding as possible. The working atmosphere of the archives was congenial, stimulating, and fun. A friend of mine, the distinguished historian of the election of 1896, Hall Williams and i, would work at library in the library of congress until 5 00 in the afternoon when they closed, have a bite to eat and we could come over to National Archives, which was open until 8 00. So we made the most of every single day. Whenever i returned, as i did during the next decade, i had the same sense of enjoyment, productivity, and professionalism as experts, professionals engage their citizen users to the best of their abilities. The cliches about lazy government employees, repeated ad nasuem by unknowning politicians, had no validity within these walls. Instead i became convinced, as im sure most historians would share, the National Archives is one of the ornaments of American Culture from this from which this researcher can say from the bottom of his heart, thank you very much. [applause] amen. Amen. There are two housekeeping things i have to discuss. I need to make them clear. With Doris Goodwin coming next week, you are in for what i can only call teddiness. There will be teddy this, teddy that in every direction. You wont hear me use that term. I will talk about t. R. , roosevelt, colonel , roosevelt, theodore, the rough rider, the president , but i wont use the word teddy. And theres a very simple reason. He didnt like the nickname. If you knew him well, you didnt call him teddy. There were a few family members who might say, t. D. , but you had to really be close. And so when you hear what i think i share calvin trillins argument about commercial news gas bags doing teddy this, tetdy teddy that, as though they have this intimacy with Theodore Roosevelt. What they are demonstrating is that they dont know the first thing about Theodore Roosevelt. So when you hear them going off on a teddy riff, you can say, i know better than these guys. The other point to make, and a more serious one, is im going to be discussing how i found out and developed the thesis about Edith Roosevelt and her views on racial issues. And this will require me at one point, discussing a song that was rendered at the white house to use an offensive word. I apologize in advance, but its inescapable. Theres a second time when it happens in the course of the talk, but thats a climax i will leave just for the moment, but it is coming up. But it is necessary to do that. One of my major scholary interests over the past years has been the role of first ladies in American History. In 1982 i taught what i assume at ane first course American University on the first lady. The spectacle of a man writing about women and first ladies produced a certain amount of notoriety, even before i was writing about the subject says im an expert. In the process, i got to know first ladies. Mrs. Carter, mrs. Ford, and especially ladybird johnson, with home i entered into a rewarding and interesting correspondence. I was never a friend, we exchanged information about her life and times. Wasinterviewing her in 1984 one of the highlights of my research career. In those years i began to write about president ial wives, what they had accomplished, and the significance of the interest that grew exponentially in the 80s and 90s about their lives and legacies. Articles and opeds came out of this work. In those days, when you wrote for the washington post, the article would appear on sunday. And when you woke up on appear on saturday afternoon for the sunday paper and when you woke up on sunday morning there would be 100 or 200 emails in your inbox. Generally friendly, but not always. In fact, there was one gentleman unhappy with what i said who sent me an email message that read, i hope you burn in hell until the end of time. I recorded him as undecided. In 1998 my wife suggested that i should edit a series of books about the 20th century first ladies. The University Press of kansas, now the i think the preeminent Political Press in the country already had a similar series on the president s, to which i had contributed a volume on William Mckinley and Theodore Roosevelt. So they agreed readily with the idea that we create the modern first lady series. We thought that we would start with Edith Roosevelt and go through hillary clinton. We didnt get into the 21st century because we wanted the books to be based on primary sources and it is simply unlikely in my lifetime well be ofe to look at the records laura bush and ms. Obama. Thats probably 15 or 20 years in the future and ill be otherwise occupied by that time. The spring of 2011 we had 16 volumes appeared covering helen taft to hillary clinton. I had contributed two of them. The others had been written by a variety of scholars who graciously and kindly, and for the royalties, decided to write the book. The royalty were not much but they were grateful anyway. How to handle Edith Roosevelt . She was the first lady until 1909 and she was important. The problem was, there was an absence of other authors willing to step forward and help out. So why, as the editor of the series, based faced a tough choice. I could find a writer to write the book. That is often a process that will take 57 years. You find them, they do their research, they write the book , time passes. I was in my early 70s when this process began, and the prospect of not finishing the process until i was 80 held little appeal. Appeal forminishing tracking down authors after a while. Historians treat deadlines like suggestions. And a decade finding another author had very little appeal to me. So i opted to write about her self. I thought i could get it done quicker. There is one there are actually three published biographies of Edith Roosevelt , but the main one was written by Sylvia Morris, published in 1981. It is a good book. It covers a long and complex life. Edith roosevelt was born in 1861 and she died in 1948. So, sylvia addressed the whole sweep of her life as the sort of matriarch of roosevelt clan. My task was different. I conceived the first ladys volumes as being the first book people would read on a first lady. So they would be, not what i would call a doorstop book, but something that would together what was known in a convenient way so you could dip into that first lady and learn more about her. My task was to look at the seven and a half years that Edith Roosevelt was in the white house. I was going to have an introductory chapter to take her to four or five chapters on the 1901. Period when she was the first lady. Then a concluding chapter that would take until her death in now, i had one advantage that 1948. Was denied to Sylvia Morris. It was a technological advantage , because research in american newspapers has been transformed in the last decade. Historians are gradually learning this. The public may not be aware of it. The internet now makes available the opportunity to do research newspapers, before 1922 anyway, in a way that was unreceivable for those who started out in the 1960s. In those days if it was on microfilm, they would hand you a real and you had to put it on the machine and he started out by trying to find the date you wanted. Nothing was indexed, there was no digitization. You had to start reading and looking and hoping you would find something. With chronicling america, bless you library of congress, and with americas newspapers, another website, all you have to do is specify the date, specify the newspaper, specify the name, click, and you can have 400 or 500 entries pop up with it nicely telling you where the story is. So, at home, sometimes in your pajamas, you can print out stuff that would roosevelt have taken months if you could have found that in the first place. I retrieved hundreds of specific articles about Edith Roosevelt that 10 years ago they would have had me domiciled in the library of congress. So, what Sylvia Morris didnt have, i had in abundance, which was these articles that showed that Edith Roosevelt was a much more covered, talked about and observed figure as first lady than we had realized. So, as i began my research with i cane paper piling up, i confronted the question of, what was Edith Roosevelt as placed in her husbands life . What role did she have . The consensus from the outset was she was as close as a perfect lady as anyone in the 21st century had been. One source says she never put a food wrong in the white house. Had no said that she had flaps and no controversies. Think what would have happened at cnn under those circumstances. She was a sophisticated matron of the white house. Moreover, she was a wise advisor to Theodore Roosevelt. The consensus was that her political judgment was probably better than his in most instances. He tended to be impetuous and she was calm and had a skepticism about the men around him. Counsel, theed her consensus ran, he faltered. When he followed her advice, he did well. Children,ised her six all of them appealing rascals in one way or another, with great skill in an atmosphere of fun and excitement that served as a model for first ladies who followed her. Andwas the sort of urtext everybody else was a variant on that. She sponsored frequent musical events which included pablo cassels. Setting the stage for similar cultural events throughout the 20th century. She also introduced the white house, the role of the first lady, by hiring the first social secretary, who became a kind of surrogate parent to some of the roosevelt children and foreshadowed the apparatus that now surrounds the first lady. Think of it as a little presidency within the white house that takes the first lady to the day. Through the day. She and her husband took daily walks around the white house gardens where she talked to him. These conversations have not been there are no records of what she said. They also rode almost daily. The roosevelts were the last president ial horseback riding couple. You can understand why president taft went in another direction. [laughter] but they both loved horseback riding. She was an accomplished horsewoman. And on those she would tell him what some of the senators or ambassadors had told her to tell him to get the word to him about potential problems. So all in all, Edith Roosevelt had achieved something as close to secular sainthood within the apparatus of president ial history as anyone could have imagined. And i found other evidence that attested to her strength. She had a head for money. She had been wealthy to start out her life and had become poor. Her family had encountered problems. She understood about any. T. R. Had no head for money. She would give him 25 each day to head into new york. When he got back he could not explain where he spent the money. 25 may not seem like much, but remember inflation. To accomplish a similar effect today you would have to give him 475 a day and he blew it with regularity, every day. Much like former president george w. Bush, t. R. Got a big hit out of cutting trees down. It was one of his great recreations at saginaw hill. Unfortunately, by the time he was no longer president , his hand eye coordination had gone into the dumpster. He often injured himself in the course of cutting these trees down. Sometimesome back, covered with blood, and find edith and a friend sitting on the veranda. And she would say, dont bleed on the porch, theodore, go inside and clean yourself up. In short, edith is what we used to call in my day a tough cookie. In 1920 this is not in the book because i found it later she told her daughterinlaw, my dear, at no time in my life would i have hesitated to chop all my children into pieces for their father. So, going into research for the book, i saw little immediate reason to question this interpretation of ediths role and character. There were some hints from roosevelt family members that she could be tough to live with. One person said shes as mean as a snake. But what did that mean . And living with tr was not always easy. Elements did not warrant a negative interpretation of Edith Roosevelt and i was clear she deserved respect from history. I thought, i can probably enhance some details, but im not going to find anything strikingly new about Edith Roosevelt. Little did i realize. Over the years i have collected a fair amount of material from roosevelt, just working on things such as the president ial election of 1912. Now, any researcher will tell you, look at the stuff you have first before you venture off new into material. So, i did that. And this brings me to a gentleman named Warrenton Dawson , about whom youve never probably never heard. His papers i encountered in 1976. My wife was a medievalist and in went to a seminar at duke 1976. As a good husband, i went along. There were no basketball games in the summer. I dont think coach k was even a coach in those days. There wasnt much else to do in durham, so i turned to the duke rape Books Library and said, what have you got on Theodore Roosevelt . They responded that they had the papers of a man named Warrenton Dawson. And they were filled with as yet unexplored letters from theodore, edith, and all the other roosevelts. Few people have heard of Warrington Dawson, 18781962. He was an american reporter living in paris and he became a friend of Theodore Roosevelts. You will recall that after turning over the reins to William Howard taft, roosevelt and his sun went off to africa on a hunting expedition for the smithsonian institution. Their goal was to hunt big game and collect specimens with the smithsonian. Financiers on wall street who disliked roosevelt said that the hope was a line would do its duty a lion would do its duty. Dawson got into animal stories as well. He once was having dinner with friends and said to a member of congress that there was nothing wrong with congress that turning a man eating tiger loose on the floor could not cure. The somewhat chastened congressman said, but mr. President , dont you think they might mistake . Roosevelt said, not if he stayed there long enough. [laughter] now, roosevelt was a huge celebrity. Think kardashians, geometrically squared, and you get a sense. He was the most famous man in the world by every measure. The working press followed him to africa. Did its duty, they wanted to be there, and they also wanted to report on his life. Roosevelt was very good at courting the press, now he was no longer president and didnt want the press around. He needed an intermediary. He decided that Warrington Dawson was just the fellow, a. Tringer in ellis paris in the course of doing that, dawson became an intimate member of the roosevelt family. He was also very friendly with the novelist joseph conrad. I learned yesterday in the papers of Theodore Roosevelt, jr. At the Library Congress that eventually dawson would be put on the payroll of the family and they were sending him money as an ancillary benefit. Dawson was a native of South Carolina and the son of a newspaper editor who had been instrumental in ending reconstruction in South Carolina after the civil war. Sharing his fathers views on racial issues, dawson had in 1912 written a book in french called the negro in the United States. Dawson praised the ku klux klan and criticized black politicians for corruption during the 1860s and 1870s. This was fairly standard historical stuff at the turnofthecentury. At a time when that period of American History was in disrepute. By 1960s, as you know, that whole interpretation would be swept away and we would have a newer, more favorable interpretation of reconstruction and there are only a few isolated enclaves in American Life that now retain the older view, one of these being the supreme court. [laughter] four years after the book came out, in 1916, theodore and edith decided to get away from the cold weather of sagamore hill in new york and also for t. R. To escape some interest in his running for president in 1916 , and to take a cruise to the French West Indies in february 1916. Since carnival cruises had not yet been founded, they could make the trip in relative safety. [laughter] edith took dawsons book with her to read on the boat. While she was on the cruise, she wrote him a letter, dated march 1, 1916, from british giana that provided me with the first clue that there was another, more complex Edith Roosevelt in the historical record. Taking up i had photocopied this letter in either 1976 or 1980. I, frankly, now forget but i had not examined it in any detail. I just put it in a folder and said, ill get to that some time and now i was. I found her saying the following in response to the examination of american blacks in dawsons book. And now i quote her. Alas, we cant send every negro in the United States to africa. And i suppose could we do so, we would still have some moral responsibility towards them. I have stopped at nine of the west Indian Islands and cannot feel that their method is any better than ours. I cant begin to write all i have seen and heard and thought, but am still firmly convinced that any mixture of races is an unmitigated evil. You,storians will tell most of the research we do is drudgery. Most of this time we are looking at a lot of letters and a lot of documents in a lot of boxes and the fabled smoking gun is usually another folder away or youll get to it tomorrow. But this stopped my clock. But this stopped my clock. You know, when i looked at it in the house and looked at the photocopy, i said, now, wait a minute. Theres something going on here. I read and reread the letter to make sure i had not missed her meaning. Though her meaning was pretty clear. Any mixture of races is an unmitigated evil. Its hard to get much racial liberalism out of that. Here was a different figure from the biographical and historical impression of Edith Roosevelt i first encountered. While the antiblack sentiment in her words to dawson echoed what many white americans believed in this period, the letter suggested that the former first lady held racial views that were more intense than many of her contemporaries. One letter by itself could not provide conclusive evidence, but as Henry David Thoreau said about circumstantial evidence like when you find trout in the milk. I needed to find more evidence of her attitude in this sensitive area. Once i began to dig around, however, more information surfaced. In those online newspapers that i earlier mentioned, one could find an abundance of information about life as president and first lady. In those days, washington reporters covered the white house and brought back information about such matters as who visited, what happened at social events and other information dear to the hearts of historians, unlike Washington White House reporters now whose favorite subject is themselves. They actually looked at what the president was doing. Mrs. Roosevelt brought Musical Artists to the white house. One of the performers was a woman named mary leech, leech, who appeared before the president ial audiences in evenings in 1902 and 1903. Leechs specialties were song in black dialect, which were called coon songs in those days. In each occasion she rendered with a title, heres what i warned you about, just a little n r, youre mine all mine, written by paul dresser, the brother of the novelist theodore drieser and xoeser of the mega hit that day, moonlight on the wabash, which is the indiana state song, as many of you know. The song was a lullabye of a black mother to her child, with these lyrics, there aint no use in crying now, so niggy go to sleep. There aint no use in fussing so n r babies go to sleep. We aint got the comforts of the rich and fine, youre just a little n r, mine all mine. This was not going to threaten john mercer or hart as lyric writing but if indicated what that audience thought about black issues at that time. One had to conclude that mrs. Roosevelt approved of leech since she invited her in the first place and asked her back to render it a second time. Mrs. Roosevelt was deeply involved in the selection of artists and what they sang and how they performed. So, i this was another evidence in a certain direction. By now, i had a sense of where i was going with this. But other than the letter to dawson, i had few actual quotations from mrs. Roosevelt about racial issues. Then the generosity of a friend helped me more to learn about her. Of her five children by theodore, Edith Roosevelt was closest to her second son, Kermit Roosevelt. He was in his teens during the presidency and she wrote him several letters a week when he was attending the groton school, a place that he did not like. The roosevelt boys did not like where their father and mother had sent them. I think the cold showers in the morning was probably one deterrent. But she wrote him as a faithful mother correspondent. She wrote him two letters a week usually, and then sometimes more letters than that. And the letters are pretty much standard stuff. How are your grades . Do you need your clothes washed . Heres some food. How are your friends doing . The usual material that were all familiar with. And he had to write her a couple letters every week, and if he didnt, she made him a point of asking him about what was going on. Kermit was a free spirit who hated groton school, as i said, and his mothers letters sustained him through a bad patch. These documents are available in this city in boxes nine and ten of the Kermit Roosevelt papers at the library of congress. A dear friend, a scholar named christy miller, who is happily with us today, photocopied for me hundreds of pages. And if you figure, hes at a school for eight or nine months and shes writing him two letters a week, you get several hundred letters over five or six years. Happily happily, they were fourpage small letters, but theres a lot to photocopy. It was impossible then for me to travel away from home, and so i was deeply grateful and still am deeply grateful to christy for this kindness. Within this huge stack of letters, some of which talked about horseback riding and pets, but within this huge body of letters, Edith Roosevelt had a lot to say about race. There were some clues. She told kermit on one occasion about meeting, quote, four old darkies on one trip, and encountering an old, old darkie on another. Now, white americans spoke this way about black americans at the turn of the century. In fact, Woodrow Wilson told darkie stories during the campaign of 1912. You have a candidate do that now, youd have wolf blitzer clone himself on camera. I mean, it would be sensational news. But at that point, it was pretty regular material. Now, in october 1918, the rose velts entertained at the white house entertained a prominent british diplomat. A few years earlier there had been a vacancy in the post of ambassador to the United States from great britain. The current occupant of the post, mortimer durant and tr didnt get along, and tr said to british government, youve got to take him back and get me somebody else or were not going to be able to do business. So they were looking at potential candidates. And rod was not chosen. Instead james bryce got the job. Rod was not chosen, and mrs. Roosevelt said to kermit that his wife is, quote, believed to have a touch of the tar brush in her background, which made her husbands appointment, as edith put it, inadvisable. That was how the progressive era describes someone with alleged black ancestors. Ive subsequently learned that mrs. Rod, whose full name was georgina lilas guthrie renel rod, was known as lily and she was known as black lily because she allegedly had west indian blood. How mrs. Roosevelt found out about this im not sure, but i suspect that their good friend, the british diplomat, sir cecil spring rice, was probably the culprit. He was a gossip. He was antisemitic, and so he would be my first choice. But there may be others. John kennedy once called washington the city of northern charm and southern efficiency. It was also a place of intense racial segregation at this time. And even a taint of alleged black blood was sufficient to damn an individual among whites if they possessed that disability. So, i was now more convinced, but still not quite there. In 1906, president and mrs. Roosevelt traveled to panama to inspect work on the canal that had begun two years earlier. Now, this was a fairly big deal, because in those days, as many of you know, there was a tradition that the president did not leave the continental United States during his presidency. Now, you know, president s globetrot everywhere, but then there was it was a major innovation. How could he go to panama, which is clearly not the continental United States . Well, in the treaty where we Ronald Reagan would say took panama, we exercised sovereignty even though we didnt really own it. It was a kind of legal fiction. So you can make the case that you were going to american territory. It also bears on john mccains eligibility to have run for the presidency, but thats another story. Anyway, edith wrote kermit discussions of what she had seen as they traveled to panama. And she said, we landed on thursday morning at colon and were taken across the isthmus on cars stopping at station where little groups of chocolate drops led by a schoolmaster or mistress sang patriotic songs and waved the flag. And where there was an indescribable mixture of pathos and humor in those poor little scraps of humanity born of jamaican negroes mostly, singing land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims pride. Some of you will note the similarity in language to what she had said to Warrington Dawson. By this time, i was convinced that i knew where Edith Roosevelt stood. Yet, like jack mccoy on law order, i thought i had enough to go to the grand jury, but i didnt have enough to get a conviction. So i kept the turning pages. I needed, i felt, something concrete from Edith Roosevelts own hand and mind to clinch the argument that was developing. There might not be anything in those letters. I had no way of knowing. But i could only be sure if i read all the correspondence. So i went back to the stack of letters and perused as carefully as i could, all she had written. The smoking gun, at least for me, emerged in the course of a letter to kermit in november of 1908. Up to this point i have not mentioned Ethel Roosevelt, the daughter of edith and theodore. Unlike Alice Roosevelt longworth, about whom professor stacey courteri has written with much insight and skill, Ethel Roosevelt lacked charisma and star appeal. She was an engaging, attractive young woman who was kind of a surrogate mother for her two younger brothers, archibald and quentin. But she was not a glamour girl like alice. Yet she probably had the most developed social conscience of all the roosevelt children. In washington, as a teenager, she taught Us Sunday School class for africanamerican children at an Episcopal Church near the white house. This was not something classy ladies upper class young in washington did in 1908. Roosevelt, who i believe needs a good biography and was a very interesting letter writer and had supported civil rights into the 1960s when her brother, archie, was taking a very different point of view. So in november, 1908, edith sits down to write kermit her usual sunday letter. And she referred to her daughter, her daughters class, and the other plans for the morning. Ethel has gone off to her little nigs, and when she comes back, we are going to see the wife of the german ambassador and so forth. I looked at the word in that sentence many times. Turns the page up, down. What else could it be. Context than the obvious seemed credible. One, with that sentence i concluded i had a solid case for the proposition that Edith Roosevelt had gone beyond genteel bigotry into a kind of racism that exceeded the unfortunate prejudices of most americans in those years. At that point you might say, so what . So what . White, upperclass women talk like that. It was sad to read such a language from a first lady. But after all, she was only the president s wife, not the president or a policymaker. That conclusion, it seemed to me as i thought about it, and i thought about it a lot, was misguided. Much attention had been devoted to Theodore Roosevelts racial views. Historians have looked at his dinner with booker t. Washington in 1901, his views on lynching, which he blamed often on members of the black community who refused to turn in criminals. His appointment of blacks in the south and his sometimes negative opinions about the future of africanamericans in the United States in general. Roosevelt liked to think of himself as a direct heir of abraham lincoln, carrying forward the ideals of the great emancipator. A precursor of Steven Spielberg and daniel daylewis, if you will. In fact, tr fell well short of these lofty, selfimposed expectations. What has not been explored, and you will look in vain in the literature about tr and race, is any inkling that edith had any views that were different from her husbands. So we now must ask what was the effect of Edith Roosevelt on trs thinking about race . That his wife harbored strong antiblack views and used racial slurs in her correspondence presumably shaped the setting in which she talked to him about racial matters. Take, for example, the most celebrated incident involving t. R. And race in his presidency. The shooting spree allegedly blamed on , not allegedly blamed blamed on black soldiers that occurred in brownsville, texas, in august 1906. The town was shot up. The white population said it was the soldiers stationed at a nearby fort who were responsible. The accused men denied all knowledge of the episode. Subsequent evidence has pretty well demonstrated for me that they were innocent. They had not been responsible. The army and the president concluded that the black soldiers were either all guilty or they knew who was guilty and were covering up for their comrades. So on november 5th, 1906, roosevelt ordered without honor the discharge of all three companies of the black soldiers implicated, in their minds, with either perpetuating the shooting or refusing to tell what they knew. The soldiers received no hearing, no lawyers, no defense attorneys, no support, no real opportunity to testified to defend themselves. They were just out. Roosevelt simply dismissed them from the service peremptoryily. Four days later the president and his wife depart for panama. On the journey, Theodore Roosevelt gets a wire from secretary of war William Howard taft, suspending the president s order until there can be a hearing. Roosevelt immediately directed that his order be carried out at once and the men were dismissed with no recourse. It was a gross miscarriage of justice. And it remains a major stain on Theodore Roosevelts historical reputation. The historical record doesnt tell us whether Edith Roosevelt commented on this episode. But, remember, this was at a time when she was referring to chocolate drops and little scraps of humanity as her impressions of black panamanians. Her husband at the same time was insisting on severe punishment for accused africanamericans at home. During his second term, when he no longer needed black votes to get the republican nomination, roosevelt was less respectful than he had been the first time around of the aspirations of africanamericans, as he had been during 1901 to 1904. Until now, there has been no exploration of what he might have been hearing on racial issues from his wife on their frequent walks around the white house grounds, on the boat to panama, or anywhere else. Did she mention the tar brush . Did she discuss little nigs . Did it matter that Edith Roosevelts view of blacks was so prejudiced . This opens up for me, at least, a whole range of issues about tr and race that had been unexplored. Few prominent americans have been more studied than Theodore Roosevelt. We have some distinguished historians of Theodore Roosevelt here with us today in the audience. Edmund morris has written three extended volumes on trs life, and Doris Kearns Goodwin is bringing out this week 928 pages of roosevelt, taft, and the election of 1912. Taft and roosevelt had once been a team, but now were rivals. It sometimes seems that theres nothing new to be said about a charismatic president who wrote more than 100,000 letters during his lifetime. In fact, yours truly published a study of Theodore Roosevelts presidency two decades ago, in which i repeated what was then the conventional wisdom about Edith Roosevelts impact on her husbands years in office. Like many another historian, i did not see any need to examine Edith Roosevelts correspondence with her sons. And i, like many others, missed a key point about the first lady. I passed on a big story, when at the time, i only sampled ediths letters to kermit. I wasnt willing to expand what the german ss called [ inaudible ], sitting and reading all these letters. Yet, as i hope i have demonstrated, the moment when a historian thinks that the subject or an historical figure has been defined and put into a permanent mold, that is precisely the time when new evidence and new interpretations are likely to emerge. Hubris is a professional sin for historians in that regard. Every history teacher has heard the student question, do we have to know all those facts . They think that historians have rooms full of fact where is we go in and assemble our books, one from column a, one from column b, put them together, there you go. There are some who try that but not many. Often, we try to explain to students that our knowledge of the facts is contingent on the interpretations we place upon the significance of historical events. Consider the nature of the fact that got me started toward a revision of Edith Roosevelt. Her 1916 letter to Warrington Dawson. It was a fact that she wrote the letter in 1916, but no one knew of her views on race but she and mr. Dawson for the next 60 years. As the letter sat in his papers until his death in 1962 and then was ultimately transmitted to the duke library where, years later, i came across it in 1976. At that point, i was just collecting documents, indispensable, but i didnt process them. And so the letter went into a folder. Edith roosevelt, post presidency. Other subjects engaged my interest over the next 35 years, and so the fact of her racial views sat there, while Sylvia Morris wrote her biography and i worked on other things. Then in the spring of 2011, i turned to edith as a topic, looked at the letter, and put the old fact into a new context. The perfect first lady who never put a foot wrong had expressed regressive racial views. The facts about Edith Roosevelt, which, of course, had been facts all along, now changed to accommodate a new reality. Her racial opinions, common in 1916, now seemed objectionable and to some, but alas not every american, seemed often repulsive. The way we see a fact changes the meaning and the significance of the fact. And so changes how we see history. A wise historian once told a seminar of which i was a member more than half a century ago, if you press the fabric of history at any specific point it will reveal how fragmentary and tentative our knowledge of the past really is. I submit this case study of Edith Roosevelt underscores edmund s. Morgans point, one of the great historians of the 20th century. There are many ways in which the picture of Edith Roosevelt as a paragon among first ladies represented a genuine historical truth. She was not a monster, and the contributions she made to the evolution of president ial spouses were important and lasting. But, she was also a woman with an intellectual flaw that characterized her life in the white house and her effect on her husband. Seeing people in the past in all their dimensions is the continuing task of historians. And i hope these remarks have indicated why members pursue these issues with an enduring fascination. ] thank you very much. [applause] ive been told by management that the microphones are necessary so that cspan and other media can make sure everybodys questions get heard. So if there are questions, if i havent convinced you of the absolute validity of everything ive said or you want more, fire away. Anyone . Yes, john. Jon cooper. Inaudible ] okay. Inaudible ] well, we do have john cooper, the distinguished for me me the preeminent buyiographer of Woodrow Wilson is at the microphone. Christy miller is here, his partner in that wonderful cspan program about the two mrs. Wilsons. And joanna stern, the granddaughter of Alice Roosevelt, is with us also today. So we have a distinguished cast. John. Just a couple of questions. One strictly factual. I take it, edith was there at the dinner with booker t. Washington. Yes. Was did they ever entertain another africanamerican as a guest after that in the white house . No. Thats what i thought. Yeah. No. The second thing is, and im curious, how much how much do you think she was influenceing him on race and how much do you think they may have been reinforcing each other . How much she was influencing him. Its interesting. There are a couple things i didnt quote. Im going to start out to try to edit the correspondent of edith and tr turns out theres a lot more at harvard than i thought. Im waiting for 170 pages when i get home to see what they say. When hes in africa, he writes her, and says that the blacks who are helping him are little black grasshoppers. And so theres that. And he writes her in 1903, when he says, i have people coming to talk about immigration this evening, and so were going to have a dutch mick chini fest. And, you know, theres that. Then the other so i just dont know. What i hope ive done is cracked open the door and said, hey, theres something more going on here than just it was him all by himself, you know, in his own head and that there were influences. I was interested also you brought brownsville into it, which i do think its extremely important. To me, that indicated just his extreme nervousness on the subject of race, of any kind of racial clash. And i was once at a session where i finally had to comment where i said, you know, tr was this great preacher of the moral virtues, and the one he held highest was courage. I swear, i think when it comes to race i dont think he gets very good marks on that one. Well, he said, i think, you know, president mckinley had the backbone of the shotgun chair eclair butte i think unfairly. You could turn the words around on him when it came to racial issue, and thats why ive always thought the comparison with lincoln was farcical. I mean, if you look at lincolns intellectual growth. I mean, tr makes one speech in 1918 thats a little enlightened as far as africanamericans are concerned. But the rest of his career was not a profile in courage in any sense of the word. Thank you. That was a wonderful talk. Thank you. Anybody else . Okay. Thank you all. [applause] folks, there is a book signing upstairs in the new archives bookstore. This is American History tv, on cspan3, where each weekend we feature 48 hours of programs exploring our nations past. [water waves lapping the wall] presidency,n the Herbert Hoover scholar george nash talked about the defining relationship between the 31st president and his oval office predecessor, calvin coolidge. This hourlong event was part of the Herbert Hoover president ial library and museums conference called president ial partnerships Herbert Hoover and president s wilson, coolidge, truman and eisenhower. Im going to introduce our second speaker. Dr. George h nash is our foremost authority on the life and times of Herbert Hoover. Receiving the phd in history from Harvard University his , dissertation, the conservative intellectual movement in america since 1945, was quickly published and remains a seminal study on this topic. On the recommendation of william