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,