Booktv. Org for the full weekend schedule. Now we kick off with clay risens story of the rough riders led by Theodore Roosevelt. [inaudible conversations] good evening. Good evening and welcome to green light bookstore. Were excited tonight to have clay risen presenting his book, the crowded hour. Hell be talking to dr. Amanda foreman. Before i turn things over to them, a couple of housekeeping things. First, turn off or silence cell phones or electronic devices. Second, book withs are for sale at the register. If you want to see whats happening the rest of the summer here at greenlight, fliers are available at the desk. And tonights program is being recorded by cspan. Amanda forman is author of awardwinning best sellers and of the forthcoming the world made by women a history of women from the apple to the pill. Her documentary work includes wellingtons women, the georgians and the bbc networks [inaudible] her next project is the exhibition fit for a queen inside victorias palace, for the 2019 summer opening of buckingham palace. Clay risen is the author of a nation on fire, the bill of the century, as well as the best selling american whiskey, bourbon and rye a guide to the nations favorite spirits. Hes appeared on the greenlight stage many times to talk about both history and whiskey, so were glad to have him here with us again. His new book, the crowded hour, dives deep into the life of thee deer Roosevelt Theodore roosevelt, illustrating not just the spanishamerican war, but americas standing in the world thereafter. The book has been praised by fellow authors and historians including jon meacham and douglas brinkley. Scrupulously researched and dramatically narrated, the crowded hour showcases Theodore Roosevelt in all of his rough rider glory. Clay risen brings the spanishamerican war and the gilded age back to life. All of roosevelts undaunted hubris, derringdo and political genius are captured in the epic. So youre in for Something Special tonight. Clay will be reading from the book, then amanda will join him in conversation, and youll have a chance to ask your questions after. That please join me in welcoming to stage clay risen. [applause] i did not come prepared. [laughter] all right. So, first of all, i just want to thank greenlight so much for hosting me for this event. It is just a single pleasure of my life to have a bookstore like in this right down the street and know that, you know, from the very beginning, my children right here from the very beginning of moving into this neighborhood with little kids, this was not just a bookstore, but truly a part of our community, part of our Friends Network and a source of knowledge and fun and just ton it is of surprises. So thrilled to be here to talk about my book. Its a true honor x. Also to have so many friends, neighbors, cocoworkers, people ive encountered through my life here. This is just really sweet. So hopefully, well have fun tonight. I will read a little bit from the book, and then amanda and i will chat. The book, as it should be readily evident, is about Theodore Roosevelt. Oh, sorry about that. See, this is where im really not prepared. I didnt even have my mic on. [laughter] all right. Thats better. So its about Theodore Roosevelt and the rough riders. Just for some context, the 30second version for people who maybe are new to story. In 1898, america declared war on spain primarily over cuba and cuban war for independence. America was, this is our first humanitarian intervention. The problem was we didnt have an army. America had, by law, congressional law, a mandated cap of 28,000 soldiers and officers. So right away there was a need for just people to go and fight the war. So roosevelt, who at the time was working in washington for the navy department, proposed the idea of getting together not just volunteers, but people who could very quickly go into war because they had certain, lets say certain skills. I describe it as sort of like that liam neeson movie, he has certain skills. Sort of like dirty dozen but a thousand. See, rachel laughed. [laughter] so he recruited a thousand college athletes, cowboys, police officers, people from all walks of life. The number one and the number two the tennis players in the country quit tennis to join the rough riders. And in short order, they went to texas to train, to florida to join the rest of the army that was shipping out and then to cuba to actually fight the spanish. So the section that ill read tonight is just a small, small bit at the beginning of what proved to be the climactic ballot but not the end of the battle, but not the end of the war and certainly not the end of the rough riders story. But this is certainly, when people think about the spanishamerican war, the battle of San Juan Heights. At about 4 a. M. On july 1st, the nearly 17,000 men who comprised the 59 corps crawled 5th corps crawled from under their blankets. There had been no bugle so as not to warn the spanish. Instead, the sergeant went from man to man shaking them awake. More than 10,000 soldiers were encamped. The rest were already a few miles north preparing for the assault on another town or they need to attack in order to protect their flank. As the men climbed the slopes of a little hill looking out over santiago, which theyre trying to attack, they could see the go of central santiago seven miles away framing san p juan hill like a halo. Where they had time and inclination, they set small fires to boil coffee or fry some bacon. No one spoke. Few had any illusion about what the day had in store for them. That night the night before, word had passed down, that morning they were going to take the hike. On paper the battle that unfolded that day hailed in every way the major engagements of the civil war, gettysburg, of course, but also fights that had receded from common memory. And it was nothing like the weekslong battles that would follow it in the 20th century like iwo jima. It was a oneday assault on the outer defenses of a provincial capital in the caribbean with a few hundred deaths on both sides. The spanish defenses were formidable, but the landscape could not compare with the imposing escarpments the Union Soldiers faced in 1863 or that army rangers climbed on dday. And yet the battle of San Juan Heights remains among the most important, celebrated and contests engagements in american history. Numbers and topography tell us little about why the soldiers that morning felt in their bones the extraordinary significance of what they were about to undertake. For many, it was to be their First Experience of combat, and for most, their last. They were right to be afraid. By the end of the day, one out of every six of them would be dead or wounded. But there was Something Else, something collective and energizing, and in a way, much more daunting than the prospect of being shot by a spanish bullet. If they carried the day, they would dechair to the day that the United States declare to world that the United States army could beat any power. They were not just any army, barelytrained volunteers, a force that most europeans would dismiss as hardly an enemy at all. Few americans paused to think that spain had long ceased being a first rate empire or the soldiers arrayed against them had been physically weakened and emotionally demoralized by three years of counterinsurgency warfare. Few of the men in the invasion force considered the numbers were in their favor since the general in charge of the spanish defenses had deployed too many of his men on the citys northern and western sides, far away from the americans, resulting in a 10 to 1 ratio in their favor along the eastern alliance. Nor, for that matter, how many mistakes had been made and how those mistakes would come close to erasing whatever advantage the americans held at the outset. No one understood what would come next if they won or how they would recover if they lost. Outside schachters inner circle, it is unlikely that anyone realized that in either instance there was no plan; no plan for victory, no plan for defeat. One thing was sure though, with dozens of correspondents and foreign attaches watching, news of their fight would spread around the world in nearly an instant thanks to the telegraph and the presence of William Randolph hurst in person watching the battle unfold from a nearby hill. That morning around the campfires as the mist rose and the San Juan River below them, there was only this; this valley, this hill, this fight. Okay. [applause] [inaudible conversations] i have to say, you know, its so rare to read a really well written history book. I mean, there are lots of history books out there, but what makes clays book, i think, so special is that its a genuine pageturner. And that doesnt happen very often. So its been such a pleasure to read. And it left me with a lot of questions. The first one, of course, has to be why this topic. You have so many interesting wars, of course, so what made you a make this choice . You know, the easy answer is when i was a kid, my Boy Scout Troop was the rough riders [laughter] true story. No one would claim that if it wasnt true, right . No, it was the rough riders, and so that story always stuck with me as not something i didnt know a lot about, but was, you know, in the outlines that i knew an engaging story. What actually happened was i had been piecing through, id been going through obituaries. Sort of, i dont know, just as its not a hobby, but [laughter] its a great way to get sources for materials because you come across obituaries from, say, the 1930s, the New York Times obituaries which are pretty robust and well reported plug for the New York Times [laughter] but its a great way to find stories about people who at one point were thought significant and today have maybe faded from memory but also still have a story to find. And i found a lot of people who, you know, it might make a good magazine article, a book idea, but i came across the obituary for a rough rider, a member of this regiment. And it wasnt someone famous, it wasnt a significant you know, someone who went on to do Something Else and this was a trust yall point in their, this was what made them famous, their claim to fame, that they fought with roosevelt. And so it is struck me that this was a story, as far as i knew, had always been kind of a little footnote, kind of an interesting story in roosevelts biography. But then to read this persons biography, this perps to bitch ware and to say obituary and to say there is a significance to group that the totality of the regiment was famous and important in the American Mind at one point because of roosevelt but also, arguably, separate from roosevelt. And so it struck me that, a, i could big into that and tell a more, you know, a fuller story than just this note roosevelts life, although it is that, but also that to try to capture the significance at the time. Why was this regiment and what was it about this war that made them significant in the american mentality. What was it that they captured at that moment, and can i put that into book form. Interesting. When you say what is it about this war, my first question then would be can you separate for us the difference between, say, the filibusters several decades earlier and this war . What makes them different . So the filibusters, right, these were individual private citizens who, in the cuban case, went to cuba often against the exmissit directions of the u. S explicit directions of the u. S. Government, went to cuba to try to help the cuban revolutionaries. And there had been two phases of cuban war for independence. Theres a tenyear war and then more or less a peace, and then in 1895 another war, and thats what the u. S. Was responding to. But in both those periods you had hundreds of americans, some of them cubanamericans, but many of them anglos who were simply energized by this story going, going off to help in a time when the u. S. Government said, well, wed rather not be involved. And i think what that story, what that back history illustrates is that there was this strong you are general city in the urgency in the population to do something. Maybe not always in the majority of the public, but certainly there were people who, out of a desire for adventure, a desire to help the cubans, a sense that they could just do something important with their lives, that they, that this was something that they were, that they wanted to go risk their lives to do. And i think its an important predicate to what ends up happening with the spanishamerican war, because so much the story we get was that we were essentially tricked into the war. It was William Randolph herself and some jingos who essentially created a false premise for us to go to war. And it is true there were people whod had their own reasons, but it leaves aside and, i think, excuses the fact that so Many Americans over the years had been building toward this point of moral certainty that we had to do something. And, you know, and whether it was they themselves who were going to get on boats and go help the cubans or finally just pressure the government to do something about it, something was going to happen. I mean, a great deal of history, military history seems to have been motivated by a moral certainty. You know, the war of 1812 onwards. Even the mexicanamerican war, the moral certainty that is driving these conflicts much more so than europe where very often its just a war for territory, you know, a war for trade. Later on, for example, the cry mean war begins to crimean war, this need to have a moral narrative to go with it. How much do you think that that tradition was driving public sentiment . Oh, it e 100 . And, you know, one of the things thats really important about the spanishamerican war is that it comes at the very end of the civil war generation as a body of leaders. So mckinley was the last president to serve in the civil war. Every president between grant and mckinley had served in the civil war, and many of the people in leadership positions both in government and business, were marked by this experience. But i think that in a way that is, you know, maybe youd say its an outlier of a period. So we dont think back on it necessarily this way, but it was a point where america became very antimilitary and really embraced both the civil warsh the reaction against the civil war, believed militaries get us into that, so we need a small military, we need to be isolationist at least in military terms, right . We dont want a military that will take us abroad to fight. We want to reembrace, you know, John Quincy Adams admonition we dont go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, we are just a wellwisher for the world. But you hit on an important point, which is the perception that europe that way, we need to be the opposite was very much in the minds of americans in the late 19th century. It was, you know, you had people looking at europe and saying, well, france has a huge army, russia has a huge army, germany has a huge army, we are not going to be those countries because they get into wars, they will get into more wars, they get into colonial occupations. And yet at the same taunt, the n economy was growing, the population was growing, technology was in the same way we sort of generically talk about it today, technology was bringing us closer together, people were copps of this conscious of this. Our time was running out as far as being able to isolate ourself. There was the sense that, okay, america has to reconceive its role in the world and start to embrace the idea what it means to be a world power because whether we like it or not, were going to be that way. So how do we do that in a way that is not what europe does. And, to me, the spanishamerican war offered an answer to that, an answer that a lot of people could embrace. It was, if you say, well, the spanishamerican war had a moral purpose to it, then that allows people who maybe dont want a europeanstyle military or a europeanstyle Foreign Policy at least in, you know, the stereotype to embrace Something Else. Say, okay, well, thats not what we do. What we do is we have a big military or we have an active Foreign Policy, but its to help the world, right . Its not for territory. And this is propaganda, its whatever you want to call it, but thats what people believed. At the same time, people who were very aggressively promoting an expansionist Foreign Policy, who wanted to see the u. S. Go out into the world and sometimes for base reasons saw this as a great way to win over a public consensus, right . Suddenly you could say, well, look, we need to go occupy cuba, or we need to bring stations around the pacific, but its for good reasons. We needed to do this for good reasons. And what was so striking when i was researching this was how many articles, articles in north American Review and harpers and these sort of longer form journals that were very popular at the time were the arguments that were being put forward for an activist Foreign Policy, for intervening in cuba, for having a larger military were the exact same thing that you heard in, you know, the runup to world war ii, in the early stages of vietnam, to in e months before the iraq war. The exact same rhetoric and the exact same, you know, moralist justification for going out into the world and starting a war. The exact same thing. And it was to point where its kind of generic to hear today or sort of cliche, but at the time it was wholly new. Well, one side of the coin is the genesis of kind of american exceptionalism. The other side is that fundamental sense of are we going to have a hamiltonian concept of what the American Military looks like or a jacksonian. Yeah. You mentioned in the book, if you wanted to touch on that, because i think its really fascinating that it can help to steal the kind of [inaudible] yeah. I mean, through the the 19th century was marked by this tension between what i call the hamiltonians and the jacksonians. The jacksonians had this belief that america was, you know, were the country of minutemen. Were the country of volunteer the, you know, farmersoldiers, citizensoldiers, volunteers who, in the event of a war, would get together and go off and fight. And you see this time after time. I grew up in tennessee, the volunteer state. Were called the volunteer state because so many tennesseans went off at the start of the mexican war, volunteered to fight against members coe. Same thing, the spirit of 61 which ised today not a common if phrase, but in the war it was an idea that, okay, well, now we have we were a peaceful country and mow were at war with ourselves, and the american, you know, Young American men are getting ready to go off to war. But the idea was that happens when we need it, otherwise we go back to farming, and we go back to being a peaceful country. And the hamiltonians had a different idea. The hamiltonian idea was, look, sooner or later this is not going to work. First of all, it never works, right . It always results in huge, you know, and when we win, hundreds of thousands of untrained men get killed when the civil war breaks out and instead of having a quick fight, its a fourandahalf year blood fest. Part of that can be with explained or was explained as these guys didnt know what they were doing, so they were going off and just slaughtering each other. And so and eventually, were going to have a war with another country that is really well prepared, and were going to get destroyed. We need a Standing Army that at least at the core is ready to fight. And so what i and those are still things we hear today. I mean, we still have this idea of americans as citizensoldiers, that were not a garrison state the, you know . We dont have a universal draft, we have a volunteer army. And then all kinds of National Guard and reserves and all these, you know, sort of people who are ready to fight but otherwise they work in their regular lives. And to me, i think that the spanishamerican war brought together those two impetuses that were intentioned and resolved them. We had long had a system where we had this very tiny military, and then we had what was the precursor for the National Guard, but really it was just statelevel militias. They were mostly social clubs. Most of these guys, they didnt fight, they never fought. They didnt even really train. But they got together occasional hi and said, yes, were a regiment, were a state mill cha. And militia. And those guys who were in units like that who went to cuba were just decimated. And yet you have a group like the rough riders where the idea, its a rough idea, but the concept is, you know, these are people who are ready to fight, theyre trained to some extent, they have a background, and theyre integrated into the federal army, you know . Theyre not just state troops that are brought if in at the last minute. Theyre ready to go. No these arent civil war civilian regiments exactly. Theyre under federal control. It just presented a new idea where you could have a synthesis of a core army that had this moral Mission Behind it and then a larger group that you could call on who are ready to fight. And thats, essentially, what we have today. So pivoting from the macro ideas that were talking now to something a bit more micro, one of the things i love about this book is the inexhaustible supply of anecdotes of these really interesting characters. The journalists are absolutely fascinating. You told me earlier that you had to leave out some of the really juicy bits. [laughter] tell us a bit more about Richard Davis who, you know, has been forgotten by history but was fascinating hes fascinating. Richard davis, i think of him as, like, the George Packer of his day. [laughter] no, in a good way. [laughter] no, he was someone who he, he was a correspondent, he was a journalist, but he also wrote plays, he was, you know, he saw himself as, you know, a chronicler of the moment, not just a reporter. And someone who was fascinated by war at its heart, right . So that was so Richard Harding davis had grown up in pennsylvania in a literary family, went to college, decided that he wanted to be a journalist along the way. I mean, its a very modern story. He worked for the college paper, decided he loved journalism and proved to be a really great journalist in a very modern way. He adopted a lot of reporting techniques that at the time were, today theyre sort of, you know, the stock and trade of journalists, but at the time this idea that you would go and profile people, you would write a profile, that you would talk to different people about that person, that you would also tell things from different points of view within one article, he went covers the jonestown flood. That was the his first big break and ended up in washington ended up in new york as, first, a reporter, newspaper reporter and then just kind of a freelancer making enormous sums of money, getting paid [inaudible] i know. [laughter] its actually you read it but also he was larger than life. I mean, he was a very handsome man for the time [laughter] no, what i mean is he [inaudible] [laughter] im sure hed be a handsome man today, but what i mean is, well, he defined what it meant tock a good looking person to be a good looking person. Unlike a lot of people, unlike a lot of men of his age and older, he was cleanshaven. And he was so often portrayed by caricaturists and portraitists, they often liked to put his picture along with his articles, which was also kind of novel, that does anyone know the gibson girls, right . The turn of the century kind of victorianamerican, how would i say this [inaudible] yeah. It was a woman who was then used as a model for different things, right . But there was a woman that it was modeled on. Anyways, if you think of her as, like, the barbie doll at the time, Richard Harding davis was the ken. [laughter] he was the gibson man. He was less well remembered no one remembers the gibson man, but it was Richard Harding davis who was a reporter who was like every reporter today looks at him [inaudible] so anyway, so the point is he ended up, you know, he liked to believe that he had influence on policy, he liked to believe that he not just reported, but actually spoke to the issues of the day. And for a long time, the he was opposed to intervention in cuba and just believed that it was someone elses fight. And then hearst, and this is to get to your question what i left out, i had this whole chapter. And, you know, im sort of its good that the i didnt put it in, because it wouldnt have worked, but it was really good material. So hearst had hired Richard Harding davis and Frederick Remington, the artist who was also equally famous and weird. Remington had, many in college he was a big football player, bigtime loved football, and he dunked his jersey in cows blood. He would get a bucket of blood and dunk his jersey in it and then wear that [laughter] i mean, its just nuts. [laughter] yeah. And also just, i mean, i hope there are no Frederick Remington fans here, just a terrible person. [laughter] he was just a really terrible person. And anyway, but it was also just one of the most, i mean, one of the most popular, famous, wellpaid portraitists, artists. Like davis, he both wrote he both drew for art and, you know, for artistic purposes, sold in galleries, but he also did a lot of stuff for harpers and the newspapers and magazines of the day. They were both paid enormous amounts of money by hearst to go to cuba for a month. And they could have there was no problem going to cuba. They could have just gotten on a boat and gone to havana, but instead they wanted someone to drop them off in rebel territory in the middle of the night. They had this whole romantic vision, but they couldnt find anyone to do it. So they waited and waited, and eventually they found someone, but he was this kind of drunk captain and his crew, and they went off in a storm [laughter] they both got seasick [laughter] and so they had to turn around. So eventually, they went to cuba, and they went to havana, and the Spanish Government and military received them like, oh, great, famous americans. Youre here to document us, great. So they gave them passes. Yeah, sure, go ahead. It was everything they didnt want out of their adventure. It was not an adventure. So remington said, is and this is where sort of the apocryphal story where remington sent a telegraph back to hearst and said, you know, theres no war here. Of course, the spanish were only showing them what they wanted. What they wanted these guys to see. So hearst telegraphs back apock rah fallly but supposedly, you supply the pictures, ill supply the war, right . Which he probably didnt say, theres no evidence from the time. Remington said he didnt say that, her said he didnt say that, anyway, but remington left. Davis, however, ended up going all over the island then breaking away from his minders, snuck behind into rebel territory and ended up going around and really got a picture of how terrible things were for the cubans. And it really was terrible. I mean, at least 100,000 cuban civilians had been massacred or killed, some of them were slaughteredded, some of them died a lot of them died in concentration camps that were set up to control the population. And davis came back after a month, and, you know, he was filing stories and telling the world about what he saw, and then he wrote a book about what he saw, came out a few months later. And he had totally turned around, and he became very hawkish and sort of, basically, became almost, you know, a missionary with this zeal. Okay, now i can tell the world and i have to persuade the public and the government that we have to go to war. And he made a very strong humanitarian case, a moralistic case. But, yeah. And just one more detail about davis, i mean, to go back and read his stuff today, its pretty good. Some of his novels are better than others, but some are actually pretty decent. His war reporting is really good. He ended up becoming the sort of attached himself to the rough riders, so he filed a lot of stories, both daily newspaper reports and longer form magazine pieces that read really well today. I mean, theyre very biased, theyre very proroosevelt. You have to read through that, but its well reported, its got great details. In a way, he and roosevelt were very similar where they were ahead of their time and yet very quickly became eclipsed by the moments that followed them, kind of what they helped usher in. You know, they were both davis was so of the moment, he was so, you know, understood what with professional journalism was at a time when a lot of people still believed that you could kind of make stuff up and, you know, file it and just hope that eventually it all comes out in the wash. He was really committed to truthfinding, but he was also fundamentally a romantic, and he believed that he could do all of that. I wanted to pursue the difference between romance and truth, because one of the wonderful things in here is that you document so well the romance that the rough riders thought they were going to encounter and were acting out and then the truth of what they got in cuba. So could you just enlarge on that . Its sort of fascinating, the tension between yeah. Yeah, no, it is. I mean, these were men who had never fought in a war. I mean, there were a few of the older officers that, some civil war experience, but by and large, these were people who had relatives, uncles or fathers or whatever fought in the war. Is so they had a very row plant ific idea about what are was, and add on top of that this idea that they were going to go save the cubans. So its an interesting story because they, in some ways, did live out the rough idea of what they would go through. They helped win the war, but in the details what they went through was this just terrible experience. They really suffered. They really suffered. And not only relatively few americans died in the battle. A lot more died of disease, malnutrition. The army was incredibly illprepared for fighting in a tropical, you know, environment in the middle of the summer. You would think they would say, okay, well, there are some special things we need to do for that. Instead they gave men wool uniforms, the same things they would wear in, you know, north dakota in the winter. They gave them lots of hard tack, you know, little hard pieces of biscuits and bacon. There was so much bacon theres so much bacon in my book. [laughter] in fact, one of the chapters, all of the chapters are quotes from people at the time, and one of the chapters is called the monotony of continuous bacon. [laughter] theres a lot of, you know, why not . But that led to a lot of malnutrition, and that weakened men who then died of all sorts of terrible things. And then the experiences of battle that some of them papered over and sort of romanticized even after the fact, but many of them really suffered longterming consequences from being in a war, from this experience. And i think its also the weirdness of bumping up against coming back and being celebrated, i mean, being celebrities. These were the most famous men in aggregate in the cup. And when they landed, they came back to a quarantine in montauk. And even today if you go out to montauk, theres still some sites around that are named after rough riders, roosevelt or theres some connection. And, you know with, after a time they were cleared and they were ab able to come into new york city where they were just, you know, they couldnt buy a drink, they couldnt buy a beer. Everything was given to them. People were if they, they night, they loved it, and they walked around in their uniforms. But also i think that probably also hurt them in a way because they were sort of being told, okay, thats how you know, we only know the romantic version, so thats what now you have to play out. And one of, well, both with of the tennis, so the number one and the number two tennis players in the country quit tennis. When they came back, they went back into tennis, and they were both successful, multiple u. S. Open winners and tennis hall of fame players. Both of them died young very tragically, and including one of them who committed suicide in, i think, the century club. Century club, yeah, well, you know, was living there in a room and killed himself. Not in the dining room. [laughter] there were many stories like that, and the sort of stories that today wed say, well, you know, ptsd. But, of course, at the time it wasnt understood that way. And so, yeah, and it, you know, what i think is i dont mean this, what was so amazing about the story was so much of it, its a compact story. All of this happens within a spread of months. And so these experiences of these men going from, you know, 1898 started and none of them had any idea they were going to go to war. Maybe some of them dreamed of it, but they had no idea they were going to be rough riders. By the summer theyre in cuba, walking through the jungle getting shot at by spaniards. And then they go through this, after the battle, this horrible siege, their friends are all dying, and then they get on boats and they come back, and its as if everything was just a pick nick x. To imagine what that picnic. And to imagine what that must have been life is terrifying. I agree. I think weve got time for one more question from me, and then well open it to audience. Did your opinion change of roosevelt though . I mean yeah. What do you think of him now . So when i started, i think i had you know, in a weird way, i think ive come around to where i started. [laughter] you know, i started with, you know, this idea that, look, a complicated figure, and i still believe that. But i think i believe it was a little more evident to say it. Look, this is somebody who, on the one hand, had, you know, some pretty difficult some opinions that even at the time were difficult to swallow about what, particularly before the war, what his, what americas role was, what america should look like, you know . He had a very, you know, a very centralist view about what it meant to be an american, you know . A very racist view, in all honesty. Even though he himself was often, you know, went out of his way to not be racist, to actually be later, this is after the war, but he integrated the white house by having booker t. Washington over for dinner. So hes this man of very come blue candidated views. Complicated views. New the course of the writing through the course of the writing, i went back and fort a lot because there are moments where you cannot help but admire him. Working on his sort of jingoera stuff in the 90s, its pretty rough going. Its poorly written, its very bombastic and kind of gross, and henry james loved to make fun of him. [laughter] henry james hated roosevelt so much, and there are some great reviews by henry james that roosevelt could give it back. The two of them were like gore vidal and buckley. [laughter] but he, look, at the end of the day, he was just kind of all over the map. And so its very hard to swallow that. But when the war came along, you know, he went to war fundamentally because he felt he had an obligation, having supported the war, to actually go to war himself. I think theres also some boyish adventurism going on as well, i dont want to say its only that. But, you know, he, i think, truly believed that he had an obligation to go do this thing. He was a very moralistic man in good ways and bad. I mean, there is a all of that. But, you know, he was someone who, i think, was, you know, was committed to honesty, was a very, was, you know, moralistic in the sense that he looked down on people who did not love up to his code, and yet he did live by a code. It is, so you go through these things, you find these sort of episodes, oh, thats so awesome. Hes such a great guy. And then you turn to next one, hes a kind of, kind of a jerk. I know. This books so much fun, you have all these nuances. Yeah. And at the end, i mean, what do you say . Complicated people are complicated, and you cant say, oh, hes a good guy, hes a bad guy. He is all of those things. Yeah. And thats the point. I think that you have a very nuanced argument in this book as well about the nature and the role of americas place in the world as selfappointed policeman. And the origins of that story. So on that note, thank you, i would like to throw it open. We have time for a few questions. Youve given us so much meat. [laughter] to discuss. Youve got a mic . Great. [inaudible] but ill take it. So you discussed the mace that this book the place that this book has in 19th century history as far as perhaps going against the particular argument about how america felt as far as isolationism. But where does this book fit into the history of the rough riders specifically . Is there any history that suggestses one conventional wisdom of the way they understand that . I dont know that it pivots it certainly is a line about the rough riders, but a lot of it is, you know, a kind of a romantic story about the rough riders, right . This group of ragtag guys who go off to war. Its not that thats wrong, but what i wanted to do was complicate that a little bit and show how selfaware they were. I mean, i think that a lot of the, so a lot of theres not scholarship about the rough riders, but as much as the storys told about them through roosevelt is that, yeah, theyre kind of this crazy bunch of guys who go off to war, and theyre having fun doing it or theyre going through terrible times doing it. But one thing i tried to pull out is how selfaware they were of what they were doing both in terms of going to war, the reasons they were going to war but then also where their place was within that war and maybe, to some extent, what that meant going ahead. A lot of them left them hours, a lot of memoirs, a lot of them left behind letters and documents. One of the characters i follow through the book is a young law student who had grown up, he was the son of this sounds silly, but he was the son of the inventer of the combine harvester. He came from money in ohio. And he was a law student in new york, and he was, his father didnt want him to go to war, and there was these letters back and forth with his father and his sisters saying ive got to go to war, i have to go you know, my country going to war, i have a place in this, i have an obligation to go do it. He really understood that he fit within this bigger picture. And through these letters you see that. He also kept a diary. And he ended up being his cousin was in the rough riders, and his cousin said, you know, i know youve already missed some calls to join a regiment, but i think i can get you into the rough riders and this whole story as he ended up catching up with them as they were making their way across i wont give up the rest. But this guy, theodore miller, i think was typical of where a lot of these guys were. They werent just doing this for they certainly were full characters. I mean, they were human beings. But they had a very clear idea of what they were doing and where they fit in. So so i think my book adds to it in that way. Steven crane as well. The author. Yeah, Stephen Crane who also was sort of selfassigned to follow the rough riders. He was already famous as, you know, a novelist, primarily as a novelist and short story writer although he did, he was a journalist. And so he was there, and he and Richard Harding davis and a few other of course, Edward Marshall and these figures who today are, you know, not remembered, but were famous journalists at the time were all following the rough riders, and they were all there at the first battle. Edward marshall got shot and then Stephen Crane and Richard Harding davis were right there when he woke, i mean, marshall was fine, and he woke up. Oh, look, theres [laughter] theres Richard Harding davis and Stephen Crane its like waking up to [inaudible] yeah. I forgot they were there. And her whos lurking hearst whos lurking in the background. Yeah, theres another moment where one of hearsts guys is covering one of the side battles, and he gets shot. James creilman, and he was shot, wounded, and he passed out. He woke up in this haze and is worried, oh, ive got to file my stories. And he wakes up and hears this voice, and all of a sudden his bosses, i mean, hearsts head looms above him. Oh, my god oh, you are wounded. Okay, give me your notes, ill go file for you. [laughter] and that was it. And then hearst ran off to telegraph or wherever he was going and filed the story. Yeah, its like having Rupert Murdoch there in the battlefield walking around. Yeah, right. Hi. Just wondering as a historian how did you deal with just the pressure of, you know, roosevelt is such a wellchronicled figure with countless works . Yeah. I think one of the other things, one of the reasons that i really bit down on this story is that its one that in certain ways has been told before. Roosevelt himself wrote a pretty good memoir about, you know, called the rough riders, so a pretty good memoir about this time. And yet my in reading, morris and brands and some of the others, theyre great books, but they really passed over this moment as sort of a side story, sort of a fun jaunt. A lot of the biographers dont really know what to do with it, and to me, its such an important it was such an important moment for roosevelt, you know . He always, you know, the title of the book comes from his nickname for the battle, you know, the crowded hour. That was my crowded hour. He always insisted that people call him the colonel or colonel roosevelt are. But that was more important than being called president. And so what i wanted to do was capture, you know, why was that what was it that was so important to him, and is there, i think i think it was a transitional moment for him. It was the first moment, i mean, that moment, that period, that was where he really began to emerge as a leader. He had had this great career. He was 38 years old. Hed done a lot but hed never been a leader. And yet we think of roosevelt as, fundamentally as a leader, you know, this president ial figure, leader of the country. I dont think he got all of that from his experience, his battlefield experience, but i think he learned a lot. And to look at his writing before the war and after the war, his ideas about politics changed. And so i think its valuable to look at this period and say, well, what about him changed during that moment. I think weve got time for one more question. You mentioned that the spanishamerican war was sort of a pivot point in american policy around the army, quite small before that. Capped, you said, right . And after that you had this moral impulse that we need to be ready and have a ready fighting force. Through the 20th century, things changed quite a bit. I was wondering if you could speak more to how and when those things changed. Well, so immediately after there was the a, you know, in response to the spanishamerican war we increased that cap to about 100,000. But then there was roosevelts lawyer, of all i mean, not of all people, elijah root, who was the leading corporate lawyer in new york and just fascinating, you know, one of these characters you think theres got to be a great biography about him except he wasnt president , and so no ones going to read it, isnt that terrible. He was a fascinating character who, among other things, when roosevelt ran for governor, it turned out that he did not have citizenship he didnt have residency status. He wasnt a resident of new york. He was a resident of d. C. For tax reasons. So he my nagginged things root finagled things. He was a good lawyer. Of the point is roosevelt or mckinley and then roosevelt, brought in root to reform the army. And root essentially took the lessons of the spanishamerican war and created what more or less today we know as the american army. There were a lot of kind of residual structures from the civil war. There was a secretary of war and a commanding general or, you know, this sort of military position that was kind of the same, sort of on the same level as the secretary of war. Created all kinds of weird policy. So he changed that to make the secretary of the Army Secretary of war and placed the secretary of defense in charge and just really streamlined the system. And the system that root put in place was one that was larger and more robust, more prepared as a baseline but then also could expand very rapidly in times of war. So thats what i meant by that sort of compromise between the hamiltonian and the jacksonian ideals. And, but i think that then that intersects with this moralistic impulse that comes out of the spanishamerican war where, you know, American Power is a good thing. And so we should have more of it, right . Its sort of theres almost this logical fallacy that starts to emerge where you say, well, you know, of course, if American Power is good and american intentions are good, then we should then anything we do is good, and we should do more of it, right . So we should always have a large particularly after world war ii we should always have a large army, we should always be involved in other countries issues, we should always be willing to go in and intervene because whatever happens its, ergo, a good thing, right . Because were good. One of the things today thats interesting, are we going through a period where were moving away from that, for better or worse . Because i dont think we can discount that American Power has benefited the world in some cases. Its also been a horrible blight on the world. But, you know, are we moving away from that, and if so, are we doing it the right way . I i mean, i think its interesting to sort of think through these things in 2019 and wonder, you know, are we now coming to the end everyones saying were sort of at the end of the american century, what does that mean and is that going to end up being a good thing . I dont know. Well, on that fascinating note, clay risen, thank you very much. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] youre watching booktv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Booktv, television for serious readers. Booktv recently visited capitol hill and asked congressman jim banks about his reading list. Well, this summer i have a very ambitious reading list. Currently, im finishing a well known book by Stephen Ambrose on dday. A couple of weeks ago i went to 75th anniversary of dday, is and im about finished with the book. But going there and seeing firsthand what happened there the 75 years ago by our heros, the greatest