I had the same sensexd of 1 e5q and productivity professionalsxd engaged their z uses to the best of their im sure most historians would share that the National Archives is one of the true onments of American Culture for which this individual researcher can only professional heart, thank you very much. Xd amen. Amen. W3 now,i] there are two housekeeping things i have to discuss before i can turn to Edith Roosevelt. They relate to her but i need to make them clear. Ko with doris gooe8r coming next week, youre in for about what d can only call teddyness during teddy this and teddy that in everyt direction. You wont hear me use that term. I will talk aboutn roosevelt, colonelht . W roosevk theodore, the rough rider, the president , but i wont use the didnt like the nickname. If you kn him well4oau didn call him teddy. There were a few family members who might say t. D. But you had to really be close. so when you h 9pq what i think share calvins argument about commercial table news gas bags, doing teddy this and teddy that1 as though they have an intimacy with Theodore Roosevelt, what th aai dont know the first thing about Theodore Roosevelt. Q when you hear them going on a t teddyjf riff, you can decide i know better than these guys. Thejf other point to make in a more serious one,e1 im going t be discuss how long i found out and develop the thesis about Theodore Edith roosevelt and her viewsjf on racial issues. And this will require mefa at o point discussing a song that was rendered u 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 ad climax that i will leave for just for the moment but it is coming up. But it is necessary to do that. R one of my major scholarly interests over the past 30 years has been the role of first ladies in American History. In 198 it 2 i taught while i still assumed was the first uqhe first lady. T jfzne1 produced a certain amount of before i started knowin2n was being quoted as anjfn expert, which tells you something about the news xd business in our time. In the process i got to know w3f ford and especially ladyt bird johnson with whom iq entered ino a rewarding and interesting i was never aq friend, but we exchanged information aboutlbuj life and time and interviewing her ini] 1984 was one of the highlights of my research career. In those years, i beganjf to wre about president ial wa,;s, what they h thatt frf grew exponentially i the 80s and 90s about their lives and legacy. Articles and opeds came out of you wrote for the washington oni] sunday appear on saturday afternoon for the sunday paper and when you woke up on sunday morning there would benix 10 200 emails in your inbox generally friendly, but not always. In fact, there was one gentlema] unhappy with whatt i said that emiio mes said, i hope you burn in hell until the end of time. Xdq i recorded him as undevhtylpjfwd now i thinkok the preeminenti] Political Press in the country already had axd similar series the president s to which i hadt contributed ae1 volume on willi mckinley and Theodore Roosevelt. They agreed readily with the co idea that wefa create the moder first lady series. We decided we would start with Edith Roosevelt and go through hillary clinton. We didnt get into thelpok 21st century because we wanted the books to be based on primary sources and it is simply c unlikely in my lifetime that we will be able to look at the records of laura bush and mrs. Obama. W3lp thats probably 15 or 20 years in the future and i will be otherwise occupied by that time. By the spring of 2011 we had 16d volumes that appeared covering helen taft to hillary clinton. I had contributed two of them. The others had been written by a variety of scholars who fa graciously and kindly and for the royalties decided to write the book. Ut book. They were grateful anyway. Qe1 so the question then became, how to handleq Edith Roosevelt . She was the first lady as you know from 1901 to 1909, and she was important. The problt uas an a÷ absence of other authors willing to step forward and help out. Xdq u0 write a book, but that is often a process which will take five to seven years. You finvvhem. They go do the research. They write the book. Time passes. It was in the early 70s when this process began and the prospect of chasing an author and not finishing the process until i was almost 80 had little appeal. You find diminishing energy for tracking down authors after a while. Suggestions. co and a decade finding another author had very little appeal to me. So i opted to write about her myself. I thought i could get it done quicker. There is one well, there arer actuallyxu lished fa silvia morris, the wife of c 1981. Long and complext life. Edith roosevelt was born in 1861 tkpsweep of her life as the sof matriarch of the roosevelt clanf my task was different. co i conceived the first ladys r that people would read on a first lady. co call a doorstop book, but something is that would bring together what was known in aw3 convenient way so you could dip into that first lady and then learn more about her. So my task was to look at the ok seven and a hal uvqp s that Edith Roosevelt was in the white house. nini so i was going to have an to 1901, to t . 1901, four or five chapters on the periwdt whenq she was the first lady and then a concludini chapteri] t 1909 to hery1ok death in 1948. T xd it was a technological advantag because research in american newspapers has been transformedo in the last decade. xdok historians are learning this, but the public at large is not p aware of this. The internet now makes availabli the opportunity to do research in America Newspapers before 1922 anyway, in a way that was inconceivable to those of us who started out in the 1960s, because in those days it was on microfilm. They would hand you a reel, ando you had to put it on the trying to find the date you wanted. And nothing was indexed. Nothing. aart readinq and looking and hoping that you would find something. ni now, with chronicling america, bless you library of congress, and with americas historical newspapers, another available oi website, all you have to do is r specify the dates, specify the i newspaper, specify the name. nrnr click, and you can have 400tn 500 entries pop up with it xd nicely telling you with that little read information where the story is. Qq3w so at home, sometimes in your pajamas, you can sit there and d print out stuff 9b would have taken you eight months if you could have h found it in the first place. n specific articles about edith ni think what would happen to cnn under those circumstances. She had been a dignified and sophisticated matron of the white house. Moreover, she was a wise adviser to Theodore Roosevelt. He tended to be impetuous and she was calmer and had a skepticism about some of the men around him. When he ignored her counsel, the consensus ran, he faltered. When he followed her advice he did well. So she raised six children, 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 the first ladies who followed her. She was the sort of the ortext and everybody else was a variant on that. She sponsored frequent musical events that included such artists as Pablo Casales and paderewski and others setting the stage for similar cultural events throughout the 20th century. She also introduced bureaucracy into the white house and the role of the first lady by hiring the first social secretary, Isabelle Belle haggler, who became kind of a surrogate parent to some of the roosevelt children and foreshadowed the apparatus that surrounds the first lady. Think of it as a little presidency within the white house that takes the first lady 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 theres no record 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. But they both loved horseback riding. She was an accomplished horse woman, and although she would tell him what some of the senators or ambassadors had told her to tell him to get the word about potential problems. 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. So she understood about money. T. R. Had no head for money. She would give him 25 each day to head into new york, and when he got back, he couldnt explain where hed spent the money. Now 25 may not seem like much, but remember inflation. To accomplish a similar effect today, youd 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 kick out of cutting trees down. It was one of his great recreations at sagamore hill. Unfortunately by the time he was no longer president , his hand eye coordination had gone into the dumpster and he often injured himself in the course of cutting these trees down. And so he would come back, sometimes 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 fact, in 1920, and i found this this is not in the book because i found it later she told her daughterinlaw, Kermit Roosevelts wife, 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 she was mean as a snake. But, you know, what did that necessarily mean . And that living with t. R. Was not always easy. These elements did not yet warrant a negative interpretation of Edith Roosevelt. And i was, it was clear that she deserved Great Respect from history. So 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 had collected a fair amount of material on mrs. Roosevelt from just doing research in that period. And working on such things as the president ial election of 1912. Now any researcher will tell you, look at the stuff you have first before you venture off into new material. So i did that. And this brings me to a gentleman named Warrington Dawson, about whom youve probably never heard. His papers i encountered in 1976. My wife was a medievalist and she went to a summer seminar at duke in the summer of 1976, and as a good husband, i went along. Alas, there were no basketball games at Cameron Indoor arena in the summer. I dont even think coach k. Was even coach in those days. And there wasnt much else to do in durham, so i turned to the duke Rare Books Library and said what you got on Theodore Roosevelt . And they responded that they had the papers of a man named Warrington 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 in 1909. Youll recall that after turning over the reins of government to William Howard taft in 1909, roosevelt and his son kermit went off to africa on a hunting expedition for the smithsonian institution. Their goal was to hunt big game and collect specimens for the smithsonian. Financiers on wall street who disliked roosevelt said that the hope was that a lion would do its duty. Roosevelt also got into animal stories as well. He once was having dinner with some friends and a member of congress, and he said to a member of congress that there was nothing wrong with congress that turning a maneating tiger loose on the floor of the congress couldnt cure. The somewhat chastened congressman said, but mr. President , dont you think they might make a mistake . The animal might make a mistake . And roosevelt said not if he stayed there long enough. Now, roosevelt was a huge celebrity. Think kardashians geometrically squared and you get a sense of roosevelt in 1909. He was the most famous man in the world by every measure. And the working press followed him to africa. If the lion did its duty, they wanted to be there, and they also wanted to report on every aspect of his life. Now roosevelt was very good at courting the press, but now he was no longer president , and he didnt want the press around. So he needed an intermediary to keep the press at arms length. And he decided that Warrington Dawson was just the fellow, a stringer in paris who made his money turning in stories for newspapers. And 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 he Theodore Roosevelt, jr. , at the library of congress that eventually dawson would be put on the payroll of the family and they were sending him 50, 60, 70 a month in the 20s and 30s just as an ancillary benefit of what he had done before. 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. In the volume, dawson praised the ku klux klan for redeeming the south from the rule of africanamericans and he criticized black politicians for corruption during the 1860s and 70s. This was fairly standard historical stuff at the turn of the century at a time when that period of American History was in disrepute. By the 1960s as many of you know, that whole interpretation would be swept away, and we would have a newer, more favorable interpretation of reconstruction and there were only a few isolated enclaves of American Life that now retained the older view, one of these being the supreme court. Four years after the book came out, in 1916, theodore and edith decided to get away from the cold weather of sagamore hill and 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 of 1916. Since carnival cruises had not yet been founded they could make the trip in relative safety. 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 gianna, that provided me with the first clue there was another complex Edith Roosevelt. I had taken up this letter in 1976 or 1980. I frankly now forget. But i had not really 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, end of quotation. Now, historians will tell you most of the research we do is drudgery. Most of the time we are looking at a lot of letters and a lot of documents and 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. You know, when i looked at it at 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 that i had 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. Of course one letter by itself could not provide conclusive evidence. But, as Henry David Thoreau said about circumstantial evidence, sometimes its important when you find a trout in the milk. So i needed to look for 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 day, 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 in 1902 and 1903. Leechs specialty were songs in black dialect, which were called coon songs in those days. And on each of these two occasions she rendered a tune with a title heres what i warned you about. Just a little still youre mine all mine written by paul dresser, the brother of the novelist Theodore Dreiser and the composer of the mega hit of that day, moonlight on the wabash, which is the indiana state song, as many of you know. The song was a lullaby. Of a black mother to her child with lyrics that ran as follows. There aint no use of crying now so go to sleep. There aint no use of fussing, babies mussent weep. We aint got all the comforts like the white folks rich and fine youre just a little still youre mine all mine. Now, this was not going to threaten Johnny Mercer or lorenz hart as lyric writing, but it 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 this was another evidence in so this was another evidence in a certain direction. Now, 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 send son, Kermit Roosevelt. He was in his teens during the presidency, and she wrote him several letters a week when he was attending the gratin school, a place 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 were one deterrent, but she wrote him as a faithful correspondent, she wrote him two letters a week usually and 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 thus she made a point of asking him about what was going on. Kermit was a free spirit, who hated gratin school, as i said, and his mothers letters sustained him through a bad patch. These documents are available in this city, in boxes 9 and 10 of the Kermit Roosevelt papers at the library of congress. A dear friend, a scholar named christie miller, who is happily with us today, photocopied for me hundreds of pages, and if you figure hes at school for eight or nine months and shes writing him two letters a week you get to several hundred letters over five or six years. Happily, they were four page, 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 on one trip. And encountering an old old on another. Now, white americans spoke this way about black americans at the turn of the century. In fact, Woodrow Wilson told 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 1908 the roosevelts entertained at the white house a prominent british diplomat named james renell rodd. 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, a man named mortimer durant, and t. R. Didnt get along. And t. R. Said to the British Government youve got to take me 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 was 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 described someone with alleged black ancestors. Ive subsequently learned that mrs. Rodd, whose full name was georgina lyless guthrie renell rodd, 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 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 a 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 globe trot 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 kind of a 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 to kermit discussions of what she had seen as they traveled to panama. And she said, we landed on thursday morning at cologne and were taken across the isthmus on cars stopping at stations 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 negros 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 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 can 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 stacy cordry 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 a sunday school class for africanamerican children at an Episcopal Church near the white house. This was not something that upperclass young ladies in washington did in 1908, in the year that she was to be presented to society. That was Ethel 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 their other plans for the morning. Ethel has gone off to her little 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. I turned the page up, down, you know, what else could it be. No other context than the obvious one seemed credible. With that sentence, i concluded that 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. Now, at that point you may say, so what . So what . White upperclass women talked 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 policy maker. That conclusion, it seemed to me as i thought about it, and i thought about it a lot, was misguided. Much attention has 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, t. R. Fell well short of these lofty selfimposed expectations. What has not been explored, and you will look in vain in the literature about t. R. 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 t. R. s 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 that 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 defend themselves. They were just out. Roosevelt simply dismissed them from the service peremptorily. 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 see 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 punishments 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 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 t. R. 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. Edwin morris has written three extended volumes on t. R. s 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 there is nothing new to be said about a charismatic president who wrote more than 100,000 letters during his lifetime. In fact, yours truly published the 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 ediths correspondence with her son and thus, 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 expend what the germans call sitzfleisch in sitting and reading all these letters. Okay. Yet, as i hope i have demonstrated, the moment when a historian thinks that the subject or a 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 question, do we have to know all those facts . They think historians have rooms full of facts where 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 upon the interpretations we place on 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 regressive racial views. The facts about Edith Roosevelt racial views. The facts of edeth s roovelt now changed to accommodate a new reality. Her racial opinions common in 1916 now seemed objectionable and to some seemed repulsive. The way we see a fact changes the meaning and 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 that if you press the fabric of history at any specific point it will reveal how fragmentary and tentative our understanding and knowledge of the past really is. I submit that this case study of edethroosevelt tmz scores one of the great historians of the 20th century. There are many ways in the which the picture of edeth roosevelt as a paragon of first ladies represented the genuine historical struth. She was not a monster and the contributions made to 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 of my profession pursue these issues with an enduring fascination. Thank you very much. [ applause ] ive been told by the 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 john cooper. Okay. Well, we do have john cooper the distinguished and for me the preeminent briographer of Woodrow Wilson is at the microphone. Christy miller is here, that partner in that wonderful cspan program about the two mrs. Wilsons and joanna stern, the granddaughter of Alice Roosevelt is also with us today. So we have a distinguished cast. John . Just a couple of questions. One strictly factual. I take it edeth was there at the dinner with booker t. Washington. Yes. Did they ever entertain another africanamerican as a guest after that in the white house . No. Thats what i thought. The second thing is and im curious, how much do you think she was influencing him on race and how much do you think they may have been reinforcing each other . Its interesting. Theres a cup of things i didnt quote. Im going to start out to try to edit the correspondence 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 saying i have people coming this evening and were going to have so 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 in his own head and there were influences. You mentioned also you brought brownsville into it which i do think is extremely important. To me what 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 when i said tr is the great preacher of moral virtue and one he held highest was courage. I swear when it comes to race i dont think he gets very good marks on that one. Well, he said i think president mckinley had the backbone of a chocolate eclair, unfairly, but i think you could turn the words around on him when it came to racial issue. Thats why i always thought the comparison with lincoln was farcical. T. R. 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. Anybody else . Okay, thank you all. Folks, there is a book signing up stairs in the new Archives Book stor. Well see up there in just a couple of minutes. We go live now to capitol hill for a hearing on coronavirus and plans to reopen the u. S. Economy. Well hear testimony from White House Task force members anthony fauci, robert redfield, and steven han. [. Q the committee on health, education, labor and pensions will please come to order. First, some administrative matters based on the advice of the attending physician and the se