Teddy and Alice Historical Talk #1 - Theodore Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth

All right. So, do we want to go ahead and get started? All right. Fantastic. Well, thank you all for being here today, both those of you who are here here in person and those who are online and even those who are going to be watching this recording later. Uh, much appreciated. Um, I think all of you probably know me, but if you don't, I am Dr. William Hansard. I am a historian in Theodore Roosevelt Center here at DSU. uh pleased to be with you today for the first in a series of three sort of little historical chats uh related to the DSU summer production of the 1987 musical Teddy and Alice. Um the three chats are going to be essentially about the characters in the show and what they were like. Um so today we're going to devote it just to the the two title characters to Theodore Roosevelt and his daughter Alice. We're going to give you just the briefest of biographical sketches of them as well as a little bit about their mannerisms, their personality. And this is particularly to help the actors who are going to be portraying these characters. And we're going to do this for as many of the characters I as I can possibly fit into these three talks. So with that, let's get started with the first title character, Theodore Roosevelt, who did not like to be called Teddy, but we will uh talk about that in just a moment. And let's begin with Theodore Roosevelt himself. Um, Theodore Roosevelt is born in New York in 1858 uh into a fairly wealthy family. His father is a old Dutch stock. He's from a merchant family. His mother, Midi, is from the southern plantation class originally. Um, they're a pretty wellto-do family. He is a sickly child, sick with asthma in particular, but he's extremely curious and intellectual. He devours as many books as he can get his hands on. Um, and he uh he uh especially in his father's library, he will sort of devour those books. He will also collect flora and fauna specimens for what he calls the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History uh that he and his cousins will will build together um in in their their home there in New York. Um as a teenager he will receive a mandate from his father that he needs to make his body his mind is strong but his body is not strong enough. Uh and so he'll take up a serious exercise regimen to help him beat his asthma in particular. Um and uh once he takes up studies at Harvard, uh later on he will uh do boxing, he will do rowing, all kinds of athletics to help continue making his body as well as his mind through his studies at Harvard where he's studying natural science essentially to become a scientist, a naturalist for most of that career until he pivots to politics and law and things uh toward the end of of that time at Harvard. Um now uh in 1878 while he's there his father will die uh fairly suddenly of a gastrointestinal tumor a stomach tumor at age 46. Uh his father was his hero. This will send him into a pretty deep depression. But he will ultimately resolve to work even harder to make his mind and body uh in his father's name. And of course he literally is named after his father. He is in fact the Roosevelt Jr. Um, while he's at Harvard, he's also going to fall in love with a socialite, Alice Hathaway Lee, who was from a wealthy Boston banking family. Um, and uh, he will soon marry her afterwarding her for for a little while. Um, and he's going to begin his political career at the same time, becoming the youngest member of the New York State Assembly, their state legislature. Um, and so, uh, tragedy will strike him again in February of 1884, Valentine's Day 1884. His wife and his mother will die on the same day in the same house, uh, within just a few hours of each other. Um, his wife will die of undiagnosed kidney disease that had been masked by the pregnancy just two days after giving birth to their first daughter, also called Alice. his mother uh will die of typhoid fever which was a fairly common disease in the days before uh you know sewage treatment sewage sanmentation. Um and so he will then sort of escape out here to uh the Dakota territory. Uh he will spend time on and off for several years as a rancher here in Dakota and uh not just you know an investor but actually on the ranch himself uh rounding up cattle, branding cattle uh uh so on and so forth. he really throws himself into that work, although he's also still involved in New York politics at the same time. But he will leave his uh infant daughter in care of his sister uh Vami, who will raise the uh the little girl for the first couple of years while he is involved in other pursuits. Um in part because even seeing his infant daughter is painful reminder of the memory of his young wife. Um now there's a terrible winter in 1886 1887 that will wipe out uh anywhere from half to twothirds of all of the cattle in the great plains. Um Roosevelt will give up ranching after this. Although he also will give up ranching because he has remarried uh his childhood sweetheart etho um sort of his first love with whom he had split just before going to Harvard. And so with the combination of being remarried and the losing his cattle, he will throw himself back into full on into public political life. Um he will rise like a rocket as he puts it uh through his political life in part thanks to the influence of his friend Dr. Henry Kavat Lodge, a Republican senator from Massachusetts who we will talk about in uh the third of these chats in this series. Um but Lodge will sort of help lobby to get him positions. Um, and so he will serve as a United States Civil Service Commissioner, president of the New York City Board Police Commissioners, the assistant secretary of the Navy, of course, famously, very briefly, as a cavalry officer, uh, the volunteer cavalry, uh, known as the Rough Riders that he forms. Um, he will, uh, then go on to be the 33rd governor of the state of New York, vice president, and finally president of the United States. Um, and throughout all these things, Roosevelt will come to advocate for what he calls the strenuous life, a life of decisive and continuous action. Uh, while he's campaigning for New York governor in 1900, he will say, "Let us run the risk of wearing out rather than rusting out." And this is a philosophy that he keeps throughout his entire life. So, uh, Roosevelt had been made vice president to neuter him politically. at this time, vice president is a dead-end job with very little power. It's not really a pathway into the presidency or to other things like it would later become. Um, and so his uh adversaries in New York politics who don't like how you reform-minded he is and how sort of a a razor he is will put him into the vice presidency. But then President William McKinley is tragically assassinated. Absolutely beloved, popular, successful president. um and Roosevelt has to come into that office and fill his shoes which uh in some ways he's very ready to do. In other ways he finds uh uh somewhat intimidating but he certainly ends up being the man for the job. Um now Roosevelt leaves an extremely strong executive power essentially that uh he's accountable only to the people and that anything that was not expressly forbidden by the constitution uh the president should and could do. Um he's often called the first modern president for this expansion of of the role in both the chief executive forms and the chief citizen in chief forms. He is somebody who is a very popular person and models himself on how he believes the American citizen should be. Um his policy of the square deal you've probably heard of, right? This is sort of a a nebulous idea that that encompasses his belief in fairness for all Americans from the biggest businessman down to the the lowliest uh you know mine worker or something like that. Um this is often narrowed down into the three C's. Uh corporate regulation, consumer protection and conservation of natural resources are the biggest and most important policies you will pursue. Uh at least domestically. Uh foreign policy you have the big stick, right? speak softly and carry a big stick. Um the idea being that one should show strength but only use it if absolutely necessary. Um in some other ways you might think of it as the carrot and then the big stick. Um now it would take you know hours just to talk about his presidency in general but just a few of the most important things that happened. He will mediate the anthraite poll strike in 1902. He's the first president to have the federal government act as a neutral arbitrator in a labor dispute. Um he will uh establish five national parks, 18 national monuments, 51 federal bird reservations, uh four national game reserves, and 115 national forests, uh totaling about 230 million acres of public land. Um and all of those things except for the national parks were things that were created by his administration. National parks did in fact already exist. Um but he expands the public land system to be so many other kinds of things. Um he will gain control of the Panama Canal zone and take over the failed French project in 1903. Uh he'll become the first president to travel abroad when he visits the Panama Canal zone in 1906 to see oversee the construction project. Um in 1903 he will also intervene in a debt crisis in Venezuela where other countries are coming in trying to get them to pay their debts. um 1904 he will declare what is kn known now as the Roosevelt correlary to the Monroe doctrine basically saying that anything that happens in the United States hemisphere in the western hemisphere belongs to the United States to deal with it um he will mediate peace in the Russo-Japanese war earning the Nobel Peace Prize. He is the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Uh he will sign the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 which is a predecessor to the modern FTA. uh he will begin enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act and he will uh enforce laws he will bring lawsuits against uh monopolies most famously Standard Oil in 1906. Um he will send a battlefield to the great white fleet to circumn the globe in 1907 to 1909. Uh he will deal with the panic of 1907, economic panic by enlisting private capital to engage in mergers and bailouts. Eventually, this will lead to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 after he is passed. And many of these things he actually does by executive order from this bully pulpit as he calls it. He will sign almost as many executive orders as every president before him combined. Uh he signs about just I think it's 1,081 executive orders. All the presidents before him combined is about 1,200. >> So he ruled very much uh with that big stick. that become the norm after that finish? >> No, actually, I mean, others following him will issue more than they might have otherwise, but really it this explosion is not normal until his fifth cousin Franklin comes on the scene who issues well over 3,000 executive orders, mostly to get those New Deal programs there. Um, and we'll talk, of course, a little bit about Franklin actually in the second in this series of talks when we talk about the extended Roosevelt family. Um, following his presidency, Roosevelt will maintain an active political life, including an ill- fated run to recapture the office of the presidency in 1912, which will see him nearly struck dead by an assassin's bullet, or would be assassin bullet. Uh he will undertake scientific expeditions in Africa, hunting the specimens that are needed to open the national museums of of natural history at the Smithsonian. Uh expedition in South America, descending a previously unmapped river in the Amazon jungle. And then finally, Roosevelt will die in his sleep in 1919 at the age of 60. Death had to take him sleeping, Vice President Thomas Marshall said, or if he had been awake, there would have been a fight. So That is the briefest of biographies of Roosevelt. Let's talk a little bit about his personality. So, in public, Roosevelt was known as an exuberant personality. He's larger than life, but very strongly expressed emotions. Um, and he was especially animated when delivering a public speech. He would shout and shake his fists. He would lean over railings and podiums. Uh, and he would make this chopping gesture, raising one hand high above his head and clapping it into the other. Um, and I will actually play you a little bit of a clip of him doing that very motion in this uh clip from his Fourth of July speech in 1903. You can see here he sort of slaps one hand into the other. Sometimes it's a closed fist, sometimes it's open, sometimes it's a little bit of a karate motion, but he will do this in just about every speech he ever gives almost his entire life. We've got tons of video and and um um uh pictures of you making this gesture. So, uh Ben, if you're watching, that gesture is one I would like to see myself. I'm not the director, but uh it's certainly one that would give it some reality. Um and speaking of that, uh his voice, so his voice is very different than many people often expect to be. Um it's of a a higher sort of tamber and people remark that he actually seems to bite his words in half. Um even when he says I as in I think this or I believe that he says it almost with two syllables. He says I believe or I think that um a iie e i. And with that I'm actually going to give you a brief recording of his voice made in 1912 following his presidency. The great fundamental issue now before our people can be taken. It is are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control them. I believe they are. My opponents do not. I believe in the right of the people to rule. I believe that the majority of the plain people of the United States will day in and day out make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller class or body of men no matter what their training will make in trying to govern. >> So you can see he's got this sort of high and tight almost in his throat voice. I believe that the people, you know, and so on and so forth, and you can hear, and especially if you look at that picture of him with his teeth, right, you can almost see him fighting words in half as he speaks. Um, uh, he was known for a very overenergetic zeal, really an aggression in all things that he did. Um, naturalist John Burroughs remembered after Roosevelt's death that Roosevelt was a manysided man and every side was like an electric battery. Um, I felt his clothes might not contain him. He was so steamed up, so ready to go to attack anything anywhere, Mukraer Idel once said of him. Um, he was also known for his infectious smile and laughed at the occasional witty remark, especially when delivering an insult, even a friendly one. Um, he had a childlike sense of wonder and a joy of life. Um, one of his closest friends, the British diplomat Sir Cecil Spring Rice said, uh, you must always remember that the president is about six. Uh, in this show, actually, William Howard Tap, the the character gets to deliver that. So, I'm glad that I will get to deliver that line because he spring rides a character in the show, but the authors made a good choice, I think, to use that particular quotation. Um, a New York Times reporter who spent a week with him said, "He laughs like an irresponsible school boy on alert. His face blushing ruddy, his eyes nearly closed, his utterance choked with merment, his speech abandoned for a weird false." So he had this very loud voice, energetic, infectious laugh. Now in private, Roosevelt was sometimes quieter and more contemplative, uh, sweet and affectionate. Sweet is a word you hear from people over and over about him. Even Woodro Wilson uses this word to describe them and they famously don't always get along. Um uh he uh he listened more than he spoke, absorbing thoughts and feelings of others. He was intellectual, curious, even hungry to absorb more knowledge, but still he got especially excited whether in a happy way or an upset way. He had a tendency to talk quickly and to interrupt uh interjecting and interrupting to make his own feel his uh now he did interestingly hate to be called Teddy at least by you know people in person one-on-one. The public was a little different. He didn't object to that so much. We don't know for sure why people he didn't want you know friends relatives to call him Teddy. There are two reasons that scholars sort of have settled on. One is because it's the name Alice sometimes used for him as first wife Alice not daughter Alice. um and uh because it sounded more like a boy's name than a man's name and as a boy he'd been known as T. Um now he never comes right out and says what the reasons are but he does come out and say I do not want to be called that. Okay, so let's move on to Alice. Now Alice was born on February 12, 1884. Uh her mother also called Alice as we said had died two days uh later of an undiagnosed kidney disease. uh her father will give her over to his older sister uh Bammy Roosevelt, also known as uh Auntie Bi uh because of her on the-go energy. It was high Bammy by Bambi. Um so they called her Auntie Bi. Um and he he gives Alice to be raised by Bi while he built his career as a politician and a rancher in 1886. When he remarries, he will take back care of her in part because Edith believes it's the right thing to do. Um Alice is a voracious reader like her father from an early age. She had a hunger for knowledge and especially enjoys poetry and literature. Um just like her stepmother actually. Um she in fact will beg her father to let me loose in your library and she will be the only one of the children who actually receive full unrestricted access to her father's library. Um now much has been said of of her time of course with the family in the White House. She will delight in bucking the period social norms that are expected both of women and of teenagers. Uh she calls this eating up the world. Uh just enjoy life. Uh she will smoke cigarettes in public. She will drive automobiles and more than once be ticketed for speeding. Or worse, she will uh ride in a male's automobile unshaper. >> She will gamble at poker, at racetracks, and other sporting events and brag about her winnings. Uh, she will carry around a pet green barter snake called Emily spinach. So named because it was green like spinach and as slender has her aunt Emily who she uh famously did not like. Um, and the examples like this are too many to count. They go on and on. But most importantly, the thing that's important to understand about this, these things were actually mostly socially pretty mild. They weren't like super extreme taboos. They were just almost playful in a way, right? They they certainly broke rules. Um, but they didn't estrange her from society in any way. And her parents could even trust her to act as an unofficial ambassador. So, this is not something that absolutely was just, you know, unbelievably scandalous. It was just overly scandalous. Um, so following her coming out party, uh, soon after the new year in 1902, Alice will become a nationwide celebrity known as Princess Alice. Uh, she's the closest thing to American royalty. Uh, she's truly a sensation. People will copy the Alice blue gown, they call it, from her coming out party. Uh they will even try to copy her habits, her demeanor as they're reported. They will write songs about her and her gown. There will be all kinds of merchandise. She really is incredibly uh popular. Um and in 1902, she's going to become an international celebrity uh not again not long after her coming out party when she will christen a ship belonging to the German emperor, a yacht actually. Um this is gesture a friendship between the two nations who are somewhat tense competition at this time especially in Latin America. So this is a really important uh goodwill gesture. Whoops. There we go. Sorry about that. Um in 1905 when she's just 21, she sent on a tour of East Asia as a goodwill ambassador for the United States, leading dozens of congressmen and other public officials. Uh the largest diplomatic delegation ever by the US to East Asia. um they go to Japan, China, Korea, Philippines, and Hawaii. Um the president was especially interested in improving relations uh getting more information from Japan as he was trying to negotiate peace in their war with Russia. Um and so Alice arrives in Tokyo and she is beloved again being the closest thing to American loyalty. This is this is amazing for her u and for the people of Japan. Um in China, anti-American sentiment was a little bit high this particular time. Uh there was actually an ongoing boycott of American products. Um but she manages to charm the upper sour uh of China who will gift her a peanut dog which she names Manchu. Um but still even on this trip where decorum was you know really important she will for just enough controversy she's going to jump into the ship swimming pool completely closed um and encourage even another senator to to jump in with her because she's having so much fun. But again no this is this is scandalous but not so much that it's you know going to ruin her reputation or her father's reputation. So in 1906, Alice will marry Senator Nicholas Longworth. He is one of the the people who was on this trip to Asia, although they had already been sort of courting even before that trip to Asia. Um he's a Republican senator of Ohio. William Howard Taft is actually in his congressional district. Um now their relationship is rocky due to Nick's alcoholism and infidelity by both parties. Um, but it actually is made worse due to a political divide. Uh, in the 1912 election, Nick will refuse to leave the Republican party to join Theodore Roosevelt's bull moose or progressive party. Um, and Alice cannot forgive this, you know, unloyalty to the family, disloyalty to the family. Um, she will have a prolonged affair with Senator Bill Bora, the lion of Idaho as he was called, with whom she will have her only child, Paulina, born in 1925. Uh Nick was likely aware that the child was not his butted on her anyway. She was she was beloved by her parents, her grandparents and so on. Well, one grandparent TR of course was gone. >> I didn't know Alice did that. >> Yeah. And and a lot of the public was pretty well aware that that that was Bill Bor's child as well. There were people who called Paulina Aurora Bora Alice. >> Oh my. Um, and so, uh, uh, and even Alice joked that, uh, she wanted to name the child Deborah, as in Deb Borum, >> or Senator Bora. So, it was somewhat of an open secret, although it was never truly confirmed until the early 2000s when her diaries and things were were made open for research. So uh following the death of her father in 1919, Alice will take on a central role in social and political life in Washington DC to the point that she becomes known as the other Washington Monument. Um her salon is the place where politicians and public servants of all stripes are going to go to work out the differences on the most pressing issues of the day. An invitation to her parties was sort of the best in that someone could have in Washington. and she specifically will choose the guests and like arrange their dinner seating and other sort of party arrangements to create interesting discussion or better yet argues. Uh she will put Republicans and Democrats who are you next to each other, people who have, you know, different opinions on war next to each other, so on and so forth. And she does this not just because it's entertaining, because she truly believes that it's essential to democracy. Alice is someone who uh could have in some ways maybe should have run for office but did not want to for for multiple reasons but she was a politician in her own way and very much cared about making sure that American democracy was um now politics is going to cause a further rift in the family when cousin Franklin runs for president in 1932. Um she will say of Franklin politically his branch of the family and ours have always been in different camps and the same surname is about all we have in common. Um she had been good friends with uh Elellanar uh as as a child and and when they were teenagers as well. Uh they were fairly close in age. Uh but that's certainly no longer going to be true in the 30s. They're going to take shock from each other proposing newspaper columns and speaking tours. Um one book describes them as being seen by the public as the witches of Oz with Elellanar as the good witch and Alice as the bad witch, the troublemaker. Um, like her father, she's going to become an author, writing an autobiography in 1933. Uh, and in 1937, uh, with her brother Ted, she edits a collection of poetry called the Desk Store Anthology. Uh, and this consists of like, uh, user submissions, American public submissions that literally things that they pull out of like desk drawers or scrapbooks or other, you know, places tucked away in their homes. So, she and her brother edit this collection of of curated poetry. Um, she will die in 1980 at the age of 96. Um, President Jimmy Carter will say she had style, she had grace, and she had a sense of humor that kept generations of political newcomers to Washington wondering which was worse, to be skewered by her wit or to be ignored. So, let's talk a little about her person. Um, she will speak rapidly and often in incomplete sentences. Uh she's just got these talks moving all the time that she's trying to get out. Um she had a very slight sort of transatlantic type accent similar to Elanor Roosevelt. Um unfortunately we don't have any real uh film footage or or audio clips from the time she's young and the time she's in the White House. Um but uh if you would like to see or hear uh uh recordings of her, uh be sure to let me know and and we can find some things for you. Um, uh, in the 1960s, uh, in in again her older age, uh, one 19-year-old observer will say, "Mrs. Longworth has this fantastic imagination. She keeps her mind loose. She listens and follows your associations. The conversation doesn't move in a straight line. You take these giant steps. She's cool, almost like someone flipping out on drugs." So, I was speaking earlier today to um Dr. Stacy Cordery, who wrote sort of the book on Alice. If you want to learn about her, uh, uh, quarterly biography is the one, uh, to to read. Uh, and Stacy said that, um, Alice was the master of the arched eyebrow and the curled lip. So, she always had this sort of mischievous uh, look about her. Um, many people describe her as very provocative uh, and very sort of sexy. She did these dances and things that uh, you know, not just anywhere, everywhere, but when she was at parties, things like that. And she did this very much on purpose. She knew uh when to be provocative. Um and she's hyper aware of the public gaze. She loves to be the center of attention uh anything ongoing. Although interestingly, many people who know her actually say that a lot of the time she's very shy. Um and if she that like a big party where she's not the center of attention, she doesn't know what to do with herself. Uh and in fact she is something like a shriveled balloon. uh I believe her granddaughter uh described her as and gets filled up when she's the center of attention but becomes shy otherwise. Um like her father, she's known to take great joy in life and that sense of joy is infectious. She's always, you know, if she doesn't have her her arched eyebrow at you, she has a smile on her face. Um but she does keep this sort of a cervvic width to the very end that in her in her later years she's got this needle point pillow on her couch that she absolutely adores. And on this pivot pillow, it says, "If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me." So, that really kind of sums up uh what her personality was like. Let's talk a little bit about the relationship then between these two uh uh very dynamic people. Um I would describe it as tender but trouble. Um Theodore Roosevelt loves his daughter dearly. She loves him. Alice will refer to the Roosevelt family loyalty as tribal. Um, but their relationship is going to get colored by the commentary of her stepmother, Edith. Their relationship is much much rockier uh for all kinds of reasons. We may talk about that a little next time. Um, but Alice never knowing her mother and getting limited attention from her very busy father, feeling somewhat abandoned and drift will go to great lengths to earn and keep her father's attention as well as the attention of everyone around her. She will so frequently burst uninvited to her father's office that he once threatened, hopefully probably in a playful way, knowing him, to throw her out the window. Um, and of course, most most famously, um, Owen Wister, a famous author of the time, who's very close friend with Roosevelt, uh, once had Roosevelt say to him, "I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both." Uh, so he found an exact brain to keep up with her. Um, sometimes she doesn't feel very loved, especially compared to her step siblings. She feels like something of a black sheep um of her relationship with her father. She once writes in her diary, "We are not in the least congenial. Why should he pay any attention to me or the things that I live for except to look upon them with disapproval? Of course, he loved me in a way because I'm one of his children. I certainly do love him with all the love that I am so far capable of." Now, this is obviously a time when she was feeling most down. I don't think she felt this way all the time. I don't think TR behaved that way all the time, but they had a lot of ups and downs. Um, they're still in many ways, they're both highly intelligent, very outspoken people, and in some ways they're sort of caricatures of themselves, right? When they're in public, they're on stage. They're playing characters. They're playing the thing that they know people expect them to be. Um, and Alice very much sees this, you know, in her typical Alice way. She describes her father as wanting to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christristening. Uh, but to some extent, she is also this one. Um, and part of the sort of rockiness, the troubling part of this relationship is because Alice does serve as a painful memory of her mother to TR. Um, Ti finds this so painful that soon after he's born, he or she is born, excuse me. He tells his close friend, "How am I not?" Uh, I shall call her Lee, for there could never be another Alice to me, nor could I have another, not even her own child bear her name. And in fact, he does in letters and to others. He refers to her as baby Lee. Um, as she gets older, she will be called sister or both by the parents and by uh her step siblings. And even when she gets older and there are, you know, more children or grandchildren, cousins in the family, they will call her auntie sister um rather than Alice. Um and according to Alice, he never once mentioned her mother to her ever and forbid uh her being spoken about. Um whether or not this is completely true, this is something she says again in in her 90s. This the way she remembers it and that's what's important. whether we can absolutely prove whether he never once mentioned her name. Um but she ends up learning from her mother from other family members. So her stepmother tells her about who her mother was. Her aunts and so on will will tell her stories of what her mother was like. And so with that I will thank you. Uh if you've got you know anything that you need from me you can get a hold of me very easily. You can either email me or get in contact with me other ways. Uh, and with that, I will take any questions you may have. Th >> this is more of a comment. Sure. I'm excited to learn more about Edith and >> how she felt almost in the shadow always of Alex >> of Alice's memory. Yes, that was something that will come up. >> And then I also forgot that he she was his um childhood sweetheart each other from the time they were, you know, very very small. One of the first pictures we ever have of of TR. Um TR and his brother Elliott are sitting in a window in their grandfather's uh home and they're watching the Lincoln funeral procession go down the street uh in New York. Um Edith was also there, but she's not in the picture because she was crying too much. So Theodore and his brother locked her in the closet. She cry. >> Yeah. So, yes, we will absolutely talk about um um Edith's, you know, relationship to TR, to Alice, to the family, so on and so forth next time. >> So, she so described Frank and that they were so politically different or yeah, different, >> but she kind of bucked the I would consider it now in terms of conservative trends of the time. How did she view her herself in relation to Franklin's politics? >> So, that's a really interesting question, I think, because there's a reason Franklin calls his policies the New Deal, right? It's just a continuation of the square deal, more or less. Um, I think part of that is simply a party loyalty situation. um Democrat versus Republican is something that they they have issues with in that family, you know, going back further and going further forward. Um some of the New Deal policies certainly go further than the square deal policies did. Um and even the progressive party with the capital P 1912 progressives are more conservative than some of the things that Franklin and others do in the 1930s and Bush in the 1930s. So part of it's a matter of degrees, part of it is a matter of sort of just rivalry in general. There's a lot of sort of elements to that, but there in fact are a lot of ways that those things are not so different and there's more of a a spectrum than a total split. Um but also too, some of this is family animosity because uh Eleanor had um campaigned against um Ted when he's running for office. I forget what he's run I think believe he's running for governor. I'd have to double check that. Um, but there was an issue with teapot dome scandal and Elanor is out driving a car shaped like a teapot with steam coming out of it. It's a whole thing. So, there had been a long political rifle there. >> We wanted to read the happy quarter book. Do you know top of your head is it available locally either on campus in the library or the Dick Public Library nor we can access that? >> If nothing else, I know for sure that the TR center library has it. I would be shocked if Stockton Library did not have multiple copies. It's available online. It's available in any library just about um it came out I believe in 2007. So you know um it's it's you know recentish. Um it should not be hard to get a hold of. If anyone is having difficulty finding it, come to me. I will make sure you can find it because that is the book to read about Alice. And also I can recommend um the the book if you want to read just one book about TR because there are a lot of them. Um, Theodore Roosevelt, A Strenuous Life by Kathleen Dalton as the best one volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt. Sort of covers his entire life. Um, and if you're interested in those or any books about any of the characters, uh, I have prepared a reading list that was meant for the cast and crew of the show, but I'm willing to share that reading list about all of the the people of this time period with anyone who would like to see it. All right. Well, I will let you all know that next time, next Wednesday, May 20th, we will talk about the Roosevelt family that you see pictured here. I was so thrilled that I've managed to get a picture of basically all all the main ones, even Nick, uh in picture. Um, so that's a pretty nice one. Um, so we will talk about all the people you see here. Uh, uh, TR, his second wife, Edith, his children, uh, son-in-law Nick Longworth, uh, Franklin and Elanor, and a whole bunch of other people. as many as I can possibly fit in the 45m minute time period that I've got a lot of doing. Um and then next time after that will be some of the other uh sort of associated characters, political colleagues and adversaries so on so forth. And if there are no more questions then I will uh gladly step off the stage. Thank you. >> Thank you William. Wonderful. Thank you. >> And I shall stop the recording, shall I? >> I hope you learned a lot then Julia. >> We love you. We miss you. >> I'm just really excited to see all the personalities and yeah, all of that come to life on stage. So fun.