Tales of Theodore Roosevelt - TR, Literary Fella

Welcome. This is the fifth episode in the series Tales of TR offered by the Theodore Roosevelt Institute at Long Island University. Today's talk focuses on Theodore Roosevelt and his passion for literature, books, and writing. We invite you to watch previous episodes of our speaker series by visiting our website at liu.edu slash Roosevelt. During the presentation, feel free to ask questions in the Q&A section or the chat box at the bottom of your screen. Now I would like to introduce my good friend and colleague, Tweed Roosevelt. Well, thank you, Rita. And good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the fifth in my series, Tales of TR. I'm Tweed Roosevelt, the professor at LIU and chair of the Theodore Roosevelt Institute at Long Island University. They are the people that are bringing you these talks. The other three sessions in this group of four, of which this is the first, will include one on TR and leadership, one on TR and conservation, and one on TR's family and his very interesting relatives. The first of these, which will be leadership, will be on January 19th. We'll have information up at our website shortly. That's liu.roosevelt.liu.edu. And you can also get the past talks there. So today, my session is titled TR Literary Fellow. And I'm hoping by the end of the session, you will see TR from a whole new perspective. I will be focusing on TR as a reader, as a writer, and a speechmaker. These first two started when he was very young. And he learned these skills then that sustained him all through his life. In spite of what you may have thought about TR, actually, he learned the vast bulk of his income from writing. And it's basically from his pen. And he grew up in a very wealthy family. And his inheritance was quite considerable. In fact, when he was at Harvard, his income from his inheritance exceeded that of the President Charles Elliott's income as president of Harvard, although I suspect Elliott had other money to live on as well. However, TR's income mostly evaporated because of a series of very bad business deals. And the most spectacular of these was what happened with his ranching effort out in North Dakota. And the result was devastating. He lost almost half of his inheritance in that. But on the other hand, he gained his experience there. And TR wouldn't have been TR if he hadn't been out there. So in sum, it was an excellent thing that happened to him. But the business side didn't work. Nobody ever thought TR was a good businessman, least of all his wife, Edith. And his uncle took care of his finances. His wife put him on a specific allowance to try to keep him away. Well, anyway, after that devastating loss, he had to find a way to live. And he decided he settled on earning his living as a writer. He called himself a literary fellow, which is where the title comes from. It started early and continued through his life. He had a phenomenal output. Over his lifetime, he wrote dozens of book introductions, thousands of articles, editorials, opinion pieces, and something like 150,000 letters, and then 40 books. And most of these earned him income, which by the end of his life was quite substantial. But nobody, I think, has ever come up with an accounting of how much money he made. But just to give you an idea, I'll tell you about a particular year towards the end of his life, he was commissioned to do two magazine articles, two series of magazine articles. There would be seven or eight articles of each, and buy a newspaper for a regular series of editorials, and then some short monthly columns for a magazine. And for these four contracts, he was paid in today's dollars $3.5 million. So it's pretty clear to see that by the end of his life, he wasn't hurting for money. Well, on the speech side, he, of course, made a huge number of them. Many of them recorded for posterity. Pretty much all his political speeches, there was always a reporter there taking it down. And the next day they were published, whatever his words were published across the country. Now, the first speech that I find a record of that he made was freshman year at Harvard. And it was kind of a stump speech for his good friend Robert Bacon, classmate, who was running for the exalted position of captain of the freshman crew. And, you know, over his life, as I say, most of his speeches were political in nature. They're not very interesting now, except to historians and to policy wants. But he made a number of what I call orations. And I'll mention some of them, maybe a dozen or two really memorable speeches. Now, as for reading, he called it an addiction. And he read an incredible amount of books. His reading speed was extraordinary. And over his life, it's estimated that he read some 20,000 books. And actually, I think that's an underestimate. It's hard to imagine TR being TR if he hadn't been such a voracious reader. Now, the subject I'm going to unveil to you today is enormous and way too much to cover in the limited time I have. Books have been written about this, and they don't even cover it all. So I'm going to have to take a minimalist approach. So try to paint in your mind something so you can gather an overall opinion of how he worked. And I'm going to start now trying to screen share. So here we go. Hopefully, this will work. There's the share. And here are my things, and you should have it. There we go. So the minimalist approach, there's a drawing by one of my colleagues, a professor at LLU, a great artist, named Dan Christoffel. And he drew this. I think it's one of what's instantly recognizable as TR. You don't need many lines to do that. In fact, Conan O'Brien once told me that he thought that TR was the original emoji, which I think is quite true, actually. So I'm going to examine TR in three different periods of his life, his young years, college to the presidency, and the post-presidency. So let's start with his early years. TR, as a very young boy, there he is, was interested in books. His father had a significant library. And TR, even before he could read and was basically a toddler still, used to take books down off the shelf. And they weren't just little books. Here's an example of one that his family records that he hauled around with him. This is Livingston's. It's a big book, Livingston's Travels in South Africa. And TR couldn't read it at this stage, but he loved the pictures. There's an example. And you can see why a young boy would like that. That's, I suppose, Livingston about to be devoured by a lion before he's rescued. In any case, he would tote this book around with him and ask adults to tell him the stories. Now, his mother taught him how to read. He never went to school. It's very briefly. He was taught home taught, homeschooled. Mother taught him to read. And he started reading the typical boy books that you would expect him to. Robin Hood there, and Matty Bumpo, and Ivanhoe. They read a whole bunch of those. My days. Well, anyway, he once said that he also read some girly books, too. Sort of interesting that he liked Secret Garden, for example. But very quickly, he discovered the natural world. And this was an author at the time who wrote these fictional accounts for boys. It's called the Boy Hunters. And they were, you know, rip-roaring tales. My day, there was the Hardy Boys. There's one of mine. Different kind of hunting. Well, when his father saw that he had an interest in the natural world, he started getting him, you know, real life books, books really about the natural world. Here's a guy named Reverend Woods, who was a popularizer of natural books, natural history books. And TR devoured those. And even was a little later in life was quite complete. He, for example, quite early on, read Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species, and of course was an evolutionist all his life. Now, the Roosevelt family really loved poetry. And TR's favorite poet, even quite young, was Edgar Allan Poe. I love this drawing with the raven over his left shoulder. And the Roosevelts had a sort of a family game they played all the time. They quoted poetry at each other. They went on and on. Somebody would start up quoting a poem, and somebody else would pick it up, and somebody else would pick it up. This went all the way down to my generation. Remember my grandparents, my parents doing this all the time. I was simply lousy at it. I didn't have that kind of memory. Anyway, so TR's writing started very young. Here's a collection of his diaries as a boy. His first entry in his diary was at age nine. And they were really quite whimsical and cute. There's an example of it. It says, my cousin Jimmy arrived today and brought me a crystal, I don't know what a crystal was, and some stones from Niagara Falls. We played, I love his spelling too, we played fort for the rest of the day. That kind of foreshadows the future, you know, the natural world and the pebbles from there, and also the adventure and so on. Well, one of the, that first story, let me tell you this, one of the first stories, the first entry he tells, it's really an essay, and he tells the story of a man telling him an adventure story that the man had with a bear. And TR loved bears all his life. This is a collection later in his life by a Forest Park Service guy of the writings of TR about bears, this whole book about the writings about bears. Now, he tended to write his diary, not every day, but either in the summer or during vacations. And here's an example of it. This, he was in Europe at the time, and he was keeping a record. This shows his meticulousness. This is five floor plans of hotel rooms that his family stayed in, in one of their trips through Europe. He was pretty assiduous about this. Now, a lot of his work was natural history. So this is some of his essay or diaries from his Egypt days. You can see they're quite good. This is meant for identification, not to be accurate. You can see an osprey-like bird there, several stages of it, and then things that are very identifiable. He actually could be quite a good artist. And here's a picture, a drawing that he did somewhat later in life. Now, when he was in Paris, he came across an insect. There it is. And his comment about this insect was, he says, I know they're in the United States, but they're very rare. Here in Paris, they're all over the place. He said, I don't know what the English name for it. By the way, he was starting to use Latin names here quite well. I don't know what the English name for it is, but in France, they call it the cigale or something. I don't know how to pronounce French, but something like that. Well, actually, he was wrong. This is a cicada. And as you probably know, they come in cycles, the 17-year cycle cicada. So they spend 16 years underground. And that's why he hadn't lived long enough to see these. But boy, when they come out, you know, they're there. They're all over the place, and they make it a tremendous racket. So no doubt, years later, he learned that he had been somewhat wrong. In his journal, he also kept statistics about his growth. His father had challenged him to build himself up. And here's one. This is his freshman year in college. And look at all the measurements he made. There were a number of these. And I thought he was kind of scrawny there. His height is 5'8", but he only weighed about 124 pounds. He called this his sporting calendar and talked about all sorts of things. He also wrote a number of essays about—one, for example, was called—a notebook was called My Expeditions and Adventures, which foreshadowed his future life. He also—this was perhaps the only time, I think, that he made a venture, an effort to write fiction. And he was very young at the time. He wrote something called The War of the Woods, which was a lurid description of the Sioux Indians and the whites battling each other. But I guess that turned out to be pretty much a dead end, because as far as I know, he didn't write any other fiction, or so it was very little of it. So then he goes to Harvard. There's Harvard University Hall. And his writing there continued. One of the organizations at Harvard he joined was the Harvard Advocate. And this was his first effort at writing editorials. And he wrote a number of editorials for them. There's the group of people who were on the board then. Here's—can you see this here? Here's T.R. I love his mutton chops. And there's a guy with a beard, and there's one other guy with mutton chops here somewhere. And so anyway, he was writing editorials for this and other things at Harvard. And then in senior year—here, look at his mutton chops have grown significantly. So have some of the others. In senior year, as his senior thesis, he wrote about the naval history of the War of 1812—naval history of the War of 1812. And after college, he published this as a book. It was his first book. It came out to great critical reviews, and the Navy loved it so much that they bought a bunch of copies to put on the various ships. And the Brits were impressed, too, even though they were on the other side of the war. And when they wrote their—created their great naval history, which went on to many volumes, they asked T.R. to write the part about this war in that. So that was his first works. So now, from college, through the presidency, let's start again with his writings. This is when he became a popular writer. And this is where he was earning his money. He was a journeyman writer. He wrote about 10 history books, three of them biographies. And here are the three biographies of them. One of Thomas Hart Benton on the top left, and Gouverneur Morris and Oliver Cromwell. He was writing these for money. I wondered why he picked these particular three. I mean, they were politicians. My only guess is he liked to write about not the world's most handsome men, I suppose. They're entirely forgotten now, as are most of the books that he wrote, the history books at the time. But they paid the bills. Now, he had a very ambitious project. He told his friend, Senator Lodge, Henry Cabot Lodge, that he wanted to be remembered. He wanted to write a great book for which he would be remembered. And what he settled on was some sort of history about the United States. He greatly admired both Frederick Jackson Turner and Francis Parkman. I love these two book covers. They're virtually the same picture painting on the front of each of them. And he wanted to write something of that quality. And so he settled on what he entitled The Winning of the West. Now, he wasn't talking about the Far West. He was talking just beyond the Alleghenies. And it was originally intended to be six volumes. He actually completed four volumes over a number of years, published over a number of years. And this is what he thought that his legacy would rest on. He was wrong. They are good books, but they're not anything of the caliber of the previous two. The books that really made it were books like this one, The Rough Riders and various stories he wrote. It's an excellent book about his experience, of course, as the Rough Riders. But the books that really made his name were the books about his experiences southwest in the Dakotas as a rancher and his hunting, hunting trips. And these were really rip roaring stories about cowboys. Here's an illustration from one of his books. Now, he wasn't going into a well used genre. The genre of cowboys was invented by three people and he was one of them. And here are the three people, two Harvard men and a Yalie. If you were here in person, I'd ask for who could tell which is which and try to figure out which one is the Yalie. And so the Western books, there was no genre of cowboy books. And amongst these three, they created that and they created an industry that has kept many publishers and writers very well paid for over the years. Now, on the top there, we have Owen Wister, who wrote what is considered by lots of people as the first cowboy book, The Virginian. You've probably heard of it. It was dedicated to TR. Wister and TR were the two Harvard men. And in fact, Wister dedicated The Virginian to TR. And Frederick Remington on the right, he was an artist and a very well, he kind of created the whole idea of Western cowboy art. And he was a sculptor and painter and illustrator. Here are four of his sculptures, extraordinary ones. These are some of his most famous ones. The top left of the Indian Warrior, the top right is called Coming Through the Rye for cowboys coming through a field exuberantly. Lower left, the Bucking Bronco, and another very famous of his, The Last Rye, which of course was an allegory for the Indian situation. And he was an illustrator and he illustrated TR's book. Here's an illustration from one of his books, TR's book, Bears Again, lots about bears. Now, TR's Western books were not just appreciated by people who liked that kind of adventure story. It was also appreciated by the naturalists in the country because much of the books are focused on the life habits and of the game he hunted. He was very careful. He didn't just tell hunting stories. He told extensive stories about, or examinations about the actual fact of the animals, even their habits, their measurements, all kinds of things. And he was considered as a reliable primary source by the biologists at the time who were just beginning to learn about a lot of these animals. And so they were much more interested in the biology side of these books. You know, I'm reminded of a review I once read about Lady Chatterley's Lover. You'll remember Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, that very sexy book. It was banned all over the world. You could only buy it anywhere from under the, go to a bookstore and they'd have it under the counter and you'd pay for it, a brown paper wrapper like this. And it spawned a bunch of court cases, which this was the book that overturned the censorship rules in the United States and England and elsewhere. Well, the book was published legally first like this with a much more lurid title. And there was a guy named Ed Zurn, who was a satirist who wrote for Field and Stream. And he wrote a review of Lady Chatterley's Lover. I thought I'd read it to you because I think this is so amusing. It says, Lady Chatterley's Lover is a fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper and is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehension of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional game hunter. Unfortunately, the author goes on, the reviewer goes on, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material, he was talking of course about parts that all the rest of us read, in order to discover and savor those side lights on the management of Midland shooting estate. And in this reviewer's opinion, this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's practical gamekeeping. That's very amusing. Naturalists tend to be very, very focused people and rather single-minded, and I have an idea that they approach T.R.'s books that way. Now, T.R. very meticulously, as I say, recorded all these things, and he became known as the leading expert on large American animal mammals of the West. There are a couple of stories about this I'll share with you. One, when later in life, I think he may have been at this time our Assistant Secretary of Navy, he was having dinner with a friend of his who was a biologist who collected skulls. And there were several other biologists, professional biologists there at dinner. And T.R. spent part of the time picking up skull after skull and wowing them all in this detailed knowledge about the animal itself, the skull and its habits and so on. Another story involves, this was while he was president, the Smithsonian received a jar, a large jar, which contained an embryo of some deer. Now, I was going to show you a photo of this, but the photos I found, they're so grisly that even I was a bit turned off. So I'll just show you a picture of the Smithsonian where it happened. Well, anyway, they got into an argument. It had become detached from its tag. They didn't know what it was. One of them suggested, well, let's send it over to the White House and see what the president says. So they sent it over there and T.R. sent it back and identified it. And sure enough, a couple of days later, the tag showed up and T.R. was right. Now, during this period, he continued to keep a diary. And perhaps the most famous entry in his diary is this one, which, as you can see, this was on the day that both his wife and mother died the same day in the same house, Valentine's Day. And this was his diary entry. He put an X and the light has gone out of my life. I think that's very poignant. Now, during the White House years, T.R. had vowed that he wasn't going to publish books because he didn't want to be seen as taking advantage of his position to make money. Well, he wasn't very faithful about it. The first book he published in the White House was this one. It's rather a technical tone to see the Deer family written with three other authors. And then there were three more books he published, two more sort of Western type books, and one of them a collection of his writings. He rationalized this to himself, not very effectively, I'd say, by sort of saying that, well, he'd written them before the presidency and he said he was going to do it. Now, T.R., of course, read a great deal. He had to read for his work. You know, when he was assistant secretary of the Navy, he had a great deal to read. But he also read significantly for his own enjoyment and edification. Now, there are three things to remember about T.R.'s reading. First of all, he was a self-taught speed reader, and he could read up to three books a day. Typically, he would read one before breakfast and two after dinner. And he could read almost anywhere. He'd read and he read pretty much everything. Over and over, people talk about asking if he'd read some current book. And nine times out of ten, he'd say, yeah, he'd read it already. There's a wonderful story of a woman who was going to try to sort of trap him on this. So she found an obscure book on Iceland, and she was going to have dinner with him that night. So went and sat next to him at dinner. And she said to him, oh, I just came across this book about Iceland. And she named it. And T.R., she figured he would know about that. T.R. said, oh, yes, it's a wonderful book. I've read it. And then he proceeded to name three or four other books on Iceland that he had read. Anyway, if you go to Sagamore Hill, T.R.'s home, which is open to the public, you certainly should do that, and Oyster Bay on the north shore of Long Island. That library has about 4,000 of his books, but that's no indication. And you see here over and over again, he generally gave away the books after he'd read them. And now everybody remarked his concentration when he was reading was extraordinary. His family would say that if he was reading, you couldn't break his concentration. If you wanted, you had to talk to him. You had to go up and shake it in order to get him to pay attention to you. And, you know, he would, there's a story, for example, he was in the cabinet meeting and the cabinet members were all there. And they got into some discussion that he didn't really have to be part of. And he pulls out a book and reads it. So and another story, which I find just unbelievable, in the 1912 convention, the Bull Moose convention, where he had just been nominated for president. There it is with all those people. Imagine that. And they had just been nominated. He was about to give his acceptance speech. The people, there was a, you know, a demonstration for Teddy went on for a half an hour. People up and down the lanes yelling, we want Teddy! Waving signs, we want Teddy! We want Teddy! Teddy was standing, as you might expect, up at the podium. And, you know, you expect to wave at him. But somebody who was up there was watching what he was actually doing. What he was actually doing was reading a book. And I find that amazing. And the other thing was this extraordinary memory that TR had. He seemed to remember everything he'd ever read. There's a famous story that took place in the White House. He, there was a guy, a lower level diplomat, Czechoslovakian diplomat, came through the line and said, and greeted him in tears and, oh, you're Czechoslovakian. And the diplomat said, yes. He said, you know, I've always admired your national poet. Here's a photograph of him, a drawing of him. Mancha was his name. He was kind of a Shakespeare of Czechoslovakia, wrote back in the 1800s. He said, I've always admired your poet. And I particularly liked that he named a poem. And he said, the part of that I really like, he proceeded to reel off, you know, a dozen or so lines from the poem. And the Czech guy was impressed. He said, oh, Mr. President, did you just read that? I thought maybe he hadn't because he knew Czech was coming. And TR said, no, no, I read it several years ago and haven't thought about it since. Now, his memory like this, somebody wants to ask him, you know, how do you remember this? What he said was, well, when I think of a book, the image of the page that I'm thinking of comes up in my mind. And I can read it from there. He kind of had what amounted to a teleprompter in his mind. Anyway, it also extended to faces. TR rarely forgot a face. And there's a wonderful story that took place at the Harvard Club in New York. Late in TR's life, he was having dinner with Henry Cabot Lodge. And the Lodge said to him, oh, there's somebody in here, I think, who met you years ago and wants to see you, wants to come back and say hello. TR said, fine, you know, bring him over. So the guy came over. This gives you an idea of how TR's mind works. The guy comes over and TR says, the guy's about to introduce himself. TR says, no, no, no, wait a minute. He looks and he says, you know, I see a cloud around your head. Now, wait a minute. Oh, I've got it, he said. I was running for governor and I was on a train, you know, a whistle-stop train. And as I often did at the end of the train, as he often did, he went up to the front of the train and thanked the crew and gave them some sort of, you know, something as a gift, as appreciation. He said, and I remember that. And he told him when the trip wasn't, you were there. He said, you were a young man. You were there. I'm sorry. I never knew your name. Well, if you can do that, there's Henry Cabot Lodge. If you can, I don't have a picture of this guy. If you can do that and you can remember everything you read, I guess you can be president. Well, so now TR had a rather eccentric way of reading, you know, the ephemera thing. So magazines and newspapers. And so what he'd do is he'd read a magazine as he finished a page, he'd rip it out and throw it on the floor. Usually, he'd go, So now we'll go on to his speeches. This was the heyday of his speeches. Most of them were political speeches, you know, stump speeches and all kinds of venues, auditoriums and on the rear platforms of trains. And as I'd said earlier, they were recorded and printed everywhere by newspaper reports. Just give you an idea about how some of this goes. A few months into his presidency, he'd been saying, you know, I'm just going to be McKinley, a copy of McKinley. He wanted to go out and announce. Remember, there was no television or radio. The only way you could talk to the people was actually to go out and talk to them. So he said, all right, I'm going to take three tours, one through New England, one through the middle, you know, the Midwest, and one out in California to announce that I'm a new president, what my platform is, you know, what I want to achieve, how I want to do it. So as an example, the West Coast one, which was mostly done on train, it was seven days. He gave 52 speeches, four or five locations a day, 50 speeches of train going around. Most of them were short, but four or five were major, and they were all different. He had no speech writers then, and he tailored them to wherever he was. They were all different. In his New England tour, which was cut a little short, he gave over 100 speeches. You can see how a teleprompter in his mind might have been very useful. Well, these speeches, he designed them specifically. These were political speeches. They were repetitious. They were filled with platitudes, and he used simple language. And the reason was, several, I mean, he was talking to the common people. He wanted them to understand. He wanted to make specific, a few short specific points, and he knew they would be reprinted. So he wanted to, you know, hammer away at whatever he thought was interesting. So he wanted his audience to remember, to understand. Well, he was attacked often for his platitudes and such. Now, one of his good friends was the French ambassador, there he is, sure, Sam, who came to his defense in this, and what he said about this was he said, you know, a brick is a platitude, but if you pile enough bricks on top of each other, you get a cathedral. Now, one of the things, there he is, look at him. That's, I couldn't believe this. I mean, that looks like two pictures of the same guy. Actually, that's Henry Cabot Lodge on the left. I was amazed, a lot of these people, they look very much the same. Now, his political speeches, sometimes they were rather dramatic, not so much for what he said, but for the circumstance. And there was a famous time in Milwaukee. I was about to give a speech in an auditorium to 1,000, 10, 50,000 people. It was an open car out front when an assassin attacked him. This, of course, is a reenactment. And the assassin shot him from close range. I mean, this is a very accurate reenactment. The assassin was a deranged bartender from New York who believed McKinley came and spoke to him and that TR had murdered McKinley or whatever it was he believed. Anyway, shot him in the chest. Now, fortunately, TR was wearing a steel eyeglass case, and this is it. And you can see right here the bullet hole. And then behind the eyeglass cases was his speech. It was a 50-page speech, which he'd folded in half, so that was 100 pages. So that slowed down the bullet significantly when it went into his chest. The bullet went into his chest. TR, as a hunter, knew what to do. He coughed. He wanted to see if he had blood in his lungs. He didn't. He figured he was probably pretty safe then. So then TR insisted on giving the speech. He went into the audience. He said, ah, you must understand I've just been shot. He knew how to take advantage of it. He gave something like an hour of speech. His handlers stood around the bottom of the podium to catch him. When he left the stage, somebody commented that you could hear the blood sloshing in his shoes. There's his shirt. So another example of speeches. He believed in going into the lion's den. And in New York, as police commissioner, he wanted to strangle the money going to Tammany Hall. And a lot of that money was coming from the fact that bars were open on Sundays. They were closed legally, but they could open if they paid off the police in Tammany Hall. And the workers, who were mostly German and Italian then, they couldn't. They worked six days. So they couldn't. They only drink on Sunday. So they didn't like the idea at all. Well, TR, instead of giving his announcement speech of this at a teatotals organization at City Hall, he went to an Irish beer hall to do it. So he stood up on a table to make the announcement. Everybody knew what he was going to do. He stood at the table. The Irishmen, all these burly Irishmen, were really unhappy with this. And so TR started his speech. And what he said, now remember, TR is a Dutchman, a New York Dutch. TR says, oh, the Irish, the Irish, they ain't much. And of course, that sort of set the Irish workmen back on the hill. They were ready to spring up and strangle him. And then he said, but they sure are better than the goddamn Dutch. And of course, the Irish loved that. There was a big parade two days later. The organizers had a, you know, a reviewing stand. They invited TR to come. They didn't expect him to. He did come and cheered and waved and laughed at himself when he was being made fun of. And he really diffused a lot of it. They still didn't like it, but he managed to diffuse a lot of it. So now let's go to his post-presidency speech making. I might as well stick with speeches here. And of course, he gave a lot of political ones. But after the presidency, he went to Africa, where he spent 10 months in a collecting, hunting, safari thing. And then he wound up in Egypt, and he was going to go to Europe for three months. So when he got through all that and he got to Egypt, he'd been asked to give an address at Cairo University, the oldest university in the world at the time, I believe. But when he got to Egypt, the country was in an uproar and tenderhooks. The Coptic Christian prime minister had just been assassinated. And T.R. was advised, don't talk about this when you go to the university. But T.R. being T.R., when he did, he gave his lecture, and much of it was admonishing the Egyptians for assassinating one of their leaders. The Egyptians are very wonderful people, and they greeted him with a modified acceptance. And fortunately, he wasn't assassinated. T.R. wasn't assassinated. Well, then he went to Europe, and the first speech he gave was the romance, I'm sorry, the Sorbonne. And this was the famous man in the arena speech. I'm sure you've all heard of it. Now, that's when he said, you know, it's not the credit who counts. The credit belongs to the man who's actually in the arena. And this is, to my mind, the most quoted. Every time somebody starts telling me about, you know, something they want to quote from T.R., nine times out of 10, I don't know, 99 times out of 100, it's the man in the arena speech. He then went to give the acceptance speech at Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize that he received. And then on to Oxford, where he gave a speech. These were all his major speeches at the romance, the Romane's language speech, a very prestigious thing at Oxford. He was very proud of this biological analogies in history, but it wasn't greeted very well. The interesting thing about this to me is that, you know, he'd just been 10 months in Africa. The last days of his White House before he went to Africa, very busy time. He wrote all three of these speeches completely and then tucked them in his pocket and took it with him. He was not a man to procrastinate, never procrastinate much. One of his famous quotes, which I'll quote you now, is often quoted for other reasons, but I think it's about procrastination too. It says, in any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The next best thing you can do is the wrong thing. And the worst thing you can do is nothing. And when he got back to the U.S., he was president of the American Historical Association and gave an address there on the history as literature, encouraging people, historians, to write in ways that people could understand. So let's turn to his writings of this time. And so from the presidency on, at a period of about 10 years, he wrote 18 books. Now, many of them were political and not particularly interesting, but six of them were significant. Two of them were about his trips down in Africa and down the Amazon. And he found a whole new way of writing books that he would write. He was commissioned to produce articles and then a book from these. And he would write these during the event. So what do you do? It was sort of like a diary, but it wasn't a diary. He would basically write chapters and he didn't know what was going to happen next. And the conditions were terrible. Here he is writing in Brazil. See, look at him with gauntlets and insects all around him. But he would write religiously every day. Even he got really ill. In fact, there were times when people thought he wasn't going to live through the night. He was terribly sick, but he still continued to write. And he completed the book on the trip. It was published when he came back. The articles first and then the book. And in Africa, the situation wasn't as desperate or as difficult. I couldn't get a photo of him writing in Africa. I can't find one. And almost all the photos in Africa of him standing over some dead beast. So I thought this one would be better. Conditions were better, but they were still tough. He spent, you know, 8, 10, 12 hours a day traipsing around in the heat and everything. And he'd come back at the end of the day with his colleagues. They would all collapse on their cots, and he would write. And he would write. And the same thing happened here. I think the introduction to his African Game Trails is excellent. I'll read you a little piece of it. I speak of Africa and golden joys, the joys of wandering through lonely land, the joys of hunting the mighty and terrible lords of the wilderness, the cunning, the wary, and the grim. He was quite lyrical. Now, these were substantial books. He also during this period wrote his autobiography, which was not at the end of the life, but still, you know, while he was doing it. And he also, he wrote a couple of other books. One of them was this two-volume with another biologist, sort of very technical book about African large mammals. And then perhaps the book, in fact, certainly the book that sold the most of all his books was his Letters to His Children, which was published after his death. And it was basically just the letters of his children. And there was a wonderful, what he called picture letters, where he draws two little pictures for his kids. And this is a wonderful book. It's available. You can find it. I recommend you see if you can get a copy. Most people who use bookstores, you'll love it. It's a terrific book. So he also wrote letters during this period, and his output was phenomenal. It's estimated he wrote 150,000 letters. Now, true, many of them were dictated, and many of them were short. But nonetheless, his significant letters of the period, his published letters, runs to eight volumes, big, thick book. There are over 6,500 letters in it, running to something like 3 million words. And that's just one of them. There's several other books or collections of books written of his letters to particular people, most of which aren't in this one. Now, to my mind, one of the best books you can read, if you want to get an idea of T.R. the Man, is this little book. It's called Cowboys and Kings. And what happened is, he would tell stories. He's a wonderful storyteller. He would tell stories at dinner, and one of the people there is people like the Secretary of State, various people, would say, write him a note and say, please, write it down. He told wonderful stories. Write it down. So he wrote it in the form of letters. And this book is three letters, one of which runs, it's the longest letter he ever wrote, I believe, runs to 3,000 words. And there are descriptions of what happened in his trips to the West that I've already mentioned, you know, when he went on that trip, and also through Europe. So if you can get a copy, read it. They're anecdotal, delightful, and humorous. So I strongly recommend that. Now, during this period, he wrote a bunch of memorable articles, too. He was writing at that time for a number of things. One of them was Metropolitan Magazine. And he wrote an article called The Great Adventure. I want to read you these. The Great Adventure. And it starts out, only those are fit to live who do not fear to die, and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy and duty of life. It really sums up this article, sums up his philosophy. And during this time, of course, he continued reading. And here he is reading Penrod. John Hay, who I mentioned to you earlier, said once, you know, who wrote a, along with another man, wrote an eight or 10 volume. Here's John Hay. John Hay was Lincoln's secretary, one of Lincoln's secretaries. Lincoln had two employees during the Civil War, and Hay was one of them. And Hay was, T.R. is on the right, T.R.'s Secretary of State. So Hay and Nicolau, the other secretary, wrote an eight or 10 volume biography of T.R. And Hay once said, you know, the only person I've seen, I know of, who read it more or less straight through, was the busiest man in America. Of course, he was referring to T.R. Now, in his later life, this is the end here, is an older T.R. You can see the book in his lap, and there he is sleeping on a train. I think he's on a train anyway. This is, I think, the only picture ever taken of T.R., at least I've never seen another one, of him sleeping. And one figures, well, he couldn't have slept much. He had such a full life. He actually said he slept about five hours a day. Anyway, in the last days, before I tell you about the last days, I think it should be clear to you now that T.R. could not have been T.R. if he hadn't been a reader and a writer. It helped him in so many ways to the contributions of what he did for the country and what he did for letters. He couldn't have been a great environmentalist. He hadn't studied the animals, and he wouldn't have studied them so carefully. He hadn't written about them. He couldn't have been as effective a diplomat as he was if he hadn't understood from his readings in other ways other countries so well. He couldn't have been the great military leader he was if he hadn't understood from the Greeks and the Romans and Mesopotamia. So, you know, his influence on writing and the literary world was enormous and lasting. He made the world a better place, and it came from his ability to learn from his readings and writings. So now for the last few days, during the last four years of his life, he is just as productive as he was the rest of the time, in spite of the fact that he was often quite ill. And during these last four years, he wrote 68 articles and over a thousand editorials, 11 book reviews, and five books. In the last two years of his life before he died, he answered some 25,000 letters. He often had two stronographers going at once. He'd do this sometimes when he was doing other things like shaving and so on. So he answered 25,000 letters and turned down over 2,000 invitations to speak. And now on the last couple of days of his life, he did the following. He wrote an editorial for the Kansas City Star, who's on the League of Nations, one for Metropolitan Magazine on women's rights, right to vote. He corrected proofs these last two days. He corrected proofs of letters to his children. He wrote two book reviews, one correcting the author, an eminent biologist, who made an error of all things on ostriches, and another more positive review about pheasants. These last two all list while he was on morphine. Now, I have no idea what he read as his last book. So I wrote a contact with my friend Heather Cole, who for many years has been the curator at Harvard at the TR, and she wrote me back the following. TR's doctor later recalled that when TR was in the hospital a few days before his death, quote, Mrs. Roosevelt held up a slip of paper and said, Colonel Roosevelt wants me to go to the library and get this list of cheap literature for him. So the doctor goes on. I did not see what it was, but I presume it came his usual stories, such as Laura Jean Lilly. And that's how you know, by the way, he spent the last part of his life. Here is Laura Jean Lilly's books, you know, that didn't seem at all like what TR might be interested in writing. I've never read, I have to admit I've never read, but it didn't seem that he was the audience there either. But anyway, so I don't know exactly what he read in the last days, but whatever it must have been, must have been light and comforting. So now on the last day, this is the bed of his life, after kissing his wife goodnight and telling her that he supposed she might never fully appreciate how much he loved his home Sagamore Hill. And his last words were to his butler. He said, James, would you please turn out the light? Later that night, he died peacefully. Someone once commented, the dead death had to comfort him when he was sleeping. Otherwise, he would have put up a fight. So that's what I have to tell you today. And I'm now ready for Q&A. Let me get out of here. Thank you, Professor Roosevelt. We have a quite a few questions that have come in. The first one is, you talked a lot about Theodore Roosevelt having a memory like an internal teleprompter. And we know he had a fabulous memory. So did he have any memory lapses? Yeah, that's interesting. You say that is an interesting question. In fact, surprisingly, even though he could bring these images up in his mind, he couldn't spell. And by the way, that's the one gene of all this that I inherited about his readings and memories. He couldn't spell. And so as a result, he mounted a huge effort to revise spelling in the United States. And this was a doomed effort. But TR said, you know, there's no reason why we can't spell words the way they sound. You know, in Spanish, you ask a Spaniard how to spell a word, you ask a Spaniard how to spell it. He won't spell it out like that. He'll just say. But in English, we've gone back to the old hieroglyphic approach, going back to the old hieroglyphic approach, where you have a different written language than the spoken language. And, you know, you all know many examples of this. And so kids have to really learn two languages. Now, it's still a situation, the hieroglyphs, they still exist. Pictographs, they're called, it still exists in Chinese, for example, and it's very hard to be literate. You know, the scribes in Egypt held on, you know, they had a lot of power because they were the only ones that could read. And they, you know, they had 20,000 pictographs. So when phonographic system was, you know, the alphabet that we can write words with using only 26 letters, it really changed the world and that everybody could read. So TR felt that we were slipping back to the old approach. And so he also knew that the way to get people to change language was through the government printing. So he got the government printing office to use 300 simplified spelling. Well, everybody, all those English teachers carried on. This was all improper and never went anywhere. So TR continued to misspell things. And I wish he'd succeeded because it would have helped me. All right. We're getting so many wonderful messages from people who are enjoying your research that you've been doing. So what is the hardest aspect about doing this research on his literary career? It's funny you asked that. I think it's the thing that most people that sort of tackle TR, his writing was atrocious. Very, very hard to read. And all those poor people that go through and transcribe his writings. I mean, they were delighted when he, you know, sort of, I guess about the time that he was assistant secretary of the Navy, he started using strenographers and the stuff was tight. But boy, when you try to read it, it is really tough. Another question has come in. How did TR help writers of the time? TR was very interested in writers. He spent a lot of time. And you see it over and over again. He's encouraging various people to write books. And, you know, he'd say, you should do this. And he succeeded often. And often they were dedicated. There were a huge number of books dedicated. A good example of this is Edward Arlington Robinson, who was a poet at the time. TR's son, one of his sons, Kermit wrote him, Kermit was in prep school at the time, wrote him and said, there's this great poet. TR had never heard of him. TR found him, found the poet. He found, you know, the works of it. He really liked it. So he put this guy on the map and it turned out that like poets, most poets, the guy was starving to death. Now, remember, TR had railed against the spoil system and then for several years, fighting, you know, as his government job of trying to change all that. And so he was kind of in an odd position. But anyway, he violated his precepts. He found Robinson a Seneca cure job. I think a custom house somewhere, which basically let him go on writing. So he did lots of things like that. And the questions are coming in faster than I can read them. Read them all. Tell everybody you can. We'll post these online later on and I'll answer as many as I can. So if we can't get them all today, which we won't be able to, we'll be able to do it later. Go ahead, Rita. This is from Sherwin. Did he have any regrets about his writings? Oh, I hadn't thought about it. Well, I mentioned the fact that his major regret was that he didn't write a great work. And that, I think, was his major, major regret. Other than that, you know, a lot of it was, as I say, for Journeyman. And he made the money. So he didn't regret that at all. And T.R. wasn't a regretter. There were a few things he regretted in life. So he didn't go around sort of looking backwards saying, I wish I had or I wish he would. Just in general, he didn't regret things. And in fact, that's sort of the major thing that comes to mind immediately that he regretted was when his youngest son, Quentin, was killed in the First World War. He clearly felt guilty, some guilt, about encouraging these boys, his sons and his daughter, too, to go and participate in the war. But that's, he rarely looked back like that. Okay. I'm going to ask a final question. And I do want to remind everyone that on our website at liu.edu slash Roosevelt, we have Tweed's Corner. And I'm collecting all of your questions. And I'm going, Tweed will answer as many as he can, and he will post them on the website under Tweed's Corner. This is a question that came in earlier. You mentioned that T.R. was homeschooled. Did he have tutors or did his family members educate him? Yes, he was homeschooled. There was a brief period of, you know, a few months that he went to school, but basically all his education was. His early education was overseen and done by his mother and his aunt. He had a maiden aunt, his mother's sister, who lived in the house. And they taught him. And when he got older, all the way up to when he was, I think, when he was preparing to go to Harvard. Don't think he had tutors before that, but I could be wrong. But the most famous of his tutor was a guy named Cutler, I think his name was, who prepared him for the Harvard entrance exams. And that went on, I think, a year or more. So it was really pretty much a family effort with some outside tutors. So if that's the last question, I want to thank you all for coming today and remind you that we will be having the next talk will be on TR and leadership on January 19th. We'll have information up and sign up ability on our website in a fairly short time. And we'll also post this talk on our website in the next few days for anybody who had to leave earlier, you have friends who had to miss it or not, so on. And so I want to thank you all. This has been a lot of fun, and I look forward to the next one. So stay safe, stay healthy, stay away from coronavirus. And we'll go on to the new year. Thank you very much.