Douglas Brinkley

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

Part of learning civics is also learning to teach tolerance. We must keep humanities alive, reading great literature, the arts, and most specifically civics, learning the building blocks of what it means to be a good citizen.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today my guest is the remarkable historian, Douglas Brinkley. I always enjoy talking to him and this podcast is no exception. He is a professor of history at Rice University, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a CNN presidential historian. He's also a prolific bestselling author with six books named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. His most recent is Silent Spring Revolution, which chronicles the rise of environmental activism in the United States. And while there have been many books written about Theodore Roosevelt, at the very top of that list, I put Doug's Wilderness Warrior. Our discussion begins with TR's conservation legacy, but extends to his use of executive power as well as his enduring appeal across the political spectrum. You'll hear Doug describe the building blocks of good citizenship, plus being a part of President Obama's book club. We cover a lot of ground here and I know you'll enjoy it. Let's jump in.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

He was born, TR, in 1858 in New York City. Say born 1858, well, a big event happened in 1859 and that's Charles Darwin published on the Origin of Species in the Roosevelt household, TR's father and his uncle Robert Barnesville Roosevelt were deeply engaged in Darwin. At that time, they were building the American Museum of Natural History in New York and it had an implicit Darwinian input. And we look at drawings from childhood and there's Theodore Roosevelt as a child writing in his childhood scrawl Darwin's theory of Evolution and showing his sister evolving from a stork or his brother from a dog. Then he would go collect his own bird's nest feathers to study. TR was preparing to be a wildlife biologist. The time he gets out of Harvard, I mean he's known for loving big forest, wildlife, hunting and the natural world along with global affairs. So it's part and parcel of him. He used to say the number one thing a president must do is conservation of natural resources. As president from 1901 to 1909, he saved 234 million acres of Wild America. I don't know any other political persona who cared deeply when he would say losing a passenger pigeon going extinct is like losing all the Rembrandts. He's kind of in a club to himself when it comes to appreciation of wilderness and the natural world.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Well, I love that you mentioned the American Museum of Natural History. There's family folklore that young TR had so much taxidermy in his house that they founded the Museum of Natural History, just to find a place to locate all of it, to get it out of the brownstone. That's how much time and energy he was spending on that as a young child. You have written a number of books where environmentalism conservation have been the underlying themes — TR, FDR, The Great Deluge and then Silent Spring more recently. I'm wondering what attracts you to that subject matter.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

My mother and father were teachers, but we had a 24 foot Coachman trailer and we would travel all over America to the national parks as a kid and it was very exciting and dramatic to spend time at the Grand Canyon or the Everglades or Olympic National Park. The list is long and wherever I went looking at all these parks, somewhere in those days before apps, I'd grab a brochure and Theodore Roosevelt had something to do with saving it. And if not TR, FDR. And Theodore Roosevelt is the most important because national parks that happened during 1901 to 1909, like beautiful Crater Lake in Oregon or wind cave in South Dakota or Mesa Verde in Colorado, and there are others, you have to go to Congress. So you have to get approved to be a national park. What TR innovated was, if you don't have the votes, use executive power and declare it a national monument. Then when the politics are right, it can get upgraded to National Park Service. Well, this was a brilliant move and it started with the Grand Canyon. The Senate wanted to mine it, zinc, asbestos, copper. So he stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon with rough riders, the former rough riders from his crowded hour of July 1st, 1898 and said, do not touch it. God has made it. You'll only mar it, leave the Grand Canyon alone. And then he used executive power to protect it. So I loved them. I loved TR then and now for doing that. So he's my favorite president. There's no president with a better life story. You never get bored with Theodore Roosevelt.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

There's no question that we're living in his conservation legacy today, but there's another piece of his legacy that I don't know that he would've foreseen. But you mentioned how when he couldn't get Congress to act, he took executive action and in doing so he expanded the powers of the presidency greatly. A lot of historians point to TR as the beginning of what is a long secular trend if the expansion in American presidential powers that leads us to today where that expansion might have us sending troops into Chicago. How do you think about that legacy of TR?

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

Well, first off, in our Constitution there is no language for executive orders. It doesn't exist, but George Washington used executive power for Neutrality Acts to keep us out of wars. But executive power in the 19th century was barely used and not in any meaningful way. But Lincoln in the Civil War, some people could call it Executive Order number one, did a presidential proclamation to emancipate the slaves. And this is very important to understand Theodore Roosevelt because his hero is Abraham Lincoln. And his thinking — if Lincoln can do something as large as end slavery with executive power, I surely can apply it to saving Muir Woods and California or Devil's Tower in Wyoming as national monuments. But you're very right. The birth of a new kind of executive power begins with Theodore Roosevelt right down to the fact that he changed the name from the executive mansion to the White House. He worked hard of how to out trick, outthink, or outmaneuver Congress. And since then it's been part of a job of a president, but it's become hijacked in recent years. I'll blame both parties. Barack Obama, he wanted to get the Affordable Care Act passed. Obama went to Osawatomie, Kansas, where Theodore Roosevelt as a Bull Mooser said that he was going to do universal healthcare, that we should not have to pay — progressive TR on healthcare.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

This is the new nationalism speech, right?

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

Yeah. And Obama went to the spots, stood where Theodore Roosevelt did and started getting political momentum to pass the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. But Obama told me that after that affordable care, he had no choice but to use executive power because Congress wouldn't deal with him and he would've been a lame duck president. So he started doing executive orders more and more and more, and then you find the same going on with Trump's first term and then Biden and it's becoming dysfunctional — puts us in this role where Congress has become very diminished and it makes people think, well, that's supposed to be co-equal branch of government, but Congress in the 21st century has been pretty lame. And the question is how do you — does Congress, Senate get their mojo back where — instead of being a rubber stamp for Ds or Rs.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

You mentioned Obama earlier and in the middle of the great financial crisis when the world at least certainly felt to me like the world was falling apart, the summer of 2009, Obama invited you and seven other historians to come in and have dinner with him, and I imagine at this moment in time, he doesn't have a spare second in his life and yet he prioritizes an evening with historians. Why do you think he did that?

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

I got to do that a fair amount with him. He formed a book club.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

The best book club ever.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

And his reading thing, he loves history and he had questions. If somebody had written a biography of Lincoln, we talked about Lincoln. In my case, he had read my Theodore Roosevelt, The Wilderness Warrior. So I learned to work with President Obama specifically on public lands, and to my great surprise, I was included in the process of Obama opening up the idea of American history. He saved with executive orders Caesar Chavez's home in Tehachapi, California where Chavez and his wife Helen are buried. He saved Harriet Tubman sites in New York and Maryland. At Bear's Ears National Monument in Utah, Obama was the first to turn it over the administration of that to Indigenous people, native tribes, and they were able to manage that because that's their land and landscape. So it was a very interesting period when Obama was president on Rooseveltian conservation and history preservation. He was saying, look, we don't need to rip down stuff. We just need to open up the American story and have inclusion of some of these other stories just kind of open up our national narrative storytelling.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Yeah. I've heard Obama cite TR as his favorite president and I've heard Elizabeth Warren cite TR is her favorite president and Josh Hawley cite TR as his favorite president. It is interesting how both sides of the aisle can look at TR and find something that they like about him.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

I've talked at length with President Obama about his admiration for Theodore Roosevelt. Bill Clinton is a giant TR fan. If anybody reads TR's literature speeches from the Bull Moose period of 1912, I mean it is today's progressivism. And even people like Jack London who TR was always in a fight with the novelist London over nature faking, TR thought that the wolves described in Call of the Wild and White Fang, no wolf would act the way London was telling people and London saying, my God, it's fiction. They had a very horrible feud. And yet here it is, 1912 and Jack London backs Theodore Roosevelt for the presidency. The right likes TR because of his pronounced Americanism and in his love of the armed forces. I mean TR's idea of great Americans were people serving in the military — Navy, Army — and people that were ornithologists or park rangers or — you know he preferred to be with those kind of public servants than people of finance. 

TED ROOSEVELT V:

There was no question that his conservation was deeply tied to patriotism. And if I think about the sort of political environment that we're in today, certainly climate has become very polarized, environmentalism has become very partisan, and even conservation has started to become partisan. You saw in the Big Beautiful Bill, Mike Lee trying to draft language that allowed the sale of 2 million acres of public land.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

Yeah, there are people like Lee that think like that in Congress, but a lot of these ranchers, particular out in Montana, Wyoming and all, they don't want to see their state marred. They may not want more federal input, but they're not interested in sort of building housing next to gorgeous national monuments and things out there.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Yeah.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

But you said the big thing — do not use the word environment. Do not say climate change. If I go anywhere and speak and if it's a Republican audience, it's best to talk in terms of, "Hey, don't you love Lake Erie? We should get the fish back in Lake Erie," and everybody applaused. You could say maybe environment once, but you could see faces — if you say it twice, they're thinking, uh oh, this guy — he's just rubber stamping for Nancy Pelosi or for Markey or for Warren or whoever it is.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Yeah. Doug, we're coming up on our 50th episode of Good Citizen and we talk to people about what makes a good citizen on the podcast, and one of the themes that keeps coming up is the decline in civics education. I'm curious, because your books, while historical cover a lot of civics — how do you feel about the current state of civic education and civic understanding in our country right now?

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

I think we have a national problem that's extremely serious of not injecting what government is, but civics in general into our schools. All public [school] kids in elementary school on down need to learn about civic engagement. They need to understand our country's foundational documents. They need to have a building block of what is American history and how we got where we are. And if we don't do the civics or talk about why we need participatory democracy and what the community means and how we pull together, we're just going to become a nation of greed and everybody looking after themselves. And what's replaced civic education is conspiracy theories. They're all over. I mean, you have no idea the number of kids in high school that think we didn't go to the moon. Neil Armstrong never walked there or that 9/11 was a setup or — these are serious things when you're getting 40% of people in a certain age are buying into that. So the internet, iPhone culture, social media, just go onto TikTok now or Instagram, you'll find just nonstop conspiratorial thinking and it leads to spikes in hate crimes, it leads to eugenics, it leads to antisemitism, it leads to a lot of ugly places because we're supposed to be — part of learning civics is also learning to teach tolerance. We must keep humanities alive, reading great literature, the arts, and most specifically civics, learning the building blocks of what it means to be a good citizen.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

We had Jeffrey Rosen on the podcast recently, and he's the CEO of the Constitution Center, and he pointed really to reading as kind of the key component that's sort of missing thing in our society. And I wonder what you would encourage, say a high school student that's on TikTok every day, where should they look? Where should they start and what might be the kind of daunting library on the hill for them?

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

George Washington carried with him his a hundred, I think it was 115 rules of civility. He had handwritten them at 14 when he's at we'll, picket Valley Forge or on his way in a carriage to be inaugurated president and in Wall Street. He's got his rules of civility with him, and it's worth reading them. It doesn't take long. And for books, I've been a teacher a long time. If I find the students struggling, I asked them this question: if you were on a desert island or you had to go away for two weeks and you could only have books on a certain topic, a certain thing, what would you bring? I don't care whether it's a murder mystery, I don't care the topic, but what would you enjoy if you were in that situation? And that gets their minds thinking. And then if I find they say murder mystery, and I'll say, well, look, I want you to read this short story of Edgar Allen Poe and I'd rather have a student read a lot on something they like, if they like rock and roll history then reading a good book about Elvis Presley or a good book about Chuck Berry or I'd rather them read, read what they like than — to get 'em going to see that reading's fun. When you get somebody who feels that reading is arduous and unfun and not necessary, that's where the problem comes in.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

As I'm talking to you, I'm also thinking about whether you think there's a causation between the decline in civic education in this country and the rise in executive power because inherent in that is sort of a decline in the balance of powers in our federal government. Do you think the sense that nobody knows the Congress should be stepping up at various moments?

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

I defend our electoral college system even though I know all the flaws of it. But starting in the 21st century when the 2000 election, when Al Gore wins the popular vote, but George W. Bush is suddenly president shocks people. And then when Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote, but Donald Trump's president, it shocks people. And so it adds to the narrative that people don't trust our system, that it's rigged, that it creates a kind of disillusionment in our democracy that it isn't one person, one vote, there's another game going on. And then I think Citizens United and the pouring of money, you basically got to have a billion dollars to run for president, turns a lot of people off. Then the fact that in your social life, if you run for public office, whoever you dated, whatever you wrote, you're going to be cannibalized. So you're asking for public humiliation and embarrassment. The point is there's not trust in anything. And then the fact that we don't have a common enemy like we had in the Cold War with the Soviets and after the Cold War, after the Berlin Wall comes down in 1989, the Soviet Union collapses in 91, Bill Clinton delivered for his two terms as an economic surplus, 300 global trade packs, which he was proud of. Many people haven't benefited from globalization. If you go to Akron, Ohio or Cicero, Illinois or East St. Louis, Illinois or people will say, we got screwed with these global trade packs — that our manufacturing sector got left behind. And there's a distrust in globalization. Disillusionment prevails in a lot of the old great manufacturing centers of our country.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

So one of the things that we've explored on this podcast is this idea of what are the shared values that Americans can still point to? It sort of goes back to that question around civic education is what are the standards values that we can all hold up and we can all point to. We might be looking at it from different angles, but say like, this is what it is to be an American. And your comment about the decline of the Soviet Union as a common enemy, we have not had that for 30 plus years now, and there's a little bit of looking for them, a counterpoint, and them seems to be internal domestic right now.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

Exactly. You read a lot of literature. People are looking for who's the villain, who's to blame? How did this happen? Who killed the American dream? When did the American dream die? And people will often point to the federal government, the Kennedy assassination, you didn't tell us the truth in the Warren Commission. You lied in Vietnam War, we served in — I mean, look at people like JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard, and you're getting a lot of veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq coming back, going after a so-called deep state or the people that gave us the forever wars of the 21st century. And so that creates another layer of confusion and mistrust across the land. Good news? Break things down on a local level. People get along a lot better than the media lets us see. Local news is in many ways better than national news in creating a civic environment. But the great Duke Ellington used to have a saying, "no boxes," meaning I'll take people who they are. I'm not trying to box somebody in. And now we're doing a lot of boxing in. Oh, you're a Trumper. You're a socialist. If we start telling our neighbors and labeling them instead of just saying, it's our neighbor, our kids are on the same ball team, we're going to the same high school, we all have the same goals and aspirations that our kids need a better life, you'll find a lot of commonality. But It's these merchants of smear out there on the right and the left that are using the labeling of people that are dis-uniting America.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

I think that's a great point, and I'd love that you brought up Duke Ellington because I think people might be surprised to know that you are a historian of musicians as well, particularly those from the 1960s and the 1970s. What are you working on now?

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

I'm just thinking recently about Bob Seeger and John Fogerty, how these guys wrote songs — they're both at the very end of the line right now, but these may be part of the American songbook like Proud Mary and Lodi and He Will Stop the Rain and Bob Seger with Night Moves and Main Street and Turn the Page and Against the Wind and meaning, a hundred years from now, 200 years from now, whatever happens, I still think those songs will be played by somebody with a six string guitar by a fire somewhere. They're going to live on. And that always interests me. In fact, this week I was looking at the Chicago songwriter Steve Goodman, who died way too young of cancer. He had written that song, City of New Orleans — "Good Morning America, how are you?" And Willie Nelson made it a big kid, and I like tracking how a song like that kind of grows and becomes a sort of Americana standard. But heroes of mine are really in the blues jazz world. I'm working a little bit to try to help Miles Davis's childhood home along Mississippi River become a music education center, so I'm always dabbling in something.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

It's interesting, all those musicians, they were all politically relevant musicians as well. And you know well, that sort of the 1960s music was as much a catalyst for change as anything during that era. And I wonder if you see the role of music being potentially part of the solution to some of the turmoil we're seeing right now?

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

Interesting question. Yeah, and I have three kids in college right now, and I know what their music tastes are and all that, but I think in American music from say the 1920s since the recording, but certainly, certainly since the forties up until nineties with Nirvana, this was a period that'll be seen forever as the American music renaissance that's not going to get replicated. The music skills aren't as great. It used to be — you could be Charlie Parker, you go to school, they give you an instrument and you learn to play it, and you could be an innovator because you weren't being influenced by so many other influencers. I teach at Rice University, and on one hand, I'm trying to get Houston to recognize its old music history. I mean like "Hound Dog" of Elvis Presley's, Big Mama Thornton recorded in Houston, but nobody cares. Peacock records got forgotten down there. And also, look, radio in the sixties and seventies, they're suggesting they hit play, hit play, Wolfman Jack, and today people quickly, with algorithms and genres, are into their own stream. Yeah, we're not sharing a whole lot of music. One of the interesting things though is the way the Dead & Company has been able to cross fertilize, pollinate with young people, it's all over. I mean, kids in their — college kids still want to go see Old Bob Ware standing up there and John Mayer and the Dead & Company and they're packing Vegas.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

I saw them at the Sierra twice now, and you would think it would be like the median age is 60 plus, but it's not. The age demographics are quite diverse.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

Exactly. And you're mixing the experience of high tech with good musical chops in a 21st century experience. Things like that I think are pretty interesting that are happening now. And I think it's paramount among us that love music to make sure we constantly pay homage to the greats because some of our artists in America, I mean unreal, their talent.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Well spoken like a true historian.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

I know you see.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Doug, we ask everybody on this podcast the same closing question, which is what makes a good citizen?

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

I think first and foremost, respect and kindness to everybody around you. One of our national characteristics is we don't like condescension and nobody likes being looked down to. Nobody likes the caste system. So just be humble and open-handed and follow the golden rules and just try to imagine being in somebody else's shoes with their situation and their problem. Just be a good Samaritan and offer fellowship and friendship. And if somebody turns out to be toxic or problematic, then do — Eisenhower used to put toxic people that burned them on a note card, write their name and then put a rubber band on it, and then stick it in his drawer and never talk about that person. But gossip can turn ugly and grim and it can create problems. So just kind of be a straight shooter and give everybody a break. Live by the line, if you don't prejudge me, I won't prejudge you. 

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Doug. I love it. Thank you very much. Appreciate everything you've had to say. It's been a fabulous conversation. Thank you for giving us so much time today. I really appreciate it.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:

No problem. Take care, my friend.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Doug, this was such a pleasure. Your insights into American history spanning presidents, conservation, and even music are incredibly thoughtful and deeply informed, and I always appreciate getting the chance to chat with you. Thank you for being a guest on Good Citizen. Listeners, if you're interested in learning more about TR and his legacy as the conservation president, I highly recommend Douglas Brinkley's, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.