The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014) s01e02 Episode Script

Announcer: Previously on "the Roosevelts," a sickly child roused himself into a life of action.
Man: Don't fritter away your time.
Take a place wherever you are and be somebody.
Announcer: Young Franklin and Eleanor struggled to fit in.
When he got to Groton and when he got to Harvard, people didn't like him.
Announcer: And an assassin's bullet brought a Roosevelt into the White House.
Man: He was a new species, a new kind of man in a new century.
Announcer: And now part 2 of "the Roosevelts: An intimate history.
" Announcer: Funding for this program was provided by members of the better angels society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating Americans about their history through documentary film.
Members include Jessica and John fullerton the Pfeil foundation Joan Wellhouse Newton Bonnie and tom McCloskey and the Golkin family.
Additional funding was provided by the Arthur Vining Davis foundations, dedicated to strengthening America's future through education; by the national endowment for the humanities, exploring the human endeavor; by Mr.
Jack C.
Taylor And by Rosalind P.
Walter.
Major funding was provided by the corporation for public broadcasting and by the generous contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you.
Thank you.
Female announcer: Before the names Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin were indelibly etched into the American consciousness and the course of human history was forever changed by their individual endeavors, a prominent family made a point of teaching the value of altruism, the power of perseverance, and the virtue of helping out one's fellow man.
PART 2 "In The Arena (1901-1910)" Narrator: For the first few nights of his new presidency, Theodore Roosevelt slept at the home of his sister, Bamie, at 1733 n street, while the widow of his murdered predecessor, William McKinley, packed up to leave Washington.
But every morning at 8:30, he started toward his office in the executive mansion 10 blocks away, while his secretary struggled to keep up.
His first night there was to be September 23, 1901, and since his wife and children had not yet arrived, he asked his sisters Bamie and Corinne and their husbands to join him for dinner.
The day before had been the birthday of the man whose memory meant the most to him his father, Theodore Roosevelt, senior.
"What would I not give if only he could have lived to see me here in the White House," the President said.
Then he noticed that the flowers on the dinner table were Saffronia roses, the same variety his father had worn every day in his buttonhole.
"I feel as if my father's hand were on my shoulder," Roosevelt said, as if there were a special blessing "over the life I am to lead here.
" [Train whistle blows.]
Man: The man and the moment were perfectly met.
This was America at the turn of the what was to become and Americans already felt it The American century.
Science was in the air: Telephones, internal combustion engines, airplanes, all kinds of stuff.
And here came this, this man who was called a steam engine in trousers.
He just embodied the moment.
Man: Roosevelt has the knack of doing things and doing them noisily, clamorously.
While he is in the neighborhood, the public can no more look the other way than the small boy can turn his head away from a circus parade followed by a steam Calliope.
Narrator: Theodore Roosevelt would prove to be a brand-new kind of President for a brand-new century.
But at first, no one knew precisely in which direction Roosevelt would lead his parade.
In the decades after Abraham Lincoln, most American presidents had been content to be caretakers.
Real power lay with the congress, with the party machines that controlled what did and did not happen on capitol hill, and with the financial giants whose power grew steadily and whose orders many senators followed without a second thought.
"I did not care a rap for the form and show of power," Roosevelt remembered.
"I cared immensely for the use that could be made of the substance.
" One admirer hailed him as "a stream of fresh", "pure bracing air from the mountains, sent to clear the fetid atmosphere of the national capital.
" But the novelist Henry James dismissed him as "the monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise.
" "You must always remember," his friend the French ambassador warned, "that the President is about 6.
" Man: I'm no orator, and in writing, I'm afraid I'm not gifted at all.
If I have anything at all resembling genius, it is the gift of leadership.
Narrator: He was the youngest President in history, just 42; the first to have been born in a city; The first to be known by his initials t.
R.
He was an author and naturalist, bird-watcher and big-game hunter, historian and expansionist, moral crusader and shrewd politician.
And he was also a proud husband and father whose 6 boisterous children transformed the dark, formal executive mansion into a giant playhouse overnight.
Man: He is a hyperactive adult, is what Theodore Roosevelt is, but the man is brilliant.
I think he's very close to a genius, if there is such a thing as a genius.
Of all the presidents of the United States.
He could speed-read before anybody knew the expression, let alone how to do it, and quote from what he'd read 5 years later.
He spoke a variety of languages terribly, almost incomprehensibly in some cases, but that didn't slow him down.
Man: The first President to go down in a submarine; The first President to leave the country during the course of his time in office; The first President to send a transatlantic cable for the purposes of diplomacy; The first President to own an automobile; And more important than all of those, the first President to win the nobel peace prize; And greater still the first President ever to invite an African American to dine with him in the White House.
And that's a short list.
Narrator: He had pledged to "continue, absolutely unbroken, the policy of President McKinley," but he also had a reputation for independence and unpredictability.
He had been taught by his father to view the world in terms of right and wrong And to see himself always as the defender of the right.
Will: He carried a pulpit around with him.
He really was this bully pulpit was an appendage.
He was a moralist first, last and always and not one racked by doubts.
Man: He also understood modern technology.
He understood the cycles of the newspaper business.
He understood that he could claim center stage if he wanted to.
And by claiming center stage he could get his message out to the American people in a way previous presidents often had not bothered to.
Narrator: Among those waiting most eagerly to see what Theodore Roosevelt would do were two young members of his own clan His orphaned niece, Eleanor, just 16, studying in england and following his activities in the newspapers, and his young fifth cousin, Franklin, a student at Harvard but already intrigued by the idea of following into politics, the man his mother called "your noble kinsman.
" Will: It was from Teddy Roosevelt that the American people first got their sense of political excitement from the President.
They've looked for many things from Washington competence, leadership, help.
But excitement? This is entertainment.
[Trolley bell clangs.]
Man: October 17, 1901, the "Atlanta Constitution.
" Tonight, just before 8:00, a negro in evening dress presented himself at the White House door, and, giving his name, said that he was to dine with the President.
Booker Washington has made several visits to the White House and his face is known there, so he was at once admitted into the private apartment.
Narrator: Within hours of becoming President, Roosevelt had wired booker t.
Washington, President of the tuskegee institute and the most powerful black man in America, asking him to come and see him.
Each man wanted something from the other.
Negro citizens had been brutally and systematically disenfranchised throughout the South.
Washington wanted the new President's assurance that he would continue to appoint African Americans to federal jobs and resist those Republicans who wanted to crack the solid Democratic South by turning the party of Lincoln "lily white.
" Roosevelt, on the other hand, wanted to make sure that he and he alone controlled all the black delegates to the republican convention in 1904.
The dinner invitation for Washington was a matter of simple courtesy, he said.
"The very fact that I felt a moment's qualm on inviting him" because of his color made me ashamed of myself and made me "send the invitation.
" A reporter for one of the wire services noticed Washington's name in the register of visitors and filed a story.
Although black slaves had built the executive mansion and black servants had waited upon all of its occupants, no black American had ever dined there before and not only had the President dined with Washington but he had done so in the company of his wife and teen-aged daughter, Alice.
Man: White men of the South, how do you like it? White women of the South, how do you like it? The negro is not the equal of the white man.
Mr.
Roosevelt might as well try to rub the stars out of the firmament as try to erase that conviction from the hearts of the American people.
"New Orleans times-democrat" narrator: "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger," said senator Ben tillman of South Carolina, "will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.
" The President was astonished at the furor.
"I would not lose my self- respect by fearing to have a man like booker t.
Washington to dinner, " he wrote, " if it cost me every political friend I have got.
" Washington remained Roosevelt's most important African-American ally, but the President never again asked him or any other black person, to dine at the White House.
[Metal clanging loudly.]
When Theodore Roosevelt became President, industrial production had never been higher or the profits greater.
But only a handful of men dominated American finance and industry and reaped those profits.
Through the manipulation of some 250 big interlocking, interstate corporations Monopolistic trusts They dictated the rates farmers paid to ship their products and the wages and hours and conditions industrial workers had to accept.
[Clang.]
They decided the cost to consumers of everything: From coal to whiskey, canned carrots to lamp oil.
And they destroyed small businessmen who dared try to compete with them.
J.
Pierpont Morgan, the new York financial titan, who had been a friend of the President's father, spoke for most of the men who ran the trusts when he said, "I owe the public nothing.
" That attitude was anathema to Theodore Roosevelt.
He had a patrician scorn for mere wealth and an inbred sense of responsibility toward society.
Man: I have been in a great quandary over trusts.
I do not know what attitude to take.
I do not intend to play a demagogue.
On the other hand, I do intend to see that the rich man is held to the same accountability as the poor man, and when the rich man is rich enough to buy unscrupulous advice from very able lawyers, this is not always easy.
Jenkinson: I think Roosevelt understood that the trusts were important but they were getting out of control.
When, the Constitution was written in 1787, there were no corporations, there were almost no banks.
So all this had sprung up in the 19th century and particularly after the civil war.
The only counterweight to capitalism is government.
Labor would like to be the counterweight but it isn't quite yet.
So the one entity that can really create a restraining mechanism on runaway capitalism is government.
And if the Constitution doesn't seem to want that, we're gonna do it anyway.
Narrator: On February 18, 1902, without any warning, the President ordered his justice department to file suit against one of the trusts in which j.
P.
Morgan had a major interest, the northern securities company.
Its goal was the monopolistic control of all of the rail roads between the Great Lakes and the Pacific Ocean.
[Train bell clangs.]
Morgan was stunned.
He hurried to the White House.
"If we have done anything wrong," he told the President, "send your man to my man and they can fix it up.
" "That can't be done," the President said.
"We don't want to fix it up," his Attorney General philander knox added, "we want to stop it.
" Morgan asked if the administration planned to attack any of his other interests.
Roosevelt replied, not unless they'd done something wrong.
The supreme court would eventually uphold Roosevelt's actions, finding northern securities had been in illegal restraint of trade.
The President never directly challenged Morgan again, but he would invoke the sherman anti-trust act against 40 other trusts during his presidency, more than all 3 of his predecessors combined.
He did not believe that economic concentration in itself was bad, but he was confident the federal government had the power and the moral duty to curb its worst excesses.
Will: What was new in urban life, what was new in all these cities into which immigrants were pouring as never before, what was new was a kind of interconnectedness, a sense in which what happened in Wisconsin to the price of milk and what happened in Cincinnati to the price of pork, and what happened to the railway costs of shipping goods to the east and out to the west and elsewhere, affected everybody.
Therefore, the federal government as the unifier of the nation was implicitly involved in everything.
This was the beginning, at the beginning of the 20th century, what the 20th century became in America: A great centralizing nation-creating force.
Man: The great corporations are the creatures of the state, and the state not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control them wherever need of such control is shown.
Will: Government was to be a countervailing power.
It's almost the language of newtonian physics, the language of our Constitution, checks and balances.
This was checks and balances outside the Constitution.
That the meat trust and the steel trust and the oil trust were big, maybe they're beneficial, maybe they're inevitable, but they should not operate alone.
The government must grow to reach up to where they were.
[Whistling and cheering.]
[Applause.]
Woman: I wonder how a man so thick-set, of rather abdominal contour, with eyes heavily spectated, could have so much an air of magic and wild romance about him, could give one so stirring an impression of adventure and chivalry.
The "metropolitan magazine.
" Narrator: Fueled by cup after cup of coffee, served to him in a special mug his eldest son said was as big as a bathtub, Theodore Roosevelt raced through his day.
Letters were answered upon receipt A lifetime total of 150,000, dictated to shifts of weary stenographers.
Jenkinson: Jefferson wrote 22,000 letters, and we regard him as one of the great correspondents in American history.
Roosevelt wrote at least 150,000 letters.
He's the writing-est President in American history, by far.
And a number of his books are American classics.
So he's an intellectual.
He read a book a day, sometimes 3 books in a day when he had some leisure.
You think of Jefferson as America's renaissance man, but it's really Roosevelt.
McCullough: He would not stop talking.
He was a one-man gasbag.
But it was so interesting that most people didn't mind.
One of my favorite stories is, when he heard that there was a famous big game hunter in Washington, and he said to some of the people on his staff, "get that man over here.
I'd really like to meet him.
" So the this big, strapping, English fellow was taken into the President's office.
And the door was closed and people outside the office heard this talking going on.
Finally the man emerged about an hour and a half later looking just beat down, just as though he'd been through a storm.
And one of the President's staff said, "what did you tell" the President?" He said, "I told him my name.
" Jenkinson: We love him because of the energy.
His laugh was infectious.
His son Ted said, "my father had" a dozen eggs for breakfast every morning.
" So he's a large man, and he's larger-than-life.
Roosevelt once said, "there's nothing quite so exhilarating" as being thrown over the shoulders of a 300-pound Japanese man.
" He played all these wild games in the White House.
He wrestled with diplomats.
He played a game called single stick with Leonard Wood in which they would wrap themselves up in cushions and then beat the living daylights out of each other with sticks until Roosevelt had to stop.
Narrator: He boxed with a young aide, too, until a blow caused him to lose vision in his left eye.
"Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing," he remembered.
"I then took up jiujitsu for a year or two.
" Photographers were forbidden to cover his daily tennis games because he thought voters considered tennis a rich man's pastime.
But when a cameraman failed to capture his horse jumping over an obstacle, he was more than happy to make the jump again.
"Roosevelt bit me," the editor William Allen White said, "and I went mad.
" [Trolley bell clanging.]
Narrator: In the late summer of 1902, Roosevelt set out on a two- week tour of New England, campaigning for trust reform.
He was on his way to speak at the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, country club on September 3rd [Horse nickers; Crash.]
When a trolley car slammed into his carriage.
His bodyguard was killed.
Roosevelt was hurled 30 feet, landed on his face, and badly injured his left shin.
He was forced to spend several weeks in a wheelchair, confronted now with a new crisis that threatened not only the nation's economy but his own political survival.
Man: Coal mining is a business Not a religious, sentimental, or academic proposition.
The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of the country.
George f.
Baer, President, Philadelphia & reading coal and iron company.
Narrator: America ran on anthracite coal, much of it mined from Pennsylvania hillsides.
It was a nightmarish business.
16-hour days.
The constant threat of cave-ins and explosions.
Boys as young as 10 breaking big chunks into small ones.
Low wages that had not been raised for more than 20 years And company-owned stores intended to swallow up what little money the miners could scrape together.
And dominating all of it, mine owners adamantly opposed to change.
In the spring, the united mine workers union had called for a strike.
140,000 men laid down their pick axes.
Management refused even to hear their grievances.
Over the next several months, the price of coal rose from $5.
00 to $30 a ton.
Winter was coming.
Homes would remain unheated.
Roosevelt believed there was a real chance of what he called "the most awful riots this country has ever seen.
" The administration was sure to take the blame.
Jenkinson: And Roosevelt decided for the good of the country that he needed to intervene.
The problem was he had no constitutional authority of any sort to intervene.
Narrator: The President summoned both sides to Washington to discuss what he called "a matter of vital" concern to the whole nation.
" Jenkinson: Roosevelt holds them together and he says, "gentlemen", I want you to agree to arbitrate.
" And the coal operators say, "no way, we're not doing it.
" We don't have to.
" And Roosevelt says, "very well then.
" "I will nationalize the mines and use the United States army to run them for the good of this people.
" And they all say, "you have no constitutional authority" of any sort to do that.
" And he says, "I know I don't.
" "The President has a moral duty to the American people that is "higher than his constitutional duty.
And by Godfrey, I'm gonna do it if I have to.
" Narrator: A conservative congressman confronted the President.
"What about the Constitution of the United States?" He asked.
"How could private property be put to public purposes without due process of law?" Roosevelt grasped his visitor's lapels.
"The Constitution was made for the people and not the people "for the Constitution," he said.
The mine owners retreated, but only slightly.
They agreed to follow the suggestions of a presidential commission provided no member of the united mine workers union sat on it.
But Roosevelt was determined that labor have a voice and appointed the head of the rail road conductor's union, instead.
The owners objected until the President told them, with a straight face, that he was naming him as a "sociologist," not a union man.
Man: I shall never forget the mixture of relief and amusement I felt when I thoroughly grasped the fact that while they would heroically submit to anarchy rather than have tweedledum, yet if I would call it tweedledee, they would accept it with rapture; It gave me an illuminating glimpse into one corner of the mighty brains of these "captains of industry.
" Narrator: The mine owners continued to refuse to recognize the union, but they did agree to a 10% pay raise and a 9-hour day.
The strike ended.
American homes would be heated and in the midterm elections, the Republicans would maintain majorities in both houses of congress.
[Cart bangs.]
Roosevelt was jubilant.
He was the first President to mediate a labor dispute, the first to treat labor as a full partner, the first to threaten to employ federal troops to seize a strike-bound industry.
And it had all worked.
Man as Franklin: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
October 26, 1902.
Dearest mama, it has been very chilly here for the past week, and the Harvard buildings have been cold through lack of fuel, but now that the strike is settled, the coal has begun to come in small quantities.
In spite of the President's success in settling the trouble, I think that he makes a serious mistake in interfering politically, at least.
His tendency to make the executive power stronger than the houses of congress is bound to be a bad thing, especially when a man of weaker personality succeeds him in office.
Ever with love, f.
D.
R.
Narrator: Franklin Roosevelt was a Harvard sophomore now and echoing the conservative opinions of classmates whose well-to-do parents were appalled at his cousin's willingness to deal directly with labor.
His own mother disagreed.
"One cannot help loving and admiring him the more for it," she told her son, "when one realizes that he tried to" right the wrong.
" When James Roosevelt, Franklin's father, had died in 1900, Sara moved to Boston to be closer to her son.
She interested herself in every aspect of his life, exulted in his successes and overlooked his failures, just as she always had.
Successes did not come easily.
He was not an outstanding student or especially well-liked by his classmates.
Many of them thought him an over-eager lightweight, just as his schoolmates at Groton had.
He did become the editor of the "Crimson," and scored a minor scoop when he learned his famous cousin was coming to Cambridge, but when he ran for class marshal he lost.
Still too slight for sports, he led cheers at a football game Though he admitted it made him feel "like a damned fool" waving my arms and legs before several thousand "amused spectators.
" He was elected to several clubs, and fully expected an invitation to join Harvard's most exclusive club, the porcellian.
He was a "legacy," after all: His own father had been an honorary member; His famous cousin, Theodore, belonged.
But Franklin was blackballed, probably by someone who knew him at Groton, which made it even worse.
As always, he let no one know how hurt he was, but 15 years later, he would confide to a young relative that his rejection by porcellian had been the "greatest" "disappointment" of his life.
He was disappointed in love, as well.
Alice Sohier was the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Massachusetts yachtsman The "loveliest" debutante of her year, Franklin remembered And after courting her for several months he asked her to marry him.
One day he hoped to be President like his fifth cousin, he told her, and he hoped to have no fewer than 6 children, the same number that now called the executive mansion home.
Alice turned him down.
Later, she would say that she'd rejected his proposal in part because "I did not wish to become a cow.
" Franklin never told his mother about Alice, and to ensure she did not know too much about his private life, had used a secret code in his terse diary.
But within weeks of his parting with Alice Sohier in the late summer of 1902, a new name began to appear in its pages.
Man: I have always been fond of the old west African proverb: "Speak softly and carry a big stick and you will go far.
" Narrator: The American expansionism Roosevelt had advocated since long before his days at the Navy department had succeeded beyond his dreams.
The United States was now a world power.
It had annexed Hawaii, driven Spain from the new world, dominated Cuba and Puerto Rico, wrested the Philippines from the Spanish and then begun a brutal, bloody campaign to subjugate the philippine people, who wanted to be free of foreign rule by anyone, including Americans.
Tens of thousands died so that the United States could gain a foothold in the pacific.
To anti-imperialists, like mark twain, such military adventures betrayed American principles and Roosevelt himself was nothing more than a "showy charlatan.
" Man as twain: I am an anti-imperialist.
I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.
Narrator: Criticism did not much concern Theodore Roosevelt.
He divided the world into what he called "civilized" nations industrialized and mostly white And "uncivilized" nations that produced raw materials, bought products instead of manufacturing them, and were incapable, he believed, of self-government.
The great enemy of civilization was what he called "chaos.
" To combat it, it was the duty of "civilized and orderly" "powers" to police the rest.
Britain should be responsible for India and Egypt.
Japan Which Roosevelt now numbered among the "civilized" nations because it had become an industrial and military power Should control Korea and the Yellow Sea.
And the United States, and only the United States, must police the Western hemisphere.
It was called the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe doctrine.
McCullough: I don't think Americans by nature are very comfortable with imperialism and never were.
And had he tried to be more imperialistic than he was, he would have been stopped.
I think he believed in power.
He was not as good as he should have been in dealing with foreign nations and particularly if he thought they were inferior to our way of life or to us as a people.
His very high-handed treatment of the Colombians during the negotiations for the Panama treaty was inexcusable.
Narrator: For Roosevelt, one great expansionist vision remained unfulfilled.
For more than half a century, American and European investors had dreamed of a central American canal linking the Atlantic to the pacific.
Roosevelt believed such an inter-ocean pathway was now indispensable for the full exercise of American naval power.
A French company was already trying to build a canal across the jungle-covered Panama province in the nation of Colombia, but that effort had stalled, a victim of poor planning, lack of money, and deadly tropical diseases.
When the French offered to sell their rights, Roosevelt agreed to buy them, then instructed his secretary of state, John Hay, to negotiate a treaty with Colombia.
It called for a payment of $10 million, plus an annual rental fee for a 6-mile "canal zone" across the isthmus.
But the Colombian senate rejected the deal, and then demanded double the price.
Roosevelt was enraged.
"I do not think that the bogota lot of Jack rabbits "should be allowed permanently to bar one of the future "highways of civilization," he said.
The refusal of the Colombian senate to honor its government's commitment was just the latest embodiment of the kind of "chaos" he deplored.
Brands: Roosevelt believed that a canal across the central American isthmus would be good for the United States and good for civilization.
It would also be good for Theodore Roosevelt.
He often mingled those three.
And he believed that anybody, any government, any person who stood in the way of that was obstructing civilization.
And Roosevelt had very little patience for those people who didn't see the way history was going, the way history is supposed to go in the same light that he did, and he simply wouldn't allow them to get in the way.
Narrator: He was determined to get an American canal underway.
He would not attack Colombia directly, but he would exploit the aspirations of the people of Panama province, who had for 50 years asserted their wish to be independent of bogota.
Roosevelt agreed to meet with Phillipe Bunau-Varilla, a lobbyist for the French canal-builders, who was in touch with rebels already eager to rise against Colombian rule.
It was a delicate conversation: What did the frenchman think was going to happen in Panama province? "Mr.
President," his visitor said, "a revolution.
" Roosevelt was careful to say nothing about how the United States might respond.
His silence spoke volumes.
Man: He had no assurances in any way, but he is a very able fellow, and it was his business to find out what he thought our government would do.
I have no doubt that he was able to make a very accurate guess and to advise his people accordingly.
In fact, he would have been a very dull man had he been unable to make such a guess.
[Gunshots.]
Narrator: 5 days later, the rebels proclaimed their independence.
An American cruiser landed troops to overcome the handful of Colombian soldiers the revolutionaries hadn't already bought off.
It was all over within 72 hours.
The President was presiding at a cabinet meeting at 11:35 on the morning of November 6, 1903, when a messenger brought him the happy news.
By the time lunch was served, the United States had recognized the brand-new Republic of Panama.
"The people of the isthmus," Roosevelt would claim, "rose literally as one man.
" "Yes," said a senate critic, "and that man was Roosevelt.
" [Explosions.]
Work on the great canal began again, but now it was an American project.
And Roosevelt himself would not be able to resist seeing it for himself, the first President ever to leave the country while in office.
Will: The Panama canal is one of the great achievements of the human race.
I mean just a stupendous achievement, wonderfully conceived, brilliantly executed, with all kinds of ancillary benefits Conquest of disease and other things.
And it's the sort of thing that America did just to affirm its greatness.
It's better to do it that way than conquering other people.
This was a wholly beneficial addition.
Now we did get the land for the Panama canal by a not-too-salubrious deal with certain central American countries.
But as was said at the time of the Panama canal treaty, "we stole it fair and square.
" Man as Teddy: I took the canal zone and let congress debate, and while the debate goes on, the canal does, too.
And now instead of discussing the canal before it was built, which would have been harmful, they merely discuss me A discussion which I regard with benign interest.
Narrator: For Thanksgiving that year, Franklin Roosevelt and his mother traveled to the delano family homestead at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, rather than face the prospect of being at Springwood without his father, Mr.
James.
After dinner, Franklin took Sara for a walk in the garden.
He had something to tell her.
He had fallen in love with his fifth cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, the orphaned daughter of the President's late brother, Elliot.
He had asked her to marry him.
She had said yes.
Sara was stunned.
They were too young, she thought: Franklin was just 21; Eleanor only 19.
And if they married, she feared she would be left alone.
Franklin did his best to reassure her.
"You know, dear mummy, that nothing can ever change what we have always been and always will be to each other," he wrote.
"Only now you have two children to love and to love you.
" Woman: It is impossible for me to tell you how I feel toward Franklin.
I can only say that my one great wish is always to prove worthy of him.
I know just how you feel and how hard it must be, but I do want you to learn to love me a little.
Narrator: Being loved a little was the best Eleanor Roosevelt dared wish for.
"Franklin had always been so secure in every way," she remembered, "and then he discovered that I was" perfectly insecure.
" Everything in her upbringing had seemed calculated to make her feel that way.
Her beautiful mother, Anna hall, had been distracted, disappointed in her daughter's looks and called her "granny.
" Woman: She made her feel unattractive.
And she made her feel diminished.
And Eleanor Roosevelt grew up really feeling both that her mother didn't love her and that she failed her mother.
Man: Her mother was very beautiful and quite self-obsessed, I think.
But she was subject to headaches, and she would allow Eleanor to rub her forehead and soothe her for hours.
And she says in her autobiography that that was when she realized that the way to be loved was to be of use to others.
And that lesson she never forgot.
Woman: I can't even bear to think of what it was like for her when her mother would call her "granny.
" And yet to be able somehow because of that sadness to connect to other people for whom fate had also dealt an unkind hand, somehow that connection gave her the strength because her vulnerability could be expressed by helping them.
Narrator: Her largely absent father whom she idealized and would never stop yearning for had in reality been an erratic alcoholic and delusional.
From afar, he sent her letters full of promises he could never keep: She would come and care for him someday, he said; they would travel the world together; He would show her the Taj Mahal by moonlight.
Ward: Eleanor Roosevelt suffered all her life from the romanticism that happens when you lose a parent.
She had the notion that somehow her mother had driven her wonderful father away when her father was, in fact, an alcoholic.
And she believed somehow the way small children do that the absent parent is a sort of fairy-tale person.
She never stopped believing.
When she was an old lady she asked a clergyman if she might possibly be reunited with him in heaven.
So it really was a life-long unexamined thing.
And it gave her a sort of unrealistic view of what men could be.
Narrator: Both her parents were dead by the time she was 10.
She and her younger brother, hall, for whom she would always feel responsible, were sent off to live with her grim, pious, maternal grandmother in Tivoli, New York.
An abusive nurse was with her, day and night.
An unstable aunt lived at home.
So did two drunken uncles.
None of them was much interested in Eleanor.
She was a lonely little girl, she remembered, timid, withdrawn, and "frightened of practically everything" Mice, the dark, other children, "displeasing" the people I lived with.
" [Children laughing.]
During her infrequent visits to Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt was always especially warm toward his late brother's daughter.
He once hugged her so hard, he tore the buttonholes out of her petticoat.
Woman: Well, she spoke about him when she was a child and how she was very fearful of her visits to his family because they were a rowdy bunch of kids having a good time, rushing around.
And also when her Uncle discovered she couldn't swim, he threw her into the water and then she was scared of water all her life.
Narrator: "Poor little soul, she is very plain," the President's wife Edith Roosevelt had written.
"Her mouth and teeth seem to have no future.
" It was the President's sister, Bamie, who would indirectly be Eleanor's salvation.
Bamie had once spent a season studying overseas with an extraordinary woman, named Marie Souvestre.
Now she suggested that Eleanor be sent to Souvestre's girl's school just outside London Allenswood.
Woman as Eleanor: I felt that I was starting a new life, free from all my former sins and traditions.
This was the first time in all my life that all my fears left me.
Narrator: Eleanor spent 3 years at Allenswood, the happiest of her life, she remembered.
Mademoiselle Souvestre insisted that her students be independent-minded, intellectually alive, and socially conscious.
"Why was your mind given you," she liked to ask her students, "but to think things out for yourself?" She devoted herself to the tall, diffident American orphan and brought out all the tact and intelligence, discipline and energy and empathy that would characterize her later in life.
Eleanor eventually became the most-admired girl in the school.
It was at Allenswood, a cousin recalled, "that she" for the first time was deeply loved and loved in return.
" "Whatever I have become," Eleanor would say many years later, "had its seeds in those 3 years of contact" with a liberal mind and strong personality.
" But when she was 17, her grandmother insisted she end her schooling and come home to prepare for her debut in New York society.
Woman: In her grandmother's circle, you joined society, you went to fancy dress balls, and you got married at 18.
And Eleanor Roosevelt was quite miserable about that, and always, to the end of her life, complained about how she was deprived of what she always wanted a real education.
Narrator: She spent that summer back at Tivoli, where one of her alcoholic uncles had become so uncontrollable, he could not be discouraged from spraying buckshot from his bedroom window at anyone who dared venture onto the lawn.
3 locks had to be installed on Eleanor's bedroom door.
"It was not," she remembered, "a very good preparation for being a gay and joyous debutante.
" Woman as Eleanor: I imagine that I was well-dressed, but there was absolutely nothing about me to attract anybody's attention.
By no stretch of the imagination could I fool myself into thinking that I was a popular debutante.
Narrator: On November 17, 1902, just 5 weeks after Franklin Roosevelt had said good-bye to Alice Sohier, he had attended the New York horse show at Madison square garden.
Several Roosevelt cousins were invited to sit in his half-brother Rosy's special box, including Eleanor.
She and Franklin had seen one another casually at family events over the years, but now he asked to see her again and again and again.
Ward: It happened on the rebound.
She was also Theodore Roosevelt's favorite niece.
But I think that was a very small part of the equation.
She was very intelligent.
She was very substantive.
There was a lot there.
He was fascinated by her substance, I think.
He truly did love her.
I think that's very important to understand.
Goodwin: I think he saw in Eleanor somebody who had deeper complexities, the part of him that wanted to reach out to other people.
She cared about issues.
I don't know how many other women in that social world that he was in would have talked that same way to him.
Perhaps it was opposites attracting in some ways.
He saw that stubbornness in her, that idealism.
He was much more pliable in a certain sense.
But it speaks really well of the depth to him that many people might not have seen at the time, that Eleanor was the girl that he fell in love with.
Narrator: A little over a year later, he invited her to Cambridge for the Harvard-Yale game.
That evening, he wrote another entry in his diary: "After lunch", I have a never-to-be- forgotten walk to the river "with my darling.
" He had proposed.
With her help, he said, he could make something of himself.
She had asked him, "why me? I am plain.
" I have little to bring you.
" But she had also said yes.
When Franklin told his mother his big news at Thanksgiving, she asked him to keep the engagement a secret for a year, to see if their feelings for one another were truly lasting.
[Drums beating; Crowd cheering.]
Man: His personality so crowds the room that the walls are worn thin and threaten to burst outwards.
You go to the White House, you shake hands with Roosevelt and hear him talk, and then go home to wring the personality out of your clothes.
Richard Washburn child.
Narrator: As the 1904 presidential election drew near, the executive mansion Newly rebuilt, refurbished, and officially renamed the White House Mirrored Theodore Roosevelt's enthusiasms.
Footmen wore blue-and- white Roosevelt livery.
The President's gilt initials gleamed from the sides of 3 new carriages.
The stuffed heads of a dozen north American mammals he'd shot personally stared down from the walls of the state dining room.
Theodore and Edith Roosevelt delighted in the company of writers, artists, and musicians, who were frequent visitors to the White House.
The pianist paderewski performed at one of Edith's musicales.
So did a promising young cellist named Pablo casals.
The President invited John singer sargent to live with the first family for a week while he painted TR's official portrait, and when Roosevelt learned that his favorite poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, was working 12 hours a day in the New York subway, he got him a less-demanding position at the New York customs house.
"A poet," he said, "can do much more for this country than the proprietor of a nail factory.
" The public loved reading about the Roosevelt White House, but they clamored to see the President in person, and he was more than happy to oblige.
Huge crowds turned out to see him wherever he went, and he went everywhere.
[Train whistle blows.]
Man as Teddy: Whenever I stopped at a small city or country town, I was greeted by the usual shy, self-conscious, awkward body of local committeemen, and spoke to the usual audience of thoroughly good American citizens.
That is, the audience consisted of the townspeople, but even more largely of gaunt, sinewy farmers and hired hands who had driven in with their wives and daughters, from 10 or 20 or even 30 Miles round about.
And for all the superficial differences between us, down at bottom these men and I think a good deal alike, or at least have the same ideals, and I am always sure of reaching them in speeches which many of my Harvard friends would think not only homely, but commonplace.
McCullough: He was the first American President who had the look and the sound and the education of a Harvard man, and there'd never been anything like that in American politics.
And I think part of the immense appeal of Theodore Roosevelt is that he didn't shed that background.
He didn't try to talk like the ordinary folk.
His upper-class accent, his upper-class tastes Once people got over that, then they realized we love him because he is this way, because he isn't trying to be just like we are.
He's himself.
And he's resolutely himself all through his life.
Narrator: That year, the democrats nominated judge alton b.
Parker of New York for President An able jurist but also, as Roosevelt said privately, "a neutral-tinted individual.
" The President promised voters what he called a "square deal," favoring neither capital nor labor, rich nor poor.
"If the cards do not come to any man," he said, "or if they do come, and he has not the power" "to play them, that is his affair.
"All I mean is that there shall be no crookedness in the dealing.
" Jenkinson: Here's what you can expect from your government.
You can expect a square deal, so that the rich man and the poor man are treated fairly, that there is due process that doesn't favor the rich.
Roosevelt's essential view was government needn't redistribute to the lower orders, but it should never align itself with the wealthy and the privileged against common people.
At the very least, government needs to be absolutely neutral in the way it treats the citizens of this country.
Narrator: By late October, a Roosevelt victory seemed so likely that the big financiers who both feared and hated him scurried to write handsome checks for his campaign.
Still, he wrote to one of his sons, he worried that he might not be elected President in his own right.
Man as Teddy: If things go wrong on election night remember, Kermit, that we are very, very fortunate to have had 3 years in the White House, and that I have had a chance to accomplish work such as comes to very, very few men in any generation; And that I have no business to feel downcast merely because when so much has been given me, I have not had even more.
Your loving father.
Narrator: Edith Roosevelt invited a few friends for dinner on election night "A little feast," she called it, "which can be turned into a festival" of rejoicing or into a wake as circumstances warrant.
" It was soon clear her husband would win by a landslide.
He took nearly every state outside the old Democratic confederacy.
"Have swept the country," he wired a friend.
"I had no idea there would be such a sweep.
" Then at this moment of personal triumph, and without consulting anyone, he made the worst blunder of his political career.
The Constitution said nothing about how many terms a President might serve.
But because George Washington had refused to stand for a third term, none of his successors had dared try to break that precedent.
Roosevelt could have argued that he would not really have had two full terms since he had shared his first with the assassinated William McKinley, but he viewed that as a mere technicality.
"Under no circumstances," he told the press, "will I accept another nomination.
" Narrator: As he spoke, Edith and his daughter Alice visibly flinched.
Brands: Roosevelt decided in the flush of victory on election night that he was going to silence all of those people who said that he was merely a politician.
And he said that he would not run for another term in 1908.
Now this appalled his wife, Edith.
It appalled all of his supporters.
It eventually appalled him.
Narrator: "I would cut my hand off," he told a friend, "if I could recall that statement.
" At the pinnacle of his power, he worried that he had made himself a lame duck.
He would do everything he could to make sure that would not happen.
Man as Teddy: Dear Franklin, we are greatly rejoiced.
I am as fond of Eleanor as if she were my daughter, and I like you and trust you and believe in you.
You and Eleanor are true and brave, and I believe you love each other unselfishly, and golden years open before you.
May all good fortune attend you both.
Give my love to your dear mother.
Your affectionate cousin, Theodore Roosevelt.
Narrator: On December 1, 1904, less than 3 weeks after Franklin Roosevelt had proudly cast his first presidential vote for his cousin, Theodore, he and Eleanor finally announced their engagement.
The newspapers paid most attention to the President's niece.
Franklin was identified only as a member of the New York yacht club who'd lost an election for class marshal at Harvard.
The year of secrecy about their relationship had been hard on both Franklin and Eleanor.
They had to meet without arousing the curiosity of friends or relatives or talkative servants, and they could rarely be alone together.
"I want you so much," Eleanor wrote after plans for one meeting had to be canceled.
Franklin's mother made things still more difficult.
She promised her son she would "love Eleanor and adopt her "fully when the right time comes," but meanwhile she looked for ways to keep them apart, even took her son on a Caribbean cruise in hope that he might get over his infatuation.
Meanwhile, Eleanor had discovered the rewards of useful work.
Like many debutantes of her era, she had volunteered to work with immigrant children in a settlement house In her case, on Rivington street on the lower east side.
Unlike most of her contemporaries, she took her work seriously.
She rode public transportation, worked overtime, sometimes turned down invitations rather than miss a class.
Cook: She meets with folks who create the junior league.
The junior league is made up of young women, just like Eleanor Roosevelt, very affluent, born to privilege, who recognize that there is no security for anybody when there's insecurity and misery for many.
Narrator: One afternoon, when Franklin dropped by to visit, a little girl fell ill.
Eleanor asked him to carry her home.
He did and never forgot the sights and foul smells of the tenement in which she lived.
"My God," he told Eleanor.
"I didn't know anyone lived like that.
" Ward: I think Eleanor Roosevelt played a very important part in making Franklin see the world out beyond the very elegant Harvard world that he had known, and it had an enormous impact on him.
And I really think that went on throughout their lives, when he couldn't move beyond his office she really did become his eyes and ears.
She was far, far more than that.
But she told him what was really happening in the real world all the time.
Narrator: She loved her work, found fulfillment in helping others that she never found elsewhere.
But she was willing to give up that work and the independent life it promised for marriage, hoping to find in her husband a confidant and to find in his mother something like the loving mother she had never had.
It was a bargain she would often regret.
Ward: Each wanted from a relationship something that the other in the end couldn't quite give.
She wanted an intimate, someone she could confide in, a husband who was always supportive and always there for her.
He could not provide that.
He wanted someone who had all the devotion to him that his mother had had but not the admonitory part, the part that told him what to do and what not to do.
And sadly Eleanor couldn't be worshipful and had to be admonitory.
["Hail to the chief" playing.]
Narrator: On March 4, 1905, the President invited the newly engaged couple to his inauguration.
Woman as Eleanor: Franklin and I went to our seats on the capitol steps just back of Uncle Ted and his family.
I was interested and excited, but politics still meant little to me, though I can remember the forceful manner in which Uncle Ted delivered his speech.
I told myself I had seen an historic event, and I never expected to see another inauguration in the family.
Narrator: Franklin never took his eyes off the President.
[Bagpipes playing.]
Narrator: 13 days later on March 17th, President Roosevelt was to lead the St.
Patrick's day parade up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt chose that day to marry in a cousin's parlor on east 76th street, so that the President could be there to give his late brother's daughter away.
Woman: The wedding of miss Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin delano Roosevelt, her cousin, took on the semblance of a national event.
The presence of President Roosevelt, the bride's Uncle, Miss Alice Roosevelt, and Mrs.
Roosevelt and, as some rather enthusiastic if not discreet woman observed, the entire family in every degree of Cousinship Made it very much like a "royal alliance.
" The "New York Times" narrator: When the reverend Endicott peabody of Groton, asked, "who giveth this woman in marriage?" The President shouted back, "I do!" His oldest daughter Alice remembered that "father always" wanted to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse "at every funeral, and the baby at every christening.
" As soon as Franklin and Eleanor exchanged their vows, he slapped the groom on the back.
"Well, Franklin," he said, "there's nothing like keeping the name in the family.
" Then, he hurried into the room where refreshments were served and held forth for an hour and a half.
The newlyweds were largely overlooked.
Franklin and Eleanor's honeymoon would last more than 3 months.
He assured his mother he and Eleanor were having a "scrumptious time.
" But there were private hints of strain: Franklin sleepwalked, suffered nightmares, developed persistent hives.
Eleanor grew jealous when she chose not to accompany him up an Italian mountainside and he went anyway, in a party that included an attractive new York milliner who happened to be staying at their hotel.
But everywhere they went, Franklin told his mother, all anyone wanted to talk about was cousin Theodore.
President Roosevelt had just succeeded at something no other statesman had dared attempt helping to end the conflict that threatened to disrupt the balance of power in the pacific.
For 2 years, Russia and Japan had been at war over which would dominate manchuria and Korea.
Russia had found itself on the losing end.
Japan occupied Korea, took Port Arthur, and sank most of the czar's fleet in the battle of Tsushima.
[Explosion.]
For the first time in centuries, an Asian power had defeated a Western one, but its victories had been won at a fearful cost.
Jenkinson: Roosevelt believed that the United States needed to assert itself and say, "we're a player.
" We're not that isolationist nation across the Atlantic.
We're part of this story now and we're going to "assert ourselves.
" He decides it would be ruinous for the future of the planet if either side won decisively.
He wanted Russia to be humbled by the Japanese and he admired the Japanese.
But he realized that if the Japanese won outright and devastated Russia, this would lead to a destabilization of the pacific.
And so he wanted to settle this before it got too far out of hand.
Narrator: In August of 1905, President Roosevelt was able to persuade both sides to agree to send representatives to a conference near Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Before talks began, he invited them aboard the presidential yacht in Oyster Bay, provided a stand-up lunch so that no one could claim he'd been slighted by the seating arrangements, and proposed a toast to which he insisted there be no responses, asking "in the interests of all mankind that a just and lasting peace may speedily be concluded.
" Then, he worked behind the scenes to hammer out an agreement the treaty of Portsmouth.
Each side could claim some kind of victory: Russia abandoned all claims to Korea; Japan dropped its demand for payment for the costs of the war; The disputed island of sakhalin was split in two.
Man as Teddy: This is splendid, this is magnificent.
This is a mighty good thing for Russia, a mighty good thing for Japan, and mighty good for me, too! Narrator: Roosevelt's friend and frequent critic, Henry Adams, declared him "the best" herder of emperors since Napoleon.
" For his efforts, Roosevelt was awarded the nobel peace prize, the first American to win any nobel prize.
But the President remained a realist about the prospects for a permanent peace in the pacific.
[Ship's horn blows.]
Man: Sooner or later, the Japanese will try to bolster up their power by another war.
Unfortunately for us, we have what they want most: The Philippines.
When it comes, we will win over Japan, but it will be one of the most disastrous conflicts the world has ever seen.
[Children talking.]
Man as Teddy: Oyster Bay.
August 26, 1905.
Dear Kermit, the other day a reporter asked Quentin something about me, to which that affable and canny young gentleman responded, "yes, I see him sometimes; But I" know nothing of his family life.
" Narrator: The country was as obsessed with Roosevelt's family as it was with him.
Sagamore Hill still provided some privacy.
Roosevelt cousins gathered there during the summer, sometimes 14 at a time.
The President led them on what he called "point-to-point" walks Long strenuous dashes through woods and marshes, pushing through brambles, crawling under fences or scrambling over them, and never, ever going around anything.
Brands: He didn't tell his children, especially his sons, that they needed to live up to his example.
But everything that he did indicated that people who didn't live up to that kind of example were somehow lesser individuals.
And the sons couldn't help but imbibe that attitude.
It was very difficult being a child, especially a son, of Theodore Roosevelt.
Narrator: Theodore, Jr Ted Was an 18-year-old Harvard freshman.
His father had pushed him so hard when he was small that Edith and a physician had had to intervene.
He remained a "regular bull terrier," his proud father wrote, stoical enough to have finished a Groton football game despite a broken collarbone.
16-year-old Kermit was shy, bookish, moody, a student at Groton who sometimes suffered from the family curse of depression.
But the White House was still home to 14-year-old Ethel and Archie, age 11.
Both were quiet and sweet-tempered.
7-year-old Quentin was sweet-tempered, too.
But he was also mischievous and irrepressible, a "fine" "little bad boy," according to his mother, fond of big words that he bit off just as his father did, and accustomed to giving orders to the band of small boys that called themselves "the White House gang.
" His father's nickname for him was "quentyquee.
" Narrator: The children's' pets were allowed to roam everywhere Rabbits, raccoons, cats, dogs, a badger named josiah that their father described as looking "like a mattress" with legs.
" It bit only legs, Archie assured nervous visitors, not faces.
They smuggled a pony into the White House elevator and up to the second floor, rolled giant snowballs down the White House roof and onto the heads of policemen, spattered Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington with spitballs, and used mirrors to reflect sunlight into the eyes of clerks trying to work in the neighboring state-war-Navy building.
Woman: Father doesn't care for me one-eighth as much as he does for the other children.
It is perfectly true that he doesn't, and lord, why should he? We are not in the least congenial, and if I don't care overmuch for him and don't take a bit of interest in the things he likes, why should he pay any attention to me or the things I live for, except to look on them with disapproval? Alice Roosevelt.
Narrator: Alice was 21, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt's first wife, Alice Lee, whose death remained so painful to him he could not bear to speak her name.
Her early life had been divided among her mother's parents, her aunt Bamie and her father and stepmother at Sagamore Hill.
Like her cousin Eleanor, she felt she had never had a real home of her own.
Jenkinson: She always felt like the fifth wheel.
She felt that for some reason or other TR resisted her.
And so there's a sort of tension in their relationship.
Alice had some of that mighty Rooseveltian energy.
But for a woman in this period, there were so few avenues to release that energy in a socially useful way, so she was straight-jacketed by the mores of her time.
Narrator: Edith and Theodore had urged her to remain ladylike, tractable, reserved To behave the way Eleanor did.
Instead, Alice set out to be "conspicuous.
" She had been the first teen-aged girl to grow up in the White House in a quarter of a century, was attractive, outspoken, desperate to be noticed.
She did everything Or almost everything A young woman of her age and standing should not have done.
She smoked.
She bet on the horses, took long un-chaperoned automobile rides in a bright red roadster, flirted with battalions of wealthy young men in New York and Newport and wore a green snake as a wriggling fashion accessory to divert attention during one of her father's meetings with the press.
Her face was everywhere Candy boxes, song sheets, the front pages of newspapers around the world.
The German Navy named a ship for her.
Overseas crowds hailed her as "princess Alice.
" Woman as Alice: The family was always telling me, "beware of publicity!" And there was publicity hitting me in the face every day.
And once stories got out, or were invented, I was accused of courting publicity.
I destroyed a savage letter on the subject from my father.
There was he, one of the greatest experts in publicity there ever was, accusing me of trying to steal his limelight.
Narrator: Alice Roosevelt would remain a Thorn in the side of one Roosevelt or another for decades.
Man: The "Washington Post.
" It is now universally recognized by experienced politicians of all parties that Roosevelt has more political acumen in one lobe of his brain than the whole militant tribe of American politicians have in their combined intelligence; That his political perception, so acute as to amount almost to divination, is superior to that of any American statesman of the present or immediate past era.
Narrator: In June of 1906, Theodore Roosevelt seemed almost invincible.
In his most recent message to congress, he had called for a series of national solutions to national problems, righting wrongs through progressive legislation.
The country was changing, and the "troublesome conscience" he had inherited from his father would not let him ignore those injustices.
Jenkinson: Roosevelt realized that we were no longer a rural people.
We were an urban people.
He realized that industry was out of control.
So when he looked at this, he thought, "well what can we do" to make sure that all Americans can thrive?" So he's essentially trying to do what Jefferson was trying to do in the "declaration of independence," but he's looking around at the technologies, the demographics, the ethnicity, and he realizes that in order to achieve a jeffersonian nation, you have to adopt hamiltonian means.
And so progressive is using government to bring about reforms that will enable everyone to thrive even if they don't have the advantages of the jeffersons, the Madisons, the monroes, the white anglo-Saxon peoples for whom the country works best.
The country has to work for everyone or it doesn't work for anyone in Roosevelt's mind.
[Train engine huffing.]
Narrator: Now, over the furious objections of the rail roads and the powerful republican senators they controlled, Roosevelt won passage of the hepburn act.
It empowered the interstate commerce commission to limit the rates the rail roads could charge to move goods from place to place, and for the first time in American history gave the rulings of a federal agency the force of law.
Will: One of Teddy Roosevelt's great accomplishments was the hepburn act.
No one remembers it now, but it was a big deal at that time because he not only favored federal regulation of rail road freight rates, but he did something no one had ever done before he campaigned as President around the country for a piece of legislation.
That was a shocking expansion of the pretenses of the presidency.
Narrator: Employing his skill to out think and outmaneuver the opposition behind the scenes and his uncanny ability to rally the people to his cause, he pushed through more bills that began to rewrite the role of government in American life.
With indirect help from crusading journalists, he championed the pure food and drug act, which demanded that the producers of everything from patent medicines to canned tomatoes accurately label their products.
And when the meat-packing trust tried to block an inspection bill that would have cleaned up their appalling slaughterhouses, Roosevelt released part of the findings of a federal investigation into industry practices and then threatened to make public the rest if they didn't back down.
They did.
Man as Teddy: I attack.
I attack iniquities.
I try to choose the time for an attack when I can get the bulk of the people to accept the principles for which I stand.
Narrator: Roosevelt enraged those whom he denounced as "malefactors of great wealth", especially those who had contributed to his 1904 campaign in hopes of having some control over his policies.
"We bought the son of a bitch," one said, "but he wouldn't stay bought.
" [Sea gulls calling.]
Will: Theodore Roosevelt understood the enormous energies that were being loosed in America.
And he saw that among the things they could devour, these forces, if not contained, would be some of the irreplaceable beauties of the country.
Narrator: The antiquities act Roosevelt had also signed in June of 1906 empowered the President to provide protection for prehistoric ruins as well as "objects" "of scientific interest" on federal lands without having to ask permission of the congress.
He immediately reinterpreted the act so that he could also save as national monuments some of the country's most extraordinary natural wonders, including devil's tower and the muir woods, mount Olympus, and more than 800,000 acres of the grandest canyon on earth.
Before Theodore Roosevelt left office And over the objections of the speaker of the house, Joseph g.
Cannon, who liked to say, "not one cent for scenery" He would create 51 bird sanctuaries, 4 national game refuges, and 18 national monuments.
He doubled the number of national parks from 5 to 10, saving Western landscapes like those where he had first learned that ceaseless action could defeat despair.
He also helped save the buffalo from extinction, leather animal he had actionable loved to shoot.
Air.
He set aside more than 280,000 square Miles of federal land under one kind of conservation protection or another An area larger than the state of Texas And created the United States forest service to see that the development of natural resources be done in a responsible, sustainable way.
[Birds chirping.]
Man: Surely our people do not understand even yet the rich heritage that is theirs.
There can be nothing more beautiful than the yosemite, the groves of giant sequoias and redwoods, the canyon of the Colorado, the canyon of the yellowstone, the 3 tetons.
And our children should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children's children forever with their majestic beauty unmarred.
We are not building this country of ours for a day.
It is to last through the ages.
Man: Office of the mayor, brownsville, Texas.
Dear Mr.
President, at a few minutes before midnight on Monday, August 13, 1906, a body of soldiers of the first battalion of the 25th United States infantry, colored, numbering between 20 to 30 men, began firing in town directly into dwellings, offices, stores, and at police and citizens.
Our women and children are terrorized.
Narrator: Back in August of 1906, President Roosevelt had ordered the war department inspector general, a white South carolinian, to investigate charges related to an alleged rampage in brownsville, Texas, by black troops that had left a white bartender dead and a police officer wounded.
The army was totally segregated then, and the soldiers had been abused and insulted by whites ever since they'd arrived in brownsville just 3 weeks earlier.
The soldiers denied any wrongdoing.
The regiment's white commanding officer backed them up.
His men had all been safely in their barracks on the night in question.
A Texas grand jury failed to indict any of the soldiers.
Race relations had not improved since Roosevelt invited booker t.
Washington to dinner at the White House in 1901.
More than 400 black men and women had been lynched since then.
Black voters were still barred from the polls throughout the South.
And a new generation of African Americans was growing impatient with booker t.
Washington's caution and his coziness with Roosevelt.
The President had made a few symbolic gestures toward civil rights.
He denounced the lawlessness of lynching and when whites in Indianola, Mississippi, forced his black appointee as postmistress to resign, he closed the post office and made them travel 20 Miles to get their mail.
But he also made much of his confederate ancestry whenever he was in the South and privately said it would take black people "many thousands of years" to match the intellectual powers of white people.
The inspector general's report on the brownsville incident recommended that the President should dismiss all of the soldiers, because none would confess.
Jenkinson: Booker t.
Washington wrote to him and said, "please, Mr.
President", "I will not criticize you publicly.
"You are my dear friend.
But I ask you to reopen this case and to look again.
" He refused and he got more and more righteous and shrill about it.
This is without question the most dishonorable moment of Roosevelt's long and extraordinary career.
Narrator: Roosevelt waited till November 7th, the day after hundreds of thousands of blacks cast their votes for his party's congressional candidates all across the north, and then dismissed all 167 men from the service.
One had fought alongside TR in Cuba.
That sergeant remembered splitting his rations with Roosevelt himself after the battle of Las Guasimas.
None of the men would get a penny in pension.
Some black intellectuals, including w.
E.
B.
Dubious, began to suggest that African-Americans now abandon the party of Abraham Lincoln for the democrats.
Roosevelt angrily denounced critics of his brownsville decision as naive "sentimentalists," but when the time came to write his autobiography, he chose to make no mention of the case.
[Sleigh bells jingling.]
[Trolley bell clanging.]
Woman as Sara: A Christmas present to Franklin and Eleanor from mama.
Number and street not quite yet decided 19 or 20 feet wide.
Narrator: In the winter of 1908, Franklin and Eleanor moved into the 6-story New York townhouse his mother had built for them at 49 east 65th street.
With them came their first two children, 2-year-old Anna and 11-month-old James, as well as Eleanor's younger brother hall and 6 servants.
Sara and 3 more servants occupied the house's twin at number 47.
The Roosevelt family crest was carved above the common entrance and open doors on three floors connected the households.
Sara had hired the staff.
She and her son had also overseen the construction and furnishing.
Eleanor had played almost no part.
Not long after they moved in, Franklin found her weeping.
He asked what was wrong.
Woman as Eleanor: I said I did not like to live in a house, which was not in any way mine, one that I had done nothing about and which did not represent the way I wanted to live.
Being an eminently reasonable person, he thought I was quite mad and told me so gently, and said I would feel different in a little while and left me alone until I should become calmer.
Narrator: Eleanor did calm down, she recalled, but her outburst was the first sign that in the interest of her marriage she had simply been "absorbing the personalities of those around me and letting "their tastes and interests dominate me" and that she resented it.
Narrator: Franklin delighted in his children.
Eleanor seemed mostly puzzled by them.
"I had never had any interest in dolls or in little children," she remembered, "and I knew absolutely nothing about handling or feeding a baby.
" Nannies hired and fired by her mother-in-law saw to such details.
"Brother fell out of his chair this morning," she noted one day.
"Anna did not come to breakfast because she said, 'no, I won't.
'" misbehavior alarmed her; So did the nurses who told her how to handle it.
Goodwin: I think Eleanor never found her stride as a mother, in part because she had had such terrible mothering on her own, her own mother being so cold to her, dying when Eleanor was young, but also maybe never accepting Eleanor for who she was.
So she had no model to go toward when she had her own children.
Narrator: Franklin had attended Columbia law school, passed the New York bar, and, with the help of family connections, had gone to work as a clerk for the Wall Street law firm of Carter, led yard, and mil burn.
The law itself didn't interest him much.
A member of the firm recalled that he "tended to dance" "on the top of the hills" and leave to others the hard work on the slopes below.
But at the courthouse, he got to know all kinds of people he'd never encountered at Groton or Harvard ambulance chasers and penniless plaintiffs and witnesses both credible and incredible.
And "thanks to Uncle Ted," his wife remembered, he was already interested in politics.
A few months after the Roosevelts moved to 65th street, Eleanor gave birth to a third child, at 11 pounds, "the biggest and most beautiful of all the babies," she remembered.
They named him Franklin, Jr.
And immediately registered his name at Groton.
That July, Eleanor and several servants took the 3 children to their summer home in Campobello, new brunswick.
Sara had bought the younger Roosevelts their own "cottage" on the island, entirely separate from hers.
There was no electricity, no telephone; All the cooking had to be done on a coal stove.
Eleanor loved it.
It was hers, the first real home she had ever known.
[Crickets chirping.]
But as the weeks went by, it became clear that something was wrong with the new baby's heart.
Doctors were consulted, first on the island, then in Hyde Park, finally back in Manhattan.
No one seemed able to do anything.
Woman as Eleanor: November 1st.
At a little before 7 A.
M.
, Franklin called my room.
"Better come, mama, baby is sinking.
" I went in.
The little angel ceased breathing at 7:25.
Franklin and Eleanor are most wonderful, but poor Eleanor's mother's heart is well nigh broken.
She so hoped and cannot believe her baby is gone from her.
November 2nd.
I sat often beside my little grandson.
It is hard to give him up, and my heart aches for Eleanor.
Narrator: Franklin Roosevelt, Jr.
Was buried in the Roosevelt family plot at St.
James church in Hyde Park.
It seemed "cruel," Eleanor wrote, "to leave him out there in the cold.
" Woman as Eleanor: I reproached myself very bitterly for having done so little about the care of this baby.
I felt he had been left too much to the nurse and I knew too little about him, that in some way I was to blame.
Narrator: Within a month of her baby's burial, Eleanor would find herself pregnant again.
Man: A man has to take advantage of his opportunities, but the opportunities have to come.
If there is not war, you don't get the great general; if there is not the great occasion, you don't get the great statesman; If Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name.
Narrator: Theodore Roosevelt accomplished a great deal during his 7 years as President the break-up of northern securities, the coal strike settlement, the Panama canal, the pure food and drug act, the hepburn act, an end to the Russo-Japanese war, millions of wild acres preserved for future generations to enjoy, but he himself was not satisfied.
Roosevelt could not class himself as a great President because he had faced no great crisis while in office.
McCullough: There was no war, no crisis.
Some people thought he was the crisis.
But you don't have to have a war in order to be immortalized as a great President.
He's shown that.
He proved that.
Narrator: Now hampered by his own pledge not to run again in 1908, Roosevelt hand-picked a successor, his good friend and secretary of war, William Howard taft of Ohio, who promised to remain true to the progressive principles Theodore Roosevelt had laid down.
Goodwin: Their friendship went a long way back, and they shared a similar outlook on life.
They were both civil service reformers.
They spent so much time together that Corinne, Theodore's sister, said that they seemed to love each other.
TR ran his campaign.
He told him advice at every moment.
He edited his speeches.
He said he was as nervous about taft's campaign as he was about his own.
And he was thrilled when taft won.
[Camera flash bulbs popping.]
He thought that this amiable person who seemed to share his values and his progressive ideals would make the perfect President to put into law all the things that he had then put out there as executive orders, but it didn't work out the way he hoped.
Narrator: As he left the white house, Roosevelt did his best to seem cheerful, but when a friend assured him he had not finished with politics, he said, "my dear fellow, for heaven's sake, don't talk "about my having a future.
My future is in the past.
" He was just 50 years old.
[Drums beating.]
Man: The hunter who wanders through these lands sees sights which ever afterward remain fixed in his mind A giraffe looking over the tree tops at the nearing horsemen; zebras barking in the moonlight, as the laden caravan passes on its night March through a thirsty land.
And after years, there shall come to him memories of the lion's charge, the gray bulk of the elephant close at hand in the somber woodland, of the rhinoceros, truculent and stupid, standing in the bright sunlight on the empty plain.
These things can be told, but there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm.
[People singing in native language.]
Narrator: All his life, Roosevelt had dreamed of hunting big game in Africa.
Now with his son Kermit at his side, he could make that dream a reality and not be tempted to answer reporters' questions about how his successor was doing.
On that subject, he promised to be as "silent as an oyster.
" When he sailed for British east Africa, j.
P.
Morgan was supposed to have said, "every American hopes that every lion" will do its duty.
" The Roosevelt safari reminded onlookers of a military campaign.
A vast American flag flew over the ex-President's tent.
Skilled white hunters served as guides.
3 naturalists from the Smithsonian institution saw to the steadily growing collection of specimens.
206 porters carried supplies, including cans of California peaches and Boston baked beans, 90 pounds of jams, 4 tons of salt to cure animal skins, and 60 miniature volumes, ranging from "Alice in wonderland" to the "federalist papers.
" His tent was cared for by 2 men.
2 more saw to his horses.
Another pair was responsible for his guns and ammunition.
For good luck on the hunt, the President carried a gold-mounted rabbit's foot, given to him by his friend, the former heavyweight champion, John I.
Sullivan.
[Gunshot.]
He didn't need it.
Together, his and Kermit's rifles accounted for 512 animals and large birds, including 20 rhinoceroses [Gunshot.]
17 lions [gunshot.]
11 elephants, [Gunshot.]
And 9 giraffes, and not including countless smaller birds felled by their shotguns.
They kept only a dozen trophies for themselves, Roosevelt said, and "shot nothing that was not used" either as a museum specimen or for meat.
" [Gunshot.]
The expedition would eventually send home crates and barrels containing 11,397 preserved creatures.
Roosevelt was away from Edith and the rest of his family for 11 months.
Man as Teddy: Oh, sweetest of all sweet girls, last night I dreamed that I was with you, that our separation was but a dream; and when I woke up it was almost too hard to bear.
You have made the real happiness of my life.
Do you remember when you were such a pretty engaged girl and said to your love, "no, Theodore, that I cannot allow?" Darling, I love you so.
How very happy we have been these last 23 years.
Your own lover, Theodore.
Narrator: In March of 1910, Edith and Theodore were finally reunited at khartoum and began a 3-month parade across north Africa and Europe, making headlines wherever he went.
He upset Egyptians by telling them they were not ready for independence from Great Britain.
In Paris, he hurried Edith through the louvre Refusing to look at ruben's nudes because he thought them not suitable for mixed company.
Near Berlin, he watched maneuvers with kaiser Wilhelm and took the opportunity to warn him that a war between Germany and england would be "an unspeakable calamity.
" [Applause.]
Everywhere, crowds cheered him as if he still held office.
Woman: Father is so tired that whenever we go in a motor, he falls asleep.
The people are quite mad about him and stand around the hotel to see him go in and out.
Though it was midnight, I had to send him out on our balcony before they would disperse.
Narrator: King Edward VII of england died while Roosevelt was still abroad and President taft asked him to represent the United States at the London funeral.
He spent so much time with royalty that week, he said, that he felt "that if I met another king, I should bite him.
" Narrator: No one followed Theodore Roosevelt's travels with more interest than his fifth cousin, Franklin, did.
He was eager now to begin following the political path his relative had blazed.
But other members of the Roosevelt clan harbored similar ambitions.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
Was just 20 years old, still too young to run for office, but already being called the "crown prince" in the newspapers; His 3 younger brothers might choose to run for national office someday, as well, and all of them would run as Republicans.
When the Democratic dutchess county district attorney dropped by Franklin's law office and asked if he'd be interested in running for the state legislature, he jumped at the chance.
It was, after all, the party of his beloved late father, Mr.
James.
No democrat could win in dutchess county unless he could peel votes away from the republican incumbent.
Who was more likely to do that than a personable young man named Roosevelt? Franklin saw no need to consult his wife.
Woman as Eleanor: I listened to all Franklin's plans with a great deal of interest.
It never occurred to me that I had any part to play.
I felt I must acquiesce in whatever he might decide to do.
I was having a baby, and for a time at least that was my only mission in life.
Narrator: Her husband always lived "his own life" "exactly as he wanted it," she remembered.
Only one thing held Franklin back.
He was worried that his cousin Theodore might object to a member of the family running for office on the Democratic ticket.
On the morning of June 18, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt finally arrived home into New York harbor aboard the German passenger ship "Kaiserin Auguste Victoria.
" The cutter "Manhattan" drew up alongside, prepared to take the Roosevelts ashore.
Among the newspapermen, old friends, and family members on her top deck were Franklin and Eleanor.
At some point during the day's festivities, Franklin asked his cousin for his blessing.
Theodore gave him the go-ahead.
It was too bad he was choosing to run as a democrat, the ex-President said, but he knew he could be counted on to battle the bosses in whatever party he chose.
A million New Yorkers were waiting to welcome him home, including scores of reporters eager to ask him what he thought of President taft and whether he would ever consider running for the white house again himself.
He deflected every question.
But there was no way Theodore Roosevelt could stay out of public life for long.
Man as Teddy: It is not the critic who counts; Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; Who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; But who does actually strive to do the deeds; Who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; Who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt.