related sites. ..

>> cnn, msnbc, "new york times," and even when that isn't true, outlets like yahoo! which is now by some measures the largest news site on the web or outlets like "huffington post," most of what they're doing is aggregating and reposting content that was originally created for print. so yahoo!, for example, who prints an awful lot of wire service news. so in terms of, the total number of people who actually visited at least one of those, the online news category looks pretty healthy. hundreds of millions of americans visit online news at least a few times a month. again the issue is the overall traffic is quite small. we have to be careful about reading too much into the fact of online news when a lot of visitors to yahoo!, for example, are looking at that site. >> the drudge report. >> so the drudge report is an

interesting, and interesting site. partly because it's very important in redistricting traffic. lots of people go to drudge, and it registers a lot of traffic, particularly to right-leaning websites. so it is partly straightness but has a bit of an editorial slant as well. oftentimes what you see with websites is that there's a period when in each is more or less fluid, where early sites have a big advantage, they start out, they're really big early on and they tend to stay big. the drudge report is a classic example of this. a site that got big initially in the '90s with the whiskey affair and was able to maintain its position. and you can find, that's certainly true in blogs as a whole now.

in 2001 there were very few popular blogs. lots of new blogs in 2003, 2004. a couple new blogs in 2005, 2006. but it strikes me when we have almost no new political blogs in the 2008 cycle. and the examples has followed a very different model. the biggest, the biggest name among this would be 538.com which really started as a diary on daily kos, a left-leaning political group log. and has made silver build an audience, was able to spin the site off. now he is blocking for "the new york times." so what we really seeing is the institutionalization of blogging over the past couple decades.

couple decades, has to years. >> it's been 15 or 20 or since the internet has become in widespread use. has increased our knowledge and gaza contributed to our democracy? >> the answer is actually tricky. on average the median citizen doesn't know more and doesn't seem to no less. than he or she did 15 years ago. what has changed is the variance in what citizens know. so there is a group of people who are news junkies who now know far more about politics than was possible 15 or 20 years ago. at the same time, lots of people are not that interested in watching news, paying attention to the news level half an hour or an hour every day. and for these people the web has resulted in lower levels of political knowledge. this is part of a broader -- not

something that just charts in 1995 with the web. this is something that really starts, really starts with the decline of broadcast television, the rising cable, the rise of news radio as the environment starts to fragment really in the '70s. but the internet is certainly a culmination of that trend. >> has the internet led to more polarization? >> i think there's a strong circumstantial case that it has. there's a big difference between polarization among elite and polarization among the public as a whole. so there's no question that politicians today are more polarized than they were in the 1980s, for example. in fact, some measures, some political sites measures suggest politicians in congress, elected

leaders in congress are more polarized than it's ever been in the history of the republic. at the same time that polarization is not as evident in the public as a whole. much lower levels of polarization, most citizens still portray themselves as moderates. at the same time reducing increasingly in the past five or 10 years, and even a little further back we see evidence of a shift even within citizens as a whole. doesn't match the polarization we see among the elite. how much of that isn't due to a change in media environment is an open question but i think there's no question some of it is certainly related. >> what do you mean by the missing middle? >> so one of the things that we assume about the internet, it's very natural to assume, is the idea that the internet is making the media environment much more

fragment, that it's all about narrowcasting, all about personalization. and the worry among a lot of scholars, a lot of journalists and other public figures has been that people get their news from radical right wing.net and left wing.com. that doesn't see what's happening. what we have in the news environment is actually a news environment with the top 10 online outlets get substantially more of the total audience, about a third of the total audience on the web than they do in print. on printer looking at only about 20% of the total print newspaper audience, for example, going to the top 10 newspapers. so what's absurd going on is audiences are moving in both directions. so more eyeballs on the very largest, most popular sites, and more eyeballs on the very smallest site.

so in terms of trying to forget what this means for the system as a whole, it gets complicated because you can focus on the shift. and it is a very real shift. and conclude that we're having more fragmented me in private. at the same time you can say with equal justice that the news media environment is moving towards more concentration. at the biggest shift in terms of how people use media is from print to digital. and generally what they seem to be doing is they seem to be moving from a print newspaper, which is generally local or regional, to a national online new source. so there are very complicated countervailing trends. and if you want to draw broad conclusions about what the internet needs, partly to keep keep up online. >> what is google are the? >> google are key is a term i

coined in the book. the notion here is that the limits of online politics are not nested what we think. many other scholars talk about the fact that many americans aren't that motivated, spend a lot of time thing attention to politics. concerns about the digital divide or worried that the effect of the internet would be diluted by the fact you have all of these politicians moving online. the book argues actually that there other factors. and with is the way in which hyperlinks are distributed. so the hyperlinks of course by the way the web works. hyper links in theory toward the website on the web, but in practice what we have seen is that within the web as a whole, within categories of content, even within subcategories of content like sites on abortion or gun control or even just left-leaning site on abortion or right wing sites on gun control. you find very, very unequal

patterns of later distribution. most of the links on gun control, one of my for example, go to sites like nra.org. and this has big implications for how people actually get news and information about politics. because what they are doing an awful lot of the time is going to google and type in gun-control and they are looking at the first page of results or even the first half of the first page of results and they're going to those sites. and the rankings that google shows to a large extent are based on the number of hyperlinks that that site receives. and hyperlinks are so heavily concentrated what you're really doing is you are channeling, your channeling citizens and voters towards just a handful of popular outlets within each site. this is a very different phenomenon than we've had before. even as the web was right open

social practices have meant people tend to get channeled or the same outlets. >> what about sponsored hyperlinks? >> this of course is the way in which google makes its money. google's business model, you know, is an awful lot of selling people online advertising, personalizing ads. unfortunately, a lot of this behavior is somewhat, i would say clandestine, but it is certainly not open. we don't know exactly what's in google's algorithm, for example. but there's the very real concern, and i would say this is even more so in the past few years, a personalization of results. so when i search, if i search for pizza in d.c., the results of a pop-up are not likely going to be same as if i'm searching for pizza in seattle, right? that certain even more true in

politics. increasingly you have large websites like yahoo! and google learning through time what users actually prefer and types of content, and even the political leaning of content that they prefer. this is especially important in facebook, which is another, one of the last areas where you might hope that people wouldn't be exposed to views that are not necessarily congruent with their own. but in practice oftentimes what facebook's algorithms seem to do, if you're on the left or on the right, they will show you more content. because it learns the sorts of things you click on, things that you don't. this is a sort of, this is another subtle way of personalization that in practice probably limits the content that users and citizens indexing.

>> professor, is there a digital divide in this country, in your view? >> absolutely. but the dimensions of that digital divide vary depending upon issues we're talking about. one of the things, some aspects of the digital divide are well known. we still even 15 years on, we still have pretty large divide in terms of age uses. we still a persistent divide in terms of race and ethnicity, levels of usage. we have a shrinking but still real divide between rural usage and urban or suburban usage. and these divides are quite important. we also see in terms of, which people are motivated to engage in online politics. and especially which sorts of people actually able to get the

postings about politics read. i think in some ways the most surprising thing that i found when i started looking more closely at the political blog was the extent to which, even among bloggers that were a anonymous or synonymous, but didn't post under their real names, these turned out to be not exactly ordinary citizens. they were extremely highly educated. most of them had graduate degrees. most of them had a degree from an online university. it was disproportionally white, hugely disproportionately male. and so even in this space where there was no institutions, per se, very quickly the social hierarchy had emerged which we should really profoundly shape the content that people did, the types of issues they think are important. and blogging is now the most important form by an audience today. >> what do you teach here at

george washington? >> so i'm in the school of media and public affairs. and i teach political communication and information technology and politics. and research methods and related topics. >> so, if i were a candidate and i read this book, what would i take away from this? candidate in 2012. >> well, i think that, i think that, i think of several things. i think it's now clearly the case you can't ignore the internet. i think it's been found internet giveth and it taketh away. the internet obviously was a huge advantage for dean in the campaign, at the same time and accelerate the decline of his campaign as, for example, his infamous scream was replayed over and over again. so the internet also, and this is perhaps another lesson for candidates, also makes it easier

to distribute information about the candidate. in some ways the clearest impact we have the internet has been the scandals that have been uncovered or allowed to unfold rapidly. and that is perhaps a cautionary tale for politicians in thinking about the ways in which a political environment is different today than it was 15 years ago. >> and if i wanted to start a political punditry site or political news site, what's your advice of? >> honestly my advice, that's why we have to be pretty skeptical. i think my advice, for you in that case is to get a time machine and go back in time to 2001. one of the messages of the book is that the frontier, in many respects, is close. we saw almost, we saw almost no new popular political blogs emerge in the 2008 cycle to the extent that we did see new

blogs, they were professional journalists, or nontraditional form of a political punditry, like nate silver. i think one, one take away from this is that institutions online increasingly are durable and a megapixel if you really want, and so the model someone like nate silver falls, building followers is a viable model in the way that it wasn't five or 10 years ago. >> what is your next book? >> my next book is one the political economy of the web, especially the future of the public sphere and the future journalism. >> what do you mean by political economy? >> so, the way in which content is produced and paid for it, in

ways is similar and quite different. so people assume that the web is making everything cheaper. but, in fact, it's not really. they're still going think about how you would create news content, for example. much of that news content, content is still quite expensive that you produce. so if i'm running a daily newspaper, i could probably save some money by shutting down the printing presses, and that would save about 40 or 50% of my total cost by eliminating the cost of paper, ink, printing presses, delivery vans and paperboys. but i would still have to pay reporters and i would still have, and that's still about half of the cost structure. the real tricky thing with the future of journalism of course is that you don't make as much money selling the same news online. so the next book tries to explain why that's the case, and

try to understand what the dynamics are for these models and what the potential is. unfortunately, i'm much better on the diagnosis that amp on the solutions. i think in many ways, particularly for local, the type of content that has been hit hardest and is in danger i think the diagnosis is pretty good. >> the author is matthew hindman, assistant professor in the public affairs department at george washington university. the book, "the myth of digital democracy." >> over the next several months booktv will travel to several universities to talk with professors who published recent nonfiction books. this month we speak with authors of george washington university here in washington, d.c.. and next month we had to george mason university in virginia. for more on her booktv college degrees is a booktv.org.

>> and now from the 2011 roosevelt reading festival, philip terzian discusses his book, "architects of power: roosesvelt, eisenhower, and the american century." it's about 50 minutes.ning, >> thank you. and good morning, and i'm b honored and delighted to bee hee or at the roosevelt reading festival. i don't live around here, so i don't get to visit the roosevelt library very often, but every time i do and every time i visit the house i'm always reminded of henry morgan thaw who was fdr's neighbor here in duchess county and probably knew him as much as anyone and said that roosevelt had a thickly-forested interior which meant that roosevelt was a very rather enigmatic, um,

distant, almost secretive man in many ways. but i've always felt that when you visit the house, especially, and walk around and look at it, you get as close as you'll ever get to appreciating franklin roosevelt as a human being and where he came from and what he was and how he became what he did become. and i'm delighted to be here, too, at the roosevelt library which is the first of the great president -- we often forget that franklin roosevelt invented the whole concept of presidential libraries. it was his idea to preserve his papers and memorabilia here on the grounds of his, of his old family estate in 1940. and, um, i'm a great fan of presidential libraries around the country and have made it my lifelong task to visit each one.

and so i'm patiently awaiting the george w. bush one in dallas which is supposed to open sometime in the next year or two. i'm angling for an -- a friend of mine is an official down there, so i keep hinting at there must be some panel discussion or something that i can come down to see it. [laughter] um, i have a sort of, if you'll excuse a digression for a minute, i have a sort of crackpot theory about presidential libraries and museums which is tangentially connected to my book, and that is that i think that they reflect in some ways what i call the civic protestantism of america. and by that i mean we don't as a culture, we don't revere religious relics so much anymore. we don't, we don't bow before the fragment of the true cross and that sort of thing. but because america is a nation founded on an idea, we've sort

of substituted that human instinct and transferred it to our political founders. so you go to the archives in washington where i live, and there's the declaration of independence and the constitution, and they're housed in the these brass and glass helium-filled rell squares which are completely reminiscent of the sort of medieval ones that you see where one of christ's thorns or one of the fragments of the true cross is located. and you go to presidential establishments -- mount vernon, monticello, recently montpelier, james madison's home in virginia has become a sort of museum and center -- and here they're wonderful institutions because they have brought together every conceivable object, paper. i know, i've been writing a little bit about the madison

house, and they have surveyed all the general region, they've found furniture that madison had owned and touched, articles of clothing, toothpicks, spectacles, everything you can think of. [laughter] and they're all lovingly collected and under glass which i think is wonderful. but if you look at it from a sightly skew as i do, it's kind of interesting, too, the way we retrieve these things. and i think it also, it also belies the idea that americans are not interested in our history. i think we're deeply interested in our history. not every american is as interested in others, but i think our presidential libraries and museums definitely, definitely reflect a national interest in our, in our past. um, now, if you'll forgive a die depression, the reason i mentioned all that is that in this, in my little monograph i

address myself to two, two themes. one is i wanted to make some biographical observations about these two individuals who are usually not united historically. we don't think of fdr and eisenhower together. but my thesis is that they did come together at a very strategic moment in american history, and, um, it's to our long-term benefit that they did. um, but secondly, i'm very interested in historical memory, how we look at the past, how our views of the past change and evolve. the speaker just before me, professor moy, has written this wonderful book about the tuskegee airmen, and he quoted a 1925 army air corps study of african-americans in the military. and it's full of these terrible

condescending, one might say racist views of black people which we are, which we, of course, recoil from, obviously, from today. but we always have the sense in history that right now we've come to a consensus and that our attitudes at this moment are the correct ones and that all the wisdom of, you know, the past was complicated and people had kind of strange ideas about things. but now we've got all the research in the, and everything -- we've come to our senses. and so now the current thinking among historians is the right thinking. um, and i was struck by that, um, a dozen years ago when i covered the dedication of the franklin roosevelt, um, memorial in washington. i don't know how many of you have visited it. it's on the mall near the world war ii memorial.

um, which is another wonderful story that i sort of tangentially covered over the years. um, the roosevelt memorial, actually, was, um, it was dedicated in 1997 which was, um, what, 52 years after fdr had died. and there was this -- and they had been contemplating a memorial to fdr almost from the time he did die. um, and there was this general sense that they could never come to a conclusion, that there would be a, there would be a design submitted and congress would approve, and then there'd be some obstacle, the archives -- i mean, this just went on and on for decades. when are we ever going to get a memorial to franklin roosevelt? and it was finally dedicated in 1997, a half century after he died. and my reaction to that was, well, it was actually more or less on schedule because not too far from the, from the roosevelt memorial is the lincoln memorial

which you all know, and that was dedicated in 1922 which was even longer after lincoln's death than the fdr memorial was dedicated after his death. so these things always have a kind of gestation period. and also things are not, things are not always as they seem. we now regard the lincoln memorial as a national treasure, and whenever we want to have any kind of unifying event in washington, people are always careful to stage it in front of the lincoln memorial with abraham lincoln sort of benignly looking down on them and the reflecting pool in the front. well, i grew up in the washington, d.c., and i'm now old enough to remember when i was a little boy there were still elderly women in washington, friends of my mother's, who still were not really very happy that the mall had been gummed up with a memorial to abraham lincoln. so we don't always, we don't

always arrive at these consensuses instantly. but what interested me about the roosevelt memorial is that as with many monuments to historical figures, it really tells us almost as much about the times in which the memorial was made as about the subject of the memorial. and i think that's particularly true in fdr's case. my own opinion is that i don't know that -- i mean, i'm, as a great admirer of franklin roosevelt, i'm delighted that there is a memorial to him, and better the one there is than none, but i'm not a huge fan of the fdr memorial, and i don't know that it's really a memorial that he would particularly like. we have a, we have a notion of what he considered a good presidential memorial because fdr was the, was the, really, the energy behind the building of the jefferson memorial in washington. it's a kind of funny side light

on franklin roosevelt personally. he as a good democrat, of course, always paid o bee sense to thomas jefferson, and i always thought fdr slightly overdid it a bit because all of his forebearers -- isaac roosevelt, old james roosevelt -- were all hamiltonians to the core. the roosevelts, in the time of jefferson, none of the roosevelts thought very much of jefferson. so fdr kind of overdid this. and, once again, i think there should be a monument to thomas jefferson in washington, but that nice neoclass call structure that you see along the tidallal basin, and i've always thought was fdr's taste, the memorial, i think, is very much a 1990s view of franklin roosevelt. and, um, i say this partly out

of, from design conviction. and i don't think the structure is what he would have particularly liked. but, also, it's franklin roosevelt that we now think about historically, and that is the franklin roosevelt of the new deal. the fdr memorial in washington heavily concentrates on the depression, it concentrates on his domestic policies, on his conservation, his stewardship of, of national parks and so on, all of which is true. but to the total exclusion of certain other aspects of him. you would never know that the great conservationist was also one of the great dam builders of the 20th century which is somewhat anathema in our time, but fdr thought that was a very logical thing to do, to generate energy and to put people to work. also you would never know that this was a monument to the man

who prosecuted the greatest war in american history and very vigorously prosecuted it. and i don't think reluctantly prosecuted it. so one of the -- and i think that's, i mean, obviously, any student of roosevelt will know that, but when you go to the roosevelt memorial in washington, you're only seeing the -- you're, essentially, seeing the 1997 sort of congressionally-approved view of franklin roosevelt. and this happens with historical figures all the time. i mean, in the journalism particularly we always when we refer to fdr, it's always the fdr of the new deal. and similarly, my other subject -- the somewhat unlikely partner of fdr, dwight d. eisenhower -- the only time he ever gets quoted nowadays in the press is that one sentence in his farewell address where he warns against the power of the military industrial complex which he believed and which is

true and which is valid. but it's just a speck in the great ocean of what eisenhower really represented and is a little bit, i think, misleading. and similarly, with fdr i think that while he is the, obviously in be my view, the dominant president, the greatest president of the 20th century and, obviously, the man who invented really our modern politics in many ways, he was also a global theorist. he was also a man ambitious for american power in the world. um, and, um, as with all such things you often wonder where did this come from? why did roosevelt think this way? what, what made him a kind of liberal imperialist, to use a scholarly term, as he was? why did he actively pursue a

kind of american, what i call an american empire without colonies which is to say american power around the globe, um, but without necessarily acquiring real estate the way the europeans tended to do? and i think the answer comes from biography. franklin roosevelt was born in 1882, the united states in the immediate post-civil war, i mean, the united states has never been a deliberately imperial nation. we never have set out to create a map of the world that's colored red, white and blue in various places like the british, the spanish or others did. but we have a kind of, we've kind of become imperial is a bad word these days, but i can't think of an alternative. we have become a global power to some degree through

inadvertence, but also -- and when i say inadvertence, partly because of the vacuums of power we have filled especially after world war ii, but also deliberately. in the period after the civil war when franklin roosevelt was born, the united states became very much an economic superpower, competitive with the british. we didn't have the strategic power that the british empire did at that age, but we certainly had comparable economic power. um, and another point is that we often tend to forget that because the oyster bay roosevelt, that is to say the theodore roosevelt branch of the family was somewhat hostile to the hyde park/franklin roosevelt branch of the roosevelt family, we forget that, n., they -- i mean, alice longworth used to make fun of eleanor roosevelt and this, that and the other, but they were closer than we think. and, in fact, not only did

franklin roosevelt marry theodore roosevelt's favorite niece, but he also regarded theodore roosevelt, as he said, as the greatest man he ever knew. and i think theodore roosevelt's influence on his distant cousin, franklin, was a reality in his life up until his death even though we tend to ignore it. remember, too, that theodore roosevelt became prominent at strategic moments in fdr's life. franklin roosevelt was a schoolboy when theodore roosevelt became mckinley's assistant secretary of the navy. he was at school when theodore roosevelt charged up san juan hill. he had just become, just entered his sophomore year at harvard when theodore roosevelt became president. so roosevelt's vision of an american sentry, of a globally-assertive united states

was something that was bred into franklin roosevelt really in his youth. and i don't think ever left him. and all through his public career you hear kind of theodore rooseveltian rhetoric. i was just reading and listening the other day to his third inaugural speech where he talks about, um, in lincoln's day the great challenge facing the presidency was danger from within. now we are dealing with danger from without, namely fascist nazi germany and fascist italy. but ea also ends -- but he also ends about the mission of the united states is not only to be vigilant about this, but also to defend and promote democracy

around the world. um, so it's a consistent theme in his, in his public life that is, um, i think, striking and striking to some degree because it's not, it's not really recognized as such. there's this, i think the historical consensus about fdr is still, as about any historical figure, it's still in flux. but that, um, he was fundamentally a domestic politician who dealt with the depression in the first two terms of his presidency and then as the war in europe came, he suddenly had to pay attention to world affairs and became what he did. and i think that's not quite true. i think roosevelt was thinking globally from the very beginning. um, certainly if you go back to his tenure as assistant secretary of the navy under woodrow wilson, um, he was a

constant promoter of -- which is an interesting innocent incidens life because the president, wilson, was a kind of diffident person as far as foreign relations were concerned. he felt that the united states should refrain from interfering in foreign affairs. he department think that we thought that -- he didn't think that we thought that we should be very restrained in our use of american power. roosevelt -- wilson's secretary of state, william jennings bryan, was a pacifist who really was a pose today the exercise of american power, resigned because he thought the wilson administration was getting too belligerent by 1915. fdr's immediate boss was a will sewn yang and a disciple of bryan's who looked upon the uniform navy with kind of

bemused suspicion. he was always reluctant to use the navy in any way. and, of course; this was all anathema to franklin roosevelt who spent his entire eight years as assistant secretary very, in that wonderful way of his, very charmingly but effectively undermining his boss on a day-to-day basis. the extent to which franklin roosevelt was insubordinate in the wilson navy department toward his boss, i mean, when daniels would leave town, franklin would have fun and do all sorts of things which daniels would have to undo when he returned. and yet the amazing thing is that daniels retained his affection for fdr. he loved franklin roosevelt. he actually survived franklin roosevelt. i think he, i think he thought of franklin roosevelt as his kind of like a naughty nephew that he indulged. but it's a kind of interesting thing. and, of course, in the 1920

roosevelt was the vice presidential nominee. on the democratic ticket, he was a strong supporter of wilson's, of course, by then wilson had become an internationalist as we now think of him, promoting democracy abroad, the 14-point program for the reinvention of europe as a kind of american-style democratic community. um, fdr was a strong supporter of that after the war, after, i mean, after the election which the democrats lost. america lapsed into a kind of isolationism, but franklin roosevelt was very active in the founding of the council on foreign relations in new york which was a gathering of kind of -- actually, it was a kind of republican organization. it was very much dominated by henry stimson and william howard taft and some of the other republican elder statesmen.

probably would have had theodore roosevelt in it if he hadn't been president. but fdr was part of that. and i've always thought it was interesting, and, actually, there's some fdr -- fdr did some writing in the 1920s both for small newspapers and for magazines, and almost invariably -- not almost invariably, but frequently on foreign topics. and a strong proponent of america in the wilsonian sense as a beacon of democratic enlightenment. we have this power, we have this great example of our people and our system, and we should be promoting this to the extent that we can around the world, that we're challenged by alien ideologies in russia and in germany and italy and elsewhere and that america is a beacon of hope. there's an interesting incident in 1932 right after, um, the

election. you may know the story. fdr is president -- of course, in those days there was a four or five-month gap between the election and inauguration which was in march, not january. and fdr famously paid a courtesy call on president hoover, and somewhat to his surprise and annoyance, hoover had with him another duchess county neighbor of fdr's, ogden mills, who was the secretary of the treasury in the hoover administration. and the reason hoover had mills there was that hoover had wanted some sort of bipartisan confidence-enhancing measures during this ambiguous transition period. and he wanted to get roosevelt onboard. of course, nowadays we would think of this as wonderful bipartisan cooperation, isn't it nice, republicans and democrats getting along and uniting for the good of the country. well, fdr was deeply annoyed by this. he didn't want to get anywhere

near uniting with the hoover administration on anything, um, and declined to issue the statement that hoover wanted him to. nevertheless, the one person that roosevelt did meet with during the transition from the hoover administration was henry stimson who was hoover's secretary of state. who was another new yorker, henry stimson lived on the north shore of long island, but he, like fdr, came from an old new york family, so they probably had a lot of concentric circles in the roosevelt/stimson orbit. but roosevelt actually asked stimson who was secretary of state to come here to his house in hyde park where they had a long meeting, with they discussed -- where they discussed, of course, by that time the japanese were on the march in manchuria, and also there was a pending meeting on,

um, the world economic conference in london which stimson would have, would have attended if hoover had been reelected. but roosevelt wanted his views on things. so the one aspect of bipartisanship and cooperation and all that during transition as we now call it that fdr welcomed was on, in foreign affakr&9ñ um, i make the point in my book that one of the most important points of the roosevelt presidency, um, came a few years later, um, when he, in 1937 when he gave is so-called quarantine speech in chicago which, i think, a very important event, i think, in the roosevelt presidency. but it's also a very important

event in american history because it kind of lays the groundwork for american foreign policy really ever since. and it's interesting because by 1937, of course, hitler had come to power five, six weeks before franklin roosevelt was inaugurated as president. mussolini had been in power in italy for a decade. the japanese, by then, the rather fascist japanese were on the march in asia. the world was getting dangerous. by 1937, of course, hitler had remilitarized the rhine land, mussolini had invaded ethiopia. it was clear that the fascist parties in europe were, were aggressive and ambitious and college rent. belligerent. but roosevelt, of course, was stymied by several factors, one of which being public opinion.

um, most americans in 1937 felt that we had been sold a pig in a poke in world war i, that we had fought and hadn't really -- we'd lost 100-plus-thousand troops, but we hadn't really gained much of anything. europe had gone back to being its usual argue meantive stuff. here they were again, the germans and the french and the poles and the british all at each other's throats. who knows how it will turn out. you know, this is nothing to do with us and, you know, if we get involved, it will have the same unhappy end although x number of americans will die in the process. so isolationism was a widespread and bipartisan viewpoint. we often forget that some of roosevelt's most vigorous isolationist opponents in congress -- it wasn't all partisan. a lot of them were new dealç democrats. one of the most prominent isolationists were senator burton wheeler of montana who was otherwise one of fdr's

closer supporters on -- and most southern democrats tended to be less interventionist and so on. so it wasn't, it was hardly a republican even though the republican party at that time was predominantly isolationist, it was a bipartisan sentiment and reflected in the neutrality acts which were a consequence of legislation in the mid 1930s that came out of, utterly, democratic-dominated senate which reflected that, that point of view, but also was once again reflected, i think, the predominant views of most americans on the subject, um, effectively tied fdr's hands from, in any sense, intervening and showing favortism in helping people that we liked in the

hostile act against people of whom we disapproved. by 1937 i think franklin roosevelt was one of the few political leaders in the democratic world, small d democratic world, global democratic world who perceived the genuine threat that came from the fascists in europe. and in 1937 he went to chicago to the dedication of a bridge. and as with many presidential speeches, the occasion was neither here nor there, but the location, i think, was significant. chicago was, of course, chicago is more or less the capital of the midwestern united states. the midwest is the, at that time, was the citadel of isolationism in the united states, and chicago was the home of roosevelt's old classmate, colonel robert mccormack, who

was the publisher of "the chicago tribune" and by far america's most prominent and vociferous isolationist. so he came to chicago, he came into the lion's den to say, in effect, that america, that to lay out what he felt -- and this was all done in kind of slightly ambiguous language, but clearly he's saying that we face a threat from the rising tide of authoritarianism in europe and that the united states, uniquely situated as we are, uniquely conceived as we have been as the great democratic republic, we must be the great arsenal of democracy. that's where that phrase, that term comes from. and that we of all nations must prepare ourselves for the coming challenge, um, and this will not only be a political challenge, but a literal military challenge

that we must, we may, we may have to do this, we may have to do that, we may have to fight. so, um, i think that that is kind of -- that has kind of been, i mean, if you look at the incremental development of american foreign policy since, since the war -- the truman doctrine and so on -- that is kind of the overall design of american foreign policy. we don't, we don't want to, you know, we don't want new zealand as a colony or anything like that, but wherever democracy is under threat in our, in the world america stands there and says, not so fast. i mean, i think, certainly, president kennedy's inaugural speech in 1961 is very much an expression of the, of the rooseveltian quarantine speech thesis. so i, my, my mission in my little study was not, you know,

in history we always are going over the same facts and interpreting them in light of either current wisdom of current thinking or how thinking evolves on things, but my, my intention was to try to look at franklin roosevelt in a slightly different way, as a global thinker and not just because global responsibility was thrust upon him as it was in world war ii, but because this was something he had devoted really much of his life to and thought through very profoundly and had very strong and deeply-committed feelings about. now, where does eisenhower come into this? since we're at the roosevelt library, i've -- i'll just mention parenthetically, i want today concentrate on fdr. and, in fact, my book is, to

some degree, almost a little bit more about eisenhower because eisenhower, the historical consensus on eisenhower is, i think, in much more flux than as about fdr. you have to make the case a little bit more for eisenhower. but once again with eisenhower youok have someone who in the,n the what i call the journalistic memory is, was this general who was elected to two terms as president. then just as he was leaving the white house, he had this epiphany that, oh, my goodness, the military industrial complex is very dangerous, so i should mention that and warn before i ride off into the sunset. and i think that's a terrible simplification of eisenhower's thinking. um, not only because, um, it's misleading, but eisenhower, too, had, um, had spent his whole life pondering these questions as roosevelt did. but in the guise of an officer in the army.

um, harry truman famously said ike's going to be miserable as president, he's used to being in the army where they, you know, do this, do that, and he expects everyone to jump. that was really not true. truman was one of the most -- eisenhower was one of the most politically experienced people to enter the presidency. he had, he had been, worked for the chief of staff in the 1920s, he'd been in paris in the 1920s working for general pershing at the battle monument's commission, he was the war office -- war department, rather, in the early 1930s. he spent the late 1930s as macarthur's deputy in the philippines, building up the philippine army as, prior to independence. general marshall brought him back prior to pearl harbor because he had recognized in eisenhower a gifted junior officer. he brought him into the war plans division. he actually tasked eisenhower who was barely at that point a brigadier general with the plans

for the defense of the philippines. he did the same thing with, when it was decided after pearl harbor to, um, mount an invasion of north africa from the west. the british were pushing rommel from the east, and we were going to land in morocco, and marshall tasked eisenhower with the, with the design of those plans. so eisenhower came to the presidency not only a great diplomat-general, but someone with, who knew a lot about the way washington worked and who'd been dealing with global issues for a dozen years by then. he not only was the great diplomat-general of world war ii, he had held together the grand coalition of the second world war, the allied coalition. after the war he was the army chief of staff, he presided over the desegregation of the army

that professor moy talked about a few minute ago. he, and he took leave of absence as president of columbia university to be the first military commander of nato in paris because at the time it was recognized if there was one american we can send to europe who personifies the american commitment to nato, to the freedom of western europe, to america's continued responsibility in the world, it would be dwight d. eisenhower. and last but not least, eisenhower was over in, um -- the story of eisenhower's nomination is often forgotten. in 1948, for example, james roosevelt, franklin's son, had been one of many prominent democrats who tried to get general eisenhower to run for the presidency as a democrat. and eisenhower declined largely on the basis that he didn't

think, he was a professional soldier, and he didn't think that it was appropriate for him to be involve inside politics. but by 1952 things had changed, and his great fear at that time was that the republican party, the likely nominee, was senator taft of ohio who was the most prominent isolationist in, in the republican party and, really, this country. and eisenhower felt that the only way that this republican party could be saved from isolationism and that the post-war consensus that had grown between the two parties about america's role in the world would be, frankly, for him to run for president partly to, to prevent taft from being the nominee and probably becoming president. so that was really eisenhower's instinct. i won't bore you with details of the eisenhower presidency, but what intrigues me about

roosevelt and eisenhower, too, is that you have these two vivid figures in american history who are utterly dissimilar personally. if you have the, if you have the pleasure of visiting the eisenhower library in homestead and abilene, kansas, and compare it to the roosevelt homestead here in hyde park, you'll see the social difference between the two. they're two exceedingly dissimilar places, not to mention western kansas being very different from the hudson valley. but nonetheless, you have these two very dissimilar individuals who, nevertheless, thought alike on what, in my view, the most critical challenges facing the country at the most critical time in our modern history which was at the end of world war ii when europe was prostrate and exhausted, and the united states with its vast economic and by then military power found itself

presented with the responsibility of superpowerdom. not something that the united states particularly wanted. i don't think americans are an imperial-minded people. but nevertheless, that what fdr talked about in the quarantine speech, that defense of democracy that to be the great arsenal, the both political and military arsenal of democracy was, came to the united states at that time. and you had these two, probably the two most famous americans of the time, dissimilar as they were -- one republican, one democrat, one a kansas farm boy, one a new york aristocrat -- nevertheless, thought exactly the same on that critical issue. and their, their mutual interests coincided. fdr, after all, did deliberately choose eisenhower. he had wanted, initially, general marshall to be the supreme commander of the allied