I drove over to Dickinson Friday and attended the Teddy Roosevelt Symposium sub-titled The Conservationist in the Arena. They had some top-notch scholars giving presentations, each of them full of interesting anecdotes. I started jotting down a few of them.
* Douglas Brinkley recently spent time with Lance Armstrong to prepare an article about him for some magazine. He said he found him to have such a strong inner strength that he wouldn't bet against him in the next Tour de France, a strength he compared to TR's of whom he is writing a biographical book.
* Dr. Donald Worster, history professor at the University of Kansas, said there are no checks and balances at work when the government acts as a business partner with corporatons. I think he was alluding to present day circumstances.
* Dr. Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek, Boone: A Biography, plus other novels of Appalachian Mountain folks as well as some top rate poetry thought Daniel Boone and TR must have been close in temperament, both having a certain blood lust for killing wild game.
* Clay Jenkinson, our North Dakota humanities scholar, gave up many stories like these: TR took up jiu jitsu for awhile and said there was nothing more exhilarating than being thrown over the head of a 300 pound Japanese man; TR rode on a cattle train and ran along the tops of the cars to get to downed critters and prod them to stand up; TR thought it a great episode in his life when in Wibaux, Montana he downed a drunk bully with his fists and heard the drunks two pistols fire as he went down; TR said the most important time in his life was being a cowboy in Dakota; TR felt so strongly about conservation issues that he refused to give a speech in the Redwoods of California until signs welcoming him were removed from the trees he valued so much; they must have complied with his request because he was then attributed with this quote --- "I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the Valley of the Euphrates."
All of the speakers spoke of the dichotomy present within TR. On one hand he became known as a conservationist, but on the other he loved to go on hunting trips around the world and shoot lots of animals. No one disagrees with the fact that TR was an imperfect man.
Dickinson State Univ., working in conjunction with the Library of Congress, has gotten the honor and responsibility for turning all of TR's papers to a digital format enabling scholars to research his life on-line. It is a huge task since the Library of Congress possesses 485 microfilm reels containing a half million of his documents. A representative of the LOC spoke to us and described the process. Anyone wishing to do research of TR will have to access documents through DSU's portal, a fact they are proud of.
