Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told a crowd of about 1,200 people at Illinois Wesleyan University on Monday night that Bloomington-Normal favorite son Adlai Stevenson II was her commencement speaker the year she graduated college.
During a speech as part of the Adlai Stevenson lecture series, Kearns Goodwin said Stevenson's speech about the Civil Rights Act and the importance of government action for change made a big impression on her. Her speech was Leadership in Turbulent Times; Advice for Today from Our Best Presidents.
Kearns Goodwin spoke with WGLT following the speech.
The following WGLT interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
How has what we tell ourselves about us as a nation changed across time?
It's interesting to think about what the role of government should be, and how that changes from era to era. There's a time when government seemed to be important during the Civil War. In the three decades between the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century it felt like the economic titans were the rulers of the country. Teddy Roosevelt comes along and says, government has a role to play. They're in charge, and I represent the people, and the presidency represents the people. The role of government changes.
[During] the period after World War I, there's a retreat back to private life, people feeling government should be less involved in their lives. The Depression occurs. Then you've got the New Deal. That takes us through World War II. You have a period in the ‘50s where people again retreat back to private life and want to not think about government's role. Somehow, the ‘60s and the civil rights revolution come. That leads us up to 1980 when Reagan comes in, saying that government's the problem rather than the solution.
You get a period of decades where the fight is over what is the role of government? We're still in that fight right now. Who represents the people? Is it the government, or is it the president, or is it the financial people? It's a continuing story that's never quite ended.
With that in mind, does the traditional left-right narrative apply at all?
I think it doesn't apply, in a certain sense. There are left people and right people, but the big changes that have taken place in the country really do have to do with the role of government. That’s the most important division we have.
There are cultural divisions. There are racial divisions, but the question is, who's responsible for making the changes for moving us forward? What does it mean to move forward? What does it mean to go backward? And it's not always necessarily left or right, but it is. It has to do with the responsibility of government.
The narrative of the Civil War from the North's perspective was about ending slavery. The myth from the southern side developed afterwards into the Lost Cause and state’s rights themes. What else operates in the slide into the war? Economics, immigration, labor force, political supremacy, international markets? How do those complicate our understanding of the Civil War?
Certainly at the time it was fought, there's no question the people understood slavery was a primary motivation for the war. Yes, there was a difference in the economy. Yes, there was a conflict between agriculture and the beginning of manufacturing in the north. Yes, there's a cultural division between values. But at bottom, it was slavery.
After the war was over, the Lost Cause becomes part of the mythology of the country. And then you get into the 1920s and ‘30s, and the question, did it really have to be fought? Maybe it didn't have to be fought.
When you get to the understanding of civil rights and go back to the what slavery meant, then the war had to be fought. It was a necessary war.
Where you are in your own societal values, I think, [helps determine] how you look back at any kind of war or any kind of crisis that we've been through, whether it was just or whether it was necessary or could have been avoided.
How do you slice this knot of multiple influences on a historic period, and decide what themes to focus on in each complicated era as you tell its story?
What you try to do as an historian is to not so much understand it after the fact, but try and understand it when it's going on. Look at the diaries of people, look at the newspapers, look at what people are saying. What do they think they're fighting for? And then, then you can render that.
I remember these books I read in graduate school about the reasons for World War I. There's like seven reasons why it possibly happened. Somebody each wrote a story about “this is the primary reason.” That's after the fact. Some may be right or some may be wrong, but the best thing you can do is to look at the people, the voices at the time.
Your first book was Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. How has the dominant understanding of the American Dream changed?
I think what Lyndon Johnson meant by the American Dream was people should have a collective responsibility for people who were poor, for people who were not educated, people who didn't have health care. That it would be an important part of the American responsibility to do something about that. Johnson meant government would help to foster that American Dream.
Lincoln defined the American Dream as everyone should be able to rise to the level of their discipline and their talent. You can't give a person more discipline. You can't give them more talent. But they should have an opportunity to exercise it to the level they can. I still think that survives. It just means that the opportunities in society have to be fairly distributed. [If] there's some kid with talent in a school that can't exercise that talent, or some kid that doesn't have health care and hasn't got a chance to make something of themselves, then it's a responsibility of all of us to give them that opportunity.
Teddy Roosevelt would have understood Lincoln's interpretation of that dream.
Absolutely. In fact, Teddy Roosevelt said there's two kinds of success in the world. One is if you have a talent that is so great that nobody else can emulate it, like a great poet or Shakespeare. Most people's success comes from taking ordinary qualities to an extraordinary degree through hard, sustained work. He would believe people should be given the chance, if they're willing to work hard, to rise in our system. That's the great thing, presumably, about an American system where the classes don't hold you back automatically.
I ran across an Edmund Burke quote about the Revolutionary War in a New York Times piece the other week.
“The Americans have made a discovery, or think they have made one, that we mean to oppress them. We have made a discovery, or think we have made one, that they intend to rise in rebellion. Our severity has increased their ill behavior. We know not how to advance. They know not how to retreat. Some party must give way.”
Does that capture in any way the present moment of political and cultural division in this nation?
Wow. I think that's an extraordinary understanding of it. I think that's right. One of the things Teddy Roosevelt had to say was that democracy would be in peril if people in different classes and sections and regions regarded each other as the other, rather than as common American citizens.
What that quote is saying is that these people see reality in very different ways. One thinks they're wrong, the other thinks they're right. We are in that situation, I think, today, where opposition is not simply difference of opinion, but difference of cultural identity, difference of facts. One side feels they are in retreat. The other feels they are in advance, exactly like Edmund Burke. I haven't seen that quote in a long time, but it's very telling.
What discoveries do present-day Democrats and Republicans need to make about the opposition to avoid this trap?
What they have to do is just understand who the people are and why they believe that they do, and why they have such different points of view. That's never going to happen unless they come together. We've developed silos in the country. There are people in the Democratic and Republican parties that don't talk to each other in Washington. We've got to figure out a way to change that structure in Washington and in ourselves.
I've often thought about a national service program as something that would bring people from different silos in the country, from the country to the city, from the east to the west, the South to the North, and let those kids learn what it's like to be one of those other people. And they’d talk to each other and not have the same judgmental [view]. They may still disagree, but they’d see we're common American citizens.
Have there been similar silos in the past in American history?
The scariest time, of course, is the 1850s when the newspapers, like our common media, were actually partisan papers. If you grew up as a Whig or a Democrat or Republican, you read only your own newspaper. You would have a different factual understanding of what was going on.
Lincoln could be in a debate in the 1850s with Stephen Douglas. The Republican newspaper would say Lincoln was so great, they carried him out on their arms. He was a triumph. [In] the Democratic paper, he was so bad in the debate, he was humiliated. They had to drag him out.
When that happens, when the two different sides are seeing two different realities, sometimes it leads to a division that's really hard to heal.
What are the crucial virtues in your view of great presidents?
There are different qualities that have to do with emotional strengths:
Humility — the willingness to acknowledge errors and learn from your mistakes and grow in office.
Empathy — to understand other people's points of view.
Resilience — to get through hard times and adversity.
Accessibility — Being willing to go out among the people, kindness, compassion.
I've often thought the ability to find time to think, is an important part of a presidential leadership.
Finally, I think that ambition grows from "self," which it usually is at the beginning of a person's career, to something larger than that. It could be the team you're on. It could be the country you're in. It could be the organization you're leading. And that ambition is for making a difference in people's lives.
A couple examples?
Teddy Roosevelt would admit that when he first went into public life, it wasn't to make life better for other people. He just wanted to try it out because he thought many people in his privileged class weren't going into public life. Once he got in there, and he began to see people living in slums when he was police commissioner, when he was beginning to understand that government could have a role in making things better, that ambition grew to something larger. And then it was that he wanted to make a difference.
Lincoln had that feeling from the time he first went into his first public office at 23 years old. He said, “Everyone has their peculiar ambition. Mine is to be greatly esteemed of by my fellow man.” He meant for making a difference in people's lives.
It comes later in [most] people's lives. I was interviewing President Obama near the end of his presidency. We talked about the idea of Lincoln saying at 23 years old that he wanted to be remembered for having done something. He said, “I don't think I knew that when I was young. Maybe my ambition was for doing something to make my absent father respect me or doing something in my race. It was only later that that ambition developed from that into something deeper.
Even great presidents are human. Is there a commonality of flaws in great presidents?
I don't know that there is. What you see happen with flaws is when something goes wrong there’s the president who is then able to correct it and acknowledge the error and move forward, versus the president who hunkers down and keeps going and lets the failure get deeper and deeper.
Does history make you optimistic about our present moment or pessimistic? Or it depends?
History definitely gives me hope about our present moment, because if we understand what the people did in living through the early days of the Civil War, the early days of the Great Depression, the early days of World War II when they did not know how it would end, they had all the same anxiety we have today. Somehow the country emerged, not only surviving, but as a stronger country.
The reason people need to study history, and it makes me so sad that history is diminishing in various places, is that it gives us that perspective of seeing that our ancestors led through these hard times, even harder than now, even though that's hard to imagine sometimes, and that it was both the citizens and the leaders that got us through. And if they got us through, we still have the chance to get us through this as well.
What kind of story does our country need today to have a new start?
While we feel democracy is in peril at this moment, we felt it in the early days of the Civil War. We felt it when Franklin Roosevelt was about to be inaugurated. Somebody said, you'll be a great president if your program wins. You'll be a terrible president, one of the worst, if you fail. He said, no, I'll be the last American president if it fails. That's how serious the fragile democracy was at the time of the depression.
I think the story we need to have now is to look forward to what can we as citizens do. Every great change in social life, in social justice, came from people from the ground up, doing something. When Lincoln was called “our liberator,” he said, don't call me that. He said, it was the anti-slavery movement and the Union soldiers that did it all.
It was the progressive movement from the ground up in the turn of the 20th century, and the social gospel of religion that allowed Teddy Roosevelt to do what he did to soften the exploits of the Industrial Revolution. The civil rights movement allowed Johnson to do what he did. There was the women's movement, the gay rights movement. It's always coming from the people, and then the leaders are there.
Hopefully that grows and becomes, as Robert Kennedy said, “ripples of hope that somehow come together and they can break down the walls of oppression.”
