Starts right now on PBS, bitches. 14 hours of Ken Burns.

lazycrockett said:

I love Ken Burns!

He's also doing series on Vietnam and country music.

Great opening, great cast. I could listen to Peter Coyote for years. I really like they they are doing all three characters arc's at the same time.

lazycrockett said:

I'm sure the Mini-series will sweep the 2015 Emmys next year....

I love Ken Burns documentaries. They are extremely well done and informative. I bought the box set of New York, but I missed the Roosevelts last night, but I can catch it on On Demand. I'm sure I won't be disappointed.

Shyra said:

I love Ken Burns documentaries. They are extremely well done and informative. I bought the box set of New York, but I missed the Roosevelts last night, but I can catch it on On Demand. I'm sure I won't be disappointed.

The DVD set comes out on tuesday just fyi.

Teddy was a mess.

Why none of the Roosevelts could be president today

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Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt. (AP Photo)

Last month, inspired by his visit to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park in New York, Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt pondered whether FDR could have been elected today. The same question has occurred to Ken Burns and Geoffrey Wards, whose look at the lives of Theodore, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt began airing on PBS last night and will continue through Saturday evening.

“I think we know too much about people these days. My view, at least with FDR, is I don’t think we would elect him now because of his handicap,” Ward told me when we spoke in July at the Television Critics Association press tour. “They would compete to see who could find him the most pitifully helpless, in footage, and put it on the nightly news.”

Burns agreed with him. “TR is too hot for TV,” he said. “Eleanor, there would be all the issues that women are unfairly saddled with, attractiveness and whatever suitability for national office. I”m afraid that none of them, along with Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, couldn’t get out of Iowa.”

It is one thing to decry a newly invasive media culture, or the fact that we still demand female politicians meet standards of attractiveness that have nothing to do with the functioning their jobs. But “The Roosevelts” ought to encourage us to think more broadly about what we deny ourselves when we narrow the path that can lead people to public office at any level.

Today, the Roosevelts’ wealth and the fact that they inherited it might have rendered all three of these remarkable people suspicious to the electorate.

“Though they had before them, in the examples around them, and within their own family, of the ability to spend their lives in leisure, they instead dedicated it to public service and really spent themselves doing that,” Burns suggested. “Because they had wealth and inherited this sense of obligation, we don’t see that anymore. We think we can buy elections rather than inhabit them.”

But Ward thinks that it was precisely that experience of growing up in great comfort that made Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor less awed by (and less dependent on) monied interests.

“They weren’t impressed by money. … They didn’t think that people who made money were any better than anybody else. … They had none of those views,” he told me. “It’s not an accident that FDR’s classmates hated them. He knew them. He sort of tried to be one of the inner circle. But later in his life, I think he really thought they were very limited in their view.”

The family’s tendency toward depression might also have been treated as if it were disqualifying, “Particularly for TR and Eleanor,” Burns said. “They come from the branch where there’s alcoholism and there’s madness and there’s insanity.” These were not fleeting sadnesses — Theodore described his with the operatic term “Black Care.”

But this tendency towards depression spurred an incredible work ethic in Theodore and Eleanor and pushed them towards new experiences and a broader sense of the world, which informed their public service. Theodore went West to become — in keeping with his family money — a rancher rather than a cowpoke and discovered a new sense of self-reliance and physical power. Eleanor traveled constantly as Franklin’s eyes and ears, wrote a syndicated newspaper column and even answered her own correspondence. Ward recalled writing her a letter as a child and getting back a handwritten response.

Without the constraints of contemporary politics, all three Roosevelts were freer to be themselves, and, Burns suggested, to make more authentic connections with voters.

“Politics is a dirty word today, but it’s a knee-jerk dirty word. Politics is the way things work, and they were interested in the way things work, and part of that is getting to know all the different people,” he mused. “Here you had TR, who spoke with a Harvard kind of accent, four eyes, a rather rotund figure, and people loved him because he was himself. … That was true of Franklin Roosevelt. He certainly didn’t look like anyone you knew who was suffering through the Depression.”

But those looks were not determinative. In a story about Franklin Roosevelt that has attained the status of a folktale, a man in Washington breaks down on the street when FDR’s casket passes him by. One of his fellow mourners asks if he knew the late president. “No,” the stricken man says, “but he knew me.”

In refusing to let politicians be human, we have denied ourselves the opportunity to be seen and to be treated the same way.

Of course Meryl is the only one doing an accent.

lazycrockett said:

Of course Meryl is the only one doing an accent.

>

But a relative did say when she hears Meryl she hears Elenore so...

Mr. Burns knocked it out of the park tonight.

So far no mention of Roosevelt Franklin

lazycrockett said:

Mr. Burns knocked it out of the park tonight.

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