April 27, 2023 • 23 mins
Have you ever wondered what books presidents kept on their bedside table? Did those works impact their presidency? Bard College Literature professor Joseph Luzzi connects American leaders’ love of literature with some of their greatest achievements.
One Day University is a co-production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. It is a Curiosity Podcast. You can sign up at the website OneDayU.com to become a member and access over 700 full length video lectures. You can also download their app. Once you’re a member, you can watch Professor Joseph Luzzi’s lecture, “The Presidents’ Book Club: Books that Shaped Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and others”
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I always joke that Daniel Craig should send the Kennedy
Estate a thank you note for having helped to make
the Bond franchise into the international behemoth that it is today.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to one day university talks with the world's most
engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses. This
podcast is your chance to discover some of our top
rated lectures on your own schedule. I'm Steven Schragis, and
we've put together some presidential recommended reads. American leaders of
(00:44):
the past and present have appreciated a variety of literature,
everything from plays to poetry to spy thrillers. But do
their reading habits give us any sense of their strength
as a leader? Professor Joseph Lutsey explores this in a
one day university lecture titled The President's Book Club. He's
(01:05):
a professor of comparative literature at Bard College, and he's
written books covering topics from Dante to Italian cinema. Joseph
says the idea for this talk came to him while
he was studying dystopian.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Literature a few years ago. I taught a course on
banned and censored books and one thing I noticed was
that in a lot of these dystopian worlds, one of
the first things that the kind of powers that be
would do. You see this in all this Huxley's Brave
(01:40):
New World. You see it in Margaret at Woods The
Handmaid's Tale, is that they would ban books. And I thought,
you know, how interesting and sinister that when a government
becomes a verse to freedom, it also becomes a verse
to books and learning. And I thought, well, that's a
connection I wanted to explore more. And then I would
(02:04):
say the tipping point was there was this article and
the Economists that I read shortly before kind of putting
the talk together, in which they talked about leadership and
leadership training. But they said, you know, instead of corporate retreats,
instead of how to books by people in the business world,
(02:25):
which of course have their validity, why not look to
great literature for models. And I said, you know, I
really want to dig into this topic and see how
leaders themselves have approached the world of books. And that
sort of got everything rolling.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
You picked a pretty logical starting point. George Washington obviously
he was first. Yeah, but that said George Washington wasn't
really known to be a scholar. Tell us about George
Washington and the book or the literary work that really
seemed to influence him.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
This is one of my favorite discoveries. I remember I
went to a Fourth of July reenactment with my family
near my house and we met the person who played
George Washington, and we were talking with him and we said,
you know, what's one of your regrets in life, mister Washington,
And he said, not having a college education. And you know,
(03:17):
my family joke, Well, he went pretty far in the
world without one. But I think that image of George
Washington as a man of action, not an intellectual. We
associate John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, some of the earlier officeholders
of the presidency with a world of books, not so
much with George Washington. He was a general, he was
(03:37):
an farmer, he was a statesman. Interestingly, though, I found
that George Washington was very committed to the world of books.
He designed his own book plate, he had quite a
collection of books, and he also was a pretty passionate
reader of one particular play. It's called Cato Cato by
(03:59):
Joseph Addison and from the early seventeen hundreds, so It's
one of those works that hasn't stood the test of time,
but in its time, its effect was profound. Not just
George Washington. It was a play about Cato, the ancient
Roman who resisted the tyranny of the death of the
(04:19):
Roman Republic when Julius Caesar became tyrant and Cato took
his own life in defense, and so he kind of
became a symbol to the American revolutionaries. Allegedly, George Washington
had the play performed at Valley Forge. He sprinkled his
letters with references to it. But it wasn't just him.
(04:39):
Patrick Henry's great speech give me Liberty or give me
Death is lifted from Cato by Addison Nathan Hale the
American Patriot, when he said I regret that I have
but one life to give to my country. That also
comes from Joseph Addison's Cato. So it was an example
of how a forgotten literary war could actually be in
(05:01):
the dna of American democracy. And that was a kind
of thrilling discovery for me.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Before we move on to the next president, I have
the word etiquette books written on my notes here. What's
going on there?
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Well, you know, George Washington had a particular genre of
books that he was quite devoted to, and that was
etiquette books. He loved to read etiquette books, he collected them.
These were books that we think of Emily Post in
the twentieth century, These books that teach us how to
gracefully accept or decline a dinner invitation, or I imagine
(05:36):
the updated version of Emily Post would be like how
to gently unfriend someone on Facebook. Obviously that wasn't something
that George Washington thought about, but these kind of etiquette
questions obsessed Washington, and I think it's in keeping with
his image as someone who knew how politically to say
(05:57):
and do the right thing, who took the quality of
dignity and decorum very seriously and sort of trained himself
in the images of these early etiquette manuals.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Second up on deck, it was Thomas Jefferson. Now, this
one's not a surprise. This is a man who all
of us think of as a dedicated reader. You've done
the research to document exactly why we think of Jefferson
as a voracious reader, and that his thoughts were even
reflected in the Declaration of Independence.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah, I mean, look, no surprise here, and you know,
Thomas Jefferson, who founded the University of Virginia, was considered
a person of letters in his age. In his library
reflected that a wide range of interests, including the fields
like botany, wine making, philosophy, history, and whatnot. So that's
no surprise.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I think.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
What was a surprise to me was looking at the documents, say,
a very famous document, the Declaration of Independence. Do you
think of aligned by Jefferson? We hold these truths to
be self evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
That among these are life, liberty in the pursuit of happiness.
(07:14):
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the government.
Now that's a bit of a mouthful. It's a lot
of eighteenth century political discourse. But I had been teaching
in Bard's first year seminar program, and we were reading
some of the founding figures of political philosophy, and two
(07:36):
figures in particular that i'd been teaching, John Locke and
Jean Jacques Rousseau. I saw how their ideas were permeating
Jefferson's writing and the Declaration of Independence. Let's take this
notion of equality, for example, that Jefferson talks about. Now,
one of the engines for that comes from John Locke's
(07:58):
idea of thela raza, which means the blank slate, This
idea that you know, all people are created equal, that
no matter where you're born or when you're born, there's
a kind of neutrality to human nature. And you know,
we take it for granted now. And of course it
(08:18):
wasn't expressed politically in the eighteenth century because the eighteenth
century had terrible forms of inequality, including the evil of slavery.
But as an idea that informed the Declaration of Independence,
that idea of equality from Jefferson has to be informed
by Locke's notion of the blank slave. And similarly, when
(08:40):
Jefferson writes about the governments are instituted among men, deriving
their powers from the consent of the government, that that
idea of consent is so essential to social contract theory
of the eighteenth century, and that's where thinkers like Jean
Jacques Rousseau were so important, where they basically came up
(09:02):
with a model saying that when we enter into society
through consent, we agree as a people to give up
our individual rights in the name of the collectivity. That
can only happen if we consent to do so. So
you can see in just one densely written paragraph of
(09:23):
the Declaration of Independence, you can see the swirling of
intellectual currents from major thinkers like John Locke and Jean Jacquesrousseau.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
We're going to jump forward a little onto Abraham Lincoln. Now,
this is someone we all know of as a voracious reader,
and we know of him as completely self taught. What
we don't know a lot about is his thoughts about Shakespeare.
Can you discuss Abraham Lincoln's relationship to the Shakespearean tragedies
(09:53):
Hamlet and Macbeth.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
To Lincoln loved Shakespeare, He carried in with Shakespeare with him.
He quoted from the plays He's on record for just
showing how passionate he was about Shakespeare. But you know,
there was a little bit of surprise in Lincoln's devotion
to Shakespeare. And I think it comes from what you
said earlier, Stephen, about Lincoln as the kind of prototypical
(10:16):
self made man. Lincoln is one of those figures becomes
a lawyer by studying for the bar, on his own.
He grew up on dirt floors the whole incredible rise
of Lincoln, and I think that that backstory shaped the
way he approached Shakespeare. For example, he said, you know,
(10:37):
I don't care too much for the famous soliloquy of
Hamlet to be or not to be, because I think
he didn't have that much in common with Hamlet. Hamlet
was the prince of Denmark. He was to the manner
born as they say. Lincoln instead said he related to
He loved Macbeth, and he loved the speech in Hamlet
(10:59):
where Claudius as, oh my offense's rank, where he basically says,
I know I'm guilty, but I'm not going to give
up the crown. And it got me thinking about, you know,
what was it about Lincoln and Shakespeare? And I think
part of it had to do with Lincoln's moral brilliance,
(11:19):
his conscience, the fact that you know, he believed that
then evil of slavery had to end. America went to
war because of that. But he also felt the weight
of all those deaths of Americans on his conscience. But
where I think Shakespeare really drives Lincoln. Think of a
(11:39):
speech like the Second inaugural address. It's one of the
most extraordinary speeches in American history, where Lincoln basically says, look,
the North is basically going to win this war militarily,
but ultimately it's a war in which both sides have
lost because both sides fighting were American and so that
(12:03):
speech is just this remarkable work of rhetoric when he says,
all knew that the interest of slavery was the cause
of the war, and then he said, neither party expected
for the war the magnitude of the duration, which is
already attained, neither anticipated, and he goes, you notice the
repetition of neither. There each looked for an easier triumph.
(12:27):
Both read the same Bible. And then he says, and
crushing that rhetorical crescendo, the prayers of both could not
be answered. And then he says, but let us not
judge lest we be judged. It's an amazing the use
of the pronouns, the sort of all both neither, and
(12:51):
then this kind of deflating sentiment at the end that
this is a war that has taken so many lives.
It's not the time to criticize, but it's a time
to heal. And I think that that moral vision of
Lincoln was nourished by his understanding of a writer like Shakespeare.
(13:18):
Shakespeare was a brilliant student of human nature, and he
understood that often our virtues are bound up with our vices.
And I think for Lincoln to think with and through
Shakespeare's plays over his lifetime enabled him to cultivate his
(13:41):
own moral vision that led to astonishing speeches like the
Second Inaurgal Address, where literally the fate of the United
States and the Union was on the line. The stakes
couldn't have been higher.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
After the break, an inspirational poem for FDR and a
spy thriller for JFK. We're going to go to FDR,
(14:19):
and you've explained in your talk how one work, in
particular Rudyard Kipling's poem if is something that FDR carried
with him his whole life. Actually, you want to give
us some detail on that.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
As you know, I love tennis, and besides my fantasy
to play at Wimbledon Center Court, which will never happen,
every person who walks onto Center Court passes under a
plaque with the lines if you can meet victory and
defeat and treat those two impostors the same. You know
that basically it's not about winning and losing, it's how
(14:52):
you play the game. And that's a poem by Rudyard Kipling,
who's much better known as the author of the Jungle Books.
Now that home If became a kind of mantra for FDR.
And it's a poem basically about overcoming obstacles, overcoming challenges,
and holding your head high and not letting other people
(15:15):
see you suffer. If you can talk with crowds and
keep your virtue, or walk with kings, nor lose the
common touch, if you can fill the unforgiving minute with
sixty seconds worth of distance, run yours is the earth
and everything that's in it, and what is more, you'll
be a man, my son. So that's just a brief
(15:35):
citation from the poem. FDR was so drawn to this,
and I think we can kind of understand why personally,
as we all know or any of us who's spent
any time thinking about FDR, he suffered from polio and
he couldn't walk for most of his life. And Stephen,
(15:56):
the way I think it's so fascinating is that politically,
it's not like we can say, oh, he's citing IF here,
but I feel echoes of IF in some of his
greatest speeches. When in his first inaugural address, which I
think is his greatest speech, in nineteen thirty two, we
were in the midst of the depression. It was the
interwar period. Fascism was on the rise in Europe. This
(16:19):
was not a good time in the world. The world
was descending into darkness and it would end up in
World War Two, and Americans were starving. There were runs
on banks, Ninety percent of the stock market had gone
down at one point. He says in that first inaugural
a dress. He says, in such a spirit, on my
part and yours, we face common difficulties. They concern, thank God,
(16:45):
only material things. And I think that's the message that
so many Americans needed to hear then, because the sense
of despair and pessimism was so rampant, and here you
had a man saying saying, we'll get through this. These
are only material challenges. And I think a work like
(17:05):
IF that poem helped fuel Roosevelt's sense of resolve and ingenuity.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Jumping forward again. We're moving quickly now all the way
to JFK. Now this is the only president who won
a Poetzer Prize, although as you know, that's a somewhat
controversial issue, not necessarily going there. Even beyond that, though
one of his favorite books was about a British spy,
a name we all know. You want to tell us
(17:35):
about that job.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Kennedy's really interesting. Yes, you know, he does win a Pulitzer.
There's a lot of controversy around it because there's the
talk that he got help writing it, etc.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Etc.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Bracketing that. We can say one thing about John F.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
His love of literature was genuine. I mean he loved
to read. In fact, early in his career his dream
in some part was to be a writer, and he
was seriously committed to the world of books. And he
was a writer he did right throughout his life. So
there was a more playful aspect to his love of literature.
(18:13):
Being a president and having access to the corridors of
power proverbial and literal, he got to meet people like
spies and former spies, and one of them that he
met was you guessed it, Ian Fleming, the author of
the James Bond series. So Ian Fleming told Jeffkasey, and
(18:33):
I think you like my books in so many words,
and JFK did love them and told the nations you
should give these books a chance. So I always joke,
you know that Daniel Craig and his fellow actors portraying
James Bond should send the Kennedy Estate a thank you
note for having helped to make the Bond franchise into
(18:53):
the international behemoth that it is today.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Do you have a line or two to say about
any of the most modern presidents Nixon, both Bush's, Obama,
Trump or now Joe Biden.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yeah, I mean, look, some presidents are readers. The nation
would wait anxiously every year for Barack Obama to publish
his recommended readings, and it's very clear that Barack Obama
was very serious and thoughtful reader of literature. Then, of course,
on the other spectrum, you have Donald Trump, who openly
(19:30):
says that he's not a reader, and that's public records.
So you know, you get the whole gamut recently, as
you did historically for every FDR, for every Abraham Lincoln,
there was like the likes of Warren Harding, who was
rated as a terrible president historically and also considered one
(19:53):
who wasn't fond of books. So there's this sense of
huge discrepancies throughout the pre of those who are book
people and those who are not book people.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Here's the bottom line. Are great readers also great leaders?
Is that a fair conclusion to reach.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
It's a very good question, Stephen. It's sort of the
proverbial eight hundred pound monster in the room. And I've
thought a lot about this because that's where I sort
of started my research, was is there a connection between
good reading and good leading? And I believe that there is.
I think Harry Truman, who is a very fine reader
(20:37):
and came to power a very difficult time after World
War Two. Truman said, look, not all readers are leaders,
but all leaders are readers. So I think the first
thing that reading does is it shows your curiosity and
(20:58):
your spirit of collaboration. The second thing I think reading
does it shows your humility as well. When you open
a book, you're basically admitting that the world has something
to teach you, that you are open to new ideas,
and I think that's sort of an allegory for being
(21:19):
open to the input of other people in your organization.
So it's a wonderful kind of sign. I think I've
talked about reading as an act of curiosity and collaboration,
an act of humility, But ultimately, I think its greatest
gift for leader is the perspective that it gives you.
(21:42):
It allows you to see the world through other people's eyes.
You know, I often speak with my students, you know.
Social media is more of a mirror. It reflects your
interest back at you. Literature is this prism in which
your ideas come into contact with those of others. It's
like seeing the world with an additional set of eyes,
(22:05):
and that I think is the most precious thing for
a leader, to have the perspective of the people that
he or she or they are meant to serve, and
to see the world through their eyes. I think literature
gives you that extra set of eyes.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Joe, I got to tell you, if there's one thing
you know how to do, it's end to talk. You're
the best at it. Thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
This has been a real pleasure.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Thank you. Thanks for joining us here at One Day University.
Sign up at our website one dayu dot com to
become a member and access over seven hundred full length
video lectures from the world's finest Professors. You can also
download our app. There you can learn more about today's
episode and watch Bard Professor Joseph Lucy's lecture on the
(22:59):
President Book Club, as well as his talks on celebrated
authors like Edgar Allan, Pope, Jane Austen, and many more.
Join us next time when we preview King Charles's coronation.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Whenever there's one of these events that criticism is made,
like money could be spent in a better way, and
Charles I think he heard some of that, but at
the same time, he wants his day in the sun.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
One Day University is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a
review in your favorite podcast app. You can also check
out other Curiosity podcasts to learn about history, pop culture,
true crime, and more.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
School of Humans
I always joke that Daniel Craig should send the Kennedy
Estate a thank you note for having helped to make
the Bond franchise into the international behemoth that it is today.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to one day university talks with the world's most
engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses. This
podcast is your chance to discover some of our top
rated lectures on your own schedule. I'm Steven Schragis, and
we've put together some presidential recommended reads. American leaders of
(00:44):
the past and present have appreciated a variety of literature,
everything from plays to poetry to spy thrillers. But do
their reading habits give us any sense of their strength
as a leader? Professor Joseph Lutsey explores this in a
one day university lecture titled The President's Book Club. He's
(01:05):
a professor of comparative literature at Bard College, and he's
written books covering topics from Dante to Italian cinema. Joseph
says the idea for this talk came to him while
he was studying dystopian.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Literature a few years ago. I taught a course on
banned and censored books and one thing I noticed was
that in a lot of these dystopian worlds, one of
the first things that the kind of powers that be
would do. You see this in all this Huxley's Brave
(01:40):
New World. You see it in Margaret at Woods The
Handmaid's Tale, is that they would ban books. And I thought,
you know, how interesting and sinister that when a government
becomes a verse to freedom, it also becomes a verse
to books and learning. And I thought, well, that's a
connection I wanted to explore more. And then I would
(02:04):
say the tipping point was there was this article and
the Economists that I read shortly before kind of putting
the talk together, in which they talked about leadership and
leadership training. But they said, you know, instead of corporate retreats,
instead of how to books by people in the business world,
(02:25):
which of course have their validity, why not look to
great literature for models. And I said, you know, I
really want to dig into this topic and see how
leaders themselves have approached the world of books. And that
sort of got everything rolling.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
You picked a pretty logical starting point. George Washington obviously
he was first. Yeah, but that said George Washington wasn't
really known to be a scholar. Tell us about George
Washington and the book or the literary work that really
seemed to influence him.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
This is one of my favorite discoveries. I remember I
went to a Fourth of July reenactment with my family
near my house and we met the person who played
George Washington, and we were talking with him and we said,
you know, what's one of your regrets in life, mister Washington,
And he said, not having a college education. And you know,
(03:17):
my family joke, Well, he went pretty far in the
world without one. But I think that image of George
Washington as a man of action, not an intellectual. We
associate John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, some of the earlier officeholders
of the presidency with a world of books, not so
much with George Washington. He was a general, he was
(03:37):
an farmer, he was a statesman. Interestingly, though, I found
that George Washington was very committed to the world of books.
He designed his own book plate, he had quite a
collection of books, and he also was a pretty passionate
reader of one particular play. It's called Cato Cato by
(03:59):
Joseph Addison and from the early seventeen hundreds, so It's
one of those works that hasn't stood the test of time,
but in its time, its effect was profound. Not just
George Washington. It was a play about Cato, the ancient
Roman who resisted the tyranny of the death of the
(04:19):
Roman Republic when Julius Caesar became tyrant and Cato took
his own life in defense, and so he kind of
became a symbol to the American revolutionaries. Allegedly, George Washington
had the play performed at Valley Forge. He sprinkled his
letters with references to it. But it wasn't just him.
(04:39):
Patrick Henry's great speech give me Liberty or give me
Death is lifted from Cato by Addison Nathan Hale the
American Patriot, when he said I regret that I have
but one life to give to my country. That also
comes from Joseph Addison's Cato. So it was an example
of how a forgotten literary war could actually be in
(05:01):
the dna of American democracy. And that was a kind
of thrilling discovery for me.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Before we move on to the next president, I have
the word etiquette books written on my notes here. What's
going on there?
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Well, you know, George Washington had a particular genre of
books that he was quite devoted to, and that was
etiquette books. He loved to read etiquette books, he collected them.
These were books that we think of Emily Post in
the twentieth century, These books that teach us how to
gracefully accept or decline a dinner invitation, or I imagine
(05:36):
the updated version of Emily Post would be like how
to gently unfriend someone on Facebook. Obviously that wasn't something
that George Washington thought about, but these kind of etiquette
questions obsessed Washington, and I think it's in keeping with
his image as someone who knew how politically to say
(05:57):
and do the right thing, who took the quality of
dignity and decorum very seriously and sort of trained himself
in the images of these early etiquette manuals.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Second up on deck, it was Thomas Jefferson. Now, this
one's not a surprise. This is a man who all
of us think of as a dedicated reader. You've done
the research to document exactly why we think of Jefferson
as a voracious reader, and that his thoughts were even
reflected in the Declaration of Independence.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah, I mean, look, no surprise here, and you know,
Thomas Jefferson, who founded the University of Virginia, was considered
a person of letters in his age. In his library
reflected that a wide range of interests, including the fields
like botany, wine making, philosophy, history, and whatnot. So that's
no surprise.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I think.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
What was a surprise to me was looking at the documents, say,
a very famous document, the Declaration of Independence. Do you
think of aligned by Jefferson? We hold these truths to
be self evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
That among these are life, liberty in the pursuit of happiness.
(07:14):
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the government.
Now that's a bit of a mouthful. It's a lot
of eighteenth century political discourse. But I had been teaching
in Bard's first year seminar program, and we were reading
some of the founding figures of political philosophy, and two
(07:36):
figures in particular that i'd been teaching, John Locke and
Jean Jacques Rousseau. I saw how their ideas were permeating
Jefferson's writing and the Declaration of Independence. Let's take this
notion of equality, for example, that Jefferson talks about. Now,
one of the engines for that comes from John Locke's
(07:58):
idea of thela raza, which means the blank slate, This
idea that you know, all people are created equal, that
no matter where you're born or when you're born, there's
a kind of neutrality to human nature. And you know,
we take it for granted now. And of course it
(08:18):
wasn't expressed politically in the eighteenth century because the eighteenth
century had terrible forms of inequality, including the evil of slavery.
But as an idea that informed the Declaration of Independence,
that idea of equality from Jefferson has to be informed
by Locke's notion of the blank slave. And similarly, when
(08:40):
Jefferson writes about the governments are instituted among men, deriving
their powers from the consent of the government, that that
idea of consent is so essential to social contract theory
of the eighteenth century, and that's where thinkers like Jean
Jacques Rousseau were so important, where they basically came up
(09:02):
with a model saying that when we enter into society
through consent, we agree as a people to give up
our individual rights in the name of the collectivity. That
can only happen if we consent to do so. So
you can see in just one densely written paragraph of
(09:23):
the Declaration of Independence, you can see the swirling of
intellectual currents from major thinkers like John Locke and Jean Jacquesrousseau.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
We're going to jump forward a little onto Abraham Lincoln. Now,
this is someone we all know of as a voracious reader,
and we know of him as completely self taught. What
we don't know a lot about is his thoughts about Shakespeare.
Can you discuss Abraham Lincoln's relationship to the Shakespearean tragedies
(09:53):
Hamlet and Macbeth.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
To Lincoln loved Shakespeare, He carried in with Shakespeare with him.
He quoted from the plays He's on record for just
showing how passionate he was about Shakespeare. But you know,
there was a little bit of surprise in Lincoln's devotion
to Shakespeare. And I think it comes from what you
said earlier, Stephen, about Lincoln as the kind of prototypical
(10:16):
self made man. Lincoln is one of those figures becomes
a lawyer by studying for the bar, on his own.
He grew up on dirt floors the whole incredible rise
of Lincoln, and I think that that backstory shaped the
way he approached Shakespeare. For example, he said, you know,
(10:37):
I don't care too much for the famous soliloquy of
Hamlet to be or not to be, because I think
he didn't have that much in common with Hamlet. Hamlet
was the prince of Denmark. He was to the manner
born as they say. Lincoln instead said he related to
He loved Macbeth, and he loved the speech in Hamlet
(10:59):
where Claudius as, oh my offense's rank, where he basically says,
I know I'm guilty, but I'm not going to give
up the crown. And it got me thinking about, you know,
what was it about Lincoln and Shakespeare? And I think
part of it had to do with Lincoln's moral brilliance,
(11:19):
his conscience, the fact that you know, he believed that
then evil of slavery had to end. America went to
war because of that. But he also felt the weight
of all those deaths of Americans on his conscience. But
where I think Shakespeare really drives Lincoln. Think of a
(11:39):
speech like the Second inaugural address. It's one of the
most extraordinary speeches in American history, where Lincoln basically says, look,
the North is basically going to win this war militarily,
but ultimately it's a war in which both sides have
lost because both sides fighting were American and so that
(12:03):
speech is just this remarkable work of rhetoric when he says,
all knew that the interest of slavery was the cause
of the war, and then he said, neither party expected
for the war the magnitude of the duration, which is
already attained, neither anticipated, and he goes, you notice the
repetition of neither. There each looked for an easier triumph.
(12:27):
Both read the same Bible. And then he says, and
crushing that rhetorical crescendo, the prayers of both could not
be answered. And then he says, but let us not
judge lest we be judged. It's an amazing the use
of the pronouns, the sort of all both neither, and
(12:51):
then this kind of deflating sentiment at the end that
this is a war that has taken so many lives.
It's not the time to criticize, but it's a time
to heal. And I think that that moral vision of
Lincoln was nourished by his understanding of a writer like Shakespeare.
(13:18):
Shakespeare was a brilliant student of human nature, and he
understood that often our virtues are bound up with our vices.
And I think for Lincoln to think with and through
Shakespeare's plays over his lifetime enabled him to cultivate his
(13:41):
own moral vision that led to astonishing speeches like the
Second Inaurgal Address, where literally the fate of the United
States and the Union was on the line. The stakes
couldn't have been higher.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
After the break, an inspirational poem for FDR and a
spy thriller for JFK. We're going to go to FDR,
(14:19):
and you've explained in your talk how one work, in
particular Rudyard Kipling's poem if is something that FDR carried
with him his whole life. Actually, you want to give
us some detail on that.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
As you know, I love tennis, and besides my fantasy
to play at Wimbledon Center Court, which will never happen,
every person who walks onto Center Court passes under a
plaque with the lines if you can meet victory and
defeat and treat those two impostors the same. You know
that basically it's not about winning and losing, it's how
(14:52):
you play the game. And that's a poem by Rudyard Kipling,
who's much better known as the author of the Jungle Books.
Now that home If became a kind of mantra for FDR.
And it's a poem basically about overcoming obstacles, overcoming challenges,
and holding your head high and not letting other people
(15:15):
see you suffer. If you can talk with crowds and
keep your virtue, or walk with kings, nor lose the
common touch, if you can fill the unforgiving minute with
sixty seconds worth of distance, run yours is the earth
and everything that's in it, and what is more, you'll
be a man, my son. So that's just a brief
(15:35):
citation from the poem. FDR was so drawn to this,
and I think we can kind of understand why personally,
as we all know or any of us who's spent
any time thinking about FDR, he suffered from polio and
he couldn't walk for most of his life. And Stephen,
(15:56):
the way I think it's so fascinating is that politically,
it's not like we can say, oh, he's citing IF here,
but I feel echoes of IF in some of his
greatest speeches. When in his first inaugural address, which I
think is his greatest speech, in nineteen thirty two, we
were in the midst of the depression. It was the
interwar period. Fascism was on the rise in Europe. This
(16:19):
was not a good time in the world. The world
was descending into darkness and it would end up in
World War Two, and Americans were starving. There were runs
on banks, Ninety percent of the stock market had gone
down at one point. He says in that first inaugural
a dress. He says, in such a spirit, on my
part and yours, we face common difficulties. They concern, thank God,
(16:45):
only material things. And I think that's the message that
so many Americans needed to hear then, because the sense
of despair and pessimism was so rampant, and here you
had a man saying saying, we'll get through this. These
are only material challenges. And I think a work like
(17:05):
IF that poem helped fuel Roosevelt's sense of resolve and ingenuity.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Jumping forward again. We're moving quickly now all the way
to JFK. Now this is the only president who won
a Poetzer Prize, although as you know, that's a somewhat
controversial issue, not necessarily going there. Even beyond that, though
one of his favorite books was about a British spy,
a name we all know. You want to tell us
(17:35):
about that job.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Kennedy's really interesting. Yes, you know, he does win a Pulitzer.
There's a lot of controversy around it because there's the
talk that he got help writing it, etc.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Etc.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Bracketing that. We can say one thing about John F.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
His love of literature was genuine. I mean he loved
to read. In fact, early in his career his dream
in some part was to be a writer, and he
was seriously committed to the world of books. And he
was a writer he did right throughout his life. So
there was a more playful aspect to his love of literature.
(18:13):
Being a president and having access to the corridors of
power proverbial and literal, he got to meet people like
spies and former spies, and one of them that he
met was you guessed it, Ian Fleming, the author of
the James Bond series. So Ian Fleming told Jeffkasey, and
(18:33):
I think you like my books in so many words,
and JFK did love them and told the nations you
should give these books a chance. So I always joke,
you know that Daniel Craig and his fellow actors portraying
James Bond should send the Kennedy Estate a thank you
note for having helped to make the Bond franchise into
(18:53):
the international behemoth that it is today.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Do you have a line or two to say about
any of the most modern presidents Nixon, both Bush's, Obama,
Trump or now Joe Biden.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yeah, I mean, look, some presidents are readers. The nation
would wait anxiously every year for Barack Obama to publish
his recommended readings, and it's very clear that Barack Obama
was very serious and thoughtful reader of literature. Then, of course,
on the other spectrum, you have Donald Trump, who openly
(19:30):
says that he's not a reader, and that's public records.
So you know, you get the whole gamut recently, as
you did historically for every FDR, for every Abraham Lincoln,
there was like the likes of Warren Harding, who was
rated as a terrible president historically and also considered one
(19:53):
who wasn't fond of books. So there's this sense of
huge discrepancies throughout the pre of those who are book
people and those who are not book people.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Here's the bottom line. Are great readers also great leaders?
Is that a fair conclusion to reach.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
It's a very good question, Stephen. It's sort of the
proverbial eight hundred pound monster in the room. And I've
thought a lot about this because that's where I sort
of started my research, was is there a connection between
good reading and good leading? And I believe that there is.
I think Harry Truman, who is a very fine reader
(20:37):
and came to power a very difficult time after World
War Two. Truman said, look, not all readers are leaders,
but all leaders are readers. So I think the first
thing that reading does is it shows your curiosity and
(20:58):
your spirit of collaboration. The second thing I think reading
does it shows your humility as well. When you open
a book, you're basically admitting that the world has something
to teach you, that you are open to new ideas,
and I think that's sort of an allegory for being
(21:19):
open to the input of other people in your organization.
So it's a wonderful kind of sign. I think I've
talked about reading as an act of curiosity and collaboration,
an act of humility, But ultimately, I think its greatest
gift for leader is the perspective that it gives you.
(21:42):
It allows you to see the world through other people's eyes.
You know, I often speak with my students, you know.
Social media is more of a mirror. It reflects your
interest back at you. Literature is this prism in which
your ideas come into contact with those of others. It's
like seeing the world with an additional set of eyes,
(22:05):
and that I think is the most precious thing for
a leader, to have the perspective of the people that
he or she or they are meant to serve, and
to see the world through their eyes. I think literature
gives you that extra set of eyes.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Joe, I got to tell you, if there's one thing
you know how to do, it's end to talk. You're
the best at it. Thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
This has been a real pleasure.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Thank you. Thanks for joining us here at One Day University.
Sign up at our website one dayu dot com to
become a member and access over seven hundred full length
video lectures from the world's finest Professors. You can also
download our app. There you can learn more about today's
episode and watch Bard Professor Joseph Lucy's lecture on the
(22:59):
President Book Club, as well as his talks on celebrated
authors like Edgar Allan, Pope, Jane Austen, and many more.
Join us next time when we preview King Charles's coronation.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Whenever there's one of these events that criticism is made,
like money could be spent in a better way, and
Charles I think he heard some of that, but at
the same time, he wants his day in the sun.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
One Day University is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a
review in your favorite podcast app. You can also check
out other Curiosity podcasts to learn about history, pop culture,
true crime, and more.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
School of Humans
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.