PROGRAM
Join us at Roosevelt House as we celebrate the publication of Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary, by Geoffrey Cowan. We are pleased to announce that the evening also marks the launch of our new Keynote Series: Decision 2016, public programs focused on the central issues – and historical context – of this year’s presidential campaign.
Just as the 2016 primary campaign begins in earnest, Geoffrey Cowan, president of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, will discuss the exhilarating story of the four-month campaign that changed American politics forever. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt came out of retirement to challenge his close friend and handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, for the Republican Party nomination. To overcome the power of the incumbent, TR seized on the idea of presidential primaries, telling bosses everywhere to “Let the People Rule.” Mr. Cowan, in conversation with Harold Holzer, the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Roosevelt House, will discuss Theodore Roosevelt’s fight-to-the-finish battle to win popular support. After sweeping nine out of thirteen primaries, TR felt entitled to the nomination. But the party bosses proved too powerful, leading Roosevelt to walk out of the convention and create a new political party of his own.
Using a trove of newly discovered documents, Cowan takes readers inside the colorful, dramatic, and often mean-spirited campaign, describing the political machinations and intrigue and painting indelible portraits of its larger-than-life characters. But Cowan also exposes the more unsavory parts of TR’s campaign: seamy backroom deals, bribes made in TR’s name during the Republican Convention, and then the shocking political calculation that led TR to ban any black delegates from the Deep South from his new “Bull Moose Party.”
More than one hundred years later, as political outsiders in the Republican Party once again vie with the party establishment, the story of the 1912 primaries is more relevant than ever. The discussion about Let the People Rule offers a chance to look back at 1912 — and ahead to the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary of 2016. In this utterly compelling work, Cowan illuminates lessons of the past that have great resonance for American politics today.
The event will be followed by a reception and book signing.
SPEAKERS
Geoffrey Cowan
Throughout his career, Geoffrey Cowan has been an important force across a spectrum of communication and public policy arenas – as a lawyer, academic administrator, government official, best-selling author, distinguished professor, non-profit executive, and Emmy Award-winning producer. He is the author of new book Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary (W.W. Norton & Company), which will be available in January 2016. Visit Professor Cowan’s author page to learn more about the book and for tour dates.
In 2010, the trustees of The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands appointed Cowan to serve as the first president of the Trust. He carried on the Annenberg legacy by developing Sunnylands into a world-class venue for important retreats for top government officials and leaders in the fields of law, education, philanthropy, the arts, culture, science and medicine. It has so far welcomed President Barack Obama on four separate occasions, including two historic summits with other world leaders: one with China’s President Xi Jinping in June, 2013, and the other with King Abdullah II of Jordan in February, 2014.
From 1996-2007, he served as dean of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. In 2007, he was named a University Professor (one of 21 at the university), the inaugural holder of the Annenberg Family Chair in Communication Leadership and director of USC Annenberg’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy. He holds a joint appointment in the USC Gould School of Law and teaches courses in communication and journalism.
In addition to his tenure at USC, Cowan spent twenty years as a professor of communication law and policy at UCLA, where he became the first director of UCLA’s Communications Law program and founded the Center for Communication Policy.
Harold Holzer
Harold Holzer is Director of Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute and a professor in Hunter’s history department.
Holzer is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. A prolific writer and lecturer, Holzer serves as Chairman of The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, successor organization to the U. S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (ALBC), to which he was appointed by President Clinton in 2000, and co-chaired from 2001–2010. President Bush awarded Holzer the National Humanities Medal in 2008, and in 2013, Holzer wrote an essay on Lincoln for the official program at the re-inauguration of President Barack Obama.
Holzer has authored, co-authored or edited 50 books. His latest major book, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion, won the 2015 Gilder-Lehrman Lincoln Prize, as well as The Mark Lynton History Prize from the Columbia University School of Journalism. Other recent titles include President Lincoln Assassinated!!, a Library of America Anthology of public and private responses to Lincoln’s death; and, Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America, the official young adult companion book to the Steven Spielberg film.
In addition, Holzer has written some 550 articles and reviews for both popular magazines and scholarly journals, includingSmithsonian, Life Magazine, American Heritage, Civil War Times, American History Illustrated, North & South, Blue & Gray, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times Book Review and Op. Ed pages, The New York Daily News and The Los Angeles Times. His regular column, “Cease Fire,” appears in America’s Civil War, and he contributes regularly to the Civil War websites of The New York Times and Washington Post.
Holzer has also written chapters to more than 60 books as well as a number of pamphlets and monographs on Lincoln, including Lincoln and The Jews (2002), and Standing Tall: The Heroic Image of Abraham Lincoln (2005). And Holzer has contributed chapters and forewords to 51 additional books. In 2004, Holzer was the historical advisor to the book Why Lincoln Matters by the late Mario M. Cuomo. His next book, written with Norton Garfinkle is A Just and Generous Nation: Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity.
