Dan Flores

kind of personality, and fortunately for America and the world, he's in the manic stage for most of his life.

I mean, he certainly has some moments of depression, but yeah, so he's a very young guy, and he's ambitious, and of course, he comes out of this kind of patrician

elite uh new york family that enables him to kind of view the world as his oyster he can do anything he wants to do he can be any kind of person he wants to be and what he decides he wants to be from a very early age is he wants to be a naturalist he wants to sort of be alexander von humboldt or or uh

John James Audubon, someone like that who gets to go out into the world and have adventures and hunt, and he hunts throughout his life, everywhere he goes, even on that Brazilian adventure on the Rio de Janeiro.

I mean, he takes time out to go on a jaguar hunt, and he gets himself a jaguar on that particular trip too.

So that's kind of – he's a person who had every opportunity to do whatever he wanted to do in life,

But he knew from a very early age what it was.

And I mean, he went for it with a tremendous amount of energy.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a useful question to be sure to provide some context.

I mean, what I did with the script for this particular episode was to couch progressivism for Roosevelt primarily in conservation.

And I think that's the natural direction

from which he comes to it.

But progressivism was a kind of a bigger movement in American life in those years, a political movement.

It was a

It was a movement that prevailed in both parties, both the Republican and the Democratic parties.

I mean, Roosevelt was a Republican, but he was certainly strongly influenced by progressivism.

And it was kind of an argument at the turn of the century that capitalism, particularly big corporate capitalism—

that was emerging in those days, was a pretty scary force in American life, and it needed to be corralled and reined in some, and the argument became in the conservation realm and in several other realms, too, that the federal government was the primary force

player in doing that although many of the states had strong progressive kind of um political developments as well but the idea was to insert the the government whether at the state level or the federal level into the economic life of the country uh in order to do thing like uh