- Brown Brothers, Sterling, Pennsylvania
- Theodore Roosevelt campaigning in the 1912 presidential election
Ken Burns came to the Francis W. Parker School Tuesday night to talk first to aspiring high school documentarians and then to an auditorium of PBS fans (most of whom were about as old as you would imagine) about his new documentary miniseries, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. I belong to neither demographic, but I was there too, because I have loved Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin for about as long as I’ve been able to read about them. In this, I was not alone; there were members of the Theodore Roosevelt Association there, and also one woman who proudly announced that she worked at Roosevelt University and had named her daughter Eleanor.
Burns claimed that this is the first combined biography of all three Roosevelts. This is not strictly true—The Three Roosevelts by James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn came out in 2000—but this is the first time it’s been done on such a grand scale, with 14 hours of TV over seven consecutive nights, plus an companion doorstop of a book, cowritten by Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward, who wrote two excellent books about prepresidential FDR, Before the Trumpet and A First-Class Temperament. The time frame spans more than a century, from Theodore’s birth in 1858 to Eleanor’s death in 1962. Burns and his crew spent seven years on the project, as he puts it, “distilling” everything that they learned into 14 hours.
