Doris Kearns Goodwin encouraged empathy even for political enemies at a Baylor University appearance this week while reflecting on her Pulitzer Prize-winning, 50-year career as a presidential historian.
Empathy was Goodwin’s watchword as she gave the annual Beall-Russell Lecture in the Humanities on Monday at Baylor University’s new Mark and Paula Hurd Welcome Center ballroom. She is the author of numerous biographies of presidents, including Lyndon B. Johnson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
“Democracy is in peril when we begin to view people of different class, different belief, different party, or who live in diverse places, as ‘other,’” Goodwin said during a guided talk hosted by Baylor history senior lecturer David Smith.
Goodwin said Americans may be able to get back on track if a leader, after winning a victory, would follow the example of Lincoln’s second inaugural address and instead of denouncing the other political party, would say “with malice toward none with charity for all … let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
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Abraham Lincoln learned empathy as a young boy after his mother died, teaching himself to read, while his father would shoo him outside to do farm work and hire him out to other farmers as well, Goodwin said.
Teddy Roosevelt learned empathy as a state legislator in New York when labor organizer Samuel Gompers took him to see the working conditions and hours of poor people rolling cigars in New York, she said. Roosevelt, who had grown up in a wealthy family, learned the workers were not “other.”
“Before Gompers showed him those people rolling cigars, TR didn’t see the need for a bill to regulate their working hours,” she said. “Afterward, he supported that bill.”
FDR, who also had an upper-class background, learned empathy during polio treatments, when he was surrounded by people of all different classes, Goodwin said.
“Life struck him down with polio,” Goodwin said. “But instead of staying down and growing bitter, he learned empathy and rose to the highest office in the land.”
Texas’ own LBJ learned empathy in 1928 as a school teacher in Cotulla, southwest of San Antonio. He saw how the children of Mexican immigrants felt when treated as “other” by the surrounding white society. LBJ used that experience to propel civil rights laws after he became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Goodwin said she learned from her own time working for LBJ as a White House Fellow while she was in graduate school in the 1960s not to judge him from the outside but to understand him from the inside.
The presidential historian also said judging the past by the standards of today leads to misunderstanding.
“We shouldn’t call George Washington bad because he had slaves. We shouldn’t call Abraham Lincoln bad because he talked colonization for African Americans. We should understand that he never would have been elected (the first time) in Illinois if he hadn’t been for those anti-Black laws,” Goodwin said.
“We have to take the journey with the people we’re studying. They didn’t know how it would end. We have to learn what they learned along with them. We should judge the past by what was done, not what wasn’t done,” she said.
