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News / Spotlight /

Bill Moyers Donates 300 Progressive-Era Publications to Roosevelt House

June 22, 2022
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Entrance to the Roosevelt House

The Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College

A large selection of 300 books and original period magazines about the Progressive Era—and on such contemporary topics as public policy, democracy, and economic inequality—has been donated to Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute by the iconic broadcast journalist and former White House advisor Bill Moyers. Mr. Moyers acquired many of the materials during years of research for a projected PBS documentary series about the Progressive Era.

The gift was reported to the Roosevelt House Advisory Board at a June 21 meeting at the landmark building where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt lived from 1908-1933, and which now serves as the school’s public policy institute.

Mr. Moyers was an organizing founder of the Peace Corps in 1960. When Lyndon B. Johnson became President, he joined his Administration as a special assistant with a portfolio of politics and domestic policy. President Johnson asked him to become White House Press Secretary in 1965. In 1967 he moved to New York as publisher of Newsday and in 1970 traveled the country to write the best-selling book Listening to America.  The response led Mr. Moyers to a 50-year-long career as a broadcast journalist and producer for CBS News and PBS.  His work spanned topics from mythology to race and class, from culture and media to creativity, history, faith and reason, the Constitution, and the shifting state of democracy.

His work received 37 Emmy Awards and nine Peabody Awards, The American Film Institute presented him its first honorary doctorates of fine arts and The Woodrow Wilson Foundation awarded him the first Frank Taplin Award “for extraordinary contributions to public, cultural, civic and intellectual life.

The 300 Progressive Era books from Mr. Moyers will be housed in the Roosevelt House Library, which occupies two spaces in the landmark building, including the original room that FDR used as an office during his residence at the East 65th Street townhouse from 1908 through his departure for his first presidential inauguration in March 1933. The adjacent Sara Delano Roosevelt Library will house the books on contemporary topics, fittingly in a room dedicated now to student study and seminars. The period magazines become part of the Roosevelt House Archives Collections.

“This is a wonderful gift that truly enriches the Roosevelt House collections in the house that Franklin and Eleanor used as their New York City base,” commented Jennifer J. Raab, Hunter College President. “We are enormously grateful to the great Bill Moyers for choosing this historic site as the repository for this generous donation. Many of our classes and programs in public policy and human rights, as well as our public programs and conferences, touch on the very issues covered in these very books. Available now for study and consultation, they will surely stimulate a new generation of students and faculty.”

Harold Holzer, the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Roosevelt House, noted: “Progressive Era ideas served as the moral inspiration and policy foundation for FDR’s New Deal.  Similarly, Bill Moyers’ telecasts inspired generations of viewers to connect with the better angels of their nature on policy questions. The Moyers series and specials were the Fireside Chats of public television—thought-provoking, humane, and eloquent. So, it is fitting that some of the Moyers source materials should hereafter reside at FDR’s home. As a former colleague of Bill’s at the PBS station WNET, I feel particularly blessed by his interest in Roosevelt House.”

“This is a wonderful gift that truly enriches the Roosevelt House collections in the house that Franklin and Eleanor used as their New York City base.”

Hunter College President, Jennifer J. Raab

Mr. Moyers has said “The populist and progressive eras were marked by sustained and dramatic efforts to make democracy work for common people and to shift the economy and power from domination by oligarchs, plutocrats and monopolies.  Cabals of the rich and powerful dominate America today, and we can learn from the glaring failures and inspiring successes of those earlier champions of democracy. I am deeply grateful to my friends at Roosevelt House for providing a home to this collection that my colleagues and I gathered and studied as we sought to understand the people who paved the way for the Roosevelts who sought a new deal for ordinary people.”

The Moyers donation includes numerous biographies of political figures such as President William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, as well as the key players of the Progressive movement, including President Theodore Roosevelt, settlement house pioneers Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, labor and agrarian crusaders like Eugene Debs, Mother Jones and Tom Watson, journalists Upton Sinclair, William Allen White and Lincoln Steffens, and Senator Robert La Follette.  There are books on the suffrage movement and women in politics like Jeannette Rankin, as well as crusaders against lynching like Ida B. Wells. The darkness of racism and violence that impeded the civil rights of African Americans is also well covered. The need for urban improvement emerges through books by and about photojournalist Jacob Riis. Other major figures of the era who influenced public opinion were J.P. Morgan and William Randolph Hearst, their careers covered in lengthy biographies.

Another whole category of books provides overviews of muckraking journalism, radical movements, strikes and their violent repression, and populism. The conditions that they were rebelling against is best described in the books on the so-called Gilded Age and the rapidly advancing incorporation of big business during the post-Civil War period as well as corruption on a massive scale from local wards in cities to the halls of Congress.  Another historical category of books traverses the years from President Wilson, World War I and the 1920s, to the Great Depression and the New Deal. Many of the contemporary volumes published during the last 20 years deal with topics that are still much in the news, like inequality, voting rights, challenges to democracy, social justice, workers’ rights, and incarceration policies.

The Moyers gift features original magazines and newspapers from the Progressive era. Issues of Harper’s Weekly from the 1870s to the 1904 feature their usual diverse mix of illustrated cultural and political articles, including pieces on the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, anarchy, political corruption, and the suffering of families of striking miners. Issues of McClure’s Magazine from 1903 contained articles by three of the most famous muckraking journalists: Lincoln Steffens, Ida M. Tarbell, and Ray Stannard Baker. Three vintage issues of Cosmopolitan magazine from 1906 feature a series on “The Treason the Senate.” The Outlook, a weekly, in 1910 and 1911 featured articles by Associate Editor and former President Theodore Roosevelt on the fight for clean government, nationalism, and “The Trusts, the People and the Square Deal.” In contrast to these magazines is Farm & Fireside, published twice monthly during the last quarter of the 19th century, and focused on farming, farmers, and their communities.

An additional 400 books given to Roosevelt House by the Schumann Media Center cover topics related to its missions and programs, including the American presidency, media and journalism, election propaganda, foreign policy, African-American history, and American history.

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