>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. ^M00:00:05 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:25 >> Welcome to the Library of Congress, everyone. Good afternoon and thank you for coming to a Books and Beyond Talk which is sponsored by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, of which I am the Director. I'm John Cole, and also co-sponsored with the Manuscript Division and we're very pleased that you are able to join us for a talk about an important Washington figure and important to the United States figure who is very well-represented in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. When Alice Birney introduces our speaker, we'll learn more about our resources for Olmsted and also we'll get a taste of what a remarkable man he really was. The Center for the Book was created in 1977 by Daniel Boorstin when he was librarian of the Congress and his idea was that the Library of Congress needed a way of reaching the general public to promote books and reading and the Center for the Book from the beginning has been a public private partnership with the Library of Congress paying our five salaries now but all of the programming and all of the activities supported by private contributions from corporations and individuals. We operate around the country through National Centers for the Book. Each state now has a center that promotes books and reading and that states local literary heritage. We also have a group of 80 non-profits mostly who are corporations--I mean non-profit organizations with whom we work on specific projects. We also are involved with the National Book Festival and I want to remind everyone that we have one coming up. It will be September 24th and 25th, it's the first time we've expanded to two days. And rather than our usual roster of around 70 writers and illustrators and poets, we will be having nearly 100 over that two-day period. So it marks an expansion for us and an examination of really which direction we're headed with the book festival. We also are the administrators of the new Young Readers Center, which is not new anymore. It's almost two years old, which is a place for kids under 16 to have a place for look at books, to have a reading aloud center to look at media programs, a way to bring younger people into the world of books, both through a physical space which has been designed for us by the architect of the Capitol and also through activities that are planned there. Here at the Library of Congress, in addition to the book festival, this particular series was started in 1996 and we have always featured new books that are by authors who have made--have a special connection with the Library of Congress. And often it is through using our collections, which we will talk about in Alice's introduction, but sometimes it's also through special projects that have been developed. These talks are actually advertised. If you want to use that phrase on Facebook, we have a Facebook page which goes back and looks at a number of the talks in the past and we're looking ahead, of course, in this place where people can comment on the talks and I realize I sometimes use that as a way to suggest new speakers. We couldn't do this without help from the curators of the Library of Congress and as I said, the Manuscript Division is our co-sponsor here today. There will be a book signing immediately after Justin's presentation and it will be held in this particular room. I would like to introduce Alice Birney, the curator of American Cultural Subjects in the Manuscript Division who will introduce our speaker. Let's give Alice a hand. ^M00:04:44 [ Applause ] [ Inaudible Remark ] ^M00:04:52 >> I will. I've been reminded and I do this without notes each time I get reminded. We are filming this for our website and there will be a question and answer period before the book signing and we encourage your involvement. But if you ask a question, you are giving us permission to use your image and your ideas perhaps as part of the website discussion. Anything else? Okay. Alice. >> Good afternoon. Today we celebrate a real page turner of a biography, Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted, explores the life struggles and works of the pioneering landscape architect of Central Park and many other important civil--important American green spaces. Lesser known is that the genius in question, Olmsted, was a Civil War hero, a fervent abolitionist, crusading journalist, and pioneering environmentalist. The book also shows how Olmsted worked reformist sociopolitical positions into his designs. In a personal note, I first must mention that as a child, I rejoiced in walking in Central Park in Manhattan. It never occurred to me then that any person actually designed such a magnificent park. Little could I have dreamed that I would spend the last 21 years administering over 2,000 cultural manuscript collections, including the papers of the designer of such landscapes as Central Park, Niagara Falls, Yosemite, the Biltmore, and the grounds of the United States Capitol. The Library of Congress is the major repository for Olmsted primary materials. Anyone doing research in early landscape architecture must consult the 30,000 items of a personal and professional papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, perhaps at 60 now, the separate 170,000 items of the papers of Olmsted Associates and the papers of the first biographer, Laura Wood Roper, on the Manuscript Division as well as related materials in Prints and Photographs Division. Our biographer indeed made frequent trips here from New York City. He used these collections as well as to the Olmsted home in Brookline, Massachusetts and other repositories. He also toured most of the sites of the actual parks. Author Justin Martin previously published two other highly praised biographies. "Greenspan: The Man behind Money", 2000; and "Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon", 2002. As one of the few journalists to gain access to Greenspan, Martin produced a best-selling biography of the secretive Fed Chairman , selected as a notable book by the New York Times Book Review. Martin's biography Ralph Nader served as a primary source for the film "An Unreasonable Man", an Academy Award nominated documentary. Mr. Martin is a former staff writer at Fortune Magazine. His articles have appeared in Newsweek, Money, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other journals. He is a 1987 graduate of Rice University in Houston, Texas. He was married in Central Park, Olmsted's masterpiece. He lives with his wife and twin sons in Forest Hills Gardens, a New York enclave designed by Olmsted's son. I am very pleased to present master biographer, Justin Martin. ^M00:08:49 [ Applause ] ^M00:08:56 [ Noise ] ^M00:09:04 >> Hello everybody and thank you very much, John and Alice, for the introduction. And for me it was--I spent a lot of time here in the Library of Congress researching my biography of Frederick Law Olmsted. And so it's just a real honor and a real privilege to return here to speak for the Beyond the Book [inaudible]. And today, what I thought I would do in the way of a speech is I'm first going to provide just really almost thumbnail sketch of Olmsted's life and then I'm gonna talk about how the Library of Congress' collection allowed me to really flesh out this great man story. And then I'm gonna end by discussing how there still--what territory remains, what remains that can be or should be explored on the subject of Olmsted. And then as John mentioned, there'll be time at the end for question and answer. And I've written down a couple of things before I came. I jot down a few notes before I came to deliver this speech about the types of resources that are available in this amazing institution and there are 147 million items here from the papers of 23 presidents. ^M00:10:10 >> It's a Gutenberg Bible, 124,000 phone books from 650 U.S cities, there's a sheet music of Beethoven. The library also has the papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, my subject; Frederick Douglas, the subject for many other people. I also came across in the website "The Rauch Guide to the U.S. Adhesives" by Frederick Keimel. So there's a lot, a lot here to explore on many different disciplines in areas if one is interested. And so, so instead I'll start with this kind of quick thumbnail sketch of Olmsted's life. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1822. He's born into a fairly prosperous family. He was educated by a whole series of very poor country parson and he dropped out of school at a pretty young age. At a young age also, his father would take young Frederick Olmsted around the countryside of Connecticut on horseback and he placed little Fred on a pillow that he placed right from the saddle and this really kind of imbued Olmsted with a passion for landscape and for the Connecticut countryside. Olmsted, as I mentioned, he dropped out of school at a young age and he undertook a whole series of professions. He was a surveyor, he was a clerk, he was a sailor, he was a farmer, and mostly notable, he was a journalist. He worked for the very first iteration of a brand new then startup paper, the New York Times and they gave him an absolute dream assignment to travel through the American south in the early1850's in the eve of the American Civil War. Olmsted produced just a spectacular reportage that he would be--if he was not remembered for being a landscape architect, he would be certainly a footnote or more in history for his antebellum southern reporting. In fact, a book he produced called The Cotton Kingdom which was published. It was a compilation of his southern reporting. It was published originally in 1861 and it remains in print today. Unfortunately for Olmsted, who had by the late 1850's established himself as a notable journalist, he was--his career and plans were disrupted by a fairly cataclysmic economic event that's come to be known as The Panic of 1857. He lost his job in journalism and so he was forced to find a new job. At this point, Olmsted was low on money, low on coal, he owed money to everyone, he had a hole in his hat and so he took a very modest job. It was quite a comedown for someone who recently had been an esteemed journalist. He took a job in which he was simply called upon to clear a very homely, very unattractive piece of land in the middle of Manhattan that was prosaically named Central Park. Olmsted's job was simply, at this stage at least, was simply to clear this very unattractive piece of land, knocking down shanties draining swamps, prepare it for someone else's design. But along the way, people started to question whether the existing design for Central Park that Olmsted was working to clear was really not anything more than an amateurish effort. And so, they decided--the park commissioners decided to have a public competition to try to get some better ideas for how Central Park might be designed. At this point, an English friend architect name Calvert Vaux approached Olmsted and he asked Olmsted if he'd like to team up and make it work together and submit a design to this public contest. Vaux had no care and no appreciation for Olmsted's high profile as a journalist. Vaux simply perceived that Olmsted have been out on the land breaking down shanties, beaking up stones, and he thought, "We'll have a leg up in this competition if I'm working with this man who literally knows the lay of the land." And lo and behold, they produced a spectacular plan, a design that the only way to put it is through a 32--there are 33 entries in total, 32 of them were served down here. Olmsted and Vaux's plan was just instantly recognized as the way that the park commissioners want to go. And so, Olmsted and Vaux began to design Central Park and the design was pretty well underway when the Civil War broke out. At that point, Olmsted came down here to Washington and he headed up a battlefield relief outfit called the United States Sanitary Commission. It was in many ways the forerunner of the Red Cross. After the Battle of Gettysburg, he perceived that so many people dead that the Civil War had had taken the decisive term that it was likely that the North would ultimately be victorious. It was a matter of time, some people would put it. And for Olmsted, he started while working for this United States Sanitary Commission, he started to think about what might he do next. Landscape architecture, the very field that he and his partner Vaux had pioneered with Central Park, did not occur to him as a possible future profession. The reason being, he had no sense that any other U.S. city would be interested in designing a park. And so, what Olmsted did near the tail end of the Civil War is he went out to California and he became the supervisor of a gold mine. But when the Civil War ended, there was an economic boom in the north. And all of a sudden, all these cities started clamoring for parks to be designed. And so Olmsted reunited with his partner Vaux from Central Park and together they designed a park system for Buffalo, the plan for the community of Riverside, a suburb of Chicago. And they also designed a park system for Chicago. Then Vaux and Olmsted who never had an easy relationship, who always were at each other's throats broke up. They broke up their professional partnership. Olmsted continued on. He designed Mount Royal and Montreal. He designed the grounds of the U.S. Capitol here. He later designed Stanford University and he continued on as a solo practitioner. And then later in his career, he did what I described as his twin swan songs. At about the same time, concurrently, he was working on the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, a giant estate that he designed for a client George Vanderbilt who is then the richest man in the world. And then he also worked on the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Chicago World's Fair. He did the grounds for that. Olmsted is a man in his late 60s and his early 70s when he was working on these projects. He was anything but sanguine. He was not--many of his--this was in 19th century. Many people didn't even live to be late 60s or early 70s. Those who did had slowed down or retired. Olmsted was fevered at this point. He had a sense that he wanted to leave a legacy and landscape architecture is so very different, obviously, from other art forms in music or literature in which you can actually have something that's permanent. He had throughout his entire career as a landscape architect watched this people stepped in and tried to meddle with his designs, whether it be his very first one, Central Park or every one in between. And so as he worked on these twin swan songs as I described them, he was literally anxiety ridden and desperate to secure his reputation and legacy. He wanted to make sure these works would hold up for posterity. Furthermore, two of his sons were getting ready to succeed him or are already in the process of succeeding him in the landscape architecture practice he'd started and he had a great deal of concern and anxiety that there be a profession in the future for them and also, that they would be properly imbued with a passion for landscape architecture. And so, when Olmsted completed the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina in 1895, he was really a husk of a man at that point. He was completely worn out. In 1895, he started to manifest the very first symptoms of some form of senile dementia. It was perhaps Alzheimer's disease. There's no way of knowing because there was no diagnosis for that particular condition in the 19th century but he started to repeat himself. He became forgetful. He was often confused and agitated. And so for a while, his family tried to care for him in a home setting. Then ultimately, he was confined to something called the McLean Asylum which is on the outskirts of Boston. And it was actually, ironically, it was--he had earlier, much earlier in his career, he designed the landscape of McLean. So among the last, perhaps the last reported words from Olmsted, he was--apparently he said upon being checked into McLean, he said, "Confound them, they did not follow my plan." [ Laughter ] >> And Olmsted then spent six very quite unrecorded, there is not much to draw from years in McLean as he sort of faded from this world he died in--and he died in 1903. And so, that's kind of, as I said, a thumbnail sketch, almost think of it as a Wikipedia entry, description of Olmsted's life. But for me as a biographer, coming down here at the Library of Congress, I was able to find all kinds of letters and other documents that helped me to flush out this man's incredible story. I'm now gonna spend a little time talking about some various documents and how they sort of animated this great man's life. The first one I'm going to make reference to is Olmsted's father was a very kind of quiet stoic man and the same time, underneath it all, he had just a real warmth for his son, Frederick Law Olmsted and for his family. And the way that's possible to notice is a lot of letters that Olmsted and other contemporaries of his father wrote so you'll get a flavor for what this man was like. But he also left--Olmsted's father had a pocket diary that he kept. And the pocket diary has been microfilmed so you can read it page by page consecutively. ^M00:20:00 >> And the best way to describe is it is unfortunately an excruciating document because what it is is this very sort of stolid stoic man would keep track of household expenditures in very precise detail. And every now and then, he would make a comment on something, you know, maybe something else was happening like maybe there was an unseasonably early spring fall and so he might write a quick notation about that. But there was a terrible event in Olmsted's very early years when Olmsted's mother died. And at that point, there's an entry to be found in this pocket diary and I recorded a passage from it in my book. And Olmsted's father wrote, "No account kept of expenses from February 24th to March 12. Tuesday February 28th, at half past 5 p.m., my dear wife died and was buried Sunday following. Given--setting up the context of what you know of this man, given what you learn about--what one can learn by reading other letters about him, this very kind of homely little passage, I felt like it really was very resonant and it really spoke volumes. And so, it was something I was glad to come across in the library's collection. I'm glad to be able to reproduce my book. Another of the many, many items that are available in the library's collection that I consulted was Olmsted took a sea voyage when he was a young man and he kept a kind of ships log and Olmsted, unlike his father, was a very verbose, very exuberant person. And so, his ships log. He tried to confine himself to kind of facts about, you know, how the rigging was done on a particular day or what the weather was like, but sometimes he gets very excited and has all kinds of observations. He cannot help but put in the ships log which, again, is you can consult it on microfilm and it's in chronological order. Well, one of episodes that his ship encountered while he was sailing during the year of 1843, from New York City to China was as the ship was rounding, the Cape of Good Hope right beneath Africa, he had absolutely ferocious snowstorm and it almost sank the ship. And Olmsted later in his life as a journalist often had--would often do accounts of earlier experiences and he produced an account of this terrible, terrible blizzard that he encountered and nearly sank ship. And that was--I was certainly able to consult that for the book. But there was a detail in his ships log that I was able to encounter that when matched with his later account, it was really interesting. This particular blizzard happened on July 4th. It happened on a July 4th of 1843. Now, of course, the weather patterns in the southern hemisphere are reverse. So you can have a terrible winter storm as you're down close to the South Pole. And so I thought, being able to find this particular detail that the actual event because in Olmsted's account that he later wrote as a journalist, he neglected to mention that the terrible blizzard that nearly sank his ship had happened on July 4th. So to be able to match that blizzard with his ships log, and be able to provide a date to it I thought was very--since the date was July 4th, I felt that was very resonance and a very telling or interesting detail. Now, when Olmsted arrived and docked in China, he passed a very, very lonely Thanksgiving in which he was actually aboard ship eating whatever gruel served to him. And he was a very imaginative person, so he pictured what Thanksgiving might be like 8,000 miles away in Hartford. And he wrote a letter home that is typical of him, as a young man at least exuberance and excitement and imagination and I'll read a little piece from that letter. He said, "It's just about the right time of day that I'm imagining you just about well to work on the turkeys and cranberry. I supposed mother has to boil it in oyster as usual while father performs in the roasting and courgette as the dressing. Take care both." He writes as a nod to his half-sisters. "That's a big drumstick but I guess you'll manage it with one hand." So reproduced and stressed that, I thought it really captured his homesickness when he was in this port. On the very same day, his father in that excruciating daily log of expenses wrote just four words, "Fred's company much wanted." And so in my account of Fred's homesick Thanksgiving in November of 1843, it was very nice to be able to contrast his sort of imaginative, picturing the Thanksgiving and his father's four simple words spoke volumes. "Fred's company much wanted." Now, I mentioned that Olmsted was a very exuberant young man and also a very kind of scattershot, very scattershot in his enthusiasms. And this attribute, this mannerism extended to his dating. He was--the only way you can describe it is he went through a frenzy of courtship. He pursued a huge variety of different eligible young women often at exactly the same time. And I came across--he wrote many letters about this, many lovesick letters. He wrote a lovesick letter about one young woman and the next day, he would somehow fall in love and become lovesick with a different young woman. So, I came across many letters. It was very--this was very well-documented in the letters he wrote and here was one I thought was very telling. He wrote--he writes to a friend, "I am desperately in love now and no mistake, only for the life of me I can't tell who it's with. The whole of them I believe." [Laughter] So, now, one things I was really--one of the things that I found made the Olmsted collection of letters here at the Library of Congress a particularly rich resource is that Olmsted, he wrote so many different letters but also, his various friends and family, they were all these different letters and so you have a lot of documentation of events of his life. And this is particularly the case when he was a very young man in his early 20s, his brother was attending Yale. And so Olmsted took the hanging out in New Haven with his brother and his brother's friends and they became a circle of friends. And what's really interesting is this group of friends, as far as I could tell 'cause I read so many of these letters, they would see each other during the day. They would see each the next day but that night, they would write letters to one another. And I found this curious at first because I thought in the modern era, of course, you might write a quick turfs email to a friend that you see regularly. But they would write long, florid 19th century letters. And I came to the conclusion and, of course, as I said, you know, I could see from, you know, that the content of the letters that Olmsted had seen this particular friend this day in New Haven, he would see him the next day in New Haven. So why write a long florid letter? I came to the conclusion that his letters were actually in the 19th century at least. These were a way for people to focus their thoughts. They were also a way for people to exercise verbal dexterity. So, even though you're gonna see somebody on a daily basis, you might still wanna put down your thoughts in a letter and pressed them with your cleverness or what have you. Another thing that was absolutely striking and one of the riches aspects of the collection of letters that the library has is that this group of fiends, Olmsted, his brother and the other friends, they were in habit of writing behind each other's backs. That's the only way to put it. It's kind of like talking behind one's back. And so, Olmsted who was always often some crazy speculate scheme, he might write a letter justifying, you know, his latest wild notion of what he was going to do. Then his brother might write behind his back to a friend say, "Can you believe my brother, you know, this is crazy what he's up to." Of course it was in 19th century language so I'm very much paraphrasing. And then the friend might write back and say, "Oh, he's at it again." So, you know, it was just--you have this and y virtue of that, I don't know how many people in here have seen the great Japanese movie Rashomon, but Rashomon is a movie in which you're able to look at certain events from a variety of different perspectives. Well, these letters in which the letters are written behind Olmsted's back that are available here, they produced a kind of Rashomon. Olmsted would be doing a particular event and you'd get the perspective of others. And in this context and also in the context I just described of Olmsted's frenzy of courtship, I wanted to read from an absolutely stunning letter that I came across in the Library of Congress. And as it happens, this is a letter that nobody has no previous scholar or writer on Olmsted had at least when coming across, I thought to reproduce. I thought it fit wonderfully into, you know, sort of describing Olmsted's look at by a peer. In this case, it's his brother. His brother was writing to a friend behind Olmsted's back and he was describing how Olmsted was sort of hard up and desperately in love. In this particular letter, it reads like a crazy personal ad. And here's--it says, "A manageable young lady would be an inducement for Fred. She must have a great deal of common sense, self-controlled, affection, earnestness, housekeeping in a small income abilities, capability of silence, capability of speech, comprehension of what is incomprehensible to others, sympathy, small visibility, docility, a broad pelvis, faith, quick antagonism, self-respect, infinite capabilities and longings, power of abstraction, sound skepticism, power over appetite, power of seeing a certain distance into a milestone, charity, enthusiasm, self-annihilation, truth, doctor Taylor's [inaudible] of night, no superior, fondness for sausages, clams, pork and old dressing gowns, all things must be under control of reason, beauty and wealth no object and no objection. ^M00:30:01 >> If you have such a person, mention the time of leaving at the early train. Fred is finally rather hard up. He won't be contempt with less infinity, while he himself is on the finite and a farmer. [ Laughter ] >> I just love, love that letter. As said it was a letter written behind his back from his brother to another friend and it really I told you a lot about in his own quirky way about his scattershotness. And here's another detail I wanted to kind of attend to and that is along the way with the research that I did. They're often mysteries that were existing from previous accounts of Olmsted whether they'd be biographies or scholarly works and so it's always a pleasure to be able to answer or find the answer to one of these mysteries and I give one example. This was a very little mystery. It's very satisfying to find the answer to it. As I mentioned, Olmsted was a farmer. He was a finite and a farmer, as his brother claimed and he worked at that point in a farm in Staten Island and he named the farm Tosomoc Farm. And previous people who'd research Olmsted some of them had speculated that maybe this was an Indian name, that seems valid or possible. Another person who had written about Olmsted speculated that maybe Tosomoc was a corruption of toss amuck which would aptly describe Olmsted's state of mind in that era. Well, I was going through the letters and I came across a letter that Olmstead wrote to Henry James on July 8th of 1891. It's a letter that was in the library's collection and as it happens, Olmstead was farming on Staten Island in the 1840's, late 1840's. So this letter was written in 1891 40 years later after he left farming and in the letter Olmstead said that Tosomoc Farm was simply a corruption of Petrus [phonetic] [inaudible] who is a Dutch settler in the 1600s who is the first person to farm on the piece of land that Olmsted then farmed on. He said this was a wonderful, and kind of surprising thing to find because the letter did not--it was not to be found in the 1840s and Olmstead was working on the farm, it was a reminiscence that he wrote 40 years later in which he revealed the origin of this particular name. Now, as I mentioned earlier had Olmsted not become landscape architect, he would definitely be remembered at some level for his reportage for the New York Times that he did down south. And best way to describe it is, for anyone who is curios, you can go to any public library in America, almost, and then you could find old issues of New York Times and you could read the southern reporting. You could also go anywhere or go on Amazon.com or what have you and get a copy of the Cotton Kingdom, the book that accounts or recounts his southern journeys. But when I set out to do this biography, I thought I really wanted to try to get behind and sort of find out what was going on for him personally at any particular juncture in his long career. And so I thought, sure you could read the New York Times as batches and that would give you an idea of where you could kind of rough out his itinerary, know that he was at Charleston at this point. He was in the Mississippi Delta at that point. You could describe the plantations he visited. But I thought I wanted to really to bring this great episode when he's reporting the south, the life. I wanted to be able to find out what was going on sort of in his own personal life, behind the scenes, what he was experiencing. And so here again the Library of Congress was a stunning resource. There are all of these letters in which, as I said, you could read the reportage in New York Times and you have an idea of what he was doing through all of these letters that he wrote to friends and his father and so forth in which she describes what he is going through while he's doing this reporting. I'll read just one passage again that in my book I reproduce a lot of the flavor of what was going on for him personally but I'll read one passage from the letter that he wrote to her friend where he says, "You can't imagine how hard it is to get a hold of a [inaudible] man and when you find one he will talk of anything else but slavery. They are jealous of observation of things that would tell against slavery." And this again, I thought this was a great letter to be able to reproduce because it told you that, you read the New York Times those batches and he's able to have these incredibly cogent observations about slavery. It's good to know about some of the challenges he was feeling that this was not an easy process to tease out this detail and this information about slavery. Now, one thing that I certainly kind of akin to how I describe with the New York Times reporting that I wanted to kind of get behind the scenes and try to get an idea of what Olmstead was feeling or going through. I applied the same standard to the various parks that I chose to cover in the book. Olmstead work on so many different parks that if you really--if you're to write a book that just accounted for these park projects, it would be very [inaudible] would be just a list, a long list of he did this, he did that. So what I decided to do is I sort of came up with a certain standard which was I decided I wanted to only attend to parks in which there was a back story, in which there was something going on his personal life that intertwine with his park work. I don't know how many people here are fans of the television show, the VH1 show, Behind The Music. I was always a big fan of that and it would feature people like John Lennon and you would learn not just about music of John Lennon maybe, you'd see the interplay of a [inaudible] with the collaborator or a problem he is having and how that animated the records that he made. Well, likewise, I thought, Olmsted was an artist subject to the same processes. In fact, I felt it made a lot of sense to try to get a sense of what was happening and like so many artists, Olmstead actually, his life was full of tragedy and he used that tragedy, it informed his park work because he was trying to create beauty against the backdrop of terrible personal tragedy. We tend to think of the past as the time when people were visited by more tragedy. Certainly, you know, people often lost children more--readily and easily, there were diseases people succumb to in the past that there are easy cures for today. The best way to put it is in the 19th century Olmsted, which we think of as the time of tragedy for many people, Olmstead faced way more than his share of tragedy on that era. And it was my observation that when there are letters at the Library of Congress which kind of interplay with the park designs that he did, that helped really bring those to life and give them some, you know, some kind of real flavor. And so, here I'll read just an incredible letter to be found. I'll read a portion of it that I published in my book that appears here in the Library of Congress' collection. It is literally a deathbed letter from Fredrick Law Olmsted, "Dear beloved brother John," John was dying of tuberculosis in this and he wrote to Fred, "Dear, dear Fred, it appears we are not to see one another anymore. I never have known any better friendship than ours has been and there can't be greater happiness to think that how dear we have been and how long we have held out such tenderness." The letter also included a really telling P.S. It was a P.S. that said, "Don't let Mary suffer while you are alive." Mary was his brother John's wife and Olmsted later married Mary and raised his brother John's three children, adopted and he raised them as his own. So here was the letter that really helped to animate. In this case, Central Park, while Olmsted was working on Central Park he actually contended with three different tragedies. This is just being one of them and I really came to conclusion that Central Park and many of these other park creations faced with, temporalness, fleetingness of life, terrible tragedies, I felt like this park works literally gives him another level, an animation if you realize it against the backdrop of these personal tragedies. He was designing these beautiful spaces that he hoped, he hoped would be lasting. I mentioned also, I mentioned earlier that he headed up an outfit here in Washington during the Civil War of United States Sanitary Commission. And while he was working for the United States Sanitary Commission with the battlefield relief outfit, he had many opportunities to both observe President Lincoln just as a sort of a person, a person who is around town and also actually to meet with Lincoln and Lincoln and Olmsted didn't get on well basically in the few times in which they actually met one another in person. Lincoln felt that the United States Sanitary Commission which Olmsted headed up, he felt that it was kind unnecessary. He thought it was redundant. He thought that the army's medical bureau was already doing what need to be done and he described in Olmsted's earshot, he called the United States Sanitary Commission a fifth wheel. Olmsted for his part would often write letters in which could very critical for Lincoln. At one point he wrote a letter in which he said that Lincoln has no element of dignity. I very much enjoyed going through these letters that Olmsted had written during the Civil War period because it was a really reminder that Lincoln who, of course, is just shrouded in myth with a one of the most, if not the most hailed U.S. president. It was such a great reminder that once upon a time he was like Obama or Bush before him. He was just a sitting president. On any given day, he was doing something that was probably making someone unhappy and Olmsted was one of those people and he wrote many, many letters in which, while he only met Lincoln on a handful occasions and they didn't see eye to eye, he wrote many, many letters during the Civil War in which he was critical of Lincoln although ultimately with the Emancipation Proclamation, Olmsted very much revises his estimate of the president. ^M00:40:11 >> But there was one particular letter that I again want to read from that I reproduced in my book and this is a letter that Olmsted wrote to his 9-year-old son, John Charles, who at that point was called Charlie, he later came to be known as John but at that point his name was Charlie. So, Olmstead writes, "Dear Charlie, I went to the White House today and I saw the president. He is a very tall man. He is not a handsome man, he is not graceful, but he is good. He speaks frankly and truly and straight out just what he's thinking. Commonly he is very sober, but sometimes he laughs and when he laughs he laughs very much and he opens his mouth very deep." I love this letter because I felt like there was a tension in it. The correspondent here is a 9-year-old boy, Olmsted's step son, and he recognizes that that's his audience and yet he make--he has that line he is not graceful, he is not a handsome man. I felt like-- like this letter particularly because it felt like there was a tension or knowing everything that I came to know about Olmsted view of Lincoln, I could feel he was kind of withholding back, resisting to urge to be more critical, but he couldn't help himself to say a few--get a few zingers or [inaudible] about Lincoln. So I thought it was a very telling letter that was a pleasure to reproduce. It's also a pleasure to reproduce this particular letter because I had to read literally thousands of letters by Olmsted and his contemporaries. This letter written by Olmsted was written to a 9-year-old boy. Olmsted formed his letters very carefully, it made my job so very much easier [laughter] to read his handwriting and I was thankful for that. And this is a good time to mention one of the challenges to be encountered here at the Library of Congress and any place for one is researching, I'm sure, which is if you're going through handwritten letters, it is just you get to know your subject intimately but you also, it can be very challenging to try to decipher a person's handwriting and also the handwriting of their contemporaries. And Olmstead was certainly a challenging subject because wrote long 10 and 15 page long letters. And when he got excited, when he was maybe in the grip of some new park idea, he would start to write in a margins like this [laughter], making my job very difficult. And I would--I was in a habit that I would consult the microfilm which is in chronological order, the letter, and other documents in chronological, and when I saw something that look promising, I didn't wanna pull through all 15 pages right then and there. What I would do is I would photocopy it and make sure I got a nice clean copy and I would take it home and I would read over it. And so, of course, some of these 15 pages have writing in the margins proved to be a challenge to go over. Another thing I noticed as I was doing my research and it really threw me early was Olmsted appeared to have two different--at least two different kinds of handwriting and for a while I thought maybe he hired someone who took dictation. But I started to notice the three different kinds of handwriting seemed to be in some kind of range. Kind of ranging from messy to really, really messy. And so I came to the conclusion and it started to become clear from the contents of these letters that Olmsted's handwriting became particularly messy, more messy than normal either late at night when he is writing the letter or when he was depressed which was very frequently, his handwriting would start to get kind of slovenly. So, that was something that I had to continue with to make sense of this as I was researching. Now, I mentioned earlier that Olmstead had what I described as twin swan songs, two different works that he did concurrently near the end of his life that he was just in a frenzy, worried that this would turn out per his hopes and one of them was the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. The other was a Chicago Columbian Exposition. And I also--just so per the model [inaudible] always wanting to animate any kind of park work with something that was going on behind the scenes, found many wonderful letters with these two twin songs, songs in which he was, you know, communicating how deeply and desperately he was anxious for them to be, you know, to be what he hoped they would be [inaudible] for posterity. And so I'm going to read just one [inaudible] of the letter that I quoted in my book that give some flavor for this. This is a letter while he's working on the Vanderbilt estate and this is written to his John Charles, his now grown stepson and Fredrick Law Olmsted Jr., his now grown natural son who are just starting to head up the landscape architecture firm that will succeed Olmsted. This was the letter he writes to them from the Vanderbilt estate where he's working on. He say's, "This is the place in GWV," that being Vanderbilt "is a man that we must do our best for. It is far way the most distinguished project place, not only for America, but of the world forming at this period. It will be critical and reviewed and referred to for its presidents, and for its experience, years I had, centuries I had." So you get some of the urgency, his sense of destiny in that particular letter. And with this particular portion in my speech I want to conclude by reading a letter from, as I mentioned, after he completed the Vanderbilt estate he was no longer the old Olmsted. He--it had taken a terrible toll on his health. He began to manifest the first signs of some kind of senile dementia. The first thing that his family did was they actually skeetered him away to place called Sunset Island off the coast of Maine where they maintain the summer cottage. The thinking was that if Olmsted stayed around the working office, where his sons were working and if clients were to see him confused or agitated that it might really defeat everything he'd hope for. He might scare way clients. He might not allow his sons to continue with landscape architecture business. The other reason for putting him on island in Maine, very logical, was that Olmsted was in a confused and agitated state. He is now in the island so he, you know, he is off limits to the amount of damage he could do to himself or others, hopefully, if he was just wandering around on this island and not able to. So anyway, while he was on this island, he drifted in and out of lucidity and when he was not lucid he wrote paranoid letters to many people, clients, to--he wrote paranoid letters to his sons back in Brooklyn, Massachusetts accusing them of trying to steal the business from him while he was still in the full vigor of his health. When he was clear-eyed, he also wrote some very powerful letters. This is a letter in which he has just received a letter from his son Fredrick Law Olmsted Jr. And so I'll read a passage from that. He said, "You cannot think how much your long letter of 5th October interest and gratifies me. I will confess to you that twice last night I lie to my bed lamp to read it over again. It has been the most satisfactory circumstance of my life here." Then I'll read a little intro that I read that kind of feeds into the next portion of that letter that kind of gives us some context. This particular letter to Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. is one of Olmsted's last and one of his most heart [inaudible]. On those occasions from the [inaudible] of his disease cleared, the old Olmsted was visibile, penetrating, aware of humane. Olmsted relates how during his boyhood away at some poor country parsonage he had been forced to memorize a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes. The passage referred to life's fleetingness. As a young boy, he told his son, it struck him as incredible that the years ahead might pass so quickly but they had. Now he found himself wonder-struck once again to have reach life's end, and here's the quote. "And now before I know it, before I am in the least prepared for it, I am there. I love you and take joy in you with all my heart, your father." So it has powerful letter that, again, [inaudible] this incredible collection. And as I said, I wanted to kind of close by describing what is possible, what territory still exist in Olmsted scholarship. And let me start by just saying, remember how I read the letter, that kind of crazy personal ad that his brother wrote to a friend? Well, as it happens, I went over and over that particular letter and there was word I could not decipher and I actually, I went over with a magnifying glass. I could not find what that word was. It was really for me it was discouraging. I also felt honour-bound or duty-bound to simply write the book to put an ellipse there to indicate. In this case, a single missing word I just could not find. Well, someone will take a look at that letter in the future and they will either have better eyes than I do or a better magnifying glass and they will discern that word. And I should just have say at this point that is merely the tip of the iceberg to be able to do that. I mean, Alice provide some data and information about the size, the scope of the Olmsted collection. I might have different numbers than her that I took from the website, but the general principle that this is a big collection is it holds--I jot down a few notes and I said there are 24,000 different items and 73 containers filling 60 microfilm reels and that's really more than any one person could realistically hope to cover in any realistic deadline you might get from a publishing company and academic institution, as a student that you might be given as a deadline. And I also want to briefly mention how these papers came into the collection. A lot of them are Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. He turned it over later in his career, I believe, he turned over a lot of letters and other documents related to his own firm and the previous Olmsted firm, you know, Olmsted firm--you know, letters of his father. ^M00:50:05 >> Also, there was a pioneering Olmsted biographer Laura Wood Roper and I almost can imagine what her work was like back in the 50s and 1960s. I was actually able to read letters which also appear in the collection in which she writes to people and entreats them. She says, "I believe that your grandfather maybe collaborated with Olmsted in this era or had this connection with him. Would you be so kind as to go checking your attic and maybe there'll be cash of letters." The amazing thing is she hit [inaudible] from time to time and that and she obtained these letters and then after she was done with her biography she generously turned them over to the Library of Congress. I couldn't have done my biography. Nobody else could do any Olmsted scholarship if it wasn't for the papers that that Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. turned over and the papers Laura Wool Roper turned over. It's just a remarkable--I also feel like, you know, this was 50 years ago when she was doing this. If I or someone else try to do this today, many of those letters which were found in attics 50 years ago would now be irretrievably lost. Now, what I want to kind of close by saying per this topic of what territory is left to explore is this biography that wrote is the proudest professional accomplishment of my life. It's getting really great reviews but it would be uberous and folly for me to pretend that it is anything like the last word of Frederick Law Olmsted. There is so much to delve into the way that I approach this project and it really about the only way that any sane biographer could is what I describe as a surgical strike and random strikes. I have limited time and so what I did was I tried to identify areas in which I felt there were gaps in the previous account in which I wanted to try and flesh something out and out and I would research those particular points 'cause there wasn't time to read chronologically through all the letters. And then sometimes when I was having a really good day of research and I found a lot of good letters, I would do what I called a random strike. I would just get a real and I would look at some random year and maybe, just maybe will turn up something really telling and exiting. Sometimes those pay--really paid dividends and I'll give one wonderful example here and that is I described earlier how the answer to the name Tosomock Farm, something that Olmsted--a farm Olmsted run in the 1840s was to be found in a letter from 1891. Well, Olmsted had a terrible carriage accident in 1860 and his wife wrote an account, a reminiscence of that. In 1920, 60 years after the carriage accident, 17 years after Olmsted had died, now Olmsted in this terrible carriage accident one of the many tragedies, one of the three tragedies in the [inaudible] the making of Central park, Olmsted's wife was so unclear and she clung to their young baby, just 3 months old, landed on her back. The baby lived for a few days but then died. Supposedly, it was from other causes but Olmsted and his wife never could imagine that the care--, obviously, this carriage accident had to be a contributing if not the contributing factor. Well, Olmsted on the few occasions when he ever spoke or wrote about this carriage accident had a somewhat self-serving explanation. He said that the horse that he--that had been leading the carriage had been bothered by flies and it had bolted. His wife's reminiscent from 1920, 60 years later, said, "Olmsted, my husband, again, exhausted from over work, fell asleep drop the reins and the carriage bolted. Very different account and also an account that helped to explain at least some of the notable coldness in the very dutiful but somewhat loveless marriage between Olmsted and his wife Mary. So this was really something that helped to inform that. It was to be found, as I described, a synchronously. It was due to a random strike into the 1920 Olmsted turned up something that had actually helped animators explain better something that happened in 1920. Finally, on the subject of what territory is still available the best way to describe it is the times in which someone writes, they're gonna produce a different biography. A biography that I produced here in 2011 is someone does on 25 or 50 years from now. It will be utterly different because it will be based on the temper of the times. I chose to focus very heavily on Olmsted as an environmentalist 'cause it's something I'm interested in and it's also something that's very much part of our current society, this discussion of environmentalism. And so the fact that Olmsted was a pioneering environmentalist who helped to preserve Yosemite and helped to preserve Niagara Falls, it was very much of the temper of the time so I focused, in fact, what I did [inaudible] what I described is surgical strikes versus random strikes. I tried to get as much information as I could about Niagara Falls, Yosemite, and other environmentalist projects that he did. But someone coming in the future, any future person who comes to this will be making use of the temper of the time. So, if it's a different time, there'll be different concerns. They'll also be making use of different expertise. I always think that if someone were to read these, all the same letters I read, who had a trainings in 19th century medical history, they would read these very same letters that I read that very same letters that people who've written about Olmsted in the past, yet they would come to different conclusions, thanks to their training. And so these letters are dynamic. Every reader brings new information to this letters based on their experience, based on their observation, they're gonna notice new details and really produce a new and different life of Olmsted. And so to me that's actually a very wonderful and a heartening circumstance. So I simply want to close by saying that in a free society where we want to be able to look at the past in order to understand the present and have road map for the future, the Library of Congress here is a wonderful priceless institution and it was my great pleasure to research here and my great pleasure to speak before you today, thank you. ^M00:56:21 [ Applause ] ^M00:56:29 >> Yes? >> Knowing him as you do from your research, how would--what would Olmsted think of the gardens that did in today's world? >> He would be--he would be-- [ Inaudible Remark ] >> Could you repeat the question? >> I sure can. The question is knowing about Olmsted from the research I've done, how would he feel about the [inaudible], the landscapes and designs that he did? How would he feel like been sort of treated in today's world? And the answer is, he would be--if he came back to life today, he would be apoplectic [laughter] but I don't agree with him. And I've met people who know a lot about Olmsted would say, well, you know, he was like most artist, most great artist. He demanded 100 percent. In some level he knew that maybe he was gonna get 70 percent best but he wanted everything done his way, brought no compromise and so he would look at these landscapes, Central Park, the grounds of the Washington, of the Capitol here and everything in between, and he would conclude, oh they had deviated from his plans. They spoiled his plans. They'd blighted this. But I think that--you know, for him as an artist maybe that's--that would be the right perspective. But the fact of the matter is so many of these designs, again, whether it'd be the Capitol Grounds or Central Park or so many of these designs are [inaudible] true, sure [inaudible] a great amount of fidelity of Olmsted's original design. So how he'd feel and how he should feel are maybe two different things. >> Okay. >> Could you talk a little bit about his collaboration on Central park and how [inaudible]. >> Sure. Central Park his partner was Calvert Vaux, his collaborator. And Olmsted and Vaux had a pretty uneasy relationship but they also found kind of a good division of labor that Olmsted pursued with other people they collaborated with throughout the square such as believed that Capitol Grounds and a lot of structures [inaudible] and things were done by a name Thomas Wisedell so that division of labor was Olmsted was kinda, was really the landscape architect. He was the one who was conceiving of meadows and passages and so forth. And Calvert Vaux who was an architect by training was building bridges and refectories, and The Dairy in Central Park. If anyone is familiar with it, it was actually where I got married, a structure designed by Calvert Vaux. And so, of course, particularly on this very first project it's very clear that Vaux had plenty of input on landscape ideas and Olmsted might have had some input although played less on bridges and structures but that was the basic division of labor. And Olmsted didn't get along well with, you know, he had trouble in these collaborations but at least from the first collaboration with Vaux and for at least by having there be a clear division of labor, structure versus landscape, he was able to keep from getting into really bad fisticuffs [laughter] to me many of this people. Yes? >> During your research on the periods with D.C. like sanitation [inaudible] and the Capitol Ground, did you get any sense of a narrative about this [inaudible] during this period? >> Yeah. [ Inaudible Remark ] >> There's actually wonderful--there's wonderful detail--rich detail about what D.C. looked like. There's a great detail where he arrives and I think it was Union Station--it was a train station. ^M01:00:00 >> He take the train down [inaudible] station, okay. Well, he arrives by train and he just describes how the Cap--and it was a wonderful metaphor for this [inaudible], he described how the Capitol. It's a great letter. He describes the Capitol, you know, the seat of American democracy is kind of in disrepair. The Capitol has--the building has scaffolding around it while it's under construction, the grounds are scruffy as he hasn't yet done the design for them [laughter]. And he notices that there are, you know, open, you know, open sewers and things. It's really vivid description. There's also wonderful descriptions of the Willard Hotel where he stayed and I guess in that era the convention growing up where people with confederate leanings, with secessionist leanings entered through one entrance. People with [inaudible] leanings entered to another. The Civil War had not. This actually within pre Civil War but there's also some references to that. So, yeah, there's actually a lot of very vivid descriptions of Washington. He complains a lot--it will be pertinent today, he complains a lot about the heat. [ Laughter ]. >> He says at one point that he was lying in bed and then that flies were worse than his Staten Island farm, something that he says. So he's--so yeah, there's a lot of flavor [inaudible] Washington that-- [ Inaudible Remark ] >> At that point, let's see. It would have been 1874 he would have not yet, he would still be in New York, he lived in New York City still. And unlike a lot of his projects, he kind of come once or twice, produce a design, and then he kind of superintendent. This was such a major project that he actually came repeatedly for a long period of time to oversee it and make sure that it was seen through. >> [Inaudible] Walt Whitman had a poor opinion of the Sanitary Commission. Do you know if they ever met? >> That's a great question, I don't believe they met. Olmsted was the editor of a magazine called Putnam's [inaudible]. It was devoted to--it was actually a need of his publication. He was trying to, you know, gonna promote American homegrown literature of the time when people were looking at England saying, "Oh, England is where, you know, the great writers hail from [inaudible] Dickens and so forth. But I was able to go through a lot of letters in which he describes, including he edited some short stories about Herman Melville. He describes going up to Concord to meet with Farrell [phonetic] if I remember correctly. He makes no reference in his letters that I ever came across to Walt Whitman. I think he likely would have had. So I don't know that despite this both the literary magazine and also the--, you know, I know that Walt Whitman was involve in providing medical aid during the Civil War. I don't see any evidence that these two men met, so you know. >> Two more quick questions. >> Okay. ^M01:02:38 [ Inaudible Remark ] ^M01:02:52 >> I work from--all I recognize them as was there were microfilmed versions of the letters and that suited my purpose. I remember someone said to me, "Oh, you really should handle this original letters." It would have been delightful for me but I wouldn't have really--from my particular purposes I wouldn't have glean much, you know, when I was able to glean by literally making photocopy and really being able to get the text of the letters as opposed to, you know, sort of more detailed paper stock and things like that so. ^M01:03:23 [ Inaudible Remark ] ^M01:03:41 >> He had--he had to battle really hard in most cases, you know. These were democratic projects in cities where, you know, there was a bubble of competing voices and competing ideas to, I guess, to Olmsted's credit, he was an intense visionary. He was also, one thing I learned in doing our research was besides being a--because he was a journalist by trade, he could do very convincing written park plans. He also, I came across several accounts of what a dazzling speaker he was and how he was able often, often to have set a meetings in which Olmsted would come up and he would try to convince the people of the city to take a certain direction. He was apparently a very apt salesman in that fashion. And by virtue of that, Olmsted certainly know there were many different people weighing on anyone of his plan saying do this, do that, do the other. Olmsted often was able to prevail because he was very convincing, very articulate, and very--and often had very powerful visions of what he wanted to achieve. >> How was working on somebody who has been [inaudible]. >> That's a great question, yeah. >> And my other sort of part to that question is because there has been a lot of published scholarship [inaudible] a number of biographies before, how did you know that there was still story to tell [inaudible]. How did you get interested [inaudible]? >> Sure, on both--on the first count. When I first got this, when my [inaudible] assigned me the contract I though, "Oh, this is wonderful. It's a dead guy. He can't ran away from me." [ Laughter ] >> You know, when I did Greenspan and when I did Nader it was such, I mean a big part of the work, of both of this project was trying to pin those guys down, trying to pin down their contemporaries and friends and associates and it was a lot of logistical work. And, you know, there's a lot of just making phone calls and being told, call back next week, write a letter explaining yourself and maybe we'll take your phone call, that kind of thing. Very challenging. Olmsted, I initially thought at least, okay, this gonna be real easy. But, of course, everything comes with these challenges. The challenge here I would describe is an embarrassment of which is here because he is no longer with us. He wasn't able to dodge me. Instead, he just left behind a giant trail and I was then left to make my way through a huge volume of letters. And to you other question, the best way to describe is Olmsted falls well into the category in my estimation of a Thomas Jefferson, a Winston Churchill, some other great figures who's frequently biographied. This was the argument I actually made with my editor who was very amenable from the get-go. I said, you know, this is a figure who I personally don't believe in the notion of definitive biographies. Anyway, I believe that, you know, it's possible to keep, as I described, revisiting a topic. But particularly with this one I thought here's a grand great figure who really is under biographied, that's how I describe it, given his preeminent role in American society. And it didn't take me a lot of research to conclude that for all the work in scholarship and very fine scholarship that's been gone that there would still very much territory to be mined. And I guess the final thing I said in that score is I also developed over the time living in New York city, getting married in Central Park, living in Forest Hills Gardens, which is I'm referring to Olmsted Jr., I developed a personal passion about the subject matter and that also certainly as I started to think do they wanna write about this, I felt like that was an advantage. The fact that I was personally passionate about this topic meant that I really could dive into it and, you know, perhaps find fresh territory to mine. >> Justin we're gonna have to--we're gonna have to have other questions during the signing period. I wanna thank Justin really for a wonderful presentation and I set his enthusiasm as infectious. He is articulate. He praised the Library of Congress many times [laughter] in many wonderful ways so we employees are happy. In 1983, the Center for the Book had a three-day conference on biography and we have 29 biographers here. And Justin if we ever have another one, you're gonna be at the top of the list. Let's give him a hand for a wonderful job. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.