Childes Burden, Cokie Roberts

NPR and ABC News political correspondent and author Cokie Roberts spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at James Monroe’s Oak Hill on July 16, at a special benefit for the Mosby Heritage Area Association, hosted by Oak Hill’s current owners and dedicated preservationists, Tom and Gayle DeLashmutt.

Gayle DeLashmutt has served as both Vice President and President of the Mosby Heritage Area Association. Ms. Roberts has agreed to join the Association’s newly formed Board of Advisors.
Following a tour of Oak Hill’s historic gardens, Roberts graciously signed copies of Ladies of Liberty, her latest book, sat for interviews with local media, chatted with visitors, and delivered a well-tailored lecture focused on the life and time of James Monroe’s wife, Elizabeth.

Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation published in 2008, is Roberts’ fourth book, and her second on outstanding women of the American Revolution and early Republic. The natural sequel to her 2004 best-selling Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation, her latest book takes the story through the Presidency of James Monroe, arguably the last of the founding fathers to occupy the White House.

Asked what she thought the extraordinary women of the late 18th and early 19th would think of today’s politics she said, “I think they would think today’s times are tame. They lived through much more trying times. Not only did they have to live through a war fought on our own soil for eight long years, with many of them in great danger through the war and some of them killed. . I also think they would also think that the politics is tame. The politics was so much worse then. People were literally killing each other over politics.” Speaking of the Burr/Hamilton duel, she said, “Think about it. The sitting Vice President of the United States murdered a political enemy over political talk.”

Asked about the oft-regretted loss of “civility” in the nation’s capital, Roberts said that she now believes that Washington was “uncivil from the beginning.” The period “in which there was a civil society,” she now believes “was my childhood. And that was very civil. . . . and I’ve now come to believe that THAT was the aberrant period, after World War II, and I think that the war had everything to do with it. Everybody went to war together. Everybody in the country was at war. Women were going to work. There was rationing. And then you have these two enormous classes, 1946 Republicans and 1948 Democrats . . . who ran, self-consciously, as “the men who went; not the men who sent. They had literally had been in fox-holes together and did not have the same sense of enmity that most American history has seen.”

Hosted by the DeLashmutt family, Roberts’s presentation was sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Marc Leepson, Mr. and Mrs. Child Burden, Mr. Peter Schwartz, Mr. and Mrs. Lenart Lundh, Mr. and Mrs. Scott Christian, Mrs. Janet Whitehouse, and Ms. Katherine Neville.

The Mosby Heritage Area Association was founded in 1995 “to promote and support the preservation of the historic, cultural and scenic resources” of the more than 1600 square miles of Loudoun, Fauquier, Prince William, Clarke and Warren Counties hallowed by “the nation’s most famous and deadly guerrilla war.”

For more information, see www.mosbyheritagearea.org

Related Articles :
No Related Content Found