Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

Thu, May 1, 2025
Lunch Program
Corey Brettschneider

American presidents have often pushed the boundaries established for them by the Constitution; this is the inspirational history of the people who pushed back. In this propulsive and eminently readable history, constitutional law and political science professor Corey Brettschneider of Brown University, provides a thoroughly researched account of assaults on democracy by not one such president but five whose actions illuminated the trip wires that can damage or even destroy our democracy.

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In his book "The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It," Corey Brettschneider, constitutional law and political science professor at Brown University, articulates how John Adams waged war on the national press of the early republic, overseeing numerous prosecutions of his critics. In the lead-up to the Civil War, James Buchanan colluded with the Supreme Court to deny constitutional personhood to African Americans. A decade later, Andrew Johnson urged violence against his political opponents as he sought to guarantee a white supremacist republic after the Civil War. In the 1910s, Woodrow Wilson modernized, popularized, and nationalized Jim Crow laws. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon committed criminal acts that flowed from his corrupt ideas about presidential power. 

But Brettschneider also shows that these presidents didn’t have the last word—citizen movements brought the United States back from the precipice by appealing to a democratic understanding of the Constitution and pressuring subsequent reform-minded presidents to realize the promise of “We the People.”  His book ultimately is about citizens—Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Daniel Ellsberg, and more—who fought back against presidential abuses of power. 

Their examples give us hope about the possibilities of restoring a fragile democracy.

Adapted from https://vivo.brown.edu/display/cbrettsc

Professor Brettschneider will deliver the 2024-2025 Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World's Lofgren Lecture Program on American Constitutionalism.

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Thu, May 1, 2025
Dinner Program
Edward F. O’Keefe

Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his senior thesis for Harvard in 1880 that women ought to be paid equal to men and have the option of keeping their maiden names upon marriage. It’s little surprise Roosevelt would be a feminist, given the women he grew up with. From his witty and decisive mother Mittie to his sunny college sweetheart and first wife Alice; from his older sister Bamie who would eventually become his key political strategist and advisor to his younger sister Conie, his eventual press secretary before the role existed; to ultimately Edith—his childhood playmate and second wife, Ed O’Keefe’s “graceful and powerful book” (Candice Millard) filled with “meticulous research [and] perceptive insights” (The New York Times), The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt: The Women Who Created a President celebrates these five extraordinary yet unsung women who opened the door to the American Century and pushed Theodore Roosevelt through it.

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Edward F. O’Keefe is the CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation. He previously spent two decades in broadcast and digital media at ABC News, CNN, and NowThis, during which time he received a Primetime Emmy Award for his work with Anthony Bourdain, two Webby Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Award, and a George Foster Peabody Award for ABC’s coverage of 9/11. 

A former fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, he graduated with honors from Georgetown University. 

Mr. O'Keefe's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at Claremont McKenna College.

Adapted from https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Loves-of-Theodore-Roosevelt/Edward-F-OKeefe/9781982145682

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Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
385 E. Eighth Street
Claremont, CA 91711

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