[A photo of William Leuchtenburg is attached to this document. Please visit www.unctv.org/pressroom for more information and images.] 

Perhaps not southerners in the usual sense, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson each demonstrated a political style and philosophy that helped them influence the South and unite the country in ways that few other presidents have. Their intimate associations with the South gave these three presidents an empathy toward and acceptance in the region. In urging southerners to jettison outworn folkways, Roosevelt could speak as a neighbor and adopted son, Truman as a border-stater who had been taught to revere the Lost Cause, and Johnson as a native who had been scorned by Yankees.

In this episode of UNC-TV’s local literary series North Carolina Bookwatch, premiering Friday, September 22, at 9:30 PM, author and master historian William E. Leuchtenburg combines the vivid biography and political insight of his engrossing study The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson to offer an engaging account of relations between these three presidents and the South, while also tracing how the region came to embrace a national perspective without losing its distinctive sense of place.

“I start the book by explaining that every time I try to say what this book is about, I get interrupted….I say it’s about three twentieth-century presidents and the South and I never get to the second sentence; they respond, ‘don’t tell me I know—Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and going back a long way, Woodrow Wilson.’ Actually, it’s none of those three… it’s Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson,” explains Leuchtenburg. “People are willing to grant me Lyndon Johnson because he came from Texas, a state that seceded from the Union, and Harry Truman because he came from the border state of Missouri, but Franklin Roosevelt’s connection does seem like a long stretch and needs a bit of explaining.”

 The William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of more than a dozen books on twentieth-century American history explains many of the extensive and surprising Southern connections in this one-on-one interview. He also explores, in fascinating detail, how each President’s unique attachment to "place" helped them to adopt shifting identities, which proved useful in healing rifts between North and South, in altering behavior in regard to race, and in fostering southern economic growth.

“Franklin Roosevelt gets off the train in a run-down Georgia village in 1924, stricken with polio, and hoping that the warm waters of the southern spas will cure him…which gives him an identification to the South,” says Leuchtenburg. “Later Roosevelt would be struck by the lack of electricity that farmers took for granted in New York State, but only a few had in Georgia, and the Rural Electrification Association (REA) was born out of this experience in Georgia. When FDR comes to power only 1 in 9 farms in America have electricity; when he leaves only 1 in 9 farms don’t have electricity…. There was certainly a major shift in power in the South during the Roosevelt years and Roosevelt swept every Southern state every time he ran, including the last time in 1944—in fact, 1944 was the last election that a Democratic Presidential candidate has carried the entire South.”

Don’t miss D.G. Martin’s all-new interview with William Leuchtenburg on North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, September 22, at 9:30 PM, with an encore episode airing Sunday, September 24, at 5 PM, only on UNC-TV!

During this season of North Carolina Bookwatch, guests also include: Will Blythe (To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever), John Hart (The King of Lies), Sarah Dessen (Just Listen), Kristin Henderson (While They’re at War), David Payne (Back to Wando Passo), John Hope Franklin (Mirror to America), Leah Stewart (The Myth of You and Me), Andrew Britton (The American), Allan Gurganus (New Stories of the South), Tom Carlson (Hatteras Blues), Bill Smith (Seasoned in the South), Dot Jackson (Refuge), Art Chansky (Blue Blood), Mark Ethridge (Grievances),  Paul Leonard (Music of a Thousand Hammers), and Angela Davis-Gardner (Plum Wine).

For more information about additional series guests and airdates, plus, the all-new Bookwatch blog and online book club, please visit: www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

Funding for North Carolina Bookwatch is provided by UNC-TV members and by Quail Ridge Books and Music, Raleigh’s independent, full service bookstore, bringing readers and writers together since 1984.

North Carolina Bookwatch is part of UNC-TV’s ongoing commitment to produce programs for and about North Carolina. UNC-TV is the statewide 11-station broadcast network of the University of North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

For more information about North Carolina Bookwatch and UNC-TV’s other local productions, please visit our website at www.unctv.org.

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