Tevi Troy discusses with U.S. News & World Report some key themes from his new book, which documents 200 years of presidential responses to popular culture.

How did the literary culture of the Revolutionary era influence the Founding Fathers?

Back then you could either read a book or you could go to a live performance. Now, obviously there’s an unlimited panoply of options. So when you have a society where reading was one of the few choices, more people read and [were] taking reading seriously. You also had a particularly literate group of people who were the founders. It was expensive to collect books – Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” in 1776 in the colonies would have cost about what an iPad costs us today. Even though it was expensive, you had guys like [Thomas] Jefferson, [John] Adams – even [George] Washington had a 900 book library – who read books, took them seriously, discussed their ideas, used them to frame the arguments for revolution against England. How was Lincoln’s relationship with books different than presidents before him? Lincoln came from pretty humble origins, and most, if not all the presidents were from richer or better connected homes. It was the power of his reading that helped break him out of the little world that he was in – a motherless boy in a poor, rural area. He used reading to counter his ideas and develop his thinking, and he was a very forceful reader. But he also recognized – in the same ways that Andrew Jackson did – that you needed to appeal to the common man, the people. Going out and making erudite literary references wasn’t going to help get you elected president. So while the power of his ideas was developed through reading, when he spoke he actually didn’t use literary references. …

JFK is often considered the first television president but you call Eisenhower a TV “revolutionary.” Why?

Eisenhower recognized the power of TV and he did press conferences before JFK did. (Although, he didn’t do them live. He was willing to have them edited.) He had a TV adviser, Robert Montgomery, who was an actor, and he helped Eisenhower understand how to use television. [Eisenhower] also understood the power of TV as a form of entertainment. Then and now, you have high brow folks saying that TV is the idiot box or a low brow kind of entertainment. But he understood that it was [a] uniquely American expression and that it was a great way to show the creativity of the American people and the American [entertainment] industry. So he liked the industry and what they were producing.