Tv, a conversation with the author of the book, the president is a sick man which recounts the surgery being performed on a i cant recollya president disappearing for five days. Im david cowen, welcome back to our lunch and learn series. Welcome to the university of oklahoma. Thank you for coming. Please join us again everyone next week on the 26th. Were going to continue the lunch and learn series of the director of the archival. This is an historic banking house, again, a week from this thursday. On the 24th, this is tuesday upcoming, well be screening the rediscovering alexander hamilton. This is the pbs documentary that was recently released and all of your questions about the movie can be answered because the producer will be in the house. Turning our attention to today and Matthew Algeo and the president is a sick man. This the matthews third book. His second Harry Trumans excellent adventure which traced their crosscountry trip in 1953, got a lot of great press, and in 2009, the Washington Post called it one of the best books of the year. And before that, he wrote a book about the war years and football and the combination of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles during world war ii. Hes got an eclectic background. Not just an author and journalist. He has been a hot dog vendor at a traveling circus. Hes been a Halloween Costume salesman, hes been a gas station attendant, a Convenience Store clerk. In two months, hes moving to mongolia with his wife who is a Foreign Service officer who is taking a position there. That should be pretty interesting. And very importantly, he is a friend to this museum and a member of it. Its my pleasure to introduce Matthew Algeo. [ applause ] you make it sound much more interesting than it is, my life. Its great to be at the museum of American Finance for a couple of reasons. One, its a fantastic museum. And ive been coming to the museum for a few years now. More importantly, when i was researching the book, the museum was very helpful in answering my questions and i would have frantic questions like how many grains of silver were in a Silver Dollar in 1870 . And this is the only place you could send an email with that urgency and get it answered within an hour. So it was very helpful to me, the museum of American Finance. And im a proud member. Thats why i got in for free today. Before i talk about grover, who was an interesting person, i should tell you a little bit about a much less interesting person. That would be me. As david said, my wife is a Foreign Service officer. We move around a lot. I my name is algeo. Everybody thinks its italian. Its actually irish. The o is on the wrong end. My grandparents were from the north of ireland and actually have irish citizenship and i spent a year in ireland back in the 90s as a freelance reporter, freelance reporter i should do this because it largely consisted of drinking a lot of beer for a year. But there was Something Interesting that i found out about having an unusual irish name in ireland. I had to get an identify card. I went to the irish equivalent of the dmv. They had three lines and it was according to the first letter of your last name and the first line was, last names beginning a a to l, mc to o. And that was the longest line. Im the youngest of seven. I did grow up in a house of readers, my parents were prolific readers. They werent sitting around reading the french existentialists. My mom liked true crime and biography. When i was kid, it would be embarrassing riding the train because she would be reading Something Like the i95 killer. On the front cover there would be somebody stabbing somebody. And i was like, can you just put it in a newspaper. I was lucky to grow up in a house like that. I ran into a friend from high school a few years ago and he said whenever i went over to your house in high school, your parents would just be sitting in the living room reading, no tv, no radio, no nothing. And i always thought that was so weird. But now that he has kids of his own, i think he appreciates that was a good atmosphere to grow up in and it fostered my love of books. I went to college in philadelphia at the university of pennsylvania. I graduated in 1988 with a degree in folklore. Any other folklore majors here today . [ laughter ] this was and david went through the list of other occupations ive had. Ive chosen many nonlucrative occupations, including writing these nonbestselling books. But folklore was a nonlucrative won. It would have been right between florist and forklift operator, if i remember correctly. But finding no such jobs, i moved to seattle and drifted into public radio, public radio, of course, those are the stations way on the left of the dial. 89 to 91, around there. And worked at public radio stations in st. Louis, seattle, i was in minnesota for a while. I went to maine for a while. 2005 i went to los angeles and got a job with a Public Radio Program called marketplace. A good program. It was around this time that my wife took the Foreign Service exam and passed and was offered a position in the u. S. Foreign service. We were in a bit of a quandary as to who would be the breadwinner, her or me. And after several rounds of voting, it was still 11. And somehow i was managed to gain a controlling share in the firm and eventually she took the position in the Foreign Service and became the breadwinner, allowing me to work a little bit on this nonlucrative career. And so we went to africa and the first book i did was a book about the philadelphia pittsburgh steagles. The nfl was short of players in world war ii, they had to merge football teams. Ragtag, misfit kind of a bunch. What i tried to do with that book and with the other books was to take a small and unusual event in American History and really expand on it to talk a little bit more about the times that that event takes place in. And hopefully ive done that with this book. The president is a sick man, even i have to look at the subtitle to read it. Grover cleveland survives a secret surgery at sea. Thank you for coming, everybody. Actually, its funny, we were trying to be invoketive of the 19th century titles that books would have. This is the short version of the subtitle. We found out that the databases for booksellers today have a limit on how many characters you can have in the title of your books. We had to reduce the title, if you can believe that. Ive always been interested in this story. Im kind of a president ial history buff and ive read several Glover Cleveland biographies. How many people here have read several Glover Cleveland biographies. But i knew the basic story that he had a secret operation to remove a tumor from his mouth. Enjoy your lunch while i talk about Grover Clevelands tumor. About ten years ago, i went to a museum in philadelphia. They have all kinds of unusual things there. They have chief justice john marshals bladder stones, they have a piece of the brain of Charles Guiteau who was the guy who assassinated garfield and they have in a small glass jar, they have the tumor that was removed from Grover Clevelands mouth in 1893. And that triggered my interest in the story, the fact that the tumor was still around and that somebody had thought maybe this is a good thing to keep. I talked to the museum and it turns out that one of the doctors who performed the operation had donated the tumor, had kept it and donated the tumor to the museum back in 1917. I guess you would know, he was a bit of a saver since he saved the tumor. He saved all of his correspondence and clippings and lots of information about the operation which was intended to be secret. I realized that there was the possibility of doing something about this story and then as i dug deeper into it, i found it wasnt just the story of this operation, it was really the story of economy at the time and it was also a story about medicine and a story about journalism as well. There were a lot of things going on in the 1890s which is a dead spot for me in my history. You know the civil war, you know world war ii, world war i, maybe, but the 1880s and 1890s, i didnt know a lot about. It was fun to go back and learn things that you can learn at the museum of American Finance today. And it was the gilded age, is what it was called. Mark twain gave it that name. It was not intended to be a comfort. To guild was to be extravagant. The politics were fascinating and there were so many things in researching the book that really have resonance today. I dont go into this in the book so much burks so much, but the first birther controversy took place in 1880 when garfield was running for president and his Vice President was Chester Arthur. By the way, good luck trying to get a book about Chester Arthur published. If you think cleveland is tough, i dont know what you would do with Chester Arthur. But the rumors at the time was that Chester Arthur had been born in canada. His father was an irishman and his mother was a canadian from quebec. When he was pregnant and ready to give birth, she went back home to quebec and had the baby there. If true, it would mean that Chester Arthur was not an american citizen because neither of his parents were and he wasnt born in the u. S. Ill point out that, no, we do not have the birth certificate. Long or short form for Chester Arthur. They just put his name in the family bible and said he was born in vermont and i guess that was good good enough in 1880 to qualify him to hold the office of Vice President and president. Grover cleveland who was elected four years after garfield in 1884 always fascinated me just for the plain fact that and this is what everybody knows, grover served two nonconsecutive terms. He was elected in 1884 and lost reelection in 1888 and came back four years later and won the white house back which is a unique achievement in american politics in the american presidency, so the guy had to be a pretty good politician and of course, he screwed up the numbering for the president s. Hes number 22 and 24. A little aside when President Trump gave his inaugural address in 2009, he said 44 people have now taken this oath of office and i was at a party with friends and i said, no, 43 because grover gets counted twice. Shut up. Nobody wants to hear about Grover Cleveland right now. [ laughter ] my friends who we were in rome today, learned much too much about Grover Cleveland, and theyre forgiven if they dont buy the book, but you wont be. Grover had the most extraordinary rise to the white house. In 1880, he was living in a boardinghouse in buffalo and had a fairly good law practice and was well respected and well liked in buffalo, but wasnt active in politics in buffalo, and in four years he became president , and its just impossible to imagine now. We know the name of our next president , we dont know who its going to be, but weve heard the name, at least. Theres a list of 30, 50, a hundred of people who might be president and probably the next two or three president s who know their name and that wasnt the case when Grover Cleveland was elected and nobody heard him four years ago and he lived a charmed life in some ways and he was born in 1837 and he moved to buffalo and studied law and had no formal education after 16 and was selftaught in law and in 1881 they were looking for a reformist candidate to run as the democratic nominee for mayor of buffalo and grover won that election and he immediately established a reputation for honesty and integrity. He vetoed a lot of bills. He was known as the veto mayor, one of the most famous bills was when there was a bill to establish a new sewer system, to build a sewer system in buffalo and the city council awarded the contract to the highest bidder and the difference between that and the next lowest bid presumably was to be spread among the members of the city council and grover vetoed that bill and vetoed many other bills and quickly earned a reputation for integrity and honestly in the following year in 1882 he was elected governor of new york and in 1884 he was elected president of the United States. So here you have from 1880 to 1884, a guy who goes from being a lawyer nobody heard about in buffalo to mayor to governor and finally to president. The 1884 election, by the way, and this is another one of those things where you think things have changed a lot and they havent changed that much was a terribly vicious election and one of the dirtiest president ial campaigns in American History, and it came after grover had fathered an illegitimate child and his response to this was legendary. Hed sent a telegram to his friends in buffalo that said simply, tell the truth and grover owned up to this. He had supported this child since birth and was still providing for the child, and really his reaction to what could have been a debilitating scandal turned out to be in a way a positive thing for his campaign and it demonstrate his integrity and his refusal to deny the truth. The campaign, he was running against a guy named james g. Blaine, as the democrats like to claim, james g. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of maine and it was that kind of a Vicious Campaign and it came down to new york state. New york had the largest number of electoral votes at that time. Whoever won new york state would win the election. It was that simple and a few days before the election, blaine appeared at a Campaign Event in new york and he was introduced by a protestant minister and the minister called the democrats the party of rum, romanism and rebellion. Drunk, catholic and disloyal, basically and this swung the catholic vote especially in new york city to cleveland who carried new york by a thousand votes out of 1. 1 million cast. So it was an extremely close election, but he won in 1884. In 1886 he finally married and he was a bachelor, and he married a woman named francis folsom, and grover was 29 and there was a 24yearold age difference. I dont think well see a 21yearold first lady again. Its possible. Good thing schwarzenegger cant be elected president , but francis turned out to be a great did win the white house back and he and francis and now their youngest daughter baby ruth had been in the white house. There had been one change while they were gone, benjamin harrison, while they were in the white house and the clevelands were away they changed over from gas to electric, and i think they did this so none of the clevelands appliances would work. But in 1892 grover went to the election and he takes the oekt of office in march, and the inaugurations were in march at that time and it was not a good time to become president and this is where the panic of 1893 comes in. Just nine days before grover took office the Redding Railroad had gone bankrupt. The redding had been one of the most successful railroads in the u. S. Just before the year before theyd built a grand new terminal in philadelphia, redding terminal which stood until the 1980s, but in 1893 the redding went bankrupt and it was a bad design. Railroads were hopelessly overbuilt in the 1880s and 1890s and this was a speculative bubble much like weve had recently with other things, real estate and dotcom. Well, in the 1890s it was railroads. The number of rail lines doubled, more than doubled after the civil war, but the population only grew about 50 , 60 . Youd have multiple lines running between cities that competing Railroad Companies had and the bottom fell out in 1893. 119 railroads went bankrupt in 1893, and about 20 , i believe, were the number of railroads in the country and of course, all of the people who had invested stock in these railroads were wiped out and this really sparked a panic on wall street and sent the stock market down. There was another thing going on that contributed to the panic of 1893, and i wont get into it too much here. Suffice it to say in the book i write about it in sparkle detail and some amazing prose they came up with and it was the debate over gold versus silver and that was what should our currency be based on . Should it be based on gold or should it be based on gold and silver . This all might seem silly and arcane when our currency is based on yes, nothing. Quality paper and very good paper it is and you can wash it and still use it, but in 1893 the debate boiled down to should our money be backed by gold or silver . The country really had since the 1870s had been on the Gold Standard and it worked simply. The governmentprinted bills was easier than gold and they kept the gold in the treasury and if you wanted to redeem your gold certificates as they were known for gold, you could, but then in the 1880s and 1890s, a lot of new states came into the union in the west, montana, colorado, nevada and these were silver mining states and the silver mining states began to clamor for silver to also be a unit of currency in the United States and they had a lot of they had a lot of cloud in congress these new states that came in with the senators and representatives and in 1890 they passed a bill called the sherman silver purchase act and this required the u. S. Treasury to buy 4. 5 million ounces of silver every month and print an equivalent amount of currency for that. This caused inflation, rapid inflation in the United States as all of this currency poured into the markets. The people in the west who were gold mining states they didnt mind this because they could sell the silver to the treasury and the farmers in the south and in the midwest who a lot of them were in debt especially in the south were still recovering from the civil war, well, inflation, if you were in debt was not a bad thing because the money youre paying your debts off is cheaper than the money you borrowed so its not that bad a thing. They didnt mind a little inflation. They needed lots of money in their pockets and of course, back east the bankers and industrialists who were by and large the people lending the money, they didnt think so much of this inflation because it devalued their money that they had and it really set up a sectional battle of the United States. It was really the most contentious issue between the civil war and the First World War and this debate over currency and it did divide along sectional lines and you really had the west in the south versus the north and the east in this. The north in the east tended to be gold people and the west tended to be silver people and so the uncertainty in the currency markets also contributed to the panic of 1893. So grover takes office in march and hes got a lot on his plate and by the way, francis, his wife is now pregnant with their second child, as well. So he had a lot of concerns and it was in may of 1893 that he noticed for the first time a little bump on the roof of his mouth behind the molar on the left side, and he didnt think much of it and as we all do, he put off having it looked at for a while and you know, he had a lot on his plate and it wasnt until june that his doctor, a guy from new york named bryant, joseph bryant, examined this bump on the roof of grovers mouth and bryant had expertise in oral cancers and he determined that it was, in fact, a cancerous tumor. He called it a badlooking tenant. Its funny, the word cancer had a stigma attached to it in the 1890s and the 19th century well into the 20th century and the word itself was often avoided. Newspapers would call it the Dread Disease or the disease that no doctor dare name, these sorts of things and bryant called it a badlooking tenant and it should be removed. Cleveland agreed to have this tumor removed and only on the condition that the operation be conducted in secret. Cleveland was afraid that if it came to be known he had cancer which was considered afrp ally a death sentence in 1893 that the markets would crash, that wall street would panic and the depression would only worsen. He had other reasons, too. He had personal reasons and ten years earlier Ulysses Grant had died from a tumor and his death was a slow, agonizing death and reporters camped out outside his watch in a kind of death watch and he was aware of how that happened and cleveland had no desire to become a spectacle like that and he was an introverted guy and didnt want to be the center of attention for this thing. He said i think we should do this operation in secret and his doctors said, okay. Fine. Why the doctors would agree to do this in secret is an example especially when the patient is president , the patient dictates the terms of treatment and not the doctors. You see this time and again in American History where president s who have some kind of illness or disability dont get the best treatment because their doctors acquiesce to the patients demands instead of doing what is best for the patient medically and physically. So where do you remove a tumor in secret from the roof of the mouth of a president in 1893 . Well, the white house was ruled out and so was the hospital and too many potentials for springing a leak. It was cleveland himself who came up with the idea to have the tumor removed on a friends yacht. He knew a guy named benedict, a magnate and he owned a yacht called the oneida and they had often gone fishing together on this yacht and so cleveland thought this will be the perfect cover. We could have the operation onboard the oneida. We can just say were going to sail to cape cod, and do some fishing and do the operation on the boat. Well, having an operation on the boat presents certain problem, but nonetheless, six doctors were recruited to perform this operation and they agreed to do it on the boat, and on the night of june 30th, 1893, cleveland came to new york and the six doctors themselves also came to new york. The boat was anchored in the east refer and the doctors were ferried under cover of dark happens, each of them separately from different piers so nobody would know what was going on. Cleveland came on the boat later that night and had some cigars. Maybe the cigars were the problem here to begin with, had some cigars and the next day the boat set sail and sailed on to Long Island Sound and it was shortly after 12 00 that cleveland went downstairs and there was a small room below deck that they had converted into a makeshift operating theater. There was no operating table. They just had a chair that they lashed to the mast that was in the center of the room and cleveland came in and they propped up his neck and head with some pillows. They did have anesthesia. They used ether primarily and they also had nitrous oxide and they found it didnt sedate the president well enough and mostly the operation was done under ether which incidentally is a very volatile operating with this in the close confines below deck on a yacht was probably not the best place to do it. They anesthetized cleveland. The operation took about 90 minutes and what they did was they removed the tumor along with most of his upper left palate and five teeth. Pretty much all of the teeth behind your eye tooth there on the left. Everything behind there got taken out as did a big chunk of his upper left chunk bone. All of this was taken out in 90 minutes and using fairly what we would consider rudimentary tools, basically chisels and forceps. They had no suction devices and no means of blood transfusion and all of the blood he lost and no means of artificial resus tagsz if anything had happened to him either. Nonetheless, the operation succeeded and cleveland survived. They packed his mouth with gauze and gave him a shot of morphine and put him to bed for the night and it was four days later on july 5th and the president had been missing for four days over the fourth of july weekend and the chief executive back in the 1890s warrasnt quite what it i today. The office wasnt quite what it is today and it was unusual for the president to disappear for the fourth of july and he arrived to his home on buzzards bay in massachusetts on the evening of the 5th late at night. None of the reporters who were there to greet him or see his arrival were there, probably back at the hotel drinking, if i know how reporters operate, so they didnt find out until the next day that cleveland had returned. Cleveland healed remarkably quickly. He was fitted with a prosthetic device after about three or four weeks when the wound had healed sufficiently enough and this was a piece of hard, vulcanized rubber and they fashioned this to plug a hole in his mouth and it clipped on to a couple of teeth on the side and it restored the shape of his face because a piece of the jaw had been missing and most importantly, it restored his speaking voice. Without this device clevelands speech was unintelligible and he was famous for his speech. He was one of the greatest american speak eshs of ters of. With this device he could speak with this, and he appeared completely normal. The operation was done entirely with the mouth and they didnt remove his trademark walrus mustache. God forbid we not have a president with facial hair. It was like he was out on vacation on buzzards bay and he was out for a couple of weeks and reporters were kept in the distance. Do you remember when Ronald Reagan would stand by the helicopter and say i cant hear you, i cant hear you when he was leaving the white house and thats what they did with grover. He would go fishing and come back at the end of the day and the spokesperson would say everything was fine. There were rumors that something was wrong with him. What had happened was one of the doctors on the boat had missed an appointment because he was performing this operation and so when he met with the doctor, he explained i was operating on the president of the United States. I hope thats a good enough excuse for you and presumably it was, and then word began to filter around the medical community in new york. Doctors in new york began to hear whispers that something had happened. Eventually these whispers reached a reporter, a guy by the name of e. J. Et wards a edwards correspondent for the Philadelphia Press, i forget how many daily newspapers new york had, 20 or 30, and philadelphia had 15 daily newspapers in the 1890s and everything was very competitive and e. J. Edwards heard this story, this rumor going around and he found out the name of one of the doctors, the source of this rumor was actually the dentist who had administered the anesthesia and so he went to the dentist and played a little trick within the fair bounds of journalism at the time, maybe even today and he led on to edwards that he knew more about the story that you did. I understand an operation was performed on the president and he had a cancerous tumor removed and this was performed on benedicts yacht the oneida. Somebody on the boat must have told you all of that and went on to spill the beans who confirmed the operation and named a couple of doctors and on august 29th, now two months after the operation, edwards published the story in the Philadelphia Press under the headline, a president a very sick man. Cleveland had developed this reputation for honesty and integrity and his spokesperson said that this was a lie, that no operation had been performed and no tumor had been removed. They said he had merely had a bad tooth extracted which technically was true if you didnt mention the other four teeth, the tumor, the palate and the jawbone. So the public, at this time, was inclined to believe cleveland, and he had built up this reputation for honesty. He was known as the honest president. It appeared that he had built up this capital in his reputation for honesty and now decided to cash in all his chips on this one big lie and it worked. Cleveland recruited some of his friends in the press in the democratic papers especially a rival paper in philadelphia called the times, to not merely deny the story and to discredit the story and this meant killing the messenger. E. J. Edwards was derided as a cancer to journalism and a panic mongerer. Hed come up with one of the great of scoops in American History and probably the the most detailed account of a medical procedure performed upon the president without authorization and nobody believed him. It was really it was really too bad. I think cleveland probably went too far in discrediting edwards. It was one thing to keep the operation secret, but it was another thing to ruin this mans reputation which he effectively did, and so the secret held. In fact, the secret held well into the 20th century. Cleveland died in 1908 and there was no recurrence of the cancer. So this was a very significant achievement in american medicine and in american surgery to have a cancerous tumor removed from somebody in 1893 and then have no recurrence of the cancer. It was really quite spectacular, but nobody knew about it, ask it wasnt until 1917 that one of the doctors who had taken part in the operation, a guy named keen from philadelphia. Fascinating guy in and of himself. There are three main character, the prd, the man edwards and dr. Keane. He graduated from med school in 1862 and then served in the hospital as a commissioned report. Later on he was a commissioned officer in world war i and we spanned this from modern immediate. . Hed always felt bad for the way edwards had been trooted. In 1917 he decided to publish an account with the operation ask he asked permission for clevelands wife francis, why did it only come out this he had cancer, any last doubts about where the prd was a sick man hop hes making babies, how sick can he be . Hed asked for francis permission to publish it, and francis agreed. Francis, by the way, she remarried after grover died and married a princeton professor a guy named Thomas Preston and was married much longer than she was married to grover and just a funny, quick story. Francis lived a long time and in 1947 she was seated next on eisenhower at a fancy dinner and her place card said mrs. Preston. They started chatting. She said general, i used to live in washington and eisenhower said really . Where . So it was only then that francis identified herself as the former first lady and eisenhower was quite embarrassed by that. Francis, to her credit agreed with keen that there should be an account of what happened on the oneida in 1893. So keen that fall of 1917 finally broke the embargo and published an account in the operation on of all places, the saturday evening post. Youd think he would go to a medical journal to talk about this achievement in american medicine and oncology, but instead he published it in the saturday eenivening post. I asked why do you think keen did it in the saturday evening post and not a journal of medicine. Its like all doctors. He had a big ego and he wanted everybody to know and the saturday evening post was the most important periodical in the country and that was the place to brag and he did it to vindicate edwards, as i said. The account came out, and it did vindicate edwards 24 years after the fact as keen wrote. He was glad that finally edwards reputation as a truthful correspondent was vindicated and it was very big news among media people who had always wondered about this account that edwards had written many years before and edwards was still among the living at the time and was very gratified by this and sent keen a letter of effusive praise. Edwards should be much better remembered than he is, not just for this, but his other work in journalism. He was one of the early he worked with jacob reese and did how the other half live and was an early supporter of Stephen Crane and he let him live in his apartment in new york when he was struggling to write red badge of courage. One of the things that happened to edwards, his house was burned down in 1808 and he lost a lifetime of correspondence and clippings and notes. So there was no legacy to leave. It would be amazing to read through his papers and see exactly what his thoughts were as this happened in 1893 and he came up with the scoop and found himself vilified. Fortunately, yale, where hed gone to school has some of his papers so i was able to kind of cobble together his story through that. Theres another postscript to the story, the tumor itself which i mentioned is at the motor museum in philadelphia. Its not much to look at and its like a piece of limp cauliflower and the tumor, ten fragments of bone and five teeth and one with a fill, gold, naturally because cleveland was a gold guy, and this blob in this emorphous jar, they wanted to know what kind of cancer did cleveland have . This was an amazing, chiefment in american surgery, American Cancer Research that they had successfully removed this tumor and that there would be no recurrence of the disease for 15 years until cleveland died in 1908, but there was a problem. Clevelands children and he had children very late in life. His last son francis died in 1995. In fact, its funny, i was living in portland, maine, and we went to church and i met a woman named Margaret Cleveland and i made a joke about grover and she said actually, he was my grandfather. Grover was born in 1837. When he was 60 he had a son francis in 1897 and francis when he was 60 had a daughter in 1957 who was margaret and so there were 120 years between the birth of margaret and her grandfather so the cleveland children lived well into the 20th century and they would not allow the specimen to be tested pathologically to determine the cause of what kind of cancer it was because grover had been a pretty wild guy in buffalo when he was a bachelor and there was a rumor that he had a venereal disease and the children were afraid that if it came out that they did a specimen, that their father had had syphilis and this would be embarrassing to them and to their fathers legacy. It warrant until the 1970s that they finally acquiesced to have a pathological examination on the tumor. It was determined that grover had a rare kind of cancer and its a varicose carcinoma, its a mag ilnant tumor, and i can never say this word, it does not metastasize, but it has to be removed because the tumor continues to grow and it can grow so large that it would make eating and eventually breathing impossible. So the breathing for this type of tumor today and the tumor itself this vc was not even identified until 1948. So the doctors in 1893 had no idea what this was because it hadnt even been identified as a specific kind of cancer. The treatment today, though, would be exactly what grover had. You have to excise the tumor completely. There is no alternative. Although today they can do reconstructive bone and tissue grafts so you dont have to walk around with a piece of vul conditioniz vulcannized hockey puck so you can talk and eat. There was no recurrence of cancer and it was a kind of cancer that does not metastasize and the test conclusively determined whether or not Grover Cleveland whether or not did have syphilis and the results of the test are in the book, which is now for sale, thank you very much, if anybody has any questions, id be happy to answer them. [ applause ] i think kristen has a microphone if anybody has a question or did i cover everything so excellently. Oh, theres a question. Hello. Thank you for the wonderful talk on Grover Cleveland. How did he die eventually . What was the cause of death . Grover died in 1908. He retired to princeton and its a bit of a mystery, actually. He complained of gastrointestinal problems and there was actually some suspicion that he may have had an intestinal tumor, although since the oral cancer that he had why do you make me keep saying that, metastasized, the tumor would not have been related to cancer. He was 71 when he died in 1908 and the official cause of death, i think, was listed as cardiac arrest, but that doesnt really explain the precipitating causes to that. Grover retired to princeton. It was interesting. Hed never gone to college and he went to princeton and sort of became the mascot there and after a football victory all of the students would march to grovers house and give a cheer and he really enjoyed his final time in princeton. Kristens going to bring a microphone up for you, in just a second. The other half of your title is the panic of 1893 and other than the fact you mentioned there was a Railroad Bubble and burst, you didnt say anything about that. Is that covered in the book . No. Its covered in the book. As i said, there were two major causes of the panic in 1893 which was the overbuilding of the railroad and the currency situation. It would be hard to overstate how controversial and contentious it was in the debate over gold versus silver and thats what precipitated the panic and people didnt know what would happen with the currency and would there be inflation and would there be deflation if they stopped minting Silver Dollars, it could be that they had a money phammin and this happened periodically and that was one of the reasons that the silver rights wanted to increase silver production until silver became a form of currency and there had been periods of deflation in the country and money would be impossible to find. There were other causes, of course, when the railroads went down it took with them a lot of businesses and things, Like Companies that made cord or rope went out of business and each of the towns where these railroads passed through all of the ancillary businesses connected with them went out of business and the panic of 1893 really lasted until 1897 and 1898 when the spanishamerican war came and gave the economy a boost, and it was the at the time it was the worst depression in American History and doubledigit unemployment in five years only exceeded now by the Great Depression of the 1930s and at the time also you have storm during the panic of 1893 where there was terrible unemployment and terrible inflation and there was no safety net as we have today and even the most rudimentary kind and grover did not believe in this and he did not believe in this as he called it. While the people should cheerfully support the government, the government should not support the people and this appeals to libertarians and ron paul keeps a picture of Grover Cleveland in his office and it contributed grovers unpopularity and by some accounts it extend the panic. Although the panic also for the first time we do see some semblance of public works project and they paid people a dollar a day to chop wood and so there were some programs that were beginning, but most of the relief programs during the panic of 1893 were run by the labor unions and also the churches and other charitable organizations and there was no Government Support program. The panic was also exacerbated and again, i go into it in the book and it was some amazing writing about the panic of 1893 and it will blow your mind. There was a hurricane that hit the southeast coast of the United States in the fall of 1893 and it couldnt have happened at a worst time and it pretty much devastated georgia and the carolinas and this contributed to even greater problems with the panic of 1893 and there was nothing, no resources to rebuild these areas and it was an interesting confluence of political, economic and natural events that created and made 1893 such a terrible year economically for the country and like i said, it took about four years for the panic to ebb, finally, but yeah, youll like it what i say about it in the book. You might want to get two copies just because youll want to give one away. Another question up here. Wait a second, kristens coming. There she comes. Whafrs the makeup of the congress at the time of clevelands operation . Was he looked at as a lame duck waiting to die if people had known about it . That was another problem. For one thing, cleveland was a gold guy and his Vice President was a guy named adly stevenson who was the grandfather of the president ial candidate. Stephenson was from illinois and was in favor of bimedalism and that is using gold and silver as currency, and he had been added to the ticket to give some balance because the democrats needed to win some Southern States so you had this unusual situation where the president and the Vice President are on exact opposite sides of the most contentious political issue of the day and cleveland was adamant that stephenson not know what was going on with his health. Stephenson was at the worlds fair in 1893 and had heard rumors about clevelands health and headed east and cleveland intercepted him with a telegram and actually, i would like to go on a political trip to seattle in 1893 which involved stage coaches, trains, ferries and that puts stephenson out of action for a considerable time. Congress, at the time, the democrats controlled both houses for the first two years of the second term, but the panic had gotten so bad in 1894 that the public took back both houses and they had the silver purchase act repealed shortly after the surgery, in fact and that stopped the u. S. Treasury from purchasing the 4. 5 million ounces of silver a month and they had accumulated so much silver in those three and a half years and so many silver certificates had been issued that silver certificates were actually issued and i believe they were valid until 1968. So it was the kind of thing that was another cool thing about the book, and you see some of the decisions that were made in 1893 and you think they dont have relevance to us, if you hear the echoes of these things 120 years later. As david mentioned, one of my jobs was a gas station attendant and you used to see even into the 80s, youd see certificates come up once a month instead of the green seal, but it was a Republican Congress for the second half of this term. Nafrsthat was a really good. Thank you. Youre a really good listener. You mentioned you have a fondness for grover, was that because he was a good president and as he would rate and rank, where would you put him . He has a muppet named after him, and you have to like grover. This is amazing to lose the white house, come back four years later and win it back. I dont care who the president or the politics involved, will that ever happen again . Its just impossible to conceive of now an incumbent president loses the presidency and they retire to their 200,000 a gig speaking events which is exactly what im getting paid today, ironically, but grover didnt have that. There were no pensions for president s at the time and i think part of the concern for grover was it was pretty much the only job he enjoyed and could do. He retired to new york between the two terms and did a little bit of lawyering and mostly acting as a mediator. Its funny, grover was the last of the donothing president s and i dont mean that in a negative or bad way. He vetoed more bills in his twice as many bills in his first term than his predecessors combined. So he saw his job primarily as keeping congress from passing bad laws and he saw thats what the executive was to do first and hed done it as mayor and done it as governor and he was the veto president , and as i said also, he didnt believe in an interventionist government and this appeals to a lot of people even today. So i think he deserves to be remembered much better than he is. I mean lets see, hes got a turnpike rest stop on the jersey turnpike named after him. Its between exits 11 and 12 northbound and thats about it. Thats oh, and this great new book. [ laughter ] thats it . [ inaudible question ] any child whoever purchases a placemat to eat at and has the president s, and they think there is a mistake here because this picture comes up twice. He screwed up the numbering. Harry truman never could understand why grover was counted twice. He just thought that was ridiculous because only 43 people have been president why is this president number 44, yeah. Thanks, grover. Thanks for a very interesting talk. The book is now available and matthew will be happy to sign a copy for you. Thank you. Thank you so much. [ applause ] weeknights this month on American History tv were featuring the contenders, our series that looks at 14 president ial candidates who lost the election and had a lasting effect on u. S. Politics. Tonight we feature former secretary of state William Jennings bryant who was also a threetime president ial candidate. Watch tonight beginning at 8 00 eastern and watch it this week and every weekend on cspan3. Youre watching American History tv. Every weekend on cspan3 explore our nations past. Cspan3, created by americas Cable Television company as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. James garfield served nine terms in the u. S. House of representatives and only 200 days as the 20th president of the United States. He was assassinated in 1881 dying 79 days after being shot at a train station in washington. Up next on American History tv, a discussion on garfields life and death. Today, of the four president ial assassinations, the one that i find the most absolutely fascinating and interesting is the one were going to discuss tonight. James garfield. For quite a number of
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