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 th