 Good afternoon, and welcome to the fifth week of the American Presidency, our series of conversations with noted historians, scholars, and journalists about the people and events that have defined the most important elected office in the world. Our program is brought to you by the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, the University of Texas Osheville Off-Long Learning Institute, and Humanities Texas. I'm Phil Barnes, and it is my privilege to chair the UT SAGE Enrichment Committee. Mark Lawrence, the director of the Presidential Library, my good friend, and himself a widely respected and published historian, is the host of our conversations. As a member of the audience, you may participate in the Q&A segment of our program by using the chat function to write and submit questions. Our Q&A host today is my UT Ollie colleague and our friend Sandy Kress. Our theme for this year's series has been the American Presidency, Pivotal Elections. I look back at six of our 59 presidential campaigns and elections, deemed by many to be among the most consequential in American history. And this itself is a reminder that the election of 2024 coming up this year will not be the only consequential and pivotal election that our nation has experienced. Our special guest today is Carl Rowe, one of the nation's premier political consultants and advisors, perhaps best known as the architect of the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns of George W. Bush. He is also a student observer of American politics and public policy, which is reflected in his weekly op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal. His column appears each Thursday and it is well worth reading. I commend it to you. And Carl is the author of two books, including the critically acclaimed The Triumph of William McKenna, why the election of 1896 still matters. Our political environment today is, in many ways, an echo of that of 1896, a nation changing by a growing immigrant population, an uncertain economy disrupted in part by new and emerging technologies, a growing income inequality, and the seeming inability of a divided country to meet these challenges. At his campaign against the charismatic William Jennings Bryan, William McKenna addressed these issues, as Carl says, as a matter of principle, framing his support for tariffs and the gold standard as a means of lifting up the economic well-being of all Americans, while always treating his opponents with respect. And that way he won the admiration of both his friends and his opponents. And he won the race by running the first modern presidential campaign in American history. And Carl Rowe, who knows something about successful campaigns, tells the story of the election with notable admiration for McKinley, the man, the candidate, and the president. At his words, William McKenna aimed to unite a divided country, reignite the economy, reignite the economy, and reinvigorate his party. And that he did. So we welcome, for today's interview, Carl Rowe, the author of The Tribe for William McKenna, why the election of 1896 still matters. And now, to Mark Lawrence. Well, thank you, Phil. And good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to this afternoon's program about the election of 1896. And it's great to have you all. And it's particularly great to have our special guest, none other than Carl Rowe. Carl, you are known for many things. And one of them that I would say really belongs close to the top of that list is this really fascinating book about what you've convinced me is, in fact, one of the pivotal elections of American history. Welcome. It's great to have you. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Mark. Carl, you are obviously a very busy man with lots to keep you busy in connection with politics in the present moment. What drew you to the election of 1896? Why write this book? Well, I wanted to write the book because I wanted to get my BA from the University of Texas. I was teaching a class, had taught a class in an undergraduate appointment between the government department and the journalism department for five or six years. And I was teaching a class at the LBJ school and courtesy of temporary Dean Mack Sherman and the chairman of the government department, Jim Fishkin said, we'll fast track you for a PhD, but you're 44 and you got to get your BA before we can enter you in the PhD program. And so I had to fulfill the upper division writing requirement. There was absolutely no evidence I could string two sentences together after running a public affairs firm for 18 years. So I signed up for, I think it was history 351, which all you had to do was do a paper in the original source documents, write a paper, and you could get three hours and fulfill the upper division writing requirement. I had no idea that while it was in the catalog, nobody ever did it. And somehow or another through Sarah and Dippity, I walked into the history department, was told nobody ever did it, thought I might try my hand anyway, asked if there was a professor around. There was one in the office that day that summer, and it was Louis Gould, who was unknown to me, but he sort of vaguely knew who I was. And he said, what do you want to write about? And I said, I want to write about Theodore Roosevelt in the 1896 election. How did he rescue his career? And Gould said, I've never done this, but I'll take you on. But you've got to read the McKinley papers because history gets McKinley wrong. And the more I delved into the disorganized, voluminous McKinley papers, the more I became convinced he was absolutely right. Only every undergraduate paper turned into such a monumental accomplishment. Obviously, I want to get into a lot of the details of the 1896 race that you bring to life in such interesting ways. But let me ask you, first of all, about a really strong assertion you make at the very end of the book. You say McKinley's victory in 1896 created a new political system in the United States. What do you mean by that? Well, I'm not the first to say that. In 1955, V.O. Key wrote a prominent political scientist, wrote a paper about it, the theory of critical elections. And it was then echoed in a book. I have my copy of it. It cost me $1.75 when I was an undergraduate. Critical elections in the main springs of American politics by Walter Dean Burnham, who at that point was at MIT but came to speak, came to teach at UT. And political scientists have said that there are elections in which the political system in America is one way beforehand and then is a different way afterwards and has some continuity. The election of 1800, the end of the Federalist Party, dominance of American politics, the growth of Jeffersonian Republicans. That lasts until 1828. Then we have another critical election with Andrew Jackson and the creation of the Democratic Party in 1860. The election of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, 1896, which breaks the deadlock of the Gilded Age, 1932. And some suggest 1980 is another realigning election. But think about the Gilded Age. We have five presidential elections in a row leading up to 1896 in which nobody gets 50% of the vote. In two of those elections, the winner of the Electoral College has lost the popular vote. And in three of those elections, the race is settled by less than a percent between the two candidates. We have four years with Republican President, House and Senate, two years with the Democratic President, House and Senate. And the rest of that quarter century is divided government in which virtually nothing gets done because these men hate each other's guts. They're still fighting the Civil War only on the floor of the House and Senate. And let's face it, many of the, most of the presidents of that Gilded Age era, the Garfields, the Arthurs, et cetera, are not all that well known. They're pretty obscure when it comes to American presidential history. You do a lot to bring William McKinley to life. And you obviously really like him. You write about McKinley in glowing terms. Before we get into where he stood on the policy issues, just talk a little bit about your thoughts about his character, who he was. And if I'm right about this, why you like him so much? Well, I do like him. He's an admirable person. That's the starting point. He's brought up in a modest house, a modest home in Northwest, excuse me, Northeast Ohio, son of abolitionist parents, enlists in the US Army at the age of 18 at the beginning of the Civil War, fights through the entire Civil War and ends the war as a major, and has three battlefield promotions for unbelievable valor, takes himself on two suicide missions. He's ordered on one, he devises another suicide mission for himself and somehow survives. He's recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but refuses to have his application pushed saying, I was only doing my duty. He then enters politics in 1865 and 66. He campaigns for his commander, Rutherford B. Hayes, who was the man who sent him on a suicide mission at the battle of Curranstown. And when he enters politics, he turns out to be a remarkable legislator and a wonderful personality. Even his political opponents, Democrats, find him to be an admirable person. And in fact, this was routine during the Gilded Age, that if you were a member of the minority who had won reelection by a narrow margin, you were the majority party phonied up an election challenge and kicked you out of the house. This happened 64 times between 1874 and 1904. And in 1884, he is kicked out of the house. And he won reelection by seven votes in a swing district. There was no evidence whatsoever of fraud, but it was close enough and the Democrats could do it. So they did it. And the only unusual thing about it was that a large number of senior Democrats voted to retain him in the house as a mark of respect. And he took on great causes and he fought for the right things. He was a staunch advocate for Black voting rights. In fact, when Hayes gets elected governor, McKinley is almost morose because a constitutional amendment guaranteeing Black voting rights goes down. He's the first candidate Republican or Democrat to openly meet with Black voters, which he does in 1895 and asks for their support. It feels like that maybe many eras of American history, but certainly the gilded age is one of those moments where you sort of think of the smoke-filled rooms and the kind of machinations, cynical machinations of American politics. And here's this guy that you describe as kind of an upstanding moral figure. What made him effective as a politician in an era that might have privileged people who had a different set of skills? Well, he was very smart and he understood how to deal with people and how important was not to take this personally. One of his great relationships is with Joe Foreaker, who became governor of Ohio, viewed himself as a presidential candidate. One of the most egotistical people I've ever stumbled across to politics and brittle and quick to get mad about things. McKinley, adroitly keeps him close and deals with him in such a way that when he, McKinley, decides to run for president, Foreaker is impossible for Foreaker to do anything other than support him begrudgingly and to help him carry a united Ohio into the national convention. But, you know, to me, one of the measures of a political leader is when they do the tough thing for the right reasons, no matter what the consequences are. The most powerful political group during this age on the Republican side is the American Protective Association, which is not a pro-tariff group. It is an anti-immigrant group, which at one point claimed to have a membership of 13 million people. And in 1895 and 1896, they oppose him. And they oppose him for president. He's the only Republican candidate, they say, is unacceptable. And it's because when he ran for governor and was elected governor, they approached him and said, there are Catholic, you know, prison guards, and you need to fire them. And he refused to do so. And they couldn't believe it. And they opposed his reelection. He won by a bigger margin. So then when he ran for president, they said, completely unacceptable. And they were a huge power. And he took them on. They went after him. And he responded with good humor. He had his campaign put out a press statement listing all of the secret organizations that he was a member of, the college fraternity that he was a member of, the Grand Army, the Republic, the Union Veterans, Loyal Veterans League, you know, and so forth. You know, a member of a Methodist church. I mean, these were all the secret societies that he was admitting to, which is a way of mocking his political opponent. And he stood up to him and beat him. And at the convention, has a rabbi give the benediction at one and a black preacher give the invocation at another session. And it was his way of basically saying, you know what, I want, and I'm going to continue to advocate an open party that's available to all. And Carl, he had to deal as well with the so-called combine, right? These sort of machine politicians focused on New York and Pennsylvania. You have a lot to say about these quintessentially, I think late 19th century politicians who are mostly concerned about patronage. Go a little further with sort of how he maneuvered in this world. How did he deal with them? Yeah, well, look, in the Gilded Age, it was normal for the Republicans to gather at convention. And then there would be powerful leaders in the party, generally in states with patronage. You know, Thomas Collier Platt, the easy boss, former Senator from New York, who controls the New York Republican Party, he has, you know, when the Republicans control the governorship, thousands of jobs in the state government. And then he also has the very powerful position when the Republicans hold the White House, as they do for all but eight years during this period of the Gilded Age. He has the New York customs office where the head of the customs office gets paid a percentage of the customs he collects, so largest port in America, very wealthy position. And so these men were practical politicians. They wanted to win, which was the one saving grace they had, but they wanted, they wanted to be in charge. They wanted to make the decisions, and they generally showed up at the convention with control over their delegates and nearby delegations. New York, for example, dominated Connecticut and New Jersey as well. And in 1895 and 1896, they're not for McKinley because he's, he literally is saying I'm taking on the bosses. They were for Thomas Brackett Reed, the Speaker of the House from Maine. And one of the most interesting characters is the blonde boss, William Larimer, the Chicago congressman who started out as a, as a, as a driver of, of, of, you know, public transportation. And by the time he's in his thirties, he's elected to Congress and controls 20,000 patronage jobs in Cook County, Chicago. You may think of Chicago as being a democratic machine, but in the 1890s, it's a Republican machine and he's in charge of it. And McKinley takes the bosses on and he does so by both attacking them for being bosses and saying that he represents the people, but also smartly not waiting for them to make the decisions. And one of the keys to the convention of the Republican convention is the South. The Republicans don't get electoral votes there, but they get delegates from there. Most, many of them black. And what happens is they show up at the convention and the bosses then, you know, promise them jobs and provide them money at the convention. And, and what happens is McKinley, the year before the convention goes to the South, his campaign, his close friend and campaign chairman, Mark Hanna has a home in what is then the Palm Beach of the South, Thomasville, Georgia. And it just happens to be at the junction of three railroads and McKinley invites the Southern Republican leaders to come and meet him. And by accident, I found out who they were. We historians have always wondered who came and I found out a number of them that came by checking the registers of the local hotels, which were published in the little newspaper, which is now online. And black Republican leaders are being invited by the former chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, the governor of Ohio, to come and meet them as man to man, treated with respect and dignity. And as one of the bosses later said, he wrapped up the South before it even began and half the votes needed to elect a Republican nominee were to be found in the South. And of course, you know, a good chunk of your book unsurprisingly has to do with the general election against William Jennings Bryan, but so many chapters in the first half of the book or maybe a little bit more deal with the race for the nomination, you make a really interesting assertion at one point in the book that McKinley ran the first modern presidential primary campaign. I think you're you're getting onto some of the ways in which he did things differently than than than earlier Republicans had. But talk a little bit more about what you mean by this first modern primary campaign. Well, generally, candidates sort of offered themselves to run. They wanted they made their intentions known, their interests known. And then they focused on getting a united delegation from their state and conciliating themselves with the bosses. And he could care less about being in touch with the bosses. So he goes in season pays his respects. But it is clear that he's going to go around them and he recruits like minded people who will go around the bosses. For example, there's a wonderful figure who pops up in this in there who is lives in Connecticut. He is a wealthy, you know, dilettante, if you will, family is very wealthy. And while this is a machine state, that's part of the empire of the easy boss, Platt, this this young young man gets McKinley to come and give a speech. McKinley gives a great speech. He makes a lot of friends and and ends up getting votes out of what ought to be a dead certain machine state Connecticut. And this happens time and time again. He he he a colleague of his who served in the Congress from Wisconsin during the 1870s and early 1880s goes leaves the Congress goes bankrupt and removes himself to Arizona, a territory that nonetheless has delegates at the National Convention. McKinley keeps in touch with them. And when the time comes, his his bank once bankrupt friend, who's who's now a near to well in Arizona, but active in the Republican Party, helps bring delegates from Arizona to be in favor of him. There all these friendships that he has allowed him to go around the machine and and pretty remarkable. And he also had an eye for talent. There's one figure who shows up who's the young son of of of a former one term member of Congress from Ohio, the young man had gone to law school in Cincinnati and then headed west to make his his living. And he shows up in Lincoln, Nebraska, and where he offices in a small office building with another young lawyer named William Jennings Bryan, and the two men Charles Dawes and William Jennings Bryan often have lunch at the diner with the head of the ROTC program at the University of Nebraska is sort of angry that he's not got a better assignment. A guy named John J. Pershing. And the three the three men often have lunch at the 25 cent diner in town. But I mean McKinley picks them out the kid shows up in 1894 says you're the kind of reform mind a guy want to run for president. And I'm for you. And when McKinley goes through Nebraska, that fall during the congressional midterms, the kid shows up and says, Here's a list of who I've got organized for for you. And I'm working on the Dakotas and and and elsewhere in the Midwest. And make and then the kid after the 1894 election moves to Chicago where he wants to become an entrepreneur buying gas utilities. Charles G. Dawes does and McKinley says you're the guy in charge of my campaign in Illinois. This is the critical battleground state for the primary season, which consists of conventions. And he picks the kid who is at that point 31 years old and only recently moved to Illinois. And why did he do it? Because he saw him as a young, bright, aggressive, well organized thoughtful man, young man who could who could captain his campaign and he does. I have to say until I read your book, I knew nothing about Charles Dawes career in the 1890s. To me, he's a figure from the 1920s. And you do a great job bringing him to life and showing how important he was to McKinley. But the better known figure is Mark Hannah, it seems to me. Talk about Mark Hannah and what role he played in the 96 campaign. Well, the best way to think of Mark Hannah is not as the great political genius. The way to think of Mark Hannah is the best friend. He's the Don Evans of George W. Bush. He is the close buddy. And he falls in love with McKinley over the course of the 1880s. He's from Cleveland and wealthy industrials. And he sees McKinley moving around politics in Ohio and becomes a fan and becomes devoted to him. And he plays an important role, particularly in the primaries, because McKinley is the shotcaller. But Hannah is the doer and the expediter. But in the general election, we always think of the campaign is run by Mark Hannah. Well, no, it isn't. It's 1896. And what I did is I sat down and charted through the newspapers where Hannah was every single day of the 118 days between the Republican convention and the general election. And he is on the road outside of Chicago or Cleveland, 70 out of the 118 days. Now, this is before, you know, you don't have cell phones. You don't even really have telephones because at that point, a telephone line rang, you know, one place at the other end of that line. And so, you know, he's on the road and maybe he's communicating by telegram and letter, but he's on the road raising money. The guy who's actually running the campaign, whose posterior is, you know, stapled to a seat in Chicago where their headquarters is, is now 32-year-old Charles G. Dawes. And to read the communications from him to his boss, William McKinley and to Hannah, is pretty remarkable because, first of all, he is on top of every penny in the campaign. He is on top of all of this activity. He's got a gigantic staff there in Chicago churning out literally materials by the train car load. They're dispatching literally train car loads of materials to the battleground states. And the campaign is being run by this kid. And Hannah plays an important role because he's talking to the people who have to write checks. But he's not the skilled operative. He's got a temper. He's got a little bit of an ego. But Dawes takes care of the campaign. And then he has an unusual person who helps him make peace with the New York machine with Thomas Collier-Platt and the bosses. And that is young Theodore Roosevelt, who literally shows up when Hannah shows up in New York. He shows up there with him and counsels him, you know, you've got to conciliate yourself to Platt. Because if you don't have Platt in your corner, you're not carrying New York. And New York is the biggest swing state in the Union. You need it in order to win. And he gives him good advice and good counsel and helps conciliate the two men who don't like each other to begin with, let alone the fact that Hannah has now beaten Platt in the most important contest of Platt's life, namely the nomination of a Republican president. Let me ask you a question that I'm sure you've heard once or twice before. Do you identify in any way with Mark Hannah, Dawes, any of these characters from 1896? Or did you in the course of your own career draw any particular lessons from them? Well, I stole from them because I did. I started my research on this literally in before the 2000 election, 1895 and 1996. And so I was studying these men and what they did in order to win. But no, I'm Carl Rove, they're Mark Hannah and Charles G. Dawes. You mentioned Dawes, people might be interested to know he's a second American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. At the age of 32, he becomes the controller of the currency and charge of the nation's banking system. He's the first director of the very first Bureau of the Budget, Vice President of the United States under Calvin Coolidge, Ambassador to Great Britain and the first head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under Herbert Hoover as the Depression begins and a very successful Chicago businessman, mostly in banking and extraordinary human being. Let's turn to the other side and the general election, the Democrats and William Jennings Bryan, who in many ways as you recount in your book is an unlikely standard bearer for the Democrats, given how little political experience he had. How did he manage to secure the nomination? He talked his way into it. First of all, let's step back for a minute. By 1896, 1895 and 1896, the Democratic Party is deeply divided over the issue of a gold currency versus silver. Cleveland is seen as a gold, he is a gold Democrat, the ultimate gold Democrat. The country is in a deep depression and the populist element of the Democratic Party says that it is all because he was a gold man and the nation has been put on a bimetallic currency. They begin an effort to basically, they don't think they can nominate a silver Democrat in 1896 because the Democratic rules are two thirds of the delegates have to nominate a candidate, but a majority can write the platform. So what they want to do is they want to have a silver platform and then force whoever the nominee is to support it. And they are far more successful than they could ever imagine. And by the opening of the Democratic National Convention, they're within a handful of votes of dominating the convention. They have well over half, they're within a few votes of two thirds of the delegates at the convention. They proceed to steal enough delegates to become that. They throw out the Michigan delegation of gold men and replace it with silver men and thereby are able to nominate a silver Democrat. But Brian is not the front runner. The front runner is Richard Park Bland of Missouri, who for 30 years has led the fight for the free and unlimited coinage of silver, cause of humanity itself, he says. And he's expected to be the leader and has the support of the major figures inside the silver community, the silver movement inside the Democratic Party. But Brian thinks that he can be the candidate. And he's about the only one. He has a close friend that he's met during his travels on behalf of the silver movement, Charles Rosser, head of the state insane asylum in Texas. And the night before they began the convention activities, Rosser and Brian's wife and Brian are having dinner and the two, the front runner, Bland of Missouri and the, and the, his close competitor, the governor of former governor of Iowa have their advocates play parading up and down the streets of Chicago. And, and Mrs. Brian turns to Rosser and says, does he, does, you know, William have a shot and before Rosser can answer, Brian answers, responds and says there, there, there, that tomorrow there will be cheering my name and I will be the nominee because I am, you know, the, the logical choice. And literally Rosser thinks he's completely insane. And, but he becomes the nominee and he does so by a series of accidents, because he is, it starts when he, he, he could have been temporary chairman of the convention, in which case he would not have been the nominee, but Nebraska has provision, the Nebraska Goldman have been provisionally seated so he cannot become the temporary chairman of the convention unless, because his delegation hasn't been seated. He then, they then seat the silver men and, but they pass him over for permanent chairman of it. They then have people are asked to speak on the floor during a period of time, but he's in a credentials committee meeting. So he misses the opportunity to speak. So the chairman of the, of the, the leader of the gold of the silver men and Senator Jones of Arkansas says to him, well, you haven't had a chance to speak. I want you to be the floor manager for the platform fight. So it gives him a job. And this will be his first hand because he hadn't had a chance to speak. He gets this assignment. Then the Senator pitchfork Ben Tillman of South Carolina says, I'm, I'm, I'm one of the people designated to speak on a half behalf of silver. I want to speak first. So you, Brian, you have to close the argument, which was a mistake because, you know, Tillman has speaks first, but the guy who's going to be the last speaker is going to be the one that might be remembered as the guy who closes till then they're, they're, they're going through this. He's got 15 minutes. Well, one other thing, this all gets settled the day before he has to speak. So he's got time overnight to figure out what he wants to say. Then literally while they're in the debate, one of the gold men, Russell, the governor of Massachusetts says that I'm not going to have enough time and people are chewing up my time. Let's extend the debate by 15 minutes, which means rather than having 15 minutes to close, Brian has 30 minutes to close and he gets up on the floor of the convention and gives the famed cross of gold speech, which incidentally was also was an accident because he'd had a paid speaking engagement in Crete, Nebraska on the Sunday before the convention begins. And in there, he resurrected the line he used one time in a congressional debate, you shall not crucify mankind on across a gold. And it has such a good response. He said to himself, if I get a chance to speak in the convention, I'm going to use it. But he gets up and goes to speech. People are not paying much attention. He starts to speak, but he's got an incredible voice. And it's an incredible speech. No matter whether you're a gold man or a silver man, it is well worth reading because it is unbelievable. I mean, he begins to grab the people's attention when he sort of begins to describe why the ordinary people of America are worthy of the respect of the financial institutions and their government. You know, the man who is employed for wages is as much a businessman as his employer. The attorney in a country town is as much a businessman as a corporation counsel in a great metropolis. The merchant of the crossroads stores as much a businessman as a merchant of New York. The farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day is as much a businessman as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets on the price of grain. And then he gives this unbelievable line of the miner who goes a thousand feet into the earth are as much businessman as the few financial magnets who in a back room corner the money of the world. And one of his friends is sitting next to a farmer who stands up and says, Oh my God, my God, my God, and literally punches his hat out. So by the time he finishes with the famous line at the end, I mean, he, think about this, not to waste too much. He said, There are two ideas of government. Republicans believe if you just legislate to make the well to do prosperous, then their prosperity will leak through on those below. Democrats believe if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it. Have you heard that before? Anyway, at the end, when he delivers the line, you shall not crucify mankind on across the gold. He thrusts out his hands. He puts his head forward. He says the line. He finishes the speech. It's incredible. It's absolutely still. He drops his hands to his side and begins to walk off thinking I've missed it. Nobody's going to respond. And the place goes utterly, completely mad. And 24 hours later, he is the nominee of the Democratic Party. Carl, one of the reasons why it seems to me these elections from the late 19th century can be somewhat obscure or feel very distant is that the two big issues, the tariff and the gold standard strike us as pretty arcane and very distant. You've done a little bit of this already, but maybe just briefly remind us why these were such passionate issues in this moment of American history. Well, the Republican Party believed that we had to protect the industries of America from unfair foreign competition. And the way to do that was to have high tariffs. And Democrats believe that the tariffs were accurately enough paid for by working people. So when you charged high tariffs on coffee and sugar, the person who was paying that was the little man and the little woman. And so the two parties had had a 60-year disagreement over this issue. But the other issue that intruded was this issue that's hard for us to get around and that is a gold versus a silver currency. And what we have is a period during which there's economic strains. And we don't have the national banking system we have today. And when money gets tight, the economy contracts. And there is a belief that grows throughout the Gilded Age, among Democrats, but also Republicans, that the way to respond to the challenge or economic challenges was to provide more money. And the way to do that is to either print greenbacks, paper money, or to make silver equal with gold, to have a bimetallic currency. At this point, the only major country with a bimetallic currency is Germany, which is actually starting to move away from a bimetallic currency. Everybody else is on the gold standard. And so the question was, which is the best way to assure prosperity in America, an inflationary silver currency, or a gold money currency? Thank you. Very well done. Really complicated issues. So when we get to the general campaign, there's William Jennings Bryan out there, and you chronicle this in such detail, just town after town after town, speech after speech after speech, really making the case in this with this oratory for which he is well known. But McKinley makes a different choice, and he engages in what we call the front porch campaign, which, you know, there are many ways in which this election feels kind of modern and his path breaking. But this feels a little bit old fashioned. Talk about the front porch campaign, what it was, and why McKinley chose the campaign in that way. Let me start by saying a quick word about Bryan. He spends most of this August, September, October on the road, which is unusual. Most presidential candidate, in fact, every presidential candidate before that point, stayed at home. They didn't campaign across the country. And here's a guy particularly through the beginning of October, he's traveling by himself, hoping that somebody meets him at the train wired ahead that he's coming and that people will be there and he's speaking to unbelievable crowds. But what happens is McKinley is inclined to McKinley, McKinley's advisors say you got to go out and match the guy. And he says, you know, I can't, you know, he's like a trapeze artist. I'm not I'm I can't I got to think before I speak. And so no, I'm not going to do that. But what happens is people start coming to Canton, Ohio, which is on main rail lines north and south, east and west. And so people start coming. And so they decide to turn this, you know, in essence, problem into an advantage. And so they start encouraging people to come to Canton, Ohio, 750,000 people and estimated 750,000 people, three quarters of a million people, make their way to this little town in eastern Ohio, in order to, you know, go go up North Market Street and stand in front of McKinley's house and have them come out on the porch and speak to them. And it's a marvelous story because it's, you know, that obviously required a great deal of organization, but it's also emblematic of the passion that people had at the time. And so there are all kinds of groups that come there, they're from all across the country. And one of the most important moments in the campaign happens on October 9th of 1896. Trains begin arriving in Canton in the late morning and off Walkman, generally dressed in butternut gray. These are Confederate war veterans. The country has never seen this. The Republicans and Democrats have been continuing to fight the Civil War. And yet here is a Republican war veteran who's invited 2,000 Confederate veterans of the Shenandoah Valley campaigns. These were the men who were trying to kill him. He's invited them to come to Canton and they're met at the train station by the Grand Army, the Republic. The women's auxiliary has created a banner for them that features a famous quote from George Washington that's a favorite of McKinley's. There should be no North, no South, no East, no West, but a common country. Each man is given a knife, a pocket knife with bearing that slogan. And they're given gray and blue badges that have the same on it. They're delayed a while because a couple of trains have been stopped by a washout. So they're serenaded by the Union bands. They're fed food by the women of Canton. And then in the early afternoon, the rest of the trains have arrived and men in blue and men in gray form up as units with their bands and begin to march out of the county courthouse square of North Market Street. And the newspaper reports are unbelievable because people are literally lining out the road and weeping at the sight of men in blue and men in gray in a sign of national reconciliation, playing patriotic songs and marching together. And they show up in front of his house and he comes out and says, if we are forced to fight again, and God forbid that we shall, we shall fight as brothers under a common flag. And this is something the country has never seen. The whole idea of reconciliation between North and South is just simply extraordinary. The nation has continued to be divided for 30 some odd years after the Civil War. And here's a man who courageously fought for the freedom of all Americans as a member of the Union Army, welcoming his Southern brethren back into the fold. And as it has luck would have it, I have two badges. And little did he know that in 1898 with the Spanish American War, he would have a chance as president to preside over precisely that sort of conflict. You know, that number of 750,000 is so remarkable. And I think you say in the book that that was one out of 20 eligible voters in the United States. Yeah, incredible number. Yeah. And look, I've got a gigantic collection of these buttons because it's also first modern political campaign. And you got everybody for you for almost a century, there have been items that people would wear and to show their support for presidential. But the volume of them and the variety of them, I mean, every, every, industry in America, you know, you had railroad workers and chemical workers and, you know, tool and dye makers. And so all of them have their own badges. And so these groups that would come to, to Canton would would all be decked out and, you know, and they'd bring things to give McKinley, but they were all decked out with badges and jackets and, you know, ribbons and they're showing their background. And McKinley makes this into an advantage. There's a giant parade in Chicago in September of the gold money supporters. And it turned out is so big that then this was Hannah's idea. Hannah says, why don't we have on the final day of November? Why don't we actually have October? Why don't we have a flag day? Let's have a gigantic series of parades all across the country where we will stand with our flag and proclaim America's greatness. And Brian makes a critical mistake. He's in Ohio campaign, which is battleground state. And he basically says, well, we ought to do that because that way everybody ought to put a flag out so that the employers don't know what who's voting Democrat and fire them. And he should have said, we should all join in. This is a great, we have a great country and steady looks like spalming and petty, which he was at that point. But there's a giant, there are giant parades everywhere in America and the most lavish is in New York City, where the parade begins at 10 o'clock in the morning and ends at after six o'clock in the evening as tens of thousands of men and women parade through the streets of New York. So, Carl, then fast forwarding to the actual election, November of 1896, McKinley, obviously wins. And you devote a good chunk of the last chapter of your book to unpacking some of the reasons why, in the end, McKinley came out on top and all of those points that you make are fascinating. I wanted to ask you, though, about a couple of them in particular. You suggest that McKinley succeeded in winning over workers, the laboring class, which maybe isn't something that we would intuitively think of when we think of, you know, the party of business in the late 19th century being the Republicans. Talk about how he managed to pull that off and to what extent that was a kind of watershed in American politics. Yeah. Well, first of all, he's screwing it up. He wins the nomination. He thinks the gold versus silver issue is going to go away. He wants to make it all about the protective tariff, which he has fostered and fought for for decades. But smart people around him, including buddies from Ohio, say, this issue is not going away. And one of the people who sort of says to him plainly is the former president, Benjamin Harrison, who says, the people get to decide what the issue is, and they've made their decision, it's the currency. So he starts talking in August about the currency, but it is the language of business. It's the language of we have to have gold currency because it's important to capital formation and to the creation of, to the strengthening of our economy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And two people pop up in late August and early September who have better language. One is the former president of the Knights of Labor, the largest labor union in America. He's the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania. And he is one. And the other one is the man who was defeated for the mayorship of New York, he ran third and was rewarded with being made a police commissioner, but a year later hates the job and is desperate to find a way to get to Washington. And that's the ambitious young Weasel theater Roosevelt. And Roosevelt begins to give speeches where he talks about the same issue, but he says, here's a half a loaf of bread. That's what a silver dollar will buy you. Here's a full loaf of bread, which a gold dollar will buy you. And the work man deserves to have a fair day's wage for a full day's work. And that's got to be a gold dollar. That's the only way he's going to be able to provide it for his family. And these two men, the mayor of Scranton and the police commissioner of New York, sort of basically give McKinley, you know, new material, a new language and a new approach that begins to influence what he says in Canton to the crowds that are coming. And more importantly, to the Republican speakers in the who are Chris Cross in the country advocating on his behalf and to these train car loads of material that are pouring out of the Chicago headquarters. And you go and read them and they are all focused, whether it's the speeches or the material, they're aimed at this message of here's why gold is important to the working man and working woman. Silver is going to be, you know, a silver dollar is worth only 50 cents of gold. And so what's going to happen? If we have bi-metallic currency, people are going to pay you in silver and buy in gold. And you're not going to have a gold to buy. So you're not going to be able to provide for your family. And you're the working man who's made this country great, whether it's in the coal mines or the steel mills or the farms and you deserve to be paid what you're worth. And that's a gold dollar. And it becomes a powerful message. It's also helped by the fact that in October, there was a resurgence of farm prices, which had been depressed for the last several years. So Republican farmers now say, you know what? I don't have a mortgage, so I don't have to pay, and now I'm suddenly making good prices for my crops and my produce. And so I'm now feeling better because the gold currency is what's keeping our economy strong and the guy who's for me is McKinley. Another important factor you identify is McKinley's ability to run as an outsider in a way that feels very, very 20th century. But you point out, we were talking about this earlier, that he was able to position himself against the bosses, against the party establishment. Did he break the power of the bosses? Is that one of the ways in which 1896 is an important watershed moment? Where do party politics go after that? Yeah, he doesn't break them. He diminishes them because they still last. I mean, as long as there's patronage jobs, governors and mayors will control, you know, for the first decade, second decade of the 20th century, they still, these bosses still are around. But yes, by going to the convention, unbidden, unbeholden to them, he diminishes their power. And we then begin to have, by 14 years later, we have the growth of primaries. And by 1912, we have a pretty large number of primaries compared to what we, and there are no primaries in 1896. But by 1912, there are six or seven or eight states that are now choosing your candidates for office by primaries, including their presidential candidates by primaries that select delegates. So, but yes, he's an outsider. He's also an outsider in the sense that he is not, he's interested in not rewarding the machine, the members of the machine, he's in rewarding excellence. He wants to find bright young men. Of course, this is an era in which public service is almost exclusively limited to men. But he wants to fight bright young men who share his reform impulses and whom he thinks will be able to deal with the challenges of this rapidly changing industrialized or increasingly urbanized economy that he sees growing in America. You write at the very end of your book that the McKinley campaign matters more than a century later today because it, and I'm quoting here, provides lessons either party could use today. What are those lessons? Well, one, McKinley was focused on addition. He was looking for people who he could draw to him by his message and his persona. And too often today, we seem to think that all we got to do is generate our base. He was aimed at persuasion about expanding the base, if you will, and by persuading people to come along. Second of all, he believed in a politics that was uplifting and positive. He was capable of saying what was bad about Brian. He was capable of saying what was bad about the Democrats when he was in Congress. But he was principally and primarily focused on articulating a positive and optimistic vision of what he felt the future ought to be like. Third of all, he's an admirable personality. He drew people into politics who were drawn by what kind of a person he was. His wife was an invalid. He lost his daughters. He was a combat veteran of the Civil War. He was personable. He didn't have sharp edges. He was enormously honest and trustworthy. And these were qualities that people found appealing. And then he ran a well-organized effort. This was not sort of, I'm going to stand there and wait for things to happen. He surrounded himself, whether it's Mark Hanna or Charles Dawes or others in his orbit, he surrounded himself with people who would come up with a plan to achieve something and go out and achieve it. And you saw this when he became president. He has the first modern chief of staff, this young guy from Connecticut, Addison Porter, who doesn't last very long, incidentally. Turns out he's a terrible alcoholic and he lasts about six months as chief of staff and then is quietly moved out of the White House and dies two or three years later of alcoholism. Harlan Crowe happened to see his White House chief of staff chair from the staff table and bought it at auction and gave it to me. I have it in my office, Addison Porter's chair. He must have been a small man. But he ran a modern campaign at a time when that gave him a significant edge. And he made it about big issues and he made it about what he wanted to do for the country and less about why his opponent was so bad and what a terrible person there was. By the way, let me pause just for a moment to invite members of our audience to put questions into the Q&A and I'll turn things over to Sandy Kress in just one moment. In fact, I'll ask you just one more question. And it has to do with Teddy Roosevelt, the figure about whom Americans know much more than I think they know about William McKinley. To what extent was Teddy Roosevelt's political career, his political style, his outlook shaped by his association with the much less known William McKinley? Well, remember when McKinley is shot in September of 1901, several months after being sworn in for a second term with Roosevelt as his running mate. And he is shot and killed, though he lingers for a number of days. When he is buried in Canton, Ohio, the first promise that Theodore Roosevelt makes as a new president is that he will continue the cabinet and continue the policies of William McKinley. He was enormously popular at the time of his death. 500,000 people lined the railroad lines between Buffalo where he was shot in Washington, DC. The stories, and I didn't put them in the book, but I'm writing an article about them. I mean, the scenes are amazing. The train comes rolling into Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and a crowd of 30,000 people jam-packs the train station. The governor of Pennsylvania cannot fight his way through the crowd to pay his respects to Mrs. McKinley. The train comes into Baltimore, and people have strewn the tracks with flowers so that by the time that the locomotive comes into the station, it's covered in flowers. When it comes on the last run into Washington, DC, where he's going to lie in state and the Capitol, the reporters say that lining the train tracks to Washington and the growing dusk are people of lit fires, and most of them are black farmers standing there silently as hats off as their leader comes by. But when he's buried, Roosevelt is standing apart from the rest of the cabinet because he's afraid his emotions will overcome him. Without being involved in the campaign of 1896, we probably would never have heard of Roosevelt, again, or at least certainly not in that same way. As the assistant secretary of the Navy, with the Navy Secretary on vacation, he sends the famous telegram to Dewey to load coal and make steam. And if hostilities are declared in the Spanish attempt to break out of the harbor of Manila, destroy them. He couldn't resign in a blaze of glory and organize the rough riders and go to Cuba. He couldn't charge up San Juan Hill. He couldn't charge up Kettle Hill. He could not be mustered out in September of 1898 in September and five weeks later be elected governor of the state of New York. And it all depended upon him in the 1896 campaign. And he's not a big fan of Roosevelt. He brought back greed for the nomination, writes influential articles and big publications, and does encourages his friends to be supportive. And after McKinley is nominated, he writes his sister, Bami, a letter and says, you know, we had a great gold platform in St. Louis and McKinley is a good man, but he is weak. And I worry about him in a moment of crisis for our country. And then a couple of days later writes one of McKinley's closest personal friends and says, we must do everything we can to elect McKinley. And when he's elected, you must be the minister to France or at least the secretary of the treasury. And my ambition such as they are, we can go by the wayside, which is his way of saying, help, I need your help. But Bellamy Stoyer, Brandon McKinley, help me get in. And he later invites the Stoyers close friends of McKinley from Cincinnati, Ohio to Oyster Bay, takes Mrs. Stoyer, who's got the mental and political brains of the family out and rows her around Long Island Sound and says, I need your help. I need to, I need you to get me close to McKinley, because the only way I can resurrect my political career is to get a job in Washington after the election. Will you help me out? She later writes that Roosevelt spoke, excuse me, Roosevelt rode like he spoke, spasmodically. And, and he's, he's just, you know, there's this great moment. Henry Cabot Lodge, his great friend, who was the campaign manager for Reed, says, I've been asked as the senator from Massachusetts to campaign in Western New York, which is the battleground region of the state. And will you come, come with me? Don't say no. Don't say police. Come with me. Well, he has no idea that Roosevelt is desperate for such an opportunity. And so the two men can do a barnstorm through Western New York. And who gets the headlines? Theodore Roosevelt, because he says so many ugly things about, about, about Brian, that he gets the headlines, not the senator. And their mutual friend, John Hay writes another friend and says, Cabot and, and TR are going to, and Teddy, are off to count and to bear their tummies to the major McKinley's nickname and commit Harry Carey. And out of this, somehow or another McKinley gets into the McKinley campaign invites Roosevelt to trail Brian through the Midwest. And, and, and appear the day before the day after that Brian is in a town and he gives a famous speech called The Age of the Demagogue in Chicago and just lacerating Brian on a Monday. I found a previously unknown speech that he delivered on Wednesday, which he's polishing the Monday speech. And by Saturday, he's, he's polished it pretty sharp. And it's given us a speech called the Jack Cade speech in Detroit, lacerating Brian while Brian is in Chicago and Detroit. And Roosevelt thought so much of these speeches that when he later put together his own collection of speeches, the only two speeches from 1896 are these two speeches. And, and at the end of the campaign, the story is go back to Roosevelt and actually go back to McKinley press for, for Roosevelt. And that's where he says, I do not trust your young man, Roosevelt, he's too pugnacious, but he nonetheless makes him the assistant secretary of the Navy without which his future is not possible. Well, Carl Roeve, you clearly have plenty of great material for a sequel to the triumph of William McKinley. I can't wait to learn more about Teddy Roosevelt. Thank you so much for spending time with me this afternoon. It's such an honor to have you as part of this series. Thank you for taking time away from your day job and producing this, this wonderful book. I'm going to turn things over to Sandy Cress for the last part of our program. Thanks again. Thank you very much, Mark. Carl, I just have to say this, not as your friend, but as a pretty tough critic, this book was just fantastic. Oh, well, thank you, Sandy. Really, it's a, it's a great read. It's fine history. And what I really admire most about it is that you've lifted up a person of virtue and challenged us all to examine this, this person, and I think to emulate him. And, and I admire you especially for that. And I want to ask you some questions about that in a moment. But I want to, I want to sort of allocate the time I have to three areas, questions that are posed by people from the audience. One is about the man McKinley, two about the election, and then three, the legacy itself. You've done such a fabulous job of convincing me and others about McKinley. And I just want to ask you, why has the nation been so slow to see it? You know, there are these presidential rankings. I think he's come up a little bit among historians, the C-SPAN, but, but he's still sort of above average, middle of the pack. What is it that the nation, why is it that the nation has, has missed seeing him as high as I think you portray him and as he ought to be portrayed? Yeah. Well, I think I've got a crackpot theory about it. And that is that what followed in the 19th and 20s were the, was the age of progressive historians. And two, two things marshaled against poor McKinley. One was the gigantic personality of Theodore Roosevelt, who was, it was either an inspiration or in many instances a friend to the progressive historians. And second of all, the progressive historians, the beginning of the, of Roosevelt's agenda is to be found in McKinley. And, and, but they didn't want to give him credit. And, you know, and he was also, look, he was not the, he was, he was not the, you know, he got things done without taking a two by four to his opponents. So I think the progressive historians did a lot that does sort of damage it. But think about it. First man to, first one to have a trade rep, he was literally moving the country into a period of reciprocity. You know, he restored the nation's economy almost overnight by, and we, by, by holding to the gold standard, he, he prosecuted, he acquired Hawaii, which desperately didn't want to fall into the hands of Japanese, which they were afraid they were going to, he won the Spanish-American war and they make, made immediate steps to both free, to give Cuba independence and to bring the Philippines into independence. And he ran, you know, a progressive administration that, that had, you know, important advances. But, you know, the historians get to write the books and the, and the historians at the time didn't. We've since had, there's a great biography of his, particularly his presidential year by Robert Mary. And then there, that Lewis Gould has written a terrific book about, about the elect, about, about him and his presidency. Another man who's in my dedication was a professor at SMU, R. Hal Williams. He's written a terrific book about the election of 1896 that's shorter than mine, doesn't have as much color. But, but, you know, there have been a bunch of historians who began to try and re-resurrect his, his reputation, but it, it, it took a big bang in the 1910s and 20s. You know, you just may have mentioned a couple of things. I just want to ask you if you want to say anything more about the two or three things that are the best examples of his achievements, of his accomplishments, of things that, that are, that made a difference then or are lasting. You mentioned a couple of those things a moment ago, but take a little bit more time with us on what he did that made a difference. Well, the first thing was he restored confidence in our economy. So we went from the depths of the greatest economic depression that we had until the Great Depression itself and helped restore through fiscal soundness and a commitment to the gold standard prosperity. So much so that when he ran for reelection in 1900, the slogan was the fool dinner pail. And that was the symbol of the campaign was that now the working man could, you know, we had to had lunch that he could take with him and could provide for his family. Second of all, he modernized the government and modernized particularly the office of the president. He has the first chief of staff. He has the first press secretary. He actually organizes the White House so that it could function. And then as, you know, he presided over, he was reluctant. He was not a, he was not a jingoist by any stretch of the imagination, but he felt the country was pushed into the war with Spain over Cuba. And, and he, he both won the war and then did what Americans typically do, which is he gave up the rewards. He was not in, he said, we're not going to keep Cuba. We, you know, I've, I'm as a Republican, he said, I've been committed for decades to the freedom of the Cuban people. He said, we're not going to keep the Philippines as a, as, as part of an empire. We're going to set them on the path to, to the creation of their own independent government. And we will not treat Hawaii as, you know, as, as a part of an empire. It will be made a territory and put on the path towards statehood, eventual statehood. And so in that way, as a modern president. H Harrison in our crowd today asked, how was the news of the front porch campaign portrayed across the country? And then what role did the newspaper endorsements play in the election to two part question? Yeah, the, the, the front porch campaign was carefully monitored by the national press, because McKinley had remarks that were, you know, that were tipped towards what the interests of that part of the country might be. So the idea that he was sending a message to, for example, border states, he was the first Republican president to, you know, to carry the border states that Brian only carried one border state, Missouri. The rest of them went for, you know, went for, for McKinley. And so the national press looked for what was his message, if you will, of the day. The second thing is, is that they brought the press with them. So if, if the, you know, if the Providence Rhode Island, Greek fishermen, sponge men came from, you know, came, they brought a press man with them. And of course, that got great press back home. And then they thought about things like these patriotic parades, the gold, the goldman parade in Chicago, which was duplicated elsewhere, the sound money parades. And then they, then the, the October 31st, I think it is, is the, is the flag day parades that involve people all around the country, which again, generated press. And Brian is also getting great press because he's, he's good copy, and he's traveling around the country and he's giving long speeches with plenty of things to say on them. McKinley's are relatively brief to each of these groups that are visiting him. But, but Brian is out there on the campaign trail. And it just, both men's activities fed on the other. Did newspaper endorsements matter in the, in the campaign? Yeah, they did, because that, you know, look, this is an era where there is very limited pliability in the election, electorate, that is to say, you're a Republican or a Democrat. And it, but it's a very high turnout, highest turnout that we've, that we've had. We've had no turnout since then has been as high. And, and, and newspaper endorsements are critical in getting what little pliability there is in the electorate. And there are, there's Republican defections in the West, led by Republican Senator, one of the founders of the Republican Party, Senator Teller of Colorado, leaves the Republican Party and leads the silver Republicans into the Democrats. But then a group of gold Democrats leave the Democratic Party. Some of them support a third party ticket consisting of two ancient gold Democrats. But some of them also come across for the, for the Republicans. But one of my favorites is, is a, there's a Democratic Congressman from, from New York, an Irishman, he's a wonderful figure of the times. Let's see if I've got a, I think I've got a picture of him here. Burke Cochran. And he was a very attractive guy. And Burke was a bachelor and he broke his leg in 1895 and actually 1896 in the spring of 1896 and goes abroad to recuperate in the arms of his lover, a British widow who lives in Paris. And he becomes quite close to her son, who actually stays with Burke in 1895 when he comes to, when he comes to New York on his way to Cuba to cover the Spanish, the battle with guerrillas in Cuba. Anyway, something happens in the relationship with his lover and he returns to the United States in the fall and saids word that he should be met at the, at the docks. And he is, and he tells the reporters, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a Tammany Hall Democrat and I always will be, but I'm also a gold man and I will always be a gold man. And therefore I'm going to support William McKinley. And I urge all gold-minded Democrats to join with me. And this is a shock because it's just that it never happens. It's sort of like John Connolly endorsing, you know, Richard Nixon in 1972. And he then gives a famous speech at Madison Square Gardens on behalf of urging gold Democrats to support McKinley. And the son of his lover writes in a letter from London saying, I've read your speech. I hope it has the impact that you, that you have, that you hope it has, because it's a marvelous speech. Sincerely yours, Winston Spencer Churchill. Wow. Wow. Carl, I want to, I love your theory about the difference, the legacy that McKinley makes over this, the way he changed politics for 30 years ahead. But I want to challenge that a little bit just to get you to respond to me by throwing out to you a sweet, generous kind of explanation that is, that it can be explained just as one of a kind things as opposed to a big different, a big, vast different thing. If you were to look at these races, so they went in in 1896, 1900s of victory, huge economic success. That sort of explains itself. 1904, McKinley is venerated, Roosevelt is popular, an incumbent, no eight, popular, picks Taft, they win. Both of us have to deal with the fact that 1912 and 1916 are a mess. They're their own thing. And then you could say that the 20, 24, 28 races, these are Republican, this is the 20s are a Republican decade. I mean, this is economically successful, roaring 20s. I mean, is it possible that all of that success could be explained by all of those many explanations as well as some grand theory about the difference McKinley made? Well, I think you've made my case. We have 32 years of Republican dominance. And it's only broken at the presidential level and at the house where we divide among ourselves in 1912. But if you look below that, we have a record number of states that have Republican governors, record number of Republican legislators, record number of Republican members of the Congress and both the House and Senate for most of this decade and most of these decades. And when we don't, it's because we divide among ourselves. And if you look at the voting patterns, particularly in the major industrial states, the blue collar working class neighborhoods and counties are overwhelmingly Republican. And again, it's, you know, it only Wilson gets elected in 1912 only because Roosevelt decides that he wants to return to the White House. And it's a three way race. But Wilson gets about the same percentage of the vote in 1912 that William Jennings Bryan did in his third race for the presidency in 1908. And yet, because the Republicans are split, Wilson gets 435 electoral college votes. Yeah, yeah. I've got a big question for you then and I see the clock ticking away, but I can't help but ask you, golly, there's so many little mini things I'd love to ask you. I was surprised to see that New York City, that McKinley lost New York City in 1900 by 30,000 votes after having won it by 60,000 in 1896. I would have thought by appealing to immigrants and all of that that he would have continued to carry New York City. Is there another reason he lost it? Well, I think there are two reasons. One is the amount of, we think we got a lot of immigrants coming into the country today. Go back and you see a gigantic growth in the electorate in New York City in those four simple years. The second thing is that local politics had sort of intruded. And so the Tammany Hall Democrats who did not like Brian that much by 1900 had sort of said, you know what, we got to get back in the game. And so the issue of gold and silver that had divided the Democrats was beginning to recede. And the question was more increasingly, are we imperialist or not? And what are we going to do about the trust? So to some degree, the issue had changed, but the main thing was the electorate. You go to some of these wards in New York and assembly districts and it's shocking how much growth there is during the period of the 90s, and particularly in the latter half. Yeah, so that he appealed to them was one thing, but it overran his politics. Okay, I got to spend the last few minutes on this Carl. You have recruited candidates, you've run campaigns, you've been as active in politics as anyone I know. And you've now written this book about a noble character, a person of virtue. How can a person of great virtue run and win today? Is it possible for such a person to run and win today? I mean, I like to think you wrote this book because I think you kind of hope that we will have McKinley again. What would you say, what can we do as a citizenry to find more people like this and to encourage them and to help support them and make them win? Can they win? What would you say? Yeah, absolutely they can win. I mean, look at now, we've got two candidates, the front runners for their respective party nominations, and more than six out of every 10 Americans don't want them to run. Yeah. One, both of them not to run. And yet there are candidates. Politics is broken today, but it's been broken before. It was broken for the quarter of a century before William McKinley entered the list. And it's been broken before in our lifetimes. We think politics is bad today. Go back to the late 1960s and the early 1970s and the 70s when it looked like the country was falling apart. So look, we're in a place where the American people don't want. I mean, seven out of every 10 Americans, better than seven out of every 10 Americans, say one guy's too old and nearly as many people say the other guy shouldn't be made president. So it is what it is and we're going to have to pick between them. But we should not, one of the lessons of 1896 is that good people do offer themselves up and when they do, they tend to win. I mean, think about 1932. We had an admirable president in Herbert Hoover, but he was not up to it. And the country said, we want to take the relatively young governor in New York who can't even stand on his own two feet. But because he says we have nothing to fear but fear itself, we got to give it a go. Take 1980. We got the nice admirable Navy veteran who's a good Christian and was the progressive governor of the South and seemed to be open minded on race, but he'd restored dignity and honor to the White House. And then he seemed to be sort of overrun by events. And then the country was in malaise and we were sitting with double-digit interest rates, double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment. We're sitting in gas lines. Long comes this B actor from California. And in one debate, there's only one debate in 1980. He seems to strike a note that touches us, are you better off today than you were four years ago? And we say, well, you know what? We're a little bit concerned about is he too right-wingy, but he's at least been the governor of the most popular state in the union and we take a bet on him. That's the way America works. When things appear to be bad, something, somebody good will come along. Well, I love it. Carl Bryant, factual, historic and idealistic. You bring all of it to bear. We're the beneficiaries of having you talk with us today. Grateful to have you. Grateful to spend time with you as always. Well, thanks, Sandy. And thanks to you. Always good to be with friends. Absolutely. I'm going to turn this back to Phil Barnes to close this out. Well, thank you, Sandy. And thank you especially, Carl and Roe, and Mark and Lawrence for a special afternoon. It was a wonderful conversation. Many of us in the audience are supporters of humanities, Texas, and members of UT Alley or friends of the LBJ Library. If not, please check us out. Each of these organizations offers a wide variety of in-person and virtual programming information about them, how to contact these organizations that's highlighted in our closing slides. I thank all of you for tuning in. We will be back next Thursday, February 15th for a conversation with journalist John Ward, the author of Camelot's End, Kennedy versus Carter, and the fight that broke the Democratic Party. I hope to see you next time. Thank you, and goodbye.