 All right, good morning or good afternoon, depending on what part of the country you're in. And thank you for joining this discussion. My name is Tom Zollner. I'm a professor at Chapman University and also at Dartmouth College. And I'm here today with Bob Reel, the author of the incredible book, Quest for the Presidency, the storied and surprising history of presidential campaigns in America from University of Nebraska Press. And this is one of these books that is welcoming to scholars and for armchair historians and for general readers of all sorts. One of the things that we do together, one of the really only unifying things we do together, all of us as a country is a presidential election. Every four years, we all have a stake in those of us of voting age, that is, in terms of where our country is going. And it distills the destiny of the United States into a single human being and index in essence for a range of ideas. This has been a feature of this country since the presidency of George Washington. And Bob Reel has pulled together a comprehensive history of every single presidential election in one readable volume. This is, the word surprising in the subtitle is not frivolous. Even presidential scholars, I think, are going to find details in here that they haven't seen before. And I was proud to give a cover endorsement to this book and I'm really honored to be sitting here talking to Bob. Thank you for doing this, Bob. And thank you to the National Archives for hosting us. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Tom. Thanks for that wonderful introduction. I feel unflattered. And yeah, I just want to second, thanks to the National Archives for having us on. And it's a great organization for research online or in person. And yeah, we appreciate it, thanks. Yes, and the other great organizations that we should talk about here in the United States are Coffee Houses and Caverns. Exactly. These were the social media of the day, certainly, and it is where a country persons got together to talk, argue, sometimes spiritually about the great issues facing the country and what they were going to do when it came to the massive decisions that we make every four years. So in that spirit, I'm going to open up. All right. Open up, Avere. I'm not gonna get loaded. Don't worry, this is a non-alcoholic beer, but... And then Bob, I believe... I have my coffee here and thank you for starting with this, Tom. It's a part of my book, as you know. Yeah. I tried to make the book accessible to a popular audience and one of the things I did was divide American political history into seven eras and the introduction to each era. As you know, I set in an historic tavern or coffee shop that was relevant to the time and all of them still exist today. So anybody who reads the book and wants to do sort of a seven-site tour of these places is welcome to. But what I did was I tried to come up with a story that was relevant to that tavern or coffee shop that was also relevant to American history in that period. So for instance, you know, at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans which everybody knows today as a pretty big tourist hot wing and you go there for your coffee and beignets. But it opened in 1862 in the middle of the Civil War. And at the time, New Orleans was under a Union blockade and there was a coffee shortage. So it was kind of an interesting time to open a coffee shop. So what residents did was they mixed coffee with chicory root to make the coffee last longer. And today, Cafe du Monde still serves coffee mixed with chicory root. It's their specialty. So for each era, I try to find a story like that that's relevant, but that, you know, provides a bit more context to that era. So the cheers to coffee shops and taverns. Here's the coffee shops and taverns. And you begin the narrative with a coffee shop that has been reconstructed in a sense, right of stride independence hall in Philadelphia. Can you talk about the significance of that particular coffee house? Yeah, so yeah, there's a couple of coffee houses. Yeah, so it's interesting because the original version of the book, I talk about city tavern in Philadelphia, which was very significant because it's where Philadelphia was the national capital for a while. It's where the Declaration of Independence was written, of course, in 1776 and the National Constitution in 1787. And city tavern was just down the street from Independence Hall. And who's who of the founding fathers used to go there and they used to grab beers. They had a coffee room. They had a tavern and they used to go there and after, you know, being in Independence Hall all day and debating the constitution, they'd go down there and have a beer and continue their debates. So unfortunately, city tavern closed during the COVID pandemic. It was an unfortunate victim of the pandemic. So we made a last minute change in the book, which may even have been after you read it. And we inserted Francis Tavern in New York City, which is also very, very relevant to the founding generation. George Washington met with his commanders there during the Revolutionary War. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr were actually there for a reunion of Revolutionary War veterans just a week or two before Hamilton killed Burr in the duel. So anyways, both of them were very connected to the founding of the United States. And they both, Francis Tavern still exists, City Tavern we hope is eventually going to be reopened. We mentioned earlier that these places were like the Twitter or the Facebook of their day in which ideas were batted around sometimes with great ranker. One of the defining features, the lasting impacts of presidential campaigns are the, if you all excuse the expression, the tweets, the ways that ideas are crystallized just down to a few words. I can think of typical new entire two. You even say in your book, yeah, that that's one of the only things that we remember William Henry Harrison for, right? Nixon's the one, right? Yes, Abe Lincoln, the rail splitter. Right, honest Abe, very Goldwater choice, not an echo. Can you talk about the crystallization of these ideas and some would say the gross simplification of complex policy into these, you know, chance? Yeah, and what I find interesting is yeah, this is obviously a big part of politics today. It really started in a way with typical new entire tour with the 1840 campaign, which I find fascinating. Democracy was becoming a lot more popularized around the time, I mean, it began with Andrew Jackson in, you know, 1828. But prior to Jackson, politics was still a sport for elitists really, and it began opening up, more states began having a popular vote with the advent of Jackson. But 1840, really interesting story, the Whigs nominated William Henry Harrison and the Democrats, Van Buren was the incumbent and they originally thought, well, you know, Van Buren beat Harrison four years ago and Harrison's old, he's in his late 60s. And, you know, of course we can beat him again. And some newspaper editor or columnist wrote a piece saying that, you know, you should just retire Harrison to his old log cabin and give him some hard cider to drink and he'll wile away the rest of his days, you know? And the Whigs took that and they ran with it and they totally turned it around on the Democrats and they said, yes, of course, you know, he's a veteran and he does, he lives in a log cabin and he does drink hard cider and he's a common person just like the rest of us. And they created this amazing campaign and they had parades with log cabin floats and they used to sell bottles of whiskey, you know, shaped like log cabins and typically in Tyler II shaving cream and all these things. And it was really the first mass branding of a political candidate. And they did, they distilled it right down to that slogan, typical new in Tyler II. And many people listening will probably know this, but if you don't, typical new was William Henry Harrison defeated some Indian tribes at the battle of typical new who were trying to form a Native American Confederacy. And Tyler was his vice presidential candidate. So typical new in Tyler II, it was very alliterative, it rhymed. And they just ran with that. The irony of this is that Harrison was actually a pretty wealthy candidate. He grew up in a pretty wealthy estate in Virginia. He moved to the Northwest Territories. He lives in Ohio and his 22 were mentioned overlooking the Ohio River. And Martin Van Buren was the son of a Tavern owner in upstate New York in the Hudson River Valley. So Van Buren was actually the common man candidate and Harrison was the elitist, but the Whigs were able to make it so that Harrison seemed like the common man and they made Van Buren the incumbent president into the elitist. And I mean, ever since then branding and especially trying to distill the branding down to a slogan that it's been with us ever since all the way up to make America great again, you know. Is this a good way in your view? And I'm not just talking about recent crystallization of ideas down to 140 characters. Is this a healthy way to run a democracy? That's a good question. I mean, I mean, there's no way around it obviously because I mean, it's the system that we have and there's pros and cons. I mean, obviously the easy answer is no, it's not. You know, we should have discussions of issues and we should vote based on that but it's the society we live in. I like to think of 1960 the first presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon that was on television and Theodore White, it's kind of interesting cause now we watch a debate and they give candidates, you know, one minute to make an opening statement or to answer a question and the moderators are always interrupting and saying, you know, stop, you know, your time's up. Back in 1960 when Kennedy and Nixon debated, I believe, I may be wrong in the exact numbers but I believe they had eight minutes for their opening statement each and they each had two and a half minutes to answer a question. And Theodore White who wrote that great book to making the president in 1960, he complained even then that it wasn't enough time, you know, how do you explain complex issues in two minutes or eight minutes or whatever, you just can't do it. But what he said was that what it did do, what the debate did do was it sort of showed candidates under stress and it showed them, you know, in a certain environment. And I think these slogans sort of do that too. I mean, if you can distill your candidacy into a slogan that resonates with people or that, you know, captures the zeitgeist, you know, sort of like Obama did in 2008 or Reagan did in 1980 or, you know, countless other candidates through the years. If you can do that, then I think it says something about, I hope it says something about your vision for where you want to take the country. So yeah, ideally, no, we have discussions of issues but that's not going to happen. So I think there is something at least to be said for the way it's distilled down. Sure, I mean, as much as we'd like to think of ourselves as rational beings who study complex policy issues and weigh the evidence and arrive at a carefully considered verdict, human nature just doesn't work that way, right? No, it doesn't. We, as every car salesman knows, we go on feelings and we justify it later after the fact with whatever data that we can marshal selectively, you know, cherry picked. Sure, absolutely, yeah. Was there an election that you covered in this vast research that, how do I say this, is was more carefully considered than others or did you find that current of passion underneath everything? When you carefully considered as in not emotional? Yeah, a more calm, thoughtful, if you'll excuse the phrase, kind of boring, you know, set of clear differences, clear choices that did not come down to raw charisma, raw feeling. I think if there's a set of clear choices, then no, I think emotion is always going to play a part. There are certainly a few campaigns that were less charismatic. One that comes to mind are the battles between Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and 1892, you know, Harrison defeated Cleveland's bid for reelection in 1888, although Cleveland won the popular vote, and then 1892 Cleveland came back and he defeated Harrison. Neither Cleveland nor Harrison, I think, can be accused of being very charismatic. And I'm starting to get this quote wrong, some writer referred to the election, they said, you know, sort of like calm, Moustachio Grover Cleveland, going up against calm, bearded, you know, Rutherford B.A.'s, and the biggest issue in the election was, was a terrorist, whether if we should, you know, raise or increase, raise or lower terrorists. It did not inspire a lot of passion or a lot of parades or, you know, great slogans or anything. So yeah, there are a few elections like that, but I think in general, most elections elicit a lot of emotion. And I think that's one of the things that we forget because we're so focused on the present day or the past few elections in American history, you know, our memory only goes back so far, but sometimes we forget how fascinating some of these older elections really were and how much emotion they really stirred in people. In the introduction to my book, I quote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, where he said, you know, elections in the United States are, you know, like this, again, I'm not gonna give the quote exactly right, but this time in national passion, and he said, it's as if a fever takes over the entire country during an election. But he wrote that in 1835, you know, and so he saw that way back then. And so in that sense, you know, the passions that we're seeing today are not very different because people always think the future of the country hinges on the outcome of the election. And sometimes it's really true and sometimes it's not, but I think people often feel that way. Sure. It's easy to look at composite portrait gatherings of all the presidents. You get these guys with the mutton chops. And as you've mentioned, various interesting facial hair, particularly in the mid to late 19th centuries and, you know, their names come down to, you know, some older high schools, perhaps bear their name, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison. James Garfield. Yeah, names that are vaguely familiar, but, you know, we obviously forget that at one time these were pitched battles, spirited arguments. Titanic, wife or death struggles and some of them over issues that, as you say, have receded into our national consciousness. And, you know, when I think about those guys, for whatever reason, like maybe because I'm from the West, I think of James K. Polk, a Tennessean whose one-term presidency was enormously consequential. Don't think is widely appreciated just how much was done during that presidency in the 1840s, enormous decisions. Enormous, yeah, it was. Yeah, a lot of people don't think of Polk these days, but yes, excellent work, enormously consequential. And I have a piece, one of the other things I do in my book is at the end of every year, three or five elections, I have a piece that sort of tries to put these elections into context to try to connect elections across time, so you have a better understanding. And to put either those elections in context or put them in context of the current day. And I have a piece after Polk's presidency. He won in 1844, I mean, just by the skin of his teeth. He won the popular vote by a small amount and he won the Electoral College because he won the State of New York by I think it was 5,106 votes over Henry Clay. And Clay lost New York. There was a third party candidate, James Burney, of the Anti-Slavery, the Abolitionist Liberty Party who won about 15,000 votes in New York and might otherwise have gone to Clay. So Polk came very close to losing the election. And what's interesting is that this was when the annexation of Texas was on the national agenda. John Tyler had introduced it. And Polk, being a protege of Andrew Jackson and being a Southern Democrat, was in favor of annexing Texas. They wanted more safe territory in the country. And Henry Clay, although he was from Kentucky, he was more Northern in his sensibilities. He did not want to annex Texas. I mean, he came out and he said, Texas is going to be settled by our race. They're going to have similar customs to us. They're going to speak English. We're going to be good neighbors, but they're going to be their own country. And so if Clay had won the election, it's at least possible. I mean, nobody knows with history, but it's possible that Texas would never have been annexed. And certainly that there would never have been a Mexican-American war because it was the annexation of Texas and then Polk put troops in West Texas, over the dispute of boundary. The war started, and then the United States, of course, and troops went down as far as Mexico City, I believe. And the peace treaties after the war, the United States acquired what is now New Mexico, Arizona, California, parts of Colorado, Nevada. So it's possible none of that would have been part of the United States, which is fascinating to think about. And the Civil War, I mean, who knows? I mean, there would have been disputes over slavery, but the Civil War was triggered in large part because it disputes over whether there should be slavery in the West. So it's fascinating to think that 5,100 votes in New York in 1844 determined whether the United States would have California and the Pacific Northwest. It's just mind-boggling to think about. And Polk's presidency was enormously consequential in that respect. Sure, and I think also about the moving parts of history in the way that small, strange incidents sometimes precipitate these large movements of armies and borders. It's almost Tolstoyan in its scope. And I think of the cannon explosion that killed the Secretary of State, I'm sure, who was not nearly as rabid an advocate for the annexation of Texas as his replacement, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, insisting that Texas must be brought into the Union. In the scope of your research, did you come across other unpredictable incidents that had big effects on national choices? Interesting question. I mean, that's the one that comes to mind immediately that I always think about. Let me think about that. I mean, let's look at Florida 2000s. Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, I should have thought. We can make a case that had the Supreme Court been one vote different, had there not been a staged riot in Miami, Al Gore would have been the president, arguably no Iraq war, arguably none of the things that George W. Bush did would have on and on a butterfly flaps its wings, right? Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's really interesting to look at. And yeah, in the 2000 election, I go through it extensively in my book and the debate can go on forever about who the actual winner of that election was. The recount showed that depending on how you counted it, it could have gone either way. They had continued with the overvote count, Bush would have won if they had included undervotes, no, the opposite. They included if they continued with the undervotes, Bush would have won if they included overvotes, Gore would have won if the Palm Beach butterfly ballot hadn't caused thousands of people to unnecessarily vote for Patrick Buchanan. Gore would have won easily. Yeah, and the Iraq war, Afghanistan war and Supreme Court justices. I mean, something that we're dealing with today. I mean, if you want to think about something else in terms of the Supreme Court, I would go back to 1968, something that sort of lost the history, nobody really talks about it. But that was the year George Wallace, obviously, ran a really strong third party campaign. And his goal, he didn't think he could win the election, but he wanted to win enough electoral votes in the South running as a law and order candidate and as an original conservative, to sort of be the kingmaker so that then he could negotiate with Nixon or Humphrey for his electoral votes. And it's, he was about around 20% in the polls for a lot of the year until he faded near the end and won eight or nine, 10% somewhere on there. But it scared the heck out of the country because it became very close to throwing the election into the House of Representatives. And the country was scared that somebody could do this, that somebody came so close to doing this. And there was a big movement to abolish the Electoral College. And Nixon, after he took office in 1969, was in favor of it. I think like 80% of Americans were in favor of it. The House of Representatives voted to abolish the Electoral College by an overwhelming margin. I mean, like over 300 votes in the House and establish a national popular vote. And it had majority support in the Senate, but it was still a buster by Southern senators. Again, this was only a few years after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964-65. And they couldn't really abide by the thought of blacks in the South being put on an equal level to the whites who then controlled Southern governments and the whole one person, one vote thing. And so Southern senators filibustered this Electoral College Act. And they killed it, basically by filibuster, even though 80% of Americans supported it. And if it hadn't been for that filibuster, in 1969, we would have abolished the Electoral College and instituted a national popular vote. And you think of the ramifications for the past 20 years with five or the six conservative Supreme Court justices. I mean, no matter what your ideology is, I mean, you can be forward, you can be against this. But it's a fact of history that five or the six conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by presidents who came into office after first losing the Electoral vote. George Bush's appointments were in the second term, but he never would have had that second term, obviously, and Donald Trump had three appointments. So you think of one small event that changed history. I mean, that one filibuster by Southern senators in the late 60s, fascinating. You mentioned third parties, and something you hear a lot in modern politics. On the Democrat side, primarily, is that both parties are the same that they've both been captured by corporate interests. And so therefore we're gonna run a third party candidate who offers a true choice. Of course, Republicans talk about Rhinos, Republicans in name only. We think of this as kind of a modern complaint. But has that existed since the 18th century, kind of a moment that Americans really aren't offered a choice? Oh, yeah, absolutely, they're forever. I mean, the first one was the anti-Masonic party back in Jackson's day. It was made up of people who thought that too much of the government was talking about conspiracy theories controlled by masons, and they were elitists. And they actually won one vote, one presidential election, they elected a few governors. But yeah, go through it all. There's always, it's usually some precipitating issue, I would think. I mean, you know, Ross Perot in 1992 and 96 and John Anderson in 1980 or two examples of candidates who I think tapped into the sense that voters didn't appreciate either party's candidates. You know, they, in 1980, they were disappointed with Carter and they were afraid that Reagan might be too conservative. They didn't know. And in the nineties, you know, it was that lament that the parties are too much alike. But often there's some precipitating issue. I mean, go back to 1848, Martin Van Buren ran as the candidate of the Free Soil Party that wanted to limit the expansion of slavery in the West. And 1856, Millard Fillmore, interestingly, built ex-presidents was the candidate of the American party, which, you know, we know as the know-nothings, which ran a nativist campaign very, very similar to the 2016 Trump Republicans. And they, you know, they wanted to restore America to a previous age of greatness and they wanted to keep immigrants out that were polluting American culture. And at the time it was Irish Catholics that, you know, they were against. And they won, I think almost 22% of the vote in 1856 running on that campaign. In 1892, there was a People's Party, which was a prairie populist movement from the Great Plains. And they won four states, I believe, and they basically preached the rise of Williams, Jennings, Bryan in 1896 and the coming progressive movement in the early 20th century. They were running out a lot of the issues that the progressive later ran on. One of the most famous third party candidacies was Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, when he tried to arrest the Republican nomination back from William Howard Taft and was disappointed that he lost it at the convention, even though he had one vastly higher number of delegates and primaries that year. And so he started his own party, the Progressive Party, and finished second to Wilson that year and helped split the Republican vote. Yeah, all the way through 1948. Truman was, he faced a split in a Democratic Party on two different wings. The Democrats that year passed the Civil Rights Plank in their platform and Southern Democrats were so enraged that they broke away and they formed the Dixie Grant Party and nominated Strom Thurmond. And on Truman's left, Henry, a new progressive movement emerged and Henry Wallace, the former vice president was the nominee of the Progressive Party that year. So yeah, and then Wallace of course in 68 and all the way up through Perot in the president. So I think every couple of decades, something emerges where either people are disillusioned with the two major parties or some major issue emerges that neither of the two major parties is doing a good enough job dealing with. And so it kind of wells up from below. I was a political reporter once and spent a lot of time with elected officials. And one thing that I of course noticed is as everyone does who spends time with them is that they're enormously, usually charismatic, emotionally intelligent that they try and get you on what Robert Heinle would call a grokking level. In that experience though, kind of suspicious of charisma, suspicious of campaigns is I wanna vote for the person who most excites me who like really engenders that sort of strong feeling that this is like the quarterback of the football team that I want. You know, and what I've tried to tell friends, they're probably sick of listening to this, that you know, the candidates are ultimately index systems for ideas and a whole raft, particularly on the federal level of appointments. You know, not just Supreme Court justices, but the entire executive branch, cabinet secretaries, you know, who is gonna be the director of the Bureau of Land Management. You know, that's really important to Westerners like me. You know, that doesn't seem to be on the ballot, but actually it is by doing this kind of binary choice between two kind of distinct philosophies of how American government should work. And so what I tell people is don't get caught up in personalities, you know. It could be, you know, a wooden post that you're electing, just so long as it, you know, is the party label that conforms to, you know, the kinds of ideas that you wanna see. I wanna ask you, Bob, do you think that's a good way to vote or am I wrong on this? No, I mean, I think in an ideal world, yeah, you should vote based on that, but it's inevitable that people vote based on emotions. And yeah, I mean, I'm an idealist and I like to think that people weigh the issues and they vote for, they candidate under the party that most represents their concerns, but it's simply not true, you know, it doesn't happen. You know, I mean, Barack Obama is incredibly intelligent and capable, obviously, but people voted for him based on emotion in 2008. Ronald Reagan, you know, people voted for him based on emotion in 1980. John Kennedy, after people saw the debates, it was a small number, but it was enough to swing the election. I mean, when you look at the polling afterwards, the number of people who said the first debate when Kennedy was perceived as the winner by people who watched on TV as opposed to people who listened to it on radio, the number of people who said that it swayed their vote was enough to have tipped a popular vote in that year's election. So people do. And so what you hope is that you find a candidate who represents, like you said, a vessel for those ideas, somebody who represents that, but is also capable of tapping into the zeitgeist of moving people emotionally, that's the ideal. I've got a ton more questions for Bob, but I wanna open this up in the spirit of democracy to anyone who might be listening on the live stream to enter your questions into the chat. And I'd be glad to ferry them to our author here. And while we're waiting for that, I wanna ask Bob, what was your biggest surprise in this research? Did you have a moment in the archives or in the midst of doing your reading that you just were blown away by something that you'd learned? I don't know about blown away, but I think it's always surprising to realize how emotional these elections have always been. I mean, I'm going back to 1796 and 1800 with Adams and Jefferson. I mean, to see some of the quotes that appeared in newspapers back then, it's, you know, I mean, Adams was called, they call him a hideous hermaphroditical figure or something, you know, who had, he said he wasn't really a man or a woman. And Jefferson, his opponent said that if you were elected that, you know, incest and murder would be openly practiced in the United States and the Bibles would be banned. And, you know, talk about you people thinking it was a life and death, you know, election. It's kind of amazing. And all the way through, you know, Andrew Jackson was devastated when he saw a report that suggested his mother had been a prostitute, brought over to the United States. He was a Scott's Irish immigrant and somebody suggested that his mother was a prostitute and he was the result of this. One of my favorite criticisms came actually from the pen of Davy Crockett, who, you know, we know is this, you know, Western frontier settler, but it was also a congressman for a while. And he took a pen and totally trashed Martin Fiume Buren. He said if it wasn't, you know, you talked about mutton chops earlier, he said if it wasn't for his mutton chop sideburns, you know, you wouldn't be able to tell whether he was a man or a woman, you know, given the tight leggings or whatever he wore. And so yeah, I mean, I think we tend to think that, oh, you know, the founding generation, you know, they did this for idealistic reasons and they did, but they were passionate and they wanted to win these elections and they thought that this was life and death. And so I think that always surprises me. It surprises me too a little bit, Abraham Lincoln, you know, we revere him as one of our two or three leaders presidents. And it seems almost inevitable in retrospect that he, you know, of course he won 1860 in a four-way race and it was narrow, but it seems like, oh, of course he was reelected in 1864. But he was criticized by every side when historians said that conservatives taught him a radical and liberals taught him a failure. And it reminds me of the present day. I mean, in a sense, you know, I mean, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, their presidencies are painted as radical by Republicans, but yet liberals in their own party think that they're failures. And, you know, people said the same thing about Lincoln. And a lot of people thought he was not going to win re-election. The country was exhausted by the Civil War. Radical Republicans didn't think Lincoln was doing enough to end slavery and Democrats thought he was doing too much. And everybody, even Republicans, Republicans thought we need to find a stronger candidate. There's no way he's gonna win. And they talked about nominating Ulysses Grant or Sam and Chase, the Treasury Secretary. And it was Lincoln himself, in fact, in August of 1864, he wrote a letter and he put it in envelope, he sealed it, and he had his cabinet sign it. And he said, we're gonna open this after the election. And in the letter, he said that after I lose the George McClell and the Democratic candidate, I'm going to cooperate with him between the election and the inauguration to try to save the union during those few months because he assumed he was gonna lose the election. And it wasn't until the fall when Sherman captured Atlanta and Grant started pinning the Confederate Army down in Virginia. And the radical Republicans that actually nominated their own candidate, again, because they thought Lincoln wasn't liberal enough, John Fremont, who had been their candidate in 1856, and later governor of the Arizona Territory. Anyways, he withdrew from the race in September because he thought, okay, the Union Army is in sight of victory. And I'm afraid if I stay in the race that it's gonna split the Republican party and it's gonna elect the Democrat that's going to preserve slavery. So it really wasn't until the last two months of that election that the stars sort of aligned for Lincoln and he, any one re-election. So yeah, things like that, things like that surprised me because we have the sense that politics wasn't like that then, but it was. You and I and many others are real junkies for this stuff, you know? It's just popcorn, it's really fun. But I'll confess like a certain weariness when fully two years out before the contest, the news is already full of news from rubber chicken dinners from Iowa, these exhaustive portraits of all the contenders, the obsessive focus that the National Press has on these contests. And I wanna ask, do you think some of it is overblown? Overblown or overdone? Overblown, do we spend too much time on it? I mean, I'm asking a biographer to minimize the importance of his own subject, which is of course a very rude thing to do. But I wanna say like, do you think that for as important as they are, do we overvalue them? Yeah, I think we do, I certainly think we do. I think personally, my personal opinion, I think the elections go on for too long and we spend so much time evaluating every little thing, what everybody says on a debate stage and every gap and because of this obsessive focus on elections that goes on really for almost two years before an election, I mean, everything gets blown up and becomes a big thing. But it wasn't always like this though. I mean, the rise of television and then more recently the rise of the instrument as I think certainly exacerbated this. It was not always this obsessive focus for a year or two before. And we talked a little bit earlier about the 1968 election with George Wallace, but 1968 was also, it's indirectly related to this topic as well. I think 1968, I almost think we should have it before 1968 and after 1968, you know, dividing land in American politics. In 1968, Humphrey won the Democratic nomination without running in a single primary and he was the last candidate to do that. And a lot of the backers of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy were pretty upset that he did that. And so they started a movement in the Democratic party and eventually nationally to have more emphasis on primaries and caucuses. And so the Democrats essentially rewrote the rules between 1968 and 1972 as a direct result of Humphrey's nomination. And they gave more power to primaries and caucuses. Before that, I mean, starting between 1912 and 1968, candidates would run in primaries, but it was mostly to prove their medal, to prove that they could get votes. But the decisions were still made by party leaders for the most part on the convention floor. After 1968, that was no longer the case. And so 72 with McGovern, he was the first nominee who won his nomination entirely on the basis of primaries and caucuses and on voters. And I think we don't often appreciate how much that has changed American politics. We took away political parties as gatekeepers. You know, there's no longer this filter there. And I mean, television already contributed to the rise of candidate-centric campaigns, but it just really took off ever since then. And I mean, if you think about it, I mean, McGovern wouldn't have won the nomination in 72. Jimmy Carter in 76, nor Donald Trump in 2016 without this change in American politics. And you could argue a few others. I mean, I don't know, maybe Obama, maybe Clinton, who knows? But certainly Trump and McGovern and Carter would not have won their nominations if political parties still had to say. And so what you were saying about how this is overdone, I think it's overdone in large part because of that, because now no longer a political party is a gatekeeper, but the media is the only gatekeeper. And so the media then obsessively focuses on all of these things. But isn't the extended primary campaign also a fight for donations that the corporate and moneyed interests want to obviously put their cash on the winning marker in any election? They don't want to see an investment just go up in smoke. I mean, those of us who have given as individuals to political campaigns know just how bad it feels when you spend all this money hoping to get someone elected and then like, well, that's it, right? Aren't primaries a contest for that viability and that access to money, which as your book points out speaks louder than ever. Yeah, absolutely. And there is something to be said for running this gauntlet, because if you can't run this gauntlet or primaries and caucuses, if you can't run a campaign, you can't run an oval office. I mean, some people can run a campaign and still can't run an oval office, but I would argue that if you can't run a campaign, certainly you don't deserve to be president. So there is that to be said for it. But on the other side, it has also put the media in the position of being the sole gatekeeper by taking away political parties and it's contributed to what your original question, whether this is all overblown. I think it's overblown to a large degree because of the candidate-centered nature of the process. Yeah, candidates need to start years ahead of time to raise donations. They need to get attention. They need to go up in the polls and the further they go up in the polls, the more attention they get, the more donations they raise. And hence the kind of cult of personality that emerges at various times? Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I see we have a question here. And this gets back into the what-ifs, the sort of alternative history. USS Grant, a pioneer for his time on race relations, but his administration was dogged with scandal. A question from an audience member here, had he been reelected? Would structures have been put in place that would have headed off the toxic effect of Jim Crow laws in the South? And reconstruction would have been done right instead of, as your book points out, ending as a compromise of the disputed 1876 election. Well, Grant was reelected in 1872. So I don't tell you to send that part of the question. He did actually, not a lot of people know this, but he considered running again. So he left office after 1876 and then in 1880, after taking a two-year trip around the world, believe it or not, he came back and a lot of Republicans wanted to nominate him for a third but not consecutive term in 1880. And he was kind of ambivalent about it. He sort of wanted to do it for his country, but it wasn't thrilled about getting it back into politics. And it turned out that the convention split between he and James Blaine. And then they ended up compromising on James Garfield in 1880. But I find it hard to imagine, yeah, that's a drunkard question, because you're right, Grant, I mean, he convinced Congress to pass the Ku Klux Klan Acts and he definitely was trying to bring blacks in the South into national politics and into national conversation. But we forget how furious Southerners were over the end of slavery and the black skating the rights of citizenship and voting. I mean, early in Reconstruction, they were blacks that were elected to Congress into the Senate, but white conservatives in the South, I mean, they just did everything they could. We think about Jim Crow, but even before Jim Crow laws, I mean, they, this is where the Ku Klux Klan came from. I mean, they intimidated blacks into not voting. They would chase blacks away from voting sites and sometimes shoot and kill them. And blacks were lynched. There were bodies of blacks down along roadways for years in early in Reconstruction. And the reason that Northern Republicans finally gave up on trying to bring blacks more into the national political fabric is I think they got excited. They wanted to move on to other issues. I mean, for a couple of decades, Republicans kept trying to pass laws that would sort of overrule what Southerners were doing in voting rights or whatever. And they kept, they kept failing. It either didn't pass or get filibustered. And I think Northern Republicans finally just get exhausted by the effort. So I'm not sure that there's a lot that could have been done to avoid what happened with Jim Crow, short of just an even heavier hand by the US government. This is maybe a good time to ask about vice presidential selection. Given the rather disastrous choice in retrospect that Abraham Lincoln made in selecting Andrew Johnson as part of a ticket balancing act here that wanted to appease Southern Unionists by choosing this Tennessean who later went on to, I think it's putting it mildly due reconstruction in a really imperfect way. I think of John F. Kennedy selecting the Texan, Lyndon Johnson, who later became, of course, president. I think of John McCain selecting Sarah Palin as a kind of attack dog, if you will. George H. W. Bush made a similar decision with Dan Quayle to create a sense of mini-me who was younger and more outspokenly conservative to placate various wings of his party. Sometimes this decision comes for naught. I think it was John Nance Karner who said the vice presidency isn't worth a bucket of warm. He said, well, his court has been sanitized into space. Exactly, right. He said something besides space, right? What in your view was the best vice presidential selection? Oh, geez. Yeah, well, you mentioned the worst in Andrew Johnson, obviously, yes, that did not work out so well. I like Truman. Really? I mean, Truman would be quite a good president and it's really interesting how he ended up as FDR's running mate in 1944 because FDR, of course, his first eight years, John Nance Karner, who he just quoted, was his vice president. And then in 1940, Henry Wallace became vice president he was vice president between 40 and 44. He was very liberal. And by 1944, a lot of people in a democratic party, they, I mean, they knew Roosevelt was not in good health. They didn't necessarily know he was gonna die a few months into his next term, but they knew he was not in good health. And some Southerners and conservatives were not thrilled with Wallace because they thought he was too liberal and they thought he was too much on the side of civil rights for blacks. And he was also pretty eccentric, you know? He's what we today call, you know, he followed a lot of new age spiritual beliefs. So he was a bit eccentric. And so they got behind and they convinced Roosevelt to dump Wallace in 1944 and nominate somebody else. And Truman was just sort of a compromised candidate. He didn't even want to be vice president. And so they, but they convinced him to run. And there was a big to do with the convention. Wallace didn't want to go easily. And he gave a big nominating speech in favor of Roosevelt and he, you know, the convention was, you know, he had a lot of supporters and they were, you know, all up in arms and cheering and the band was playing, you know, because he was from Iowa. Iowa is where the tall corn grows, you know, and sort of Wallace's theme song and convention managers thought that they were gonna lose control of this and that they were gonna have to renominate Wallace. And so they, they got the organist to stop playing, you know, somebody sent somebody up there and said, you know, something's the effect of cut the damn cables if you have to get, you know, stop the music. And then they said that there were too many people in the hall and it was a fire hazard. So they had to end the convention for the night. And so they basically stopped this protest, this, they stopped the cheering. They stopped, you know, what was happening and then they reconvened the next day. And overnight, these states that had been voting for favorite sun candidates, the party leaders basically forced them into voting for Truman. So Truman was, you know, he was, he was derided as the Missouri compromise at the time. But yet it turned out to be sort of an inspired choice, you know, Truman was turned out to be a good president to lead the United States through the post-war era. And, you know, he's today considered, you know, one of the top 10 presidents and near great president, but really interesting how he came into office. These, these accidents, these sort of turning points. Yeah. There's a saying among Democrats, a little actually a bit of a doggerel goes like this, usually said in late November. The election is over, the ranker has passed. I'll kiss your elephant and you can kiss my... And that's a statement of of course, the reunification that's supposed to happen around inauguration. Your book has this wonderful epigraph from Theodore H. White, the great documenter of presidential campaigns who said that inaugurations are a magnificent event. You know, this ceremony, this spectacle on the National Mall that we try to bridge the differences. There's a tradition, of course, that the elected president invites the losing candidate in for an Oval Office lunch. Based on your research, do you find that this is really the case that after all the shouting is over that we really do come together? We could easily point to 2020 and say, well, that's actually not the case. That, you know, the cut is still open. The bitterness intensifies. Is this new in US history, Bob? Or did you see this in prior contests? Well, both. I think there was a period for about a century or so where we did come together. You know, I mean, John Adams famously did not attend Thomas Jefferson's inauguration in 1800. Although to be fair, there wasn't a tradition yet established of a defeated president attending his successors inauguration. And Andrew Johnson, same thing, did not attend Ulysses Grant's inauguration. But I think from then, at least up to the 1990s, people were, I mean, there was definitely frostiness. I mean, Hoover and Roosevelt were not very friendly to each other and Carter was pretty devastated. I don't think he talked a lot to Reagan in a car on the way over to inauguration. But I think there was a tradition of the parties coming together at least initially. I mean, that's why we talk about presidential honeymoon. So I mean, there was an effort to give the new president a chance. Doesn't mean we're going to vote for everything, but we're gonna let you establish yourself in office. And I think that really started changing again in the 1990s. You know, when we talk about the roots of today's polarization and part of it goes back to the 1960s and the rise of social and cultural issues that have been with us ever since. But the other part of it, you know, goes back to the 90s and, you know, the rise of talk radio and Fox News and then later the internet and social media. But Newt Gingrich, you know, this has been talked about a lot, Newt Gingrich's really changed strategies of how the two parties would interact with each other. I mean, he's the one who developed the strategy of obstructing everything that a Democratic president would propose, even if it had bipartisan support under the theory that voters wouldn't notice the obstruction and they would just blame the ruling party for lack of progress. He also came up with all of these words, these poll-tested words that Democrats were anti-family, anti-flag and pathetic and radical and bizarre that, you know, we never talked about before. And both of those things are still, I mean, they're so successful that they're still part of our politics today. I mean, the opposing everything that the, you know, the incoming Democratic president would propose and these words that are used. And so Gingrich had a strategy of, you know, we're not gonna give Clinton a honeymoon. I mean, you know, we don't think he's a legitimate president, you know, if pro hadn't been in the race, he wouldn't have won, which isn't true, by the way, if you look at the polling, Clinton would have won no matter what. I mean, the only thing pro did was stop Clinton from getting 50% of the vote. They painted Clinton as an illegitimate president. And I think it's gotten worse since then. And obviously, you know, the Nader was, you know, the Trump-Biden campaign where Trump refused to accept their results of the election and didn't attend Biden's inauguration. But I think it's gotten worse since the 1990s. So I would say that, you know, from the 1870s to the 1980s, we did try to give the new president a chance. And I think that has started going away and there's no longer such thing as a presidential honeymoon or coming together. Right. I mean, I mentioned earlier that some of us are real junkies for this stuff. It's fun. It involves, you know, clashes and ideology and personalities. Part of me wonders, and you know, is this exacerbating the sense that we're not really neighbors or that the divisions between us are exploited by those chasing power. And so I'm gonna confess an ambivalent relationship to presidential politics. Is this realistic? Should I rethink that position? I always choose to remain idealistic, but yeah, it's been more difficult in recent years. I like to say that in my book, it did not take an ideological perspective. I tried to write it as nonpartisan as possible and I was pleased somebody just on Amazon that I don't know complimented me on that. They thought it was very nonpartisan, but I feel like I do have a bias that in my bias is pro-democracy. And you know, it makes me, so I'm not thrilled with, you know, whatever happened with Southern Democrats in the years after the civil war with Jim Crow and restricting voting rights that I'm not thrilled with that segment of the Republican Party today that won't accept the results of the 2020 election. So I do have a pro-democracy bias, but I like to remain idealistic and I think that presidential politics are, I like to think that they are important and that we should remain engaged. And it does make me a bit sad that democracy is suffering these days and makes me a bit sad that democracy may be at risk at all. Because I think the United States has, you know, since the late 1700s has, you know, been a beacon to the world as, you know, in terms of giving people choice and implementing democracy. And I hope that, you know, this continues for centuries into the future. Indeed. Some may consider that sentiment corny. And some may consider vast elements of presidential politics as corny or cheesy or, you know, pick your food product. But there's a reason why corn and cheese are popular is because they're pretty good. And so I wanna thank you, Bob, for, first of all, writing this enormously accessible, well-researched, surprising, knowledge-grounded book. And also thanks to the National Archives for the work in preserving our nation's past and understanding who we are. And I think that's it. Yeah, absolutely. And I just wanna second, thank you to the National Archives for having us on and for all they do. And thank you, Tom, for coming on with me. I've enjoyed our chat. It's been fun talking about two centuries of presidential history with you. Yeah, a huge topic, but like I said, the time flew by. So. Yeah, it sure did. Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone. I appreciate it. Take care.