Growth in his mouth. The author of the book the president is a sick man which recounts the surgery being performed on a yacht and the president disappearing for five days. Home run, im david cowen, president of the museum of American Finance. Welcome. Welcome back to our lunch and learn series. Welcome to the university of central ork and professional allen and. The okies are in the house. Thank you for coming. Join us next week on the 26th, were going to continue the lunch and learn series. Director of rothschild will be here melanie aspy. That should be fascinating, this is a historic banking house, again, on thursday. On the 24th, tuesday upcoming, well be screening rediscovering alexander hamilton. This is the pbs documentary recently released. All your questions about the movie can be answered because the producer director will be in the house. Now, turning our attention to today and Matthew Algeo and the president is a sick man. This is matthews third book. His second, Harry Trumans excellent adventure, which traced harry and besss crosscountry trip in 1953. A lot of great press. In 2009 the Washington Post called it one of the best books of the year. Additionally before that he wrote a book about the war years and football and steagles, a combination between the Pittsburgh Steelers and eagles. He has an eclectic background, not just an author, a journalist. Let me tell you some of the things he has done. Hes been a hot dog vendor at a traveling circus. A Halloween Costume salesman. He has been a gas station attendant, a Convenience Store clerk. In two months, hes moving to mongolia with his wife, whos a Foreign Service officer taking a position there. So that should be pretty interesting. Very importantly, he is a friend to this museum and a member of it. Its my pleasure to introduce Matthew Algeo. You make it sound much more interesting than it is, my life. Its great to be at the museum of American Finance. For a couple of reasons. One, a fantastic museum. Ive been coming for a few years now. But more importantly, when i was researching the book, the museum was very helpful in answering my questions, and i would have frantic questions like, how many grains of silver were in a Silver Dollar in 1870. This is the only place you could send an email with that urgency and get it answered within an hour. It was very helpful to me and i am a member, a proud member. Thats why i got in for free today. Before i talk about grover, who was a very interesting person, i should probably tell you about much less interesting person. That would be me. As david said, my wife is a Foreign Service officer, so we move around a lot. My name the algeo. Everybody thinks its italian. Its actually irish. The o is on the wrong end, i know. My grandparents from north of ireland, from done donegal. Actually of irish citizenship. G. Actually of irish citizenship. I spent a year in ireland in the 90s as a freelance reporter. I should do this because it consisted of drinking a lot of beer for a year, but there was Something Interesting that i found out about having an unusual irish name in island. I had to get an Identity Card and i went to the irish e quift equivalent of the dmv. They were very organized. The first line was last names beginning a to l. Second was mick to o, the third was p to z. Of course, the longest line was mick to o. With an unusual last name in ireland, there were certain advantages to that. I am the youngest of seven, which is why im avoiding eye contact with you. I found it was better to keep my head down. I did grow up in a house of readers. My parents were prolitic readers. They werent sitting around reading french existentialists or anything. My dad like michener. I used to say he would read by the pound. My mom loved true crime. When i was a kid, it would be very embarrassing riding the train into the city with her. Shes be reading Something Like the i95 killer. On the front cover, there would be somebody stabbing somebody. I was like, could you just put it in a newspaper or something. But i was lucky to grow up in a house like that. I ran into a friend from high school a few years ago who said when ever i went to your house in high school, your parents would just be sitting in the living room reading. No tv, no radio. No nothing. I always thought that was so weird. Now that he has kids of his own, i think he would appreciate that was a really good atmosphere to grow up in. It fostered my love of books. I went to college in philadelphia at the university of pennsylvania. I graduated in 1988 with a degree in folklore. Any other folklore majors here today . [ laughter ] this was and david went through the list of other occupations ive had. Ive obviously chosen many nonlucrative occupations, including writing this nonbest selling books. Folklore especially was a nonlucrative one. I still remember looking at the want ads in the Philadelphia Inquirer every sunday. Would have been between florist and forklift operator. Finding those such jobs, i moved to seattle and drifted into public radio. The stations way on the left of the dial. Like 89, 91, around there. And worked at public radio stations in st. Louis and seattle. I was in minnesota for a while. Went to maine for a while. 2005, i went to los angeles and got a job at the Public Radio Program called marketplace. It was around this time that my wife took the Foreign Service exam and passed and was offered a position in the u. S. Foreign service. We were in a bit of a quandary sass to who would be the breadwinner, her or me. After several rounds of voting, it was still one to one. And somehow, i was managed to gain a controlling share in the firm and eventually, she took the position and became a bread winner, allowing me to work a little bit on this nonlucrative career. So we went to africa. The first book i did was about philadelphia pittsburgh steagles. They were so short during world war ii they had to merge the steelers and eagles. So rag tag misfit kind of bunch. What i tried to do with that book and with the other books is to take a small and unusual event in American History and really expand on it to talk a little bit more about the times that event takes place in. And hopefully, ive done that with this book. The president is a sick man even i had to look at the subtitle to read it. Written virtualous Grover Cleveland vilified the newsman who exposed the truth. Thank you for coming, everybody. Actually, its funny. We were trying to be evocative of 19th century titles that books would have, being the true and fair account of blah blah blah. This is the short version of the subtitle. We found out databases for book sellers have a limit for how many characters you can have in the title of your book. We had to reduce the title, if you can believe that. Ive always been interested in this story. Im kind of a president ial history buff, and ive read several Grover Cleveland biographies. How many people here have read several Grover Cleveland biography . I always new the basic story that Grover Cleveland had a secret operation to remove a cancerous tumor from his mouth. By the way, enjoy your lunch. While i talk about Grover Clevelands cancerous tumor. I never really thought much more about it, but about ten years ago, i went to another fine museum in philadelphia. Its a museum of medical history. They have all kinds of unusual things there. They have chief justice john what are shalls bladder stones. If you ever have a hankering to see that. A piece of brain from charles guiteau, the man that shot garfield. In a small injury they have the tumor from Grover Clevelands mouth. That really triggered my interest in the story, the fact that the tumor was still around and somebody thought this would be something to keep, an interesting keepsake. I talked to the museum. Turns out one of the doctors that performed the operation had kept it and donated it to the museum back in 1917. Not only that but i guess you would know hes a bit of a saver since he saved a you tumor but he saved letters and lots of information about the operation, which was intended to be secret. I realized there was the possibility of doing thing about this story. Then as i dug deeper into it, i found it wasnt just the story of this operation. It was really the story of the economy at the time. It was also a story about medicine, and its a story about journalism as well. There were a lot of things going on in the 1890s, which is sort of a dead spot for me in my history. You know the civil war, you know world war ii, world war i, but the 1880s and 90s, i didnt know a lot about, so it was a lot of fun to go back and learn things that probably i should have been taught earlier but that you can learn at the museum of American Finance today. And it was the gilded age is what it was called. Mark twain gave it that name. Not intended to be a compliment. To guild was to be extravagant, unnecessarily extravagant. That name stuck, the gilded age. Politics were fascinating. And there was so many things in researching the book that i talk about in the book that really have resonance today. I dont go into this the book so much, but i like to point out the first birther controversy took place in 1880 when garfield was ranked president and his Vice President was Chester Arthur. By the way, good luck trying to get a book about Chester Arthur published. If you think clevelands tough. I dont know what you do with Chester Arthur. The rumors at the time were that Chester Arthur had been born in canada. His father was an irishman, his mother was a canadian from quebec. They emigrated to vermont. The story went when she was pregnant and ready to give birth, she went back home to quebec and had the baby there, which if true would mean arthur was not an american citizen. Because neither of his parents were and he wasnt born in the u. S. Ill point out right now, no, we do not have the birth certificate, long or short form for Chester Arthur. They just put his name in the family bible and said he was born in vermont. I guess that was good enough to qualify him to hold the office of Vice President and president. Grover cleveland, who was elected four years after garfield in 1884, always fascinated me just for the fact that, and this is what everybody knows. Grover served two nonconsecutive terms. He was elected in 1884. Lost reelection in 1888 and came back four years later and won the white house back, which is a unique achievement in american politics. In the american presidency. So the guy had to be a pretty good politician. Of course, he screwed up the numbering for the president s. Hes number 22 and 24. A little aside, actually. When president obama gave his inaugural address in 2009, he said 44 people have now taken this oath of office. I was at a party with friends, and i said, no, 43, because grover gets counted twice. Shut up, nobody wants to hear about Grover Cleveland right now. My friends, we were in rome at the time, learned much too much about Grover Cleveland than anyone should and theyre forgiven if they dont buy the book, but you wont be. Grover, aside from being an extraordinary politician also had the most extraordinary rise to the white house. I mean, in 1880, cleveland was a single guy living in a boarding house in buffalo. Had a fairly good law practice. Well respected and well liked in buffalo, but really wasnt active in politics in buffalo. In four years, he became president. Its just impossible to imagine now. We know the name of our next president. We dont know who its going to be, but weve heard the name at least. Theres a list of 30, 40, 50 100 people that might be president. Probably the next two or three weve heard their name. But that wasnt the case when Grover Cleveland was elected. Nobody had heard of him four years before. He lived a charmed live in some ways. Born in 1837. 16, left school, moved to buffalo, studied law. In a law firm there. Really had no formal education after 16. Selftaught in law. And in 1881, they were looking for a reformist candidate to run as democratic nominee for mayor of buffalo. Grover won that election and he immediately established a reputation forrenesty and integrity. He vetoed a lot of bills. He was nope as the veto mayor. One of the most famous bills was when there was a bill to establish a new sewer system in buffalo, and the city council awarded the contract to the highest bidder. The difference between that and the next lowest bid presumably was to be spread among all the members of the city council. Grover vetoed that bill. And he vetoed many other bills and quickly earned a reputation for integrity and honesty. In 1882, he was elected governor of new york and in 1884, he was elected president of the United States. So here you have from 1880 to 1884, a guy who goes from being a lawyer nobody heard about in buffalo to mayor, to governor and finally president. The 1884 election, by the way, this is another one of those things where you think things have changed a lot, they havent changed that much, was a terribly vicious election. One of the dirtiest president ial campaigns in American History. It came out during the campaign that grover fathered an illegitimate child. His response was legendary. He sent a telegram to his friends back in beautiful that said simply, tell the truth. Grover owned up to this. He had supported this child since birth and was still providing for the child and really his reaction to what could have been a debilitating scandal turned into a positive thing for his campaign. It demonstrated his integrity and refusal to deny the truth. The campaign, he was running against a guy named james g. Blaine. As the democrats like to say, james g. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of maine. It really was that kind of vicious campaign. It all came down to new york state. New york had the largest number of electoral votes. Whoever won new york state would win the election. It was that simple. A few days before the election, blaine appeared at a Campaign Event and was introduced by a protestant minister. The minister called the democrats the party of rum, romanism and rebellion. Drunk, catholic, and disloyal, basically. This swung the catholic vote, especially new york city, to cleveland, who won carried new york by 1,000 votes out of 1. 1 million cast. So it was an extremely close election but he won in 1884. In 1886, he finally married. He was still a bachelor when elected. He married a woman named francis folsom, who was 21 at the time. Grover was 49. It was a 28 year age difference. I dont think well see another 21yearold first lady again. Its possible. Its a good thing schwarzenegger cant be elected president. But francis turned out to be a great political asset for grover and everybody loved her. Really one of the most beloved first ladies in American History. There is a story after grover lost the election in 1888, he lost to harrison, although grover won the popular vote in 1888 but lost in the electoral college. Well never see that again. And as they were leaving the white house in 1889, apparently, francis told chief steward there, just keep everything the way it is. Well be back in four years. Sure enough, in 1892, cleveland did win the white house back, and he and francis and now, their youngest daughter, baby ruth, moved into the white house. There had been one change while they were gone. Benjamin harrison while the clevelands while they were in the white house and they changed over from gas to electric. And i think they did this so none of the cleefds clevelands appliances would work. But in 1892 grover went to the election and he takes the oath of office in march. The inaugurations were in march at that time. And it was not a good time to become president. This is where the panic of 1893 comes in. Just nine days before grove took office, the Redding Railroad had gone bankrupt. One of the most successful railroads in the u. S. Just the rear before they built a brandnew terminal in philadelphia, redding terminal, which stood until the 1980s. But in 1893, the redding went bankrupt, and it was a bad sign. Railroads were hopelessly overbuilt in 1880s and 1890s. This was a speculative bubble, much like weve had recently with other things. Real estate and dotcom. In the 1880s, it was railroads. The number of rail lines more than doubled after the civil war, but the population only grew about 50, 60 . Youd have multiple lines running between cities that competing Railroad Companies had. And then the bottom fell out in 1893. 119 railroads went bankrupt. In 1893. And about 20 , i believe, of the number of railroads in the country. And of course, all the people who had invested stock in the railroads were wiped out. And this really sparked a panic on wall street and sent the stock market down. There was another thing going on that contributed to the panic of 1893, and i wont get into it too much here. Suffice it to say in the book i write about it in sparkling detail. Really some amazing prose i came up with. But its about the debate over gold versus silver. That was what should our currency be based on . Should it be based on gold, or should it be based on gold and silver. Now, this all might seem arcane and a little silly to us today when our currency is based on yes. Nothing. Quality paper. Very good paper it is, though. You wash it and you can still use it. But in 1893, the debate really boiled down to should our money be backed by gold or silver. The country really had since the 1870s been on the gold standard. It worked simply. The government printed bills redeemable for gold. It was easier to carry bills than gold in your pocket. They kept gold in the treasury. If you wanted to redeem gold certificates as they were known for gold, you could. Then in the 1880s and 1890s a lot of states came into the union in the west. Montana. Colorado. Nevada. And these were silver mining states. And the silver mining states began to clamor for silver, to also be a unit of currency in the United States. They had a lot of clout in congress, these new states that came in very quickly, the senators and representatives and in 1890, they passed a bill called the sherman silver act. This required the u. S. Treasury to buy 4. 5 million ounces of silver every month and print an equivalent amount of currency for that. Well, this caused inflation. Rapid inflation in the United States, as all this currency poured into the markets. Now, the thing was, the people in the west who were gold mining states really didnt mine this because they could sell all their silver to the treasury and the farmers in the south and method, who a lot of them were in debt, especially in the south, still recovering from the civil war, inflation if youre in debt is not a bad thing, because the money youre paying your debts off is, you know, cheaper than the money you borrowed. So its not that bad a thing. They didnt mind a little inflation. They needed lots of money in their pockets. Of course, back east, the bankers and industrialists who were by and large the people lending the money, they didnt think so much of this inflation because it devalued their money that they had. It really set up a sectional battle with the United States. It was really the most contentious issue between the civil war, the currency. It did divide along sectional lines. You had the west and south versus north and east. North and east tended to be gold people. The west and south, silver people. The uncertainty in currency markets also contributed to the panic of 1893. So grover takes office in march, and hes got a lot on his plate. By the way, francis, his wife, is now pregnant with their second child as well. So he had a lot of concerns. It was in may of 1893 that he noticed for the first time a little bump on the roof of his mouth, right back behind the molar on the left side. He didnt think much of it. As we all do, he put off having it looked at for a while and you know, had a lot on his plate. It wasnt until june, his doctor from new york named bryant, joseph bryant, examined this bump on the roof of grovers mouth. Bryant had had some expertise in oral cancers. He determined it was, in fact, a cancerous tumor. He called it a bad looking tenant. Its funny. The word, cancer, cancer had a stigma attached to it in the 1890s. In the 19th century, well into the 20th century. The word itself was often z6m avoided. Newspapers would call it the dread disease, the disease no doctor would dare name, those sorts of things. Bryant called it a bad looking tenant and said it should be removed, and cleveland agreed to have this tumor removed, but only on the condition that the operation be conducted in secret. Cleveland was afraid that if it came to be known he had cancer, which was considered virtually a death sentence in 1893, that the markets would crash, wall street would panic and the depression would only worsen. He had other reasons, personal reasons, too. About ten years before, grant died of an oral tumor. His death was a very slow agonizing death. It was a public spectacle. Reporter camped outside his house in a kind of death watch. Cleveland was president when grant died and was fully aware of how that happened and cleveland had no desire to become the object of a spectacle like that. He was a very introverted guy in many ways and just didnt want to be the center of attention for this thing. So he said, i think we should do this operation in secret, and his doctor said okay. Fine. Why the doctors would agree to do this in secret is an example of how especially when the patient is a president the patient dictates the terms of treatment, not the doctors. You see this time and again in American History, where president s who have some kind of illness or disability dont get the best treatment because their doctors acquiesce to the patients demands instead of doing what is best for the patient medically and physically. So where do you remove a tumor in secret from the roof of a mouth of a president in 1893 . The white house was ruled out, so was the hospital, to many potentials for springing a leak. It was cleveland who came up with the idea of having the tumor removed on a friends yacht. He knew a guy named benedict, a magnate from new york, he owned a yacht named oneida. Cleveland and benedict were old friends and had often gone fishing together on the yacht, so cleveland decided this would be a perfect cover. We can have the operation on board the oneida. We can say we are going to sail up to cape cod. Cleveland had a summer home on cape cod, do some fishing and do to operation on the boat. Well, having an operation on a boat presents some problems. But nonetheless, six doctors were recruited to perform the operation, and they agreed to do it on the boat. On the night of june 30th, 1893, cleveland came to new york and the six doctors themselves came to new york. The boat was anchored in the east river. The doctors were ferried, under cover of darkness, from separate peers. Cleveland came on later that night had some cigars. Maybe they were the problem to begin with. Had some cigars. Then the next morning, the boat set sail and sailed into long island sound. It was shortly after 12 00 that cleveland went downstairs. There was a small room below deck they had converted into a makeshift operating theater. What they did, there was no operating table. They had a chair in the center of the mast, the center of the room. Cleveland came in, and they propped up his neck and his head with some pillows. They did have anesthesia. They used ether primarily. Also, nitrous oxide, but it didnt sedate the president well enough. Mostly the president was done under ether, which is a volatile compound, operating wnl, ith, w was close confines of a room below deck on a yacht was probably not the best place to do it. They anesthetized cleveland. It took about 90 minutes. They removed the tumor along with most of his upper left palate and five teeth. Pretty much all the teeth behind your eyeteeth on the left. Everything behind there got taken out, as was a big chunk of his jawbone. All this was taken out in 90 minutes using fairly not fairly but rudimentary tools using chisels and forceps. There was no means of blood transfusion, so all the blood he lost, he lost. And there were no means of artificial resuscitation if anything happened to him either. The operation succeeded and cleveland survived. They packed his mouth with gauze and gave him a shot of morphine and put him to bed for the night. And it was four days later on july 5th. So the president had actually been missing for four days now, over the fourth of july weekend. The chief executive back in the 1890s isnt quite what it is today. The office wasnt quite what it is today. But even then, it was a little unusual for the president to disappear on the fourth of july. He arrived at his home on buzzards bay in massachusetts on the 5th. None of the reporters were there. Probably back at the hotel drinking if i know how reporters operate. And so they didnt find out until the next day that cleveland had returned. Cleveland healed remarkably quickly and was fitted with a prosthetic device. After about three or four weeks when the wound had healed sufficiently enough. This was a piece of hard volcanized rubber. They fashioned it and it clipped onto the teeth. It restored the shape of his face, because a piece of the jaw was missing. But more importantly, it restored his speaking voice. Without this, he was unintelligible and he was famous for his speaking voice. With this device in his mouth, he could speak again and he appeared completely normal. They hadnt made any external incision. The operation was done in the mouth. They hadnt removed his walrus moustache. God forbid we had a president without facial hair. To all intents and purposes, just looked like he was going for a vacation on buzzards bay. He was out fishing for a couple of weeks. Reporters were kept at a distance. Remember how reagan would stand by the helicopter and say i cant hear you, i cant hear you, when he was leaving the white house. Thats kind of what they did with grover. He would go out fishing and came back at the end of the day. There were rumors that something was wrong with him. What happened, one of the doctors on the boat had missed an appointment performing this operation. When he met the doctor he was supposed to meet with for the missed point, he explained, well, i was operating on the president of the United States. I hope thats a good enough excuse for you. Apparently it was. Then word began to filter around the medical community that something had happened. Eventually, these whispers reached a reporter. A new york correspondent for the philadelphia press. A great time for newspapers. The 1890s. I forget how many daily newspapers new york had. 20 or 30. Philadelphia had 15 in the 1890s. Everything was very competitive. E. J. Edwards heard this story and found out the name of one of the doctors. The source of this rumor. Actually the dentist who had administered the anesthesia. So he went to the dentist and a played a little trick within the fair bounds of journalism at the time, maybe today. He kind of let onto the dentist that edwards knew more about the story than he did. Said that i understand an operation was performed on the president , performed on the oneida. He said somebody on the boat must have told you that. Went on to spill the beans and gave more information to edwards and named a couple of doctors. August 29th, two months after the operation, he published the story under the headline the president is a very sick man. The problem was, nobody believed him. Thats because cleveland had developed this reputation for honesty and integrity. His spokesperson said this was a lie, no operation had been performed, no tumor removed. They said he had merely had a bad tooth extracted, which was technically true. If you didnt mention the other four, palate, tumor and the jawbone. So so the public at this time was inclined to believe cleveland. He had built up this reputation for honesty. He was known as the honest president. In a way, it almost appears he had built up all this capital and reputation for honesty and now decided to cash in all his chips on this one big lie, and it worked. Cleveland recruited friends in the press, democratic papers, especially a rival paper in the philadelphia called the times to not merely deny the story but to discredit the story. That meant killing the messenger. E. J. Edwards was derided as a disgrace to journalism, a cancer faker, panic mongerer. He had come up with one of the great scoops in American History, still probably the most detailed account of a medical procedure performed on a president without the patients authorization and nobody believed him. It was really too bad. I think cleveland probably went too far in discrediting edwards. It was one thing to keep the operation secret, but another to ruin this mans reputation, which effectively did. So the secret held. In fact, the secret held well into the 20th century. Cleveland died in 1908. There was no recurrence of the cancer. This was a very significant achievement in american medicine and american surgery to have a cancerous tumor removed from somebody in 1893 and have no recurrence of the cancer. It was quite spectacular. But nobody knew about it. And it wasnt until 1917, finally, that one of the doctors who had taken part in the operation, a guy named keen from philadelphia, fascinating guy in and of himself. Really, there are three main characters in here. The president , the newspaper man, edwards, and the doctor, keen. Keen had served he graduated from med school in 1862 and served in civil war. He was a commissioned officer working as a medic and later on, a commissioned officer in world war i. He had an amazing career that really spanned to this period from almost medieval to modern medicine. Was a good baptist and he always felt badly about the way edwards had been treated. In 1917 he decided to publish an account of the operation. And so he asked permission from clevelands wife, francis. And by the way i should point out, i forgot this, francis had the baby only about six weeks after the report came out that he had cancer. This helped to quash any last doubts about whether or not the president was a sick man. I mean, hes making babies, how sick can he be . So keen asked for franciss permission to publish an account of the operation. Grover had been dead many years now and francis agreed. Francis, by the way, she remarried after grover died. And married a princeton professor, a guy named Thomas Preston and was married to him much longer than she was married to grover. A funny quick story but francis lived a long time. In 1947 she was seated next to eisenhower at a fancy dinner. And her place card just identified her as mrs. Thomas preston. Soize enh so eisenhower had no idea who she was and they began chatting and francis said, you know, general, i used to live in washington and eisenhower said really, where . It was only then that francis identified herself s. A. T. Former first lady and eisenhower was quite embarrassed by that. By francis to her credit agreed with keen that there should be an account of what happened in 19 that fall of 1917 finally broke the embargo and publisheden a account of the operation in, of all places t saturday evening post. Now, you think he would go to a medical journal to talk about this amazing achievement in american medicine and oncology. But instead he decided to publish it in the saturday evening post. I interviewed a couple of pathologists researching the book and i asked one of them, why do you think keen did this article in the saturday evening post and not some journal of medicine . And the pathologist said its like all doctors, he had a big egoand ego and he wanted everybody to know. That was the most popular periodical in the country. That was the place to brag but he also did it to vindicate edwards. The account came out and it did vindicate edwards 24 years after the fact and keen wrote he was glad that finally edwards reputation as a truthful correspondent was vindicated and it was very big news among media people who had always wondered about this account that edwards had written many years before and edwards was still among the living at the time and was very gratified by this. And sent keen a letter of efusive praise. He worked with jacob reese, of course did the other half live, was an early supporter of steven crane, let him stay at his apartment in new york when she was struggling to write red badge of courage. Wufs things that happened to edwards, his house was burned down in 1908 and it was burned to the ground and he lost a lifetime of correspondence and clippings and notes. And so there was no legacy to leave. It would be amazing to read through his papers and see exactly what his thoughts were as this happened in 1893. And he came up with the scoop and then found himself vilified. Fortunately yale, where he had gone to school, has some of his papers. I was able to kind of cobble together his story through that. Theres another postscript to this story. The tumor itself. Which i mentioned is at the muter museum in philadelphia. Its not much to look at. Kind of like a piece of limp cauliflower or something. Its the tumor, ten fragments of bone and five teeth. One with a filling, gold naturally. Because cleveland was a gold guy. And this blob, this blob in this jar always tantalized medical and president ial historians because they wanted to know what kind of cancer did cleveland have . This was an amazing achievement in modern in american surgery, American Cancer Research that they had successfully removed this tumor and that there would be no recurrence of the disease for 15 years until cleveland died in 1908. But there was a problem. Clevelands children, and he had children very late in life. His last son francis died in 1995. In fact, i its funny, i was living in portland, maine and we went to church and i met a woman named Margaret Cleveland and i made a joke about grover and she said, well, actually he was my grandfather and grover was born in 1837. When he was 60 he had a son francis in 1897 and then francis when he was 60 had a daughter in 1957 who was margaret. There were 120 years between the birth of margaret and her grandfather. The cleveland children lived well into the 20th century and they would not allow the specimen to be tested pathologically to determine the cause of what kind of cancer it was because grover had been a pretty wild guy back in his days in buffalo and there were rumors he had a venereal disease, specifically syphilis. If children were afraid if it came out, if they did the testing on this specimen, that it would come out that their father had had syphilis and this would be embarrassing to them and to their fathers legacy. It wasnt until the 1970s that they final aacquiesced to have a pathological examination done on the tumor and the examination determined that grover had had a very rare kind of cancer. Its called varicose carcinoma or cvc, its a malignant but it doesnt metastasize. It does not metastasize. But it has to be removed because the tumor continues to grow and it can actually grow so large that it would make eating and eventually breathing impossible. This treatment for this type of tumor today and the tumor itself, this vc was not even identified until 1948 so the doctors in 1893 had no idea what this was because it hadnt been identified as a specific kind of cancer. The treatment today, though, would be exactly what grover had. You have to excise the tumor completely. There is no alternative. Although today they now can do a reconstructive bone and tissue graphs so you dont have to walk around with a piece of as a rule ca recognized rubber, a hockey puck in your mouth, basically, so you can talk and eat and this explained why grover had gone so long without any recurrence of the cancer. That it was a kind of cancer that does not metastasize. And the test also conclusively determined whether or not Grover Cleveland did have syphilis. And the results of that test are in the book, which is now for sale. Thank you very much, if anybody has any questions. Id be happy to answer them. I think kristen has a microphone if anybody has a question we can just or did i cover everything so excellently . Theres a question. Hello, thank you for the wonderful talk on Grover Cleveland. How did he die eventually . What was the cause of death . Grover died in 1908. He retired to princeton and its a bit of a mystery actually. He complained of gastrointestinal problems and there was actually some suspicion that he may have had an intestinal tumor, although since the oral cancer that he had doesnt my do you keep making me say that, metastasize, the intestinal tumor would not have been related to the oral cancer. Its a mystery. He was 71 when he died in 1908 and the official cause of death, i think, was listed as cardiac arrest. But that doesnt really explain, you know, the precipitating causes to that. Yeah, grover retired to princeton. It was interesting. Hed never gone to college and he went to princeton and sort of became the mascot there. And after a football victory, all the students would march to grovers house and give a cheer and he really enjoyed his final time in princeton. We have somebody thats got kristens going to bring a microphone up for you, just a second. Yeah. The other half of your title is the panic of 1893, and other than the fact you mentioned there was a Railroad Bubble and burst, you didnt say anything about that. Is that covered in the book . No, its covered in the book. As i said there were two major causes of the panic in 1893 which was the overbuilding of the railroads and the uncertainty in the currency situation. And it would be hard to overstate how contentious and controversial and detrimental this was to the country, the debate over gold versus silver. And i think that was what really precipitated the panic. People didnt know what was going to happen with the currency. Would there be inflation . Would there be deflation if they stopped minting Silver Dollars, could there be a money famine. This happened periodically. One of the reasons the silverits wanted to increase silver production until silver became a form of currency. There had been periodic periods of great deflation in the country and money would be almost impossible to find. There were other causes, of course, when the railroads went down they took with them a lot of businesses. I mean, things Like Companies that made cord or rope went out of business in each of the towns where these railroads passed through all the ancillary businesses connected with them went out of business and the panic of 1893 really lasted until about 1897, 1898 when the spanishamerican war came and gave the economy a boost. It was the worst depression in American History, double digit unemployment for more than five years. It only exceeded now by the Great Depression of the 1930s. During the panic of 1893 theres a terrible unemployment, terrible inflation but there was really no kind of safety net as we have today, even the most rudimentary kind. Grover was opposed to this. He did not believe in paternalism as he called it. In the second inaugural he said while the people should cheerfully support the government the government should not support the people. This appeals today even to libertarians, ron paul keeps a picture of Grover Cleveland in his office. This, i think, also it certainly contributed to grovers unpopularity at the end of his second term. But by some accounts it extended the panic. Although the panic also, for the first time, we do see some semblance of public works projects in boston they paid people a dollar a day to chop wood. There were some programs that were beginning. But most of the relief programs during the panic of 1893 were run by labor unions and also churches. And other charitable organizations. There really was no kind of Government Support program. The panic was also exacerbated, again i go in the book, its just some amazing writing that i do about this panic of 1893. Its really going to blow your mind. But there was a hurricane that hit the southeast coast of the United States in the fall of 1893 and it couldnt have happened at a worse time and it pretty much devastated georgia and the carolinas. And this contributed to even greater problems with the panic of 1893 and there was really nothing to there were no resources to rebuild these areas. And so it was an interesting confluence of political, economic and natural events that created that made 1893 such a terrible year economically for the country and like i said it took about four years for the panic to ebb finally. But yeah, youll like it, what i say about it in the book. Youll like it. You might want to get two copies just because youll want to give one away. Another question up here, wait a second, kristens coming. Here she comes. What was the makeup of the congress at the time of clevelands operation . Did looked at as kind of a lame duck waiting to die if people had known about it . That was another problem. Well, for one thing, cleveland was a gold guy. His Vice President was a guy named add Lee Stevenson who was grandfather of the future president ial candidate, stevenson was a silverite, he was from illinois and was in to the ticket in 1892 to give some balance because the democrats needed to win some southern states. You had an unusual situation where the president and Vice President are on exact opposite sides of the most contentious political issue of the day and cleveland was adamant that stevenson not know what was going on with his health. Stevenson heard rumors. He was at the worlds fair in 1893 and had had heard rumors about clevelands health and headed east to visit him. And he was intercepted with a telegram, saying id like you to go on a political trip to seattle in 1893, stagecoaches, trains, ferries, boats, all sorts of things. That put stevenson out of action for considerable time. Congress at the time the democrats, i believe, controlled both houses for the first two years of his second term but the panic had gotten so bad by 1894 that the republicans then took back the two houses. Although cleveland did manage to have the sherman silver act silver purchase act repealed shortly after the surgery, in fact. And that stopped the u. S. Treasury from purchasing the 4. 5 million ounces of silver a month. But, you know, they had accumulated so much silver in those 3 1 2 years and so many silver certificates had been issued that silver certificates were actually issued and i believe they were valid until 1968. So it was the kind of thing that had it was another cool thing about the book is you go back and see some of these decisions made in 1893 and think they dont have any relevance to us. They really do. In a lot of ways if you hear the echoes of these things, even 120 years later. I remember when i as david mentioned, one of my jobs was as a gas station attendant and you used to see even into the 80s youd see silver certificates come in once in a while. A green seal instead of a blue seal. It was the Republican Congress for the second half of his term. That was a really good talk. Thank you. You mentioned well, i like your sense of humor too. You were a really good listener. You mentioned, of course, you had a fondness for Grover Cleveland. Because you think he was a great president or would you rate and rank, put him on the spectrum . Well, he had a muppet named after him, first of all, youve got to like grover. I always thought, like i said at the beginning, its amazing to lose the white house, come back four years later and win it back. I dont care who the president s politics and policies involved, will that ever happen again . Its just impossible to conceive of now, an incumbent president loses the presidency and they retire too their 200,000 gig speaking events, which is exactly what im getting paid today, ironically. But grover didnt have that. There were no pensions for president s at the time. And i think part of the concern for grover was it was pretty much the only job he enjoyed and could do. He retired to new york between his two terms, and did a little bit of lawyering, mostly acting as a mediator. He was the last of the do nothing president s. I dont mean that in a negative a bad way. He vetoed more bills in his twice as many bills in his first term than all of his predecessors combined. So he really saw his job primarily as keeping congress from passing bad laws. He really saw thats what the executive was supposed to do, first and foremost and he did that and hed done it as mayor and done it as governor and he did it as president. He was the veto president , and so and as i said also he didnt believe in interventionist government and this appeals to a lot of people even today. So i think he deserves to be remembered much better than he is. I mean, lets see, hes got a turnpike rest stop on the jersey turnpike named after him. I think thats between twits 11 and 12 northbound and thats about it. Thats and this great new book. Every child who ever purchases a place mat to eat on and has all the president s and the child looks down and said, oh, i think theres a mistake here because this picture is coming up twice. Yeah, he screwed up the numbering. Actually, harry truman never could understand why grover was counted twice. He just thought that was ridiculous because only 43 people have been president. Why is this president number 44 . So, yeah, thanks, grover. Thanks for a very interesting talk. The book is now available, and matthew will be happy to sign a copy for you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Watch tonight beginning at 8 00 eastern and enjoy American History tv this week and every weekend, on cspan 3. Youre watching American History tv. Every weekend on cspan 3, explore our nations past. Cspan 3, created by americas Cable Television companies as a public service, and brought to you today by your television provider. James garfield served nine terms in the u. S. House of representatives, and only 200 days as the 20th president of the United States. He was assassinated in 1881, dying 79 days after being shot at a train station in washington. Up next, on American History tv, a discussion on garfields life and death. Today, of the four president ial assassinations, the one that i find the most absolutely fascinating and interesting is the one were going to discuss tonight, james garfield. Four quite a number of reasons. First of al
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