American History Hit - President Chester A. Arthur: Redemption in Office?

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Vice President to a narrow election winner, Chester Arthur was a very unlikely President. But on September 20th 1881 he took his seat as the 21st President of the United States at the dawn of the modern administrative state and presidency.So what kind of President did he become? Was he progressive? What was his role in the creation of the Civil Service? And how did the Presidency impact him as a person?Don is joined by Michael J. Gerhardt for this episode in our Presidential series. Michael is the Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Forgotten Presidents: Their Untold Constitutional Legacy and FDR's Mentors: Navigating the Path to Greatness.Produced by Sophie Gee and Freddy Chick. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. In 1881, Puck Magazine published a cartoon featuring newly inaugurated President Chester A. Arthur. It's a caricature portraying Arthur in dandied plaid trousers and a top hat.

A few years earlier when he was Roscoe Conkling's collector in that beating heart of all-American graft, the New York Custom House. Having just been kicked off the front stoop of the custom house, Arthur will momentarily land in a splatter of mud. The man doing the kicking with an oversaworthy. shoe, President Rutherford B. Hayes on his crusade to clean up federal corruption. The caption below reads, From the tow path to the White House, with tow spelled T-O-E. But what was obviously a satirical dig at Chester Arthur, here's our new president, once kicked to the curb, could, in hindsight, be interpreted another way. It also suggests the redemptive road Chester Arthur would travel, as a once

dodgy dealer of New York politics and route to a higher-minded destiny in the nation's capital. From towpath to the White House, indeed, the implausible journey of Chester A. Arthur. Glad you're with us. This is American History Hit, and I'm Don Wildman. Today, again, we join the ever-rolling train that is our U.S. presidential series. Now departing, all aboard, it's Chester Arthur, number 21, 1881 to 1885. Chester A. Arthur, A is for Alan, born in 1859 in Fairfield, Vermont. yet another log cabin president from way up there in the woods of New England. Arthur enters the presidential pantheon through the back door,

or at least the door no reasonable person wishes to use, when President James Garfield was shot in the back in only his fourth month in office and died in his seventh. As Garfield's vice president, upon that unfortunate man's passing, Chester A. Arthur was sworn into office on September 19, 1881. An office, fair to say, he'd never really aimed to occupy. in his career, and yet there he was. And the general storyline that seems to come down to us today is what a remarkable surprise, Arthur turned out to be in his single term as chief executive. Kind of a story of redemption. From the backroom dealings of party machine New York politics,

he is thrust into the limelight of presidential responsibility, and, interestingly, rose to the occasion, exceeding expectation, and transforming into a higher-minded leader. It's Arthur's admirable pivot that's really worth understanding because it also involves a fundamental course change in the way presidents created their administrations, laying the foundation of what is our modern federal bureaucracy, very much in the news today. President Chester A. Arthur's one-term presidency. It's a heartening tale of sorts right when we needed one as a nation. And we'll find out how and why, speaking with Michael Gerhardt, professor of legal history at the University of North Carolina, author of The Forgotten Presidents. Once named a Financial Times Book of the Year,

and which covered our subject today in depth. He has a new presidential book just recently published entitled FDR's mentors, navigating the path to greatness. Hello, Michael, welcome to the pod. Hi, thanks for having me. He's quite the picture of the Gilded Age, Chester A. Arthur of New York,

his whole bearing with the mutton chops and the formal dress in the prodigious midsection, truly a man of his times. Little did anyone expect this guy would usher in such serious changes. Nobody, including Chester Arthur, expected it. His becoming president was, as you've said, quite a shock to a lot of people, including Arthur. But it became a test for him to simply continue the ways that he had followed that got him that far or whether he was going to shift. And he shifted. And that's the story.

His presidency, as I mentioned, is an unlikely one. It's also a pretty forgotten one today. We're going to do our best to change that. I suppose any presidential assassination leads to an unlikely presidency, but in this case, it really started much earlier. Garfield's was a very close election, dark horse candidate. And this is the first thing I want to sketch out before we get too deeply into the nitty-gritty of Arthur. There is a growing rift in the Republican Party in this general period between what is called the stalwarts, which was a faction led by Roscoe Conkling of New York, and the half-breeds led by James Blaine of Maine, as I understand. Can you explain how these two factions developed and what is their greater implication?

Basically, the stalwarts were Republicans who were very conservative. And their general orientation was not to rock the boat, but to kind of preserve things as they were and resist change. And that meant allowing to remain in existence all the sort of excesses and extravagance that was prominent throughout society, but also not. not to inquire into any kind of corruption within government, just to let it be, so to speak. The half-breeds were arguably a smaller contingent within the Republican Party, but they generally favored a moderate change in government, particularly they were interested in trying

to establish some kind of civil service within the federal government. And the idea of the civil service was that there would be people not. necessarily beholden to politicians or presidents, but who would be long-term employees of the federal government and would have the federal governments and public's interests the highest thing in mind. Is there an awareness now of a need for professionalism in government? Is that what's sort of emerging? Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it.

And this goes all the way back nearly to the founding of the Constitution. So one of the big issues that presidents had to address from the beginning of the report, public had to do with their ability to remove people. Did they have the power to remove anybody within the executive branch, even in the cabinet, on their own initiative? And what came with that was if you believed in presidential removal power to that extent, then presidents were thought to be people who could replace anybody within an administration with any pal, with any friend, with any ally. And that introduced into being a concept called rotation, that if you had the president of one party and a president of a different party won, than that new president could rotate

out of office all the partisans from the last administration and replace them with partisans of their own. And so that battle, in a sense, or that divide, persists. And it helps define the presidency of Chester Arthur. Stallworts would have believed very strongly in rotation. Let's get rid of anybody who's not one of us, replace them with our kind, and that'll keep government in their view as it should be. It's what's called the spoil system, which has been really in power since the 1820s. Andrew Jackson kind of ushered that in, didn't he? And it wasn't necessarily viewed as a corrupt thing. It was kind of this idea that you clean house.

You're a new president with a new agenda. You've been elected to be so, so therefore you should be surrounded by all the people that you believe in. It's very much headline news these days with the possibility of a Trump second term. He very much is talking about this. So this is part of a tradition in America for better or worse that Chester Arsler sits smack in the middle of because this is the first era in which they're confronting. Is it better or not to do this kind of thing? The argument for changing it is that this country is vast now. It's a continent-sized country with enormous infrastructure to manage.

and these states are growing and everybody, it's just a bigger operation. So you need people in power who aren't going to just leave their jobs who actually know how to work that. And thus begins the bureaucracy. Am I, am I right? You're right. I think you've stated it very well. So the stalwarts, as I've said, and as you've indicated, would have preferred to clean house and put their own in. But that practice ultimately became problematic because it meant new appointees were always having to learn the whole system from the ground up anew. And there was no kind of professionalism or expertise, really, within the government that was constant. And so the half-breeds saw some value in a permanent civil service.

Jester Arthur, up until the time he became president, had been a beneficiary of the stalwart, had seen himself as a stalwart and gave no indication whatsoever that he was ever going to deviate from their point of view. Well, that's where you get into the story of him. And let's back up a little bit. I've mentioned 18 times already that he was a New Yorker. And New York was known as the bastion of exactly what we're talking about here. It was a big money town still is, of course.

But in those days, we're coming off of the Erie Canal and all the money that's going through New York Harbor is making a lot of people rich. And he ends up in a job by virtue of being, and I'm just going to go through this quickly, he's a lawyer. He had his own private firm. He's in this age post-Civil War when New York is starting to boom into the gilded age. Interestingly, with the Civil War, he was also a quartermaster of the New York state militia. Like he learned the ropes of how to supply and how to, you know, network with people. He was just a very, very good administrator is what the upshot of that was. So he enters into Republican politics very quickly aligns with Roscoe Conkling and this stalwart group of Republicans. And this leads him to a plum job. Tell me about that. So Chester Arthur had been, as you point out, a stalwart. But his rise in politics was closely aligned with Roscoe Conklin, who was a very colorful figure in New York politics and had become a New York senator, a senator from New York in Congress.

and Conkling had presidential aspirations which never materialized. Come the election to the presidency that Garfield won, there is a moment that's quite extraordinary that occurs at the convention. And it's not just the fact that Garfield, the Dark Horse, wins the nomination. But Garfield had been widely viewed as somebody perhaps not necessarily a stalwart through and through. So there was a movement within the convention to try and find a stalwart. Lo and behold, the name Chester Arthur comes up. And Arthur's surprised. Arthur asked to meet with a Conkling. And this extraordinary meeting happens in a room in which they thought,

mistakenly, they were alone. They tried to find a room where they thought there was nobody else so they could have this candid conversation. They go in and they don't notice somebody in the corner reading a newspaper. And it was a reporter who astutely figured out as soon as he saw who walked in, put the paper up to kind of hide himself. Conkling and Arthur don't realize it. And the conversation then ensues. Conkley pleads with Arthur not to take the position because he thinks it's going to be a betrayal of Conkling. And Arthur says, and I'm paraphrasing, but this is basically the greatest thing I could ever have imagined that could happen to me. I don't think I could do that. I don't think I can turn down. So it's somewhat heated conversation.

They're not yelling, but it's not thoroughly friendly. And the upshot is Conkling doesn't really get his way. Now, Conkling had been a very astute and corrupt politician, very good at sort of feathering his own nest, so to speak, trying to accrue power, lusting for the presidency, and even having turned down a seat on Supreme Court to keep alive his chance to be president. So I think partly what Conklin was concerned with was, oh, Arthur was about to eclipse him, and that wasn't a good thing either. Arthur just thought this was like lightning striking, and how could he ignore that good fortune? Obviously, we know Garfield gets elected. Arthur's the vice president. And then later, after Garfield dies, largely because of medical malpractice in the aftermath of the shooting, Arthur becomes president.

and his first meeting is with Conklin. And they have it behind closed doors. It's not recorded. Historians have surmised that probably what happened is a couple things. One is Arthur might have offered Conkling a seat on Supreme Court because one had become available. Conkling doesn't want that. But then the other thing that happened in that closed door meeting is Arthur is telling Conkling, I'm going to be a president in my own right.

So Conkling leaves the meeting not looking terrible. terribly happy. They're press outside. And then that's the beginning of Arthur's presidency. Well, their relationship was really forged in the Port Authority, really. I mean, I guess it wasn't called the Port Authority in those days, but it was the Customs House that Conkling had placed Arthur in charge of for years, I believe, for four years, right, or more. And that role was one of not only power, because you were handing out jobs in the port, which is its own form of power, but he was also making money. So Conkling had every reason to feel like this guy owed him a favor.

I mean, it really built his career at this point. So it's very surprising. This just adds to the surprise and unlikelyhood of Arthur's ascendancy because he has to really answer to a lot of skeletons in his closet at that point. I think all that's correct. And Conkling, I think, certainly did think that Arthur owed him. In fact, I think almost everybody thought Arthur owed Conkling. That was the concern for many.

but also maybe a good thing of that many people had in mind. And so the highest office Chester Arthur had before he became vice president was head of the customs house in New York. It was, as you said, a very important job, though, particularly at the time. It produced 75% of the revenue of the federal government. But it had long been thought to be a place of corruption. Even as far back as Rutherford-Hays presidency, the thought was this custom House had to be cleaned up. In effect, it really hadn't been cleaned up by the time Arthur became

president, and he had benefited not just from the corruption that it existed within the custom house, but Arthur had also become known as Conkling's lieutenant, sometimes called Conkling's creature. So this is the kind of low regard that people have for Arthur that ended up kind of fueling his conversion to try and become something bigger. Well, Hayes' commission, I mean, it's created a government commission to oversee the port actually ends up edging Arthur out of a job along with Conkling, right? I mean, he gets fired. Yeah. Yeah.

And I was unclear about how that worked because I would have thought that that would have been a local concern, the port of New York. But as you explained, it was a federal concern because those fees were going straight to the federal government. It's part of a mess that is spreading to some extent at the time. So Arthur does get removed by the president. And incidentally, Conkling is not. happy because this means his own power is being diminished. So Hayes nominate somebody to replace Arthur. Conkling has this idea that because it is a local office in New York, he ought to be the one to approve the person named to head up the Customs House. The president had ignored Conkling.

So Conkling decides, and this is kind of crazy, that he, out of protest, he's going to resign his seat in the Senate. Conkling was thinking, oh, that'll draw a lot of people to my side. Instead, it has very little positive reaction for Conkling, and it's just his shooting himself in the foot. Well, Hayes put somebody in. Later, of course, it's going to change, of all people, Chester Arthur. But Conkling has managed to bungle his own career in an attempt to try and keep that seat on the Customs House under his control. This is the political landscape that Arthur occupies when he steps into this office. This civil service issue is very much on the front burner of American governance and has been for at least the prior administration, Rutherford B. Hayes.

It's basically an issue of cronyism versus merit-based hiring. It's kind of where it comes down to. When I say merit-based, there was actually they wanted to give exams to the people who would take these jobs. Is that right? Yes. And I think you phrased it very well. Yeah, the ultimate problem with rotation was that it was synonymous with cronyism. You weren't necessarily going to get the best people.

If the president could just keep replacing certain public officials with people that he preferred. And so the idea that the half-breeds had, and strangely enough, Arthur was going to listen to them, was that if we bring in a permanent cast of people in government, we call them civil service, they would be a bulwark against cronyism, and it would also be a source of professionalism. I mean, it's really, as I said earlier, the beginning of modern presidency, the modern bureaucracy. And it was called the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act eventually. How soon does Arthur get involved with this? It's right out of the gate, right?

Yes. I just also might mention that somewhere in the background, one of the people proposed to replace Arthur was the father of Teddy Roosevelt. But he doesn't get the position largely blocked by Conklin. So Arthur almost hits the ground running after he becomes president. He's got his meeting with Conkling. He makes it clear to Conkling. And ultimately later to the party, Republican Party, I'm going to be a president in my own right. And I'm going to try and actually do good.

That's kind of a surprise for a lot of people. And so he is the president who will sign into law the Pendleton Act. and therefore he's going to be responsible for transforming the federal government. This gets signed into law on January 16th, 1883. So you figure he came into the presidency in the fall of 1881. All this happens very quickly. This is a major act. And we've spent so much time on this because I really want listeners to understand how fundamental this is to what we have today.

We would still have, quite possibly, this rotational system of cronyism, if you want to call it that, or a better term if you favor that. But nonetheless, this was the building block of what becomes also the progressive age as well, which becomes Teddy Roosevelt. You know, none of that happens without this new structure beneath the presidency, beneath all of Washington, which is this returning crew of civil servants who get better and better at what they're doing. And that's really, you just see so much.

You see the whole redesign of Washington, D.C. You know, the whole thing comes out of the Civil Service Act, in my opinion. Yes. And so this is perhaps, if not the first time, it is the time when reform in government was first significantly achieved at the federal level. And again, it happened under the most inauspicious of presidents, Chester Arthur. And of course, in signing the Pendleton Act, Arthur is going to create opposition from the stalwarts in Congress and pretty much ensure he's not going to get nominated by that party for a second term. But Arthur keeps going. He doesn't let that stop him. He actually ends up having a Supreme Court vacancy and makes a

terrific appointment to the Supreme Court. Again, not a crony, not somebody who was ill-equipped to be on the court, but he actually picks somebody who's very, very good. And this is, again, Arthur's realizing he can make up for almost all of his life before becoming president by trying to do good in the short time he's going to be present. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. There are arguments against the Pendleton Act that we can get into more subtleties of, but in general, I just want to explain that this is really what makes so much possible. I cited the redesign of Washington, D.C., forget about that new deal.

I mean, everything that happens under FDR is a direct result of this civil service that now exists here. And actually, I might add that the significance of the civil service persists, over time, but also the controversy over it persists. And Donald Trump has said, one of the things he wants to do if he's reelected as president is basically get rid of the civil service system. Yeah, exactly. He's speaking directly to Chester Arthur. He's speaking against Chester Arthur, and he's demonstrating to some degree, I suppose, his preference to be a stalwart. Right, exactly. He's a conquling, Donald Trump. Little does he know. Let's touch on a few other issues that confront

Chester Arthur as we come along here. One of the fascinating things I found in the reading was about the state of the U.S. Navy, which was old school. It was a nice way of saying. It was all sailboats. And it was a big change was happening in that we needed to reform the Navy and get some real ships involved here. And he begins that process. And that's going to be really important, perhaps for obvious reasons. But if the United States is going to be a major power internationally, it needs. needed to have an armed forces that was modern and that would include a strong navy. And what he begins is going to be, in a sense, expanded and fortified by Teddy Roosevelt, who is going to occupy the position of assistant naval secretary in the first term of William McKinley.

And then it's later going to be fortified as well by a distant cousin of Teddy Roosevelt who becomes deputy assistant secretary of navy under Woodrow Wilson, and that is a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It's all connected. It's amazing when you start building the layers. Where does Arthur stand on reconstruction, which is now passed, as far as the presidency's concerned? This is for better or worse and largely worse,

now moving to the backburner. What's his outlook on it? He was actually a very active in his early career in civil rights, wasn't he? He was, but I think he's going to hit a wall. And I think Reconstruction, if it's not dead by the time he's president, it is dying by the time he's president. And he's also going to undertake some very controversial moves, perhaps one of the most controversial, being he's going to sign into law a bill that would exclude citizenship for Chinese Americans and try and cut down their numbers as immigrants. So Arthur isn't going to expand who qualifies as we the people, that idea, that concept that's fundamental to. the United States. But instead, here he's going to be more conservative, so to speak,

and kind of you might think of this is also trying to throw an issue to the stalwarts that would make them perhaps not hate him as much. It's interesting or very sad and maybe even pathetic how these issues just continue over 150 years. You know, the idea that immigration was the source of problems. Chinese had been coming in for a long time. They were invited in. because of the need for labor on the transatlantic railroad and et cetera, all kinds of railroads, not to mention mining and so forth. The enormous labor force was necessary. Now that they were here, there was a resentment towards them. Arthur was probably not, as I understand it, probably not

of that mindset himself, as you say, but more it was a political move to take that side of the issue and sign this. Those stalwarts wanted a 20-year exclusion of any immigration from China. He got them down to 10. Yes. And again, Again, maybe that's a victory of sorts. It's certainly a stain on American history. So Arthur isn't, we can't say, he's going to be progressive on everything. In the era, he was in the center, but the center was complicated, and his presidency kind of reflects that. Were the issues the same?

I'm curious about immigration in those days. They're taking their jobs. Absolutely. Absolutely the same. It's going to persist. The concern that immigrants are going to take jobs is going to persist. not just through Arthur's presidency, but it will continue to persist, even through Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt's presidency.

An economic aspect of, that's very, it fascinates me is that we were in incredibly good shape as an economy in terms of the budget. There was a tremendous surplus, which was coming by way of New York, big time. Those tariffs and customs fees were really building up. And it became this sort of interesting challenge for Arthur as to what do we do with that surplus, right? It was, I mean, the reverse of today completely. Right. And so Arthur also is going to try and build a better government, so to speak. But the surplus allows the government to do things it might not have been able to afford to do them before. We've just mentioned the Navy, for example.

And Arthur is going to be, I suppose, a rare president in that there's not just this surplus, but he's actually going to try to some extent to get the budget under control. To what end? What's his greater vision? I think his greater vision is basically he's going to try and leave things better than he found them. Because he only wanted one term, is that right? Or not? I think he was stuck with that. I think he would have liked to have been renominated by the party and to be able to continue because he thought he was acting in the best interest of the American people. But that was not to be. I mean, once he crossed the stalwarts, he would lose their support. Democrats would have no interest in maintaining Arthur's president. So he's basically, whatever sport he's got,

it's not nearly enough to keep him in office. Yeah, exactly. He's going to come between Rutherford B. Hayes, sort of, with Garfield in there for a moment. He's going to be followed by Grover Cleveland. I'm dying to talk about Grover Cleveland. There's a whole lot that happens under him. But it's a really fast, part of the problem with Arthur is that he's such a brief moment and he wasn't elected into government. So therefore, there isn't a great governmental legacy. But What do you take away from his years? How were we advantaged by the Chester Arthur presidency? Well, Chester Arthur may be one of the best examples of how occupying the office of the presidency can change you. There's always this question, do people change when they become president or do they change the office?

And I think in Arthur's case, it was a little of both. But it certainly was one of the first great examples of how becoming president changed. Arthur, and he therefore tried to live up to the office, and that's his legacy. And surprisingly, born for the moment, because he doesn't have much of a life afterwards. Right. He's one of those presidents who dies like the day he leaves. And in fact, a couple of things happen. I mean, at the very end of his presidency, he burns a lot of his personal papers.

Why is that? I don't understand that. I think it was because there was a lot of stuff there incriminating him, particularly going back to the days when he headed up the Customs House and was a... Lieutenant of Conklin. So the thinking is he burned anything that would have embarrassed himself. What he hadn't fully understood as he was doing that is that he was dying, or maybe he actually did have a sense of it because he died only a couple days later. Yeah. And that would have something to do with his forgotten presidency, isn't it? I mean, the fact that he burned up, literally burned

up his president's papers. There's nothing to look at in the archive. There's no presidential library because there's nothing to put in it. Yeah. He dies of a kidney ailment, as I understand, at the age of 52 and is buried out there and next to his wife on upstate New York, who had died earlier than him. He was a widower for his entire presidency. Yep. So Arthur, I think it was called Bright's disease. Arthur had come down with this sickness, and it killed him pretty quickly. And I think, again, it really also is one of the reasons why he burns the papers. I should make that clear, because he's thinking about his legacy. and he doesn't want to leave behind any evidence that at one time, and for a long time, he was a crook.

Right. Well, that worked until your book came along. That's sooner or later we find out these things. But in his case, this is what I started out saying. I end up with a very positive feeling about Chester Arthur. I admire someone who can turn on a dime, which he really needed to do, and push back against those who are pressuring him, like Roscoe Conkling, and decide that he's going to, to leave behind a better world than he found before him. And that's an admirable thing. It makes me wonder how easy he was with everything that was happening back in the day in New York.

Like there must have been a lot of qualms that he had about that patronage system and the way things happen. Although he would never have shown it because he was such a gregarious partier in those days. I mean, I don't think we have much evidence to suggest he wasn't happy, so to speak, during that time period. But what may have graded him a little bit, maybe even ultimately more than a little bit, was that he was always viewed in the shadow of Conklin. And I think that probably was frustrating. I'm taking away the direct line that one can draw from Chester Arthur straight through to the New Deal. That to me is the beginning of the modern, the 20th century America that we still live with today.

This period from the Gilded Age to the New Deal, I've always been confused about. I've always hung my hat on Teddy Roosevelt, but indeed what Teddy Roosevelt does actually dates back to Chester Arthur. And by the way, they are not at all allies. And so I think we're seeing the so-called modern presidency, and particularly the modern administrative state, beginning in that era. And it really builds on what Grover Cleveland does in office. And of course, it builds on Teddy Roosevelt. And it's a good build on Woodrow Wilson. And then Franklin Delano Roosevelt's going to. finish the job, so to speak. Yeah. Is the Pendleton Act still on the books, yeah? A variation. Interesting. Thank you, Michael. This is some fascinating conversation. You know, it's an ever-developing theme of this series for us to find the links between these presidency, which just satisfies my OCD to do so. But there definitely is that to do with Chester Arthur. Michael Gerhardt is the professor at the University of North Carolina studying legal history. He is an expert in many things,

including the history of impeachment and the interaction between the presidency and Congress. As I said at the top of the show, he is the author of the Forgotten Presidents, which I encourage anyone interested in the presidency to get. It was a big time award-winning book back in 2013, but it's still something to read. His newest book, however, something to look for, published just in April, this past April, is all about a far-from-forgotten president, FDR. It's called FDR's Mentors, Navigating the Path to Greatness. Michael, is there anywhere we should send the listeners to see more of

about your work? I've got a web page at the University of North Carolina Law School where I teach, so that's probably the best place to go. Excellent. Thank you so much. Great to meet you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed this episode of American History Hit. Please remember to like, review, and subscribe. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And I'll see you next time.