American History Hit - President Rutherford B. Hayes: The First Great Depression

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Emerging victorious from an electoral quagmire in 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes became the 19th President of the United States.Professor Mark Zachary Taylor joins Don to explore the first great depression and how Hayes navigated the US towards recovery from it.From strike and unrest to growth and stability, how did Hayes lay the groundwork for economic prosperity?Produced by Freddy Chick. Edited by Sophie Gee. 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/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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It is a fancy room. It is also, today, the setting for an unprecedented event. It is March 3, 1877, and beneath the room's golden chandelier, Rutherford B. Hayes takes his oath of office in a private ceremony, the first U.S. president to do so. His election had been a tense affair, the results bitterly contested. And as the inauguration day this year falls on a Sunday, Hayes chose to ensure a secure transfer of power on this Saturday, here in the mansion, rather than risk the consequences of an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Two days from now on Monday, March 5th, Hayes will again take the oath,

but this time in the open air, and in front of a crowd. But that will only be for show. For now, here in this red room, he is safe. And for now, so is the presidency. Hello, it's Don Wildman, and you're tuned in to another episode of American History Hit. Today, the story of our 19th presidency. Republican from Ohio, former congressman and state governor, Rutherford, B. Hayes. A proper presidential name, if ever we had one.

A lawyer by trade, Hayes was a strategic choice of candidate for the Republican Party in the election of 1876. At the tail end of our proud centennial anniversary, the nation's economy was, well, flagging is hardly the word. A bank panic, a few years earlier in Grant's second term, had led to a full-blown depression, with normal financial repairs only worsening matters. As such, Hayes fully expected to lose the election to the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, but he pulled it out in a squeaker that remained contested for months until Congress created a special commission to decide the winner. Final electoral vote, 185 to 184. It was hazed by a nose. And he set out to retool the economic machinery of a nation. And what transpired is the subject of study and revision,

including the work of our guest today, Professor Mark Zachary Taylor, who is found at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Stingham Jackets, where he studies economic competitiveness and public policy. Author of Presidential Leadership in feeble times, executive power in the Gilded Age published just last year in 2023. Welcome, sir. Zach, glad to have you here. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Feble times, indeed. In layman's terms, what had brought about the not-so-guilded economic

conditions of 1877? This was a terrible time, wasn't it? Basically, classic boom and bust. During Civil War, railroads essentially stopped building, and so after it was done, investors poured tons of money into railroad. So you get for your classic, boom, railroads are building all over the place, but the good investments quickly get used up, and then there's the medium investments, and then there are the lower quality, higher risk ones. And eventually, some of them start going bankrupt and blowing up until it all hits in 1873, and there's a giant financial crisis, and everything tanks. And a lot of his advisors urge then-president Grant to sign what's called the Inflationary Act. It was essentially

what we call increase the money supply and sort of print more paper dollars to grow the economy out of this recession. But Grant just can't go along with it. He thinks that printed money just isn't the real money is something you could hold and touch. And that's gold at the time. And he said, no, I'm not going to do that. And you got one of the greatest, worst depressions in American history that lasted long after Grant left office. It's what Hayes inherited when he stepped into the White It was worse than the Great Depression of the 30s, wasn't it? There's still a lot of debate. It definitely is in the same ballpark.

Yeah. So into the breach steps Rutherford v. Hayes, not exactly central casting for a heroic type. Although he had distinguished himself in the Civil War, he was an understated fellow and a compromise candidate, as I mentioned, hardly a mandate victory. Yeah, he presents, even in his own time. He presents this sort of formal, very polite but austere personality to those. around him. But in his own private life among family and friends, he was extremely outgoing. All his life, he went off on adventures and travel and love politics and cultural events. He really dove into the Civil War as much for glory and adventure as for being anti-slavery. And at heart, he's kind of a

policy walk and was not that much of a politician, but he was so well respected and fit the demographics that the Republican Party kept dragging him back into politics because he was a vote getter. He kept winning elections. And that's what happened in 1876. I imagine he serves in Congress. He's a multiple term governor of Ohio. I mean, he's a professional guy. He really knows how to run government. But these are extraordinary things to have to manage, especially when you think you're not going to win. Like, it's not coming in with a sword and ready to fix the day. This is a real closed election that takes a long time to figure out. In a moment, we're going to talk about labor, strife, striking workers, industrial consolidations. Is it possible to give us a bird's eye view of what's

taking place in the American economy at this unique moment? It's a whole new nation being born, isn't it? Economically speaking. It is. The country had been almost monopolized by issues around slavery and the North-South divide and cotton export from, you know, the 1830s onward. Cotton was the wealthiest greatest export. The South was per capita, the wealthiest part of the United States, if not the world at the time. And all that gets eliminated by the Civil War. The South is thrown into object poverty. You now have millions of ex-slave, former slaves, wandering with uncertain status trying to establish new economic relations. And meanwhile, the North is industrialization is coming. And you get the seeds of what will become the America,

that we recognize today. And it's that panic of 1873 and the Great Depression that kind of clears the field. You get a lot of, before this, America didn't have a lot of large corporations. You know, a big company back then, maybe had a few dozen workers. The railroads, maybe a couple textiles,

Nills might have a few hundred. But America was mostly small farms, small businesses producing for local markets. The panic of 1873 in the Great Depression is gonna wipe out a lot of these small firms. And some of the big, guys are going to move in to take over. So these are going to be familiar names like Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Philip Armour and Pork, Gustavus Swift and Beef. We're going to see Pillsbury

begin to take over the wheat business. They're going to start emerging out of this as they take over all these bankrupt firms and the railroads are going to knit the economy, what used to be a very fragmented local economy in the around the United States, into this national economy. So suddenly both producers and workers working for small markets, working for small markets, markets now have to compete nationally and even internationally as steamships start bringing in more and more imports from abroad and taking American exports into Europe, South America, and Asia. So much of American aspirations as a nation in those days were modeled on England, of course, but also Germany.

Is what you describe here as this sort of new age of corporations? So was that unprecedented? Was this a new age all around the world or was remodeling this after someone else? It was unprecedented. Few other countries had the scope and diversity. The American economy and its potential was far larger than anything you might see in England or Germany. Germany then was not even a country. Remember, it was still being forged together by German leaders at the time. So it was knitting itself into its own national economy with its own peoples and contest between winners and losers, but not producing at the level of the United States. And in fact, the United States would exit

the Great Depression of 1873 to 1878 would exit the Hays administration being a global competitor, perhaps even more wealthy and powerful than Great Britain, whereas before we go back to 1870, it was still plotting its way up. That's what we're really talking about, isn't it? The Hays administration being the pivot point in American history for really the modern age that's coming, isn't it? It really was. I don't think we realize how extraordinary the economy was under Hays.

by almost any measure, growth, employment, trade surplus, the U.S. dollar all boomed while inflation, the deficits, the national debt, all fell. Even economic inequality declined. And this is at a time when the U.S. was in a really fragile state. Our ability to expand was based on things that threatened to divide and weaken the country. Rapid industrialization, globalization, the exploitation of natural resources. They created all sorts of economic losers. and winners on a scale never experienced in U.S. history. So you had these fierce political battles being raped throughout the 1870s and onwards over monetary policy and trade policy and wages and prices and the pace of technological change in corporate power. And other societies at the time have fallen into civil war. In fact, we had just had a civil war and many feared that we might go back to it. So Japan went into civil war. Germany, there was violence over these same issues. other states going to other nations going through similar pressures became weak and decrepit from corruption and infighting.

We're talking Spain, China, Russia. And then Hayes comes into office under the similar conditions under this cloud of suspicion into a political system beset by graft just a decade after civil war. So he easily could have set the country on a path towards becoming a banana republic and a complete mess. But he did the opposite and, you know, we still don't recognize this and give him credit today.

What a cool period to write a book. book about. That's really, as a thinker of economic policy and all of that which you do for a living, it is really rife with it all, isn't it? Honestly, there is so much drama going on in the Gilded Age. There's a popular series on HBO, I think it's APO Max now, about the Gilded Age. It fairly touches on the political upheaval, the corruption, the machinations, there were assassinations, pandemics, there was terror attacks, violence in the streets, all sorts of incredible wealth and incredible poverty developed during this period, you could do movies upon movies, and they would all be fantastic, and people really could get into this.

Well, there's a later career for you in that. One element you haven't even mentioned is the massive immigration, which has just been going on for decades now, between the Irish and later the Italian, everything is coming to pass right now with this massive amount of people that are coming in, especially in the Northeast. And part of that is because the United States is becoming so productive, and it's exporting so much agriculture out into places like, especially Europe, that it's devastating peasant farmers in Europe who immigrate to the United States in the same ships that were exporting American wheat, corn, pig products, etc. Also, all sorts of upheaval over in China,

sending Chinese immigrants into the West. And we get that same sort of reaction against globalization and immigration back there that we see today, that same reaction against immigration from workers and white supremacists. And back then, European immigrants were not necessarily considered white. White is this changing category that morphs and warps over the decades as different populations try to define themselves as white or not. Yeah. You've mentioned the railroads. It works in such different facets.

I think of the railroad off the top of my head. The golden spike. It's a glorious thing. It's transcontinental stuff. But it's an enormous industry. It's the computer age of the time. like altering American society as everyone knows it. But it's also this huge economic engine and agent in the whole process of this happening.

Zach, take us back to 1877, the start of Hayes' presidency. All of this economic progress is ahead of us. We're at the bottom of a deep depression. And then we cap it off with a huge nationwide strike breaking out in the railroads. Tell me all about this. It's July 1877. It's barely a few months into Hayes administration. and it starts in West Virginia as a protest over wages.

There were wage cuts because of the Great Depression hitting railroad workers in West Virginia, and it quickly spreads throughout Pennsylvania, down into Maryland, and soon throughout the East Coast and across the railroad lines, eventually involving 100,000 workers and 6,000, 7,000 miles of track, and it all comes to a stop. which is a killer for the American economy, which now depends on these railroads for transporting all these goods and agriculture products and imports and exports in and out of the United States and across throughout the United States economy. And this was new to Americans. The speed,

size, and the spread of the strikes seemed revolutionary. And they quickly became violent with looting and vandalism and destruction of property and eventually shootings. Strikers burned down parts of Chicago. St. Louis seemed headed towards armed conflict. You had old military veterans putting on their old Confederate or Union uniforms to go out and lead fellow citizens in the fight. And historians now rank these protests as the biggest instance of labor violence anywhere on earth for the hundred years between the end of Napoleon in 1815 in the beginning of World War I. So this was huge and it came out of nowhere and it terrified Americans. They thought we were going to go through a communist revolution. And they urged Hage to

get in there, send in troops, and start shooting people. Hays didn't agree with them. He thought that this was just a labor protest, and he did send in the troops, but he did not empower them to run the railroads or to start arresting people. It was just to sort of settle things down. So he wound up throwing cold water on this fire rather than gasoline. It allowed these workers to sort of vent their frustrations and make their demonstration, but not go too far. So after a couple of weeks, it just burned out as magically as quickly as it had appeared. And I think Hayes' wisdom and moderation deserve a lot of credit for that. Zach, my producer gave me several images to look at for a reference, the strike in 1877 strike and also the strikes and the labor strife in the

streets there. These are violent. Pictures are railroad cars burning up in the depot. Troops in the streets shooting at protesters. This is January 6 kind of stuff, but on a whole big scale. And people were seeing it in the periodicals of the times. They were aware of how bad things were, weren't they? Yeah, oh, definitely. Yeah, this is showing up in newspapers around the country. I think estimates are of at least 100 deaths, probably thousands injured, enormous amounts of property damage. There was a lot of arson and vandalism against businesses, railroads. There's incredible property destruction. So yeah, this was, this is January 6th. This is worse in January 6th stuff. And it was spread around the country. So people really thought that a revolution was

potentially at hand. What were their demands? What were the issues of that strike? They mostly wanted the same thing that labor has always wanted, higher wages, shorter working hours and better working additions with an emphasis on high, the high wage cuts really triggered it because it's the great depression or the, you know, the a great depression. And folks couldn't afford things. And they just, they wanted work. They wanted to be able to afford their food and for rent. Remember, there's no welfare at the time. There are no food stamps. Right. There's no Medicare or Medicaid. And we look back on that. We call it the Gilded Age, but that's with the perspective of history. At the time, how aware were they of the great amounts of money

that were being made around them? They were gradually becoming aware. We're seeing the buildup of these great fortunes in the 1870s. After Hayes, when we start getting at the 80s and certainly in the 1890, then you start getting these glorious mansions and fantastic wealth that the HBO series, the Gilded Age tends to focus on and that the sort of soap opera and garment there. So that's when you get these fantastic buildings. And they're still around the country in the Midwest and on the East Coast. You can see these old mansions and estates and they're just fantastic. Yeah, exactly.

There's an interesting element to this. You've already mentioned communism coming in. This is the time of Marx writing his books and angles and this new consciousness about society and how societies ought to function for the common man. This is a brand new idea that's becoming very scary to a lot of, certainly, capitalists. But there's another side of this. There's another element, too, which is the Catholicism of all these immigrants who are coming in. Scared that Dickens out of Puritan American, didn't it?

It did. And Hayes, who was generally a fair guy and didn't like to be a demagogue or play the fear button. He did play on fears of Catholic. because then people thought Catholics were loyal to the Pope, they weren't real Americans, and there was often Italians and Germans and other South Europeans. And so back then they weren't considered white in the way that English or Dutch or settlers from northern Germany were. So they were kind of seen as an alien race and Catholicism was part of that. And with the Catholicism came all sorts of festivals where there is wine and beer.

So we get this anti-alcohol, anti-Catholic movement. Hayes will use that to win election as governor because Catholics don't like learning, being taught Protestantism in their public schools. So there's going to be sort of a Catholic school movement. And Hayes will be on the other side of that saying, no, we're not going to have the Catholics teaching in the public schools or in the prisons. We're going to defend education as being secular, which at the time meant Protestantism. As we get further down the line, you'll get the anti-alcohol movement of which Lucy Hayes will be an enthusiastic participant. Interesting. But it also has to do with the creation of the labor movement, doesn't it?

The AFL, the American Federation of Labor, all of that comes out of the dynamics of this friction in a weird way. You're going to see the first labor movements begin to evolve during this period. And a lot of it does come from immigrants, especially from Germany, where there was a labor union tradition. they will bring these ideas and start organizing in places like New York and Chicago, and they will have some success. They will bring the tenets of Marxism with them and anarchism even, and those won't be as popular. So you'll get more traditional old stock, if I can use that term, Americans will develop their own labor unions and try and separate themselves off from the anarchists and the Marxists.

So the Americans will fear Marxists and anarchists, but they will remember. a small fringe movement, highly vocal, always grabbing the headlines, but always in reality pretty small and not that popular. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. It's really this one-term presidency, because he doesn't want a second term. He advertises that. Correct. Which I don't know why more presidents don't do that. They can always change their mind, but what an appealing thing to come into office and say, I'm not here for glory, I'm just here to fix the problems. You can always change it halfway through, but I never have. understand why they don't do that these days. But anyway, how does he turn the corner in all this

mess? We've got a labor crisis mixed with extreme depression. I just don't see how this turns around in such a short period of time. It turns around for a few reasons. One solution to the economic depression is all that wealth, untapped wealth in the American West. At the time, only around less than 3% of the U.S. population lived west or north of Nebraska. And the there was an incredible amount of agricultural land, mineral wealth, forests, the ocean life of the Pacific. All of this was undeveloped because they didn't yet have the infrastructure, the railroads, developing the land, building the farms to do so. And at the time, you had a lot of Native American tribes who've been driven west, and they now had

100 years of experience in dealing with white settlers, which did not turn out well for the Native Americans, and they ably and competently defended themselves with military actions. So the West had all this wealth, but it was not secure and it needed an investment. And Hayes did what he could to address that situation. He sent in the military to drive out mercilessly the Native American populations. He made war against the Nez Pierce. And he made it secure enough so that investors can invest in the first industrial farms in the United States, which were then called Bonanza Farms, which took place in what is now Minnesota in that territory. And for about a decade, these farms brought out in the latest technologies,

migrants to build the farms and ranches, telegraphs, railroad tracks. So you get these farms that were highly productive because back then you had a lot of family farms. These were massive farms on industrial scales using the latest techniques, tapped into railroads, bringing the grain into the major cities, who would be processed into flour, bringing down. down costs enormously. So bringing down the cost of food and sending exports into Europe were more productive and better prices that you would get over in Europe. And this brings a tremendous amount of wealth in the United States and helps bring the United States out of this

terrible Great Depression of the 1870s. It really is about developing the breadbasket, isn't it? Yeah. That's a major part of it. Yeah. Along with that comes the infrastructure of the canal systems, improved river transport, and then, of course, the growth of the shipping industry. All of this is about pumping out this American grain and cotton and all the rest of it. Right. And another thing that investors, both foreign and domestic were worried about is, okay, back then the most trusted currency was gold because you couldn't print it, you couldn't manufacture it, you had to dig it up, you could hold it, you could feel it.

And when you brought your gold to keep it in a bank, they would issue you a bank note. And the idea is you could take this paper note and bring it back to the bank and get the gold back. But during the Civil War, banks and the United States started printing all sorts of currency that at first had gold behind it, but after a while they just kept printing and printing it, there was nothing more than the word of the American government. So the U.S. dollar, the paper money, the Greenback, lost about 75% of its value during the Civil War. And people were very nervous about paper currency. And Grant said, okay, we're going to bring this paper currency back to parity with gold,

which is part of the reason that he refused to print money in response. of the 1873 panic. And so he leaves in a state when the US isn't a terrible depression, and one option is start printing more money, and the other option is to guide the dollar back to parity with gold, and Hayes continues the grant project, and in doing so, reassures investors that they will get paid back in dollars worth the same in gold as they initially invested. When you invest your money today, you want to get at least the same money back. If you lend me $100 at 3% interest, you want to get back dollars that have the same purchasing power that they had when you get.

So that was the idea back then. And there are differences now in the 21st century than back then. So we don't want to make parallels with the U.S. dollar in 1870 with the U.S. dollar in 2024, right? But what he did is in guiding the dollar back to parity with gold and in fighting the spread of silver, he kept the monetary supply steady. and he reassured investors that the U.S. was not going to print its way out of trouble because investors back then had a choice. Argentina, Chile, Australia, Canada, those are places that investors could go and possibly get competitive returns.

So Hayes reassured them that the U.S. was going to be a good place to put their money. He also cleaned up the government, didn't he? This was a major issue for him. The corruption within the federal government needed to be straightened out, and he did it. He started it. Coming out of the Grant administration, there were all sorts of terrible reputation for scandals, some real, some rumored that his enemies then blew out of proportion in order to delegitimize Grant. Grant never played a role in any of them, but still, this idea of corruption still hovered around.

And Hayes hated this corruption. He hated the spoil system, and he cracked down on it. He started the first investigations. He created something. called the J Commission to investigate infamously corrupt New York City Customs House run by a guy named Chester Arthur and eventually fired him. And at the time, the New York City's Customs House accounted for about 70% of the nation's customs revenues. That's a major source of federal revenues. And there was all sorts of skimming off the top and cheating and miscalculating. It was also a prime source of patronage slots and graft for the state Republican Party. And Hayes said, I'm going to clean up that customs house, and that's going to be a beachhead in which we can start

cleaning up others. And soon the J Commission started investigating corruption in the custom houses in Philadelphia, in New Orleans, in San Francisco. So Hay's strategy was to attack these high-profile cases of corruption in order to send a message, and he still allowed more general street-level practices because, hey, he wanted the Republican Party to still win elections, and a lot of its corruption was a tide to vote getting. So he didn't solve the problem, but he started the solution. He's going to leave office 1881. By the time he leaves, what's the economy looking like? Are these changes he's put into effect taking hold, or is this going to play out historically? Is it only looking back that we appreciate Hayes or were people's feelings about him at the time,

positive? They were positive at a time. A lot of folks urged him to run again, but Hayes was done with the presidency. It was popular during the 19th century. the 1800s to want a weak president. Today we want a strong president who stays in there for a long time and gets things done. Back then, people feared executive power. Remember, the United States was one of the few functioning democracies in the world, and a lot of people thought it was going to collapse back into some form of aristocracy or dictatorship. The Civil War was part of that. A lot of northerners thought the southern cotton plantation owners were trying to establish an aristocracy, and were using the wealth and power of cotton to do so, and they were fighting for all sorts of stuff in addition to the

elimination of slavery. Hayes was one of these. Every gilded age, almost every gilded age president looked at their presidency through the lens of the civil war, and they tended to want a healthy Congress and a weaker president and Hayes more so than others to the point that it said, president should only be in office one term, and he actually suggested term limits, a six-year term for the president. And he promised. he would only be a one-term president. He obeyed that promise, part of which because he was not enjoying the presidency. There was a lot of drama and ridiculousness and infighting, and he found it childish to a certain degree. And I think he said that he looked forward to the end of his presidency

in the way that a schoolboy looks forward to the end of the school year, like getting out on summer vacation. That's how I look at most Fridays. Is it fair to give him this credit? He has basically, as you're describing, it laid in the infrastructure of a new kind of economy that is able to handle the expansion that will inevitably come. We're talking about a nation that's really got huge resources, but you can only make money on those resources if you can transport them and purvey them efficiently. That's what's happened under Hayes, isn't it, both physically but also economically and financially? Right. So the economy, it starts tanking with a panic of 1873. It probably bottoms out in 1877. the year that Hayes comes into office. And it's called the year of violence,

because there's so much upheaval throughout the country and such economic destitution. I think the word tramp or hobo starts entering the English language is so much unemployment. But by the mid-1878, it starts recovering, and by the time Hayes' law office in 1881, we've got an economic boom on our hands. And it's these new, larger, more competitive, more efficient railroads,

these large, more efficient, productive bonanza farms. We see the beginnings of the California wine country and fruit orchards. We're beginning to see recovery even in parts of the south. So by creating the security in both physical security in the West by mercilessly driving out the Native Americans, the financial security by bringing the dollar back to parity with gold, he creates this environment and the infrastructure of the railroads knitting it together. this environment where American capitalism and industrialism can do its thing. So does he get single-handed credit?

No. But he was sort of a shepherd who guided the economy into tremendous productivity. And we see what happens when you get the opposite kind of leader, which is Chester Arthur, who will come to office in late 1881 after Garfield dies. And Garfield is a different kind. He didn't want the presidency. He didn't want to do the job, and he did as little of it as possible. That's not the podcast, but he is the opposite kind of leader, and you get the emergence

of corruptions and a new recession and eventually another financial crisis under Arthur, and Arthur basically is kind of a do-nothing. He does as little as possible, and you get America beginning, the economy being in the sink again under that kind of leadership. But it's telling we've had a conversation that's all about the economy because that time was all about the economy. And thus, the nation is distracted from all those issues that the Civil War was fought over and which are still very much present on the American landscape. And we'll all sort of brew and boil beneath the surface for the next many decades to come.

I suppose Hayes really doesn't get the credit for all of the good that he did because he didn't go for a second term. I have a feeling if there was a second term, we'd be talking about the Hayes presidency as one of the great times of America. It's possible. Hayes was not a lot, none of the Gilded Age presidents were big sales. promoters. So a lot of them were amazing men who did heroic, fantastic things both before and during their presidencies. But they didn't self-promote. This is a time when the president was expected to stay quiet. There was not great relations with the press. The press was very tabloid at the time. And there was still this ethos of Congress leads to the country. The president is

supposed to administrate. And if the president is going to start advocating for a policy agenda, then he does so in writing, and he does so to Congress, usually in his annual message, what we call the State of the Union, which was then submitted in writing and read into the congressional record by the clerk. When the president went out in the public, most presidents at the Gilded Age, and even before, didn't talk about policy. They would talk generally about prosperity and patriotism and national pride and greatness. Even Lincoln did not campaign in his own election and rarely ever talk to the public about policy. Foreign policy was a different animal. Foreign policy was by all rights and tradition, the purview of the president, but under Hayes,

there wasn't a whole lot of foreign policy to deal with. There were some bandits coming in from Mexico, which affected concerns about security there, and there Hayes sat in the military and got those stamped down, and he settled relations with Mexico, and that provided some growth opportunities for the Southwest. But other than that, there's not a whole lot going on in foreign policy that would elevate a present to greatness in the same way that Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson got elevated. Sure. Well, those are the nation states forming over there, and that's another age to come. Mark Zachary Taylor, you can find him at the Georgia Institute of Technology, studying economic competitiveness and public policy. I want to remind listeners of his authorship of presidential

leadership in feeble times, explaining executive power in the Gilded published last year. Fascinating Reed. Thank you so much, Zach. I really appreciate being on the show. I hope we meet again. Thank you very much. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our show are on and while you're at it share it with a friend American history hit with me

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