CW Goodyear

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to Country Over Self, defining moments in American history. Each episode we welcome a notable historian to tell us the story of a president and a choice that president made to strengthen the country without regard to the impact of that decision on himself, his power, or his party.

Welcome to Country Over Self, Defining Moments in American History. I'm your host, Matt Blumberg, and I'm here today with Charlie Goodyear, who is an author and historian based in Washington, D. C. Charlie was born in New Orleans and grew up abroad before graduating from Yale University. His latest work is President Garfield from Radical to Unifier, a critically acclaimed biography of America's 20th president, which I just finished last week, and it's an excellent book. Charlie, welcome to Country Over Self. 

Charlie Goodyear: Thanks, Matt. It's a pleasure to be here. 

Matt Blumberg: So as this show is all about storytelling and about deep dives into vignettes or moments in the life of a president where that president made a choice or a series of choices that reflected a desire to strengthen the country. Either at the expense of or at least without regard to the potential impact on his own stature or role or power. and in my view, the accumulation of these moments is one of the hallmarks of our success as a nation for nearly 250 years now. so today we're here to talk about James A. Garfield.

And I know for many people who are not history nerds, and I count myself, on that, list. Garfield is sort of one of those in a long list of kind of bewhiskered, largely one term presidents from the post Civil War era that kind of blur together. 

Charlie Goodyear: Yes. Yes. It's funny how all these Gilded Age presidents, they all clearly put so much effort into cultivating this distinguished facial hair.

The result being that you can't tell any of them apart. Yeah. This is a wasted effort on these guys parts. 

Matt Blumberg: It is. and what's interesting about Garfield as president is that he was actually president for a little over six months. he was, shot and then he kind of died a lingering death for a couple of those months. So he was really only kind of an active president for three or four months. But I've always felt and I know you agree that there's a lot more to Garfield than meets the eye, even in his short tenure as president. So, is there a particular story we want to dive in on today? Like what's the headline?

Charlie Goodyear: There is actually in the moment. So Garfield's life was described as being one of the most. incredible rags to riches stories of American history in general. but his political, his peculiar political brand was he was a very selfless politician. He was a unique consensus builder in an increasingly politically polarized time.

And his presidency reflected that. And the moment that he defiantly chose country over self and in a most mortal way, he really did. It was when he decided to appoint a man named William Robertson to a position that I'm sure all of your listeners know, the customs collector of the port of New York. When Garfield did that, he was trying to broker peace within his party.

And the result of it actually was when you're talking about country over self, that decision ultimately led to his assassination and the end of not only his presidency, but his life. And I can't think of a more, defiantly selfless. I mean, of course he didn't know that was going to happen, but if you're looking at hindsight, That's pretty hard to beat. I'd argue. 

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. So, so let's start with sort of the context around this. What were the circumstances on the ground? I think, there's so much that, you people might remember from a history class in high school about machine politics and the spoil system, but what, was the world that Garfield was operating in as a newly elected president?

Charlie Goodyear: Yeah, no, it's a very good question. So I'm sure your listeners are familiar with the term to the victors go the spoils. That's actually a phrase that comes from this period of American politics. and it's a reflection of what you just mentioned in your question, something that was called the spoils system.

So in modern America, we're used to thinking of our federal bureaucrats, our tax collectors, our DMV agents, our, department of the interior clerks, all those things. We're used to those. bureaucrats being professional appointees, professional civil servants who have to go through competitive exams and a competitive hiring process and who are very strictly regulated in their conduct and where they can take their salaries from and all those things.

That is actually a pretty unusual thing in the context of larger American history. For a lot of our nation's early history, including during Garfield's time, most jobs in the federal government, or at least a hefty, majority of them, were the result, not of competitive examination, but political appointment.

If you were a supporter of your local congressman, if you were a prominent, hustler for his votes or a donor of his, you were pretty much entitled to pick whatever job in the federal government that congressman had in his power to award you. And so what you had, especially in the aftermath of the Civil War, you had this explosion of, cronyism in the federal government where you would create what were called political machines where, you know, local, ward bosses and, councilman and things like that, they would, they would vote in favor of their local politician.

He would reward them with places on the public payroll. Those people would then often embezzle money from the government and then use that to fund their patrons election again. And it spins on and on in this cycle. And that's where the term machine came from. 

Matt Blumberg: Right. And it's just so different from today. I mean, obviously there are critical appointed positions today, but it's something like 1 percent or 2 percent of the federal payroll. And by and large, they're not in those jobs to embezzle money. 

Charlie Goodyear: There are elements of it. And what I mean by that is if you support the right horse, you get, for example, an ambassadorship to, I don't know, Lithuania or something like that, not to disparage Lithuania, but, It's it was a vastly different system and it was, we talk about corrupt politics today. we have nothing on the Gilded Age in terms of what went and what was the norm of political behavior and literally self enrichment. So the context that this relates to Garfield, Garfield was when he was the presidential candidate in 1880, a job he did not really want, by the way. He had to broker peace in his party between these different factions, some of which wanted these machines.

They wanted, high paying jobs on the public payroll to give to their cronies. But there were other factions of the Republican Party that wanted clean government. That wanted clean government reform, and they wanted norms of behavior in office, and they wanted to put control of the federal bureaucracy beyond the power of a political party.

A good thing, right? Garfield was, as I said before, he was a great compromiser of his time. He knew in order to, get elected in order to get the Republican Party in power, he needed to be a lot more open minded to these corrupt elements of his party than his predecessor, Rutherford Hayes was. So in the election campaign of 1880 he was essentially forced to make a series of deals with the Stouart's were the corrupt faction of the Republican Party and they basically said, this is actually a verbatim quote from one of the Stouart's who Garfield had to bargain with one of the Stouart's told Garfield, we cannot afford to do all the work and let another Republican reap all the rewards, they're literally bending the presidential candidate over a barrel and saying, look, Okay.

we elect you, you better give us top line in terms of like, control of the Treasury Department, control of the Navy, control of the post offices. And Garfield, he has to say yes, and he believes, by the way, that this is a necessary part of running for office. So he goes along with it. 

Matt Blumberg: It's not unlike, Lincoln. Putting together the famous team of rivals, right? 

Charlie Goodyear: And Lincoln was no stranger to using patronage in the spoil system either. that was just part and parcel of the day. 

Matt Blumberg: So, talk about the, particular job here, the New York, customs collector, which sounds today like it doesn't even. It doesn't exist. 

Charlie Goodyear: Yeah, no, it's a very, so, of all of the patronage jobs that a president had in his power to award, perhaps the most lucrative one was the customs collector of the port of New York. it was a job that gave its occupant access to tremendous amounts of money, and this is this kind of shows you the necessity of political civil service reform in that time and also how corrupt the system was the and also how appealing this job was, by the way, the occupant of the customs collectorship of New York he was personally entitled for a very long time to until 1874, actually, to take a personal cut of whatever taxes or fees were imposed on imports coming into the port of New York. 

Matt Blumberg: This is the biggest, port in the country. 

Charlie Goodyear: Biggest port on the continent, not just the country, the continent.

Matt Blumberg: Right. This is before, any other form of transportation. So everything's coming in on ships. And whoever happened to, get that job was skimming off the top and it was publicly accepted. 

Charlie Goodyear: Exactly. And you can imagine, Let's say you're a political boss. Let's say you're a political boss in New York city. If you had the power to award that job, if you had that in your machine, you were a top dog. You had more money than anybody else. You had access to other collect other customs like, clerk jobs. You could award that to whoever you wanted. It was just a tremendous currency, for a political boss to have.

And interestingly enough. Garfield's vice president, Chester Arthur, had used to be the customs collector of the port of New York. It had made him, he'd actually, in, in that job, Chester Arthur had been the highest paid public servant in America. He was more, he was more highly paid than the president. That's how nice it was to be the customs collector of New York. 

Matt Blumberg: And who was the, the machine party boss in New York? It's Roscoe Conkling. 

Charlie Goodyear: Roscoe Conkling, one of the most flamboyant and Charming and brutal political bosses of American history. He was the senator from the state of New York, and he wasessentially the de facto head of the Stalwart wing of the Republican Party.

And his nickname, by the way, was Lord Roscoe. And they call them that because of not just how well dressed he was, but also how, how powerful he genuinely was. So when Garfield was trying to make these deals in his administration and his campaign, who was he dealing with? Who was he negotiating to?

It was essentially Roscoe Conkling. And Chester Arthur, Garfield's vice president, was a crony of Conkling's. Garfield had appointed Chester Arthur to be his vice president, his, running mate, because. Garfield knew that would be a good way to get Conkling's good graces. 

Matt Blumberg: Right. And what's interesting, Conkling wasn't, he was only barely an elected official, right? This was before the, whichever amendment, the 20, 20th amendment or 22nd amendment. So this is when senators were appointed by the state, essentially the state party apparatus. 

Charlie Goodyear: Yeah, exactly. they were appointed by, the vote of the legislature. So, he was lordly in more ways than one. He really didn't need to worry too much about the will of the common man, which is funny. 

Matt Blumberg: Is there any equivalent of Conkling in today's political environment? Even if you sort of had to say, Oh, it's, Nancy Pelosi plus Barack Obama. Plus, is there any equivalent or is it just, that's just a relic?

Charlie Goodyear: I think it's generally a relic. You will find it locally on a few state based systems generally. but for the most part, I think that those times are quite behind us. You do have, people who are wielding a tremendous amount of money for example. But they typically are not the ones who, they're working through PACs and things like that.

They're very subtle. Conkling held the office himself and he was also somebody who, money was an important part of his operation, but it was also, he was, he was in many ways, he was a Senator's Senator. He was somebody who really believed in the institution as well. So there's not really quite a one to one, I'd argue.

But the crux of his disagreement with garfield when Garfield became president was Conkling was all of a sudden very upset that Garfield was not giving the Stalwarts, giving Roscoe Conkling command of enough government jobs. So Conkling was on the verge at one point of, breaking with the administration and, he and Garfield ends up deciding to give Conkling's cronies control of a lot of New York.

Garfield appointed a lot of Conkling's underlings. He made them district attorneys and federal marshals. throughout the state of New York. Right. And that was quite early in his administration. When Garfield did that, when he decided to give Conklin kind of an olive branch, the Republican party, the other wing of the Republican party started to really, get up in a firmament, get very angry with Garfield.

And so he decided with the help of his secretary of state, James Blaine, In the middle of the night, they, essentially plan for a way to, balance things out to, to move to, to, to having given Conkling something Garfield then decided there was a need to give an olive branch to another part of the party.

And that was when Garfield decided to award the customs collectorship of New York to a man named William Robertson. And, that, as I said before, That was the, in some ways, the beginning of the end of peace in the Republican Party, and then also indirectly, Garfield's life. 

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. So, so it sounds relatively small, right?

Hey, the president's balancing factions. He's given a job. He was given a job there. it's hard, I think, to appreciate how impactful that decision was. so let's talk about that impact on history a little bit, maybe start with Conkling's reaction. 

Charlie Goodyear: Yes. It was immediate fury, to be honest. And again, to put this in context, Garfield's decision to, rather than cave into the bosses, to try to balance things out by giving this customs collectorship away, what he was essentially doing, he was taking the most valuable job that would be available not just to, himself, but also to any political boss in New York.

He was taking that away from the most powerful politician in New York. And in doing so, he actually was, from Conkling's perspective, Conkling's entire machine was in jeopardy as soon as Garfield decided to take this job away from Conkling. And the reason was because, if in a spoils based system where political machines are entire, like the, election of a candidate is entirely based on how they're able to literally financially reward their followers.

If you take the most important job that's available to be awarded away from the boss of that state, you're basically casting doubt on their ability to award any of it to anybody. And, so from Conkling's perspective, when this new appointment was read out in the Senate, this was, as I write in the book, it was a knife thrust at the heart of his machine.

it was, an existential threat to his ability to hold on to his power. And also to keep New York in the hands of the Republicans because it was a battleground state, democratic and Republican factions. they fought over New York all the time in those days 

Matt Blumberg: and it was arguably the most important state.

Charlie Goodyear: Yeah, it was a swing state. It was actually, it was one of two major swing states in the election of 1880. The other one being Indiana of all things times have really changed . By the way, New York and Indiana is major swing states. Good lord. 

Matt Blumberg: So do you have, evidence or at least a belief that Garfield understood just what he was doing. Did he know he was thrusting a knife into the heart of the machine? 

Charlie Goodyear: I think he did. I believe he did. he was very pleased with himself after he made the appointment. He's, and I can't remember the exact quote in his diary, but he writes something to the extent of, something along the lines of, Gosh, what did he write?

This classifies me determined not to be a friend of one faction in particular. I made a decision, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So he really thought that he was doing what he from a party, a national party perspective to be a fair thing. And in the aftermath, by the way, so we're skipping ahead a little bit, but Conkling decides to use this whole , because this appointment, by the way, needs to be confirmed in the Senate. So this is a Senate confirmed role. So, immediately you have the showdown between Conkling and the president. Conkling announces that he's going to try to block Robertson's appointment and Garfield writes in his diary, and he repeats this by the way, to many other people at this time. And this kind of shows you how important this battle was.

He writes, this will be a test that will settle once and for all, whether the president is the registering clerk of the Senate or the executive of the nation Garfield realizes he's like, okay, well, this is really, these Senate bosses, these corrupt politicians, they think they can dictate terms to the president rightfully elected by the people, I don't think so.

let's take this on. So what becomes this factional patronage battle in theory, and this attempt by Garfield to balance the factions, instead, it becomes this much, much bigger deal that settles, who is really in charge of the nation? Is it the executive branch, or is it, the Senate, basically, and machine machines, right?

Exactly. And, it would have been to go back to the theme of this podcast, it would have been perhaps a more politically expedient move in some ways, if Garfield had just gone along with this Conkling appointment, it would have made the other factions very upset, Hypothetically, he could have handled it.

but his decision to listen to the alternate viewpoint and then to take action against, the bosses that was, that was a risky play and it, played out in this giant fight. The Stalwarts announced that they were going to, block the president's attempts to, they basically started this massive internecine battle within the Republican Party, and it became literally very explosive.

What happened to Conkling? That's, that's a great story. 

Yeah. so, so this becomes the defining fight of the administration. For a couple months, there is the standoff between the Senate and the White House. There are peacemaking senators attempting to broker a deal between the sides. It doesn't work.

And eventually what happens is, in frustration, and this is at the suggestion of the other Senator from New York, Tom Platt, who's also a Stalwart, Conkling, decides that he and Platt are going to quit their Senate seats. They're going to resign in protest of the President's, heinous decision to, defy them.

And, And, they had, I tell you, it was a lot of people be confused by this over the years. What I think essentially they were expecting, what I think they were expecting was, I think the Stalwarts realized that this confirmation was going to go through. There was nothing they could do about it.

So their best bet would be to quit their seats, go back to New York. and while they're being reelected to the Senate, that appointment would then go through. That Robertson thing would happen. They wouldn't have to be there for that, 

Matt Blumberg: but their expectation was that they were going to quit in a huff and that Albany was going to say, no, we're sending you right back. 

Yes. 

Charlie Goodyear: They expected to be reelected to their seats. And they thought that like they, they thought they were making this grand protest on behalf of their rights as senators and for the stout machine. And so what they thought was going to happen is they were going to quit.

They were going to go home. The, nomination would go through and then the new, their New York supporters would be like, Oh, how could the president do this to you? we're going to do we're in our, in a show of our support. We're going to send you right back into his face. And that'll really show him what's going on.

And, that was a harebrained decision. I don't know what they were thinking. because what ends up happening is these Stouart's in protest of this one appointment, they quit their seats and everybody goes. What the hell are you doing? Like, are you kidding me? How spoiled are you? they get not, they don't, they're, not, they, what they think is this dignified protest on behalf of senatorial rights.

It instead becomes, this clearly very childish tantrum. That's how everybody interprets it. And so they go home and, everybody laughs at them from Washington all the way up to Albany. The appointment goes through and Garfield has won this very important battle of presidential prerogatives against the odds, by the way, because this is a fight he didn't want to have.

Again, his decision was to just, give an olive branch to the other side of the party in response. The Stourts have a meltdown and Garfield has to spend a lot of his political capital to win this fight. Now, this leads on it. You're, asking earlier about the consequences. So first of all, they don't get set back.

They don't get set back. That's right. Sorry. They elect, new senators. They do. They do who are more friendly to the administration. Right. And it's kind of the end of Conkling, right? It is, yes, in many ways. It's, he, what happens to Conkling is he basically, and we're skipping ahead a little bit, he finds himself exiled, not just by Garfield, but also by Garfield's successor, Chester Arthur.

Conkling, who had once been, who, and who remains one of the defining senators of the Gilded Age, at least the early Gilded Age, he ends up just becoming a regular attorney in New York. he dies actually very interestingly. He dies, in, in the aftermath of a blizzard in New York City. He, catches some kind of cold and, people think that's what killed him, although his relatives dispute that, but it's a very, it's, an almost Shakespearean demonstration of the, dangers of political hubris, which I think.

Some people have listened to it over the years, and other people have not. Right. Yeah, 

Matt Blumberg: in a lot of ways. Well, so let's talk about, sort of the end of Garfield then. And what this moment, may or may not have had to do with that. 

Charlie Goodyear: Yes, so what happens is, in the aftermath of this big fight between the Stalwarts, Conkling, and Garfield, one of a man who was both mentally ill and who identified as a stalwart get who had been trying to get a job in the administration because he believed in the spoil system and this man had failed to get a job in the administration. He decides in the aftermath of this fight, well, if I. If I kill the president, then the new president, Chester Arthur, who was a stout, will be so grateful to me, the assassin, he'll give me whatever job in government I want.

So, and that's, he, it's an unpredictable, talk about a chaos element in politics. He stalks Garfield to a train station and, shoots him in the back. And Garfield dies very slowly. He dies not of the wound. He rather dies of the infection that develops in him over the course of the next three months.

And what does this do? It makes him a martyr for clean government, for civil service reform. Garfield had tried to, he, he, in life, he had been somebody who was more likely to meet the bosses halfway than he was to be a Puritan fighter of theirs. but in the aftermath of his death, in the context of it, he was made into an icon.

Of civil service reform and as a result of Garfield's martyrdom, you have in 1883, I believe the first comprehensive civil service reform passages, the first really comprehensive ones, the Pendleton civil service reform act go through. And all of a sudden we start to have our federal bureaucracy become apolitical.

Beyond political control, and I think you could argue that you can draw that decision all the way back to the Robertson appointment, which this, this episode, this podcast has been about and the yields, by the way, on that, the reason if you go to your DMV and your level of service doesn't depend on your party affiliation.

That's because of what happened to Garfield. That's because of this Robertson appointment. God knows how many years ago. So the savings on that in both the literal sense, and then just in terms of the, just the, fruit, the benefits of the intangible benefits on all Americans, it's, incalculable.

It's really a fantastic example of again, country over self in a lot of ways. 

Matt Blumberg: I mean, there's so many interesting things about the aftermath. One is that Arthur was the one that signed that. Right. A creature of machine politics. Right. Right. and the other, quite frankly is that, Garfield.

Garfield died partly because he was shot, but partly because of the state of medicine at the time. Right. Lincoln was gonna die even if he had gotten shot in the head today. Kennedy. Right, right. Kennedy the same thing. Probably McKinley the same thing. Garfield would have lived. if he had been shot, even 20, 30 years later, 

Charlie Goodyear: yes, there have been these, there have been a couple of great books written about that.

Ira Rutkow wrote a great book about that. Candace Millard wrote a very good book about that. And it's true because his, his treatment was medieval in many ways. His doctors didn't really believe in germ theory. They, were rooted in traditional views of infection being more of a, Like a metaphysical illness rather than a really, truly physical one.

So they were, he was shot. He was lying on the, floor in the, the train station in, in, DC after being shot by this assassin and the doctors who arrived on the scene, they were burrowing into his back with unwashed fingers. They're trying to find where that bullet had gone. And, they're just swabbing their face.

They're just seeding him with infection. And it may be one of the most graphic and ugly ways the president has ever really gone. 

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. 

Charlie Goodyear: but it's, really tough stuff to read, tougher stuff to write about, I assure you. 

Matt Blumberg: well, that is a great story. Well told. I'd like to, move now to a few rapid fire questions before we wrap things up.

So today we talked about Garfield. what's your favorite example of another president choosing country over self? You don't have to tell the whole story, but what, if you had, If you had to be on the show a second time, what would you tell him? 

Charlie Goodyear: Yeah, I, I'm a sucker for George H.W. Bush, actually. And there was a moment, I don't remember the specifics, unfortunately, but he basically played a key role in giving the go ahead for a compromise budget deal during his administration. That was brokered in the Senate and read my lips. no, exactly. And his decision to, let that go through.

And it was a, an incredible, piece of bipartisanship that I think really would have been very good for the country, but it, but his approval of that went against his campaign promise to the partisans of read my lips, no new taxes. And, as Alan Simpson, who was one of the senators who brokered that deal once said, And his own party turned on him.

It played, and I'm not the only one to argue this, but it played a key role in making sure that George H. W. Bush was not a two term president and said he became maybe the most effective one term president our nation has ever had. Now, of course, that, I don't think, it truly was a country over self moment, but it led to a 

Matt Blumberg: balanced budget under Clinton, 

Charlie Goodyear: right?

Right. Exactly. Inherited a 

Matt Blumberg: smart decision. So hopefully 

Charlie Goodyear: he very much deliberately. he knew it was going to be, as he put it at the time, a punch in the gut. And, I don't know if he knew how big of a punch, but it really, especially these days, it really stands as one of those moments of it.

Would this be possible today? Do we have somebody with that character at the very top? 

Matt Blumberg: Well, hopefully we'll have, a Bush specialist on another episode to talk to him because he's on my list as well. So good. Right. Second rapid fire question. what's a poignant example you can think of, of the opposite.

so a president who chose self over country. 

Charlie Goodyear: I think a good example of this action, this kind of shows you why choosing self over country is actually Rarely a case of self over country. I think Nixon in Watergate is a very good example. Yeah, it was his attempt to stack the deck in his favor Nixon, by the way, I think might be And this also is something other people have said he might have been our most shakespearean president A lot of ways.

he certainly talk about it, certain talk on the tragedy scale, big tragedy scale. Yeah. Like King Lear almost. In terms of somebody who, if you look at his inner life and some of the battles he had fought in the past, somebody who had good noble intentions and then just ended up. In many ways, a villain, he, his, what, happened with Watergate was his attempt to put self over country to, play dirty tricks and, stack the election in his favor.

And it ended up redounding, not just to the down, not just to the downside of our country, but also to the downfall of Nixon himself, his attempt to play self over country resulted in. the worst possible outcome for himself. He ruined his legacy. and I, you might argue though, actually, by trying to play self over country and then being exposed and doing so, the country benefited from having him as an example of.

You know what not to do, that's our benchmark, right for presidential misconduct. It's Watergate. You can't have a scandal these days without putting gate at the end of it. So, so maybe that is actually a case of public, utility. 

Matt Blumberg: Okay, next question. as we sit here in, sort of the summer of 2024, president Biden's withdrawal from the race.

it was sort of heralded as an act of choosing country over self But i'm curious for your take as a historian as to whether history will view it that way Will history view it that way? or will history sort of look at the backdrop of saying like He never should have been in the race to begin with he was 81 years old People had been talking about how he was too old for years Only when his back was to the wall and he felt like he was in jeopardy of losing the party or losing support or losing the race.

Did he drop out? So, I guess the question is how do you think history will view that decision? 

Charlie Goodyear: Yeah, I think one it will probably depend on the outcome, but that's only part of the answer Really? I think the broader answer and this is true by the way of any Part of history, only time will tell.

And when I say time, I'm not talking about 4 years, 8 years, 12 years. I'm talking about maybe 50 or 60. That's when these things become clear in hindsight with anybody's decision. take, for example, Lyndon Johnson's decision to not. And that's probably the nearest comparison we really have for what's happening right now.

Johnson, an incredibly acquisitive politician. Somebody for whom, who might have been literally the most personally ambitious person in American presidential history. What did it take for that guy to, smell the wind and decide that he didn't want to throw his hat in the ring one more time. it was Vietnam.

That was his decision. And, what are the consequences of what happened after that? the scope of American history changed. It enabled, Nixon to take, control, in, in many ways. So how do we now view Lyndon Johnson's decision to, to step out of the limelight? it took a while for us to really have a clear beat on it.

And I'd argue, we're still not really sure what to think of Lyndon Johnson in many ways. Bob Caro is, still after 50 years, he's not stopping. It's amazing. and, I don't know if you've ever, by the way, I don't know, this is a kind of a tangent. I don't know if you've ever seen photos of the old Lyndon Johnson when he was retired at his ranch.

Dude looks, he, he looks wrecked. He's got long hippie hair. He's smoking again. He's eating badly, so, so this is a bit of a, run around, but I'd say, we're not really going to be able to tell with anything happening these days. and by the time that we're by the time that. Yeah.

We were able to view the events of today in the context of our larger arc. Society is going to be focused on some whole new crisis. There's going to be something else that we're paying attention to that we can't even really look back on. So it's funny how that works. 

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Final question for you.

A lot of people think our politics are so dysfunctional today, whether you point to gerrymandering, partisan gridlock, money in politics, the fact that campaigns seem to go on forever. and as far as I know, there's only been one really You know, even moderately serious proposal to amend the constitution, which is a short book written by, John Paul Stevens, a former Supreme Court justice, called Six Amendments.

So my question for you is knowing everything you know about our history, about our system of government, if you could wave a magic wand and you could make one or maybe two changes to our system and we have a magic wand here. So whether or not they require a constitutional amendment, what would they be and why?

Charlie Goodyear: I think if I could wave a wand, and this is also not an original idea, I think it would be interesting to bring back a national service system, that has a like the kind of, I don't want to say universal, but that would have some kind of significant appeal to graduating high school seniors. If you could get 30 to 40 percent of graduating high school seniors to take kind of the equivalent of a service oriented gap year in our nation.

I know that's not exactly a political reform, but, it would be nationwide. It was, so I'm, kind of including it in my answer. I think if you were able to have that kind of thing, you would have an element of common national experience that would allow different types of Americans to break out of their filter bubbles and, would give them exposure to other ways of life, other parts of America.

And I think that would go a very, long way to solving some of the base causes of political polarization. If you were able to physically break up, the ability of Americans to isolate themselves from one another. I think that would be a very important step. a lot of people have talked about that.

Some of whom I greatly look up to. There are reasons why no one wants to do that. it's not exactly a politically popular move to go out to the people and say, Hey, take a year off your lives. 

Matt Blumberg: yeah, although I think the way you framed it is right, which is, make it appealing, don't make it compulsory, right?

This isn't Israel where you have to join the IDF, but make, it appealing. So I think in the spirit of this show, that is a great note to end on. All right. Charlie Goodyear. historian, author of President Garfield from Radical to Unifier. Thank you very much for joining me today. Oh, thanks so much, man.

I appreciate it. Thank you for listening to the Country Over Self podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute to give us five stars and leave us a review. If you have an idea for an episode or want to reach Matt directly, please email podcast at countryoverself.com.