Troy Senik

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 Troy Senik. Troy is a former White House speechwriter. He's the co-founder of Kite Key, which is a nonprofit digital media company dedicated to making public policy research accessible to the public.

He is also a former Jeopardy! champion, which I may have to get into here at some point. Troy is the author of A Man of Iron, The Turbulent Life, and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland, which he published a couple years ago. Troy, welcome to Country Over Self. Thank you very much, Matt.

Delighted to be with you. So today we want to talk about our 22nd and also 24th president, Grover Cleveland. And I would venture to guess that to the extent that most Americans know anything about Cleveland is that he's the only president to serve two non contiguous terms. which, sort of this like asterisk you learn in elementary school, although it's echoing obviously very broadly at the moment in the 2024 campaign, because we might end up with the second one of those, in Donald Trump.

but there's just a lot more to Cleveland. There's a lot more depth than most people realize. first, he was the only Democrat elected president between the Civil War and World War I. So between James Buchanan and Woodrow Wilson, 72 years that had nine Republican administrations. he's one of only three presidents to win the popular vote three times along with FDR and Jackson.

he's one of only 14 presidents to serve a full eight years in office. And he worked on, I would say many more domestic issues than, foreign issues, civil service reform, Native American land reform. The Chinese exclusion act, which maybe we'll talk about in a couple minutes. and, interesting little footnote.

He was the president who accepted the Statue of Liberty as a gift from France. so Troy, no one in the world better to dive into Grover Cleveland's life with you on the topic of country over self. and unlike a lot of the episodes I'm doing, I don't want to pick one vignette. I'd rather just focus on the theme, and sort of several incidents from, from Cleveland.

I think to start, one of the things, I think you say in the book directly is that Cleveland had a superhuman level of moral courage, sort of up there with Lincoln and Washington, and that, you go on to say, interestingly, he may be remembered so poorly because of that. So tell me more about that thinking.

Troy Senik: Yeah, what I mean by that is. We should have set the stage for who Grover Cleveland was. So as you say, he's the only Democrat who becomes president this window post civil war, and it's probably important for the listeners and the viewers to understand that he is also the last. of the sort of Jeffersonian Democrats.

He is what we would today call a classical liberal, which in many ways looks more like almost a Reagan era conservative. This is somebody who has a very primped view of what federal power should look like. This is somebody who wants a very sort of laissez faire, hands off approach to the economy. This is somebody who regards himself as a defender of the Constitution and somebody who doesn't want to overstep any of the boundaries.

These are the important principles that are animating him. And the reason that I say that he has this level of moral courage is you have a guy who over the course of these Eight years broken up into two blocks of four. The data service is present. Who is constantly doing things that a more calculating, more ear to the ground politician would not have done.

He is constantly making stands on. Principle, even when they are to his political disadvantage, I might even say, especially when they're to his political disadvantage, because he clearly gets a thrill out of this. And there is a feeling of, I don't want to call it moral superiority because I actually think that's gilding it a little too much, but he clearly has confidence in his own ability to judge what is right and what is right for the country as a whole.

And this gets him into lots and lots of political trouble. There's a reason that I say that he is the last of the Jeffersonian Democrats because he kind of spoils the Jeffersonian Democrat brand forever within the party. And I don't say that to indicate that he is solely responsible for it going away.

Those currents were already swirling in the Democratic Party at that time. There is the Democratic Party of Cleveland's era is not entirely different from the Republican Party of today in that it's undergoing this transition from being a more limited government classical liberal party to being a more activist.

populist party and Cleveland in his first term is trying to hold that off by the time you get to the end of his second term I mean he has succeeded as the democratic party's presidential nominee by william james bryan who is in many ways his sort of metaphysical opposite right and that Transition is complete the cleveland brand of the democratic party goes away And to the extent that it ever re emerges it re emerges starting in like the 1920s You In the Republican party and a lot of it is that he just stuck his chin out on all of these issues 

Matt Blumberg: What's interesting about that transition to William Jennings Brian is Cleveland was the nominee three times in a row And then brian was the nominee three out of four times in a row, right?

So it really went from sort of a hard Cleveland in one direction to you know hard, populism in the other direction That's right. So let's talk about, sort of that context, in terms of some of the highlights of his presidency. So one of the first things that I noted in Cleveland's first term, is that he vetoed more pieces of legislation in his first term.

Then all 21 presidents before him combined. Most of those, I think we're sort of single purpose pieces of legislation, around pensions to civil war union veterans, but you know, there's still, just the volume of them, like using the pen that many times, is noteworthy. So I'd love to, sort of have you dive into that for a minute, did that, was there a political price he paid for that? What was going on there? 

Troy Senik: Yes, there was. There's some, important context around here. We learned a couple of important things about Cleveland from him. One is his conception of the presidency, his conception of executive power and executive responsibility, which is very much in terms of how we think about the office today.

It's very much negative. It's stopping bad things from happening. It's not proactively laying out a vision or an agenda. So the veto is his favorite tool as president of the United States. And as you say, the vast majority of these vetoes that he's piling up are for these pension benefits or union veterans, which themes.

Like a pretty marginal issue for the president to be disconsumed by, but there's some important context for it. So one is that at the time, these pensions were the second largest federal expenditure. This is actually a fairly serious consideration in terms of the nation's financing. Also, some people know this story when you get beyond the two non consecutive terms, this tends to be the thing that people know, the mountain of vetoes.

What I don't think they know oftentimes because there's this sort of image of Cleveland, this kind of miserly penny pension figure that comes out of this, is that he actually approved way more of these pensions than he approved about 90 percent of them, which actually gets you to the nub of what's going on here.

There had been a massive expansion. In the payout of these pensions, because the legislation had been changed, excuse me, legislation had been passed to change the system so that you can make retroactive claims. So basically, if you were eligible and hadn't filed, and then you were granted the pension, you would get in arrears all those years.

that you had missed. And this opened up the system to a mountain of fraud. A lot of these cases were clearly not legitimate. The people who were applying were counting on the fact that the federal government would not put in the work to figure out that they were not legitimate. And if you know anything about Grover Cleveland, who is a really fastidious lawyer prior to being president of the United States, this is right in his wheelhouse.

Auditing applications, but it's a great afternoon for Grover Cleveland. So what's really at stake here, part of it is his fiscal conservatism, right? Part of it is not wanting to see taxpayer money spent without justification, which is a theme that he is obsessed by and runs throughout his entire career.

But he actually regards there as being an important moral principle at work, which is that it is per se illegitimate to have these pension rolls, which are supposed to be a tribute to men who took the highest risk on behalf of their country, excuse me, during the Civil War, to have that polluted by people who are just trying to game the system, who are just trying to make a quick buck.

This is actually at the center of his conception of why this is so important. We have these men who made this sacrifice for the country. The idea of polluting this pot of money could be offensive to anybody as a matter of patriotism. So that's really why this is such a central focus for him. 

Matt Blumberg: And with these vetoes, did they, do any damage to him politically?

Troy Senik: I mean, I'm sorry, I left out that question. 

Matt Blumberg: It feels like, reading what I've read that these were kind of like the equivalent of the modern day earmark or pork barrel. 

Troy Senik: They're very similar, especially down to the point that rather than passing one sweeping package that makes people eligible for these at the time.

They would be passed individually. That's why there's so many vetoes. Yes, he did pay a price for it, and this is a good example of where his idealism bled into a sort of naivete. He thought, because of the rationale I just gave you, Well, veterans will appreciate this more than anybody because I'm trying to protect the integrity of veterans.

That is not how it happened. And the reason that is not how it happened was because in this era, probably the most single, most powerful interest group in America was an organization called the Grand Army of the Republic, which was the veterans organization for. Union vets and they had matured over time from just being sort of a civil society organization into being an organization that, as I say in the book, had a combination of the emotional appeal of the BFW and the lobbying power of a major union.

The grand army of the republic is not that concerned about is every last one of these legitimate. They're concerned about it. Keep the spigot going. And what Cleveland found is that this generates a huge backlash from them and one that he in particular is vulnerable to because he is the first Democrat to serve as president after the Civil War, the Democratic Party.

Still has the stench of the confederacy on it. The only reason Cleveland is really able to get around that is because, A, he's a northerner. B, he had been a unionist. C, he had a couple of brothers who had served on the union side. So there's no real question about him on that front as there had been about other Democrats, but it does make him vulnerable to these accusations that, well, of course, the Democratic president doesn't care about the Union veterans.

And yes, that is a line that is used against him, particularly as he runs for reelection the first time in 1888. 

Matt Blumberg: So, let's move, that's a good segue to the next topic I want to cover, which is, which is Cleveland's response to the panic of 1893. And I think this is one where, I don't know if you would describe what he did as country over self or country over party, but you would certainly describe it as country over party.

I, and I don't think a lot of people entirely understand the role of gold and silver standards in currency and how panics in the 19th century relate to, or differ from recessions that we have today. And I don't know that this is necessarily the place to get into that unless you happen to have a very simple definition of those things.

But, the, in the panic of 1893, Cleveland did a couple of things, pushing hard for the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and having the government go out and buy gold bonds and doing a deal with JP Morgan. Both of those were incredibly unpopular with his own party.

so what was his calculus on those? And this is in his second, this is the beginning of his second term, 

Troy Senik: beginning of the second term. Yeah. I'll, just say to your point at the start, I wrote an entire book on Grover Cleveland and I don't fully understand the gold and silver issues. I mean, it's just amazing when you really dive into this, how different that world is, but let me just, I think I can give sort of two sentences for the reader who is not, or the viewer who is not, Acquainted with this, because this is one of the reasons we don't remember presidents of this era is the issues are really foreign.

It's hard to understand them. All you really need to know is that this is all occurring in the 1890s. So a couple of decades before we have a federal reserve. So monetary policy is really being handled by politicians rather than by an expert board that is insulated from politics. The country is on the gold standard and there is a big push to add silver to the money supply.

Why does that matter? Because the people who want silver want it, because they think it's going to be inflationary, why do they want it to be inflationary? Because there's a lot of people, particularly out on the frontier in the West and the South who are heavily in debt, who have taken out a lot of debt to start a farm or move out and homestead.

That's the entire dynamic that's going on here. And there, there is actually some merit to their position because when we were on the gold standard, was slightly. Deflationary. So their debts were actually becoming, in real terms, even worse. How does Cleveland approach this?

Cleveland is hell bent on keeping the country on the gold standard. He's resistant to all this stuff with silver. And the reason why does not come down to any sophisticated economic calculus. There actually wasn't a lot of terribly sophisticated economic thinking about monetary policy at that time for him again, good lawyer.

This comes down to. A principle rooted in his understanding of the law, which is that if you are playing games with the money supply. for the purpose of essentially changing the denominations of deals, right? And if I change the money supply, then the lender owes less than he would, sorry, the borrower owes less than he would, the lender is going to get less back.

And Cleveland sees this as a violation of the sanctity of contract. He sees this as almost a type of economic dishonesty. We can't just change the rules after the fact, or we can't have a workable economy. That is what he is really resistant to. And if I can just note one other thing that probably really helps underscore the dynamic of politics in that era versus politics in this era, as you said, this created tensions in the party.

The democratic party was moving much more in the silver direction and Cleveland is sort of standing up toward it, trying to hold it back. And when Cleveland runs for the third time in 1892, he gets the nomination almost entirely on the basis of this stand, even though it's pointing in the opposite direction of where the party is going, which sounds insane to us today, because that would not happen today.

And the difference of course, is that in the late 19th century, you're in the era before party primaries. It's party bosses who are making these decisions. The party bosses are much more aligned with sort of the Eastern financial establishment. So we're thinking about, as we have every four years, more controversies about how our electoral system works.

If you have a system, if you want politicians who will take unpopular stances. Putting them through heavily democratized primary processes made up of electorates, mostly the most hardcore members of their party is actually not a good formula to get that. 

Matt Blumberg: hold that thought for the end of the discussion today.

Okay. Yeah, so, it's not necessarily with these decisions that he bucked his own party as it was. It's that he bucked his own party as to where it was going. 

Troy Senik: That's right. He is a lagging indicator throughout. He is always sort of yesterday's man in the democratic party. 

Matt Blumberg: And would you say the same thing about, the, another, sort of, noteworthy, thing in his second term, which is sending in federal troops, to quell, the Pullman strike, through today's lens, you think a democratic president is doing what, but as you were saying, it was a very different time back then.

What did that, was that something that took moral courage? Was he putting country over party or country over self there, or was that 

Troy Senik: he certainly thought he was, I mean, the democratic party of that time was allergic to this for a couple of reasons. One of which was it's a democratic president moving against organized labor, which is at the root of the Pullman strike.

This is a strike at a rail car factory that then turns into sort of a general strike across the rail sector throughout the country so that wasn't a great look for him within the party. The second is The Democratic Party of this era is still very much a state's rights party, and the Democratic governor of Illinois had not only not asked for this, but had said, do not send them.

We do not want them here. And Cleveland's response to this is, I don't need your approval. These are powers that are inherent in the presidency, because we have to understand what the Pullman strike was. The Pullman strike, by its end, people mostly think of the violence in Chicago, because that's what's most combustible about it, no pun intended.

But at the root of it, Is a rail stoppage in so much of the country. The commerce is essentially grinding to a halt. I mean, the statistic in the book that in Chicago, and it's in the middle of a sweltering summer, the only way you can cool yourself is with ice. In the course of about a week, the cost of ice in Chicago quadruples.

I mean, rail traffic is shut down, commerce is shutting down. So he thinks as president, his inherent power to regulate interstate commerce, allows him to do this. So it is not popular, at the moment. And it's also an interesting case study in how he evolved. Because if you think about it, Cleveland is unique on this front.

We talk a lot of times about presidents being somewhat different in their second term than their first term. They learn things on the job or the factors on the ground change. Cleveland is the only one who gets to sit at home and think about it for four years. And then go through the second term. And one of the things that changes, even for a guy with a pretty limited government sensibility, is he does become more forceful.

He does become a little bit more comfortable with the power of the office, because I think the Grover Cleveland of the first term would not do this. I think the Grover Cleveland of the first term would say, it's not clear to me that I have the power under the constitution. And I take that so seriously.

That they're going to have to figure this out on their own in Chicago. 

Matt Blumberg: That's so interesting. I'm sure you're right about that reflective period, right? It's the number of times that any of us as humans think about something and say, Oh man, I wish I had said X, or I wish I had done Y. Well, he actually then got to do that.

yeah. And, look, I think one of the quotes in your book that really resonated with me on that front was him saying something to the effect of if it takes the entire army and Navy of the United States to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that could be delivered.

Troy Senik: he just thinks of this fundamentally as a question of state capacity. Can the government make things work? Will American society function? And if I don't do this, it won't. 

Matt Blumberg: Let's talk about the Chinese Exclusion Act, which, again, if you sort of think about, the world today and even the world over the last 60 or 70 years, this looks like sort of a dark chapter in the Cleveland presidency.

And what was his calculus there around the good of the country, the good of himself? 

Troy Senik: Well, the first thing that's important to stipulate about the Chinese Exclusion Act is that Cleveland did not sign it. Cleveland inherited it. This was passed during the Arthur administration. What Cleveland did do, however, was, extend some of its provisions.

made it last a little bit longer. Also changed the terms about, Chinese laborers, if they left the United States, being able to come back in. And to the extent that Americans remember the Chinese Exclusion Act, I think they generally remember it as a dark chapter and remember it for the racism that animated a lot of it, which is certainly true, but also incomplete.

The thing that I think we tend to forget about the Chinese Exclusion Act is how much of it was economically motivated. So you have to understand that the Chinese laborers who were coming to the United States at the time, these were not people looking to settle as immigrants. American citizens. There's actually more analogous to like seasonal agricultural workers.

You're just coming for labor. Oftentimes they cycle in and out. And what's sort of ironic is when people think of the racism animating it, they tend to think of Americans in long standing, not liking the idea of these Asian immigrants coming to the United States. There was definitely some of that. The actual flashpoints for this were white immigrant groups pitted against the Asian immigrant groups, because this oftentimes happened in mining.

And so you had groups like the Welsh who had long histories in mining at these mining sites. antagonizing or being antagonized by the Chinese miners. And a lot of this came down to the Chinese were a lot less interested than the white miners were in collective bargaining. So there was these sort of economic tensions at the heart of this.

And this really explodes in this first year of Cleveland's first term. There's a terrible, brutal massacre at a mining site in Wyoming, where the white miners kill about 28 Chinese miners, burn their houses to the ground, and disfigure others. It's a horrible event, in the history of American immigration.

And Cleveland, this is what, the reason I bring this up is this is what precipitates the changes in the Chinese Exclusion Act. Cleveland does something that he doesn't have to do, which is hard for us to give him credit for, but actually in his context. He deserves a lot of credit for it, which is that we've already passed legislation at this point that is trying to reduce the inflow of the Chinese.

He looks at the situation and says, look, we're going to have to be more restrictive on this stuff because we can see this powder keg this keeps happening, He's not endorsing that. He's just saying, this is the reality on the ground, but what he does, and it's a very unusual language that he uses. For his era in the statements that he puts out, he sort of explains, this is the dynamic on the ground.

It seems like there's no way we're going to get around this for the sake of peace, harmony and safety. These restrictions on Chinese immigration are going to have to be expanded. He said, but what is driving this on the ground is race prejudice. which has no place in America. And he pushes to compensate these Chinese victims, which we were under no legal obligation to do, to make what at that point was a gratuitous, and for him, politically unhelpful point, that racism is at the heart of this, and racism is irreconcilable with the American creed.

It's not something he's remembered for. I didn't know it before I was researching this book, but, as much self-flagellation as Americans go through on issues of race, much of it justified. We should look back when we can in our history, when we find somebody who was 10 or 15 years ahead of the curve, even if it's only a half measure by today's standards, that's worth remembering.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, there's so much of when you talk about presidents from previous centuries, there's so much of, there's so much difficulty in remembering what things were like at the time when you look at their actions. And that's a good segue to my next question, which is Cleveland's cancer. This chapter unthinkable in today's world, Cleveland has, gets cancer diagnosis in his mouth.

He is a big tobacco guy, doesn't tell anyone goes on board a ship with a surgeon, to have an operation that nobody knows about, none of this could happen today. But at the time. My take is that he was very concerned about panicking the country. But the thing that I can't get my head around is it would have been far worse not to prepare the country in case he had died aboard the ship.

what's your take on how he was thinking about that decision? 

Troy Senik: Well, I think he was really thinking about it. in the context of public policy. Because it's important to note that this happens at the very start of his second term at the same time that the panic of 1893 is really starting to unspool.

And so his thought was, I can panic people unnecessarily. I hope he couldn't have known that it was gonna be unnecessary, right? You'd flip a coin. But I can tell people in advance People would get panicked, maybe for no reason, because I might be flying. The markets are already jittery. They're already on a knife's edge.

And by the way, the important piece of context for this is that on these gold silver questions that were at the heart of the panic, Cleveland had a vice president in his second term, Adlai Stevenson, who was on the other side of this issue from him. So had he died, it's not only the country is unstable at a moment Where it's already been unstable, so you're compounding it.

It's, we're unstable and we're about to do a 180 on policy. Now, is that an intelligible rationale for this? Yeah, definitely. Is it a justifiable one? I don't know. I mean, I have the same reaction that you do to it. If you can imagine if you're worried about destabilizing the country, let's say this goes the other way, what's the story that comes out the other way?

The president of the United States has died under anesthesia while having surgery for a cancer. You didn't know he had on a boat in the middle of Long Island Sound. I don't think the country. It is less shaky under that set of circumstances, but this is a, fascinating moment in his life too, because as you would know, I'm, and as the audience would know, because we've talked about some of it, but as you really know, when you go through the entirety of my book or any other book on Cleveland, he is as a general matter, grupulously honest, and this is all deception.

For a long time. This doesn't come out until after he's dead. This secret is kept for a dozen years. At the time, most of the Cleveland administration does not know about this. this is one of the reasons, it's a great story in and of itself, but it's one of the reasons I put it in the book. Because when we know people for such defining traits, some of the most interesting moments in their lives are the ones where those traits take a backseat.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, and that episode does stand out, as one where it probably took a backseat and, I think one of the, interesting framings that you have of Cleveland is that he was a great statesman, but maybe kind of a less good tactical politician. And I'm wondering sort of how you think about how you think about that in the context of moral courage or choosing country over self.

Troy Senik: Well, it's interesting. I have this sort of amateur typology for this as somebody who has worked in Washington and been around that stuff, which is that I think people in government have different types of temperaments that correspond to the different branches. If you are a really good member of Congress, you may not be, in fact, I think are less likely to be a really good president, a really good president would be unlikely to be a very good Supreme court justice, either different skill sets or different sensibilities.

And I mentioned this in the book, I think Cleveland, to some degree, is miscast. And actually probably would have been best suited as a Supreme Court justice. This was an original aspiration, clearly, was to, be a judge. He is similar in this respect to William Howard Taft, who in the end did end up becoming not only a Supreme Court justice, but the Chief Justice.

So Cleveland is bizarre because he has such a firm sense of principle. He has this courage. He knows what it is that he wants to do. He knows what he thinks is in the best interest of the country. And yet he kind of bobbles things to get there. And this is the opposite of what we're used to, particularly today in politicians.

We're used to the politician who's really slick and has figured out where all the trap doors are, but whose principles are negotiable. And so he's an odd figure in this way. And he lacks some of what, well, what, the Greeks would call phronesis prudence, the right way to do the right thing.

So you will oftentimes see him take such a firm stand on a policy on something in the sort of the tactical aspect of the policy that he sort of undermines his own goal. I mean, the great example of this is that in both of his administrations. He's obsessed with tariff reform. It only happens in his second term.

And in his second term, he clearly has a really neat, pristine vision of some simple principles of what tariff reform is going to look like. And there's one problem, which is that is not what legislation that comes out of Congress looks like. So it goes to Congress. There are 8, 500 other provisions that get added that help out this district or help out this state.

Now, in the end, the legislation that he's presented with moves the world further in his direction than the status quo. So if you're a, if you're a capable politician, you count that as a win. He thinks about vetoing it. He publicly. Pronounces that, well, I just, it's so compromised that maybe we won't do it at all.

That shows you somebody who doesn't really get the thrust and parry of, politics. And so there are a lot of places where he's very well served by the sense of principle, but a lot of ones where as they're, he's sort of undermining himself with it. 

Matt Blumberg: What do you, how do you think history views him in light of that and, I'll ask, I'll lead the witness a little bit, right?

How does history view today, which made the answer for me, maybe they don't. But how has history viewed him over time? One of the things you talked about in your book is a poll conducted in 1948, which I think would be interesting to talk about. 

Troy Senik: This is the Arthur Schlesinger poll where they're rating presidents.

So by 1948, he's been dead for 40 years out of office for about 50. and he is ranked eighth, I think, all time on the list of presidents between Teddy Roosevelt and John Adams. I mean, he's in what in today's parlance, the way they break these out, they called the near great category, which is bizarre to us now.

I mean, who in the year 2024 would put Grover Cleveland there? There are ebbs and flows. So when he leaves office. He's extremely unpopular. You can think of the last days of Grover Cleveland sort of like the last days of George W. Bush, where there's just, it falls off a cliff in terms of what the public is thinking about him.

And Also, I think in some ways similar to George W. Bush, there's, a window of about a decade where he's just in isolation, the country's forgotten about him, is happy to have forgotten about him, and then there's a newfound appreciation towards the end of his life, which I think continues to flower through that, about the era of that 1948 poll.

And then my theory has always been that it dies off with the generation that actually experienced him, because there's no legacy following that. He's too far back. We don't have recordings. We don't have video. We don't have audio. He didn't write a memoir. And I think a combination of that and the fact that these gilded era presidents like Cleveland deal with issues that are so foreign to us.

I mean, who in the year of our Lord 2024 knows anything about union pensions or the gold standard? or the Pullman Strike, civil service reform, the idea that was the biggest issue in the country, which it was for a couple of decades is so foreign to us. I mean, this is part of the reason that I wrote the book was not only because I thought more people should know about him, but because I think he comes from an era.

That is very hard for us to understand. And I was trying to put that era in more relatable terms because, you can go much, further back in American history. You can go back to the revolution and go back to the Civil War. We really understand what was at stake there. We really understand what those debates were about.

And this era, I mean, it's a blank slate for most people. 

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. I mean, as you say in the book, there are three kinds of presidents. Americans remember three kinds of presidents. The first few, the most recent few and Lincoln. 

Troy Senik: Yeah. And that's me. That's me summarizing the actual sort of psychological research.

We just, we know this is an empirical fact. Those are the only ones. 

Matt Blumberg: All right. So one final Cleveland vignette, that I'd love for you to tell the story of is the story of Benjamin Harrison's inauguration, March 4th, 1889, after he defeats Cleveland. So we've all seen lots of presidential inaugurations. The outgoing president sometimes is retiring and sometimes has been defeated other than five or six times in our history, the outgoing president is there.

Although that didn't happen in 2020, as we all know, and frequently the outgoing presidents kind of sitting there with a little bit of a scowl on their face or, some disappointment for whatever reason, what happened? So Cleveland gets beaten by Harrison after winning the popular vote. and what happens?

Troy Senik: Well, the popular vote is actually a very important context because the election leading up to this inauguration doesn't look totally dissimilar to the 2020 election. And Cleveland wins the popular vote, loses the electoral college. And also there are allegations that the election has been stolen from Cleveland, which Cleveland will not entertain.

The press asked him what happened and he said the other side got the most votes. That's the story. So he's up there on the dais with Harrison. Harrison's inauguration is overtaken by a pretty significant rainstorm and Cleveland.

In an act that totally echoes with everything we know about his life, unassumingly, gets up, stands on the platform, and holds an umbrella over Harrison's head as he is taking the oath of office. And it's indicative of the spirit between the two men. Cleveland had a very ugly, first presidential election in 1884 against James G. Blaine. There was a lot of mudslinging on both sides. Cleveland and Harrison, who ran against each other twice, 1888 and 1892, fundamentally respected each other. And Cleveland said during his interregnum between those two terms, Harrison's a good man. He's a smart man. And I admire some of his accomplishments.

They disagreed on policy, but it was never personal between the two of them. And there was a real spirit of stability. Animating those two men. And that was an important value to Cleveland in the way that he conducted himself in office. And, it's just, it's, a beautiful moment. Unfortunately, we don't have much record of it.

There's really only one picture you see. Cleveland has this enormous top hat that is obscuring most of his face. So you really, you have to get the narrative of the story before the picture makes any sense to you. 

Matt Blumberg: It's just hard to imagine that happening today. And it, feels like a moment. It feels like a defining moment in American history.

Troy Senik: I think that's right. Although if I were to buck you up a little, I'd say this. Is it hard to imagine it happening today? Yes, but in the not too recent, not too distant past, I mean, the relationship that George W. Bush and Barack Obama had the relationship that George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton had, 

the past is not that far away in the future isn't necessarily either.

So right this moment, yes, but I think America is capable of getting back to that. 

Matt Blumberg: All right. I want to close witg four kind of rapid fire questions. The first one is we talked about Cleveland today. If I had you back on the show a second time to talk about a second president, country over self, who would you pick?

Troy Senik: Well, I think the ultimate example of a president choosing country over self is George Washington in 1796, choosing not to run for a third term. And it reminds you of the thing that George III said about him. Actually, when he was giving out command after the revolution, he was told that Washington was going to do that.

And he said, he'll be the greatest man in the world. I always think that it's a little silly When people try to compare Washington and Lincoln in terms of who's, who is the greatest, because you can't compare what Washington did with anybody else because Washington was the only one who got to be first, but the institutional legacy that left, I mean, it's really remarkable, especially today when you think about an era where soft norms in politics are really collapsing.

Washington does this in 1796, . And that soft norm, there is no law, there is no constitutional provision, that soft norm keeps any president from getting a third term until 1940. The power of Washington's example is so great that for 150 years, everybody says, okay, well, what George Washington did . That's the rule. So I think it is the ultimate example of that in the history of the presidency. 

Matt Blumberg: All right. Let's do the opposite. If this show were called self over, who would we be talking about? 

Troy Senik: Well, for a specific example of this, I don't mean this as a commentary on the rest of his presidency, but for a specific example of this, the last, was it about two years?

The end of Woodrow Wilson's second term. Woodrow Wilson should have resigned. Woodrow Wilson was so thoroughly medically incapacitated that Thomas Marshall, his vice president, should have taken over at that point. And of course, this is an era prior to the 25th amendment. It's part of the reason we have the 25th amendment, but also because everybody had been reminded in 1963, I mean, my God, what if Kennedy had been hit in such a way that he was alive and was a vegetable?

so I, I just think Wilson, I don't even know that it, I was going to say set a dangerous precedent. It's so outlandish that I think most people regard it as the precedent to be avoided. But the idea that the country, particularly in that window, really had no functioning chief executive is, I think, Inexcusable, although maybe you can give Wilson himself an asterisk on that point.

It should have really come from the people around him because who knows? Wilson's probably not really compos mentis as anyway to make that judgment. 

Matt Blumberg: So that's a great example. Next question, Biden's withdrawal from the race in 2024. Will history view that as country over self? We're not, or does it depend on how the race turns out?

Troy Senik: That's an interesting question. I think I just start by disclaiming any authority to speak for history because I think so much time has to pass before I always get a little nervous when historians say History will say this Partially because there is no capital H history, right people historians will still be fighting over this 100 years from now I think it would have been regarded that way You If Biden's plan all along had been to do what he eventually did, and I think he actually would have had a very different presidency.

I know why you wouldn't publicly announce it because you're a lame duck from the get go, but if you knew you had four years and you thought my only role here is to suture up the country from the last four years, I actually think that there's a scenario in which he goes up with the likes of Polk and Bush 41, the most important one term president. But I think the fact that he's sort of, that he really forced the issue and that it took a public embarrassment followed by prolonged lobbying from the rest of the party probably diminishes that some, I mean, he will, certainly get credit for what he eventually did, but I think a lot less than he would have, if it was seen as.

Something that had been baked in from the story. 

Matt Blumberg: Last question. Knowing everything you know about our history, our politics, our system of government, and the problems that we have today, if you could wave a magic wand and make one change or two changes to our system to strengthen it, and whether it requires a constitutional amendment or not. Magic wand.What would you do? 

Troy Senik: Yeah, it's funny. This may sound weird coming from a historian of the presidency, but, my, if I had to pick one thing, it would be to strengthen Congress. This is something that there's one of the few things that you really point to the founding fathers got deeply wrong, right? The founding fathers were really concerned that Congress was going to get off the leash and it was going to be so powerful that was the thing that we had to insulate again.

And, Congress. I think is, I would say, inarguably the weakest of the three branches at this point, and Congress is weak because its members want it to be weak. I mean, the amount of power that they have ceded to the executive branch, I regard as a dereliction of duty. but in terms of, What am I actually asking for when I wave the magic wand?

all the members of Congress would have to do is put up a fight, as they have such a strong case on legal merits and everything else to get these powers back. But they're pretty comfortable the way things are right now. There was a poll that was done years ago that they spend about a third of their time on the core parts of the job and the rest of it has been, doing media hits and fundraising, campaigning, things like that.

It's pretty good to live in a world where you're not on the hook for anything. Something goes wrong, you can blame the president. You don't have to vote on a tough issue, that's one less negative ad that's going to be cut against you. But how do you actually change that? I think it's actually a matter of civics.

I think it's actually a matter of the voters caring enough to realize that when Congress represents us, they're the branch that's supposed to do that. So when they're ceding that power. They're ceding our power, but you have to have voters who think of it that way. Whereas today, your feelings about your congressman are probably based on the partisan and ideological signals that they're sending on cable TV hits.

And I realized why that's psychologically satisfying for people. It actually doesn't translate too much in terms of results. So you have to start thinking about the process a little bit. 

Matt Blumberg: Troy, this is a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining me. Troy Senik, bestselling author and presidential historian.

I appreciate you coming on Country Over Self. Thank you. It's a delight to be here.

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 country over self. com.