Ron Chernow - The Author of Alexander Hamilton & a New biography of President Grant

[Music] this week on Q&A Pulitzer prize-winning biographer Ron chernow he discusses his biography of ulysses s grant Ron chernow author of us grants new biography even as other Civil War generals rushed to publish their memoirs flaunting their conquests and cashing in on their celebrity US grant refused to trumpet his accomplishments in print when did you decide to start that way in your book well you know when I started working on the book Brian I ran into a friend who said to me Ron how can you write a great biography of someone who wrote a great autobiography and that really kind of stopped me dead in my tracks I thought about that comment for many days and then I realized that it actually helped to define the direction of my book because I realized that what my job was to do as a biographer was to zero in on the silences and the evasions in grants memoirs and I should say grants book it's not really an autobiography it's a military memoir it covers the Mexican War he covers the Civil War there's not a word for instance about that small thing his two-term presidency and all of the remaining events in his life but I ended up again zeroing in on those things that granted not one to talk about particularly his lifelong struggle with alcoholism and his repeated business failures I want to start off concentrating on the end of his life and go to I believe it was 1883 he had been a two-term president is you know point out and he slipped on the ice you also tell that story what is it yes it's cascading series of crises that happened to him 1883 so he's about 61 years old he and his wife Julia were living in Manhattan in a townhouse at 3 he's 66 reaches to a 5th Avenue he comes home I think it was Christmas Eve he turns on this icy pavement to give the driver a Christmas trip to Christmas tip and he trips and he either a muscle in his thigh he may have dislocated his hip but he's never quite the same again and for weeks or maybe months afterwards he's hobbling around on crutches and then one terrible thing after another happens to him grant and ward what was grant and ward okay about four or five years before he died he entered into a partnership with a young man named Ferdinand ward third Ned Ward was only 29 years old but he was already a legendary character on Wall Street he was lionized as the young Napoleon of Finance and he had already entered into a business partnership with Grant's younger son buck ulysses s grant Jr and grant throughout his life was an incurably naive person particularly when it came to business dealings and it seemed like every confidence man in the universe had x-ray vision when it came to us grand in terms of identifying him as a prime sucker so that the you know the name on the shingle is grant and ward but the person who not only is doing all of the business transactions but who alone has the power to sign checks who alone has access to the vault that supposedly has all these securities is Ferdinand ward and so grant is providing window dressing and of course a lot of people invest in grant and ward because that's the name of the integrated Union general and former president on it and sadly grant was so trusting and so enamored of young ward that grant invested his life savings in the company his three sons invested their life savings numerous cousins and sisters and friends and confederate veterans invested their life savings and grant showed he went to work every day was to Wall Street you reported there regularly very proud this firm seemed to be the most successful in Wall Street in fact he should have been more skeptical because Ferdinand Ward was promising people rewards of 15 to 20 percent per month on their investment not 15 and 20 percent / yeah which would have been mazing enough but per month so this was clearly a warning flag and this will not surprise the listener that it turned out to be a massive Ponzi scheme and Ferdinand ward turned out to be literally the Bernie Madoff of his day so grant who fancied that he was worth several million dollars woke up one morning to discover that all of the profits were fictitious and he was worth exactly $80 and you say that he went to Vanderbilt for money well what happened right before the firm went bust a Ferdinand Ward came to him in a panic and said that he needed to borrow it $150,000 from William a trendabl the son of the the Commodore Ward claimed that the money was needed to bail out the Marine National Bank which was the major Bank of the firm in fact it was to bail out grant and ward and so you know grant grabs his crutches and he goes off to see Vanderbilt who does give him a check grant assures him that he's going to be repaid within 28 or 48 hours only to find out that the firm went bust and you know grant was so innocent that he later said that even on the night before Grant and ward went bust and this whole sham was exposed he had no inkling that there was anything wrong in fact he said he had such implicit faith in Ferdinand worth that it took him a day or two to believe in the reality of what had happened he kept imagining as did his son that Ferdinand would was suddenly materialized and explained oh the whole thing and this is kind of very interesting side of a man who during the civil war could be so shrewd and sizing up his fellow generals could be so shrewd you know when sizing up the opposing generals so it's something of a mystery of a man who could be so perceptive about other people in certain situations in business situations seem to lose all sense of skepticism or reality when did he discover that he had cancer he discovered that he had cancer it was about a year before he died so it was not long it was really just a few months after the whole grant and ward debacle and as you mentioned the beginning grant thought that there was something kind of preening and egotistical about writing your memoirs all the Civil War generals had rushed to publish their memoirs for two reasons one they wanted to cash in on it but two they really wanted to kind of put forward their you know preferred version of history the the close kawin sense of those two events being wiped out financially and then being diagnosed with cancer of the throat and tongue a very excruciating and invariably you know terminal form of cancer the combination of those two things didn't make grant realize that if were really when he died that his wife Julia would be left destitute it was that point that he decided to write his memoirs and I don't think initially realized just quite what the commercial potential of that was in fact the first publisher he spoke to from the century magazine first publisher he spoke to who proposed grant writing his memoirs I grant said Tim do you think anyone would be interested and the publisher said are you kidding general do not think that people would have been interested in Napoleon's you know account of his own battles and PS were jumping ahead but it ended up earning four hundred fifty thousand dollars you know which would be 10 20 million dollars today and it was probably it was published posthumously it was probably the greatest best-seller of the nineteenth century the only one that might have rivaled it in total sales would have been Uncle Tom's Cabin but it sold more copies more quickly than any other book in 19th century histories so grant shall we say slightly underestimated the commercial potential of the book go back to the cancer how did he discover that he had cancer well he and Julia had a cottage cottage it was rather how's Long Branch New Jersey it was kind of a fashionable watering hole in its day and in June 1884 they were sitting out on the Piazza and Julia served him a plate of peaches and he bit into a peach and he said ouch that peach stung me 13 Julia thought initially that maybe there was an insect or something had gotten in that had literally stung him it was the first that he realized he had the cancer and he tried to at that moment rinse out his mouth he thought that maybe that would remove the sensation but this is a very very excruciating form of cancer in fact grant made the statement that swallowing a glass of water was so painful that it was like swallowing molten lead almost anything that he ate or drank was difficult to swallow and digest and then he went to him because he was you know on the shore in New Jersey his next-door neighbor had a doctor visiting and this doctor examined him and told grant you know that you should as soon as possible consult your physician at home pumping in Manhattan grants doctor was at the time traveling for his Barker so he did not go to his see his doctor for four months which is really rather amazing and I wonder in the book and I wondered to you right now was this a case of Stoicism because grant was able to endure an enormous amount of pain throughout his life without complaining it was this more of a kind of childlike you know fear of bad news and escaping from it we'll never know but given the fact that these were rather severe symptoms and he had a he had a nagging cough that just didn't go away and at the beginning maybe that was understandable but that goes on for several months I think we would all be curious what was going on particularly if he was accompanied by these sensations of a very painful swallowing and it just got just got worse and worse how many cigars did he smoke a day well this is an interesting story because during the Civil War you never probably his first great victory for Donaldson you know he's surrounded for Donaldson the entire of Confederate Army they're surrendered at least 13,000 trips and in the journalistic accounts of that battle grant had a cigar stub which he had gotten from an admiral you know at breakfast that morning and so he was kind of riding around the battlefield with this cigar stub and the cigar stub featured in different journalistic accounts of the battles well it became kind of the first Union victory celebrated in all of the northern cities and people out of the blue began to send him cigars in fact fine cigars and they sent him 10,000 cigars and grant up until that point had been more of a pipe smoker but he had aural cravings throughout his certainly a free supply of 10,000 cigars you smoke heavily so he began to smoke 20 cigars a day in fact at the end of the Civil War with a great feeling of virtue he announced that he was cutting down his consumption to ten cigars a day but 20 cigars name meant delayed he was pretty much smoking the entire day and he later last year was life and of course of the cancer he gave up the cigars and he said it's very difficult to say goodbye to these fragrant weeds which had been a solace in a comfort to me throughout the years so he really loved smoking but I don't think there's any question but that it's the cigar consumption that led to the the cancer and the doctors did tell him too well but one of his doctors was convinced that it was the cigars and told him to cut out the cigars once he was diagnosed with tongue cancer what could they do for him you know in terms of treatment very little there you know there was no treatment they would keep swabbing out his mouth and you know trying to remove debris and cancerous there were a lot of different things that they could do in terms of pain relief they used cocaine because cocaine would anesthetize the area occasionally they would use brandy as time went on he used opiates and one of the interesting things is that you know he starts writing the the memoir and he found that as soon as he ate anything or drank anything that he would be in agony and as soon as he was in agony he would have to start taking you know morphine and other opiates and that would clog you know cloud his brain and so what he got into the habit of doing kind of with great courage and fortitude was that he would go for four or five hours at a stretch without eating or drinking anything and that was really not simply to avoid the pain of the swallowing but I think even more importantly not to have to take any painkillers that might interfere with his mental clarity I don't know that any book written a masterpiece like this has ever been composed under such horrific circumstances and you know its masterpiece even Mark Twain said that style is flawless no man can improve upon it and Twain thought it was such a great military memoir that deserved to stand alongside Caesar's commentaries and many commentators and readers since then have agreed go back to when you said he was 61 and he slipped and fell and had to go on crutches and and then you know he just dies two years later and then he looses all that money and he's down to $80 in his account what did he do then about where he lived he was in a house where it did you on 66th Street in New York right what did he do then if he did if he had no money well you know okay so immediately what happens he knows that they closed up the house in d66 Street fire all the the servants he did get a $1,000 gift from a veteran in upstate New York it was kind of signed it with a lovely letter to grant he said you nervous there's analysis for services rendered before aid for April 1865 he was a veteran you know who wanted to thank grant but they went to Long Branch and then Long Branch actually before he started working on the members he did a series of articles for the century magazine called battles and leaders of the Civil War and they had him write about four different battles now the interesting thing is Brian when he wrote the first one I think the first one was on Shiloh he writes that he sends it off to the editors the grant had never written professionally anything before sends it up to the editors they're very disappointed they immediately dispatched a young editor to Long Branch to speak to him and the editor said that grants first article is very dry and very bloodless it was like one of his in a civil war military reports very factual but no life and the young editor says Tim you know what the reader wants from you is kind of enliven it with your personal impressions and observations and your impressions of you know people and Grant was a very good student have been a very very good writer so life you're a troll his wartime reports you've heard every speech he wrote as president and he prided himself on his writing anyway this came came as a revelation to grant that one can as it were a gossip a little bit and have fun with a little bit and set the scene and describe the personality so he rewrites it and the I mean he's like a pupil of genius he rewrites it and the difference is extraordinary and he actually begins to we've all had that moment experienced the joys of authorship where we suddenly feel the freedom of writing something that this you know our imagination or emotions come into play or our memory opens up and that happens to to grant and it's really it's considered a you know a classic and American letter is because of its literary style it's that the prose is beautiful the descriptions are extremely and accurate there's a delightful bit it's very moving this is very becoming modesty about it and their reflections are profound you know Twain was amazed that grant wrote the entire Appomattox section in one sitting you know and he wrote a letter to Simon he said grant wrote the Appomattox sitting without changing anything he said it was nine thousand words he wrote in one sitting and Twain says to his writer friend even on a good day I can't write five words from cancer he wrote nine thousand words great was just an amazing person you know Brian the hell fascination of this story and it's the essence of our Gary its character revealed under the pressure of circumstance you know and you know Grant said at the very end of his life just how improbable it was he said I went in through yarn but I never imagined that you know I would get any higher as a grade you know when he ends up as a full General of the army he said I never imagined that I would go into politics I became a two-term president and he said I never imagined that I would end up and author and now my book is going off to them to the press so again again under the pressure of circumstances this man who could seem very kind of ordinary and smaller than life you know in many ways something would happen that would force him to do something completely new and unaccustomed and he would do it brilliantly and I find that it's a it's an inspirational story for all of us that we really don't know our own potential until we're tested and granted there was own attention I tell the story in the book that when he left West Point he graduated like the middle of his class and in West Point his highest ambition was to be an assistant math professor at the academy not my do a full math professor but to be an assistant math professor and yet this is a man who will end up having a million soldiers under his command who will end up being the only two-term president between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson who will write one of the most famous you know memoirs of the English language so I don't think that anyone could have been were surprised by Gran's life and grant in your acknowledgments you mentioned a woman by the name of Michelle Crowell ye in the manuscript division at the Library of Congress women talk about inspiration we grabbed a camera and went over to meet her and I want to run a couple of things that she had to say so we can see what the actual manuscript looked like oh yeah what the grant family gave us specifically ulysses s grant the third and 1920 he and his mother gave to us the handwritten manuscript that grant wrote himself so as grant was writing his memoirs he started writing them himself then of course because he had cancer in the base of his tongue and in his throat it became a little bit difficult for him to write because he was getting I'm tired so if he would dictate and then when it became too much for him to dictate he went back to handwriting when did you go to look at the actual manuscript well you know it's interesting right because when I first started writing the book I was amazed at how many people said to me did Mark Twain go straight the the man was he was his publisher we have the title it was a publisher and I don't think that Twain was any more capable of imitating grand style than Grant was imitating train stuff so I really didn't have any doubt that Grant had written memos because the style was consistent with what he'd written his entire life but anyway just so that when I was on Bryan lambs Q&A I went down to the Library of Congress and I said to Michelle Crowell and the other curators I said I would like to actually examine the original manuscript and they were a little bit reluctant it's one of their treasures so they ordinarily urge people to look at it on microphone but I said no no this is very important they brought it out and I leapt through every page and it was the single most poignant date my research because we could see grand starts out he's writing in a very clear firm handwriting but then as time goes on both from the pain of the cancer and also from the affair to the narcotics that he was taking from the pain you could see by the end his handwriting is beginning to kind of slant and wobble as if he's standing on the deck of a ship so you really feel is you're going through this that you are living through that final year of his life in a very personal way towards the Varia I mean so it was all in Grant's handwriting towards the very end you see the handwriting of his son Fred and his histone Agra fur as Michelle said that grant reached a point where it was impossible for him to write so he was dictating it but I can proudly announce that it really was by Ulysses as grant and Twain said that his own because he was a publisher really more than the editor who's the publisher he said that his own involvement was restricted to relatively trivial matters of grammar and punctuation so anyone who's expecting a sudden and suspicious interjection and walked winged witness get disappointed reading the Memphis it all sounds like grant where did he physically write it and with what well he wrote you know you wrote with a pen and it was written at their townhouse East 66th Street and he had his son and stenographer and four times military secretary Adam Bedok we're doing the research that is they were bringing in an enormous number of kind of you know maps and battle orders and different things to help him refresh his memory because he was you know writing of events you know 20 years before uh so his library and his townhouse was kind of full of the documentation that have been brought him but his memory was quite extraordinary act there's a wonderful story you know about to enter mess of just a good trance memory was when and Mark Twain always revered ulysses s grant and Jane grants first term as president senator from the dragged Mark Twain into drains offices president it wasn't the Oval Office yeah and train was really nervous about meeting grant and grant was sitting there writing something and grant looks up in Twain system I'm a little embarrassed are you and then Twain didn't see grant again what would it have been I think for about you know 15 years or so and they ran into each other at an army reunion in Chicago and grant looked at Twain without missing a beat said to him I'm not embarrassed mr. Twain are you and people would say I mean there were kind of a there were a lot of stories of you know 20 years after the Civil War they were Grant running into someone whom he had seen like for maybe 30 seconds in Shiloh in Sanko --nz I remember you from the second page look and he was always he had he had a photographic memory for people's faces and names kind of maybe one reason that it was a such good politician want to go back to Michele Karl who has been at the library for 17 years do you remember when you went there how long ago when I went slug river cone to see the manuscript Elvis was in early in your research it was later in the in the research so it was probably I'm guessing three three years ago let's hear her describe to some more about and we can take a look at what it looks like I don't know it's like legal paper here and it's probably just in a in a thought process and writing and then when you turn the page you see it's a different piece of paper and it's different hand and still grants that this is where he said I have always regretted that the last assault that Cold Harbor was ever made and so the way that mr. chernau has has traced in his book is that by having it on a different paper you can also see that he's made notes to his assistants put this in after coral coldharbour about the time the army reached the James River probably will be best so he's writing it if I know the way the mr. chernau says it's almost an afterthought that he's struggling with with admitting that this was a very bad assault or one that he regretted and so as he's riding along he thinks of this and says put that in later you write about that in your book yeah because Grant said that it was the you know single greatest regret of his Civil War decisions that he ordered the assault on Coldharbour where as many as 7,000 of his soldiers you know could have died in the 30-minute maybe 60 minute period and it was interesting because it was like a loose sheet that was inserted and then it's Michelle pointed out there were kind of instructions to put it put it in and so it was something that grant obviously had wrestled you know with kind of admitting in print that he should not have ordered that it was interesting that even all of those years later he was still haunted by the Battle of Coldharbour which of course would haunt his reputation even today that was near Richmond the close-knit Richmond it was right outside of the rituals it was the end of the so-called Overland campaign you know it starts at the the wilderness and through Spotsylvania zarm is kind of moving south and right before the siege of richmond and petersburg you know it's kind of that final clash he tries to break through Lee's line through a brutal frontal assault even Lee's that it was Lee had a lot of respect for grant but that was kind of one move where he was completely perplexed in terms of what grant thought we you know what he was doing and it was just a catastrophic mistake I'm gonna come back the writing in just a second but you tell a story in there about Charles Guiteau who assassinated Garfield and there's a lot of in there about the whole convention and the 36 votes and all that said but what what's the story about guitar I do go after Grant at some point yeah I mean it's kind of interesting cuz in the book I reveal that Grant was stalked both by guitar before you killed Garfield and John Wilkes Booth before he killed killed Lincoln that what happened was that guitar came up to guitar was constantly approaching Grant you know guitar was always described as this disgruntled the office seeker but he was a mentally disturbed disgruntled of a seeker and he kind of kept approaching grant and Grant either by his son or one of his aides had been kind of warned about him that this was someone who was disturbed and have nothing to do with them and yet Guto actually came up to grant's hotel room you know kind of knocked pretending to every way out or was he's president at the time this was after who's president reason yeah this is kind of not long before Garfield is so good that was already stalking people and ketosis false pretenses to force his way into grants hotel room grand system what are you doing here I told you to leave me alone you know and gita' was saying I want nothing from you but your signature recommendation or for something so grant recognized that here was a very kind of disturbed individual and obviously this realize just quite how disturbed until get out turned out to be the assassin of Garfield in by interesting coincidence grant is staying with son Fred and Long Branch the at Garfield is shot and granted had a very initially warm but then a very frosty relationship with Garfield had criticized Garfield publicly after Garfield became president then suddenly Garfield is shots out granted Chris feels terrible here has been publicly criticizing someone who's now this kind of you know fallen leader variance identity Garfield's wife appreciate was staying in Long Branch and so Grant was probably one of the first maybe even the first to cross the street and offer you know his sympathy of Chris he did not die he would linger on for what couple of months afterwards Garfield but I granted had cases including one that I described the book in the Mexican War Grant had seen people in the war who were shot where they couldn't find the bullet which is the problem they had with Garfield and what grant remembered was that people who had bullets that they couldn't find would seem to be fine and even recovering for a while and suddenly would take a turn for the worst and die which is exactly what happened with Garfield you know they had Alexander Graham Bell they had all these people coming in trying to use different devices to locate the bullets something that of course is so easy today but was a complete mystery at the time I want to go back to the writing of the memoir when m'as the length of time between when he started writing it and he finished this two hundred and seventy five thousand word memoir yeah it was a period of about a year and at first he's writing these four articles for the century magazine you know the writing of that will be incorporated into the memory so it's kind of a rolling process if I could put it that way so altogether from the time he starts writing the century articles to the time that he finishes the memoir it's a period of about a year and there doesn't seem to be any question that grant literally willed himself to stay alive to finish them democracy he puts down his pen just about six or seven days but he dies the doctors had suggested that he go to a place called Mount McGregor it's in upstate New York the cottages still there people want to visit and they thought that if he wasn't kind of pine-scented you know mountain air that it might have a good effect on his health and so the last month or two of his life it was it's right outside of Saratoga Springs and it's a beautiful scenic spot up in the mountains there and he would sit out on the porch writing and the funny thing was that it was just down there hotel just down the hill from a hotel called the Balmoral and so grant became sort of a tourist attraction for the residents of the hotel who found that when they were wandering up or down the path of the hotel they could actually watch the Foreign Press the United States dying of cancer and composing his memoir in Grant it was kind of looked very dramatic sitting there on the on the porridge when I show a photograph and you have it in your book and it's been shown for years and years of grant sitting out on the porch at McGregor explain what we see blanket do we see this is in summer we see yeah this is this is you should say this it could have been either June or July in 1885 so even up in the mountains there it is extremely hot it gives a sense of you know how bad his condition was and you could see his beard is grizzled and you can see that he has a shawl or cloth on the right side of his face and what that was doing he had a tumor bulging from the side of his neck that people said was as large as a baseball and that the person said that it was as large as two fists together so in other words there was a really enormous tumor that I guess he had the cloth on it because he felt self-conscious about the appearance of it and there he is you know composing his memoirs and it's just an extraordinary picture of him into in terms of his seriousness his determination his intelligence and that he became obsessed with these memoirs that he realized you know at first he was doing it maybe to save Julia from poverty after he died but as he got into it he just he always couldn't wait to get back to it and he was a real perfectionist he wanted this to be you know as good as possible and so his output was astonishing I also think that there are a lot of things that he said and as I'm saying around you know when he first started writing magazine articles you know the first one was like a kind of bloodless rapport and then I think he begins to experience the joy of authorship and the intense emotional experience of reliving experiences so emotional that we can almost not imagine them and so I think that what happens with any kind of writing is that when the emotion is you know deep and true suddenly beautiful language you know was forced out of us that in Printz famous passage you know meeting Lee at Appomattox where he said I felt like he talks about how sad he was at the moment not at jubilant he said I could not imagine you know rejoicing over the defeat of a foe who had fought so hard and valiantly even though that foe had fought in the worst possible cause and cause for which there was the least possible excuse actually phrase more beautifully than I just did now but again and again just kind of took takes your breath away in terms of how gorgeously and perfectly he has stated something and what that says to me as a writer was number one how deeply he felt this and that - these were words that had been germinating you know in his mind for a long time he never thought that he grant was very kind of taciturn I think that he never imagined that he would ever be in a position of being able to express these very private feelings that he had had one of our folks Tiffany Rock was up at Mount McGregor a few weeks ago and here's a clip of talking to a guy named Ben Camp who was working for the cottage but it'll give you a couple of things that you write about - you can explain here in a minute it's a really interesting item we have in this room is Grant's original medicine is still here the bottle with the original liquid and the original substance and most people guess that what they were using for medication is something like morphine or some heavy sedative like that the only problem was that grant couldn't take medicine like that because it was just too powerful and he wouldn't be able to concentrate on working on his book so the doctors settled on a fairly new substance at the time a little controversial it was cocaine so what you see in the bottle is actually cocaine and they would stir that up and they would apply it on his throat topically to give him a little bit of pain relief so they could keep concentrated on that work we also have some video showing the living room and they with which we can role showing where that how he put two chairs together how much pain was he in from what you can tell and you can see this significant yeah cuz okay say he'd be kind of you know sitting on one chair he then would have his legs raised on the other he would create a writing nest by burning putting a board across but the reason that these overstuffed armchairs were so important to grant was that he found it very difficult if not impossible to sleep in a normal horizontal position because he would have a terrible feeling as if he was strangling it was a massive element so like he was being waterboarded that means terrible sensation when you're suddenly gasping for breath and so he would actually you know often sleep sitting up because being in a vertical position would keep the the patentee air passages open so there was I'm it's amazing the amount of suffering that he he went through and that the last thing that the average person would want to do you know during that year would be this massive project is it so unit to write a long book like this is is any writing rule the test is to you know carry very large weight on your shoulders and he was already carrying the largest weight of all in terms of mortality than worrying about providing financially for his family so it was it was really an amazing amazing feat you say just a few days before he died that he finished the book what was his the end of his life like well they it was almost as if grant recognized at that moment that his work was done you know and that his his life was over they they wheeled him out one day to a scenic overlook where you could see a number of different mountain ranges and then that just that exertion they controlling him there he came back and then he had really taken a terrible toll on him but luckily he passed away very very quietly he left to Julia the very difficult decision in terms of deciding what to do about his earthly remains because the grants it had a sort of vagabond life they did not have a fixed abode grant had grown up in three small towns in southwest Ohio then he married Julia who was from this slave-owning family in Missouri then he had been assigned to you know four different Garrison's in around the country then they had lived in Washington then of christen Civil War you know he's moving around Missouri in Tennessee and Virginia etc Mississippi and so there wasn't a natural resting place Grant had very fond feelings towards New York he felt that during the last five years it was that New York had really you know embraced him as New York tends to do for people from other parts of the country and other parts of the other world but it really felt to Julia because there were people who wanted him buried in Arlington he actually would have preferred to be buried at West Point but Julia could not have been buried with him at West Point then to the the rules there Galena Illinois where he'd been living at the a break Galena want to Julia said that she made the decision to locate Grant's Tomb on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for a number of reasons she thought that in Manhattan a lot of people would be able to visit it and she was living in Manhattan she would be able to visit it but I think that and Riverside Park was new and the mayor said that they could put it there but I think that for Julia this was a real love match between them beginning to end and for Julia I think the single most important consideration was that New York City's part of the deal said that Julia could be buried you know and adjoining sarcophagi you know next to Ulysses so there they are and for those people who still wonder who's buried in Grant's Tomb it really is grand but it's also it's also julia grant and incidentally Brian that line who who's buried in Grant's Tomb you know where he comes from Groucho Marx guess when Groucho had the quiz show you bet your life graduates they mercilessly ridicule the gas but Groucho began to feel sorry for the guests because they couldn't answer a single question so he said disappear so let's ask everyone a question that everyone can answer and the question was who's buried grants tomb and two graduates amazement half the contestants got it wrong I can't tell you how many people but I would say I'm working on grant immediately shot back who's buried in Grant's Tomb Gary Gallagher and John wah and you also have been fellows down at Mississippi State where the new group grant library is grant library at Mississippi fairly interesting Stewart and has did not get as much as one might have imagined when it happened okay starting in the 1960s at Southern Illinois University they began to create the first edition of grants papers first volume is published 1967 I think the 32nd and final volume in 2012 they're fabulous this is one of the great scholarly feats he said John why Simon John my Simon yeah as I say in the acknowledgments of the book I wish I could have thanked him because he died right before I started the book but if I and my you know fellow grandpa givers look good it's because of John why Simon then the Southern Illinois University decided to shop the papers and it's 250,000 grant related documents and one of the people on the board of the Grant Association which supervises the papers John Moores Lac John is an emeritus professor of history at Mississippi State in Starkville and John and Mississippi State and I think said Mississippi made a strong bid for it so the grand papers lo and behold ended up in the deep south they've just created this beautiful this is the first annotated edition of grants memoirs long overdue is that beautiful cover and you know John and his staff at they called the grant Presidential Library have done outstanding job they showed me every courtesy and they show everyone who shows up there because and I've asked John and people there was there controversy when grants papers removed to Starkville Mississippi and they said no John could only remember one person who had made an issue of it and they've done a great job we ask Michele Crowell about you and here's her answer to working with you do you expect a Broadway musical to be made look like Alexander Hamilton well I guess you would have to ask mr. chernau if any contract is in the works but if if we can do for grant what what he did for Hamilton I think it would make sure that in perpetuity is still on the $50 bill for one thing so when's the musical gonna start the Grant's life does not move to a hip-hop beats I don't think that Grant is gonna endeavours of a musical I hope that may be lined up as a feature film I think would be very good subject for a future I think you know with with Hamilton aside from lin-manuel Miranda's a genius Hamilton was young and dashing and handsome and romantic in a way he was a perfect leading man for musical you know grant Grant's life moves were very different kind of beat he was he was playing and laconic and the the charisma of ulysses s grant was that he had no charisma you know the drama very often is that he was not dramatic in different situations he's no less he's nellis fascinating but he's kind of a much more you know no less deep than Hamilton but kind of very very subtle character actually in that respect to reminds me much more George Washington that George Washington had assembly kind of reserved and eggmad ik quality to to grant you've been involved with the Alexander Hamilton musical I don't know whether you know or willing to tell us but by now how many books have been sold oh well my publisher took out an ad last year saying that more than a million sets well in excess of a million at this at this point which is really very very unusual and wonderful for a serious biography so I just feel very very fortunate that I somehow got swept up in this whole hamilton phenomenon and it's a gift that just goes on giving and you know my relationships with the producers with the creative team with all the various cats we have three different cats they were before very long be six different companies doing Hamilton its opening in London in December so it's now god national and it's about to go international it's coming to Washington also I asked you about some politics this is Linda during the campaign last fall my question to you is why did the Broadway show get into politics I mean that was a fund raiser for Hillary Clinton that's a good question right you know when when the show started out we were all you know we will made an agreement that we would try to keep the the show and that the promotion and the marketing show completely nonpartisan that we did not want the show to be perceived as either a Republican or Democrat or a liberal and conservative and we were hoping that political figures from both sides of the aisle would would come as it turned out we had many many more Democratic politicians then Republicans came in terms of you know kind of the the change in the end of Chris Linn has been very active in recent weeks in hurricane in puerto rican hurricane relief and has made some very very strong statements about the the president that hasn't been kind of an official change i mean i still like to think that this is a you know the subtitle of it is hamilton american musical and i still like to think that this is a show for all americans and i would hate for people either to come or not come because they're you know bookends or they're Democrats you know we had this a much-publicized incident when Mike Pence came there was just a few days after the show opened and no member of the cast made a statement from the the stage then I thought it was kind of very you know eloquent and thoughtful not kinda mean our we've got that statement I want to run this and so people can see what worried that the other side wouldn't come to the play well you know what I mean I wasn't involved you know in this I didn't know about this in the red so I kind of woke up the next morning and read about it and the in the newspapers like everyone else I dunno you know and this was part of the whole secret sauce of Hamilton you know that we had a cast that was overwhelmingly black Latino asian-american biracial of course a lot of the members of the cast are gay you know so I think that in addition to all the people who didn't vote for Trump you know kind of worrying whether multiculturalism you know would it would be honored it was these feelings I think we're particularly acute understandably you know with these with these casts so I certainly understood you know you know where they were coming from about this and in fact it was not clear whether Mike Pence was actually in the theater or whether he had already kind of left and was in the lobby when the state was was was made but as I recall it was on a Friday night and on Sunday he gave an injury with Fox News in which he was very complimentary you know about the the show he said he was great history buff he said it was a great show he loved it and he was actually very presidential I think I wouldn't respond to but you know mr. Trump by over 48 hour period tweeted four times about the show and in one of the tweets said I hear the shows vastly over which was which is kind of funny and then we went through a period where it didn't last very long went through a period where some of the pro Trump people were boycotting the show then the anti Trump people we're saying please do maybe we'll be able to get tickets to the show if you if you boycott it but kind of faded away pretty pretty quickly and I and I hope that that is behind us and I still fervently hope that you know every American will feel that this is their show one last piece of video involves you will watch this and ask you to describe to us why you did this mm-hmm there comes a time when I and you can no longer remain neutral silent we must speak up and speak out like many other historians I have been deeply disturbed by the Trump campaign history is full of demagogues who rise and sometimes rise to the very Heights of power what do you say in Cleveland only I can solve these problems nothing is more antithetical to America's Founding what's especially different about Donald Trump is that he's not a patriot one of the things that Donald Trump is not is a populist Donald Trump is attuned to the white backlash against a black man in power he's Melville's confidence man he's the huckster the shark I don't know as much about Trump's temperament but he seems like a narcissist why did you decide as a historian to jump into this well it was interesting you know this this project historians and Donald Trump I was started by Ken Burns and David McCullough during the campaign and Ken made a quite extraordinary speech at Stanford commencement and he said that as historian it was stuck in this case documentary filmmaker all right you said that ordinarily we try to be completely you know nonpartisan you know and we will you know when I have liberal followers and you know conservative followers etc but you know I what I said in my statement was I was just kind of picking up things that I noticed were absent in Trump's words you know words of kindness and sympathy and compassion there was much too much of an emphasis I thought and kind of money and power you know and and and strength and so you know I felt that it's it's not something that I think any of us did likely because I was saying with the show we want the show to be the show of all the people we want to be you know historians for everyone but we felt it was an unusual situation with myth Trump in my hands the October 15th New York Times Book Review and there you are leading the whole thing written by William Jefferson Clinton yeah how did that happen you know the interesting is I I met Bill Clinton a few years ago actually when I was just starting work on Grant and he he's a great reader of history and he said to me who you working on and I said you this is s grant and he had read grants memoirs and he had read three biographies I'm granting as we started discussing it I could tell that he really had read all four of those books because he had pertinent things to say about them and then I recently was interviewed by the editor of the New York Times Book Review section and I asked her how she happened to pick Clinton and someone had told her that Clinton had Buckland that always had this fascination with us grant so I you know there was a wonderful view and needless to say I was so deeply flattered they have a former president reviewing the book and particularly one who was he's really student of American history they're deep reflections I think deep reflections not only about grant but in terms of the continuing echoes in our national life of a lot of the issues raised by the Civil War and reconstruction I also thought that it was you know for such a celebrated figures Bill Clinton it was an amazingly modest review you know he really made it about grants rather than about Bill Clinton and he very carefully not quoted the the book and so I thought that it was a model review and not just because it was a big Batman happen to be favorable but it just showed his own scholarship and integrity a student of history next book I don't know you're trying I'm trying to clear my head first those that are disappointed we only talked about the writing on the memoirs there are a thousand pages they can read that you've written and the cover of the book looks like this the name of the book is grant our guest has been Ron chernow and we thank you very much who is the pleasure what I think [Music] for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program visit us at Q&A org Q&A programs are also available as c-span podcasts [Music]

Channel: 바카라 7시 테스데스크

Views: 5,250

Keywords: President Grant, Ron Chernow, Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton

Id: MC1UqyNbSL0

Length: 58min 36sec (3516 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 24 2017