Teddy and Alice Historical Talk #3 - Roosevelt's Accomplices

Well, thank you everybody for being here for historical chap number three, the third and last in the uh series that I've done. Um, for those of you online watching this who don't know me, my name is Dr. William Hanser. I am a historian here at the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. Um, and we've been talking about the, you know, life and times of the characters in the 1987 Broadway musical Teddy and Alice. In the first of these three talks, we talked about Teddy and Alice themselves, their mannerisms, their relationship, what their lives were like. In the second, we talked about the rest of the Roosevelt Roosevelt family, his wife Edith, his other five children, uh, and Alice's husband, Nick Longworth. Today, we're talking about who I'm calling accompllices, associates, and adversaries. basically the rest of the characters in the show who have a name uh who are real historic figures uh that we can draw upon and talk about uh what they were like and what their relationships with TR in particular were like. Uh and with that I'm going to get started with Dr. Henry Kavat Lodge. Uh now in the show uh he is one of a group of three cronies as they're called who are sort of doing TR's bidding or working against his bidding in some cases behind this fact. Um, now in real life, Henry Kev Lodge was uh TR's closest friend and political ally. Um, he's from Boston or Boston area. Uh, he's descended from two very wealthy families in Boston. He is very sort of prototypical upper class Boston Brahman type of person. Um, he becomes uh the Republican senator from Massachusetts, one of their two senators in 1892. remains a senator until uh his death in 1924. Uh he uh first gets a law degree and then he becomes one of the earliest PhDs in history in America in 1876. Uh and one of the first three doctorates at Harvard ever period. Um and then he will join their faculty there of teaching history. Um he's also a very popular historian, not just an academic. He's publishing popular biographies of figures like George Washington, uh, uh, Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, sort of these early important figures. Um, and so he also actually later on will publish a book with TR as well about some of these important figures. Um, he's a member of a lot of very important societies like Whoops, I'll jump forward. No, okay. There we go. um you know the American antiquarian society so on and so forth he's really involved in these things um as a politician as a statesman he's a very strong believer in the Monroe doctrine and enforcing you know American empire having a powerful navy overseas territories very aggressive approach um he's a partyline a Republican voter um he is he is very very strong in his beliefs um and later on he will come most famous actually for very bitterly opposing the Treaty of Versailles terms at the end of World War I and the American entry into the League of Nations and ultimately he will be successful in preventing the United States from joining the League of Nations because he believes it violates American sovereignty. Um now he's a friend and mentor uh uh to to TR even though he's only just a little older than him. Um, and as far as his personality goes, another fellow historian, Henry Adams, will describe Waj as an excellent talker, a voracious reader, a ready wit, an accomplished orator with a clear mind and a powerful memory. Um, and he puts a lot of literary references, especially Shakespeare, into his speeches and his writings. Um, one historian who writes about him later, uh, looks up accounts of him and things and describes him when he speaks says, uh, his thumbs adjusted in his armpits and a copy of Shakespeare in his pocket. He spoke in rasping tones words that were brilliant but often bitter. Uh, so he is a very sort of almost arrogant sort of Boston Brahman. Um, he himself will describe his voice as like the edge of a saw being fighted. So, he has a very raspy uh voice that he speaks in, but apparently it's not quite as grading as he's describing because he's, you know, popular as a speaker. He's an accomplished ortor, but he certainly had a rat to his voice. He could be very sharp, uh, very haughty, very combative in his speech, but again, he's he's going to become Roosevelt's closest friend and political ally. Roosevelt will call him the most loyal friend that ever breed. Uh they will first meet in 1884 at the Republican National Convention and they will stay political allies throughout their lives. Um it will actually be Elaj's influence that will get Roosevelt some of his earliest federal positions as a civil service commissioner as assistant secretary of the Navy. Um and they will bond over their shared politics especially really zealous in their want for reform desire for reform. Um, again, Roosevelt will say, um, that Lodge is not only the staunchest friend I've ever known, but the very staunchest friend I've ever read of. And the more I see a public life, the more I realize and appreciate what he is and what he has done. Um, and so they are really, really close. Let's move on then to the second of the three cronies, as they're told, in the show, and that will be Eli Mut. Um, Elijah Brute is a man from upstate New York. He's the son of a math professor there, uh, in Clinton, New York. He's encouraged to become, uh, minister. His family is Presbyterian. He's encouraged to go into the ministry. Um, he will take up law instead. Um, within two years of graduating New York University in 1967, he's a partner in his own firm, uh, working in corporate affairs, basically banks and railroads and so on. uh and he becomes a very very powerful uh corporate lawyer, a very very uh wealthy uh corporate lawyer. He uh in 1883 will become the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is one of the most important attorneys in the United States, both then and now. In private practice, he's going to take on some of the biggest and most wealthy corporate clients, people like JP Morgan and Edward Henry Haram, who we will actually talk about later in this lecture. um and sort of will represent other moneyed interests as well. Um he will later become the secretary of war um under President McKinley and then he will become the secretary of state after that. Um so he is serving in McKinley and Roosevelt's cabinets as a as a prominent statesman. Um he will briefly return to private practice between those two moments but not for very long. Um this is a man who is considered very analytical and very disciplined but also very creative in his problem solving. Uh he is approach to to solve a lot of of legal problems. Uh and uh he's considered very comprehensively skilled. Um when he's in the war department he's going to reorganize the administration, found the war college. He's going to open branch schools at West Point. He basically creates the modern National Guard uh with federal funding and uniform drills and all these kinds of things. Um he really approaches this very strongly. Uh as Secretary of State uh he's pushing uh for um uh in the overseas territories, a very sort of democratic administration but very paternalistic of the overseas territories. Um he's considered pragmatic, logical, unemotional, precise in his calculations, not really a politician um but certainly a lawyer. U he is humane uh in his treatment of people. He's humorous with people, but he is sort of also viewed as cold in general overall. He can be friendly with you, but he was seen as a sort of a detached person. Um and in particular, he was sort of disillusioned with the American public sometimes. The New York Times will remember him later and say he did not suffer fools gladly and he was often inclined to think he the American people were fools. Um but he's clear and straightforward. Uh Roosevelt will say of him uh he is the ablest man I've ever met, the man on whom I most rely to whom I owed most the greatest secretary of state we have ever had as great a cabinet officer as we have ever had save Alexander Hamilton alone. U Root is also of course very impressed by TR. will say that he did not originate great new truths but he drove old fundamental truths into the minds of the hearts of his people so that they stuck and dominated old truths he insist upon insisted upon enlarged upon repeated over and over never straining for novelty or for originality but always driving home the deep fundamental truths of public life. So they are they uh they get on very proudly. And the third of the cronies we will come to is William Howard Tap. Uh now I did a fair bit of research to play William Howard Tap only to uh discover yesterday that I would be asked to play Theodore Roosevelt instead. Thank you. Thank you. Uh I am uh uh certainly uh going to do my best to to take on that uh that opportunity that has been offered me. Um Taft, however, is also a very interesting figure that we should devote some time to. Um he's the son of a prominent lawyer and statesman who was Secretary of War and attorney general. He's from Cincinnati, Ohio, from a very large family. As as a kid, he's very athletic despite already struggling with obesity. He's an excellent student. Uh and really he has a desire to be loved and respected from the time he's a little boy. He really is anxious for everyone's approval very much so. Um and really from the time he's you know a teenager or at least a young man he's got a lifelong ambition to be chief justice of the Supreme Court. That is what he wants most. Um he will graduate from Yale, become a prominent Republican attorney attorney, excuse me, through appointed posts, um appointed, you know, political posts in part to his father's connections and also just having some good timing. He will say, uh that uh he always had his plate the right side up when offices were falling. So he just sort of was in the right place at the right time. His wife Nelly also uh pushed pretty hard for him to to go higher and higher in his career. Um, President McKinley will appoint him governor general of the Philippines. Um, he's pretty sympathetic to the Filipinos. He tries to improve life for them through economic initiatives, building roads and schools. Um, he does sort of have still a paternalistic view that they're not able to govern themselves, but he tries to improve life in the Philippines. He's actually twice offered Supreme Court appointments while he's governor general by President Roosevelt and he turns them both down because he feels he still has work to do that and it's important that he stay there and do his work even though being on the Supreme Court is what he always wanted. Um uh when that tenure ends though he will become actually secretary of war under President Roosevelt. Um in general as a politician or at least as an administrator as a lawyer he's opposed to executive overreach. and TR clash on this. Uh he prefers to use existing administrative law and regulations. Um but he shares many of TR's views and morals and wants to achieve some same some similar things. Um he's seen as a very charming, engaging man. He's very jovial, warm-hearted. Uh he's somebody that that people really love to be around. Um the Roosevelt will say to Archie in 1908, I almost envy a man possessing a personality like Tabs. People are always be possessed by him. one loves him at first sight. He has nothing to overcome when he meets people. I realized that I have always got to overcome a little something before I get to the heart of people. Um so, you know, Chap was somebody who is very approachable. Um in his actions, he's deliberative but not always decisive. He really loves to ponder every angle of a question, but that doesn't always get you to what to do about it. Um he's very institutional, very conscientious. There are ways to do things and you should do them that way. Um he's very irritable and depressed as the president. He does not want to be the president when he later uh becomes TR's successor. Um and in fact that will break their friendship because Tap will not do the things that TR expected him to do and everyone expected Tap to do. In fact there was a joke that Tap stood for take advice from Theodore. Um but he did not quite do things that way and so that will break their friendship until 1918. They will reconcile though when they have a chance meeting in Chicago. Um uh he will eventually become chief justice in 1921 like he always wanted and he will say I don't remember that I ever was president. Uh so he kind of walks it out. Um he was a man who talked plainly in a very clear unacented deliberate speech. Um and he was you know very straightforward in most of what he did. He actually refused to be embarrassed by any of the jokes about his weight or his you know the things that that caused. he helpful would fall asleep in meetings or at concerts and he took those jokes and comments about that in stride. Um so that's that's an interesting thing about him. He probably had sleep apnea actually that caused that. Um and also he loved golf and will contribute a lot to popularization of golf in the United States. By the time he's finished with his presidency the number of golf players on in the United States will have doubled. And so now then after we've done the cronies, we're going to move on to a couple of the prominent businessmen. And I better check the time because you like to talk about those guys for a long time. All right. So we'll talk now about JP Morgan. Uh JP Morgan is a person who a lot of people have heard his name, maybe know he was an important banker, businessman, but probably don't know very much about him. At least I knew relatively little um compared to what I learned researching for this. uh he is a son of a financier himself. Uh he's from a very wealthy influential family in Hartford, Connecticut. He will be educ educated in the United States and Germany and then will work his way up through the finance world. uh he will reorganize a sort of existing finance company to become his own in 1895 and he will ultimately become or or his firm will become one of the most powerful banking houses in the entire world really of all time not even just in his own time but certainly then um because he'd been educated in Europe and because he had European connections um he's going to get especially British capital to flow into US industry and really allow it to grow um the main thing he does with this company at least at first is he's got to reorganize railroad companies that are competing with one another into new uh either into new corporations or to what's called trust which are assembly essentially holding companies that hold multiple corporations together sort of umbrella companies. Um this is going to stabilize them. It's going to minimize competition but it's going to create monopolies. And his method of doing this actually comes to be called morganization uh because it is so unique to him. Um and through this sort of corporate restructuring he does he's going to create the modern version of US Steel which uh after buying out Andrew Carnegie this is the first billion dollar corporation in the world. Uh he's going to create the modern version of General Electric and he's going to electrify uh New York City alongside uh Edison using his financial uh abilities there. uh and also creates international harvest as we know it now by combining multiple agricultural uh equipment companies. And when he does all these things with all these companies, he actually takes board positions as part of this structuring. And so he puts himself in charge basically of US corporate finance and structuring because he's on the board of nearly every major company there is. Um he's going to also be essentially a central bank of the United States before we have one. there is no Federal Reserve before 1913. Um, and so he's going to relieve financial panics by forming syndicates to replenish gold stocks when gold is running low in one panic. Uh, supplying liquid assets when the United States government needs it. And so they called him sometimes the lender of last resort. And the Federal Reserve will in fact be created in part to make sure that the government never has to rely on a single private citizen to, you know, bail out the US government again. Um but before the finance system that exists in 1913, he is sort of US finance. Um he will be called upon by Roosevelt's administration to intervene in a coal strike that happens in 1902. Um and he will get involved in part because of his own railroad interests that are involved in this coal strike. Railroad companies that operate mines that transport the coal so on and so forth. uh he will with Eli root uh create a compromise uh that leads to an arbitration commission because the mine operators don't want to say that they're recognizing the union bargaining with the union. So instead they're bargaining with this arbitration commission as a sort of neutral third party. Um he was very authoritative, very demanding, very blunt in his speech. Um even arrogant uh especially when speaking one-on-one or in small groups. Uh he's got a very nasal barking voice. Um but he avoids crowds. He actually does not, you know, he's not authoritative or or demanding in big crowds. He's actually intensely shy. Uh interestingly enough, very very private. Uh he's self-conscious in part due to his uh condition of rosacea that causes, you know, him to have this larger uh and bumpy nose. So he's very self-conscious of that. Um he's also got a more tender side. He's a very sincere polymath. he becomes a great art and book collector. Um the Morgan library is one of the great institutions of the United States today for uh books and art. Um and he believed that he deserved to be sort of the demanding and fun person that he was because he was a great force in history uh and because of his importance in the economy. Um he will clash with TR and TR's first big trusting p tr trust busting case for Northern Securities uh which is one of those railroad trusts hold multiple railroad companies but they're going to find common ground over working toward stabilizing the economy essentially. Let's talk next then about Edward Henry Haramman. Eh Haramman uh was another sort of very big businessman, one of the robber baronss as they're sometimes called. He's a name that's kind of forgotten now, but at the time he was just as well known and just as significant as Morgan, as Rockefeller, as Carnegie, as any of these big names. Um, but for whatever reason, his name has has not uh continued in in fame like those other gentlemen. U, he is from Long Island, from the same uh county as Theodore Roosevelt. Actually, he's the son of an Episcopalian minister. Um, he will work with his uncle Oliver on Wall Street as an Aaron boy. At 14 years old, he actually quit school to go work with his uncle on Wall Street. Uh, he'll work his way into management of an investment firm eventually, and he will become a member of the New York Stock Exchange by 22 and establish his own firm. He buys a seat there. Uh, he does very well with that. Uh, at 33 years old, he will acquire a small railroad that's kind of beaten down this railroad company. he will reorganize it and sell it for a profit and this will become his career sort of reorganizing individual railroad companies and and selling um he will continue to acquire railroad companies and build them up. He will become massively wealthy and powerful. He's worth several billion in today's dollars at the time of his death. He controls five railroad companies with 60,000 miles of track, including the Union Pacific Railroad, a steamship company, and Wells Fargo Express Shipping Company. Uh, so he is extremely powerful man. Um, he's considered to be a logistics genius in the way he, you know, reorganizes these railroads. He will actually personally inspect thousands of miles of tracks to find out what he's doing. He's also got very wide interest. He will sponsor a very famous scientific expedition to Alaska to catalog flora and fauna. Also sponsors a pretty big jiu-jitsu exhibition. So he's a man with a lot of interest. U he's small in stature but he still projects a lot of power. According to John Mureer, who was involved with this finalist who was involved with this Alaska expedition I described, he is a person who people do not like very much personalitywise. He very hard, disagreeable, coldblooded, abrasive. He really hates both small talk and long speeches. He just wants to get to the heart of the matter. Um but he was actually vocally extremely quiet sometimes almost as to be inaudible or in fact would be silent rather than speak. Um and he's very reserved in his manner, but he was uh deeply loving and tender to his wife and children. They remember him very fondly and he's he's good with children in general. He will found an organization that is today the Boy Club of New York. Um so he is he is ruthless but even he has a soft side. So from business we move on to labor uh to one of the most famous lab labor leaders in United States history and that is Samuel Gumpers. U Gers is born uh in London in the east end to a workingass Jewish family. as a teenager, they will move to the lower east side of Manhattan. Um, and he will help his father to manufacture cigars in their home, in their tenement home. This is a very common thing at the time, but it's very dirty, dusty, disgusting work. And the cigars that come out of these tenementss are not always of high quality. Um, it's it's a pretty rough business. Um and because he is in this you know very uh uh rough you know unpleasant business he will uh become very involved in labor leadership. He will uh eventually become president of the local cigar makers union. He will join the predecessor of what is now the American Federation of Labor. He will be the first president when that actual organization was created in 1886. Um he's president for all but two years uh until his death in 1924. So he is the leader of the American Federation of Labor. Um he fights for what he calls pure and simple unionism which is basically just fighting for better conditions and better wages practical things rather than making big political moves or trying to change the system entirely as other uh labor movements are trying to do. uh he opposes socialism in general, sort of anything that changes the political status quo. He's conservative with a small C in his thing. He will first meet TR in 1882 while TR is an assemblyman uh in the state of New York. Um and Gers at this time is campaigning to end for a bill to end cigar manufacturing in the tenement houses. Uh Roosevelt is in opposition to this bill until Gumpers tells him put your money where your mouth is. come on a tour of the tenementss and slums and see this cigar manufacturing firsthand. Uh when TR does this, he absolutely doesn't about face and he campaigns very hard for this bill to end cigar manufacturing in tandem houses. Uh it'll eventually be passed, but it will be found unconstitutional by the New York Supreme Court. U but it is something that that TR is changes his mind on uh because of Gers. Uh many times they're going to be in agreement on things. Goffers will support the SpanishAmerican War. He's big on military preparedness. He's opposed to, you know, radicalism and socialism. He and TR agree on these things. But they will come to split over the role of unions in society and how much power unions should have, so on and so forth. And they actually in 1917 will almost come to blows literally when they're both on stage at an event and they're debating u causes and appropriate reactions to a race riot in East St. Louis. Um, personalitywise, this is a man who is very charismatic, very magnetic. People talk about him having a lot of vitality in his speaking. He's got a lot of conviction and determination, and he's got a really big, booming, deep voice. He's very emotional in his speaking, very theatrical. He will take dramatic pauses. Uh, he's a very theatrical ortor. Um, so his his speeches are very, very popular. And he's one of uh quite a few people at this time who will tour what's called the circuit. basically sort of adult self-study education and give uh educational and political speeches. That brings us next to Idatarbell, a uh very famous journalist of this period, one of the best journalists of this period. Um Idatarbell is born in a log cabin in a log cabin on a farm in Pennsylvania to a poor parents who at first are teachers, although they will go for a couple different careers. uh his or excuse me, her father will uh eventually start a small oil business. Uh um he will first make wooden barrels to store oil in and then he will actually be uh extracting and refining some oil. Um, and what will happen without getting too much into the weeds is that some shady practices by Standard Oil uh will lead to that small business and several others in the Pennsylvania oil fields being closed uh due to sort of unfair competition and unfair methods. So even as a young person, Ida Tarbell is being exposed to sort of shady ruthless dealings of Standard Oil. Um she initially dreams of being a a scientist, specifically a biologist. Um but the sort of professional sciences were more or less closed to women at this time in society. It was not really something that you could easily if at all do. So she instead will go to Alageney College and she will get both a bachelor or the equivalent of a bachelor's and a master's degree and become a teacher. Uh she will teach science, math, and even languages, multiple languages. First she will teach in Ohio, then she will return home uh to Pennsylvania. She will briefly write for the Chiakwan magazine. Again, this Chiakwa institution, this adult education movement, she will write for that magazine. Um, and later, uh, she's going to move to Paris and sort of strike out on her own. She's going to study at the Sorbon, uh, and she's going to write freelance for American magazines. While she's in Paris, she's also going to study the work of French historians who are sort of professionalizing their career at this time. um and she's going to start writing books and articles of all kinds. She writes over the course of her career about 20 books and dozens of articles. Um many of these are biography. She writes a biography of Napoleon. She writes multiple books on Abraham Lincoln. Um and she uses the sort of methods that she learns at the Sorbon as a from the historians uh in her journalism uh to look at primary sources in particular. Um she's most famous certainly though for um what is first a 19-part magazine series and then a book uh written from 1902 through 1904 on the history of standard level again. So this published in magazines and then becomes a book. Um she's going to pour over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of public records of court records of newspaper stories anything you can imagine. but also through her connections in the world of journalists and also uh to other sort of bigname people at the time like Mark Twain, she's actually going to get interviews with many of the executives at Standard Oil including uh John Rocke himself. Um so she is absolutely going to get at the heart of the matter as best as she can as many facts as she can gather. Um, and this book when it comes out is hailed as a masterpiece is still considered sort of the cornerstone example of investigative journalism today is something people still look to for her command of facts, for her fairness. Um, again all of her work is considered very thorough, very fair, very factual with a lot of intellectual integrity in what she does. Um, and so this book uh will uh create some greater awareness of the issues of monopolies that's going to lead to a public outcry for reform and eventually an antitrust lawsuit will break up Standard Oil into multiple smaller companies. Although the grand irony of that is it will actually increase John Rockefeller's wealth. The value of the stocks will go up uh by all these companies. It will it will actually have a positive effect on the stock market. Um she is a woman who's considered very meticulous and analytical, scientific if you think about her first, you know, interests. She's very independent in her, you know, in her life, very unintimidated by others. She actually describes herself as having a bachelor of soul. Um she is somebody who strikes it out on her own and is happy to do so. When she speaks, she's very calm and reasoned in her delivery uh very factual, not emotional, very direct in the way she delivers information. Um, and she and TR have a sort of interesting uh long ongoing uh relationship and it's sometimes combative, sometimes friendly. Um, TR will actually coin or popularize the term mukbreaker to describe her brand of investigative journalism. Uh, it's referring to the uh classic Christian allegory story, The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunan. There's a character in that book uh the man with the muck ring who is so busy scraping the muck that he never looks at anything good. Uh and this is what TR sometimes feels about these people who are scraping up the muck of the corruption of American society. Although in in the same speech even that first one where he says that he will also recognize the value of needing to get at corruption. They will maintain a good working relationship even if they butt heads. um she will often feel that he does not do enough to make further progress in dealing with corruption. She will say he hammered at the effects of privilege, pursued malifactors of great wealth, but was not willing to do the hard studying of the causes which produced the malifactors. Uh so she felt that he did not do as much as he could have done. We have just one more person to talk about and that is Bel Hagner, the first White House social secretary. Um uh Bel Hagner uh is born uh to a wellcon socially well-connected doctor in Washington DC. She first has a very full social life, parties, dancing, concerts in Washington. But sadly at 16 16 years old, she will be orphaned. Both of her parents will die and she will be left to care for her three younger brothers on her own. Um she will end up taking work as a secretary to various wealthy uh residents of Washington DC. Uh, one of these people will be Theodore Roosevelt's sister, Karen. Um, and when she works for Karen, she then is introduced to Edith Roosevelt, who is very impressed by her organizational and secretarial abilities. She will ask Bill Hagner to organize Alice's coming out. Um, and she does such a good job at that that Edith will then employ her full-time as the very first White House social secretary, which is still a position that we have today. and at the same time sort of creating the modern office of the first lady by doing this. Um so uh Belhagger will manage correspondence. She will plan events even writing invitations herself, drawing up seating charts herself. Um today in DC in the administration, those are actually jobs all their own. There's somebody whose job it is just to write invitations for example. Um she will implement event protocol that was not there before. She's even going to assist in e shopping. Um she's going to be in charge of releasing official photos of the family to sort of curb the paparazzi. She is absolutely invaluable. Um she's basically going to become an unofficial member of the family. Edith in particular sees her as something of a daughter. Um the children will see her as a sort of mother. She's very very loved by the family. She's invited to shows and events with them. She will visit Sagin Hill several times. um she's considered very loyal and very discreet in what she does which are both important uh qualities for a political secretary um and also having enough energy to handle this job. And that is all the people I have to talk about to you today. So I will thank you again for being here. As always I will let you know that you can contact me for anything you may want or need. And now I will gladly take any questions that you may have. I have a question not really related to anybody that you talked about kind of first kind of establishing the office of the first lady or the predecessor to it. >> Sure. >> In that time there was probably no budget for that. How would Edith go about financing any sort of events or >> That's a good question. Now I know that I know I've read that somewhere but I don't know that I can remember. know that she is officially Bel Hagner for example is on the government payroll. Um so where that money comes from I would have to look into that because it's it's true that like even the president uh you know was going to have to pay to entertain out of his own pocket. Um they that he does get a salary but all that's going to have to go right back into entertaining and things. Um so I know that they do find government money for some of these things not all of them. And again, like they might pay bill with government money, but then the party, they're going to have to pay their own money to have it. Um, so I'd have to look more into the actual specifics of how that is arranged. But, you know, um, the the first lady, you know, she was, you know, Edith was doing official government work. You know, she was a, you know, just as much as the president was, and yet she wasn't being paid for it. Um, and of course that is still a debate that's being had today over whether the first lady should receive a salary and how much that salary should be. Um, and that's something that basically starts with Edith, although Edith never asks for a salary. Um, but the idea of the first lady being more than just the president's wife begins with Edith and it's able to happen because she has Bill Hagner to run these states. So, all right. Seems like I covered it pretty thoroughly there. Fantastic. Well, again, for online people as well, you have any questions, be sure to let me know and I will gladly answer them if I can. Um, but with that, I will thank you all again for being here.