(upbeat music) - And welcome to "Forum 360", a program with a global outlook into a local view.

Our global outlook today will be politics, the executive branch, and our local view will be Ohio, the Buckeye State.

And we're fortunate to have Dr. Kevin Kern, member of the history faculty at the University of Akron.

And he is a co-author of one of the more recent books about Ohio history, "Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State".

Professor Kern and his co-author, Greg Wilson, Gregory Wilson from the University of Akron also.

And it's published by Wiley-Blackwell.

And we'll talk a little bit about that.

But we're going to concentrate on chapter 10 of this book, Dr. Kern, and that is about the executive branch and how Ohio became an influential state.

We call it the Dynasty of Presidents, right?

- The Ohio Dynasty, yeah.

- Ohio Dynasty of presidents.

A little bit about your background, Dr. Kern, how you got involved in specializing in history of Ohio.

- Well, I, you know, I think I came by it honest.

I'm born, raised in Ohio.

I went to school in Ohio.

I got my degrees from Kent State in Bowling Green.

My father, Dr. G Richard Kern was also an Ohio historian, so I'm kind of a nepo baby of Ohio historians.

But he taught at Findlay, University of Findlay.

And so, yeah, when I applied for jobs, University of Akron was looking for an Ohio historian, and I was very, very happy to land there.

- And then you decided that this would be a good topic, as a matter of fact, "Lectures in History", a program that CSPAN cable network focused in on, they wanted to learn more about how Ohio started developing this dynasty.

Who are the presidents that we should always remember, but who are they?

- Okay, well, I mean, there's a little debate about William Henry Harrison, of course.

William Henry Harrison is generally considered to be the first of the Ohio Dynasty.

He was elected in 1840.

There's some dispute because he was born in Virginia, but his estate was in Ohio.

And then you have Grant, right after the Civil War, there's this big run from 1868 to 1900.

- Okay.

- Nine elections.

Eight of those elections there was an Ohioan on the ballot.

So you have Grant, you have Hayes, you have Garfield.

Garfield unfortunately gets assassinated.

You have Benjamin Harrison, and then you have William McKinley.

And then the next four presidents alternate.

So you have Teddy Roosevelt, but then you have Taft, then you have Woodrow Wilson, but then you have Harding.

So within a little more than 50 years, there were seven Ohioans who were elected president.

- Now, the other state, Virginia also claims to be a mother of presidents.

- It does.

And everybody's fighting over William Henry Harrison and his all 30 days he's spent in office, because whoever gets him gets to say they have eight presidents.

- And now his grandson also became a president.

- Right, that was Benjamin Harrison.

In fact, when Benjamin Harrison was running for present, a lot of the campaign buttons and ribbons actually featured Old Tippecanoe, his grandfather, much more prominently than they featured Benjamin.

- Speaking of that, Indiana then could also say they had a share of the Harrisons.

- Sure, yeah, 'cause both Harrisons actually had a-- - Political.

- William Henry Harrison was the territorial governor in Indiana and Benjamin Harrison spent his entire adult career in Indiana.

- So what do we mean when we say dynasty, that how this dynasty developed, we talked a little bit about the presidents you mentioned.

We all remember President Grant because of his involvement in as the leading victor of the Civil War.

And would you say he, at the time, was probably the most prominent of the 19th century presidents?

- Sure, yeah.

First of all, he got reelected.

A lot of these Ohio presidents did not get reelected.

And he, in some ways, he was one of the most popular, just people in the United States at the time.

Of course, he was hugely, he was a hero for the Union cause, but even some people in the South had respect for him because of the relatively magnanimous surrender that he negotiated with Robert E Lee.

There were some people in the South who respected him on that level.

And so, yeah, he was very popular.

He was elected twice, you know, unfortunately, he also had a lot of scandals associated with his administration.

- But he was considered, if we think of US Grant on the $50 bill, I believe.

And we, you know, he's got, he's still in the minds of many people.

- Sure, yeah.

I mean, he was the foremost, he had the highest rank as a general since Washington during the Civil War.

- Now, his popularity at the end of his career was boosted a little bit by Mark Twain.

- Yes!

- Samuel Clemens, who helped him edit his memoirs.

- Yes and and this is one of the things about Grant, he was just generally, he's a general, but he was just generally a very nice guy.

He was very amiable.

He was not full of himself like a lot of people.

And yet, this comes out, if you read his memoirs, which are edited by Mark Twain, I mean, he just had tosses off these things.

He says he didn't know much about music.

"I only know two songs.

One of them is 'Yankee Doodle', the other one isn't."

You know, these are the kinds of things you get from the memoirs.

- Right.

- And so he came off as being a very personable, very amiable, very approachable person.

So he was actually, I think in his postpresidency, he toured the world and did a really kind of a goodwill tour for the United States.

He ended up being one of the most revered people of his era.

- Another veteran of World War, rather not the World War, but of the Civil War was Garfield.

And tragically he also met with an assassination-- - Yes.

- Similar to Lincoln.

- Yeah, and boy, you know, I consider Garfield to be one of the great what ifs of presidential history, because he is only in office for a few months before, and he's getting on a train to go to a college reunion.

And the Secret Service wasn't anything like it is today.

And this guy, Charles Guiteau, he was a mentally unstable person, disappointed office seeker, because Garfield wouldn't appoint him Ambassador to France.

I mean, you don't appoint random people to Ambassador to France.

He just comes right up behind him and shoots him.

And the sad thing is, if the doctors had just left him alone, he probably would've been okay.

But they're digging in there with their unsterilized fingers and instruments trying to find the bullet.

And he lingers for months.

And see this is why a lot of people, the bullet did not lodge in any sensitive area.

The body probably would've just formed a cyst around it.

And I mean, Andrew Jackson went his whole life with two bullets in his body.

But, you know, here he is a guy who was a reformer.

He really wanted to clean up the civil service.

He wanted to bring about change, get rid of some of the more corrupt people in the administration.

And yeah, we will never know because, you know, he's only-- - Life was cut short.

- His life was cut short, yeah.

- And then what about Rutherford B Hayes?

This is an interesting, he's from western Ohio, more or less.

- That's where he settled, yeah.

He was actually born in Delaware, Ohio.

But then he set up his professional career in what is now Fremont, Ohio.

- Right, Fremont, Ohio.

- And he was just, he came right after Grant, right?

And Grant presided over this very corrupt administration.

Now, I wanna make it clear, Grant himself was not personally profiting off this, he just had terrible taste in friends, he appointed these people to office who took advantage of his trust.

But you had a situation where the Republican Party was looking for someone who was kind of like squeaky clean in contrast to Grant.

And they could have picked no better person than Ruther B Hayes.

He was a very scrupulous, he had no skeletons in his closet.

He had a terrific pedigree of being a reformer.

He was, you know, abolitionist before the war.

He went out of his way to defend African American clients.

And then when the war started, he joined right up.

He's wounded five times and kept coming back.

And then he's like nominated to go into Congress and he refuses to campaign.

He says, "Anyone who at this critical hour who would leave the battlefield to electioneer for a seat in Congress ought to be scalped."

And that was all the campaigning he did.

And that's all the campaigning he needed to do.

He was elected.

And then he became a very popular governor of Ohio.

He was elected governor three times.

First time anyone was elected governor three times in Ohio.

Even in years when the Democrats ended up winning control of the State House, he ended up winning the election, that shows how popular and how his trans-- So in 1876, they say, "This is the guy, he's got the pedigree, he's got he's squeaky clean.

He's got the war reputation of being a general during the war."

And with one thing in another, his presidency probably wasn't as successful as it could have been.

One reason of which has to do with his own fault.

He said that he was only gonna serve one term.

And can you imagine a president today?

"I'm only gonna," they don't do that anymore.

No, but he just wanted to make it clear he was only gonna serve one term, but that meant he was a lame duck the moment he entered the office.

And then of course, the big thing was the election of 1876 was the most disputed election in American history.

You think you've seen disputed elections?

No, this was, they did not know up until just a few days before inauguration who was going to be president.

And it was what's called The Compromise of 1877, where he essentially agrees to end reconstruction, and of course, to leave African Americans in the South to their own devices.

And so that was a, he lost the popular vote.

There was a whole big thing about, you know, these disputed electors.

- Right, and the electoral college was able to bring truth.

- Right, they're just along party lines.

The Republicans found every single one of those electors for the Republicans.

So it really seemed to be, and he was called Rutherfraud B Hayes.

He was called Your Fraudulency.

You know, this was "The Cleveland Plain Dealer" had this thing at the top, it was a Democratic newspaper at the time, this thing on the masthead saying, you know, "X number of days since the election was stolen."

You know, that kind of thing.

So I think that really tainted his presidency.

- So we're talking about the 19th century presidents.

Our topic today is the dynasty of Ohio's presidents.

And the guest that we have today is co-author of one of the most recent histories of Ohio, "Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State".

The book is written by our guest, Dr. Kevin Kern, and his co-author, a fellow faculty member at the University of Akron History Department, Dr. Greg Wilson.

And we are featuring chapter 10, discussion of the presidents and the politicians that made Ohio such a influential state.

I'm Bill Steven Sous and we're here on "Forum 360".

So I'd like to continue, Dr. Kern, now that we've reintroduced your book, getting the information for your book and the sources, primary sources for your, that chapter especially, where were some of the, where did you go for some of the?

The presidential libraries or, you know, where did you go?

- Well, I actually, my colleague Greg Wilson, actually wrote this chapter, but we, you know-- - But between the two of you.

- Between the two, yeah.

But yeah, so there is an awful lot of primary source material out there for the presidents, of course, Hayes, we were just talking about Hayes-- - Rutherford B. Hayes, yeah.

- Spiegel Grove, his estate there, that was really one of the pioneers of the presidential library idea.

So there's a wonderful museum there.

But there was also all these really terrific sources.

This is really, and they kept everything.

The Hayes', they kept everything.

They kept all their China, every little trinket, every knickknack.

- So they valued their history there?

- Yeah.

- And their time in Washington DC and traveling back to Ohio.

- So early in the 20th century, they built this thing.

And that's kind of a model for later presidential libraries.

- Now, moving a little bit, we talked a little bit about the tragedy of President Garfield and how he was assassinated.

Another president, William McKinley from northeast Ohio here also, also was very influential and kind of the transition between the 19th and 20th century.

Tell us a little bit about McKinley's activity as president.

- Yeah, McKinley and in the eyes of historians tends to be ranked pretty much the highest of the Ohio presidents, in part because of his significance, not just to the history of the country, Spanish-American War and all that, but also because of his history to American politics.

The election of 1896, he's running against William Jennings Bryan.

A lot of political scientists call this the first modern presidential election.

And so he made history even before he was elected because of the way he ran his campaign.

And William Jennings Bryan ran his campaign.

In those days, it was considered to be declasse, you wanted too much if you actually go out on the campaign trail.

You have surrogates do that for you.

- [Bill] Be a little more conservative then?

- Right, yeah, it means-- - And how you go out?

- Yeah, so, but William Jennings Bryan, he breaks the mold.

He goes out on this big campaign tour, whistle-stop tour.

William McKinley is urged to do that by his handler, Marcus Hanna, a really important financier up in Cleveland.

And he said, "No, I can't compete with that."

And he wants to stay home with his wife who had some medical issues.

So they actually had this front porch campaign.

So, well, if you can't take McKinley to the voters, we'll take the voters to McKinley.

All these trains coming into Canton day and night, they march from the station to the house that he was renting at the time.

And he comes out on the porch and he gives a speech.

But it was the first modern campaign too, in terms of the way it was run, it was run like a business operation.

It was, they had polling, they had a direct mail.

They sent out literally hundreds of millions of pieces of direct mail, and they tailored their message to different constituencies.

They had it in different languages.

- Wow.

- And they really approached this election in a way that is actually not too unfamiliar to people today with a kind of this almost scientific precision.

And they, and of course, the money.

The money, they raised tons of it.

It was the most expensive election in US history to that point.

They outspent William James Bryan, something like seven to one.

And this is one of the reasons why even before he takes the oath of office, he's significant to the presidency.

- Yeah and you mentioned, Spanish-American War.

America was involved in the Boxer Rebellion in China.

There were so many foreign involvements that he and his, McKinley's staff and cabinet, must have dealt with, the foreign affairs.

- Yeah and this is really the beginning of American overseas empire.

And that's the introduction of the United States as a global imperial power.

You know, they had picked up Alaska, they had picked up a few islands before this, but this is really where, that there is, in Europe at this time, this imperialist thing.

And all the countries, industrial countries, wanna make sure they're part of that club, right?

- Right, gotcha.

- And so the Spanish-American War and the annexation of Hawaii, which also happens at the same time, is a kind of the US entree into this.

- So you can see why McKinley was influential - And he was, and now he was, his motivations may have been different.

They weren't as crassly commercial as the motivations for some other American imperialists.

He really did think he was doing something to uplift these people.

And yeah, it's a little patronizing-- - But in the dynasty sense, he was probably the pinnacle of the dynasty at the-- - Yeah, I mean, he was, when he gets, when he is assassinated in 1901, he is arguably the most popular president ever to be assassinated.

He won in overwhelming landslide victory in his reelection.

And he's assassinated just a few months after that.

He was immensely popular.

And you really can't say that of the other presidents who were, and that helps explain, for instance, his monument down there in Canton.

It was school children would bring pennies in to help finance all throughout the country.

- Very well loved.

- Very well loved.

- Now moving down to Cincinnati, the Taft family was very influential.

The next president we were gonna discuss in the dynasty is William Howard Taft.

A little bit about Taft.

- I mean, Taft I think, sometimes gets a bad rap just because he was so much in the shadow of Teddy Roosevelt.

He was Teddy Roosevelt's handpicked successor.

And no, there is no, there is no one who can step into Teddy Roosevelt's shoes.

He was just a force of nature.

Taft was not a force of nature.

Taft arguably wasn't even a politician.

Taft really, really wanted to be a judge.

He really was much more comfortable in the judicial sphere.

And I think if Teddy Roosevelt had offered Taft a spot on the Supreme Court, he would've been much happier.

But his family all wanted him.

So, okay, he runs for president.

And he tries to do what Teddy Roosevelt did, but he was no Teddy Roosevelt.

And he just kind of paled in comparison.

And so, yeah, he only serves one term.

And then his good friend Teddy Roosevelt runs against him in the Progressive Party in 1912.

And he had actually kind of good humor about that.

He got 22% of the vote.

He says, "I have the distinction of being elected ex-president by the largest majority in American history."

And then he gets his life's ambition.

He does eventually get appointed Chief Justice in the United States.

And that was really what he wanted.

- So the Supreme Court was typically, we focus more on his Supreme Court work than his presidency.

- Yeah, his presidency, I mean, he did a lot of stuff to prosecute antitrust violations.

That is his big accomplishment in terms of, this is the progressive era at that time, a lot of people call him, he was not the progressive candidate.

He did a lot of stuff that would be considered to be progressive.

At least, especially in terms of regulating big business.

- And you know, they still talk about the Taft family, the influential Republican family-- - Oh, sure.

- For many years after.

- And before his father, Alfonso Taft, was a major player.

He was in cabinet, held multiple cabinet posts, and was a kind of a big deal in Cincinnati politics.

But then, yes, his sons and his grandsons and his great grandsons have all made a mark in Ohio politics.

- And of course, let's cap it off.

The end of the dynasty was Warren Harding.

Tell us a little bit about Mr. Harding.

- Harding... - The Roaring Twenties.

- Yes, and he was an appropriate candidate for the Roaring Twenties.

You know, my mom always told me, "if you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything at all."

Which is a little difficult when you're a historian.

He probably, he was a nice guy.

He, again, had terrible taste in friends.

So he comes into office and he installs what's called the Ohio Gang.

These basically poker buddies of his into these very high offices.

And then they just do all kinds of scandalous stuff.

And, you know, again, he was not personally profiting from that, but you know, it was the ignominious end of the Ohio Dynasty because you had Teapot Dome and you had the VA scandal, and you had problems with the Justice Department.

Bribery, all kinds of stuff like that.

And that might have helped hasten his end, I think, just because all this stuff was coming out right about the time he died.

- So between you and your colleague, Dr. Wilson, what explains the Ohio's influence disproportionately in this country, in the executive branch during this, during the 19th and 20th century?

- That's an excellent question.

I think it's several things.

I mean, first of all, in real estate, They have this saying the most three most important things about real estate are location, location, location.

And Ohio's location was key.

Demographically it was the third largest state in the country for most of the 1800s.

But that population had come from all over the United States.

The people had moved into southern Ohio from the South, into central Ohio, from the middle states, and then into northern Ohio, from New England and the upstate New York area.

And so Ohio really represented a microcosm of the United States in a way that no other state really did.

So if you're a politician from Ohio, you need to be able to speak to these constituencies.

And it's also a big swing state, right.

It, up until recently was the most reliable bellwether state, and in part because of that.

And a lot of that also had to do with the fact that Ohio was crucial in the formation of the Republican Party.

Notice everybody we've talked about was a Republican president.

And that's because the Republicans needed Ohio, the South could elect, I mean the Democrats could elect presidents using the South, the solid South, and various other places, they could do without Ohio.

They wanted Ohio, but they could do without Ohio.

The Republicans needed Ohio.

And so it made sense to keep going to that well over and over again.

The average margin of victory in presidential elections from 1872 to 1896 was something like 1.4%.

And so, and to this day, no Republican has been elected president without taking Ohio to this very day.

- True, Ohio, very influential.

And we've got just a minute to, again, reiterate our desire to have people look up the history of Ohio.

Our guest, Dr. Kevin Kern and his co-author, Dr. Gregory Wilson from the University of Akron, put together a very voluminous study, "Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State".

And they've got the second edition out.

It's got a different cover than the first edition, and it's published by Wiley-Blackwell.

You can find it through Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, or through Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

But check it out, Kern and Wilson, "Ohio: History of the Buckeye State".

- That's the Cuyahoga River Valley, by the way.

- Very, very nice, yeah.

The Cuyahoga Valley.

- We thank you Dr. Kern for being a part, letting us know.

And, you know, my co-host at "Forum 360", Leslie Ungar, wanted to know why Ohio kind of lost this dynastic trend.

And I think you talked about, we at one time, Ohio was the center of geographically and politically, but now there's so many states.

- Yeah and of course, Ohio has dropped to like seventh or eighth in terms of population, all that migration to the South and to the West.

It just, that sapped a lot of the... - Well, thank you for sharing Ohio's mother of presidency on "Forum 360".

- Well, thank you.

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