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- [00:00]
Ron Chernow
Foreign.
- [00:11]
Ryan Rosillo
Chernow is one of the great biographers in the history of biographers and he has covered history extensively. It is an interview that I've hoped to do for years. And we got word when the Mark Twain book was coming out that we'd be able to get him. Something I was really looking forward to. So something that I was planning on doing and looking forward to for about a year. The Twain book is out, we discuss it. We also get into some of his other works. Hamilton, Washington, a little bit of Grant. There's some overlap on some of these characters as well. So I hope you enjoy it. I know I did. This has been years in the making and I am thrilled, as excited as I've been in a long time. For a guest, author Ron Chernow joins us. Good to see you.
- [00:55]
Ron Chernow
Pure pleasure to be here. Thank you, Ryan.
- [00:58]
Ryan Rosillo
I just finished Twain. I appreciate the work that you put into this one. I wait with great anticipation every time I know something new is coming through, so I rip through it. Let's start with something simple. Why Twain?
- [01:10]
Ron Chernow
Okay. Back in 1974, I was a struggling 25 year old freelance magazine writer in Philadelphia. And one night I saw posters up around town that said, Mark Twain tonight, exclamation point. A 90 minute show by Hal Holbrook. Now, Hal Holbrook, maybe forgotten figure for a lot of people, was an actor who did this one man impersonation of Mark Twain. And so I went and there he was standing up on the stage with the trademark white suit and the cigar and the unruly mustache. And he told one political witticism after another that left me howling with laughter. He said, there's no Native American criminal class except for Congress. He said, suppose you're an idiot and suppose you're a congressman, but I repeat myself. Then he said, and I say it with pride that we have legislatures that bring higher prices than any other in the world. Well, I was just sort of howling with laughter because the lines were not only so fresh and funny, they still felt very pertinent. And these were lines that had been written 100, 150 years ago. So this kind of started my Mark Twain obsession. It was almost more with Mark Twain, the platform artist and the political pundit, than just the Mark Twain of the novelist. And then about 20 years later, Ken Burns did a very good four hour documentary series about Mark Twain. The first half was kind of the familiar Mark Twain. It was the Mark Twain of Tom and Huck and life on the Mississippi. And it was a little rather jovial and merry. Then the second half was about his later years that were really quite tragic. So at first you had this great literary triumph, and then you had tremendous personal complications. He goes bankrupt, he's forced into exile. There are calamities in his family. So as a biographer, what I always look for is that kind of combination of light and shadow, because we're all strange mixtures of good and evil. And I was amazed by just the many contradictions of this man and that the story was really much more complicated. We have this image of this merry man with a twinkle in his eye telling funny stories. It was a lot more than that.
- [03:41]
Ryan Rosillo
Anyone that's able to be this creative as long as Twain was, which is one of my favorite kind of parts of the arc of his story, is like, he was this significant for this long. Do you know how hard that is to pull that off? What do you think was the most influential stage or experience or part of his life that led to having him this unique voice?
- [04:01]
Ron Chernow
Well, you know, he had a way, and some of this was just accidental. He had a way of always being where the action was, where, you know, a vast swath of humanity crossed his path. For four years when he was in his 20s, he was a steamboat captain on the Mississippi. And you can imagine that every breed of humanity crossed his path. The Civil War breaks out, blocks commerce on the Mississippi. Then his brother had become the secretary for the Nevada Territory. And he brings along his kid brother, then Sam Clemens, to act as his private secretary. There was the time of the Comstock load in Nevada, which, for those who don't know about it, was the biggest silver mining boom in American history. So people all over the country are flocking to the Comstock load. So again, gave Mark Twain the opportunity to see Americans from across the country, really people across the globe. So he's always storing up experiences along the way. So he really has a vast range. He once said, ryan, in his notebook, I found this line. He said, I am not an American. I am the American. It sounds kind of arrogant, but there's some truth to it. I mean, we think of him as the quintessential American because he sort of embodies much of the best in our culture. You know, he has that irreverence, that cynicism, that that skepticism of the rich and powerful. He has the sympathy for the underdog, but he also has this money medicine side, and he's stumbling into one crazy business venture after another. So he really is our national character writ large, which I think is why he continues to this day to fascinate us. We see ourselves in Mark Twain even though he was a genius, but he was a genius kind of made up of many of the ordinary elements that we all have.
- [06:01]
Ryan Rosillo
It really emphasized the power of being observant. And I think some of the greatest voices in whatever, you know, whether it's literature, I think, you know, obviously different forms of media now, but people that can combine these, these different life experiences then also relay them to other people. Like, that seemed to be the gift. It was. It was clear he was a genius. And his first writing opportunities, it's almost like, hey, this guy's like pretty good. I mean, he. It's almost as if he's like the first Paul Thoreau. Like, he's this incredible travel writer. Do you think that that ultimately was the most important thing in him creating this path where he becomes kind of the standard for American literature with a very different non traditional background?
- [06:48]
Ron Chernow
Yeah, people tend to know Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but actually his bestselling book, sold 100,000 copies, was his first book, and it was called the Innocence Abroad. He went on this early tourist cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. And he not only is satirizing all the different sites they see in Europe and Holy Land, but he's satirizing his rather stodgy, pious fellow passengers as well. And what's so interesting about Ryan, it was a time when Europeans tended to. When Americans tended to fawn over European culture. And here is Mark Twain, who is wildly irreverent about everything that he sees. They're dragging him through one museum after another instead of being awed by paintings. He said that he loads the old masters and he only wishes that they had died sooner. You know, they take him to the Sistine Chapel and he calls it Michelangelo's Nightmare. They take him to see da Vinci's the Last Supper in Milan. And he said that there were a dozen people who were doing copies of the mural. And he said he couldn't help noticing that all the copies were superior to the original. And he said that there were many painters in Arkansas who would not have had to paint science for a living if they had lived in the days of the old masters. Well, here is someone who is, I think, so fresh and funny because he's saying the sorts of things that many of us might think but are afraid to say out loud, embarrassing ourselves. And he's seeing everything with these kind of, you know, virgin eyes. I think what you said about being observant is very important. Now, there was a famous line that Henry James said, you know, to be a great noticer of all things. And there is something about genius that manages to use every scrap of experience. But it's particularly funny just then when they get to the Holy Land, which people don't always written about in this kind of, you know, hushed, solemn tone. They go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, of course, one of the most sacred sites in Christianity, maybe the most sacred site. And Twain is wandering around in the church. And at the time they thought that Adam's tomb was in the church. We no longer believe that, but there was this marker for Adam's tomb. And so Twain is wandering around the church and he says, finally I found the relative Adam. And I dropped my knees and burst into tears. He was helping again. I mean, who would dare to sort of be funny and satirical at that moment? And he always found enormous humor in Adam. In fact, he said that he always envied Adam because when Adam told the joke, he knew that no one had told it before.
- [09:51]
Ryan Rosillo
He's a contradiction. For a bunch of different examples that you point out in the pages. I enjoy him kind of liking his small town. You know, if you ended up in Hannibal like you must have made a mistake type of upbringing. This rascal, this outsider. And yet he also really enjoyed the finer things in life. Whether it's his choice in marriage, where he settles in Hartford, his, I would say he would give George Washington a run for buying on credit remembering your book on him. But he seems to be like, I'm this everyman, but I'm also sort of an elite socialist as well.
- [10:37]
Ron Chernow
No, it's interesting because he's born in this little town called Florida, Missouri, all the way up in the northeast corner of Missouri. It had a town of 100. In fact, he said that when he was born, he increased the population of the town by 1%. He said there's no record of anyone else doing so much, not even Shakespeare. And then when he's 4, the family moves to Hannibal, which was 35 miles to the northeast. Very significant because it was right on the Mississippi River. And of course that's going to change his life. But here's this poor boy whose father failed at one business after another. Fast forward to he meets Libby Langdon, who's this heiress from upstate New York. Her father had made a fortune in coal and timber and railroads. Twain himself begins to make a fortune from book royalties and lecture fees. And between Livy's inheritance and Twain's royalties and fees, they buy a 25 room mansion in Hartford, Connecticut. 11,500 square feet with a loyal team of six servants. And so here it's kind of one of the basic contradictions of his life. Not only because he was so poor and then he went to, you know, being so, so rich, but his first novel was entitled the Gilded Age. Actually was Mark Twain, who coined the term the Gilded Age. And in that book, in many of his other books, he's satirizing the plutocrats of his day. But in private time, in his private life and investing life, he's doing everything in his power to become a plutocrat himself. And he succeeds. And he and Livy, as much money as they have, they were just incorrigible spendthrifts and always had this tremendous overhead, which put a lot of pressure on him as a writer. But he goes from being this poor southern kid to being this sort of northern, you know, plutocrat, living in a mansion in Hartford where they lived in for 17 years, until all of his disastrous investments, both in a newspaper typesetting machine and also in a publishing house. Both of them ended up failing at the same time, you know, and driving him into, into exile, into bankruptcy and, and poverty. But it's an interesting thing, Ryan. I thought about this entire time that I was writing the book was that here was somebody, he made so much money, he married into so much money that he could have had an easy, placid life. So that the wounds are all self inflicted. He didn't need to engage. He really functioned almost like a venture capitalist, even though he really didn't know very much about business, you know, he began to finance the development of this newspaper typesetting machine. He was convinced that it was going to revolutionize the newspaper business worldwide. And that you can see in his notebook, he's jotting down the number of newspapers in the world that would be forced to buy the machine. And he says that he will become one of the richest people in the world. He said, I'll become a member of the Vanderbilt gang. And so in contemporary dollars, he and Livy end up investing $6 million in this machine, which is crazy for a writer. A writer's life, no matter even a Mark Twain, any writer's life, the income is so irregular and unpredictable. You're a bestseller one book, you're a bum the next. You just never know what will happen. And so invested in that for 14 years. It was invented by a man named James W. Page. When he first meets Page, he says that Page is the Shakespeare of mechanical invention. He thought he was a complete genius by the end when this machine goes bust, he is so angry at Page. He said that if I saw Page with his testicles caught in a steel trap, I would shut out all human succor and watch until he died. Another time he said that if Hays were drowning, he would throw him an anvil. Well, this was something that he should never have gotten involved in again. As any venture capitalist would know, the risk is kind of investment. It's that sort of open ended development because you never know how many years it's going to take to launch this product and launch this, this, this company. But he himself said, you know, ruefully, at the end of his life, he said, I've often been the easy crave, the cheap adventurer, cheap speculator. And boy, he was.
- [15:30]
Ryan Rosillo
Yeah, I felt bad for him for a bunch of different reasons. Throughout the book, especially in the second half. I can't imagine what it was like knowing the end game, but reading his personal notes and the hope with each stage because the investments and then doubling down on it and then just convincing himself. And Paige would have him visit and the thing would fall apart and they'd be like, we just need by the end of the day. And then it would be another few months and it would be another check. What was that like, seeing his hope slowly dwindle?
- [16:01]
Ron Chernow
The same brilliant imagination that made him such a great writer that was transferred to his business career. But what I found was that he had this very florid imagination for the potential success of the business that he was involved in, where he seemed to have a very impoverished imagination for what the failure might look like. So, I mean, there was an interesting case because he started his own publishing house. He was convinced that all publishers were kind of morons in swindlers. So he decided that he would start his own publishing house. Did very, very well at first. Their first two books were the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which was the biggest bestseller of the 19th century. So it starts out, it looks like indeed he is a business genius. But then he becomes a victim of his own imagination. He decides to sign up the authorized biography of the Pope. Now this has topical resonance because the Pope at that time was Leo xiii, the current Pope, just as now Leo xiv. And Leo XIII was very transformational. But Mark Twain was absolutely convinced that every Catholic in the world would rush out to read the authorized biography of the Pope. When the Pope himself was told about it with papal infallibility, the Pope was skeptical that all these Catholics would want to read his book. Turned out the Pope was right and Mark Twain was wrong. But it's sort of an example. His mind would be working overtime on this success. In fact, with the page typesetter, he almost never seemed to stop and think about what failure might be. And it was actually his ancient mother, Jane Lambton Clemens out in Missouri, who posed to him the simple question, what if the machine fails? That was a question that he never seemed to ask himself. And he would get just very caught up. He was very much a victim of his own imagination. But of course, it's that great imagination that we owe all these great books and stories and all the tremendous, you know, witticisms. But it, in a business setting, it turned out to be his undoing.
- [18:25]
Ryan Rosillo
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- [19:49]
Ron Chernow
Yes, it did. And I think that this surprised him. You know, it's funny because I was saying before Ryan that in many ways he's the quintessential American. So people are always surprised to learn that there were these kind of nine years in exile and in total he spent 11 years outside the United States. So this man that we think it was the quintessential American was actually the most worldly well Traveled and cosmopolitan person. When he and Libby and the three daughters went to Europe, it was to try to economize, which was something that was very difficult to do. So while they're economizing Europe, they're living in this 30 room villa outside of Florence. They're living in a lavish hotel suite in Vienna. But when he comes back to America, he is surprised that his popularity has grown in his absence. He's more popular than ever. In fact, he had to do kind of in the middle of that exile period. He does an around the world tour and people all over the United States and Canada. Then he goes to Australia, New Zealand, then to India, then to South Africa. He's amazing, number one, that he has fans all over the place, the world, and that he's so beloved and that people come out to see him lecture because they knew the story of his bankruptcy and they're trying to help him out. In fact, there's an interesting moment living because she had this very aristocratic background. For her, when they went bankrupt, she felt this tremendous stigma of bankruptcy. She said, we must pay back the creditors every penny. Well, they end up paying back the creditors a little bit ahead of schedule. And Mark Twain is reluctant to publicize that because he's getting all these lecture fees and selling all these books because people feel badly that he's going bankrupt. So he doesn't want to announce too quickly that he is out of bankruptcy. But, you know, it's interesting that at the very end of his life picks up something he said at the beginning when he died. The New York Times said that, you know, Mark Twain had become so integral to American life that it was very hard to imagine a time when he was not there. It still is actually difficult for us to imagine America without Mark Twain. But after the nine years of exile, when he comes back to New York, he's more beloved than ever. And it's also interesting. He always had very, very strong opinions, not surprisingly. But he was, he started out, he was the beloved humorist. And so he was always afraid that if he expressed these strong opinions that he would alienate his loyal readers. Well, when he comes back to the United States, this is now about 1900, he's in his 60s. He suddenly is fearless and outspoken and saying all of these controversial things. In fact, you know, everyone knows about the white suit. He suddenly, you know, appears in the white suit. And when the reporters ask him, why are you wearing this white suit? And he said, it's the, it's the uniform of the American association of Purity and perfection of which I'm president and sole member. But it was interesting that with the white suit. He used to call the white suit his I don't give a damn suit. You know, we're accustomed to thinking of people mellowing with age. It's the opposite. He becomes more and more of a political activist, more and more outspoken on different topics, and he is embraced by the country, and he's willing to say a lot of really very controversial things that he would never have dared to have said earlier in his career.
- [23:48]
Ryan Rosillo
Whenever you're going back in history and you start thinking of, like, okay, we're digging through the memoirs, we're digging through their opinions on what are current events at that time, and then you're applying today's understanding of these same topics. It's where, you know, history, I think, at times, can be a little unfair and how we judge some of these people. Sometimes I think it's a complete waste of time to apply today's standards. But what's so fascinating about Twain is that he is so advanced on so many of these issues, whether it's race, all of his stuff for the. I don't. I don't want to say everything because I don't know all of his thoughts or every single one of his written words, but women's rights, he's all over it. Religion, he's just. He's just fearlessly, to your point, pragmatic about it. It doesn't make a ton of sense for a thinker like him. And then it even gets to the point with imperialism, where once he travels the globe, he starts coming back. I mean, he is on fire. You're right. It's the complete, complete opposite of aging gracefully. It's like, I actually have way more thoughts, and it doesn't have anything to do with two fictional characters on a raft.
- [24:49]
Ron Chernow
Yeah. In fact, when he comes back, after the Spanish American War, the US Occupied the Philippines. And Twang had been a strong, jingoistic supporter of the Spanish American War. He thought it was a noble war and the righteous were. And he was very much in favor of it. He felt that it was these Cuban insurgents against their colonial Spanish overlords. And as part of that, we took over the Philippines. He felt that we had taken over the Philippines in order to create a Philippine. He said, instead redeeming the island. We subjugated it, we conquered it. It became territory for us. And he got up at a dinner in New York City. He was. Everyone always wanted Mark Twain as the toastmaster at a banquet. He was perfect for that. So he gets up at this banquet where everyone is imagining he's going to say sort of delightful and funny things because he's Mark Twain. Instead, he starts talking about the Philippines, and he said that the American soldiers in the Philippines were fighting with disgraced muskets under a polluted flag. Wow. That's. I mean, any. We've all been through wars. We know that you can criticize. You know, war is always a very risky thing to do, and you risk a tremendous backlash. In fact, when he said this at this banquet, someone immediately rushed up to the stage and said, our soldiers are not fighting with disgraced muskets and they're not fighting under a polluted flag. It was very difficult for him to say that. He lost a lot of readers. I mean, you could see we have like 19,000 letters that were written to Mark Twain. You can see the letters that people were writing to him. Mr. Twain, I used to think that you were so funny and I loved all your stories. And I'm never going to read you again because there were a lot of people who agreed with him. There are a lot of people who admired his courage in doing this. But suddenly everything that has been kind of stood around inside Mark Twain starts coming out. And you mentioned his views are always surprising in terms of, you know, women's suffrage. He said that there would never be a perfect civilization until there was an exact equality between men and women. He said that the average woman has a higher intelligence than the average man. I won't comment on that. He also, he had tremendous admiration for the Jews. We've had so much discussion recently of anti Semitism. And Mark Twain said that the. The Jews were the most marvelous race on the planet. He said they were the intellectual aristocracy, etc. Etc. And he was one of the first people to speak out in terms of the right of his case in France. And so you never quite know what his take is on something. And I think that part of the power. People very often ask me, would Mark Twain have been a Republican or a Democrat then or now? And it's interesting because we're going through this period of hyper partisanship, Two warring camps. Well, that happened in his day. In fact, he made the statement, he said that things had gotten so bad that if the Democrats included the multiplication table in their electoral platform, the Republicans would vote it down at the next election. So he became what was called a mugwump. He felt that people had become captive of party and that they just kind of repeated the slogans. The positions of the party and what the mugwumps represented was that they would not have that kind of party allegiance and that they would vote for people based really on the content of their character. And he talked about the fact that when he was a boy, in order to get you to vote for someone, they would hand out donuts. And so he claimed. I don't know if this was true or not, but he claimed that he was a void. He was a member of the anti Donut party. So he was trying to create this anti doughnut spirit. But isn't that interesting, because we keep talking about America's, you know, divided into these tribal loyalties, but that this happened before in our history. And he tried to break away from that. And he had been a loyal Republican. And then 1984, they nominated a man named James G. Blaine, who'd been speaker of the House. He'd been a very corrupt speaker of the House, and the Republican press itself had always been criticizing him. Suddenly he's the presidential nominee and he's no longer corrupt. He's a perfect human being. They just whitewashed him. And Feng was very, very disillusioned. And he said to all his friends at the party, said to all these newspaper writers, I thought he was such an awful person, you know, now you're talking about how wonderful he is, you know, so we can all think of, you know, sort of different analogies in contemporary politics to it. So there's just, you know, enormous amount in his life and his story that still feels very, very fresh and relevant today.
- [30:13]
Ryan Rosillo
Yeah, I loved anytime he was talking about government, because I would tell, you know, we've all heard the line, there's no good government. But his conclusion is there's no good government because of people, all right? And the failures of human nature, human things. And I just wonder, is it his level of education? Is it. Back to the observations throughout his time, and then, you know, once it starts to turn for him, you know, he outlives his wife, he outlives three of his four children. He's clearly suffering from some version of depression, I would imagine. I don't know that that's debatable. And it becomes. And I wouldn't say it's a spiritual thing, because if it's his lack of faith. Right. He was not a religious person. I just felt. I felt really sad towards the end of the book, Ron, because it's this brilliant character that has this experience in life so few would ever have. And yet it seems like towards the end of his life, he's coming to the conclusion that life is just a test that everyone will ultimately fail because of the nature of human beings.
- [31:23]
Ron Chernow
Yeah, it's again, one of kind of many contradictions and ironies of the story of this man who made us laugh more than anyone else. Just had so much sadness in his life. And he said. And made a couple of statements later in his life. He said, life is not a comedy. Life is a tragedy sprinkled here and there with comedy, but only to heighten the pain and amplify it. By contrast, another time, he said that life was a fever dream in which sweetness was embittered by sorrow and pleasure was poisoned by pain. Those are kind of pretty grim statements. But, you know, in his own life, as you were saying, you know, there were so many family members who had died. At one point in the book, I make this statement that suddenly so many awful things happened in his own family. It's amazing he didn't commit suicide. So you can see the bitterness and the pessimism coming from his own experience. And it is a sad thing because he was such a beloved figure who brought you right to so many people. You would have liked to have seen him have this happy old age. Instead, he's this kind of lonely man, and he's raging, and then his behavior becomes increasingly odd.
- [32:49]
Ryan Rosillo
Would he have liked this book?
- [32:52]
Ron Chernow
I think I have to say that Mark Twain tended not to be generous in his attitude towards other authors. I can give you a long list of authors he hated, starting with Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott and George Eliot, et cetera, et cetera. All people who were widely read by his wife and three daughters sticking it to their father. So he can be a very tough critic about other authors. I would hope that he would feel that it is an honest book. And, you know, there are different things. He has this very late life obsession with teenage girls called the Angelfish. I don't know if you want to get into that at all. You know, I would just.
- [33:44]
Ryan Rosillo
Now, the way you set it up, let's. Let's follow through.
- [33:46]
Ron Chernow
Yeah. Okay. So he had the happiest marriage imaginable. His wife Libby. Every single letter that Livy ever wrote to him ends, I worship you. I idolize you. I adore you. That was fully reciprocated. There was never any hint of scandal about Mark Twain fooling around or anything like that. She dies in 1904. So he's in his late 60s, he's very lonely. The following year, he resumes his lecture career. But he makes this strange announcement that he's only Going to speak at women's colleges. He says, have the college girl habit. But then again, unfortunately, it gets worse. Then the following year, he begins to collect. And collect is his verb. Never mind. He begins to collect teenage girls. He begins to collect teenage girls between the age of 11 and 16. There are about a dozen of them. He calls them his angelfish. He makes them members of his aquarium club. He's the only male member of the Aquarium club. He calls himself the admiral of the Aquarium Club and is headquartered in his house. And he spends an extraordinary amount of time with these girls. Days, sometimes, you know, weeks on end. He spend time playing billiards with them, reading to them, playing cards, whatever. Now, he was never accused at all of groping these girls. There was no sexual impropriety. He made sure to incorporate the girls, mothers and grandmothers, you know, into the whole thing. There was nothing furtive about it. He, in fact, enjoyed posing with these girls for the photographers. So he's almost kind of flaunting it. And at the time, the way that it was perceived was like, well, another charming eccentricity of, you know, Mark Twain. Mark Twain, you know, loves these young girls. And in fact, there was an actress, mature actress, whom he knew who came to dinner one night dressed as a 12 year old girl because she said she was envious. She wanted to become an angelfish in the aquarium club. So that was the way that it was perceived at the time as this kind of endearing eccentricity of Martin. I think anyone reading the book now, myself included, is going to find it very kind of odd and disturbing that he spends. He was spending much, much more time with these teenage girls than with his own daughters, who by then were in their, you know, 20s, early 30s. And two of his daughters, the three daughters were still alive. They found it disturbing, interestingly enough, disturbing in part because they interpreted as a rebuke of them. Because he was saying that he was lonely, he needed to have, you know, female companionship around. So they felt that it was kind of an implicit criticism of them. But they also can feel, in fact, one of the daughters, Clara, finds out that the mother, one, the angelfish, is about to publish a memoir about this. And she pleads with the mother, one, not to quote any of the letters that Mark Twain wrote to her daughter. And two, she was going to include a photo of Mark Twain's daughter, not to include the, the photos. So that they were picking up something that was disturbing about him. You know, it was partly. I can't get him on the analytic couch. He's Dead. So in terms of what the underlying psychosexual dynamics were, we can only speculate. But he was extremely lonely. You know, one interpretation of this whole craziness was that he was trying to recreate that period in Hartford when he was rich and living in the mansion with Livy. And there were the three teenage daughters, and he was so happy, and the girls had this unconditional love. They thought he was this magical father. And he had a lot of difficulty. The girls adored him when they were teenagers, had difficulty making the transition when they became adults and more independent and sometimes more critical of their father. So that there were a lot of different things going on. But it's kind of interesting because all of this, you know, whatever tendency he had in that direction had been suppressed during this extremely, extremely, unusually happy marriage.
- [38:30]
Ryan Rosillo
Yeah, it definitely reads creepy.
- [38:32]
Ron Chernow
Yeah.
- [38:32]
Ryan Rosillo
But the fact that so many mothers were involved and excited about him reading to them and inspiring them to pursue this stuff. Yeah. I think there's also probably a theory that you could say he was replacing the fact that he didn't have any grandchildren.
- [38:48]
Ron Chernow
Yeah, right. I mean, that was his initial explanation. He said, I woke up one morning and I realized that I had grandfatherly feelings, but I had no grandchildren. So this was the story, or maybe the COVID story of the whole thing. And actually, the mothers and the grandmothers were very much complicit in this because they were extremely proud of the fact. Oh, my God. You know, my Dorothy is one of the angelfish and most famous author in the world, thinks that my daughter is this remarkable, you know, person. So they were very much kind of part of this whole phenomenon. And, you know, it was a different age. I feel like we're living through a moment in history where so many things that had been, you know, buried before, sexual assaults, incest, all sorts of different things that no one ever used to talk about. All this stuff, you know, it's kind of risen to the surface. And so we tend to take, understandably, much more cynical view of things. So it was a more innocent time. And people tended less to psychologically look below the surface in terms of what was going on. Going on.
- [40:07]
Ryan Rosillo
So Twain, because he was a critic as much as he was anything, I just like thinking of that question again of whether or not he would have liked this book to pivoting into just in some of the other subjects. So it's all surface. But who do you think that you've written about, would have enjoyed your biography on them the most?
- [40:27]
Ron Chernow
That's a very, very good question. I do think that Mark Twain would have respected the honesty and accuracy of my book, which is elaborately footnoted, because I think that there's been a tendency to stereotype him as just the kind of merry man with the white suit and the cigar. And the story was much more complicated. So I think that he would have respected my desire to try to dig below the surface. I think that Hamilton might enjoyed my book about him the most. I have a kind of contrarian streak in my nature. And so one of the reasons that I did the Hamilton book. Okay, I can go back 1998, when I started that book, Long before I knew the name Lin Manuel Miranda, I did that book number one, Hamilton was becoming this forgotten founder. People knew he was on the $10 bill. Maybe they knew that he died in the duel with Vice President Darren Burr. But I was reading all these books about the era, and all of the books were, you know, there was the saintly Thomas Jefferson, but then there was this villainous character named Alexander Hamilton who was always undermining Jefferson. And the more I read about him, the more I realized that his accomplishments were perhaps equal to that of any other founder. And also, as Lyn also agreed, the most fascinating personal story of any of the founders. So it tickles me, it delights me that Hamilton is now perhaps the best of the founders, certainly most popular of the founders. And I know for a fact that Lin Manuel Miranda and I saved hamilton on the $10 bill because the treasury secretary was going to drop him, came to see the show, came backstage and told us that when he announced that because of the show, there was such a backlash against dropping HAMILTON from the $10 bill that he had to abandon the idea. So we did that. But I think that Hamilton would feel that perhaps he was very flawed. And as with Train with Hamilton, there was the Mariah Reynolds scandal. I mean, there was sort of a lot of stuff, too. Hamilton was not a saint at all. But I enjoyed writing that story. Again, it's that combination of a great person with a brilliant intellect who at the same time, is deeply flawed in some way. We could never entirely understand that. But I think it takes someone who we might have difficulty identifying with because they're off the charts brilliant and humanizes them because they're, you know, flawed the way that we are. But I think that Hamilton would have liked the book.
- [43:24]
Ryan Rosillo
I. I was gonna guess, like, if I. We were doing this, be like, hey, let's rank him. Who would like it the most? Who would like it the least? Like, maybe Pierpont would Like it the least just because he was so private. Wouldn't want anyone to know about any of the business dealings whatsoever in the house of Morgan or maybe Rockefeller, who knows?
- [43:38]
Ron Chernow
But I think that, I think that Hamilton would get such a kick out of seeing the show and all of these pretty women dancing around on the stage saying, Alexander Hamilton. I'm sorry I interrupted you.
- [43:56]
Ryan Rosillo
So you're telling us there's no chance for Titan, the Broadway?
- [44:01]
Ron Chernow
You know, when I was working on the Hamilton, I had a strong hunch that it would be dramatized. It was actually option for feature film three times in Hollywood before Lin Mandel Veranda came along in Hollywood. Couldn't figure out what to do with the story. Then Lynn reads the book on vacation in Mexico and kind of a blinding flash, he sees the whole thing. And so when I met him, I was very charmed by him. I was very impressed by. He was still doing his first show in the Heights. And I thought that, that I wanted to be part of the show. Not because I thought that it was going to be a phenomenon. It seemed like a real long shot idea, a hip hop musical about Alexander Hamilton. But I had been a lifelong theater goer and I thought, wouldn't it be fun to be involved with the development of the show? And boy was it interesting.
- [45:01]
Ryan Rosillo
It is the perfect drama of a single figure. Yeah, like that book reads like I've told people, like, hey, which one? And I'm like, look, you may want to go the other way because of the popularity, because of the play and everything. I'm like, when I got done with that, I put it down and went like, what a ride. You know, like all of these elements and the villain hanging in the background and reentering the story over and over again. Can't believe that it's true. There's maybe subjects I enjoy more than Hamilton, but I felt like the way that you did that was about as perfect a dramatic arc as you could ever create for a character.
- [45:43]
Ron Chernow
No, that's a very astute comment. Because Hamilton's life is structured not because of me or because of Lin Manuel Vendor. Hamilton's life is structured as a perfect tragedy. So you kind of go up around 2/3 of the way, his success upon success and then suddenly there's a tragic fall just about 2/3, 3/4 of the way through. And the same qualities that kind of powered his rise, suddenly powering his downfall. In the case of Mark Twain, it doesn't have that kind of neat, coherent structure. It's kind of longer, it's more Sprawling. It's more episodic. Whereas with Alexander Hamilton, you didn' to give it a dramatic structure. The dramatic structure was actually built into the story itself, which was just gold for a biographer. I think the other one who would really be very, very pleased about my biography would be Ulysses S. Grant, because Grant was caricatured. When I started the book, Grant was still caricatured as Grant the drunk in his personal life, Grant the butcher in his professional life. And in fact, it was interesting in the Twain book. I write a lot about Twain's relationship with Grant, and I had some lines I wish I had had when I wrote the Grant book. Mark Twain said of Julius S. Grant that he had the kindest character of anyone he had ever met. Grant was the greatest man he'd ever personally known. When Grant died, Mark Twain wrote this beautiful elegy, and he said, manifestly, dying is nothing to really great and brave man. But I think that Grant would really have felt that I had rescued him from a lot of stereotypes that had become encrusted onto his life. And he was a genuinely good human being. And what he accomplished was quite extraordinary.
- [47:54]
Ryan Rosillo
I wanted to end on a Twain quote here that I thought, really there's a bunch of quotes from him that you could say, hey, this is the one that summarizes all of it. But I think it plays well with so many of your subjects. And he says only man's pride places him at the center of things, endowing him with an undeserved cosmic significance. And when I think about Washington, he wanted that significance. And it was exciting for me to learn about, like a Lafayette coming over because he wanted significance. And at that time, you know, we're going 200 years ago, we're talking about if man is determined to be significant, really the only way that you can stand out is through war. You have that element with Grant. You have it with Pierpont, who's more expected to follow in the father's footsteps and become this worldly banker. And then Rockefeller's dominance financially is a whole nother level. And then Twain himself finds significance by becoming the standard of American literature. When you're going back and we're talking about some of the most important people in the history of this country in shaping it for a variety of different reasons, what do you think you've learned about these men or the men in general that stood out for their drive, their determination to be remembered by history?
- [49:14]
Ron Chernow
Well, drive, determination, you put your finger on two things. What I found with all of them was that There was a clarity of vision and that they were able to kind of harness all of their drive and energy and determination in terms of achieving that goal. I mean, one of the main things that made Washington such a great figure during the Revolutionary War was that here are all of these other generals who are jockeying for power. Their interest is sort of more egotistical. And Washington keeps his eye on the ball, that the objective is to win the war and to unify the country. And he was never deflected from that. And that was always very clear in his eyes. The exact same thing happened with Ulysses S. Grant, that the objective was to. To win battles, to preserve the Union, and then to abolish slavery. So clarity of vision. Know what you want to achieve, and then kind of, you know, mobilize all of your energy to the attainment of that goal. Of course, Rockefeller with, you know, Standard Oil also, you know, a brilliant example of it. So all the people that, you know, I have written about had this great ambition and kept their eyes on the prize.
- [50:49]
Ryan Rosillo
Like I said at the beginning, this is something I've wanted to do for years. So I just want to thank you and I'm sure there's a lot of listeners that also share the appreciation, the hours, the thousands of pages. Thank you for all the work that you've done and the enjoyment that you've brought to me.
- [51:03]
Ron Chernow
Thanks. I'm so glad that we got a chance to meet virtually. And thanks, folks, for listening. It's been a great hour. Thank you, Ryan.
- [51:12]
Ryan Rosillo
Thanks, Ron. Thanks to Ron Chernow and all of his people for making this happen again. It's something I've been looking forward to for a really long time. So I hope you enjoyed it as well. The Ryan Rosilla Podcast Ringer Spotify they.
- [51:28]
Ron Chernow
Were gonna name me Michael Jordan. My dad was like, I don't think he can live up to it. So they named me Michael Jarrett.
- [51:52]
Ryan Rosillo
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