Roger Bishop

NonfictionPoliticsHistoryAmerican History

One Person, One Vote

Review by Roger Bishop

“The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing—one person, one vote,” wrote Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas in 1963. It seems simple enough. However, as we learn in fascinating and depressing detail from Nick Seabrook’s wide-ranging history, One Person, One Vote, when politicians intentionally draw boundaries for partisan advantage, politicians pick their voters rather than voters picking politicians.

The practice known today as gerrymandering began long before the term first appeared in 1812, when Governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced with a hard G) of Massachusetts signed a bill that seriously distorted voting districts for political purposes. He was not directly involved in preparing the legislation and found it distasteful, but his name nonetheless became attached to it. Gerry later served as vice president under James Madison. Earlier in Madison’s career, Patrick Henry had used the tactic in an unsuccessful attempt to keep Madison from being elected to the House of Representatives. If Madison had lost the election, we might not have his Bill of Rights.

Prior to the 1970s, when the constitutional mandate to redistrict every 10 years went into effect, gerrymandering was the exception rather than the norm. Politicians only used this tactic when it was necessary or expedient, which was rare—especially since the detailed election data and computer technology that has become so crucial to modern election strategy was not yet available.

Those who benefit from gerrymandering are determined not to lose their advantage. Even the Supreme Court has failed to address the harms of the practice. On three separate occasions, challenges to the most pervasive partisan gerrymanders of the 21st century have come before the Supreme Court, but reformers came away disappointed. Instead, change has almost always come from concerned citizens who convinced elected officials to take on the issue.

Seabrook’s important book should be of interest to every citizen who wants to better understand what goes on behind the scenes as political parties seek power.

Nick Seabrook’s One Person, One Vote should be read by every citizen who wants to understand what goes on behind the scenes as political parties seek power.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

The Pope at War

Review by Roger Bishop

The role Pope Pius XII played during World War II has long been a subject of controversy. Under great pressure to align himself with the Allies or Axis powers, he chose silence and diplomatic neutrality. Some saw him as a heroic champion of the oppressed. Others thought he turned a blind eye to the killing of Jews and other vulnerable populations and did not use his moral authority to work for peace. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David I. Kertzer explores the truth of how Pius XII handled this situation with great skill, combining extraordinary documentation and elegant writing, in The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler.

Early in his papacy, which began in 1939, Pius XII decided to tread a careful path. Once World War II began, his public pronouncements were crafted so that each side could interpret them as supporting their cause. The pope often said, for example, that true peace required justice—a familiar theme to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who complained that the Treaty of Versailles was not a true peace because it was unjust. The pope insisted it was his role to attend to spiritual, not political, matters. Using this excuse, he didn’t criticize Italy’s anti-Jewish racial laws. He didn’t denounce totalitarian states, until the only one left was the Soviet Union. In his first speech after the war, he emphasized the Nazi regime’s campaign against the Catholic Church and didn’t make any mention of the Nazis’ extermination of European Jews nor Italy’s part in the Axis cause.

The Vatican archives of this period were sealed when Pius XII died in 1958, but they became available to researchers in March 2020. This book is based on many sources but is the first to take advantage of these previously unexplored materials. (Among their revelations are secret negotiations between the pope and Hitler.) Kertzer believes, based on this new evidence, that “Pius XII saw his primary responsibility to be the protection of the institutional church, its property, its prerogatives, and its ability to fulfill its mission as he saw it.” But Pius XII was also aware that, to many people, he failed to provide courageous moral leadership, which Kertzer outlines in gripping detail in his outstanding book.

David I. Kertzer explores the role Pope Pius XII played in WWII with great skill, extraordinary documentation and elegant writing.
NonfictionMemoirAmerican History

Because Our Fathers Lied

Review by Roger Bishop

Robert S. McNamara served as secretary of defense in the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations and was the primary architect of America’s war strategy in Vietnam in the 1960s. Even as the war became increasingly unpopular, Robert continued to insist that progress was being made, that victory was just around the corner. He didn’t admit his mistakes, even when doing so could have changed history. Many veterans and protesters still believe Robert never fully apologized for his role in the war—including his only son.

Craig McNamara’s loving but brutally honest account of his difficult relationship with his father, Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, From Vietnam to Today, tells of his father’s reluctance or inability to engage him in serious discussion about the evils of the war, or to apologize to the country. Veterans wanted Robert to understand the true cost of the war in human terms of lost lives and limbs rather than “lessons learned in the war,” as Robert put it in his 1995 book, In Retrospect. When that book was published, Craig asked his father why it took 30 years for him to try to explain himself. “Loyalty” was his father’s only answer. For Craig, this meant loyalty to the presidents he served without regard for ordinary people. This loyalty to the system eventually got Robert appointed as president of the World Bank and led to other personal advantages. “Loyalty, for him, surpassed good judgment,” Craig writes. “It might have surpassed any other moral principle.”

After Robert was out of government, but as the war continued, Craig received a draft notice. During his physical, he was found medically disqualified to serve because of being treated for stomach ulcers for several years. Despite his opposition to the war, not going to Vietnam as a soldier still made him feel overwhelming guilt. To cope, he set off on a motorcycle trip through Central and South America.

Through life-changing experiences during his travels, Craig discovered his love of farming and began a new direction for his life. He is now a businessman, farmer, owner of a walnut farm in Northern California and founder of the Center for Land-Based Learning. By making different choices than his father, Craig has begun to make peace with his family’s complicated legacy. His mother always played a positive role in his life (the memoir is dedicated to her memory) and acted as a “translator” between father and son, but it took years for Craig to understand how dysfunctional his family was with respect to speaking the truth.

Because Our Fathers Lied gives readers a vivid, front-row view of the divisiveness in one very prominent family, and through that family, a view of the national divisiveness that continued long after the Vietnam War.

Many Vietnam War veterans and protesters still believe Robert S. McNamara never fully apologized for his role in the war—including his only son.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

Review by Roger Bishop

The so-called lost generation of American writers and other expatriates began to return home in the late 1920s. By contrast, foreign correspondents became more concerned with international politics and began to venture abroad more often. As a result, what Americans understood about world events in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s came largely from these U.S. newspaper correspondents. In her luminous, extensively researched and beautifully written Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War, historian Deborah Cohen brilliantly captures the complicated personal and professional lives of that period’s four most influential journalists, all close friends, who witnessed the rise of fascism and communism, the powder keg of the Middle East after the Balfour Declaration and much more.

Dorothy Thompson saw journalism as her era’s “most representative form of letters,” as the theater or the novel had been for other periods. John Gunther described their profession by saying, “We were scavengers, buzzards, out to get the news, no matter whose wings got clipped.” These two journalists, plus Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean and H.R. Knickerbocker, felt the need to go beyond objective reporting and convey what they thought and felt about the rise of dictators and the strong chance of war, which set their reporting apart. Drawing from abundant primary sources, Cohen brings these four reporters, as well as Gunther’s wife, Frances, vividly to life in Last Call at the Hotel Imperial. Their disagreements, approaches to getting stories, excessive drinking, infidelities, ambitions, achievements and disappointments are covered in detail—as well as their interactions with figures such as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Mahatma Gandhi, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund Freud, Jawaharlal Nehru and Josef Stalin’s mother.

Sheean’s memoir of his experiences in China and Soviet Russia was a bestseller during his lifetime, as was his biography of Thompson’s marriage to the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis. Thompson became a prominent commentator and activist, and at one point she and Eleanor Roosevelt were called the most influential women in the country. Between the 1930s and ’50s, Gunther had more American bestsellers, both fiction and nonfiction, than all but one other author. Knickerbocker was an outstanding reporter but also an alcoholic, and Cohen explores the professional consequences of his condition with sensitivity. He eventually recovered and returned to work, only to be killed in a plane crash in India when he was only 51 years old.

Cohen’s book is a remarkable and exceptionally reader-friendly account of the lives of an extraordinary group of writers and people.

In Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, historian Deborah Cohen brilliantly captures the complicated lives of some of America’s most influential journalists.
NonfictionBiographyAmerican History

The Trials of Harry S. Truman

Review by Roger Bishop

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in April 1945, World War II was not over. His successor, Harry S. Truman, faced crucial choices both then and in the years to come. Some, such as the custody and use of nuclear weapons, had never been faced by another president. As Truman’s longest serving secretary of state, Dean Acheson, said of that period, “Not only is the future clouded but the present is clouded.” As president, Truman was forced to make quick and risky decisions in a time of war scares, rampant anti-communism, the beginning of the Cold War, stubborn labor strikes and petty scandals. When he left office after almost eight tumultuous years, his approval rating was 31%. More recently, however, historians have begun to consider him in the category of “near great” presidents.

Jeffrey Frank, author of the bestselling Ike and Dick, considers Truman’s achievements and misjudgments in the engaging and insightful The Trials of Harry S. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945–1953. In Frank’s assessment, Truman was “a complicated man concealed behind a mask of down-home forthrightness and folksy language.”

Truman thought the point of being a politician was to improve the lives of his fellow citizens. Overwhelmed at times, he at least made some excellent cabinet choices, such as George Marshall and Acheson. At the beginning of his presidency, Truman needed to conclude the war and assist in the founding of the United Nations. Other milestones followed, including the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the Berlin airlift, the recognition of the state of Israel, the creation of NATO, the dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur and more.

Truman’s two most controversial decisions, to use the atomic bomb and to enter the Korean War, are covered in detail here. On domestic matters, Truman worked for a national health care program but was ultimately unsuccessful. In 1948 he sent a civil rights program to Congress that included a Fair Employment Practices Act, an anti-poll tax bill, an anti-lynching law and an end to segregated interstate travel, but it also failed to gain enough support.

The first detailed account of the Truman presidency in almost 30 years, The Trials of Harry S. Truman is very readable. Anyone who wants to go behind the scenes of those pivotal years will enjoy this book.

In the first detailed account of the Harry Truman presidency in almost 30 years, Jeffrey Frank engagingly considers Truman’s most controversial decisions.
NonfictionHistory

The Founders’ Fortunes

Review by Roger Bishop

The Founding Fathers ended their Declaration of Independence with this solemn oath: “We pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” In his superb The Founders’ Fortunes: How Money Shaped the Birth of America, historian and biographer Willard Sterne Randall explores in extensive detail the economic circumstances of the budding republic. It also offers a history of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among others, as businessmen.

The need for money was a major factor for individuals and governments before the American Revolution, and its importance only increased throughout the war and postwar periods. English settlers had risked their lives and fortunes for many years to establish new colonies, which vastly increased England’s commerce. Yet, facing a huge debt, Parliament sought to gain even more revenue by taxing American colonists. Their opposition sparked the resistance that led to the Revolutionary War.

The 1764 Currency Act had outlawed all colonial currency. Lack of money for Washington’s troops was an ongoing problem during the war, as well as a problem for keeping promises to veterans afterward. When the war ended, the new country was in a depression that prevented them from being financially independent. In addition to these highlights, Randall covers smuggling, war profiteering and privateering, establishing a stable currency, economic diplomacy and much more.

The personal stories of the Founding Fathers’ wealth are especially interesting. For example, Washington and Jefferson were land rich but cash poor, despite their possession of hundreds of enslaved people. Randall explores less well-known figures, as well, such as three patriotic and wealthy men named Robert Morris, Silas Deane and James Wilson. They (and their money) played important roles in winning the war and securing America’s government, but each died in debt.

Randall is a biographer of Washington, Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, so he knows his territory well. The Founders’ Fortunes will hold readers’ interests with its carefully drawn portraits of personalities and insightful analyses of events.

The Founders’ Fortunes will hold readers’ interests with its carefully drawn portraits of personalities and insightful analyses of events.
NonfictionHistory

The Fifties

Review by Roger Bishop

We remember the 1960s as a time of social protest in the United States, with diverse groups demanding change. But some of those calls for change actually had their roots in the 1950s, led by a few lonely, gifted, stubborn “accidental activists” who would not or could not tolerate the injustices they suffered and witnessed. Journalist and historian James R. Gaines introduces us to some of these courageous individuals in his enlightening, powerful and intimate The Fifties: An Underground History.

One is struck by the differences in these activists’ personal histories, whether their cause was gay rights, racial justice, feminism or environmental justice. Pauli Murray’s experiences as a multiracial Black woman, for example, led to her long legal career making advances for women’s and civil rights, including the argument that finally persuaded the Supreme Court to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sex. She was also the first African American woman to be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church. By contrast, Fannie Lou Hamer spent most of her life as a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta. Her civil rights activism didn’t begin until she was 45 years old, but her strong leadership skills and charismatic personality were natural assets to the movement for voting rights. Gilda Lerner had an entirely different origin story. As a young woman, she barely escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna, but she went on to teach the first college-level courses in women’s history in the United States.

Rachel Carson and Norbert Wiener had nothing in common and probably never met. But in their defining works—“she in the living world, he in the electrical, mechanical, and metaphysical one—they converged on the heretical, even subversive idea that the assertion of mastery over the natural world was based on an arrogant fantasy that carried the potential for disaster,” as Gaines writes.

The ’50s were, among other things, a time of fear for many—when raising questions could lead to losing friends or jobs at best, or to jail time, beatings and even death at worst, just for doing what one knew to be right. The activists profiled here didn’t wholly achieve their goals during the “long Fifties”—the social, cultural and political uprising between 1946 and 1963—but they made significant progress that others built on in the future.

Gaines concludes that the people he writes about were authentic rebels, although they didn’t regard themselves as such. This excellent, well-researched and well-written book shows how far America has come and yet how very far we have to go to become the country we often think we are.

James R. Gaines introduces readers to the lonely, gifted, stubborn activists whose calls for change in the 1950s influenced the course of the 20th century.
NonfictionMilitary HistoryHistory

Looking for the Good War

Review by Roger Bishop

The iconic images that accompany the conventional narrative of World War II depict American military service as a force for good—like soldiers handing out candy bars to children. But to interpret World War II this way, writes Elizabeth D. Samet, a professor of English at the United States Military Academy at West Point, requires “a selective memory.” Terms such as “the good war” and “the greatest generation” were shaped by “nostalgia, sentimentality, and jingoism” after the fact, causing “the deadliest conflict in human history [to become] something inherently virtuous.”

In her compelling, enlightening and elegantly written Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness, Samet compares popular myths about World War II to the facts. She draws on a broad range of cultural expressions that came about during the war and the years that followed. Especially noteworthy are writings by veterans and other firsthand observers of war, which Samet uses to contrast their ambivalence at the time with how later generations understood the conflict. Legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle, for example, found little romance in war. As he traveled with the troops in 1944, he wrote, “I am sure that in the past two years I have heard soldiers say a thousand times, ‘If only we could have created all this energy for something good.’”

There was an increase in racial violence during those years, as well. In 1942, there were more than 240 riots and other racial incidents across the United States, and segregation was still the official policy of the armed services and in many other places. “One of the chief ironies inherent in the project of bringing democracy to the rest of the world remained the signal failure to practice it at home,” Samet writes.

After the war, violent crime films were the most commercially successful stories featuring veterans. The veteran with amnesia was a staple of postwar noir, even though it didn’t reflect the reality for most veterans who were trying to readjust to civilian life. A 1947 survey of ex-service members found that more than 50% of them said the war “had left them worse off than before.”

This richly rewarding and thought-provoking book splashes World War II history across a broad canvas, with insightful discussions of the works of Homer and Shakespeare and the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln. Along the way, Samet convincingly argues that we should reflect on our current relationship to war in the light of wars past. “The way we think and talk about force will influence not only the use of American military might abroad,” she writes, “but also our response to the violence that has increasingly been used as a tool of insurrection at home.”

In her enlightening and elegantly written Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet compares popular myths about World War II to the brutal facts of war.
NonfictionBiography

The Chancellor

Review by Roger Bishop

The key to Angela Merkel’s extraordinary political achievements lies in her beginnings. The first half of her life was spent in East Germany, where she withstood the pressures of a police state. She learned that freedom of thought and action cannot be taken for granted. As the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, Merkel also believed in the importance of love as expressed by deeds, not just words, and in serving others. Although she became a brilliant physicist, she had wide interests and was quietly ambitious. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, she welcomed the chance to pursue politics in a united Germany.

In The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel, former NPR and ABC News reporter Kati Marton explores the public and very private life of the woman who served for 16 years as the head of the German state, which now generally reflects Merkel herself: stable, moderate and civil. Marton, who spent her childhood in Hungary during the Cold War under a totalitarian regime, is a perfect choice to write Merkel’s biography.

Merkel’s rise was spurred on by a combination of self-control, strategic thinking, passive aggression and luck. In 1991, she assumed a cabinet position in Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s newly unified Federal Republic of Germany. In 1998, however, after a political scandal, she publicly opposed his continuing in office. When she became chancellor in 2005, she did not bring specific policies to the office. Instead, she brought a belief in Germany’s permanent debt to the Jews; precise, evidence-based decision-making; and a loathing for dictators who imprison their own people.

At an event for volunteers who had helped with refugee settlement, Marton asked Merkel which single quality sustained her during her long political life. Merkel responded, “Endurance.” Marton’s beautifully written, balanced and insightful biography should be enjoyed by anyone interested in global politics or a fascinating life story.

This absorbing biography explores the public and very private life of Angela Merkel, the woman who served for 16 years as the head of the German government.

Truman in the White House

Review by Roger Bishop

Harry Truman was ambitious, but his journey from a Missouri farm to the White House was largely the result of circumstances beyond his control. Once in the Oval Office, he faced monumental foreign and domestic policy challenges – the end of World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, the founding of the United Nations, diplomatic recognition of the nation of Israel, revolutionary change in China, the Korean War and concern about Communists in the U.S. government; only a few presidents have had to make such crucial decisions with such long – term consequences. When he left office, Truman's popularity ratings were abysmally low, yet he is now regarded by historians as one of the great, or near – great, presidents of the previous century.

Historian Robert Dallek – who has written biographies of Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy, as well as books on FDR's foreign policy and the Nixon – Kissinger relationship – brilliantly captures the life, times and achievements of this seemingly ill – equipped politician in Harry S. Truman, the latest volume in the outstanding American Presidents series from Times Books. Dallek notes that Truman loved political combat and besting opponents who underestimated him, as he did in his 1948 victory over his highly favored Republican opponent, Gov. Thomas E. Dewey.

The most important foreign policy legacy of Truman's presidency was his adoption of the "containment" strategy, continued by his successors until the fall of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. He agreed to U.S. leadership of NATO, the culmination of earlier actions to assist Western Europe. Truman established the CIA and the office of the secretary of defense. He introduced comprehensive civil rights legislation and desegregated the armed forces. His proposal for national health insurance eventually led to the establishment of Medicare in 1965.

Dallek is scrupulously fair in his account. He acknowledges numerous instances of Truman's missteps. All told, Dallek has given us an excellent introduction to a pivotal period in our history.

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Harry Truman was ambitious, but his journey from a Missouri farm to the White House was largely the result of circumstances beyond his control. Once in the Oval Office, he faced monumental foreign and domestic policy challenges – the end of World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, the founding of the United […]
History

A real American birthday party

Review by Roger Bishop

In his inaugural address on March 4, 1825, John Quincy Adams declared, "From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future." This was not mere political rhetoric. Our sixth president was, of course, the son of a key Founding Father who had served as the young republic's second president. But the son was an accomplished public figure in his own right, with a keen sense of history. As the country grew, he wanted it to reaffirm a connection with the generation of 1776 and the political ideals of its founders.

During that crucial formative period in the early 19th century, as settlers moved West and a series of canals helped to strengthen the country economically, "All Americans," according to historian Andrew Burstein, "agreed upon one thing, and it seemed, one thing only: that homage should be paid to their Revolutionary origins. It was that universal devotion which promised to preserve a language of unity and harmony and pure motives in an era of widely divergent tastes and purposes. Behind them lay glory days, ahead lay civil war. For them, as for us, the past was a comfort." In his rich new study, America's Jubilee, Burstein attempts "to uncover the soul of the (Revolution's) successor generation." To do this he introduces us to a wide range of personalities, some largely forgotten today, using a variety of sources private letters and diaries, public addresses, newspaper accounts to give us a vivid account of individual experiences, attitudes and thinking as the country prepared to celebrate its 50th birthday in 1826.

Burstein writes that a prominent figure in 1826, William Wirt, author of both fiction and nonfiction and U.S. attorney general for 12 successive years, "arguably did more than anyone else of his generation to link the Romantic movement in America with the Revolutionary spirit." Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry, published in 1817, was not an objective biography, for the author wished "to restore the Revolution to living memory for his generation, even if his book had to take on a quasi-mythical character." It was Wirt who was selected to give a "masterful oration" in the U.S. Capitol on the nation's 50th anniversary.

Burstein explores his theme through the writings and public careers of such figures as Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Marquis de Lafayette and John Randolph. He writes in some detail about the remarkable coincidence of the almost simultaneous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4, 1826, a symbolic passing of the torch to a new generation. He discusses the differing accounts of the last words of the two founders, who heard those words, and how they have been remembered by later generations. Among many public events associated with the deaths, a particularly moving one was Daniel Webster's address in Boston. Burstein describes it as a "message of national religious significance.

Some of the most enlightening chapters of the book concern writings by people who were not public figures. Ruth Henshaw Bascom of Massachusetts began keeping a daily journal when she was 17 years old and continued to maintain it for 57 years. Her father had helped to organize the Massachusetts militia and had fought with George Washington at the nearly disastrous Battle of Long Island. "The most perceptible emotion one recognizes in reading Ruth's adult years' writing is her devout acceptance of the fragility of life," Burstein notes.

Burstein convincingly makes the case that contrary to popular myth Jacksonian democracy did not arise and flourish only with the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. It was already established before that. "In mid-1826 the now 'knightly' Hero of New Orleans loomed as the embodiment of the democratizing conscience. There is a better way to put it: the democratic conscience prevailed in America already, and only lacked a president who would resurrect Jefferson's convincing call for the restriction of privilege."

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

In his inaugural address on March 4, 1825, John Quincy Adams declared, "From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future." This was not mere political rhetoric. Our sixth president was, of course, the son of a key Founding Father who had served as the young republic's second president. But the […]
Memoir

A celebrated American life

Review by Roger Bishop

After his junior year at Harvard College in the 1930s, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. had a summer job in the Charlestown Prison where his assignment was to prepare case histories for prisoners about to appear before the parole board. We wrote our case histories out of court records, social workers' reports and prison interviews and assessments, he recalls. It was good training for an embryonic historian. We were understaffed and had to work hard to keep up with the flow. At the time, he noted, I rather like this sense of several balls in the air at once. Those words could well apply to the whole of Schlesinger's extraordinary life and career. He has been a major American historian, a public intellectual, a political activist, a special assistant to President Kennedy and, at all times, an elegant and insightful writer. Among many honors, he has received two Pulitzer Prizes, for The Age of Jackson in 1946 and for A Thousand Days in 1966.

Schlesinger had not planned to write a memoir, but, he says, I have lived through interesting times and had the luck of knowing some interesting people. He is aware of the potential hazards of such a project, and says, In the end, no one can really know oneself or anyone else either. Fortunately for all of us, he overcame his doubts and the result, A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, is a rich, evocative and perceptive look at a man and his times. Schlesinger comments that as a historian I am tempted to widen the focus and interweave the life with the times in some reasonable, melodious and candid balance. He succeeds admirably.

From a happy early childhood in the Midwest, his family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Arthur was seven years old. Not surprisingly, Of all childhood pastimes, reading was my passion. Schlesinger takes time to discuss his reading in some detail, to recall the profound excitement, the abiding fulfillment, books provided. At Harvard, he took classes with such respected scholars as Perry Miller, best known for his work on the Puritans, and D.O. Matthiessen, whose American Renaissance study of 19th century American authors was highly regarded. A third strong influence was Bernard DeVoto, whose composition class vastly improved Schlesinger's writing style.

Although Schlesinger's interest in reading did not decline, he did develop a singular intensity for the movies of the '30s. He says that Film . . . is not only the distinctive art of the twentieth century, it is the American art the only art to which the United States has made a major difference. Although the '30s did not produce the best films, it was a decade in which film had a vital connection with the American psyche more, I think, than it ever had before; more certainly than it has had since. Scheslinger writes of the political battles of the '30s that shaped his political outlook and how he remains to this day a New Dealer, unreconstructed and unrepentant. He points out that it was FDR's ironical achievement to rescue capitalism from the capitalists. The author devotes considerable attention to the three books he wrote during the years covered in this memoir. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson, he attempted to tell the intellectual history of a political movement. In responding to criticism that the work was an attempt to legitimize the New Deal by finding precursors in the American past, Schlesinger says, I did not, I believed (and believe), impose an artificial schema on history. My belief was (and is) that I merely discerned patterns others had overlooked. This superb memoir provides a unique window from which to view some of the important issues and influential personalities of the first half of the last century.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

 

After his junior year at Harvard College in the 1930s, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. had a summer job in the Charlestown Prison where his assignment was to prepare case histories for prisoners about to appear before the parole board. We wrote our case histories out of court records, social workers' reports and prison interviews and […]
HistoryAmerican History

The bonds that started a nation

Review by Roger Bishop

The crucial political decisions in the young American republic of the late 18th century were made by relatively few leaders. They knew one another personally, and their face-to-face interaction in social settings had a significant impact on the choices they eventually made. In the words of historian Joseph Ellis, these decisions with long-ranging consequences came about "in a sudden spasm of enforced inspiration and makeshift construction. How this worked is the subject of Ellis' magnificent new study Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. The author knows the terrain well. His American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson received the National Book Award in 1996, and Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams is regarded as one of the best books on our second president.

Ellis eloquently conveys the interconnected personal relationships and overriding issues that set the nation's course. The eight most influential leaders he focuses on are: George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and Abigail and John Adams. The extraordinary mix of such diverse personalities with strongly held opinions helped check each other. Despite their differences, and particularly when contrasted with what was happening in France during the same period, it is noteworthy that the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in 1804 was the only case in "the revolutionary generation when political difference ended in violence and death rather than in ongoing argument. The author says the Jefferson-Madison relationship "can be considered the most successful political partnership in American history. For many years, Jefferson provided the grand strategy and Madison was an agile tactician. In the 1790s, Madison managed the effort behind the scenes to oppose the policies of Washington and Hamilton and to prepare the way for Jefferson's presidential candidacy. Ellis contrasts Washington, the realist, and Jefferson, "for whom ideals were the supreme reality and whose inspirational prowess derived from his confidence that the world would eventually come around to fit the picture he had in his head. The author explores Washington's vision as expressed in his last Circular Letter as commander in chief of the army to the states in 1783 and in his Farewell Address as president. It is interesting to note that Washington, in his "Address to the Cherokee Nation, imagined the inclusion of Native Americans in the developing country. And, in contrast to Jefferson, "He tended to regard the condition of the black population as a product of nurture rather than nature that is, he saw slavery as the culprit, preventing the development of diligence and responsibility that would emerge gradually and naturally after emancipation.

John Adams is one of the author's favorite characters. "His refreshing and often irreverent candor provides the clearest window into the deeper ambitions and clashing vanities that propelled them all. Ellis shows how all other political leaders deserted Adams when he became president and Abigail became his one-woman staff. The author masterfully steers us through the Adams presidency and Abigail and John's reconciliation with Jefferson, which led to their 14-year exchange of letters, now considered the most important correspondence between prominent American statesmen.

This carefully researched, beautifully written overview of the "band of brothers and Abigail Adams who established our nation" should be enjoyed by a wide readership.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

 

The crucial political decisions in the young American republic of the late 18th century were made by relatively few leaders. They knew one another personally, and their face-to-face interaction in social settings had a significant impact on the choices they eventually made. In the words of historian Joseph Ellis, these decisions with long-ranging consequences came […]

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