In “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs,” historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf create a character study of Thomas Jefferson, attempting to explain our third president through his perceived role as patriarch to both his families and to his slaves.
‘Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination’
by Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf
Liveright, 320 pp., $27.95
It’s not entirely clear that the world actually needs another biography of Thomas Jefferson. True, he played a remarkable role in shaping the young American democracy at a time when it was not at all clear that the rebellious colonies would emerge as a cohesive nation.
He wrote the Declaration of Independence, served as the nation’s third president, second secretary of state and as ambassador to France. But the library of Jefferson biographies is seemingly boundless and includes contributions such as Dumas Malone’s six-volume series (“Jefferson and His Time”), a work that took more than 30 years to complete and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for the first five volumes. What’s more to add?
But perhaps the sheer volume of scholarship is a testament to Jefferson’s enduring contributions and his elusive and contradictory personal life. Jefferson was a master of soaring rhetoric, articulating lofty principles of universal justice and equality while simultaneously not only owning large numbers of African-American slaves, but sleeping with one of them — Sally Hemings — and fathering several children by her. The relationship, long rumored and the subject of fierce debate, is no longer subject to serious question in the wake of definitive DNA testing.
Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf take on the task of explaining Jefferson’s own vision of himself and how he reconciled these conflicting threads in their somewhat awkwardly titled new book, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.” Gordon-Reed, a professor at Harvard Law School, is the author of the “The Hemingses of Monticello,” for which she won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Onuf, one of the nation’s leading Jefferson scholars, teaches at the University of Virginia, founded by Jefferson himself. No insignificant pool of talent here.
The book is largely a character study, organized in sections seeking to explain Jefferson’s understanding of himself and his life through his roles as a “patriarch” or as a “traveller,” both at home and abroad.
It’s an approach that allows exploration of Jefferson, unleashed from a chronological narrative. But perhaps more interesting, the book returns, like a touchstone, to remind the reader that Monticello and all that it stood for was built on the backs of enslaved African-Americans. Jefferson may have preferred to turn his face and avoid the harsh reality of his slaveholding, but neither these authors, nor history, will allow that contradiction to stand unexamined.
Of course, Jefferson’s fraught relationship with Sally Hemings is central to understanding Jefferson. Hemings was just 16 when she accompanied Jefferson’s young daughter from Philadelphia to Paris, where he served as the American representative to France.
Jefferson fathered several children with Hemings and, as Gordon-Reed and Onuf note, he held great affection for both his acknowledged as well as his unacknowledged family. He agreed with Hemings to free their children when they reached adulthood, a deal he honored (even as he simultaneously refused to free the slaves who kept Monticello afloat economically).
In the end, the book is an important contribution to understanding Jefferson in light of his now-confirmed relationship with Hemings. Sex, as they say, changes everything. Even our understanding of Jefferson himself.
Category: American History
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A character study of Thomas Jefferson as ‘patriarch’
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‘The Bully Pulpit’: a president’s clash with his successor
‘The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism’
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Simon & Schuster, 928 pp., $40
Theodore Roosevelt became president in September 1901, with the assassination of his predecessor. It was, to be sure, hardly what the Republican conservative wing had in mind.
Angered by his progressive politics as the governor of New York, they hoped to bury him in the most useless of offices: U.S. vice president. Less than one year later, he was the president. Oops. For eight years he dominated the landscape, promoting conservation and progressive causes with relish. He was re-elected in a landslide in 1904 but refused to run for a third term. He left office at 50.
Roosevelt had a complicated relationship with his successor, William Howard Taft. Roosevelt relied heavily on Taft’s judgment and helped install Taft as his successor, only to be sorely disappointed by Taft’s backsliding on Roosevelt’s progressive agenda. Ultimately, Roosevelt challenged Taft in his 1912 re-election bid and, after losing the Republican nomination in a tumultuous convention, bolted, formed the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party and aggressively ran against Taft in the general election, all but ensuring the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Roosevelt pushed for a variety of progressive causes: limiting working hours, breaking up monopolies and trusts, and expanding government power over rail, energy, telecommunications, food and medicine. All this as a Republican.
He was helped immeasurably by the rise of “muckraking” journalists Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens and William Allen White, led by editor Sam McClure, who published groundbreaking investigative stories in McClure’s Magazine (and later in the newly created American Magazine) detailing sordid working conditions, filthy meatpacking plants and abusive monopolistic trusts. The journalists helped to mold public opinion, forcing the hand of Roosevelt’s opponents.
Author Doris Kearns Goodwin has profiled several American presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt in “No Ordinary Time” (which won the Pulitzer Price in 1995) and Abraham Lincoln in “Team of Rivals.” Here, she focuses on the Progressive Era. “There are but a handful of times in the history of our country when there occurs a transformation so remarkable that a molt seems to take place, and an altered country begins to emerge,” she writes.
Goodwin writes beautifully, but it’s difficult to imagine what she was thinking here. Roosevelt’s life has been the subject of numerous biographies, including most notably Edmund Morris’ definitive three-volume biography, the last volume of which (“Colonel Roosevelt”) was published just three years ago. Roosevelt’s complicated relationship with Taft is certainly fascinating but was dealt with far more comprehensively in the Morris biography. Goodwin’s effort to combine a short-form biography of Taft and Roosevelt in one volume (with short profiles of muckraking journalists tossed in for good measure) is interesting but ultimately falls short of its objective.
For starters, Taft is rather decidedly given the short shrift here, in favor of his more colorful predecessor. Taft in fact had an astonishing career — as U.S. Solicitor General, 6th Circuit judge, secretary of war, president, and then as chief justice of the Supreme Court. (Goodwin repeatedly identifies Taft as serving on the “Sixth District Court of Appeals,” not the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, an unfortunately glaring error). But here, Taft is left little more than an overweight foil, good-natured, but no Theodore Roosevelt. That’s unfair to a remarkably talented man trying to fill impossibly large shoes.
Ironically, Roosevelt suffers the same treatment. His life and ascent to the presidency are covered in rushed detail. Goodwin omits any significant discussion of Roosevelt’s extended post-presidential trip to Africa, his later nearly fatal trip to South America, and his relationship with Woodrow Wilson.
In fairness, Goodwin likely never intended a comprehensive biography of either man, seeking instead to focus simply on their relationship. But without the larger context, it is difficult to understand either, much less the relationship between the two. That is, unfortunately, a rare miss from a talented author. -
‘The Terror Courts’: rough justice at Guantánamo
‘The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay’
by Jess Bravin
Yale University Press, 448 pp., $30
The United States has long prided itself on the strength of its judicial system and its respect for the rights of criminal defendants. For more than 200 years, our justice system has withstood war, economic depression and even foreign invasion. Until Sept. 11, 2001.
In the aftermath of those horrific attacks, both anti-Taliban groups and American troops in Afghanistan rounded up hundreds of detainees. President George W. Bush signed an Executive Order authorizing the establishment of a prison camp at Guantánamo Bay where they would be tried by military commissions. Drafted by conservative ideologues from Vice President Cheney’s staff, the Order established a commission system almost entirely under Presidential control. Worse, the President secretly authorized brutal interrogation techniques. In hearings before the commissions, neither the rules of evidence nor the safeguards applicable in military courts martial would apply. Indeed, hearsay and even confessions produced from torture would be admissible if deemed “reliable.”
In “The Terror Courts,” Jess Bravin vividly recounts the struggles both inside the administration and with the U.S. Supreme Court over the Commissions and its operations. Bravin, a lawyer who covers the U.S. Supreme Court for The Wall Street Journal, provides a fascinating, if depressing, overview of the Bush administration’s approach to the detainees.
Guantánamo was intended to serve as the “legal equivalent of outer space,” where the prisoners would have no recourse to outside lawyers or courts. But military lawyers assigned to represent the detainees immediately challenged the commissions’ jurisdiction. The case ultimately was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The young Georgetown law professor who argued the case, Neal Katyal, was an odd choice, having never appeared in any significant litigation. He was so nervous that he used a “litigation coach” to calm his nerves by holding hands and practicing before eight stuffed animals before the argument. Despite his inexperience, however, the Supreme Court, in Hamdan v. United States, struck down the effort to try the detainees before commissions.
Congress quickly passed the Military Commissions Act to reauthorize the commissions and to provide at least some due process rights. But the problems were only beginning.
The abuse of the detainees, including waterboarding and brutal interrogation techniques, complicated many of the cases. Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Couch had joined the prosecution team after one of his former squadron buddies, a United Airlines pilot, died on 9/11. But sorting through the files, he was disgusted by the horrific abuse rained down on the detainees, spoiling any chance of fairly trying them.
After several false starts, the administration settled on Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden. Hamdan’s trial, though, hardly turned out as the administration hoped. The commission acquitted Hamdan of “conspiracy” and convicted him instead of the catchall “material support for terrorism” charge. The Commission then rejected the government’s request for a 30-year sentence and, after credit for time served, sentenced Hamdan to only five months. Even that conviction was overturned on appeal.
In the end, of the 778 detainees once held at Guantánamo, only 166 remain, the government quietly conceding that the vast majority could not be convicted. As a nation, we suffered an incalculable loss on 9/11. But the sacrifice of our constitutional principles in reaction did nothing to avenge that loss. Bravin’s thoughtful history teaches a painful lesson. It should be required reading. -
‘The Boys in the Boat’: UW team vanquishes Hitler’s crew
‘The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Olympics’
by Daniel James Brown
Viking, 404 pp., $28.95
Few sports carry the aristocratic pedigree of crew. Long-established teams at Yale, Harvard and Princeton are mere upstarts by comparison to teams with even more refined heritage from Oxford and Cambridge. Few of them imagined that a crew from Washington, of all places, could be competitive.
But by 1936, that’s exactly what happened. The University of Washington built a team from kids raised on farms, in logging towns and near shipyards. They blew away their Californian rivals and bested the cream of New England to become the American Olympic Team and won the gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
In “The Boys on the Boat,” Daniel James Brown tells the astonishing story of the UW’s 1936 eight-oar varsity crew and its rise from obscurity to fame, drawing on interviews with the surviving members of the team and their diaries, journals and photographs. A writer and former writing teacher at Stanford and San Diego, Brown lives outside of Seattle, where one of his elderly neighbors harbored a history Brown never imagined: he was Joe Rantz, one of the members of the iconic UW 1936 crew.
Rantz was perhaps the most unlikely member of the eight. Literally abandoned by his family as a teenager to fend for himself, he enrolled at the UW and paid his way through school working odd jobs and summers in brutal heat on the Grand Coulee dam. The discipline, coordination and sheer physical demands of crew gave him a chance to prove himself. He was not alone. The team was built from lanky young men winnowed from a large field of curious freshmen. Not many lasted long.
Those who did were in for quite a ride. Coached by the stoic Al Ulbrickson, the rowers built muscle, coordination and teamwork into an unbeatable machine. Hovering in the wings was George Yeoman Pocock, an eccentric Englishman who became a legend, building racing shells from his UW workshop for rowing programs across the country.
The young men quickly learned that rowing was synergistic — sheer brawn was not nearly enough to win, nor was synchronization, although both were surely necessary. Only when they perfectly melded trust, determination and optimism did they excel. Ulbrickson continually reshuffled the varsity eight as they grew from awkward freshmen to experienced seniors, seeking the perfect combination.
The individual stories of these young men are almost as compelling as the rise of the team itself. Brown excels at weaving those stories with the larger narrative, all culminating in the 1936 Olympic Games. Few of these young men had ever left Washington state, much less the United States, when they left New York on the steamship Manhattan to represent their country in Berlin.
The final race could not have been more dramatic. With poor placement in bad weather, the UW crew faced daunting disadvantages as the race began. But they had something no one could see, a team that worked so closely together that, when it clicked, they were able to soar beyond their apparent capacity. Hitler himself attended the race with his top lieutenants expecting his Nazi team to take the gold medal in the premier rowing event. He left badly disappointed. For the boys in the boat, when hearing the results announced, “their grimaces of pain turned suddenly to broad white smiles, smiles that decades later would flicker across old newsreels, illuminating the greatest moment of their lives,” Brown writes.
A story this breathtaking demands an equally compelling author, and Brown does not disappoint. The narrative rises inexorably, with the final 50 pages blurring by with white-knuckled suspense as these all-American underdogs pull off the unimaginable.
The 1936 Pocock shell still hangs in the UW crew house. It’s an icon now, revered by modern day crews. But once, not so long ago, it carried eight kids and a coxswain from Northwest farms, orchards and shipyards to an improbable victory in the greatest of all crew races. -
‘Master of the Mountain’: Thomas Jefferson’s enduring support of slavery
‘Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves’
by Henry Wiencek
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 319 pp., $35
Thomas Jefferson towers over American history. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, served as the nation’s third President, second Secretary of State and Ambassador to France. He engineered the Louisiana Purchase, and commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Lionized in American history for his soaring defense of individual liberty, Jefferson’s extensive slaveholdings have been curiously downplayed, dismissed as beyond his control, or excused.
In his new book, “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” noted historian Henry Wiencek, author of “An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America,” takes on the formidable task of setting the record straight. Jefferson was a lawyer by training and carefully curated his correspondence to portray himself as opposed to slavery and in favor of emancipation. He wrote what he described as “soft” answers to those who questioned slavery, suggesting emancipation at some point in the undefined “future” when circumstances were right.
But despite enormous power and influence, Jefferson did little to actually end slavery during his lifetime. It was, in fact, the source of his wealth and prosperity. He calculated the profits his hundreds of slaves earned him, even putting the children to work making nails or weaving cloth, under the harsh supervision of his overseers, who routinely beat the children. Slave children were sold or presented as gifts, and slaves’ marriages were destroyed when one spouse was sold or transferred to distant locations.
Jefferson removed himself from direct involvement in the messy details slavery entailed. He built Monticello itself so that visitors would be dazzled by displays of exotic Lewis and Clark artifacts and reminders of his intellect, while the slave housing remained safely out of sight.
Curiously, history has conspired to overlook, downplay or excuse it all. While Jefferson powerfully dominates early American history, in our collective memory his slaveholding is different: he becomes a victim of historical circumstance, trapped by social convention, unable to right so clearly a wrong. This is, of course, nonsense. Contemporaries not only could but did emancipate their slaves, including George Washington himself.
Jefferson fathered several children by Sally Hemmings, one of his slaves. Hemmings, then only 16 years old, accompanied Jefferson to France when he served as Ambassador. She could have remained there, free under French law, but returned with Jefferson after striking a bargain that would free her children from slavery in return for her continued service. The relationship, hotly contested since Jefferson’s own time, is now beyond dispute with DNA proof. But curiously, it has served to only burnish his reputation — as a tormented lover and father of a multiracial family. But such a sympathetic reading requires, as Wiencek notes, an “enormous act of forgetting” — forgetting the hundreds in bondage, hidden from view in Monticello, bought, sold and beaten like animals.
Wiencek carefully probes the historical record, parsing the enormous body of Jefferson literature. His work is a thoughtful and well-documented contribution, offering a powerful reassessment of our third president. He notes the irony that many “accept Jefferson as the moral standard of the Founders’ era, not Washington.” Perhaps, he suggests, Washington’s emancipation of his slaves stands as too stark an example, demanding that those who claim to have principles live by them. Quite obviously, our young Republic did not — an enduring stain on our nation’s founding. Jefferson offers a more complicated compromise, concealing harsh injustice with soaring rhetoric and promises of a better future. Just like, one might note, America at its founding. -
John M. Barry’s ‘Roger Williams’: separating church and state
John M. Barry’s ‘Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul’ tells the story of the Puritan minister who became an unlikely champion of the ‘wall of separation’ between church and state in America. Barry will discuss his book Wednesday at Seattle’s University Temple United Methodist Church.
Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul’
by John M. Barry
Penguin, 464 pp., $35
Roger Williams may not be a household name, but he surely contributed as much or more to the American view of individual liberty and the separation of church and state as any of the much more celebrated Founders who drafted our Constitution over 150 years after his death.
Born and raised in London, Williams watched firsthand as the Parliament battled the King over religious freedom as a young apprentice to Sir Edward Coke, one of the greatest English jurists. Although the Puritans ultimately fled to the new American colonies to escape religious persecution, they had no scruples against persecution for religious belief. John Winthrop, the first Governor of the Massachusetts colony, famously called for the building of a “shining city on a hill,” but shining not because of its religious freedom. Indeed, quite the opposite: it would shine because Protestant Christianity would inform the state and religious principles and practices would be enforced by the state through force and even death. Sound familiar?
Williams was himself a devout Puritan minister but arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony carrying lessons learned firsthand from the King’s willingness to brutally enforce religious doctrine with state power. As a result, Williams proposed a radically different conception of freedom: that there ought to be a “wall of separation” between church and state. Perhaps even more radically, he proposed that the government received its power and authority from its citizens, not the other way around. Neither idea was well received. Massachusetts found Williams’ ideas so offensive that in 1636, in the depth of winter, it banished him from the colony under penalty of death. Only the mercy of Native American tribes saved Williams from certain death.
Williams founded Providence as a refuge where one could choose to believe or to pray however one wished and citizens controlled the government. It was a radical experiment. At the time, the Puritans elsewhere were furiously working to perfect religious persecution, torturing, hanging and burning at the stake those whose only crime was to hold differing religious views. Williams’ conception of individual and religious liberty ultimately prevailed, but the tension between religious intolerance (building that “shining city on the hill”) and individual liberty (creating a “separation of church and state”) remains a fundamental theme in America even today.
In “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul,” New York Times best-selling author (“Rising Tide”) John M. Barry tells the story with passion and an eye for fine detail. Barry, who also authored “The Great Influenza,” knows his English history and weaves political intrigue across both sides of the Atlantic at a time when the crossing depended entirely on fair winds and good fortune. If the story were not compelling enough, Barry’s dramatic first chapter of conflict, confrontation and banishment into the wilderness is worth the price of admission alone. As Williams, stunned by the civil banishment order for a religious dispute, stumbled from the settlement, “snow began falling. It fell softly but also thickly, until it rose to his knees.”
As Barry notes, the dispute “opened a fissure in America, a fault line which would rive America all the way to the present. That fissure opened over the question of the role of government in religion and of the reverse, the role of religion in government.”
Williams’ arguments, made in a lonely colony on the edge of a vast untamed continent, laid a foundation for a liberty that continues to thrive today. Perhaps religious freedom and individual liberty would have emerged over the last 400 years in all events. But Roger Williams deserves our thanks for his courage to fight for it with his very life at a time when few thought it anything but the rankest heresy. And John Barry deserves our thanks for illuminating this critical and timely chapter of American history. -
David McCullough’s ‘The Greater Journey’: How France nurtured the American experiment
David McCullough’s ‘The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris’ chronicles the outsize influence France, particularly Paris, had on American writers, artists, politicians and scientists in the 19th century.
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris’
by David McCullough
Simon & Schuster, 576 pp., $37.50
There are few countries with as much in common as the United States and France. The French provided not only critical support to the American colonies fighting for their freedom but also much of the philosophical foundation for the young Republic. Long after the revolutionary dust settled, France continued to nurture the American experiment.
From 1830 to 1900, a tide of influential Americans – artists, writers, painters and doctors – braved the treacherous journey across the Atlantic to visit Paris. What they saw profoundly changed not only the travelers, but also America itself.
Charles Sumner studied at the Sorbonne, astonished to see black students treated as equals and, as a result, became an unflinching voice against slavery as the U.S. senator for Massachusetts, beaten nearly to death by a South Carolina senator on the floor of the Senate for his views.
James Fenimore Cooper (“The Last of the Mohicans”) wrote some of his most significant works in Paris, working with his close friend Samuel F.B. Morse. Morse, inspired by the French communication system of semaphores, invented the modern electrical telegraph and his famous code and radically changed communications globally.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain and Henry James all lived and worked in Paris. Charles Bulfinch, the architect who designed the U.S. Capitol, was inspired by touring Parisian monuments in 1787 with Thomas Jefferson, then the American minister to France.
In “The Greater Journey,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, captures this flood of doctors, writers, artists and free spirits who coursed through Paris. Moving chronologically, he tells the story through the eyes of these young travelers, astonished by the beauty of the city before them.
McCullough’s skill as a storyteller is on full display here as he relates the treacherous Atlantic crossing, the horse-drawn carriages and less-than-ideal plumbing that greeted the travelers, many of whom had little exposure to anything outside the rural U.S. For aspiring artists who had never even seen a copy of the masterpieces of the Old World, the experience of an afternoon at the Louvre was enough to bring them nearly to their knees.
The idea of telling the story of the French cultural contribution to America through the eyes of a generation of aspiring artists, writers and doctors is inspired, and McCullough draws on untapped historical sources to tell the story, against the roiling backdrop of a French military coup and a new Emperor (Louis Napoleon), a disastrous war with Germany that included a siege of Paris (setting the stage for WWI) and the horrific Paris Commune that followed.
But the effort in several ways falls disappointingly short of its early promise. The historical narrative is disjointed. McCullough mentions Andrew Jackson’s defeat by John Adams, only to jarringly describe a toast to President’s Jackson’s election only pages later, without explanation. (Adams narrowly won in 1824 in an election decided by the House of Representatives but lost his re-election bid four years later to Jackson – but you wouldn’t know it from this book.) French history, similarly, unfolds with only cursory explanation of the events.
Second, McCullough’s focus on such a wide cast of characters renders the portrait of each one superficial, scattered by a wide historical lens and large cast. Exciting accomplishments, tragic losses and almost everything in between is lost.
At the same time, however, McCullough focuses inordinate attention on detailed descriptions of sculpture or paintings, distracting from the larger point McCullough is making: the powerful influence on American painting, sculpture, writing and medicine wielded by a small but hugely influential group who braved the dangers of transatlantic travel and brought home radical and transformative new ideas.
Perhaps an 80-year history of France, told through the eyes of dozens of American visitors, can only be told with such a blurred historical detail. It’s a shame, though – with the absurd memory of “freedom fries” and hostility to one of our closest allies still ringing in our ears, it’s worth remembering the French contribution to American art, politics, science and medicine. But even with its faults, McCullough deserves credit for finding a compelling and largely untold story in American history. -
Colonel Roosevelt’: Edmund Morris’ superb account of Teddy Roosevelt’s final, feisty years
‘Colonel Roosevelt,’ the third volume of Edmund Morris’ trilogy about Teddy Roosevelt, is as good as the Pulitzer Prize-winning first volume. It picks up after Roosevelt leaves his second term as president.
Colonel Roosevelt’
by Edmund Morris
Random House, 570 pp., $35
Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency after his predecessor was cut down by an assassin’s bullet on Sept. 21, 1901. Over the next eight years, he towered over the political landscape, built an American empire, and through sheer force of personality bent the political world to his will. He was enormously popular, re-elected in a landslide in 1904, but refused to run for a third term.
Roosevelt left office at 50, turning over the reins of power to his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, and left the United States for an extended African safari, flashing his famous white-toothed smile as he departed.
The third of Edmund Morris’ three-volume biography of Roosevelt’s life, “Colonel Roosevelt” picks up where the second volume, “Theodore Rex,” left off. Morris won the Pulitzer Prize for the first volume and critical acclaim for the second. Sequels are rarely the equal of their predecessors, but this hefty 570-page volume is the exception to prove the rule: It is a superbly written tribute, part of a trilogy that will stand as the definitive Roosevelt biography.
Roosevelt plunged into the African wilderness with a charter to collect specimens of African game. Treated like royalty, he preferred life in the wilderness, stalking lions, elephants, giraffes and hundreds of other examples of African wildlife. He was a hunter, to be sure, but a trained naturalist as well, preaching conservation in the same breath as boasting of his latest kill.
Upon his return, Roosevelt did his best to contain his dismay at the failure of President Taft to continue his progressive policies. The corpulent Taft watched, equally dismayed, when Roosevelt – silent no longer – mounted a primary challenge to his renomination. With competing slates of delegates, the 1912 Republican National Convention became a dramatic showdown, with Taft outmaneuvering Roosevelt to win the nomination. Roosevelt promptly bolted, established the Progressive Party, and ran an aggressive presidential campaign.
On Oct. 14, 1912, John Scrank, a deranged young man, shot Roosevelt in the chest in Milwaukee, Wis. The bullet was slowed as it pierced Roosevelt’s overcoat, suit jacket, a steel-reinforced glasses case and the thick text of his speech, before entering his chest and coming to rest beside his ribs. With blood spreading across his white shirt, he insisted he was strong as a “Bull Moose” and delivered his 90-minute speech before allowing himself to be taken to a hospital. Although he recovered, the election was a rout and Democrat Woodrow Wilson was swept into office.
Roosevelt watched with increasing alarm as the world inched closer to war. When World War I exploded, he urgently called for American intervention. He watched, astonished, as German U-boats sank American ships loaded with men, women and children, even as Wilson coolly refused to take action, instead maintaining studied neutrality. To Roosevelt, who embraced action, not words, this was little more than “mollycoddling,” “pussy footing,” if not outright cowardice.
When it could no longer be avoided, Wilson obtained a declaration of war, which prompted urgent demands from Roosevelt that he be allowed to raise and lead a volunteer regiment to fight. His offer was politely declined, but Roosevelt’s four sons went through military training. One of them was killed in France, and two of them wounded.
Roosevelt’s boyish energy ebbed as the years slipped past and the world became increasingly unfamiliar. As he put it in a letter, “when it is evident that a leader’s day is past, the one service he can render is to step aside and leave the ground for the development of a successor.” He died on Jan. 6, 1919, at 60, one of the most interesting, colorful and dazzling presidents in American history. -
The Shallows’: Is the Internet changing the way we think?
In ‘The Shallows,’ Nicholas Carr posits that the Internet is making the human brain more prone to surf broadly and less capable of sustaining concentrated thought or analysis. Carr discusses his book Monday at Town Hall Seattle.
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains”
Nicholas Carr
Norton, 276 pp., $26.99
In 1455, Johannes Gutenberg produced the first major book published with a movable-type printing press, an enormously significant advancement that marked the beginning of widespread publication of books.
As books proliferated, some observers attacked the whole idea of such mass distribution of information. English writer Barnaby Rich complained in 1600 that one “of the great diseases of this age is the multitude of books that doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought into the world.”
Change a couple of words and he could have been talking about the Internet, Twitter, blogs and Facebook updates.
In “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains” (Norton, 276 pp., $26.99), Nicholas Carr asks a similar question: What is the Internet and its irresistible invitation to surf broadly but to read superficially doing to our ability to analyze complex problems? Or, as he asked in his article in The Atlantic in 2008, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
Drawing from neuroscience, history and social-science research, Carr reviews evidence that learning how to solve a problem, how to play a piece of music or how to speak a language physically changes the brain. It’s a mistake, he argues, to think of the brain as a hard drive that stores information; it’s far more than that and changes dynamically as it processes information, altering itself as it confronts challenges – for better or worse.
Reading a book, he notes, is vastly different from reading hyperlinked Internet text. Reading a book is solitary, requiring deep thought, analysis of the text and sustaining a narrative thread for the duration. By contrast, Internet reading invites shallow skimming for relevant passages, incessant clicking to hyperlinked articles and reliance on Google’s search algorithms to determine relevance. But Google determines “relevance” by, among other things, popularity (the number of other sites linking to the text) and how recently the site was updated. That is hardly a proxy for authoritativeness, reliability or trustworthiness.
Carr argues that the result is an emerging nation of shallow and impatient readers, who are constantly bombarded with breaking news updates, tweets, Facebook updates and a barrage of e-mail, invited to surf links without stopping to analyze the substance of what they are reading. This, he argues, has a lasting impact, making us unable to sustain concentrated thought or analysis.
Carr’s argument is thought- provoking but a bit breathless. As Rich’s critique of the humble book illustrates, it isn’t difficult to find the same arguments advanced throughout history in the face of change. Books – lauded by Carr – were once derided as flooding the world with idle thoughts and ideas. Magazines and newspapers were, similarly, blamed for their hasty delivery of the latest news. But somehow each generation managed the change and, in retrospect, it would be difficult to argue with a straight face that the world is the worse for it.
Carr’s contention that the Internet is different is, ultimately, unpersuasive. Even for those of us old enough actually to remember a world before the Internet, it’s difficult to imagine a world without it. The pace of information delivery has accelerated beyond a doubt, but that’s hardly a bad thing. Book sales may be fading but Kindle sales are soaring. Somehow, humanity has endured the technological siege throughout history. Neither books, newspapers, nor Google are likely to make us stupid. Overreacting to change might. -
‘Franklin, France, and the Birth of America’: Revolutionary ideas, charm
‘A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America’
by Stacy Schiff
Henry Holt, 489 pp., $30
In December 1776, a decidedly seasick 70-year-old Benjamin Franklin arrived in France, seeking financial and military support for his embattled new country. During the seven years he served as the American representative in Paris, Franklin proved a masterful diplomat, manipulating the tangled European political scene to achieve what, from a distance, appears an improbable outcome: the massive support for a republic founded on democratic principles from one of the strongest monarchies in Europe.
In “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America,” Stacy Schiff recounts the story of Franklin’s time in Paris. A Pulitzer Prize winner (for “Véra,” a biography of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), Schiff poured through diplomatic archives, family papers and even spy reports to reveal insights into this little-known chapter in Franklin’s life.
At the time of Franklin’s arrival in Paris, the newly declared American republic was recognized by no other countries, had few financial resources and no military allies, and was attempting to win its independence from one of the most formidable, well-armed and well-financed military powers in existence. Its citizen army was poorly equipped, on the run and suffering one defeat after another, retreating even from major metropolitan centers. To say that the colonial revolutionaries faced an uphill battle is an understatement.
Franklin’s purpose was to secure French military and economic support for the revolution. France sought to undermine England’s hegemony over North America and to support its own designs on that continent. England sought to crush the revolution and keep the French from meddling in what it considered “internal” disputes within the British empire.
Franklin deftly played one side off the other — holding out the possibility of a negotiated settlement to the British on the one hand, while cajoling a series of enormous loans, grants and military support from the French on the other. And he was spectacularly successful: During the first year of the revolution, 90 percent of the gunpowder came from France. Millions of dollars in economic aid, military uniforms and French volunteers poured across the Atlantic to support the cause. The battle of Yorktown was not only fought by brave American patriots, but also by the combined American and French armies, where the victory cry was equally “God and Liberty!” and “Vive le Roi!” The French population became passionately pro-American in what, in retrospect, plainly presaged the French Revolution itself.
When he arrived, Franklin was already well known and widely respected by the French. His unannounced arrival caused an uproar of well-wishers trodding the path to his door, and he quickly won over the Parisian population with his charm.
But even from the outset, the French-American relationship was strained in ways that continue to this day. First, cultural differences between the two countries were stark. As Schiff notes, in American society, a young lady could properly flirt until marriage, but never thereafter. The roles were almost precisely reversed in pre-Revolutionary France, where flirtation among married women was elevated to a near art form. Franklin excelled at the art and had numerous relationships (in his 70s) with a variety of French women. Moreover, class standing played a central role in defining one’s role in pre-Revolutionary France, and many French were puzzled by Franklin, a mere printer by trade, who rose to prominence on the strength of his scientific and diplomatic accomplishments.
But for all the power of the story, the biography suffers from stilted, awkward writing, almost as if written in French, or perhaps German, and then poorly translated to English. More than once, a reader is forced to reread a sentence two or three times before comprehending what Schiff was attempting to communicate. The editor here was plainly missing in action and the book suffers as a result.
Still, the story rises above even this flaw, and has special relevance today, in an era of “Freedom Fries” and blatant anti-French sentiment. Franklin, who embraced — and was embraced by — the French, recognized that, without French support, the American Republic would have quickly vanished without a trace under the bootheels of the British regular troops. Perhaps it is a timely reminder that, despite passing political trends, the bonds between America and France were forged from the outset of the Republic and can withstand even today’s unfortunate political posturing and sloganeering. For, indeed, without France, there would have been no America at all.