‘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.
Category: Reviews
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‘The Boys in the Boat’: UW team vanquishes Hitler’s crew
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‘The Art of Power’: Thomas Jefferson shapes the republic
‘Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power’
by Jon Meacham
Random House, 759 pp., $35
Thomas Jefferson’s timing was perfect. He came of age as tensions between England and its restive North American colonies were rising. A brilliant Virginian state legislator at 25, he authored the Declaration of Independence at 33, then helped lead the Revolution that inspired it.
He was governor of Virginia at 36. He served as an American ambassador to France, then secretary of state to President Washington, then vice president to John Adams before finally ascending to the presidency itself in 1800.
His life is a riveting story of our nation’s founding — an improbable turn of events that seems only in retrospect inevitable. Few are better suited to the telling than Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “American Lion,” his 2008 biography of Andrew Jackson.
After the Revolutionary War ended, the colonies struggled with fundamental issues. How strong should the central government be? How much power should the central government or the nation’s chief executive hold? In a world still filled with monarchies, how should an elected president be regarded?
Jefferson played a key role in shaping the new democracy. He feared those who would make the American president a monarch, or establish a Senate with lifetime tenure (like the House of Lords), or — worse — reunite with Britain.
Jefferson was elected president in 1800, in a hotly contested election that yielded a tied Electoral College vote between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, throwing the election to the House of Representatives. After months of turmoil, the House elected Jefferson, who served two terms. (Neither candidate, apparently, thought it appropriate to involve the Supreme Court — that would take another 200 years and another close election).
Jefferson abandoned Washington’s ceremonial sword and pretensions of grandeur, shocking Washington by padding around the White House in slippers and clothing deemed too casual for his office.
Jefferson was concerned that French possession of New Orleans (a city of enormous trading significance) threatened American security interests.
To address that risk, he dispatched an envoy to Paris to discuss the possible acquisition of the city. He was astonished at Napoleon’s response: offering to sell not only the city but the entire Louisiana Territory, including the vast Mississippi watershed not already incorporated in the United States.
Jefferson was thrilled and seized the opportunity. Though he acted without congressional authorization, contrary to his distrust of expansive executive power, it was simply too good a deal to pass up.
Meacham’s writing is captivating; indeed, the book unfolds like a novel, with events cascading one after the other. He provides fascinating detail, as we read over Jefferson’s shoulder Napoleon’s offer and share with him the shock and joy of the unexpected development. Meacham puts the rivalry between Jefferson and Hamilton, Burr and Adams into philosophical and historical perspective, but without the unnecessary clutter that so easily could destroy the book’s narrative flow. It’s no small task to survey 50 years of fundamental change, shifting alliances and political infighting, balancing context with focus. Meacham makes it all look easy.
Meacham discusses Jefferson’s slaveholdings and his relationship with Sally Hemmings, with whom he fathered several children.
Although he notes that DNA evidence has demonstrated paternity, he mentions only in passing the central role that slavery played in Jefferson’s life and prosperity. It’s the only disappointing failure in an otherwise brilliant full-length biography of one of the most influential founding fathers.
Jefferson died on July 4, 1826 — the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He was buried in his family graveyard at his home in Monticello. But he left behind a vision and legacy that, more than almost anyone else, framed our American democracy. -
‘How the French Invented Love’: 900 years of living, loving and liaisons
Marilyn Yalom’s lively “How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance” documents the French obsession with love and sex in literature and life.
‘How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance’
by Marilyn Yalom
HarperPerennial, 416 pp., $15.99
Few things define the French more vividly than romance and love.
For hundreds of years, the French have obsessed over love and sex, in art, literature and poetry. From the middle ages to modern day, French culture has played an outsized role in fashioning concepts of chivalry, gallantry, and appropriate (and sometimes inappropriate) relations between men and women. Even in English, we turn to French to speak of love: “French kissing,” “liaison,” or “rendezvous.”
In “How The French Invented Love” author Marilyn Yalom surveys French literature through the ages, tracing the development of the concept of “love” and “romance.” A French professor working on “gender research” at Stanford University, she is well suited to the task, displaying an easy familiarity with 900 years of French literature.
To the French, the story of Abelard and Heloise is as familiar as Romeo and Juliet are to Americans or the British. In 1115, he was a 37-year-old cleric, philosopher and famously popular teacher; she was a brilliant 15-year-old niece of a church official. They became lovers, were married, then became victims of an angry uncle who castrated Abelard. She became a nun; he a monk. But their correspondence burned with a passion she could not quench, and 900 years later, still smolders.
Edmond Rostand’s play, Cyrano de Bergerac, is the most frequently performed French play in history. Cyrano, witty and articulate, but cursed with coarse looks, sacrificed his own love for Roxane to assist his friend Christian, who coveted the same woman but who had no gift for language. With Cyrano’s help, Christian won her to his side, then died a tragic death. Roxane retreated to a convent and only after many long years and on his deathbed does she discover that it was Cyrano all along who spoke for Christian.
Yalom surveys the delicate art of seduction, perfected by the French royalty who seemingly spent more time focused on the opposite sex than the, ahem, affairs of state. In 1782, for example, Choderlos de Laclos published “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” a radically different portrayal of love. Far from a romance, the novel traces the story of two ex-lovers who use sex as a competitive game, leaving their degraded “conquests” in their wake. The book remains required reading in French high schools (imagine the outcry if added to the curriculum of an American high school). But it was an apt critique of the Ancien Régime on the eve of the French Revolution.
Yalom covers the famous love letters of star-crossed lovers, gay love, republican love in the time of the Revolution, and the “sentimental education” offered by the sexual initiation of a younger man by an older woman. It’s a fascinating short course through French literature, history and changing attitudes toward sex and love, all of which heavily influenced western thought over the last millennium.
But even so, French and American perspectives remain markedly different. Americans scratched their heads in wonder at the state funeral for French President François Mitterand in 1996, attended by both his wife, Danielle, and his longtime mistress, Anne Pingeot. The French, in turn, were baffled by the impeachment of an American President for an office dalliance with an intern.
But as Yalom demonstrates, these are the very questions that have been debated throughout history, much of it defined by French literature, culture and language. The French may not have “invented” love but they certainly have spent a lot of time exploring its application. -
‘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. -
‘What Money Can’t Buy’: putting a price on the public good
The Moral Limits of Markets’
by Michael J. Sandel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pp., $27
Michael Sandel, a Harvard University professor, teaches one of the most popular college classes at the university and, perhaps, the world. His legendary “Justice” class has been taken by 15,000 graduate students over the years, serialized on PBS, translated into a variety of foreign languages and viewed by literally millions of viewers. His classes sparked a moral philosophy craze in Japan, and he was named by China Newsweek as the “most influential foreign figure.” It’s quite an accomplishment for a mere political philosophy professor.
His new book, “What Money Can’t Buy,” explores the consequences and implications for the ever-increasing expansion of markets and market-based reasoning in our society. “The problem with our politics,” he writes, “is not too much moral argument but too little. … A debate about the moral limits of markets would enable us to decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they don’t belong.”
Modern economists routinely describe the world as a series of incentives and rewards, ever seeking to expand the explanatory power of the metaphor but without accounting for the transformative power of putting a price tag on everything, particularly in an economy with such widely disparate wealth distribution. Simply put, Sandel argues, reducing human behavior to market-based reasoning crowds out public spirit, moral obligation and similarly noneconomic factors. And some of his examples are compelling.
In Switzerland, for example, public-opinion surveys measured public opinion in a small town selected for a nuclear-waste repository. A slim 51 percent majority accepted the placement, apparently in a display of civic responsibility. But the same survey asked the same voters if their support would increase or decrease if coupled with an annual payment to each resident in exchange for placing the waste repository. The result? Support went sharply down not up. Only 25 percent would support it with the payment. An economist would be confounded, but not Sandel: Once you introduce the market, it crowds out and displaces what was, until then, a civic duty.
A second example is even more telling. When day-care centers introduced a “late fee” for parents arriving after closing time to pick up their children, the result was more parents arriving late, rather than fewer. Why? Because parents understood the penalty as a fee for service, which stripped the sense of moral duty out of the equation.
Sandel’s point is that markets leave a mark, changing the way we look at the world. “Once we see that markets and commerce change the character of the goods they touch, we have to ask where markets belong — and where they don’t. And we can’t answer this question without deliberating about the meaning and purpose of the goods, and the values that should govern them.” In a world in which ads are sold on school programs, police cars feature Daytona-style advertisements and cities routinely sell naming rights to civic ballparks, city parks and public spaces, Sandel’s book raises important questions.
Sandel’s best-selling book “Justice” provided a whirlwind tour through moral philosophy. “What Money Can’t Buy” is a superb follow-up asking many of the same questions. A baseball stadium where the wealthy sit next to the working class and the variation between ticket prices is minimal is a very different place (with very different civic consequences) from one where the rich peer down from richly appointed “suites” and the less fortunate sit across the stadium in distant bleachers.
There is no more fundamental question we face than how to best preserve the common good and build strong communities that benefit everyone. Sandel’s book is an excellent starting place for that dialogue. -
Young American in Paris tale is lightweight but amusing
“Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” is young New Yorker Rosecrans Baldwin’s short and often clichéd tale of moving to Paris with his wife only to find it is a lot different from New York.
‘Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down’
by Rosecrans Baldwin
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp., $26
In his new book, “Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down,” Rosecrans Baldwin, a young New Yorker, recounts moving to Paris with his wife to take a job with a French advertising firm.
A thorough Francophile from a young age, Baldwin is ecstatic when he arrives, thrilled to be living in the City of Light, surrounded by the stunning architecture, food and people. But reality soon sets in as it dawns on him that — quelle horreur — the city is actually French, and not only the language but the culture is different from, say, New York.
You can, of course, imagine the shock.
Baldwin struggles with mastering French in a business setting (it gave him migraines). As he recounts, “First day on the job, my French was not super. I’d sort of misled them about that.”
He struggles learning to master the informal kiss that is the typical greeting, even in business settings, and dealing with infamous French bureaucracy. He describes it all as if it were a daunting challenge rather than a rather tame exercise in cultural differences. This is, apparently, a sheltered young man. Think Paris is different from New York?
The book is an entertaining but lightweight addition to a genre that is already crushed by the number of Americans “living abroad” books (further subdivided into the French and Italian versions). It’s more than a little cliché to describe how terribly difficult it is to move to a foreign country where they don’t speak English all the time. But honestly, this borders on downright silly as virtually everyone in Paris speaks English at some level and most visitors hear almost more English than French on the street. There are McDonald’s everywhere. The difficulty isn’t finding someone who speaks English; it’s trying to escape the expanding American cultural dominance abroad.
Almost worse, Baldwin spends chapters on how the French dress, their notoriously sexy ads, and difficulties involved in renting an apartment. Yes, all of that is different from what one might find in New York or Chicago. That’s the point of living abroad, isn’t it?
Ultimately, Baldwin moves past the cliché, but just barely. The book is worth reading only because it’s thankfully short and doesn’t require a lot of serious attention.
As a friend once said of her sister: “She talks a lot but says so little, it gives you time to rest.” Still, it’s a worthy read, if only to get a glimpse of what it’s like to live on a budget as an overwrought young ad executive in Paris at 29. -
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. -
‘The Fall of the House of Zeus’: Portrayal of lawyer’s fall not a pretty picture
A review of Curtis Wilkie’s new book about Mississippi trial lawyer Dickie Scruggs, ‘The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Most Powerful Trial Lawyer.’ It has a confusing cast of characters and offers way too much information. Worse, its author’s bias toward his subject, who is a friend, shows everywhere, particularly in Wilkie’s attempt to portray Scruggs’ banal criminal misconduct as tragedy.
‘The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Most Powerful Trial Lawyer’
by Curtis Wilkie
Harmony, 400 pp., $25.99
Dickie Scruggs, in his heyday, was one of the most powerful trial lawyers in America. From his Mississippi-based law offices, he aggressively challenged Big Tobacco, asbestos companies and some of the largest corporate interests in America in enormous class-action lawsuits, raking in millions in legal fees along the way.
A brother-in-law of Trent Lott, the former U.S. Senate majority leader, Scruggs was well connected in Southern politics and seemed invincible. He spent lavishly on yachts, vacation homes and private jets. Ultimately, though, his empire collapsed when he was convicted and sent to jail for conspiring to bribe a Mississippi state court judge in 2008.
In “The Fall of the House of Zeus,” Curtis Wilkie, professor at “Ole Miss” (the University of Mississippi), tells the story of Scruggs’ rise and surprising fall. Although a revealing tale of corruption, the book is significantly burdened by several flaws.
First, Wilkie seems unable to tell the story without introducing approximately 700 characters, each with a short biographical sketch (offered for no apparent purpose). This leaves the reader gasping for breath and wanting to reach for a pencil to try to outline all the relationships and sort out which little subplot is or isn’t significant or meaningful to the larger morality tale. To say that the narrative thread is lost would be a vast understatement. The editors here surely should have been given some strong coffee and encouraged to use the red pens they were given when hired.
Perhaps more significantly, despite Wilkie’s best efforts to portray Scruggs’ legal trouble as a Greek tragedy, it falls just a bit short. It’s indeed a shame that Scruggs attempted to bribe a state court judge to subvert justice and went to jail as a result, but this is hardly what most would consider a tragedy. It might be better characterized as what we sometimes call “justice.” Wilkie, who candidly admits that he is close to Scruggs, is unable to separate himself from his friend and tells the story from the most favorable viewpoint for his subject – damning almost everyone else as biased, unfair or partisan. Wilkie, of all people, should have known better: History at short range is dangerous, and this is a classic example.
Finally, Scruggs’ misconduct is indeed offensive, but it’s nothing more than obviously stupid, not to mention criminal, misbehavior. Sometimes legal ethics can be complicated or arcane, but any schoolchild can identify an effort to bribe a judge as wrong. The more obnoxious misconduct here is what was legal. The book is crammed full of conniving, snarky lawyers cutting deals to divide millions of dollars of legal fees from class actions, then bickering among themselves, suing each other and generally acting like spoiled children squabbling over money.
But that’s all legal and, at least to Wilkie, apparently normal behavior. It’s not a pretty picture. But in that context, it’s hardly a surprise that Scruggs found the temptation irresistible to weight the scales in his favor. Wilkie may have intended the reader to sympathize with Scruggs. Revulsion is the more likely, if unintended, result. -
‘Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned’: new biography of an indefatigable champion of the underdog
John A. Farrell’s ‘Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned’ is a new biography of the legendary American defense attorney who defended union organizers, despised minorities and those accused of sensational crimes
Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned’
by John A. Farrell
Random House, 561 pp., $32.50
America has long adored winning trial lawyers, and none more than Clarence Darrow. Born in 1857, he resigned from a promising career as a corporate lawyer to represent union organizers, despised minorities and those accused of sensational crimes. And he was devastatingly effective, winning most of his nearly 2,000 trials almost regardless of the circumstances, the defendants or the actual evidence.
In “Clarence Darrow: Attorney For The Damned,” John A. Farrell adds to a growing body of Darrow biographies. Farrell, a Boston Globe editor, draws from previously unpublished correspondence to give fresh insight into Darrow’s remarkable career.
Darrow cared little about consistency, political agendas or larger issues. For Darrow, mercy (and a quick acquittal) was the only thing that mattered. It is, of course, a handy attitude for a criminal defense lawyer.
He represented Thomas Kidd, an organizer put on trial in Wisconsin for leading a conspiracy to destroy the Paine Lumber Company by helping to organize a strike of its employees. Those workers earned 45 cents a day working under guard in locked facilities. The case was watched nationally as an early test of the right to organize – Darrow won and became labor’s leading trial lawyer. He also won acquittal for Big Bill Haywood, the secretary for the mine workers, accused of murdering the Governor of Idaho. He represented Eugene Debs, the Socialist, and hundreds of other social outcasts.
Darrow was no businessman and would have fared poorly in today’s big-business orientation of most law firms. He worked for free in over a third of his cases. But the common theme of most of his cases was the defense of individual liberty against the gathering force of industrialization and government intrusion.
In his most famous case, Darrow defended John Scopes, who was charged with teaching evolution in defiance of a Tennessee state law prohibiting such a science-based approach to education. Darrow saw the case as protecting education from “religious fanaticism.” His dramatic confrontation with William Jennings Bryan, who represented the State of Tennessee, was spellbinding and years later won Spencer Tracy an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Darrow in a movie about the trial, “Inherit the Wind.”
Darrow took pains to polish his own image. He was remarkably successful at it. Farrell’s book all but gushes over in admiration for the great orator, but Darrow was hardly flawless, and would have fared poorly in today’s media-saturated world. He was unfaithful to a remarkable degree, ultimately divorcing his wife and remarrying, all the while sleeping with innumerable women across the country.
He was indicted and stood trial twice for attempting to bribe a jury, ultimately resulting in a hung jury and an unshakable taint of guilt he could never shake. He was long-winded in an era when long speeches were the norm. He often took several days to pick a jury, and even longer to present his closing argument. In most modern trials, jury selection consumes a morning and trial judges frequently limit closing argument to an hour or two. Darrow could barely have introduced himself in that time. A modern jury would likely fall asleep before he got to the point.
Farrell provides a thoughtful overview of Darrow, his life and his many accomplishments. It’s no small task with a subject so large and encrusted with such idol worship. But only when Darrow’s quite human failings are exposed can history appreciate his enormous gift to the American legal tradition. -
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.