Book Reviews The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration. By ROBERT K. MURRAY. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. ix + 626p.; illustrations, bibli- ographical essay, and index. $13.50.) In the dialectic of history, the hitherto almost unanimous judgment against Warren Harding--as expressed, for instance, by Wil- liam Allen White, Frederick Lewis Allen, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Arthur Schles- inger, Jr., and Allan Nevins--had to generate sooner or later a rebuttal. The opening of the Harding Papers to scholars in 1964 has begun to spawn Harding books, most notably Andrew Sinclair's The Available Man and this one by Murray. Sinclair's is closer to the traditional interpretation; Harding was available but unqualified. But Murray's is a comprehensive defense of the entire Harding administration. Nominated in 1920 not by the bosses or the Interests but by an almost leaderless Re- publican national convention, Harding was "under the circumstances the strongest pos- sible candidate," Professor Murray writes. Harding, rather than the Best Minds (or worst) surrounding him, was "the dominant figure" throughout the campaign, and after the election was on the whole successful in putting together an "independent-minded, first-class cabinet." As President, he was an innovator; many beginnings that Donald McCoy in The Quiet President attributes to Coolidge Murray credits rather to his prede- cessor. The Harding administration among other things sponsored most of the agricul- tural legislation usually attributed to the con- gressional Farm Bloc, experimented with "pump-priming" to meet the challenge of postwar unemployment, and promoted a Latin-American policy that was "a decided improvement over the past." (It also created the Bureau of the Budget; and Charles G. Dawes, the first Budget Director, amazingly testified that "on fiscal matters Harding's mind was 'quick as lightning.' ") Regressive in certain areas, notably toward labor, tariff, and war debts, the administration triumphant- ly solved the two major problems of its day --liquidating the war and restoring prosperity. Sometimes Murray's case is overstated. His |
quotations from a presidential address at Birmingham, Alabama, in 1921 make Hard- ing sound far more enlightened on the race question than do the passages from the same speech cited in E. David Cronon's study of Marcus Garvey, for example. But the book is not a case of what Murray himself faults as "historical revisionism for revision's
sake," and many a reader is going to work through these pages in a mood that mingles incredu- lity with a growing respect. Indeed, this study exploits many of the his- torical guild's most cherished assumptions. Murray deals with the "Ohio gang," for ex- ample, in much the same way that historians have often dealt with Tammany, by sharply distinguishing between private internal cor- ruption and public constructive policy. Simi- larly, the author echoes the familiar treat- ment of "idealism" and
"self-interest" in for- eign policy by praising Harding and Hughes for turning from the doctrinaire moralism of Wilson to a view of the world that took sober account of the national interest. Finally, Mur- ray concludes that "by all standards of politi- cal compromise the Harding administration was a success," in that it got its program es- sentially intact through a recalcitrant Con- gress; and have not historians been inclined to test presidents--FDR as against Hoover, for instance--by their pragmatic ability to deliver the goods? PAUL A. CARTER Northern Illinois University Poles in American History and Tradition. By JOSEPH A. WYTRWAL. (Detroit: Endurance Press, 1969. x + 485p.; bibliography and
in- dex. $6.75.) The author of this work is a foremost student of the Poles and their institutions in the United States. His earlier book, America's Polish Heritage (Detroit, 1961), was discussed by the present reviewer in this journal, Vol- ume 71 (1962), p.68. The present study
sup- plements the earlier one, although there is some duplication as well as amplification; each volume contains a chapter on Polish immigrants, 1608-1776. The earlier work emphasized the retention by Poles in the United States of their distinctive ethnic char- acter and properly gave extensive attention |