Ohio History Journal

Book Reviews           The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. By KENNETH E. DAVISON. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1972. xiii + 266p.; illustrations, notes, and index. $12.00.)   In his account of the Hayes presidency, Professor Davison has attempted to correct the interpretation of the Gilded Age as an era of ruthless plunder depicted by Parring- ton, Beard, Josephson, Twain, and others. He portrays Hayes as a decent, high-prin- cipled, experienced statesman, a unifier, pacifier, and reformer. He views the Hayes administration amid years of turbulence when workers, blacks, Indians, middle-class factions, and ethnic minorities found them- selves involved in social and economic up- heavals resulting from an expanding econ- omy. A revisionist, the author tries to present a more balanced interpretation based on accurate data, one that attempts to arouse our sympathy for Hayes and his administration. The book is a model of compact erudi- tion. In less than 250 highly factual pages we have a superb portrait of a much ne- glected president and his administration. The book is more than a political narrative. Some chapters depict United States society in an age of transformation and complexity. Others discuss major problems and policies: racial strife, civil rights, politics, Indian af- fairs, the role of the chief executive, the money question, labor upheavals, and the development of a foreign policy which sought to maintain American prosperity through expanded foreign markets. In these chapters, the author's informative data and primary source material constitute a valu- able source book for students of the period. Some readers would want more material on racial, ethnic, and labor problems with critical interpretation. This was not the author's main intention. There are num- erous minor insights, interpretations, and factual materials illuminating the plight of

blacks, Chinese, Indians, and other minori- ties as Hayes attempted to resolve almost insoluble social and economic problems. Hayes emerges as a harmonizer and ex- cellent administrator concerned with polit- ical, economic, and social issues. Even though he was unable to cope with up- heavals beyond his understanding, he at- tempted with his administrators to alleviate the country's burdens after years of strife and reconstruction. Though convinced of the supremacy of middle-class capitalism, he was perturbed by American capitalism's development and feared what large concen- trations of wealth in the hands of a few would do to America. He was sympathetic to analyses by such social critics as Henry George, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells. There are anecdotes and seemingly in- significant materials on personalities, pets, and travel in this book. These details, how- ever, help to evoke an era and add a human element to these years. There is some un- evenness in structure, but the scholarship is impeccable, and we are presented with a view of Hayes and his times that seems satisfactory though incomplete. One hopes that the author will elaborate in future works the themes he has begun to expound so well in this book.   ARTHUR W. THURNER DePaul University       The Presidency of William Howard Taft. By PAOLO E. COLETTA. (Lawrence: Univer- sity Press of Kansas, 1973. ix + 306p.; notes, sources, and index. $10.00.)   According to textbook stereotype, the Taft administration was an unfortunate and re- actionary interlude between two reform presidencies. Theodore Roosevelt has been

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Book Reviews   represented as a trustbuster and conserva- tionist, while Woodrow Wilson is seen as sponsoring a host of reforms which institu- tionalize advanced progressivism. Taft, however, is portrayed as presiding over rule by big business, thereby stifling all efforts to secure social justice. Professor Coletta of the United States Naval Academy, author of a multivolume life of William Jennings Bryan, has effec- tively challenged much of this picture. The present study under review - part of a new American Presidency Series--reveals Taft as rather a good President, one in fact with "a fairly laudable legislative record." If Taft had the kind of "grocer-intellect" that led him into the snares of dollar diplo- macy and made him oblivious to social cur- rents around him, he still could boast a variety of solid achievements. Possessing "almost unparalled qualifications to be pres- ident," Taft was the first chief executive to introduce centralized planning in the execu- tive department and secured more legisla- tive reforms in four years than Roosevelt in seven. Gains were made in a variety of areas: tariff revision, railroad regulation, Army and State Department modernization, con- servation. Also listed, almost in passing, are such reforms as new bureaus dealing with mines, industry, and children's conditions; regulation of campaign contributions; postal savings banks; and an eight hour working day for federal employees. Coletta also en- dorses some aspects of Taft's foreign policy, such as his arbitration efforts and aloofness in the Mexican turmoil. Yet the book does not lack balance. Coletta notes Taft's thin skin, his failures with the press and insurgents, the legal cast of his mind, and his continual lack of polit- ical astuteness. Noting his persistent fum- bling, the author asserts that Taft had a veritable "penchant for doing good things in a bad way." Some policies, in fact, bore a positive genius for failure: his actions in Nicaragua and Columbia embittered Latin Americans, while those in Manchuria an- tagonized the Japanese and the Russians. A variety of sources are used, including some unavailable to Henry Pringle when he

115   wrote his still valuable Life and Times of William Howard Taft (1939). Coletta draws upon the Taft, Roosevelt, Knox, and Root papers; State Department records: the popular press; unpublished doctoral theses; and New Left monographs (though Coletta could have engaged the New Left far more directly concerning the nature of progres- sivism). Some omissions might be noted. Busi- ness backing for much regulation is duly recorded, but much more could be done with the ideology of the insurgents (some of whom opposed much tariff and conser- vation reform). A restrained psychological interpretation might shed light on Taft's curious placidity. While chapters dealing with the 1910 and 1912 campaigns are thorough, the chapter on social and eco- nomic trends offers little not found in a good textbook. Dollar diplomacy was suc- cessful in at least one area, for Secretary of State Philander Knox mobilized a strong group of backers to secure battleship con- tracts for Argentina. But these in some ways are minor quib- bles. Coletta, skillfully interweaving fresh monographs with primary research, has given the new presidential series a fine start.   JUSTUS D. DOENECKE New College, Sarasota       Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft. By JAMES T. PATTERSON. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972. xvi + 749p.; illustrations, notes, and index. $12.50.)   In this compelling and compassionate ac- count, Professor Patterson has set the high- est of standards for future political bio- graphers. Beautifully written, this study captures well the outward serenity of Taft's boyhood, the passion of his political cru- sades, and the pathos of his untimely death. Extensive research in the Senator's papers, supplemented by numerous interviews and skillful use of secondary sources (including unpublished doctoral dissertations), has

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116   made this work truly definitive. Psycholog- ical techniques are used with restraint, though the author reveals how Taft's hard- driving father and neurotic, domineering mother turned his personality inward. All his life Robert was a solitary person, striv- ing to reach the top while trying to avoid the barbs accompanying personal rejection. One learns much: that Taft's education at Yale and Harvard Law School and his stint in the Ohio legislature poorly prepared him for the outer world of turmoil; that his first-hand observations at Versailles left him, like his beloved boss Herbert Hoover, fearful of Bolshevism's spread and suspi- cious of Wilson's messianic dreams; that his hostility towards Wall Street and accom- panying faith in the small entrepreneur colored his conservatism which took a prag- matic, not a philosophical turn. Taft, un- troubled by disputes over the nature of man and himself adhering to the inevitability of progress, possessed neither the traditional- ism of a Russell Kirk nor the medieval crusading of a William F. Buckley. Conventional stereotypes are continually modified. Taft was not always vehemently anti-New Deal, for he advanced welfare measures even before World War II and supported liberal legislation avoided by Deweyites and the Goldwater movement of a later decade. No hard-core isolationist, he favored American entry into both the League and the United Nations, wanted a world run on the principles of international law, and was zealously pro-Zionist. He also harbored private doubts about McCarthyism (though at times he both Red-baited and was Red-baited in turn), and was suspicious of MacArthur's proposals for a Korean victory and Eisenhower's 1952 call for "liberating" captive nations. Viciously at- tacked by the Luce press, he lost the 1952 presidential nomination, not because of poor campaign organization or the stormy Texas issue but because of continued weak- ness in securing mass coast-to-coast support. Patterson endorses much of Taft's cau- tion on international affairs, particularly his critique of presidential war-making power, heavy overseas investment, and the inept

OHIO HISTORY   NATO alliance. Taft was also right, he be- lieves, in opposing the 1944 sedition trials and the Nuremberg tribunal. Yet in de- scribing Taft's "Achilles heel," the author notes that partisanship frequently pushed him towards irresponsibility. Patterson's analysis of the Senator's hazardous "Asia- Firstism," his naive reliance upon interna- tional law, his faith in air power and atomic retaliation, his underestimation of the Ger- man threat in 1941 (though Bruce Russett's new monograph No Clear and Present Danger would question Patterson's anxiety here) all show the tragic degree to which Taft became a prisoner of his own anti- Communist rhetoric. Future researchers should now examine the economic and ideological bases of the Cold War isolationists who gave Taft their most fervent loyalty. In the meantime, the Pulitzer Prize has at least one worthy candidate. JUSTUS D. DOENECKE New College       Anne Royall's U.S.A. By BESSIE ROWLAND JAMES. (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni- versity Press, 1972. viii + 447p.; illustra- tions, notes, and index. $15.00.)   Long before the Federal Writers' Project provided the American Guide Series' de- scriptions of the states and their inhabitants, the traits and quirks of Americana had been investigated by a trio of intrepid women - Anne Royall, Frances Trollope, and Harriet Martineau. Persevering, adventurous Anne Royall (1769-1854) visited all of the then twenty- four states within sixteen years. Her motive was not only to earn a living by writing travel books but also to satisfy her own curiosity and to expose political and reli- gious chicanery. Her ten volumes in a read- able, sometimes gossipy, style brought her notoriety, which she used to gain access to highly placed officials and to pry out in- formation on corruption in government, which she published in her Washington,

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Book Reviews   D.C., weeklies. This notable crusader came to her calling late in life. A frontier girl who married a well-to-do western Virginian, she was left penniless at fifty-four when in-laws suc- ceeded in breaking her late husband's will. Rather than become a servant to support herself, she embarked on a writing career. Traveling by horseback, stage, wagon, canal packet, steamboat, and foot, she explored the country by day, wrote by night, and sold her books on subscription. Ohio was on her itinerary four times between 1814 and 1830, when she visited Cincinnati, Gallipolis, and Steubenville. In addition to succinct "pen portraits" of notables--and she met almost everyone of national importance--she aroused pas- sions by her detailed descriptions of places and customs and by championing Masonry in an anti-Masonic period and castigating organized Protestant religion in the heyday of revivals. Her trial as a "common scold," which was viewed as an invasion of the freedom of the press to inquire and expose, and her early use of the quoted interview were two of her journalistic landmarks. Bessie Rowland James' exhaustive re- searches into Anne Royall's life, especially the early years, correct some previous state- ments and provide substantial background on each person or event Anne encountered. A thorough investigation into the life of one of America's journalistic crusaders, it is in- spiring as the account of an indomitable, undaunted individual. It is also a depress- ing commentary on the way single, needy women were treated early in the last cen- tury. This woman of talent--who was frequently reduced to panhandling to get food and travel funds, to asking strangers to shelter her, to depending on friends to provide an occasional dress--succeeded professionally because of her own wits and courage. She withstood physical assault, verbal abuse, and illness to get her story. As a former newspaperwoman, I salute these two reporters--Mrs. Royall for her steadfastness in probing everyday life as well as power circles to capture the detail and color of life in America in the early

117   1800's, and Mrs. James for a comprehen- sive, crisply written biography supplemented by an inclusive index and explanatory foot- notes of value to the researcher.     MARILYN G. HOOD Ohio Historical Society       The Realism of William Dean Howells, 1889-1920. By GEORGE N. BENNETT. (Nash- ville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1973. x + 254p.; notes and index. $10.00.)   In 1959 this journal reviewed George Bennett's earlier book on the Ohio-born Howells. It was an excellent study of the novels Howells published in the first half of his career, including his social radicalism and "economic novels" which climaxed about 1890. This date has usually been con- sidered the zenith of Howells' creative power. Mr. Bennett's new book now car- ries that study forward through the twenty novels which Howells, by then "The Dean of American Letters," wrote from 1890 to 1920. Bennett's new book is a sound and sensi- tive one. Yet, oddly, it has a thesis which is not impressive. Bennett is arguing against the prevailing view that Howells' late novels reveal fading creativity in a tired old Vic- torian writing-machine who, still in posses- sion of a distinguished style, an unimpaired dexterity, and plenty of manuscript paper, went on and on and on confecting light comedies of manners long after he had stopped having anything to say or the energy to keep involved in important social issues--thus becoming increasingly obso- lete in a period when more "relevant" young writers such as Stephen Crane, Frank Nor- ris, and Theodore Dreiser were the new wave in American realism. Bennett is aware that all this is partly true, but not to the degree implied. His view, maintained somewhat defensively it must be said, is that there was a continuity and coherence throughout Howells' total work--the later novels together with the

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118   earlier ones. Bennett sees in the late books the same irony, moral seriousness, devotion to character analysis and psychology, com- mon sense, and good will which distin- guished Howells' best novels during his prime years, the 1880's. Indeed, Bennett considers that Howells improved and deep- ened as a psychological novelist as he ma- tured and learned more about human nature and himself. This thesis, however, is not very impor- tant in the book. What is important are two other quite different aspects. The part that will be most widely useful is Bennett's novel-by-novel analysis of the books written after 1889. This is extremely helpful for professors of English and their students and for the general reader of Howells, if there still are some outside the universities. Even more significant, the remaining twenty per- cent of the book is a truly new contribution and will be finally its most valuable part-- at least to the specialist audience with the background to know what he is talking about. This part (some fifty pages) is a condensation of what might be called the

OHIO HISTORY   essence of Howells. Unfortunately for the purposes of a short review, Bennett's ex- ceeding subtle analysis of Howells' person- ality, ethic and aesthetic--in short, what is meant by the term "Howellsian"--does not lend itself to a few simple statements. The interested reader may peruse Bennett's pages 163-167 as a sampler, preferably after reading several of the later novels by way of preparation. No wonder Mr. Bennett is fourteen years between books (something we might hope becomes a trend in literary scholarship). A professor of English at Vanderbilt Uni- versity, Bennett studies, and thinks, and writes in scholarly leisure, letting his dis- coveries ripen into definitions and assess- ments which are not going to be superseded by future books on Howells. The result is an important contribution toward the clearer and truer understanding of a major American artist.     JAMES STRONKS University of Illinois at Chicago Circle

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