Roger Bishop

History

A real American birthday party

Review by Roger Bishop

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

In his inaugural address on March 4, 1825, John Quincy Adams declared, "From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future." This was not mere political rhetoric. Our sixth president was, of course, the son of a key Founding Father who…

Memoir

A celebrated American life

Review by Roger Bishop

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

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

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

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

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

 

After his junior year at Harvard College in the 1930s, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. had a summer job in the Charlestown Prison where his assignment was to prepare case histories for prisoners about to appear before the parole board. We wrote our case histories out…

HistoryAmerican History

The bonds that started a nation

Review by Roger Bishop

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

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

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

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

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

 

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

NonfictionPolitics

Get perspective this election year

Review by Roger Bishop

On March 4, 1861, retiring president James Buchanan remarked to his successor, "Abraham Lincoln, If you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning [home] to Wheatland, you are a happy man indeed." Few of our presidents have assumed office with a more distinguished record of public service than Buchanan. But despite serving as secretary of state under James K. Polk and ambassador to Great Britain under Franklin Pierce, he did not have the understanding or the diplomatic skills to deal effectively with the divisive issues that confronted our country at that time. In fact, he left office with the nation very close to civil war.

Although Lincoln had little formal education and his performance as a one- term congressman had not been notable, he had been involved in public life for many years. He enjoyed grappling with difficult issues. As our only Civil War president, Lincoln expanded the role of the office in some areas but treated others, including foreign affairs, in the conventional ways of his predecessors. He is usually regarded as our greatest president.

Why have some presidents been successful in certain ways but not others? Why are some regarded as complete failures? What role have social, economic, cultural, demographic, and political factors played throughout the 42 presidencies of our history? Just in time for the presidential election year, an outstanding and provocative overview of the American presidents, seen in the context of their times, has just been published. The Reader's Companion to the American Presidency, edited by Alan Brinkley and Davis Dyer, features authoritative and insightful essays written by many of our most distinguished historians on the lives and careers, and particularly the administrations, of each occupant of the office. As the editors note, It is not just the gap between image and reality that makes American presidents elusive and intriguing figures. It is also the problem that both contemporaries and historians experience in trying to separate the president as a person from the things done in his name. They point out that from the founding of the Republic it has often been difficult to separate a president's own actions and achievements from those of his associates and political allies.

It is fascinating to realize how close many of our elections have been. Thomas Jefferson did not become president for his first term until he was elected on the 36th ballot in the House of Representatives. Once elected, as historian Joyce Appleby notes, Jefferson turned himself into an agent of change profound, transformative change in the social and political forums of his nation . . . Indeed, because his eight years in office were followed by sixteen more from his closest associates, James Madison and James Monroe, it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Jefferson was the nineteenth century's most influential president. We usually regard Theodore Roosevelt as our first modern president, but Walter Lefeber points out that the self-effacing William McKinley, who worked quietly behind the scenes, can claim that distinction. McKinley, not Roosevelt, was the first modern U.S. president, modern in the sense of being a pioneer in manipulating the new technology of telephones and movies to enhance his power; a trailblazer in exploiting the modern powers of the presidency, especially in foreign affairs; the initial chief executive when the nation turned from acting continentally to acting globally. As a congressman, McKinley became a powerful political force because of his mastery of the tariff issue. He recognized that the tariff was the key to both the creation of immense economic power by great corporations . . . that could be protected from foreign competition, and also to the unlocking of corporate wealth for the support of ambitious politicians.

Both Michael Kazin writing about John F. Kennedy and Robert Dallek on Lyndon Johnson agree that our direction in Vietnam would not have been different in a JFK presidency. Kazin says, In recent years, some writers have maintained that JFK at the time of his death was bent on withdrawing from Vietnam. If he had lived, goes the argument, the long ordeal in Indochina would have been avoided. The bulk of the evidence refutes that contention. Dallek notes that Kennedy was leery of America's growing commitment to Vietnam . . . There is some evidence that JFK intended to remove U.S. advisors after he won reelection in 1964. But most of what he said and did indicated a determination to preserve South Vietnam freedom from Communism. Michael A. Stoe notes that, contrary to historical myth, Herbert Hoover was a whirlwind of activity when compared to other presidents who served during economic depressions, including Martin Van Buren, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Warren Harding. Stoe points out that Hoover attempted to use the government to promote private and public action throughout his term to resolve the crisis sparked by the 1929 stock-market crash.

Its timelines, special features, important data boxes, and concise, well-written essays make this an invaluable reference. The Reader's Companion to the American Presidency offers historical perspective on the office in this presidential election year.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

On March 4, 1861, retiring president James Buchanan remarked to his successor, "Abraham Lincoln, If you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning [home] to Wheatland, you are a happy man indeed." Few of our presidents have assumed…

FictionPoetry

Great words and great poets

Review by Roger Bishop

One of the major literary events of the year is the publication of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, an extraordinary portrait of his marriage to poet Sylvia Plath through 88 chronologically arranged poems to her. Hughes, since 1987 Great Britain's Poet Laureate, was married to Plath from 1956 until she committed suicide in 1963. The Bell Jar, as well as the posthumous publication of Ariel, brought her work worldwide recognition and acclaim. Hughes's reluctance to publically address Plath's death and his realtionship with her has been viewed by some as reprehensible. Their marrige has for years been the subject of intense scrutiny and has contributed in part to the mythology surrounding Plath.

Now, with Birthday Letters, the world is finally hearing Hughes's response. His tender, despairing poems make his grief evident and show a couple deeply committed to their work. "And we/Only did what poetry told us to do." But Plath was often troubled. "You were like a religious fanatic/Without a god unable to pray./You wanted to be a writer./Wanted to write?/What was it within you/Had to have its tale? . . . You bowed at your desk and you wept/Over the story that refused to exist."

Hughes acknowledges that Plath's troubles began before their life together, but does partially accept responsibility. He shows his failure to understand. "At that time/I had not understood/How the death hurtling to and fro/Inside your head, had to alight somewhere/And again somewhere, and had to be kept moving,/And had to be rested/Temporarily somewhere." In images tender and frightening, sometimes searing and powerful, we gain a sense of two creative people caught up in something they could not control. "You were a jailer of your murderer /Which imprisoned you./And since I was your nurse and protector/Your sentence was mine too."

This is only one side of the story. The reader may or may not accept it as the truth. As poetry, however, and as at least a partial truth, it succeeds magnificently.

Diane Ackerman is one of our finest writers about nature and the senses, the author of the bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, as well as A Natural History of Love, and The Rarest of the Rare, about endangered animals. She is also a prize-winning poet. Her long-awaited new collection, I Praise My Destroyer, has just been published. She explores nature and science with awe and praise but is always aware of the human dimension. In the title poem she writes: "Our cavernous brains/won't save us in the end,/though, heaven knows, they enhance the drama," and "it was grace to live/among the fruits of summer, to love by design,/and walk the startling Earth/for what seemed/an endless resurrection of days." In "We Die," her poem for Carl Sagan, and "Elegy," for John Condry, she speaks of the pain of loss, the reality of mortality. But she conveys joy and sensuousness in such poems as "The Consolation of Apricots." These poems are rich and intense.

In her acceptance speech upon receiving the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature, Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska said: "Poets, if they're genuine, must also keep repeating, 'I don't know.' Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift, absolutely inadequate. So poets keep on trying . . ." Szymborska's work always questions searching for a different way to perceive things, another way to understand better what our lives are all about. She does this with an economy of language that is at once intelligent, philosophical, witty, yet always in touch with the real world. A major publishing event this month is her Poems New and Collected 1957-1997. This volume contains virtually all of her poetry to date, including all 100 poems from her popular collection A View with a Grain of Sand. An additional feature is the text of her Nobel lecture.

Szymborska reminds us: "After every war/someone has to tidy up./Things won't pick/themselves up, after all." And that "Reality demands/that we also mention this:/Life goes on./It continues at Cannae and Borodino,/at Kosovo Polje and Guernica." She notes: "We're extremely fortunate/not to know precisely/the kind of world we live in." In "The Century's Decline," she writes: "'How should we live?' someone asked me in a letter./I had meant to ask him/the same question./Again, and as ever,/as may be seen above,/the most pressing questions/are naive ones."

Three years ago poet Jane Kenyon died after a 15-month struggle with leukemia. Her husband, Donald Hall, himself the author of 13 volumes of verse, offers very personal poetry about her life and death, and life for him after her death, in Without. After reading these poems we feel that we know these people and have shared a range of experiences with them. Although this collection conveys sadness and agony and loss, there exists also courage and strength in these poems.

One of the major literary events of the year is the publication of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, an extraordinary portrait of his marriage to poet Sylvia Plath through 88 chronologically arranged poems to her. Hughes, since 1987 Great Britain's Poet Laureate, was married to Plath…

HistoryBlack History

Branch’s brilliant look at King continues

Review by Roger Bishop

The civil rights movement that began in the 1950s continued to grow in scope and intensity into the early 1960s. A series of non-violent protests in such places as Birmingham, St. Augustine, and Selma met with strong resistance but led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That legislation was crucial, but it was only part of a long and bitter struggle for full equality for all of our citizens. Although various groups and leaders emerged during this period, the charismatic and eloquent Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference stood, out and, among other honors, received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. In the outstanding second volume of his projected three volume narrative history of the civil rights movement, Pillar of Fire, Taylor Branch reminds us how divisive the issue was and how difficult the period. The first volume, Parting the Waters, which begins in 1954, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. A third volume, At Canaan's Edge, will follow. A project the author hoped to complete in one book over three years has now taken 15 years and two books.

Although King is the major figure in the book, Pillar of Fire is not a biography. Instead, Branch is interested in a broad overview of the move toward equal rights. This involves exploring the relationships between individuals and groups, the actions and reactions that led, in some cases, to good, and in others to suffering. He demonstrates that the movement was not monolithic and that often even King and his advisers could not agree on appropriate courses of action. We follow Malcolm X as he breaks from the Nation of Islam and develops his own approach to racial issues. Branch skillfully shows us the tense and often frustrating relationship between King and Robert and John Kennedy until the latter's death and later with Lyndon Johnson. And although the FBI was eventually able to solve some of the worst racial crimes of our time, the Bureau displayed strong animosity toward King and his objectives, and, unknown to him, had him under surveillance for a long period and taped many of his private conversations.

Branch relates the stories of brave and courageous individuals who were not public figures or government officials but put themselves at risk because they believed strongly in equal rights, and he conveys how powerful the resistance to change was and how violent. He relates such incidents as the Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls, and the murder of Medgar Evers. He discusses the Mississippi Summer program in 1964 that brought many students to a part of the country they had never seen before. He details the events leading up to and following the deaths that year of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

The author's meticulous accumulation of detail upon detail helps us to gain a greater appreciation for what King, as a political as well as spiritual strategist, with the help of many others, accomplished. I was led to reflect on what the late Alex Haley told me in a BookPage interview in 1988. Haley, who collaborated with Malcolm X on his autobiography also conducted what is considered to be one of the most incisive interviews that King ever gave. Haley told me: "The thing that has always intrigued me about Dr. King and Malcolm was how easily either of them might have been the other . . . Dr. King would have made a tremendous hustler. And Malcolm would have made a tremendous theologian. Both of them were great powers in their own way. And so to me always the intrigue has been the two men are a case of Ôbut for the grace of God . . . ' And as a matter of fact, not enough recognition is given to the fact that Malcolm was most helpful to Dr. King. The way Malcolm . . . scared people. And what it did was shake people enough so that when Dr. King came along, speaking of turning the other cheek and the Gandhi principles, he was a lot less threatening . . ." Branch's magnificent work is a must for anyone who wants to understand a turbulent time that helped change the attitudes and practices of this country.

The civil rights movement that began in the 1950s continued to grow in scope and intensity into the early 1960s. A series of non-violent protests in such places as Birmingham, St. Augustine, and Selma met with strong resistance but led to the passage of the…

LiteratureArts & Culture

Partisans

Review by Roger Bishop

From the late 1930s through the early 1960s, Partisan Review was the most influential literary and cultural journal in the United States. The editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, and their circle of writers and critics composed the core of the group often described as the New York intellectuals. Contributors during those years included many of the leading writers of the day from this country and Europe. Among the many writers whose work was published there: T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marguerite Yourcenar, George Orwell, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, and Walker Percy.

PR was primarily a men's club, but there were some remarkable women who, through their extraordinary writing and ambition, were able to not only get their work published but also become prominent intellectuals. David Laskin explores the lives and careers of these talented yet different women in Partisans. Laskin focuses on the interconnected lives and careers of Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Hannah Arendt, and, to a lesser extent, on Diana Trilling and Jean Stafford. He also discusses the Southern novelist and short story writer Caroline Gordon, who was not part of this circle, but who, like her husband Allen Tate, had close ties to Northern intellectuals and had a significant influence on a new generation of writers.

The men who were editors, critics, partners, advisers, and husbands of these women included Rahv, Robert Lowell, Edmund Wilson, and Randall Jarrell. Drawing on correspondence, memoirs, and personal recollections, Caskin shows how complex their lives were. He does not romanticize them. They were all, in their way, crazy at times, he notes, mad in every sense but when they were sane they were extraordinarily brilliant, often charming people, most charming of all when they were with each other. They made serious mistakes in judgment, but, Laskin says, they had a zeal and idealism and originality that have all but vanished from the American political scene or migrated to its fanatical fringes. They were often fiercely competitive but they shared a sense of public responsibility.

How were women regarded by this group? In a sense the Rahv set had no women only wives and writers, and if a writer happened to be female, she became one of the boys. Being a wife in that crowd was a fate worse than death. Both women and men writers believed in marriage, but there was a contradiction. The men and women were intellectual peers and companions, but socially, professionally, and emotionally, the men came first. The husbands wrote; the wives did everything else the housekeeping, child rearing, entertaining, nursing, gardening and then wrote. And it never struck any of them to arrange things differently. The women's movement of the '60s changed things. For these women, they had won their first battle without fighting and lost the war without realizing there was one. They managed to get published and become famous, formidable intellectuals without challenging or offending the males who published them . . . But their unintended victory proved to be perishable, personal, bound up as it was with their own gifts, sway, charm, and intimate connections, powers of persuasion. This fascinating group biography gives us a most revealing look into the literary culture of a unique period in history.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

From the late 1930s through the early 1960s, Partisan Review was the most influential literary and cultural journal in the United States. The editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, and their circle of writers and critics composed the core of the group often described as…

History

Tale of two Williams: Strachey, Shakespeare and ‘The Tempest’

Review by Roger Bishop

William Strachey wanted to be a writer. He hoped to publish travel narratives and sonnets; his best friend in London was John Dunne. Strachey enjoyed reading the chronicles of New World explorers and had seen indigenous people who were captured and brought to Europe. But in 1609, after 10 years in London without any notable success and his inheritance running low, the 32- year-old left his wife and two sons behind and signed on for the largest expedition ever sent to Jamestown by the Virginia Company.

Strachey’s extraordinary journey to Jamestown was interrupted by a hurricane and a shipwreck in Bermuda, where he was stranded for almost a year. He was a careful observer and gifted writer about that experience as well as about the life of the Jamestown colony, where he was especially interested in the native people. Strachey could not know until later that his writing would inspire the last play William Shakespeare wrote alone, and that the play would include many of Strachey’s own words, among them the play’s title: The Tempest.

Hobson Woodward masterfully tells this fascinating, harrowing story of adventure and survival in A Brave Vessel. Drawing on Strachey’s journals and other authoritative sources, Woodward shows, in a most compelling manner, how dangerous such a voyage was.

The place in Bermuda where Strachey and his shipmates finally landed after being tossed by the storm was the only place on the island’s entire coast deep enough to allow a large ship to approach so close. On the island, there were much hard work and mutinies, but the voyagers had found a generally wonderful place that was free of disease, unlike plague-ravished London. Many did not want to leave, but most did. What they found when they finally arrived in Jamestown, however, shocked them. Only about 90 of the 245 original settlers had survived a winter of starvation and Indian attacks. Conditions were so bad, the colony was abandoned and only the arrival of a new governor, Lord Delaware, reversed the decision that would have perhaps changed the course of history, and even theatrical and literary history. Strachey was appointed secretary of the colony, allowing him to do officially what he hoped to do on his own—write about events and people in the New World.

Strachey also wrote to a possible patron, Lucy, Countess of Bedford, who had earlier supported Dunne. The narrative sent to this “Excellent Lady” is most likely the source from which Shakespeare read Strachey’s work. In two excellent chapters, Woodward discusses in significant detail the parallels between Strachey’s writings and The Tempest. They include the use of certain words, expressions and themes unique to Strachey. Woodward also notes, for example, that Shakespeare’s character Caliban had attributes that appeared to come from a mix of animal allusions in Strachey’s text.

Woodward believes that while Strachey would have been flattered to see his influence in the play, he would have also believed that The Tempest was merely popular entertainment that would fade away. He would have felt it was up to him to write a work of literature that would endure.

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

William Strachey wanted to be a writer. He hoped to publish travel narratives and sonnets; his best friend in London was John Dunne. Strachey enjoyed reading the chronicles of New World explorers and had seen indigenous people who were captured and brought to Europe. But…

Biography

Badge of Courage

Review by Roger Bishop

Stephen Crane was only 28 when he died of tuberculosis in England in 1900. He packed into that time, however, enough highs and lows, achievements and disappointments, as well as adventure, for several lives. Almost a century after his death, his best novels, The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, are American classics. His short stories, “The Open Boat” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” among others, are widely read and enjoyed. It confirms what Crane’s friend, H.G. Wells, said at his death, “I do not think that American criticism has yet done justice to the unsurpassable beauty of Crane’s best writing. And when I write those words, magnificent, unsurpassable, I mean them fully. He was, beyond dispute, the best writer of our generation, and his untimely death was an irreparable loss to our literature.”

Crane was a complex man of great personal charm whose work was a combination of his imagination and experience. Red Badge was set during the Civil War, although Crane was not born until 1871. He drew on his work as a war correspondent in Cuba and Greece for later work including his last novel, Active Service. He was, as Linda H. Davis writes in her outstanding new biography, Badge of Courage, a writer who was always pretending to be someone else. Davis begins with the early influence of Crane’s parents. His father, a Methodist minister, wrote ten pages a day, primarily, it seems, to impress his children with the importance of writing. More importantly, his mother, who bore 14 children, was a social activist and the author of several published short works.

During his brief period as a college student, Stephen began to write seriously and left school to become a newspaper reporter. In 1895 he explained to Willa Cather that he led a double literary life; writing in the first place the matter that pleased himself and doing it very slowly; in the second place, any sort of stuff that would sell. It was a pattern he would follow all his writing life. Although he lived modestly, even in virtual poverty at times, he seems to never have been free of debt. This was due in part to the fact that although he was widely acclaimed as a writer, he earned little from it. Davis notes that “In four years [he] had published five novels, two volumes of poetry, three big story collections, two books of war stories, and countless works of short fiction and reporting.” And yet in three years he had earned just over $1,200 for his entire American output, at a time when the country’s per capita income was $1,200 annually.

Crane was sensitive to the plight of others. His sympathies, as novelist and war correspondent were with the wounded and the private soldier. His defense of a prostitute wrongly arrested by a corrupt New York City policeman cost him the friendship of Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. At the same time, he did not write or talk about his feelings for Cora [the bordello madam he met in Jacksonville, Florida, and who lived with him as his wife] yet friends described him as devoted and protective of her. Cora was devoted to him as well. His happiness, well-being, and work were of paramount importance to her something that endeared her to his friends, whether they actually liked her or not. In discussing his life Crane wrote to a friend, “I cannot help vanishing and disappearing and dissolving. It is my foremost trait.” To an admirer he did not know, he wrote “I am clay very common, uninteresting clay. I am a good deal of a rascal, sometimes a bore, often dishonest.” Of particular interest are Crane’s relationships with other writers. In the United States, these included Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells. Later, in England, they were H.G. Wells, Ford Maddox Hueffer (last name later changed to Ford), Henry James, and, most importantly, Joseph Conrad.

Because of his tuberculosis, Crane was convinced that he would die young. Davis speculates, Given Stephen’s personality, his feverish approach to his work, and his penchant for risk-taking, one wonders whether he lived and worked on the ragged edge because he knew he hadn’t much time. Drawing on the latest Crane scholarship, Davis captures all of these aspects of his life and work. Her book is beautifully done, and I finished reading it with the appropriate response to a good literary biography I wanted to read or reread Crane’s work.

Roger Bishop is a monthly contributor to BookPage.

Stephen Crane was only 28 when he died of tuberculosis in England in 1900. He packed into that time, however, enough highs and lows, achievements and disappointments, as well as adventure, for several lives. Almost a century after his death, his best novels, The Red…
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Cause

Review by Roger Bishop

No one called it the “American Revolution” while it was happening. The British spoke of the American rebellion. Those protesting in the colonies merely called it “the Cause” and insisted they were not engaged in revolution. Even now, the question of whether it was a true revolution remains controversial.

Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian Joseph J. Ellis superbly captures the issues, personalities and events of the American Revolution from the perspectives of both England and the colonists in his eminently readable The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783. Using rigorous scholarship, Ellis offers vivid portraits of and penetrating insights about this period in history, while challenging our conventional understandings of it.

For the British, Ellis argues, the defining issue was power, not money. Imposing new taxes on the colonies was a way to establish parliamentary sovereignty, not to reduce the debt they accumulated during the Seven Years’ War. Trade with the American colonies was lucrative for Britain, after all, and any taxation policy that put their trade relationship at risk would have been too costly.

Also counter to the narrative we usually hear, those early colonial Americans had a conservative character. From their perspective, the British were more revolutionary than they were. Britain was causing revolutionary change by taxing colonists without their consent, and even then, no American delegate to the first Continental Congress advocated for independence.

Likewise, John Trumbull’s famous painting, “The Declaration of Independence,” depicts an event that never happened. Thomas Jefferson wrote the original version on his own, then Congress made 85 specific changes to Jefferson’s draft, revising or deleting slightly more than 20% of the text. The final version was sent to the printer on July 4, and the printer put that date on the published version. Most delegates actually signed it on August 2, although there was no single signing day.

By the end of the war, a majority of Americans felt that the creation of a nation-state was a distortion of the Cause. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, among others, were outliers, not leaders of the dominant opinion.

This riveting, highly recommended book by one of America’s major historians will change how you see the American Revolution.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis superbly captures the issues, personalities and events of the American Revolution in The Cause.
NonfictionMilitary History

Humane

Review by Roger Bishop

In 1880, the chief of the Prussian General Staff wrote, “Eternal peace is a dream—and hardly a beautiful one. . . . War is part of the world order that God ordained.” Many have disagreed with this statement and offered various alternatives, from abolishing war completely to conducting it in a more humane way. In his enlightening and provocative Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale, offers “an antiwar history of the laws of war” that traces America’s journey, over the last century and a half, toward the disturbing place we now find ourselves: a period of endless war.

Moyn discusses many notable individuals, causes and arguments within this history, including the founding of the Red Cross despite Leo Tolstoy’s strong opposition. The peace efforts of an Austrian noblewoman named Bertha von Suttner, especially through her book Lay Down Your Arms in 1889, stand out as well. Moyn writes, “Before World War I, no document of Western civilization did more to turn what had been a crackpot and marginal call for an end to endless war into a mainstream cause.” In 1905, von Suttner became the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Moyn argues that the increased use of “unmanned aerial vehicles” (armed drones) and U.S. Special Forces in the modern era makes belligerency more humane but augurs for a grim future. In Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize address in 2009, he said, “We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.” Instead, Obama emphasized a commitment to global justice and international law and insisted on humane constraints—which included the use of drones. He sanctioned the use of armed drones more times in his first year in office than George W. Bush did in eight years. By the time Obama left office, drones had struck almost 10 times more than under his predecessor, with thousands killed. Special Forces units were engaged in fighting in at least 13 countries during the last year of Obama’s presidency, and the same approach continued during the Trump years.

This sweeping and relevant book is a vital look at how foreign policy should be conducted ethically in the face of America’s endless wars.

In his enlightening and provocative book, Samuel Moyn traces the history of America’s disturbing journey toward a period of endless war.
NonfictionPoliticsBiography

The Ambassador

Review by Roger Bishop

Franklin Delano Roosevelt described Joseph Patrick Kennedy as “a very dangerous man.” Kennedy became wealthy on Wall Street and in the movie industry and had political ambitions to be secretary of the treasury and then the first Roman Catholic president (a title that eventually went to his son John F. Kennedy). He became a prominent financial backer of FDR’s first two presidential campaigns and successfully served in two key governmental positions during FDR’s administration. Then he campaigned to be ambassador to Great Britain. Despite serious reservations, FDR agreed to the appointment for his own political reasons. The result was a major diplomatic disaster.

Using many newly available sources, Susan Ronald brings this pivotal point in history vividly to life in her meticulously researched The Ambassador: Joseph P. Kennedy at the Court of St. James’s, 1938–1940. As ambassador, Kennedy was primarily concerned with avoiding war. He grew close to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and became a fervent supporter of Chamberlain’s appeasement approach to dealing with Hitler. In a conversation with King George VI, Kennedy expressed his opinion that, if it came to war, “Britain will be thrashed and there will be nothing left of civilization to save after the war.” Kennedy was strongly anti-communist but failed to appreciate that fascism was not a better alternative.

The ambassador often differed with FDR on policy, so they maneuvered around each other for the most part. Despite the fact that Kennedy’s views often differed with his government’s, Ronald explains that Kennedy liked to give the impression that he was a policymaker and not just carrying out instructions. By tracing the opinions Kennedy expressed, Ronald outlines the likelihood that he was antisemitic and a fascist sympathizer. “He was bedazzled by the Vatican, which sympathized with Franco and Mussolini for religious and venal reasons,” she writes, “and sought to placate Hitler before he turned on Catholics once the Jews had been exterminated.” She adds that Kennedy was antisemitic “through his own ignorance and prejudices” and “placed prosperity above human life and liberty, above democracies being crushed.”

Although Kennedy failed as an ambassador and never again served in any public office, his wife and their large, attractive family made a positive impression on the American public. Three of his sons, with quite different political views from their father, were elected to high political offices. As John F. Kennedy said years later, “He made it all possible.”

When Joseph P. Kennedy campaigned to be ambassador to Great Britain, FDR made the appointment despite serious reservations. The result was diplomatic disaster.
NonfictionBiographyAmerican History

The Outlier

Review by Roger Bishop

While Jimmy Carter’s post-presidential years have been exemplary, filled with significant humanitarian projects, his presidency is often regarded as a failure. Biographer and historian Kai Bird (American Prometheus) takes a fresh look in his balanced, detailed and very readable The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, summed up their administration’s aims: “We obeyed the law, we told the truth, and we kept the peace.” Carter added, “We championed human rights.” His radical foreign policy initiatives and stellar domestic legislative record made his term an important one. Bird argues that Carter will come to be regarded as a significant president who was ahead of his time, despite the numerous missteps, misunderstandings and gossip treated as investigative reporting during his administration.

Carter was an outlier, “a person or thing situated away or detached from the main body or system.” Deeply religious and fiercely committed to the job, he was not an ideologue but a liberal Southern pragmatist, a fiscally conservative realist. He was perhaps our most enigmatic president, basically a nonpolitician who “refused to make us feel good about the country. He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better,” Bird writes. 

Two of Carter’s most successful foreign policy initiatives, securing Senate ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty and personally brokering the Camp David Accords, wouldn’t have happened without his persistence. He also normalized relations with China, negotiated an arms control agreement with the USSR and influenced his successors and others around the world with his human rights emphasis.

Domestically, Carter’s controversial appointment of Paul Volcker to lead the Federal Reserve helped to heal the economy. He appointed a record number of women and Black Americans to federal jobs, including a substantial number of nominations to the federal bench. He and Mondale also expanded the role of the vice president, creating the modern vice presidency we know today.

His first major mistake was to appoint Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was always a disruptive force, as national security adviser. Others in Carter’s administration were not Washington insiders, and there was often friction between them and the press, members of Congress and others who were lifelong politicians.

This compelling portrait of Carter, a complex personality who was finally undone by the Iran hostage crisis, is an absorbing look at his life and administration that should be appreciated by anyone interested in American history.

Bird argues that Jimmy Carter’s radical foreign policy initiatives and stellar domestic legislative record make his presidency important, despite the missteps.

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