Both John Adams and John Quincy Adams disdained a two-party political system. They believed that competence, rational judgment, independence and a commitment to public service should guide our presidents rather than force of personality. Political courage, rather than consensus-building with other politicians, was a core value. That proved to be a shared, serious misstep that helped each to serve only one term as president. In the ambitious and beautifully written The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality, historians Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein show us how the presidents Adams’ healthy skepticism about human nature and the fragility of government have caused them to be misunderstood and underappreciated.

This book offers an abundance of riches. It is both biography and family history of two brilliant men who were deeply concerned about the long-range prospects of their country. They were avid readers, letter writers and diarists, as well as experienced diplomats and keen observers of their own and other cultures. They could be stubborn at times, but to see their lives in tandem makes for absorbing reading. 

Isenberg and Burstein push back on a number of accepted tenets of early American history. They believe Benjamin Franklin received too much credit for negotiations ending the American Revolution in 1783, while John Adams and John Jay did more; that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was overrated and did not have as much influence on the Continental Congress as many historians think; and that Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were Southern politicians whose public images “praised the little man, while acting solely in the interest of the plantation economy and the southern elites.”

The presidents Adams wrote much about political parties, demonstrating how the prejudices of the party system allowed men of wealth or with recognizable family names to be turned into idols. Accused of being elitist and anti–democratic, the Adams “did not sell dreams, let alone democratic dreams. They fought a losing battle with historical memory, which made them virtual exiles from their own historical moment and damaged their combined legacy.”

If you’re not familiar with the term “white shoe,” never fear. Author and retired Wall Street lawyer John Oller explains this and much more in the captivating White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century. (For the record, “white shoe” refers to the white buck shoes worn by the Ivy League college men who shaped the leading firms on Wall Street.)

If Oller once wrote dry, impenetrable legal briefs, there’s no hint of it here. His narrative sparkles with details that set this study of the legal profession’s influence on big business into a fascinating historical context. Oller begins at the turn of the 20th century, when most lawyers were willing to adopt the newly introduced paper clip—but not much else. (The profession was also slow to use telephones and typewriters.)

Enter Paul Cravath, one of several colorful figures brought to life in Oller’s book. Cravath launched an entirely new model of management for a law firm, and represented George Westinghouse in a legal battle with Thomas Edison in what has become known as the “light bulb war.” Other figures who reshaped the profession were Frank Stetson, who represented J.P. Morgan; William Nelson Cromwell, the man who “taught the robber barons how to rob”; and John Foster Dulles, who, Cravath argues, had a large hand in shaping the entire 20th century.

In an epilogue, Oller quotes attorney Paul Cravath in 1929, before the stock market crash, who opines that big business is “perhaps the most serious menace of our age in its social consequences upon American life.” Now, nearly a century later, as America continues to grapple with the role of corporations in politics and policy-making, it’s worth looking back at the men and forces that have made big business what it is today.

BookPage starred review, February 2019

Perhaps the most amazing fact about American Indians is that they still survive to this day. Most American Indians regard themselves as indigenous peoples whose land was invaded by European colonial powers. For them, boastful expressions such as “the winning of the West” hearken to the violence, breaking of treaties, introduction of disease and the terror unleashed by settlers and military forces. In his sweeping, consistently illuminating and personal The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, David Treuer, a member of the Ojibwe tribe, offers a compelling counternarrative to popular U.S. history with a combination of reportage, interviews and memoir about American Indian life in the recent past.

After the United States cavalry massacred 150 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota in the winter of 1890, marking the last major armed conflict between Native American tribes and the U.S. government, it seemed that their culture was at an end. But it survived, albeit with new challenges. Treuer reveals the richness and diversity of Native Indian life and the complexity with which Indians understood their past, present and future after 1890. Native Americans survived for centuries after settlers arrived, displaying a supreme adaptability and toughness, qualities that were crucial between 1890 and 1934, when the government’s weapons against them were cupidity and fraud. Most American Indians did not become citizens until 1924.

There is much to learn here, including the government’s misguided attempts to solve the “Indian problem,” the positive and negative aspects of the American Indian movement and the protest at the Standing Rock Reservation against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. Treuer, who grew up on a reservation in Minnesota, offers reflections on the casino business on reservations and why Indians don’t have a Martin Luther King-type leader.

This engrossing volume should interest anyone who wants to better understand how Native Americans have struggled to preserve their tribes and cultures, using resourcefulness and reinvention in the face of overwhelming opposition.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If you assume that Hollywood went overboard portraying the derring-do of the shotgun riders of the Old West, think again. These guys were as daredevil, dogged and—according to the tintypes—dashing as any Louis L’Amour novel hero. And the highway bandits (and occasional Wells Fargo turncoat) were every bit as colorful and defiant as those in a romantic ballad. Shotguns and Stagecoaches author John Boessenecker is an unabashed lover of the wild, wild West, and quite frankly, he loves the tales of the bad men as much as those of the good guys. This fun, flamboyant read is his ninth book, and it reads a little like a wall of wanted posters, handlebar mustaches and all.

Henry Wells and William G. Fargo were owners of American Express, but after the discovery of gold in California, they realized that the western half of the United States needed a mail delivery system, especially for valuable commodities. So Wells and Fargo recruited a small army of armed guards, called shotgun messengers. Some of the property they were transporting was astonishing—like thousands of dollars’ worth of gold dust. And it wasn’t just shotguns they used to protect their cargo, but pistols, rifles, knives, whatever came to hand and sheer nerve.

The shotgun messengers were a truly colorful crowd, crossing the legal boundaries in both directions, and often more than once. Some were former or future justice officers, some just happened to be good shots, while others were failed gold miners at unwanted leisure. The luckiest, or smartest, lasted the longest: Henry Ward worked for almost 50 years as shotgun messenger and driver.

Most of the reference material Boessenecker uses is from the period, like contemporary newspaper reports, and the fervid prose has seeped into the text. But that’s much of the fun of the book; short, dramatic scenes and crosscutting violence.

Perhaps the most interesting, and saddest, facet of these mini bios is how many of the stagecoach heroes died lonely, crippled and even destitute—divorced after years of absence, wracked by wounds and hard riding and, in many cases, even harder drinking. Barkeep! Shots for the shotgun messengers.

What would our Founding Fathers think about the most divisive issues of our time? So many things have changed since the United States was formed. Joseph J. Ellis—one of the foremost scholars of early American history, a bestselling author and recipient of both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—explores this question in his richly rewarding American Dialogue: The Founders and Us. Ellis utilizes the documentary record the founders left behind to help readers better understand the world the Founding Fathers lived in. He includes sections on Thomas Jefferson and race, John Adams and economic inequality, James Madison and the law, George Washington on foreign policy and a section on leadership. The Founding Fathers often disagreed; their greatest legacy is for those who have followed to be able to argue differences, rather than provide definite answers.

All of our present problems have histories, but “none of them is as incomprehensible, when viewed myopically or ahistorically, as our racial dilemma.” Early in his political career, Jefferson advocated measures to end slavery, but he was unable to imagine a biracial society; he insisted on the inferiority of blacks even as he fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. Adams believed that all men are created equal—but also that inequality was the natural condition for human beings. Of all of the prominent founders, Adams was the only one who anticipated the country’s embedded economic inequality.

The founding of the nation, particularly the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, was a messy political process that, of necessity, involved various compromises. Jefferson wrote in 1816: “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence. . . . They ascribe to men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human. . . . But I also know that law and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” These words are relevant today for those who believe in a “living Constitution.”

This immensely stimulating, in-depth look at the past and America’s challenges in the present should be read by anyone interested in American history.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Bestselling author and National Book Award winner Nathaniel Philbrick subtitles his latest history “The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown.” But it could just as accurately be, “the frustrations of George Washington.” Six years into the Revolutionary War, it was still a toss-up as to whether the American rebels or the British crown would prevail.

General Washington, still quartered in New York in 1781, realized that the revolutionaries’ success depended on the difficult task of coordinating with the French navy and persuading them to heed his strategies. But French intransigence wasn’t the totality of Washington’s worries. His troops were resentful at going unpaid, and the colonies were notoriously parsimonious in funding the larger war effort. Then there were the abiding distractions of the general’s inflamed gums, rotting teeth and failing eyesight.

Drawing on letters, journals and sea logs, Philbrick manages to impart the immediacy of breaking news to his descriptions of marches, skirmishes and battles. From describing crucial shifts in the wind during naval conflicts to detailing the unimaginable horror of war wounds, he places the reader in the midst of the fray. The successful three-week siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in the fall of 1781 effectively won the war for Washington and humbled his tenacious adversary Lord Cornwallis.

The most tragic figures, however, were the slaves who joined the British in a bid to ensure their own liberation. As the siege tightened, Cornwallis decided that “despite having promised the former slaves their freedom, dwindling provisions required that he jettison them from the fortress” and into the hands of their former masters.

In the Hurricane’s Eye is illustrated with an array of useful maps and a section that reveals what happened to the principal American, French and British players after the war.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Pity poor, honest Robert Snead. A justice in colonial Philadelphia in 1697, he was determined to enforce the laws against piracy by arresting members of pirate Henry Avery’s crew who were living in the city. But the governor’s daughter was married to one of them. Snead’s fellow justice also had a relative married to a pirate. They blocked him at every turn. Ultimately, the sheriff let the criminals “escape.” A disgusted Snead gave up.

In a nutshell, that’s how the so-called “Golden Age” of piracy from 1680-1726 became so golden. American colonists not only tolerated piracy, they built their economy on its loot. As author Eric Jay Dolin illustrates in his gripping Black Flags, Blue Waters, colonists and pirates were “partners in crime”—until their interests diverged.

Dolin, who has previously written popular narratives about whaling, the fur trade and opium trafficking, finds another can’t-miss subject in the adventures of Kidd, Bonnet, Blackbeard and their ilk. Dolin makes it fresh by focusing on the interaction between pirates and the British colonies. His evidence is irrefutable: pirate cash and stolen goods were invaluable to colonial ports.

As long as the pirates were attacking Spanish and Muslim ships, the colonists were delighted to abet them. But, inevitably, the authorities got around to cracking down, and the pirates sought new victims closer to home. The culmination was Blackbeard’s blockade of Charleston, which led to the exciting chase that ended in his death. The colonists were now pirate hunters.

Many of the infamous pirates were hanged, and they didn’t leave behind buried treasure. But Dolin ends with real treasure: the discovery in 1984 of the wreck of Samuel Bellamy’s pirate ship Whydah off Cape Cod, producing “a torrent of artifacts.” Our fascination with the robbers who sailed under the black flags is unlikely to end any time soon.

With Leadership: In Turbulent Times, pre-eminent presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin turns her perceptive lens to a question on the minds of many Americans these days: What is leadership?

But the “turbulent times” of the title are not, in fact, our own. Instead, Goodwin examines the leadership styles and challenges facing four previous United States presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Goodwin has written about these men in previous works, but her approach here uncovers new insights and understanding—both for readers and for herself. “After five decades of studying presidential history, examining these four men through the lens of leadership allowed me to discover so many new things about them that I felt as if I was meeting them for the first time,” Goodwin reflects.

Readers will share that sense of discovery. Goodwin divides her study into three thematic areas: Ambition and the Recognition of Leadership; Adversity and Growth; and The Leader and the Times: How They Led. Within these sections, she devotes a chapter to each president. These chapters are chronological, allowing the reader to better appreciate and understand the historical forces that shaped the four presidents’ growth and decisions.

In the final section, Goodwin examines different kinds of leadership: transformational, crisis management, turnaround and visionary. Readers follow Lincoln as he grapples with the Emancipation Proclamation, Teddy Roosevelt as he deals with the coal strike of 1902, FDR through the first hundred days of his presidency in 1933 and Johnson as he approaches civil rights.

In an epilogue titled “On Death and Remembrance,” Goodwin reflects on the final days of each president and their legacies for us today. With Leadership, Pulitzer Prize winner Goodwin cements her reputation as a scholar with a remarkable ability to bring the complexities of our past to life for everyday readers. It’s a welcome gift indeed.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In a sense, the first battles of the Civil War were fought in Congress. Between 1830 and 1860, there were at least 80 violent incidents between congressmen in the House and Senate chambers or nearby, as the country and its politicians grappled with racism, abolition, expansion of slavery, Native American removal or massacre and war with Mexico. The threat of violence was so routine that it had a significant impact on congressional debate. Bullying was a favored tactic of Southern legislators, and both Northern and Southern politicians shared concerns about defending one’s honor and party. Voters often re-elected combatants who were literally fighting for their constituents.

Yale historian Joanne B. Freeman spent many years researching this subject, which she explores in great detail in her compelling and enlightening The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War, which reveals “for the first time the full scope and scale of physical violence in Congress” during the antebellum years. Although she draws on a wide range of sources, at the center of her narrative is Benjamin Brown French, whose various positions in government usually involved working closely with congressmen, and he seems to have been present whenever an important event occurred. He was a superb political operative, a fine writer and keen observer, and his 11 volumes of diary entries make him indispensable as an eyewitness to history.

Freeman masterfully describes the confluence of events that led to the Republicans’ close loss in the presidential election of 1856, noting, “Congressional violence ushered in the Third Party System.” This realistic look behind the scenes of the corridors of power vividly shows why there were many weapon-wearing congressmen by 1860. They were not armed to gun people down—they just wanted to protect themselves. Freeman’s pathbreaking book should be read by anyone interested in Congress, the Civil War or American history in general.