Steve Bailey's Blog : A Yet Unpublished Book Review

After reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, An Unfinished Love Story I went to the library in search of another of her tomes, and I found The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. All 900-plus pages of it.

I remember seeing it before I had heard of this author and thinking, it was a dull historical account like a textbook. I now knew that Goodwin has an engaging story telling style of writing and extensively researches her subjects. I have always enjoyed reading about Theodore Roosevelt, and other than the story of getting stuck in the bathtub, I knew little about William Howard Taft's personal life. Sandwiched between the dynamic Roosevelt tenure in the White House, with its trust-busting and Panama Canal, and Woodrow Wilson's presidency with its World War I, Taft is, like Frankin Peirce and James Buchanan, a president who is easy to forget. So, I resolved to read this thick book.

There is more to Taft than what appears in US history survey classes, which focuses on the Pinchot–Ballinger controversy that drove a wedge between Taft and his friend Theodore Roosevelt. Unlike his aggressive and sometimes violent predecessor, Taft was a gentle, likable fellow. His career took him away from the one job he loved the most, adjudicating the law. After the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley appointed Taft Governor General of the newly acquired Philippines. William Taft, who was not fond of imperialism, began to prepare the Filipinos for self-rule.

He and his wife Nellie developed a deep love for the island country, its people, and their culture. He campaigned to reduce tariffs on Filipino products, then and later as president. which led him to support tariff reductions. The Filipino people appreciated all his efforts, and throughout the rest of his life, large crowds of people cheered him whenever he and Nellie returned to their land.

As the title suggests, The Bully Pulpit is not just a biography of two presidents. It is a comprehensive account of the politics of the era that includes the influential journalists and editors who shaped the public's perception of the country's issues and the progressive ideas that defined both Roosevelt's and Taft's presidencies. Samuel Sidney McClure, the excentric creator of McClure's, hired talented reform-minded reporters, including Ida M. Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and William Allen White. Each of these had their pet project. Tarbell showed how unscrupulous John D. Rockefeller was in his business dealings and the damage the Standard Oil Company monopoly did to small oil businesses. Lincoln Steffens exposed corruption in the nation’s cities and promoted reform in urban government. Ray Stannard Baker exposed the monopolistic practices of the United States Steel Corporation, and William Allen White expressed small-town midwestern values that made him a progressive leader.

Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft both read what these journalists wrote in McClure's. Roosevelt had a friendly relationship with the press due in part to his experiences as a writer. Several of McClure's writers were repeat guests to lunch with him while he was president. William Allen White would help form Roosevelt's ephemeral third party known as The Bull Moose Party.

Fragmented by that party, the Republicans lost control of the government to Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats. In the end, Taft got a position he treasured more than the presidency. As Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he streamlined the court's operation and had the government build the Supreme Court building we have today.

Doris Kearns Goodwin covers all this and more, exploring the lives a wide range of people who were part of that time in American history when the people and their leaders began to come to grips with what the Industrial Revolution had done to their society and how reform was necessary. She deserved the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction 2014 which she won for this book.

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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A Yet Unpublished Book Review

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