When I read the American Presidents treatment of Jimmy Carter, I knew right away I wanted more. Not because his presidency was hugely impactful, but he struck me as such an odd personality I wanted to ponder him more. I was particularly interested in his rise to power through Georgia politics, and wondered if The Outlier might fit the ticket. It doesn’t, as it focuses largely on Carter’s presidency, but still proved a useful and absorbing read.
Carter is unusual in that he was the first Southern president of the Civil Rights age. Carter brought a definite outsider perspective to Washington, surrounding himself with the “Georgia Boys”. While I was particularly interested in Carter’s early political career, there’s not a lot here on that subject: we briefly review Carter growing up in the Plains area, joining the Navy, slowly building a career there and then resigning after his father’s death to take care of the family business. Then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, he puts on a suit and announces he’s running for state office. Although Carter would later denounce class-based identity politics, Kai Bird offers that Carter’s edge in politics came from a class-oriented populism. He managed to pitch to both blacks and poor whites that he was on their side, telling a black official that while he might not like the way Carter ran his campaign, he would like the way he performed in office. Carter was an unusual mixture of socially liberal and fiscally conservative; there were a great many things he wanted the government to do for people, but he would not countenance runaway spending. This was especially important once he reached higher office, as Carter believed that deficit spending spurred on inflation, and that fiscal discipline was necessary. This put him increasingly at odds with New Deal and Great Society-type liberalism, which was far more comfortable with deficits and entitlement spending. (It would also put him at odds with the rising neo-cons: Reagan would reinstate the B-1 bomber program that Carter reviewed and cancelled on the grounds of being already obsolete.)
What I continue to appreciate and puzzle over is Carter the Man. He brought an informality to the White House –jeans and sweaters rather than suits – but he was definitely not some “Aw, Shucks, Rosalyn, you know they just went an’ e-lected me to the White House?” type. Bird records people who came expecting Uncle Jimmy and encountered instead Uncle June – a man who could be cold, supremely self-confident, and not at all amenable to glad-handing. Bird notes that Carter’s contempt for politics-as-usual was one of his weaknesses; he rarely went out for dinner, and when he played tennis with Congressional figures, that was all they did – play tennis. No after-match drinks, no relationship-building. Carter loved the tediousness of paperwork – he was apparently enthusiastic about reading and processing reams of briefs and notes that appeared on his desk – but not the work of slowly building relationships with lots of small talk.
The largest part of this book, as with Carter’s presidency, is consumed by foreign policy. Carter was keenly interested in negotiating peace between Israel and the Arabs, then led by Egypt; he was able to do so, though with less Israeli cooperation than he would like on the area of expanding settlements. Iran became a huge issue in the last two years of his administration, when the Shah was run out by an alliance of jihadists and leftists and the American embassy was taken by Iranian students. The new ruler of Iran, Big Beard the First, saw the captive Americans as useful leverage to get Carter to turn over the former government’s money and purchases still in the US. While Carter made steady progress getting the jihadis to the table, distractions arrived in the form of Russians invading Afghanistan and Iraq invading Iran.
Although I have issues with Bird as author (his ease in referring to Carter’s conservative antagonists as racist, for instance), he tells a compelling story about a unique man in American politics. I don’t think I’m done with Jimmy just yet, but revisiting – through his White House diary, for instance – will have to wait. There’s a large Texan glowering in the corner at me.
Quotes
In Egypt again some years later, [Carter] made a point of visiting Sadat’s widow Jehan, who after an elaborate Egyptian dinner one evening, turned to carter and explained that she had recently found a note written by Sadat shortly before his October 1981 assassination. Awkwardly clearly her throat, Jehan pulled out the note and read: “Jimmy Carter is my very best friend on Earth. He is the most honorable man I know. Brilliant and deeply religious, he has all the marvelous attributes that made him inept in dealing with the scoundrels who run the world.” Stunned for a moment, Carter then smiled and replied, “Well, maybe, but I’ll never change.”
“‘The scary part,’ noted Anatoly Chernyaev, a member of the Kremlin’s inner circle, ‘is that the final, sole decision [to invade Afghanistan] was made by someone who is completely senile…It was a terrifying sight. […] The Soviet apparatchiks knew what a disastrous mistake had been made — and yet many of Carter’s advisers were clueless about the disarray within the Kremlin.'”
September 2026….a heck of a month, beginning with Wendell Berry’s death, punctuated by a funeral and a strong storm system rolling through my alma mater in Montevallo and threatening but not taking down my Reading Tree, and then dominated by presidents. On the bright side, after three weeks of August heat, someone upstairs finally remembered there was a temperature setting on the ol’ sky thing and we’ve been experiencing a little bit of fall, at least for one weekend.
Not sure of photo credit: this was shared by celeb meterologist James Spann and appears to be looking at the Main Quad via Napier Hall (my former residence). My reading tree on the left, looking bedraggled but unlighteninged. MANY books were read 2007-2009 under that tree.
September certainly had a theme: I read 11 books, 10 of which were presidential. Early in the year when I made my Hail to the Chief reading page public (I’d created it over a decade ago when I read biographies for Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison), I said that I would not be trying to finish it this year, because that would be “like, thirty dudes”, and account for entirely too much of my annual reading. At some point, however, this minor thread in my greater America @ 250 project became the means of the project itself, as my reading around the presidents led to me hoovering up a substantial amount of American history. The biographies and adjacent reading account for half of my reading this year. September has been that in concentrate, as I decided to knock out a series of presidents who would just get the small 200-page volumes from the American Presidents series in order to give more complex individuals like LBJ more time to properly digest.
Three-quarters of the way into the year, Classics Club is struggling, and the Science Survey is..erm, still hibernating. Bible in a Year is still going well, though my plan to read one Bible-related book a month to augment the actual texts has largely fallen by the wayside. While 2026 may be developing in a very different way than I intended, by the end of it I expect to be able to say I’ve read a biography for every single dead president. and like reading War and Peace there’s not many that can say that. Retreating into history was a way of getting away from the August-like weather and several funerals, though at least the Red Sox managed to wander into the postseason, however improbably. As of this writing, it’s the top of the fifth and they’re one game from being removed….by the Yankees. Fiddle-dee-dee! They were so dismal back in April I just focused on University of Alabama softball and baseball instead.
My reading tree — bloodied, but unbowed. My reading spot is now fully sun exposed, but hopefully the ol’ girl will bounce back.
The tree in happier times (May 2010)
2026 Goals: Checkpoint Inquisition
What were my goals for 2026?
Finish Classics Club II. Hahahahah no.
“Do Proper Justice to America @ 250”. I’m pretty sure that’s a “yes” provided we’re allowing for the hostile takeover of America @ 250 by Andy Jackson and company. (And it doesn’t matter if we’re allowing for it, because Andy Jackson has made it so.)
Bible in a Year. Remarkably, I have not fallen off this horse despite how much of the Hebrew scriptures are lists of people (and their pastures).
Continue to Avoid Reddit. I’d forgotten that I quit reddit cold turkey in the beginning of the year: I eventually drifted back by April, I think, but I’m going to claim a huge win: not only do I spend a lot less time engaging in reddit/facebook group discussions, when I do it’s very casual and I don’t get invested whatsoever. This is important to me not simply because they can be a timesink, but because I’ve found that I don’t like who internet arguments urge me to be — sarcastic, dismissive, and combative.
More writing. Manalive, yes. Granted, I haven’t been churning out history articles the way I wanted to, I have been doing a lot of fiction writing, working on a collection of small-town southern short stories, and I received an email inviting me to submit articles to a news magazine if I could think of pieces that would apply to their general theme.
“Expand my role as a local historian by attending history society meetings in other counties”…I’ve done a little of this but not nearly as much as I ought. Yesterday, I skipped driving to the Autauga County Historical Society’s meeting in favor of napping in the sun on a covered porch. Beastly of me. I’m going to be a galley-reader for a work of local history, though, so…progress.
Reading Johnny Clegg biography….not yet. Purposeful tech training….eh, not enough to write home about. I’ve been looking more at cataloging stuff rather than IT. Re-reading….again, not enough to brag on.
Star Trek @ 60
I watched a fair bit of Star Trek, hitting TOS, DS9, VOY, ENT, SNW, and making an effort to watch DSC. Started replaying Star Trek Elite Force but wound up spending my evenings listening to lectures, instead. I did play through my favorite segment, though, an exploration of a 1960s Mirror, Mirror starship. It didn’t help that I have played Elite Force so many times that I’d just race through levels on muscle memory alone and then think “Where am I going? Why did I run up here?”.
New Acquisitions
Biographies of McKinley, Richard Henry Lee, and John C. Calhoun that were on sale. . If RF years were Friends episodes, this one would be “The One With All the Biographies”. Rumble Fish, Parliament of Whores, Southern Honor, and C.S. Lewis in the Shadowlands were picked up at an indie bookstore (Recollected Books), and last night I bought a few titles for November’s SF focus, in addition to Ghosting the News on the collapse of local newspapers. I’m diversifying!
Love is the yearning for eternity. It explains a lot of things. You ever see a schoolboy carve a heart into a tree, “John + Jane Forever”? It’s easy enough to see how John and Jane got there, but you always wonder about forever, and why that should occur to a schoolboy, and every schoolboy?
My father died when I was only 31 years old. We did a lot of things together, my father and I, when I was a boy, but I never got the chance to stand beside him and kill our enemies in battle.
The Cyclopeses don’t ever get together in assembly, and every family ignores its neighbors. In other words, the Cyclopes is modern America. Everything is controlled from very far away, and we almost never get together in direct, personal, human ways to secure the common good. It’s been taken out of our heads, perhaps, and everyone lives for themselves — we even make up our own identities now — this is all ‘Idiotic’ in the Greek sense of the word.
The real storehouse of different cultures, cultures that are not ours, is the past. Right now everything is more homogenized before — where are you going to go to learn about completely different ways to live a human life if you don’t go to the past?
There is a kind of stupidity that you don’t get by Nature. You can only achieve it by hard work.
“If the Will of the People has an executive, his name is not president. It is Caesar.”
“Tolkien on Fairy Stories“, Dr. Brad Birzer. The Tolkien Seminar. A discussion of Tolkien’s lecture at St. Andrews, which warned students that there there are more things in heaven and Earth than are written in their philosophy.
“The Truth About the Biggest Act of Domestic Terrorism in American History“. Tucker Carlson interview with Kathy Sanders, who lost two grandchildren in the OKC bombing; in the interview she discusses how she became convinced early on that there was more to the story (specifically, she believes McVeigh was part of a larger conspiracy that the FBI ignored, content in having gotten its guy) and then switches to how she’s lived with the OKC bombing since. While I came to listen skeptically to the conspiracy theory, I was honestly moved by Sanders’ account of being shaken by her husband’s death: he was filled with rage and enmity toward McVeigh and the government, and died before McVeigh did. Sanders became convinced, she said, that her own hatred would destroy her, and began praying for McVeigh and Nichols; she subsequently met Nichols’ mother, and his son, and befriended both. Her quote?
“I made the decision to forgive, and I think it changed the ending of my story.”
“Introduction to Jacksonian America“, Dr. Brad Birzer. Jacksonian American series. I like how when other colleges are assigning students excerpts rather than books Dr. B is like “Nope, you’re reading The Last of the Mohicans, Democracy in America, Union and Liberty, annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd a thousand page history.”
“One reason I love this class is that everyone we meet is so strange“
“John C. Calhoun is an person I will argue with — I don’t like him — but he’s the most powerful and original thinker of [The Jacksonian Era]. You need to know him, or you’ll miss the period.”
“Charles Carroll of Carrollton gives his last testimony before he dies: always love Jesus, and always love Cicero.”
“The Roman Civil War, Pt. 3: Sulla Marches on Rome”, the Rest is History podcast.
“So Marius is dead, but — he was in power, he was drunk, and he was killing people. It’s exactly what he would have wanted.”
“Reconsidering Calhoun“, the Brion McClanahan Show. Dr. Brion McClanahan. He reviews a few elements of Calhounian thought, particularly an emphatic rejection of Rousseau and Hobbes’ “state of nature”, emphasizing the importance of political order, and the inevitable breakdown of constitutions. More of a podcast than a lecture, though McClanahan talks about Calhoun a LOT.
Speaking..of… “The Roman Civil War, Pt 4: Sulla, Master of Rome”, the Rest is History podcast. Enter Pompey the Great, who was given that title when he was all of 24.
“Calhoun“, Dr. Brad Birzer, Jacksonian American series. (Brion and Brad have VERY different approaches to Calhoun, but I encountered both via Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom.) Brad emphasized Calhoun’s ideas of a Republic which drew from both Rome and Scottish Presbyterianism, and reviewed five points of Calhounian political thought. (A state of nature doesn’t exist, you need political order, God doesn’t have a political preference but republics are best, your political order will eventually disintegrate, and those who desire liberty should deserve it by fighting for it) This was just an intro to the subject, but he pointed out that Calhoun embodied in miniature a perversity that swept the South from 1820 to 1850: a shift from viewing slavery as an evil that was perhaps necessary for a time, to a positive good. Brad speculates that racial distortions of evolution played a part, but I think economic complicity (slavery has become more profitable, we are more invested in it, therefore we are more invested in justifying it) was far more potent — especially considering that the Origin of Species was not released until 1859. Granted, Darwin’s boon was identifying the operating mechanism of evolution (natural selection), not inventing the concept of evolution ex nihilo, but surely the general idea hadn’t percolated THAT much in the general public without Origin? I think that the ‘lights of a perverted science’ (as Churchill may have put it) were being lit well before poor Darwin ever stuck his head onto the chopping block.
We remember Disunion’s Southern equivalent, Secession, but they’re equivalent terms. We associate this term of breaking the Union apart with the South, but Disunion is proposed long before Secession is proposed — at the Hartford Convention in 1814.
Listening to Calhoun while Marius and Sulla began the erosion of Rome’s constitution — Sulla doing it in the NAME of the Republic and its constitution — was an accident but a gloriously illustrative one.
“Scripture and Liturgy“, the Rev. Amy George. I’m quoting my rector in the Commonplace entries this month and googled her to see what came up, just in case one of you google her. When I began attending St. Paul’s in 2011, I was flabbergasted by how much I LOVED liturgy. Lex orandi, lex credendi!
“Soft Despotism and Missouri Compromise“, Dr. Brad Birzer. Jacksonian Democracy. Reviewing Tocqueville’s warning about how easily democracy can slip into tyranny. the explosive matter of Missouri, and a quick intro to John Calhoun.
“All democracies end in imperialism.”
“Tolkien and Baptizing the Pagan“, Dr. Brad Birzer. Tolkien Seminar. On how Tolkien’s creation of a ‘fundamentally Catholic’ work, the Lord of the Rings (quoting Tolkien there, not Birzer) that wove in myths and impulses from Northern Europe. We learn that one of Dr. B’s favorite historians sought him out to tell him he was wrong for believing that Tolkien was a poor soldier, and that said historian (Martin Gilbert) was inspired to write a book in response to Birzer’s Tolkien book to reveal how brave a soldier Tolkien was.
“Tolkien is a romantic. He doesn’t have a cynical bone in his body. No cynic could have written Sam, or Eowyn.They are the products of deep romanticism.”
“I probably need to go Confession for this, but at the beginning of every semester, I teach Genesis — well, my first class is always Socrates, but I also get to teach Genesis — and I cannot read Genesis without thinking of Tolkien.”
“Tolkien, Faerie, Logos, and Mythos“, Dr. Brad Birzer. Tolkien Seminar. Evidently the introduction to this series in which we learn that Dr. B’s son is in class, and that Dr. B is an historian invading the English department to teach this seminar. (Is it bad that when he began reviewing his expectations for a final papers, part of my brain is going ‘Mmm, I bet a paper comparing Lewis and Tolkien’s relationship with Mary would be appropriate for this class’).
When we read about Frodo, we’re not reading about a make-believe character. We’re reading about a broken man who is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and he does not know if he can live up to his Task. Everyone of us in this room is Frodo. We carry pain, we carry burdens, we don’t know if we’re going to make it. We want so badly to be in The Story.
“Jacksonian Culture, Pt I: James Fenimore Cooper“, Dr. Brad Birzer. Jacksonian America series. I know…nothing about Cooper; I read Last of the Mohicans back in 2014 as part of a project to read classic American literature, but I found it bewildering. According to Dr. B, Cooper wrote the Leatherstockings tales as a response to a challenge from his wife after he rolled his eyes at Austen; evidently Cooper’s stories made an impression in Europe. Birzer recalls two Austrians dressing up as characters from the Tales when he was a student at Innsbruck!
[Jackson] is a fascinating figure — and a creepy figure, in a lot of ways. Remember he pickled Pakenham and sent him to his wife. I’m not suggesting we imitate Andrew Jackson, but we need to know him.
You guys, just think about Dante: what happens whenever you meet a sinner in Hell? The first thing they always do is justify their sin. But what happens when you meet them in Purgatory? They say they shouldn’t have done that, that was terrible. They take it away from themselves. Selfishness is terrible.
Mythology, when it is done well, makes what’s commonplace absolutely brilliant.
“Andrew Jackson, Part I“, Dr. Brad Birzer. Last year’s Jacksonian America series. Mostly on New Orleans. “Andrew Jackson, Part II“, Dr. Brad. Birzer. Last year’s Jacksonian American series focusing on the Jackson presidency.
“Andrew Jackson is utterly honest in every day. He may shoot you — there’s no question about that — but he will tell you he’s going to shoot you.”
“St. Augustine and the City of God“, Dr. Darren Staloff. Staloff appears to have been a colleague of Dr. Michael Sugrue: they took turns in one lecture series on western philosophy, and Staloff’s videos are hosted on Dr. Sugrue’s channel. (Dr. Sugrue has since left us to travel through the Asphodel meadows to Elysium.) Interestingly, Staloff and Sugrue have a kindred pedagogic ‘voice’: you’d never confuse one man’s voice for the other, but if they traded places and gave the other’s lecture, the pacing and tone would be so similar that even someone who’s drunk deeply of Sugrue’s offerings would not sense a difference. This lecture was arguably more about Job than St. Augustine, let alone the City of God — I don’t think Gus’s book or the circumstances that created it (Rome being sacked by the Visigoths and people freaking out because Rome being sacked is like the universe dividing by zero) — was even mentioned.
“St. Augustine and the Christian Self“, Dr. Michael Sugrue. Largely about St. Augustine and the Logos, though we also get some background on Manicheanism and Pelagianism.
Religious faith demands not less than everything we can put up. It wasn’t until St. Augustine was willing to stake it all that he was able to receive God’s grace.
Nonbook Commonplace Entries
“I often see mothers — some evidently struggling, others well-dressed professionals — with children in tow. The eyes of the small children are alive with interest, and a bus ride that includes strangers, dogs, and a change of scenery is fascinating to a tiny mind. The child attracts the mother’s interest, and the response differs sharply and indisputably. Some mothers talk to their children, or (still quite often) hoik them on their laps to look through a favorite book, brought along for the purpose of distraction. Most, however, show their child their phone, or just hand it over. The child’s eyes dull; they grow quiet; and when their bus stop approaches, they become angry and querulous. If we are going to allow literacy to be taken away from the majority of people, we are going to have to get used to a world which is worse even than the one we currently live in. You will not want to ride on the same bus as the adults those people become.” – “Closed books: Who are we without reading?” Philip Hensher, Spectator (print).
“Optimization is terrific if you want to get somewhere else in the future. But it’s terrible for being where you actually are right now. When goals overtake experience, you lose the freedom to encounter your life as it happens. And when you lose that ability, are no longer living in full. We used to optimize work so we could do everything else. Now we optimize life as though living were another job. – “The Missing Ingredient of Modern Life: Why We Need Wonder”, Ian Bogost. ATLANTIC magazine (Print).
Teaching a class is easy; listening to people and giving them our time is far more difficult. And I’m going to be honest with you, I rarely ever feel like staying late on Sundays; but nobody ever said being a Christian is about what I feel like doing. – “So You’re Orthodox. Now What?”, Kenneth B.
“Some people, we only know for a little while — but that little while MATTERS.” The Reverend Amy George, St. Paul’s Episcopal. Funeral for a thirty-year old BrodieMoore
Christian Humanism was not yet another ideology, but an anti-ideology, something that transcended the simple and ridiculous left-right horizontal spectrum, and, instead, viewed life vertically. One was either God or anti-God, Christ or anti-Christ, man or anti-man. A Christian humanist embraced not only the ethics and morality of Socrates and Christ, but he also loved the liberal arts and liberal education as a means to distance oneself from the immediacy and materialism of this world. As a Christian humanist, one sought the eternal within time. – “Ave, Patrick Deneen: Christian Humanism“, Brad Birzer
Boomers grew up in a high-trust, religious and family-centric culture cultivated by their parents and grandparents. Progressive members of this generation also got to enjoy the rejection of all that once the 1960s swung into gear. They benefited from the old culture and from its destruction. This is a trick that can only be pulled once. – Louise Perry, “Boomer Christianity is Dying Fast“
“[…] when I first became a Christian, a Catholic in my mid-twenties, I used to sneer inwardly at older priests for being squishes about sin. […] I didn’t need that priest to give me permission to sin; I needed him to give me the strength to be faithful, through the difficulties. I still believe I was right in that case. Still, much later in life, I realized why older priests strike firebrand young converts as too soft. They hear so much suffering in the confessional, and see human weakness in a thousand different ways. They learn to love the poor sinners who come to them, seeking God’s pardon. They learn what Jesus meant when he said that he desires mercy, not sacrifice. – Rod Dreher, “Stoner: AQuiet American Masterpiece“
Last week, I posted something about this new far-right Zoomer bookAmerican History Z, which attempts to explain and justify the anti-democratic radicalization of white males in their twenties. The book concludes by calling for a Caesar. This line on the book’s opening page — “All we have is feeling. But the feeling is all we need” — is absolutely key. They too have surrendered to politics as emotivist pathocracy. See, this is what the philosopher Max Picard meant when he said Germans in the Weimar period made themselves vulnerable to Nazism because they had lost the logos. By that he meant a principle of underlying order that gave people living within German society a sense of connectedness, not only to each other, but to their past, and to transcendent meaning. Without shared belief in logos, reason becomes impossible. Control in a post-logos society goes to whoever shouts the loudest, and provokes and harnesses the greatest feeling. This is where we are headed.Rod Dreher, “Aristotle vs White American Women“
“Social media elicits calumny, backbiting, and rash judgement the way pornography elicits lust. The two aren’t the same — social media isn’t intrinsically evil and pornography is — but the fact of the matter is that it draws poison out of you.” – Matt Fradd, Pints with Aquinas. This reminded me STRONGLY of Freya India’s “What’s Become of Us“, an essay on how social mediamagnifies the human character’s most rotten parts.
Coming up in October…
I Need. To Read. Science. 2027 will mark 10 years of the Science Survey (and 20 years of Reading Freely, hey-yo!), and I cannot go into that with such a pathetic showing for 2026. I have the books, I just need to stop being dragged into the Oval Office! Otherwise, October is generally when I read something scary, or something about German history, or both. I’ve already read 1932, which brimmed over with psychotic-sounding Nasties, so I may just try to work on science and presidents and Andrew Jackson and whatever else the ol’ monkey mind decides to screech and run after. ALSO: Sherry Turkle’s Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines just released, so I’m going to be tempted by that but I need to read Freya India’s GIRLS first.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? 1932, finally. FDR and Hitler are interesting subjects and more so when compared against one another, but the nitty-gritty of party politics is not my cup of tea.
WHAT are you reading now? The Outlier, Kai Bird. So fun fact — someone requested this via ILL, but they haven’t come up to claim it yet so I keep reading it during lunch and..um, may finish it this week if they don’t show up for it.. Also working on The Forgotten Man, a history of the Great Depression. Economic troubles are so in this week, apparently.
WHAT are you reading next? Strong possibility that I’ll revisit Rumble Fish, since I just re-acquired a copy of it this past Saturday while exploring a new-to-me bookstore. I am also looking at a take on the Great Depression from an Austrian economist (not Rothbard; that’s TOO much economics) and trying to decide on FDR biographies. I know and like Brands but Jean Edward Smith keeps bobbing to the top despite the greater page count.
I’m afraid 1932 won’t get much of a review because frankly, it exhausted me. It’s the story of two men who were rising to national leadership on their respective sides of the pond in the same year – two men who would rule for twelve years, two men who would be antagonists and who would die within a month of one another. That’s the future, though: 1932’s story stays largely in 1932, and zooms in on the fine grain of political machinations. Pietrusza alternates between Roosevelt and Hitler chapters, and the Hitler chapters are largely more exciting given that Hitler and his cohorts are flamboyantly villainous and the Democratic backroom action is …soporific, frankly. It made me realize that Candidate Roosevelt was a very different creature than President Roosevelt; FDR was something of a political chameleon, and justified it with the conviction that to do good, one must first get in power. If that means using the Happy Warrior Al Smith as a stepping stone to greatness – relying on Smith’s support to reach the NY governor’s chair and then running off to DC – so be it. In Hitler’s case the backstabbing is more literal, as the Nazis’ rise to power is constantly mixed up with violence in the streets, largely against their codependent antagonists the KPD (Communists). There’s so much detail here, though, that even reading about von Hindenburg’s struggles to create a stable government and finally giving Hitler a shot at the chancellorship, had gotten dull by the time I was there. Given that the last Pietrusza book I read (1960) also lost me after a while with the precinct-by-precinct maneuvering, it’s safe to say that he and I probably aren’t great author-reader combinations, at last not for that microgenre of political history. There’s a lot of interest in his books, but it’s buried in paper for me.
Coming up: I am 2/3rds through a larger treatment of Carter and 1/3 through Amity Shlae’s Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. I think I can finish one of them before month’s end.
Quotations
The experience took away half of the man, though many said it made him whole. “There are times,” thought Howe, “when I think that Franklin might never have been President if he had not been stricken. You see, he had a thousand interests. You couldn’t pin him down. He rode, he swam, he played golf, tennis, he sailed, he collected stamps, he politicked, he did everything under the sun a man could think of doing. Then, suddenly, there he was, flat on his back with nothing to do but think. He began to read, he talked, he gathered people around him—his thoughts expanded. He began to see the other fellow’s point of view. He thought of others who were ill and afflicted and in want. He dwelt on many things that had not bothered him much before. Lying there, he grew bigger, day by day.”
Göring, brilliant in his own way and shameless in his evil, provided the best, frankest, and most frightening, explanation (and to an interrogator at Nürnberg, no less) of what brought the lot of them together: If you really want to do something new, the good won’t help you with it. They are self-satisfied, lazy, they have their God and their own pig-headedness—you can’t do it with them. “Let me have men about me that are fat.” An anointed king can say that but not a leader who has made himself. Let me have men about me that are errant knaves. The wicked who have something on their conscience are obliging, quick to hear threats because they know how it’s done, and for booty you can offer them things because they will take them. Because they have no hesitations. You can hang them if they get out of step. Let me have men about me that are utter villains—provided that I have the power of absolute power over life and death. The sole and single leader, whom no one can interfere with. What do you know of the possibilities and evil! Why do you write books and make philosophy when you only know about virtue and how to acquire it, whereas the world is fundamentally moved by something quite different?
And what, in fact, did Franklin actually know about anything? What lay beyond his dazzling smile, the well-formed words, the often-forced banter? Fiorello La Guardia praised Roosevelt as “aldermanic” in remembering political details, and Tugwell conceded that he possessed “amazingly detailed” knowledge of utility valuations. But that was about it. “One of the characteristics most puzzling to those who met him first as late as 1932,” Tugwell would later confess, “was the completeness of his assurance, especially since it seemed to proceed from a less than sufficient competence. There were many matters about which his lack of knowledge was total. There were issues about which the groundwork had not been laid. Even his general attitude of liberal progressivism, sufficient until now for expedients, was suddenly irrelevant and obsolete.”
“Mr. Roosevelt, once a dry and a liberal and a reformer, has listed with every political wind that has blown within the last twenty years. He has stood in every camp; he has fought on every firing line. He is the soldier of fortune of American politics.” Did such “soldiering” result from a lack of interest? From mere cowardice? Or, instead, from sheer calculation? The first duty of a patriot, an old maxim held, was to get elected. William Jennings Bryan had been forthright. So had TR in 1912, and The Happy Warrior in 1928. What good had it provided them? Or the country? Or anyone, for that matter?
SPD delegate Kurt Schumacher (severely crippled in the war) sarcastically congratulated [Goebbels] for having succeeded for the first time in recorded history “in effecting the total mobilization of human stupidity.”
Hitler jeered at his opponents, “I know your slogan. You say, we will stay [in office] at any cost. And I tell you: We will overthrow you in any case!”
[Hitler] challenged not merely Grzesinski but also Hindenburg: “Dear old man, . . . With our deep regret, therefore, you must step aside, for they want to fight us and we want to fight them.”
Hitler remained unswayed. “In any case,” he challenged his foreign press chief, “what part does Churchill play? He is in opposition and no one pays any attention to him.” “People,” the frustrated Hanfstaengl answered, tossing caution to the wind, “say the same thing about you.”
Coolidge also hated Hoover’s tendency to react to news with grand, intrusive plans. Could not Hoover see where some of his rescues had led? At one point later on, the minimalist president Calvin Coolidge concluded quite simply that “that man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad.” He had a nickname for Hoover: “Wonder Boy.”
The American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker inquired of one of Hitler’s followers, “What will you do when you get power?” “He might have launched a long discussion of the party program,” Knickerbocker recalled, “but his only reply was: ‘Keep it.’”
Hitler needed to prove he was no longer a whip-wielding, putsch planning monster. The road to power was paved with new-found restraint— not the caked, dried blood of opponents. Moderation being absolutely necessary—he did the exact opposite.
Asked if he like Mussolini and his black shirts might march on Berlin, he snapped, “I don’t have to march on Berlin as they say I propose to do. I am already there. The question is who will march out of Berlin.”
“Mr. Hoover’s speech at Des Moines,” sniped Sen. George Norris from next-door Nebraska, could be “boiled down and summed up in one sentence: ‘It might be worse,’ and taking into consideration the remote possibility of his re-election, I am inclined to agree with him.”
Counted together, the Brown-Red total had now reached an alarming 50 percent. The majority of Germans had, in one form or another, voted not simply for dictatorship but for totalitarianism. (Brown being Nazis, Red being the Communists.)
“I saw them,” she recorded of these vigorous, brownshirted men, “in my mind’s eye, marching on and on, over frontiers, north, east, west and south. . . . I saw, in my mind’s eye, the machine guns that would soon be in their hands, the planes that would fly over their heads, the tanks that would rumble and roll with their tread.” “Post-war Europe was finished,” she sorrowed, “and pre-war Europe had begun. . . .”
Today’s TTT is a “Fall Freebie”. As it happens, since I resumed doing regular Teaser Tuesdays in early October of 2022, I have made a point of sharing my favorite Teasers for the last year around that time.
Barnabus: I’m here to chase birds and learn about Alabama colonial history and I don’t see no birbs
First, though, today’s Teaser Tuesday, from 1932:
Hitler remained unswayed. “In any case,” he challenged his foreign press chief, “what part does Churchill play? He is in opposition and no one pays any attention to him.” “People,” the frustrated Hanfstaengl answered, tossing caution to the wind, “say the same thing about you.”
That passage is particularly interesting because Churchill and Hitler come very close to talking face to face before either is in power — one wonders if any alt-history writers have tried to create a rapport from their hotel near-miss.
Top Ten Teaser Tuesdays
The belief in the inevitability of the past — that whatever happened had to happen — is the great enemy of learning from history.Lars Brownworth, IN DISTANT LANDS
In my lifetime, in my part of the world, the notion and meaning of ‘home’ has steadily crumbled under this external pressure until it is little more than a word. In a Machine anticulture, the home is a dormitory, probably owned by a landlord or a bank, in which two or more people of varying ages and degrees of biological relationship sleep when they’re not out being employed by a corporation, or educated by the state in preparation for being employed by a corporation. The home’s needs are met through pushing buttons, swiping screens or buying-in everything from food to furniture; for who has time for anything else, or has been taught the skills to do otherwise? Phones long ago replaced hearth fires. Handily, a phone, unlike a fire, can be kept under the pillow in case something urgent happens elsewhere while we sleep. We wouldn’t want to miss anything.
Paul Kingsnorth, AGAINST THE MACHINE
To say that Stephen Douglas lived and breathed politics is to make apt use of a stale cliche. He scheduled his wedding for the narrow window between the 1856 election and the opening of a new session of Congress — after courting his Adele Curtis on the campaign trail. – ARGUING UNTIL DOOMSDAY
Hurrying means that you miss out on many things. Riding a train will take you far, but it’s a misconception to think that this will give you more insight. Flowers in the hedgerow and birds in the treetops are accessible only to the person who walks on their own two feet. –THE CAT WHO SAVED BOOKS
The house of my soul is too cramped for you to enter: make it more spacious. It is falling to ruin; repair it. Much inside it offends your sight; I know it and I confess it. […] But I, I slipped away in the days of my youth, and wandered from you, my God, far afield from your steadfastness. And I made of my own self a kingdom of want. – –THE CONFESSIONS, St Augustine
Back in Washington, Lincoln came down with what doctors diagnosed as “varioloid,” a mild form of smallpox. So now he and Tad both were sick—though Tad at least was improving. Where were the office seekers? Lincoln quipped. Now he had something he could give everybody. –WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE
“We need to work this out,” Burke said. “I don’t want to have to keep shooting people.” “We got plenty.” – DOUBLE PLAY, Robert Parker
“If Aliens landed in Los Angeles, their first impression might be that Earth’s dominant life-form is the automobile. An obvious conclusion. When one gets injured, another version of that life-form shows up to haul it away and get repaired. Some of the larger life-forms on the freeway carry multiple automobiles within them. To the Aliens, these car haulers are surely pregnant.” –Neil deGrasse Tyson, Take Me To Your Leader
“When you talk to [John F. Kennedy] or see him you always have the impression that his big white teeth are ready to bite off a huge hunk of life. There is determination in his green Irish eyes. He has two backbones: his own and his fathers. Somehow he has hit the bulls-eye in every respect. He can’t fail.” – Inga Petersen, quoted in THE LETTERS OF JFK.
Odysseus openly laughed. ‘Oh my goodness, you’ve never seen such a rocky, scrubby, barren, unforgiving spot,’ he said. ‘It’s all our farmers can do to grow weeds there, let alone cereals and fruit. We have the sourest wine, the raggediest sheep, the scrawniest cattle of any island in the wide Ionian Sea. Trees and houses are blown down every year in the gales. Some years, the rain never comes, and the earth turns to sand. Other years, the whole island slops with mud. Believe me, Ithaca is no Ogygia. But it’s something else … it’s …’ His eyes now filled with tears and the word came out hoarsely, ‘… home.’ ODYSSEY, Stephen Fry.
Happy end-of-September week, bookish friend! I started another book over the weekend, so this week is going to be a bit of famine-and-feast: no book reviews at the outset and then an absolute barrage of them later on. Over the weekend the ladyfriend and I — let’s call her Joy — celebrated our two years of her putting up with me by driving across the state to Jacksonville, Alabama. We were not there to cheer on the Fighting Gamecocks, but to check out a bookstore known for its collection of rare and first-edition books. (We did some exploring before and after, finding everything from a Civil War-era furnace turned knife museum to an old train station that’s been incorporated into a rails-to-trails project. And the furnace was her idea!)
Somehow, neither of us took a picture of the outside of the bookstore: we may have been distracted by the typewriters in the window.
I am not exaggerating when I say that the inside of Recollected Books is 90% books, 9% aisle, and 1% cat. Every usable inch of the place was crammed with books!
Every. Usable. Inch.
I’d imposed a limit on myself of $20 dollars (I wound up spending $24, I think), so I purposely didn’t tempt myself with any first editions. There were some I had to admire, though.
Profiles came in a plastic wrapper to protect it from grubby-handed window shoppers. The shop also had unusual decor:
“….is there a story behind an East German flag?” “Somebody picked it up in East Germany gave it to me.”
Several rows of Carter and Reagan alone!
I wish I’d got a general shot of the interior, but this instagram post will give you some indication of how busy it was. There were so many books in this shop I could delight in the Old Book Smell oooozing out the front door!
I was….relatively constrained considering how big their science, religion and Southern History sections were. Rumble Fish will be a re-read, but I’ve long lost my copy.
I’m planning on going to the grand opening of another indie bookshop in Prattville, so this ‘celebrating indie book shops’ may turn into an occasional series.
Afterwards, we found a place to eat with an irresistible smell. Until next time!
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “One of my pet peeves”. I don’t need to think about it. It’s cellphones. I hate cellphones. I don’t mean “Ugh, cellphones annoy me”, I mean part of my brain actively wants to do violence when I am in a restaurant eating and someone has decided they need to watch videos at the table. (Specifically, taking their cellphone and throwing it into traffic.) I HATE CELLPHONES. I hate CONSTANTLY having to listen to people’s annoying ringtones and notifications everywhere — in the library, in the restaurant, at church, at funerals — I hate having to listen to their one-sided conversations everywhere, especially the boring ones. (If you’re going to impose noise into my life, at least make it fun, like city hall gossip or some wild anecdote I can steal for a story.) I hate it when I’m standing in line and the noise goes off and the person starts talking on the phone instead of handling their business and the clerk behind the desk just looks dead inside because he’s basically being treated like a human NPC whose existence is contingent on the Main Character not having a phone call when they’re in the middle of transacting business. I hate seeing people walking down the street staring down like they’re trying to reverse evolution by becoming knuckle-draggers again. You are a human BEING, dammit, your ancestors built cathedrals and wrote hymns and went to the Moon! STOP SCROLL-SLOUCHING!
I. HATE. CELL. PHONES.
And now with off my chest, let’s do WWW Wednesday! 🙂
WWW Wednesday
WHAT have you finished reading recently? William Henry Harrison, Gail Collins.
WHAT are you reading now? 1932: The Rise of Hitler and FDR: Two Tales of Politics, Betrayal, and Unlikely Destiny. David Pietrusza. A lot of very granular Democratic primaries talk mixed in with Hitler sounding psycho.
WHAT are you reading next? I began looking at 1929 on Friday, but that was during a day when I’d only had four hours of sleep and was too exhausted to keep up with the narrative that kept bounding back and forth between different timeframes and viewpoint characters. Amity Shlaes’ Forgotten Man history of the Great Depression is far more likely. I’ve already read and enjoyed her, despite the fact that she wrote 600 pages about a man obsessed with budgets.
“You could have read JEFFERSON’S HAMMER, which focused on my entire career, but instead you decided to read a biography which is prefaced by the author saying that she mostly wrote it because HER FATHER LITERALLY TORE DOWN MY SON’S HOUSE. Thanks. Thanks so much.”
Before I began this reading project, there was a short file in my head of presidents who governed too short a season, or who were too undistinguished, to merit thinking about. I did not know that Chester Arthur had anything but a set of muttonchops, or that Franklin Pierce maintained his friendship with Jefferson Davis despite the pressures of the Civil War, or that John Tyler basically established the precedent that vice presidents become president if the president is shot dead. The presidential precedent, if you will. William Henry Harrison was very high (or low) on that list of Presidents I don’t Know a Blessed Thing About: I could tell you his campaign slogan for some mysterious reason (Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too!), and I knew he died after making a very long speech, but that’s it. At least with Zachary Taylor I had a mysterious image of cherries and milk that floated up when I heard his name.
So, Grandpa Harrison. He was born in Virginia, moved west, served in the military, and really leaned into that part of himself. When he asked his future father-in-law for permission to propose to his daughter, Future Father in Law asked how Harrison expected to support a family. Harrison was name-rich but money poor, something that would persist throughout his life because his business savvy was so poor he managed to invest in a distillery that failed. How do you manage to lose money making hooch? — he struck a pose and declared “My sword is my means of support,sir!”. Personally, I think that’s a bit ambiguous — he could be professing to be a pirate or a highwayman as easily as a soldier — but martial feats did punctuate his life.When he was the territorial governor of Indiana, for instance, he personally parleyed with Tecumseh (a Shawnee who he was personally awed by, but forced to fight) and then rallied his troops after a dawn ambush. The story of the ambush itself is movie-worthy: the natives said “We’ll talk about this tomorrow, why don’t you and your army camp right over there, with a stream and woods and some nice hills for us to hide behind and then attack you at dawn?”. They did attack, but Harrison — for whatever his faults — does appear to have been blessed with the ability to keep a cool head during battle.
One would think being a governor was an open door to great and noble things, but Harrison continued to struggle: most of his now-grown sons were financial drains, and at one point he was working as a clerk and badgering John Quincy Adams for appointments. As soon as Quincy had given Harrison a good one, Andrew Jackson was elected and immediately recalled him. Jackson would inspire an Anti-Jackson party, the Whigs, and eventually they would elect Harrison in large part because they couldn’t agree on anyone else. (Rather like Garfield or Truman, when Truman was the veep.) Even with increasing suffrage, politics appears to have been very much an insider’s game, with Harrison being advanced on the grounds of being 3.6 — not great, not terrible. Then he died; people used to say he’d caught a chill because of his two-hour speech in the rain, but evidently there’s now arguments he died from ‘enteric fever’.
Grandpa Harrison’s life was one of constant struggle — reaching peaks then being knocked down again. He was an interesting fellow, I think — prone to florid speeches but also something of an everyman in actual company, and a touch obsessed with the Greeks and Romans. He had an idea of every man receiving military training, so that in an hour of need all men could take their place in the phalanx.His approach to slavery is complicated: he didn’t so much buy ‘slaves’ as he did buy their labor, long-term. He always changed their status to that of indentured servants who would be freed after a few years (nine appears to have been the longest term), giving them clothes and a Bible at the end of the term. Nevertheless, he resisted any attempt to quell the expansion of slavery into the western territories, probably because he was one of many southerners who had come west and brought slaves in tow. It was also good politics to say on the good side of Virginia and the Carolinas, even if in speaking to Northern states he pointed to his policy of freeing ‘servants’ after some time. He was also not a fan of hooch (…ah, now I see why the distillery failed), an oddity in a time when most people drank like fish because water could give you cholera or some other disease.
This was a surprisingly interesting book, though it didn’t rev up my engines and make me want to go on a Grandpa Harrison sidequest the way other presidents have. He’s far more of a character than his grandson, though Benjamin is more palatable to modern audiences because of his support for black Civil Rights, whereas Grandpa’s idea of progress was giving his personal slaves a contractual expiry. Harrison underscores one unexpected thing I’m enjoying about this project — how people from other eras are a lot more messy than history books give them credit for. Every so often you run into someone who plays a stereotype to the hilt, but the messy men and women are more numerous and far more interesting. Also, Gail Collins is fun Her personality really hooked me in the early parts, though she steps back a bit as the book progresses.
Up next: Well..um. I’m reading 1932, I should take a crack at Polk so I have a beautiful uninterupted stream of dead presidents from Washington to Cleveland 2: Electric Boogaloo, but I am also mindful of my promise to not make this a presidential sweeps week. In all likelihood it can’t: 1932 is huge, and none of my remaining reads are in the AP series. I’ve had my Polk book for a year and bought my McKinley this morning (on sale!), and have yet to decide on my FDR and LBJ treatments. And then…?
Sidebar: John Scott Harrison, the son of Grandpa Harrison here and the father of Benjamin Harrison is largely known for what happened to him after he died. Turns out his body was stolen, and it was found when investigators went looking for another body that had been stolen. One of the Harrison boys encountered his father’s corpse dangling from a rope in another city! How has a book not been written?! Netflix, get your Death by Lightning people on it!
Desist. From Calling me. GRANDPA HARRISON.
Quotations
I am going to take a big historic leap and guess that if he had lived—if Anna Harrison had accompanied her husband to Washington and demanded that he carry an umbrella at all times— William Henry would still not have been the sort of chief executive who gets his head carved on the side of a mountain. He was living in a bad time for presidents, that long gray period between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln when the great cloud of slavery and approaching civil war would make everybody—even an effective president like James Polk—seem like a historic asterisk.
But it is my experience that there are not many Americans, or even many American historians, who are particularly interested in speculating on what it would have meant if things had worked out better for the Whigs.
[W]hen a British nobleman visited Berkeley after the conflict had ended, he noted rather snootily that while the exterior of the great homes of Virginia compared favorably to their English counterparts, their interiors lacked elegant furniture and decor. “I can account for my paintings and decorations, sir,” Benjamin [the Signer] roared. “Your soldiers burned them in my backyard.”
The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay to him is really astonishing, and more than any other circumstance bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order,” Harrison said. If fortune had not dumped him in the middle of the American progress westward, Harrison theorized, “he would, perhaps, be the founder of an empire that would rival in glory that of Mexico or Peru.”
“[Harrison’s] thirst for lucrative office is absolutely rabid,” President [John Quincy] Adams wrote. “Vice-president, major-general of the Army, Minister to Colombia—for each of these places he has been this very session as hot in pursuit as a hound on the scent of a hare. […] “Harrison wants the mission to Colombia much more than it wants him, or than it is wanted by the public interest.”
Webster and virtually everyone else who might have been a first choice rejected a post that had traditionally been regarded as meaningless at best. The vice president had so little to do that the men who occupied the job often never even bothered to come to Washington during their term of office.
“As God as my witness…….as God as my witness….they’re not going to lick me. I am going to live through this, and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again! No, nor any of my folks! The Great Depression: Fiddle-dee-dee!
“Life is worth more, too, for knowing Hoover. But for him Belgium would now be starved … . He’s a simple, modest energetic little man who began his career in California and will end it in Heaven, and he doesn’t want anybody’s thanks.”
When I opened this book, I had some faint appreciation of Herbert Hoover as an accomplished engineer and disaster-relief organizer, a man who intervened after Black Thursday far more than is generally known, and who is unfairly blamed for the Depression. Twenty minutes into this, I had to shake my head. Herbert Hoover was…extra.
We begin in complete sympathy for a near-orphan who grew up in poverty, whose mind impressed a series of men who helped him get into higher education despite his writing skills being atrocious for the time. These days, of course, he’d be considered a master of the craft for writing a complete sentence. Hoover developed an interest in geology, its most practical application being mining — and that took him far, to Australia and China and England, there and back again. Young Hoover was despite his impoverished beginnings not a friend of labor: he prided himself on increasing hours, firing striking workers, and then hiring replacements at lower wages. It made the company money, though, and that made him money. (Pbtttt on being poor!) Although he began to dabble more in mine-financing than engineering, he still regarded himself as an engineer, first of all, and as he started feeling a vague sense of unease about the whole getting-and-spending-and-laying-waste-to-all-our-powers thing, he began looking at engineering as a noble service instead of simply a path to wealth. Now with pelf and place secure, he could begin talking about the importance of unions and the sanctity of the eight hour day — his hunger was now for meaning, not money. (He had $4 million in the 1910s, so…) He would find it in government service, making a reputation for himself as an organizer of relief for the Belgian people during World War 1 (annoying both Churchill and the Kaiser in the process) and then later being Coolidge’s man on the ground during the 1927 Mississippi floods.
I have previously commented that the AP series seems to have brought on writers with a particular shingle to address certain presidents — a surgeon for Garfield, a legal historian for Taft, etc. In Leutchenburg’s case, they brought in a New Deal Historian to analyze Hoover, which steadily eroded the book’s trust for me. Leutchenburg cannot restrain himself from personal potshots at Coolidge, who he calls a sourpuss who “wanted to shirk” from duties. Coming off a biography of Coolidge and seeing how very seriously he took service, these remarks got on the fightin’ side of me. Leutchenburg also fires at prior presidents who took no action during economic hiccoughs, dismissing them not as men who viewed intervention as outside their Constitutional prerogative, but as men who did not care. I do not trust, and do not respect, an author who turns historic personalities into his strawmen and imposes motives on men who are not allowed to speak for themselves. I doubt I will be reading him again. He is at least a better writer than finkleman, the turd-with-a-pen who began a biography of Millard Fillmore purposely to defame him. But, I digress.
The main reason I continued in this volume is that Hoover is so confusing: he begins as this hardass who is consumed by making a success of himself, and then he transforms into something I don’t quite understand — a man who, in any public offices, hoovers up any responsibility he can to expand his name, while at the same time beating his breast and talking about the importance of the individual. One minute he can sound like Obama and the next minute Ayn Rand: choose a lane! Lord knows I have enough conflicting opinions of my own to not sit in judgement if a man has conflicting values, but I’m not imposing those on the body politic and taking a salary for it: I’m just writing sometimes cranky but hopefully entertaining book reviews. By the time he was elected president — rather handily — he seemed more reluctant to embrace intervention than to embrace it, which would make for bad optics when the global economy endured the equivalent of being hit by a freight truck. Although FDR had shook his head in wonder at the outrageous expansions of government Hoover tried to instill as Commerce Secretary — and though he called Hoover’s policies socialistic — FDR could now castigate Hoover for not doing enough, or (in the case of the Bonus March suppression) doing too much. “That’s me elected,” FDR said in response to Hoover’s decision to put down the Bonus March by force. After being summarily dumped from office, Hoover became a strident critic of the New Deal, but Harry Truman began engaging him as a consultant for global food aide: his experience in World War 1 made him too valuable an asset to ignore. He would live to see the rise of Goldwater and the triumph of LBJ, taking solace only from the fact that he’d outlived his enemies.
So, who is Herbert Hoover? I don’t think I really know, because his opinions and his works offer testimony and opposing evidence: even though he’d grown so vocally conservative that Truman referred to him as being “to the right of Louis XIV”, once he was placed on a board for improving the Executive branch, he immediately began trying to magnify the authority said branch. It would be very easy to dismiss him as a hypocrite for continually saying one thing and then acting to the contrary, but during the crisis of the crash and depression, he didn’t act as dramatically as one might expect a hypocrite to do: he did in fact take actions that FDR’s New Deal would continue and expand, but his desire to expand his reach was not nearly as aggressive as when he was commerce sec. I found his cantankerousness as he aged endearing, but I leave his company –for the moment — still finding him a bit of an enigma.
Coming up: I solemnly swear this will NOT be another presidential-sweep week. For one thing, I don’t have that many left. (Grandpa Harrison, Polk, McKinley, LBJ, and Reagan.) For another, even I want to read something else. Right now I’m starting a book on the rise of Hitler and FDR in 1932 —
…well, baby steps.
Quotations
Not until Herbert Hoover was twenty-two would he see the country east of the Mississippi. West Branch was churchgoing, sober, Republican. The sole Democrat was the village drunk.
But for Hoover that was not enough. “If a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty,” he said, “he is not worth much.” And, by his lights, he was getting on in years. He was thirty-three.
An organization with no legal standing and no stable source of funds, the Commission for Relief in Belgium crossed national frontiers in the midst of the world’s first global war, plunged into markets on two continents, and spent unheard-of sums. Nothing daunted Hoover. He seized control of railways, took over factories and warehouses, and commandeered five hundred Belgian canal boats. When the kaiser’s armies occupied northern France, Hoover extended his realm there too. The [Committee for the Relief of Belgium], said a British Foreign Office functionary, was “a piratical state organized for benevolence.”
A man who wore scuffed suits (always of the same dreary design) and shoes with broken laces, he could not see why anyone should covet luxuries or want to dine out. “Afternoon tea,” the Kansas editor William Allen White wrote later, “was not in his social lexicon, and when he appeared at a tea he was like a Great Dane at a cat show—sniffy, but not so savage as evidently he wished to be.”
To lessen congestion, he ordered all amateurs off the airwaves; he empowered himself to issue licenses; and, in contravention of both domestic and international law, he assigned frequencies. In 1925 the department suspended the license of Aimee Semple McPherson’s radio outlet in California for straying from its assignment. The popular evangelist wired Hoover: “Please order your minions of Satan to leave my station alone. You cannot expect the Almighty to abide by your wavelength nonsense. When I offer my prayers to Him, I must fit in with His wave reception.” But Hoover prevailed, even though Congress denied him “the Napoleonic powers,” in the phrase of one critic, that he sought.
His conception of the need for long-range planning exceeded that of some progressives. “We had better let God run it as in the past,” said Senator George Norris of Nebraska, “and not take power away from him and give it to Hoover.”
“Acts and ideas that lead to progress are born out of the womb of the individual mind, not out of the mind of the crowd,” he argued. “The crowd only feels: it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams—but it never builds.”
“Mr. Hoover has always shown a most disquieting desire to investigate everything and to appoint commissions and send out statistical inquiries on every conceivable subject under Heaven,” Franklin D. Roosevelt complained to an industrialist. “He has also shown in his own Department a most alarming desire to issue regulations and to tell businessmen generally how to conduct their affairs.”
“If the election was held tomorrow,” a former Oregon governor said, “any Democratic candidate who had not been convicted of anything more than rape or murder would defeat Mr. Hoover.”
Commentators have often said that FDR always ignored his actual opponents and campaigned each time against Hoover until he ran against Hitler—but even in 1944 Hoover remained a target. “We ought to be eternally grateful to Herbert Hoover, who has been our meal ticket for twelve years,” a sassy New Dealer remarked.
Asked how he managed to endure the many years when leaders of both parties treated him as a pariah, he replied, “I outlived the bastards.”
Asked by an acquaintance bound for Europe whether there was anything he would like done, Hoover replied, “Well, you can tell the British to take their hands out of our pockets.” Nearly blind, toothless, and confined to a wheelchair, he stayed feisty to the last. He was so hard of hearing that his secretaries had to shout. That was all right, Hoover told a visitor. “I’m used to being hollered at.”
Today’s TTT topic is Books on our Fall TBR. As always, let’s check in with the last quarter’s TBR to see how I did, and — oh. Oh, dear. I wish I hadn’t done that, as I only managed four of the ten items: Bad Blood, on the RFK/LBJ feud; Rupture, a friend’s new fantasy release; End of the Road, on the plight of American truckers; and Communion, JD Vance’s memoir of converting to Catholicism after a few years of being agnostic/nonreligious. But first, the Tuesday Tease!
“General Wayne, I am afraid you will get into a fight yourself and forget to give me the necessary field orders,” [William Henry Harrison] told Mad Anthony. “Perhaps I may and if I do, remember the standing order for the day is, charge the damned rascals with the bayonets,” Wayne replied. WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, Gail Collins
To those who knew him and followed him he was something beyond the mere demonic shouter and hater we recall from newsreels, something very different. The devil, after all, does not corrupt souls by being repulsive but rather through charm and by being oh-so-very reasonable. 1932, David Pietrusza
So this quarter’s list:
(1) GIRLS, for the third TBR TTT post in a row. (And Elvis said, “Girls! Girls! Girls!”) It’s a reflection by a Gen-Z woman on the commodification of girlhood — how growing up on social media made them turn themselves into brands. Her writing is really good.
(2) …But At Least They’re Human, Bill Kauffman. BILL HAS A NEW BOOK OUT! Well, sort of. Technically it’s a copy of his keynote speech (75 pages, good lord Bill) supplemented with hand-drawn illustrations and notes pages, prepared as a ‘pocket stack’ printed volume by School of the Unconformed, one of the many anti-Machine substacks I follow. I entered a giveaway for it, but if I don’t win I’ll buy my own copy if only to support School of the Unconformed and print culture.
(3) An FDR biography, either Jean Edward Smith’s FDR or HW Brands’ Traitor to his Class. While I have No Ordinary Time listed as an FDR book for my Hail to the Chief series, my review indicates it was less a biography and more a study of his wartime administration. At any rate, it’s been 20 years since I read it, so I need to touch base with Franklin again. They’re both beefy bois, alas.
(4) Some Arthur C. Clarke, maybe Rendezvous with Rama or Childhood’s End. Considering how much SF I’ve read over the years, the Golden Age master is conspicuous in his absence. This would be for SF Month in November.
(5) Monsters of Ohio, John Scalzi. This title will be released on November 3rd, just in time for SF Month!
(6) Delta-V, Daniel Suarez. Have been meaning to read this for years, and I really enjoyed my return to Suarez via Influx…um, three years ago. That tempus be fugiting.
(7) William Henry Harrison, Gail Collins. “You can’t TBR a book you’re already reading!” Just try and stop me.
(8) McKinley: Architect of the American Century, Robert Merry. Maybe. I know I need to give McKinley a more considered look than say, William Henry Harrison, but six hundred pages?
(9) The Outlier, Kai Bird. A biography of Jimmy Carter. I mentioned possibly reading this after my short AP bio of Carter, and then someone came into the library wanting to ILL it!
(10) Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, Walter Borneman. I was a bit weary with the 1840s a year ago and moved on to the 1960s, but I need to circle back to ol’ Polk here. Few presidents can go into office, say “I’m after these four things”, do said four things, and then refuse to run again.
A bit homogeneous? Yes. But given the way this year has gone, I think by December I will be able to pat myself on the back for hitting at least .600.
