Book Review: Grant

Grant
Ron Chernow
Biography

Ulysses Grant owned one slave in his lifetime: William Jones, a gift from Grant's obnoxious father-in-law. This was in 1858, and Grant was down and out. He'd resigned from the army under a cloud. He'd failed in business, was failing at running the farm he'd named "Hardscrabble," eking out a living by selling firewood on street corners, reluctantly taking handouts from his wealthier relatives. The gift of a slave was a substantial windfall. Grant could have sold Jones for a good $1,500 (and in 1858 money, $15 a month was a living wage).

So Grant freed William Jones.

I've plucked that anecdote from Grant's rich soil not just because it's admirable--although it is--but because it seems to me that it illustrates one of U.S. Grant's fundamental character traits: he lacked duplicity. One can only guess at his reasoning, but plausibly it went something like this:

1. I own a slave.
2. I don't like slavery [Ron Chernow documents this thoroughly].
3. Therefore I should free my slave.

That same clear-eyed assessment of the facts served Grant well as a general. While others were havering about what the enemy might do, or quoting learned authorities about Napoleon, Grant simply observed that he had an army and a duty to use it. He was not a stupid man or an unsubtle tactician, in spite of what later (mostly Southern) writers said, but he didn't delude himself either. War means fighting.

Before and after the Civil War, though, this trait served Grant badly. He consistently lost money by trusting dishonest men. The corruption of his presidency never touched him personally, but he had immense difficulty in understanding that his associates were conniving, scheming, self-seeking manipulators. Over and over, in Ron Chernow's telling, Grant assumed that other men were like him: straightforward, candid, and consistent. It ruined him, eventually, and it did his posthumous reputation no good either.

You'll gather that I liked this book. It's 959 pages long, and I finished it in a couple of days. Like its hero, it has its flaws; but, again like its hero, its flaws are in many ways merely the defects of its virtues.

Chief among these virtues is the astoundingly complete and consistent portrait of Grant as an individual. Ron Chernow deftly picks out the major-key themes that defined Ulysses Grant--his modesty, his quiet humor, his odd combination of clear thinking and naïveté, his battle with alcoholism--and threads them through the narrative. Sometimes it gets repetitive; about the eight time that we're given a dissection of when and why Grant fell off the wagon, for example, we could reasonably take the explanation as a given. But as a character study, it's absolutely convincing.

A character study is what it is, too--not an examination of historical trends or an academic exercise in thesis-proving. Rather, Grant is most certainly an example of the great-man school of history. Some people may well deplore it on those grounds. It's not an unfair point--noble white males have been decidedly oversold in the past--but, as a matter of plain observable fact, sometimes the person on the ground really does make a difference. Grant certainly did; you need only to contrast his behavior with that of other Union generals to see as much.

The occupational hazard that comes with the great-man school of history is a tendency to be a little too kind to your subject. Chernow doesn't fully resist; I think he makes Grant out to be a bit more steely-eyed in the defense of southern freedpeople than he really was, for example. On the other hand, the former "definitive" biography (by William McFeely) was quite certainly far too harsh. Much as with Chernow's other works--you may possibly have heard of this one?--the portrait that emerges is that of a flawed, great, and ultimately sympathetic man.

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I don't usually recommend anything but books in this space, but all the hype about Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War is 100% true. For written Civil War history, try James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom or Bruce Catton's Centennial History of the Civil War.

Book Review: The Republic for Which It Stands

The Republic for Which It Stands: The United states During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896
Richard White
History

On its own terms, The Republic for Which It Stands is a pretty good book. I don't recommend it, because I don't like the terms.

I'll stipulate that it's decently written, with a few flashes of wit. White has a knack for finding the telling quote, the stiletto statistic, and the sardonic aside. He's got a few consistent themes, which he follows through the three decades of his story. He's even got a central character of sorts in William Dean Howells.

He's also got an agenda--actually, several overlapping agendas. Though the language is the vernacular, the text is clearly designed to engage the academic world. The Republic etc. is a book by a professor whose purpose is to advance that professor's theoretical framework and impress other professors. His mission, broadly speaking, is deflationary. He's here to rescue us from the triumphalism of past historians, and get us to embrace a more nuanced understanding of the past, to wit: Everything Sucked.

No, that's now how he'd put it. He'd probably say that the theme of the book is how one vision for the republic--a kind of updated Jeffersonian utopia of independent freemen--failed, and a different one--industrial wage-earner capitalism--took over. But as he writes it, the real message is: Everything Sucked.

I'm not saying that White is wrong. (It's certainly true that the Heroic White Male Theory of History is pretty threadbare.) I'm saying that, right or wrong, he's just not very interesting--not, at any rate, for the general reader. The horse he's beating is dead a long time before the book ends.

You can get a sense of the book's lopsided shape just by looking in the index. Thomas Edison gets roughly the same amount of ink as the immortal Stephen Field. White mainly mentions Edison, in fact, in order to sneer at him. (White is big on sneering.) You don't have to buy into the Edison mythology to note that White is, in fact, far off base. 

Similarly, Mark Twain receives a few transient mentions, but is vastly outdone in word count by such unforgettable luminaries as Frances Willard and Thomas A. Scott. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson gets a couple of pages; federal land policy in the West with respect to the railroads gets a long, slow, screed-y chapter. You'll find precious little in TRfWITS about art, entertainment, engineering, science, music, middle-class culture, the transportation revolution, the first national parks, newspapers, or even the women's suffrage movement. No doubt too much loose talk about such things would have left the readership in danger of forgetting that Everything Sucked.

Historical revisionism, then, is the agenda. White sticks to it with messianic fervor. He's long on facts, but he's not always scrupulous in his treatment of them. For example, in deflating the story of the Cattle Kingdom, he observes that there were always fewer cattle west of the 98th meridian than east of it, except for the "burgeoning herds" of California and Texas. Which is to say, if you exclude the places where there were a lot of cows, there weren't many cows. By that same logic, more people speak English than Mandarin, if you don't count China.

It almost goes without saying that White holds religiously to the Standard Academic Liberal Catechism of History. That, by itself, wouldn't necessarily offend me--it is, to be honest, close enough to my own prejudices. White's technique, however, is to simply decline to engage with any ideas that don't fit the aforementioned Catechism. He just reiterates that Everything Sucked, owing to people and ideas that weren't as enlightened as Richard White. For example, White--quite rightly!--calls out Southern whites for their savage, revolting, contemptible, nauseating, anti-American, and ultimately successful campaign of anti-black terrorism. When it comes to violence done by people whose politics he likes, though, it counts as "achieving retributive justice". Or, at worst, it's rationalized by saying that the perpetrators "had learned, with good reason" to hate their enemies.

(You could make a drinking game out of White's pet phrases, too. Try taking a shot every time you encounter "contract," "the home," and "gendered". You'll be too soused to continue before you finish chapter 3. This probably counts as a win.)

Finally, there's a problem with White's own ostensible thesis. The notion that the later 19th century represented a conflict between two differing visions of the American future implies that there was some chance that the alternative vision--an America of sober independent freemen, where wage labor was but a way station on the way to independent producerhood, without extremes either of poverty or wealth--was anything other than a pipe dream. That's another one of White's unexamined assumptions. Other western nations were going through similar transitions at the same time, and in none of them did anything even remotely resembling this neo-Jeffersonian utopia show any signs of appearing. It's hard to accept this as a fundamental conflict when one of the combatants is a purely notional one.

Oh, and don't forget: Everything Sucked! When White, late in the book, concedes that the economy had grown rapidly for much of the period, it comes as a considerable surprise. Not to worry, though: this is just a way of leading into the depression of 1893. Every anecdote, every statistic, every character portrait, is carefully chosen for its nastiness. Because Everything Sucked.

Well, OK. Quite possibly almost everything did  suck. But this is history without story, history without characters, history shorn of everything interesting. White demonstrates no gift for descriptive writing, doesn't care about narrative structure, and (with a few exceptions) has little insight into into character. I started this book because I wanted to learn some things. I finished the book because I did learn some things. But one of the things I learned is not to read any more books by Richard White.

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White refers many times to William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis. The latter, although also aimed at academics, is a far more enjoyable book.

Part of the reason I was disenchanted with The Republic for Which It Stands is that it's part of the Oxford History of the United States, and the previous volumes that I've read have been outstanding. Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought (1815-1848) won a Pulitzer, and richly deserved it. So did James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom (the Civil War). Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty (1789-1815) was a finalist. I'd recommend all of these without hesitation.

Book Review: Churchill and Orwell

Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom
Thomas E. Ricks
Biography

Churchill and Orwell is an audacious attempt at an interleaved dual intellectual biography, showing the parallels and cross-connections not just of its two subjects' lives, but of their thoughts. It doesn't entirely succeed, but it's a worthwhile attempt.

Churchill and Orwell never met, though they had acquaintances in common. (Given the chummy closeness of the British politico-literate classes, it would have been surprising if they didn't.) Ricks, therefore, tries to highlight two things: the ways in which their personal story arcs reflected each other, and the ways in which their thinking--specifically, both men's hatred of cant and unyielding defense of freedom--ran in parallel. When he sticks to this program, he's doing something really interesting. 

He just doesn't stick to it strenuously enough. Both threads of Churchill and Orwell spend a bit too much time in basic biographical detail, the kind you could get anywhere. It's all interesting, but it's not all deep. Ricks quite rightly magnifies the episodes that he considers most formative--particularly Orwell's experience in the Spanish Civil War and (inevitably) Churchill's triumphal return from political exile from the late 1930s to 1941. But he doesn't entirely solve the problem of making that stuff his exclusive, concentrated focus.

Still, I'd rather read an ambitious book that doesn't quite pull it off than an unambitious success. At its worst, Churchill and Orwell is entirely readable. At its best, it's thought-provoking. If you any interest in the 20th century's intellectual response to the problem of totalitarianism, this is a good book for you. Sadly, the matter is still relevant.

Book Review: Caesar's Last Breath

Caesar's Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us
Sam Kean
Science

This is one of those "a thousand and one fascinating facts about [fill in noun here]" books. I like books of this sort, I like Sam Kean's writing, and I liked this. It's not a thorough scientific study; it won't give you a sound theoretical basis for anything. Instead, Caesar's Last Breath romps lightly but intelligently over the ideal gas law, nitrogen fertilizer, weather, ballooning, fallout, volcanoes--anything at all that fits into this generously-sized topic. This includes fart jokes. The overall style is strongly reminiscent of James Burke's classic TV series Connections, in which pulling on a thread leads on to unexpected places and extraordinary vignettes. What's not to like?

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Much more constricted in scope--but also much more intellectually ambitious--is Steven Johnson's thought-provoking meditation on connectedness, The Invention of Air; the latter overlaps some with Madison Smartt Bell's Lavoisier in the Year One. For more fart jokes, as well for writing that will appeal to anyone who likes Sam Kean's style, read Mary Roach's Gulp.

Book Review: Words on the Move

Words on the Move: Why English Won't--and Can't--Sit Still (Like, Literally)
John McWhorter
Language

All John McWhorter's books are fun reads for language mavens. This one is arguing that there is no single, unalterable standard for what makes "correct" language. There are a lot of interesting examples of how words and pronunciations that we now consider standard were once considered solecisms. There's also a good, non-technical description of how vowel shifts happen, specifically in the context of the zaniness that is English orthography.

I have a few quibbles with specifics--I think McWhorter's discussion of the modern "like" is incomplete, for example. That didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the book. It probably won't change your life, but it's an enjoyable work on a thought-provoking topic. If you're a strict prescriptivist in matters linguistic, though, it may provoke you to wrath. If so, you're in good company--just not very effectual good company.

Book Review: The Race Underground

The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway
Doug Most
History, engineering

I expected to like this book. It has trains, engineering, urban design, history, and a city I'm familiar with. And I did like it. I'd have liked to have liked it more, though.

My problem with The Race Underground is that it reads as though it was written in haste and never received the attention of a first-rate editor. For one thing, the prose is often distinctly middle-schoolish:

"Dling, dling, dling," the bell rang out, and the car pulled away again.

For another thing, there's too much information that's badly presented, ill-phrased, eyebrow-raising, or just plain wrong. None of it is essential information, but there's enough of it to make me uneasy. For example:

• Springfield is not "an hour west of Boston," even today--much less in 1826. (Google gives the distance as 90.9 miles.)
• On page 302, workers are getting paid $2 for an eight-hour day. Four pages later, these same workers at the same time are getting paid $2 for a ten-hour day.
• Most thanks "Several living ancestors of Henry Whitney". This is quite a trick, since Whitney was born in 1836.

There's more, but you get the picture.

So much for the bad. On the plus side, Most has an interesting story to tell--even if it's not nearly as dramatic as the subtitle would suggest--and he tells it at a nice quick pace. The characters are deftly sketched out, their interactions are clear, and it's always easy to tell who's who (this last being an underappreciated feat). It's especially interesting to see the variety of attitudes that 19th-century people had toward the very idea of a subway. It's equally interesting, if mildly depressing, to note that it was no easier to get essential transportation works done then than it is now.

Most importantly, by choosing the two Whitney brothers as the poles of his book, Most gives his narrative a shape and a structure. I'm big on structure, in which I'm in excellent company. I wish Doug Most had given his book another once-over--or that he'd had a really good editor. But the first and most important task for a non-fiction author is to get the reader to want to turn the next page. I'll forgive a lot for that.

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The ne plus ultra of this sub-subgenre is David McCullough's The Great Bridge. Also worth mentioning is Jill Jonnes's Conquering Gotham--twenty years later, crossing the other Manhattan river, and going under rather than over, but very much related.

Book Review: The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
Stephen Greenblatt
Religion, art, philosophy

This is a pretty good, readable account of the purposes to which people have put the Adam and Eve story. (As a person with no religious background whatsoever, I found some of it decidedly odd.) Greenblatt is at his best when he resists the temptation to theorize; happily, the bulk of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve takes the form of good, clear, interesting accounts of what other people have thought.

The account is perhaps a little uneven. There are big chunks devoted to St. Augustine and to John Milton, for example, but there's not much in between them. I didn't mind, particularly--a comprehensive survey would surely have been unreadable--but it's of a piece with Greenblatt's other books, which make it clear that in his mind everything between Rome and the Renaissance was a mistake. The book also digresses from Adam and Eve in spots, but the digressions are interesting, so I didn't mind that either. Pay attention and you may learn a little bit about paleoanthropology, a certain amount about art, a few snippets of poetry, and (in a surprisingly moving closing essay) something significant on chimpanzees.

This is, then, the kind of book that's ideally suited to the pondering classes. It's not a deep philosophical-theological dive. It's not an exhaustive history. You could call it a highlights reel, picking out some key ideas and interpretations of the Adam and Eve fable. No doubt readers who are more theologically sophisticated than I will find little new here, but I quite liked it.

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There's a strong connection between The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve and Born Bad, which I read in 2015. Greenblatt's book is better, though.