DREAMS OF AN IDEALIST

 A review of Thomas J. Knock’s To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (1992)

(Rating 4 of 5)

Thomas Knock’s book To End All Wars is a study of President Wilson’s foreign policy.  There is a bit of a mini-biography in the beginning the traces President Wilson’s intellectual development and rise to the presidency.  Everything else focuses on the President’s work abroad. In his first term the book's focus is on United States’ relationship with other nations in the Americas.  The Knock's focus on second term is partly on World War I but more so the battle to create the League of Nations.  

One of the ironies the Knock points out is: with all the major foreign policy issues that would arise with President Wilson’s time in office, the 1912 election had almost nothing to do with foreign policy.  Knock however is quick to defend Wilson’s own remark about how it would be ironic if foreign policy were to cover his Administration.  Knock argues that Wilson’s comment was based on the content of the election campaign not on his personal study of the issues. 

 

            “The election of 1912, like almost all the others of the preceding century, did not hinge on foreign policy.  President Taft now and then reflected upon his futile exertions for reciprocal trade with Canada and arbitration treaties with the European powers.  Debs viewed foreign policy as irrelevant to working-class interests, just as he had done during the debate over imperialism in 1900.  The Progressive platform advocated free passage through the Panama Canal for American coastwise shippers and recommended the construction of two battleships per year, while the Democratic platform called for independence for the Philippines.  But none of the candidates said much about even these rather innocuous issues.” (pg. 19)

 

Wilson was an idealist but Wilson was not alone in his idealism.  There were many people and movements on both sides of the political spectrum who wanted to change from the theories that used balance of power and national interest in guiding foreign policy, and to replace it with a new internationalism that would embrace the rule of law over nations. 

            “Jane Addams played a key a pivotal in this wing of the internationalist movement; indeed, she personified its purposes and values perhaps better than anyone else.  Dismayed by the failure of the established peace societies to show any muscle, Addams, with the help of Paul Kellogg and Lillian Wald, organized the Woman’s Peace party in January 1915.  The Woman’s Peace party distinguished itself as the first organization of its kind--unlike the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace or the World Peace Foundation--to engage in direct political action (and on a variety of fronts) in order to achieve its goals.” (pg.50-1)

There is very little in this book about World War I as a conflict.  It discusses how Wilson had America enter as an associate belligerent power rather than an ally.  Wilson was disgusted with the allies and their plans to divide up the spoils after the war.  Wilson wished for a new way of doing things and the actions of the allies, to him, represented what was wrong with the world. 

            “In addition to arbitration, Wilson concentrated on disarmament.  Sounding much like a card-carrying member of the American Union Against Militarism, he posed to alternatives to his audiences--disarmament through the League or the eventuality of a national security state.  Should it stand apart, he argued, the United States would have to be ‘physically ready for whatever comes.’” (p.261)

Wilson’s view of what America might become has become reality.  I am not sure his ideas for change were a realistic alternative.  The League was not worth much and even the U.N. that replaced it has some terrible flaws.  It is ironic that the ship Wilson used to go France in was the called the George Washington.  I can think of no president whose views on foreign policy were closer to the exact opposite of Wilson than Washington.  I am not talking about entangled alliances either.  Washington was a realist who felt that nations would only go along with whatever aligned with their interests.  Wilson talked of ‘equity of nations’.  Why would a great power like Great Britain want to be on an equal footing with Luxemburg?  Wilson’s goals were admirable and maybe one day be attainable, but his methods were questionable at best.   

{Video was posted on YouTube by historycomestolife}
 

THE FIRST MODERN PRESIDENT

A review of Edmund Morris’ Theodore Rex (2001)

(Rating 5 of 5)

Morris’ earlier book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt that focused on the mere forty-two years Roosevelt went from birth to being the President of the United States, the fastest rise on record.  The election of 1900 was supposed to silence the rebellious Governor of New York by making him the Vice President.  However when an assassin’s bullet mortally wounded President McKinley fate put Roosevelt in a great position to act.  This book covers the accomplishments and failures of an administration.

The first thing of significance that Roosevelt decided to do was infuriate the entire solid south over their favorite issue: Black people.  Booker T. Washington was the least offensive African-American that white southerners could ask for.  Popular in the African-American community in his own time, Washington has since fallen out of favor after the ‘black power’ movement in the 60s and 70s.  Washington’s philosophy was focused on practical things now, political rights later.  Roosevelt, on race, was enlightened for his time, although not quite with ours.  He tended to agree with society’s view on race (that White people were the best), but Morris points out that Roosevelt viewed was different in that he thought White supremacy would be temporary.  He thought races could become better as time went on and ‘catch up’, and that each individual should be judged on his or her own merits.  And Roosevelt thought absolutely nothing about inviting the accomplished Washington to the White House for dinner, but the South had other ideas. 

             

“The storm squalled louder when reporters discovered that Roosevelt had entertained blacks before, in the gubernatorial mansion at Albany and at Sagamore Hill.  Hate mail and death threats swamped the White House and the Tuskegee Institute.  In Richmond, Virginia, a transparency of the President’s face was hissed off the Bijou screen.  In Charleston, South Carolina, Senator Benjamin R. Tillman endorsed remedial genocide: ‘The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing of a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.’” (p.55)

One has to wonder how Senator Tillman would react after the 2008 election.

Booker T. Washington and Theodore Roosevelt

After infuriating the South the new President decided to take on the seemingly all-powerful trusts.  When Northern Securities Co. threatened to take over all the railroads in the United States, it was President Roosevelt who stood up and stopped it.  Morgan was shocked because no President of the United States had ever stood up to him before.

 “Whatever qualms the President may have had in granting an interview, he had little difficulty handling Morgan.  Or at least Roosevelt chose not to remember any, when recounting the conversation afterward.  Morgan had seemed less furious than puzzled.  Why had the Administration not asked him to correct irregularities in the new trust’s charter?

Roosevelt: That is just we did not want to do.

Morgan: If we had done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up.

Roosevelt: That can’t be done.

Knox: We don’t want to fix it up, we want to stop it.

Morgan: Are you going to attack my other interests, the Steel Trust and others?

Roosevelt: Certainly not—unless we find out that in any case they have done something we regard as wrong.

Alone with Knox later, Roosevelt mused, ‘That is a most illuminating illustration of the Wall Street point of view.’  Morgan could think of the President of the United States only as ‘a big rival operator’ with whom he could cut a deal.” (p.91-2)

Roosevelt vs. the Trusts

Roosevelt would gain a reputation for being pro-labor, but he was not pro-labor so much as he was pro-fairness, and for the last few decades management did not need to negotiate as the government was always there to back them up.  Roosevelt moved the government into a more neutral corner, and allowed for labor to deal in a fairer environment. 

 

“Some weeks after the Coal Strike Commission had begun its work, and anthracite fires were glowing in forty million grates, George Baer encountered Owen Wister and roared at him, ‘Does your friend ever think?’  The railroad executive was still furious over Roosevelt’s ‘imperious’ intervention between free-market forces.  Even the most conservative economic experts were predicting that United Mine Workers would win at least 10 percent wage increase, plus fairer and safer working conditions and the right to arbitrate all disputes.” (p.169)

Roosevelt shared the international stage with a host of other characters.  King Edward VII of England was one who Roosevelt rather liked.  One who Roosevelt despised was King Edward’s psychotic nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.  

“What made Roosevelt wary was Wilhelm’s inclination toward bejeweled fantasy.  ‘He writes to me pretending that he is a descendent of Frederick the Great!  I know better and feel inclined to tell him so.’  The Kaiser liked to dress up like Frederick; when he posed for photographs in his hero’s thigh-boots he revealed rather wide hips.  Roosevelt, alive to any hint of effeminacy, understood that in negotiating with Wilhelm he must at all times remember the importance of show.  It would be foolhardy to humiliate him in the Caribbean.  The Kaiser was enough of a man to stand tough, confidential message—and enough of a woman, presumably, to retreat if it could be made to look glamorous.” (p.186)

Roosevelt’s most famous and long-lasting accomplishment was the Panama Canal.  When Columbia decided to back out of its deal with the United States Roosevelt turned his eye to a little revolution that was going in the province of Panama.  If Columbia did not want to deal than perhaps the revolutionaries would. 

   

“There was no doubt now that the province would soon—must—secede from the Colombian federation.  Bogota’s rejection of the canal treaty, and Washington’s apparent acceptance of that rejection, amounted to dual deathblows to the Istmusenos.  Not only had they lost their long-dreamed waterway, spilling wealth on both sides forever, but their railroad, too, would become redundant, once the Nicaragua Canal opened for business.  With no paved highways, no bridges, little industry, and less commerce, they might just as well revert to jungle living. 

 The President could not help feeling sympathetic.  Here was a little ridge of country, about as wide as southern Vermont, a half-drowned hogback of mostly impenetrable rain forest, walled off from the rest of Colombia by mountains.  Geographically, it belonged to Central America.  Its only surface communications with the southern continent were by sea or mule train.  Letters took fifteen days to get to Bogota, if they got there at all; about the only reliable deliveries were those carrying tax money out of the Isthmus.

 Panama’s political status as a provincia of Colombia was equally tenuous.  It had spontaneously joined the New Granadian Federation in 1821, and seceded with its disintegration in 1830.  Bogota had reasserted control twelve years later, and from then on Panama had alternated stormily between semi-autonomy and subjugation.  Roosevelt counted no fewer than fifty-three isthmian insurrections, riots, civil disturbances, and revolts since 1846.  None had been perpetrated with any American help.  On at least ten occasions (six times at Bogota’s request, twice during his own presidency), Washington had blocked rebel movements and shipments along the Panama Railroad.” (p. 273)

It is easy to see how useful the Panama Canal was

No President who entered the office by means of succession was ever elected—much less nominated—to a term of their own.  Roosevelt would achieve both at the expense of the party elders and conservatives.  Roosevelt would redefine how a President campaigned to retain his office.  After President Jackson, only three incumbent presidents retained their office after a presidential election. (Lincoln, Grant, and McKinley)  In over a hundred years since Roosevelt left office only five have failed to retain it. (Taft,Hoover, Ford, Carter, and Bush I)

   

“In the meantime, the President felt free to set his own Republican agenda, in a series of indiscretions calculated to heave fresh sod on Hanna’s grave.  He preached conservation to the National Wholesale Lumber Dealers’ Association, and political morality to Republican professionals.  He meddled in the gubernatorial politics of New York and Missouri, ordered a draft platform for the convention, considered and approved a mysterious proposal to translate American campaign literature into Bohemian, and grossly flattered the first national assembly of American periodical publishers: ‘It is always a pleasure for a man in public life to meet the real governing classes.’

 Old Guard Republicans worried about the undignified spectacle of a President campaigning for his own office.  He was supposed to put himself in the hands of party professionals.  McKinley had successfully sat out two campaigns at home in Canton, Ohio; here was ‘Teddy’ virtually setting up pre-convention headquarters in the White House.” (p.319)

Roosevelt loved being a member in the party of Lincoln; it was Roosevelt who put Lincoln on the penny.  John Hay, Lincoln’s personal secretary, who was U.S. Secretary of State when Roosevelt took office, gave him a special ring to where at his inauguration in 1905.   

“Close observers noticed a strange, heavy gold ring on his third finer.  It contained a strand of Abraham Lincoln’s hair.  John Hay had given it to him with a request that he wear it when he was sworn in: ‘You are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln.’” (p.376)

Another great Roosevelt achievement that occurred in Kittery, Me, despite the claim that it took place in Portsmouth NH.  In Kittery, Roosevelt mediated the settlement of the result of the war between Russia and Japan.  Roosevelt had a great respect for Japan and could not stand the Tsar or his government.  The great challenge for Roosevelt was having to deal with a Tsar that did not want to deal with reality. 

  

“Roosevelt detected a resurgence of the Russian lack of logic that had so infuriated him with Count Casini.  His Majesty would not give up Sakhalin, yet Sakhalin, was already occupied by the Japanese.  Russia was not conquered—she had merely been beaten in every land battle of the war, and lost almost all of her navy.  He soil was undefiled, but if she did not soon treat with Japan, she could say good-bye to eastern Siberia.” (p.410)

Treaty of Portsmouth

The one sour spot on Roosevelt’s record was his action during the Brownsville Affair.  Some African-American infantrymen were accused of murdering a bartender and injuring a cop.  When none came forward Roosevelt discharged the entire black regiment for engagement in a ‘conspiracy of silence’.  These orders would not be reversed until the Nixon administration.   

“Roosevelt remained silent.  He closeted himself with the original Brownsville report of Major Blocksom, rereading it carefully.  Its findings did not alter his conviction as to the guilty of the men.  But after studying another view of the case, by a retired Union Army general, he betrayed the first trace of regret over the hastiness of his action.  He wrote Taft a confidential note, saying he was now ‘uncertain whether or not the officers of the three colored companies… are or are not blamable,’ and asking for ‘a thoro investigation’ to clarify his thinking.”  (472-3)

            Roosevelt’s crowning achievement on his presidency was the ‘Great White Fleet’.  Ever since he was a boy he loved his country's Navy.  He wrote the Naval War of 1812 and served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy as an adult.  After Roosevelt was done the U.S. Navy had become the third best in the world ranking only under Great Britain and Germany.  The tour of the Great White Fleet confirmed it. 

“Roosevelt considered the options, and his own as President and Commander-in-Chief.  He had just seventeen months left in office, and wanted to make a grand gesture of will, something that would loom as large historically in his second term as the Panama Canal coup had in his first.  What could be grander, more inspirational to the Navy, and to all Americans, than sending sixteen great white ships halfway around the world—maybe even farther?” (p.494) 

Great White Fleet

 Morris’ book is very well done.  It has a great following narrative and would be enjoyable to someone who knows a lot about history or a causal reader.  In terms of style I really like that he includes his pictures within the text not in a separate section like many other books do.  I really like the capitalization.  Morris is thorough back who capitalizes titles, as I believe we should.  I would recommend this book to anyone.

{Video is from TR's inauguration in 1905}
 

An Incredible American Decade

A review of Nathan Miller's New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (2003)

(Rating 5 of 5)

As I continue to march through the ages, I now come across Nathan Miller's guide to America in the 1920s. It was a decade that saw an incredible transformation of a nation and a people. This was the era where the motorized car did away with the horse and buggy forever. Sandwiched in between two world wars, the 1920s buzzed with excitement and wonder about the new age. This was the first decade that American women were able to vote in Federal elections. In this era, flight would start to become a more mainstream way of traveling and the skies of the major cities would see the rise of the new incredible feet of engineering: the Skyscraper. With the new popular HBO series Boardwalk Empire now heading into its second season, I would recommend this book as a great introductory guide. It presents a world where alcohol was illegal yet almost everyone was still drinking.

Leadership in the Twenties was lacking in comparison to the nation's first two decades in the twentieth century. The first fifth of the century the nation was led by the inspirational leadership of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and the president who was not as successful, William H. Taft—was a great man in his own right. The Twenties saw the leadership of the pathetic, to the boring, and ended with a disaster. Warren G. Harding started the decade off with his election which was the first time in American history in which women participated. It was unfortunate that such a sad president was the result of this historic occasion. Harding was not himself a bad man but he knew that he was not qualified for the job that the people had elected him to do.


(President Warren G. Harding, not that intelligent)

“'John, I can't make a damn thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side and they seem to be right and then—God!--I talk to the other side and they seem just as right, and here I am where I started. I know somewhere there is a book that will give me the truth, but hell, I couldn't read the book. I know somewhere there is an economist who knows the truth, and I don't know where to find him, and haven't the sense to know and trust him when I find him. God, what a job!'” (p.88)

(President Calvin Coolidge, smarted than Harding but the personality of a rock)

Calvin Coolidge was smart but dull. He was known as the last nineteenth century president. It was under his leadership that the country went through great prosperity in the heart of the decade. Despite great economic success President Coolidge governed over a nation that had a growing cancer. This cancer, one of the nasty aspects of the 1920s, was raised to height of its power during the decade. The cancer was the hateful Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was more than just a terrorist organization. It was a hate group that extended its political power into the halls of Congress.

“Both Texas and Indiana were represented in the U.S. Senate by Klansmen, about seventy-five members of Congress owed their seats to the Klan, and the governors of Indiana, Georgia, Alabama, California, and Oregon had been elected with its support. In Oregon, where there were over 100,000 Klansmen in a population of 850,000, the Klan elected the mayor of Portland and would have succeeded in outlawing Catholic schools except for a ruling by the Supreme Court.” (p.145)

(Klan march on Washington)

Miller describes how the nation really changed in the Twenties was in the rise of the automobile. Although invented prior, the automobile really had its era begin in the Twenties. Miller compares the auto's impact to similar technological impacts such as television in the 1950s and the Internet in the 1990s. And the man who was at the front of the automobile's takeover of the American streets was Henry Ford with his Model T.


(Ford and the T)

“The Model T offered a combination of innovation and reliability, ruggedness and power never before seen in a reasonably priced automobile. Although derided as the Tin Lizzie, the car was built strong, yet light-weight chrome-vanadium steel, which Ford experts perfected after their chief picked up a sample from a wrecked French racer. Because of its lightness the car got twenty-five miles on a gallon of gasoline compared to the engine, which gave it a top speed of forty miles per hour, semiautomatic planetary transmission, and magneto, which supplied power for the spark and lights while doing with heavy storage batteries, were all new designs.” (p.180)

What Ford did was not only make great cars, but he made them affordable. Ford make them affordable by making them available. He made them available by creating the assembly line, in doing this he revolutionized the industry and made cars affordable to the common man and the common woman.

“'The man who places a part doesn't fasten it,' exulted Henry Ford. 'The man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut does not tighten it.' He boasted that any job could now be learned in little time, with nearly half requiring only a single day. Labor costs were reduced because there was no need for skilled workers. Before the introduction of the assembly line, it took twelve hours to build a car; in 1914, the time dropped to ninety-three minutes.” (p.181-2)

(The Assembly Line)

The African-American community, oppressed with discrimination and segregation legally with terrorism and lynching illegally, found a method of resistance and cultural empowerment in the Harlem Renaissance. The center of African-American culture, Harlem, would be the intellectual breeding ground for the Civil Rights Movement that would, on the other side of the century, change the world.


(One of the great American poets, Langston Hughes)

“'On a bright December morning in 1921,' recalled poet Langston Hughes, 'I came up out of the subway at the 135th and Lenox into the beginnings of the Negro Renaissance.' While young white writers found their Mecca in Paris, Harlem was the center of the cultural and intellectual life of black America during the Twenties. If you were black and you wanted to write, you came to Harlem; if you were black and wanted to dance or sing, you came to Harlem; if you were black and you wanted to effect social change, you came to Harlem. Harlem was more than a geographic location—it was the soul and heart of African-American culture.” (p.220)

What most everyone remembers about the Twenties is the failed experiment of Prohibition. Not only did the government fail to stop people drinking, but by making drinking a crime they created a disrespect of the average person for law enforcement. It made heroes of bootleggers and other celebrity criminals. It helped create the rise of the mobster and the criminal rackets that would infiltrate local governments. Organized crime was already on the rise but the coming of Prohibition feed the beast and made it grow faster than it would have naturally.


(Al Capone, top mobster)

“Some of those involved showed a genius for business organization and made fortunes. Every major American city had its own underworld gang that peddled beer and booze and carved out territories for its distribution. Big Bill Dwyer was a longshoreman on the Brooklyn docks in 1920 and, three years later, was the largest importer of whiskey in the nation. Waxey Gordon—ne Irving Wexler—began his career as a pickpocket on the Lower East Side but, by the mid-1920s, owned a pair of skyscraper hotels, a brewery in New Jersey, and had an interest in a large distillery in upstate New York. Dutch Schultz controlled the beer business in upper Manhattan and the Bronx. In Detroit, the Purple Gang, a loose coalition of Jewish groups, liquidated the competition. In Boston, Charles Soloman assumed the role of boss; in Philadelphia, there was Max 'Boo Boo' Hoff; in Denver, Joseph Roma; in Cleveland, the Mayfield Road Mob. None had the power and influence of Chicago's Al Capone.” (p. 301)

Miller describes the rise of the modern celebrity obsessed culture that would get its first character with Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh was made famous by the first solo flight across the Atlantic in which he made aviation history and became a national icon. The celebrity culture would also celebrate Babe Ruth the famous baseball slugger.


(Charles Lindbergh)


(Babe Ruth)

“Charles Lindbergh arrived on the scene as a culture of celebrity was taking root in America—a culture encouraged by the flashy new tabloid newspapers that were revolutionizing American journalism. Scandal, sex, and crime were the lifeblood of the tabloids—or half size—newspapers designed for subway straphangers. The New York Daily News was the first and most successful with a daily circulation of over a million copies. William Randolph Hearst's Daily Mirror and the Graphic—known as the Pornographic—imitated their rival with varying degrees of success. The taboos of genteel journalism had already been broken by the yellow journalism of Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer at the turn of the century, but the tabloids went even further with in presenting journalism as entertainment, gossip as news, the trivial and salacious as the drama of life—a trend that sent quality journalism into full retreat and has since taken over television.” (p. 329)

Second to Prohibition, the one thing most people remember about the 1920s is the way in which it ended. Black Thursday October 29, 1929 the day the stocks started to drop fast. What I found most interesting was the way Miller reminds his readers how the Great Depression came in waves. At first, on October 30, it did not seem so bad. But as the stocks continued to fall, banks began to close and firms followed which led to mass unemployment without any protection to the unemployed from the waves of the market. President Hoover had no idea how to act.

“Americans were puzzled—and then deeply angered—that a president who handed out relief to corporations could ignore the misery of people grubbing in garbage cans for food. No leader who permitted such a policy could maintain the confidence of his people. The Democrats won great gains in the 1930 off-year elections, including control of both houses of Congress. Hoover saw his name transformed into a symbol of derision: encampments of shacks erected by the homeless on the edges of the great cities were 'Hoovervilles,' broken-down automobiles pulled by mules were 'Hoover wagons,' and empty pockets turned inside out were 'Hoover flags.' He was the butt of a hundred bitter jokes. When he dedicated a monument and a twenty-one-gun salute boomed out, an old man was supposed to have said: 'By gum, twenty-one chances and they missed him.'” (p.380)

(President Herbert Hoover)

Miller does a great job at bringing the 1920s and the America of that era to his readers. My only one complaint was like like the Restless Decade there are no visuals (photos, political cartoons, or election maps). Nevertheless this is a great book that I would recommend to anyone with an interest in this time period or just likes the show Boardwalk Empire.

{Video from the hit HBO series Boardwalk Empire}

A BOLD AGE OF LIONS AND SCHOLARS

A review of John Milton Cooper Jr.'s Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920 (1990)

(Rating 5 of 5)

Now my march through the ages brings me to the early decades of the twentieth century. It was an era of dynamic political leadership and technological innovation of a maturing nation trying to figure out its destiny. This was a time where old ideas were being challenged and America was going to fight in an a great international conflict known as World War I. In the aftermath of the war the United States would decide if it was going to play a leadership role in the world. And that decision would to go in the opposite direction of world leadership, preferring instead retreat and withdrawal.

The century began with the reelection of the last Civil War veteran to occupy the White House. William McKinley, the 25th President of the United States, would win his re-election against William Jennings Bryan. Months into his new term, McKinley would be assassinated, and his cowboy vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, would assume the office.

One of the main themes of Copper's book is how rich America was in leadership during this time period. Each political party produced an incredible president who would help reshape the nation and the office of the presidency. The Republicans produced Theodore Roosevelt by accident. Placed in the vice presidency in an effort to get rid of him, Roosevelt would become our most dynamic president ever. No vice president who assumed the presidency had ever even been re-nominated, but Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 would go on to win a term in his own right due to his incredible performance in the White House. The Democrats produced Woodrow Wilson an academic who gained the office because of a scism within the Republican Party between Roosevelt and Taft. Wilson had studied the American political system his entire life and was about to make theory reality. He would bring back the tradition of presidents delivering the State of the Union address in person*. He would hold regular press conferences and his success with the Congress in producing legislation that was lasting, such as the Federal Reserve, dwarfed that of his predecessors.

“It was ironic that Roosevelt resembled Jefferson in his intellectual range and depth. There was no predecessor whose legacy and influence, particularly on states' rights and the support of limited governmental responsibilities, the new president disliked more. As a self-proclaimed Hamiltonian, Roosevelt meant to exalt the power and prestige of the federal government. As a self-anointed heir of Lincoln and Civil War Republicanism, he yearned to preserve his party's fidelity to nationalism and centralization. But the resemblance to Jefferson was more than intellectual. Roosevelt likewise quickly became a patron of science, scholarship, art, and literature. Prominent among the Roosevelts' frequent and well-publicized guests were the painters John La Farge and Frederic Remington, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the historian James Ford Rhodes, and the Western novelist Owen Wister. The president promoted scientific research thought the Smithsonian Institution, which had been founded in 1846, and boosted public art by commissioning Saint-Gaudens to redesign the nation's coins. In all, through his public pronouncements, associations, and private encouragement and criticism, Roosevelt made himself a cultural arbiter such as the United States had rarely seen before in a president.” (p.36)

(Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President)


(Woodrow Wilson, 28th President)

Even the president who served in the middle of the two giants was a great intellectual named William H. Taft. Despite being a one-term president who was incapable of using the pulpit of the presidency as his two rivals could, Taft not only continued with the trust busting started by Roosevelt but he also had surpassed him. Taft even beat John D. Rockefeller's great machine, Standard Oil. One of the reasons Presidents Roosevelt and Taft had been so successful is they did not take permenant sides when it came to management and labor. They sided with whoever they felt was in the right.

“The greed of the rich and the envy of the poor repelled him equally, and during the 1890s he had repeatedly feared incipient social revolution. Roosevelt had then stood unhesitatingly with pro-business Republicans against radicals and Bryanite Democrats, whom he had luridly likened to the zealots of the French Revolution. Yet he had never believed that the cure for ills caused by the growth of big business and industry lay in choosing sides. In 1894, Roosevelt had told his friend Henry Cabot Lodge that to control mobs he would send troops who were 'not over-scrupulous about bloodshed; but I know that banker, the merchant and the railroad king well too, and they also need education and sound chastisement.'” (p.37-8)

Cooper points out that in addition to the presidents, on the next level on the American political ladder, the men who lost the presidential elections were great men as well. William Jennings Bryan was a legend in his own day who had helped reshape the way presidential candidates campaign. Charles Evans Hughes would go on to become chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. Only Al Parker, who was nominated in 1904, did not go on to become a legend. There were also incredible senators and governors during this period such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Robert La Follette. Among the African-American community men such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois were continuing the debate that they had begun against each other and for the African-American community in the 1890s. And there were also women such as Jane Addams who was a pioneer in the area of social work.


(Jane Addams)


(W.E.B. Dubois)

Copper also discuss the average American whose life was increasingly changing because of technology. The rise of America's past time and the celebrity status of baseball greats such as Babe Ruth and the more infamous 'Shoeless' Joe Jackson, who was involved in the Black Sox scandal that tainted the 1919 World Series.

But the biggest event of these decades was World War I. America tried to stay out of the war 'over there' for the longest time but unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmerman note would tip America into the conflict. Led by their commander, General 'Blackjack' Pershing, American soldiers would conduct themselves valiantly. Having to go through the horror of war they helped push the tide and were ultimately responsible for victory over the Empire of the Kaiser.


(General Pershing)

“But combat was not an unrelieved horror. Because most American troops saw action in the summer and fall counteroffensives of 1918, they experienced the exhilaration of a war of movement. World War I produced its share of colorful tales of fighting and inspiring stories of heroism, such as Corporal, later, Sergeant York. Equally celebrated heroes had already emerged from the ranks of aviators. The minuscule but highly publicized air war had long provided both the movement missing on the ground and the opportunity for knight-like individual combat. Before 1917, enough Americans had joined the French air arm to form the nucleus of the Army Air Corps in France. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, a former automobile racer who went to France as General Pershing's chauffeur and learned to fly there, downed twenty-six German aircraft and later became a pioneer in civilian aviation.” (p.282)

Instead of the America embracing its role as a leading world power, the United States would ultimately shrink from its responsibility. Woodrow Wilson would fail at what had mattered to him most, the League of Nations. This travesty would do a great deal of damage to America's next generation. John Milton Cooper does a great job telling the story of the early twentieth century America. I highly recommend this book to anyone.

*Presidents Washington and Adams had done it, but Jefferson had ended the practice.

{Video was posted by ryanatallahdotcom on YouTube}