No comments about Journal of Colonel George Washington, Commanding a Detachment of Virginia Troops.

3 comments about The Presidency of Franklin Pierce (American Presidency Series).

1. THE AUTHOR, LARRY GARA, SETS THE STAGE FOR FRANKLIN PIERCE'S EMERGENCE TO THE PRESIDENCY BY DELVING INTO THE POLITICAL SURROUNDINGS OF THE 1840'S AND '50S. PIERCE WAS AN OBSCURE CONGRESSMAN WHO SAID NO TO BECOMING PRESIDENT. HIS WIFE SUFFERED FROM DEPRESSION.THE FAMILY EXPERIENCED THE TRAGIC DEATHS OF FAMILY MEMBERS AND PIERCE DRANK A LITTLE TOO MUCH. THE FAMILY PROBLEMS WERE ENOUGH, BUT BECAUSE CONGRESS' VIEW OF THE PRESIDENCY BEING THE PERSON WHO EXECUTED CONGRESS' WISHES, THE TRUE LEADERS OF THE TIMES COULD NOT GET ELECTED. FACTIONS ABOUND!! THE NEW YORK HARDS AND SOFTS, DEMOCRATS AND WHIGS, THE NEW REPUBLICAN MOVEMENT, FREE SOIL, THE NATIVISTS AND MANY MORE SPLINTERED GROUPS THAT CAUSED SETIONALISM. THERE WERE NO MAJORITIES. PIERCE WAS DOOMED TO FAILURE. IF YOU ENJOY AMERICAM POLITICS OF THE 19TH CENTURY THIS BOOK WILL PROVIDE GREAT INCITE.



2. This is very dry reading. As well, there is almost no mention of Pierce! Instead, the author focuses on the issues/characters that shaped the times. These are crucial to understanding the political atmosphere surrounding Pierce's presidency, but a biography should focus on the individual. We learn next to nothing about Pierce.



3. The years before 1860 were a period of increasing cold war in the United States. From the perspective of over a century after the conclusion of the internal war, we tend to lose the knowledge that there was more to the separatism than the disagreement concerning slavery. While the North/South dispute over slavery was paramount, other regional differences such as the role of the frontier led to a political fragmentation that prevented any faction from being able to govern and solve the growing problems. Several new parties arose while the formerly powerful Whig party was dying. This fragmentation is the main theme of this book and Gara states it very well. With the modern emphasis on the slavery question, the other divisive forces in the nation are often overlooked, which leads to historical inaccuracy.
   Gara explains in great detail how the political fragmentation prevented any real attempt to resolve the issues. One point in particular that is often ignored is the three-fifths representation. For census purposes a slave was considered to be three-fifths of a person, even though they were also property. This absurdity caused a great deal of resentment in free states, as it concentrated more political power in the slave states than the size of the free population should have allowed. This caused more representatives to be elected from the southern states, which altered the outcome of some of the votes in favor of the south. Deeply resented by many in the north, it points out the inherent absurdities of slavery and is well documented and explained.
   The federal government was still largely a weak institution with most of the power held by the states. With all of these problems, it would have taken an extraordinary president to alter the course of history. Franklin Pierce was no such man, and the best that can be said is that he muddled through without any great catastrophes. More than anything else, it was his handsome, presidential appearance that earned him the white house. His rise to the presidency was largely an accident, as he was a compromise candidate after the better candidates were somehow disqualified. His administration also began on a tragic note, when one of the Pierce children was killed before the eyes of his father and mother. Being largely untested on the national political arena, Pierce also wore a colossal political tin ear, often making basic errors that made things worse.
   Given all of these problems, it is surprising that the Pierce administration did as well as it did. As the author points out, his presidency is ranked somewhere above a failure, but nowhere near a success. In reading about all of the problems of the country at that time, it is hard to see where a great deal of improvements could have been made. The country was expanding rapidly and the industrial revolution with associated social changes was just beginning. Slavery was a historical anachronism, clearly in the process of being eliminated and had it not become the symbol of the rights and tradition of the southern states, it would have naturally ceased to exist. Even the ardent proponents of slavery referred to is as the "peculiar institution."
   In retrospect, the forces that led to the regional split were so powerful that it is hard to envision any way that it could not have led to a civil war. Those forces were stronger than any man or political party and in this book you learn about the actions of a man who landed in a job beyond his talents and yet avoided being a total failure. Given the complexity of the circumstances, his time as president was close to the best that could have been done.

5 comments about Woodrow Wilson (Penguin Lives).

1. If you don't know much more about Woodrow Wilson than an overview of the important events of his life, this book isn't going to help much. There's very little political analysis, almost no attempt to portray what diffiulties Wilson needed to overcome, and no passion at all in the writing. Actually this book feels a lot like a high school term paper that someone knew they had to write and just wanted to turn in for a passing grade. Auchincloss talks a bit about the two Wilsons (one good one bad) and hints at Wilson's dependance on women, but neither of these positions is fleshed out or used consistently. Maybe Woodrow Wilson's life is just too large for a book this small.



2. This is a reasonable brief introduction to the career of Woodrow Wilson. His upbringing and early academic career are disposed of in short order in the first chapter. Then one chapter deals with his presidency of Princeton, one deals with (or covers the same time period as) his governorship of New Jersey, and the remaining seven cover his Presidency, all in an engaging and chatty style.

   The book's strongest point is describing what happened, although even here there are some strange omissions. It mentions his break with Hibben in Princeton without describing the circumstances, noting that Hibben went on to succeed Wilson as President of the university, or exploring the parallels with his later breaks with House and Tumulty. All of this could have been covered in a single paragraph. In addition, there is no mention of the country's Caribbean adventures in 1915; none of the Red Scare of 1919; and, probably worst of all, nothing about the Sedition Acts and the imprisonment of Eugene Debs, and no discussion of why America behaved worse towards its own citizens during and after the war than either Britain or France did. The first time the book mentions the League of Nations, it doesn't clearly describe what its purpose was (and it would have been nice if it had mentioned that it was actually the idea of the British Foreign Secretary, not Wilson). Still, as an overview of the events of Wilson's life it hits most of the main points.

   The book has less to offer on why things happened. In trying to explain why Colonel Harvey picked Wilson for Governor of New Jersey, it gives two pages on what Harvey got wrong about Wilson, but nothing on what he got right. It also takes at face value the idea that Wilson was offered the governorship "without ... even lifting a hand". It describes Wilson's feeling of betrayal by House when he returned to Paris in March 1919, but not what House had actually done!

   As noted by another reviewer, the book also fails to put Wilson's international achievements in a broader context. His aim of a just, lasing peace with Germany failed; his aim of encouraging self-determination among smaller nations succeeded, and he is still looked on as a hero in many smaller nations of Europe. Some more insight and context, and a more detailed assessment of his legacy, would have been welcome.

   Woodrow Wilson was a fascinating and controversial President. This book helps explain -- and to an extent shares -- the fascination, but it doesn't do enough to help the reader assess the controversies. Still, it's an reasonable starting point for people who know little about Wilson.

   One final comment: I'd also have been interested to know how the author is related to the Gordon Auchincloss who attended the Versailles conference -- it's not that common a name, after all.




3. Of all the men who have tried to fill the shoes of Washington and Jefferson, who was the worst? Our current crop of "Hallmarxist" professors consider anyone who would assign Wilson and FDR to the lower depths as deserving a quick commitment with Ezra Pound into loony bin of St. Elizabeth's, and for anyone to hold Lincoln among the worst invites being regarded a simple crank. But Thomas DiLorenzo's _The Real Lincoln_ has finally exposed Old Abe as well worthy of infamy, and Jim Powell's _FDR's Folly_ has corrected the omission of Murray Rothbard's _America's Great Depression_ by exposing FDR as really nothing more than - pardon the pun - Hoover on wheels.
   
   This leaves only Wilson, the man whom Mencken denominated _Doctor Dulciferous_ for his cooing blovations. The lack of a good biography of Wilson that reveals him for what he was - our worst president - or at least a book as good as DiLorenzo's on Lincoln- is not remedied by Louis Auchincloss (hereafter LA).
   
   LA for the first 64 pages gets his facts roughly right and his conclusions quite wrong. For example:
   - LA calls Wilson's claims to being a Southerner "factitious". This is putting it mildly: Wilson in his heart was an utter New England barn burner and witch-hunter, oblivious to the positive achievements of Calvinism (Milton, Rembrandt, and the Jansenist Pascal) and a perfect specimen of non-conformism's worst faults: obstinacy, a cocksure belief in one's moral correctness, a deluded sense that he was the agent of the Almighty, and that his opponents were tools of the Devil.
   -- Wilson's view of blacks can only be called sheer racist, even in a time when "racist" has become a word of cultural socialist McCarthyism - yet LA offers the lame excuse that everyone else from his background thought the same.
   - LA faults Wilson for appointing an Anglophile to the Court of St. James, yet LA's own facts prove Wilson the most Anglophilic of all. He tried to remake Princeton into the image of Oxford and Cambridge. He wanted American government to resemble Westminster, knowing full well that in Britain today the Prime Minister is a dictator, free of any checks. Wilson wanted the same for the President in a manner that would make even a Gaullist blush. Indeed, one of Wilson's many bad legacies is a chief executive out of control. Mencken was right to observe that the US State Dept. was simply an antechamber to the Foreign Office in Whitehall.
   - LA mentions Wilson's stokes, one after another it seems, and tries to blame them, wrongly, for his manifold shortcomings. In fact, I have yet to see in print what seems quite possible: That Wilson - and for that matter Theodore Roosevelt - were really unhinged.
   
   Wilson's 2nd worst foreign policy blunder was his treatment of Latin Americas - a treatment inept when it wasn't contemptible. LA tries to make Bryan the fall guy for Wilson's folly, and considers the Villa fiasco as "necessitated". I pray the Mexicans now flooding into the country have short memories. When it comes to economics, LA really shows himself wanting. He considers the Federal Reserve Act a "great success", giving us an "elastic currency", when in fact the fiscal solvency of the US -- relatively sound after Hamilton's schemes were put down and prior to Wilson - has been a shambles ever since. Need proof? Check the inflation monitor at the Commerce Dept website and see what a dollar in 1950 is worth now. And thank Woodrow Wilson. Desperate for something good to say about Wilson's domestic turn at the helm, LA chooses his tariff reduction - only on the same page to state, rightly, that the taxpayer was now to be equally robbed by the new Federal Income Tax (also a Wilson deed), that tariff reform was aborted by the Great War, and that it was repealed in 1922.
   
   LA never mentions Wilson's lasting effect on domestic US politics: Completing the work of Lincoln in the destruction of the Jeffersonian party in the US (I'm grateful to Thomas Dilorenzo and Clyde Wilson for this insight). Prior to Wilson, we had such a party, the Democrat Party - with support for minimal government, subsidiarily, states' rights, low tariffs, originalist construction of the Constitution, Anglophobia, gold standard (at least until Bryan), staying out of European affairs, and a healthy suspicion of banks. Wilson turned this party into a socialist party. In fact, now we really only have the choice between two socialist parties: The Hamiltonian version of the Republicans, and the 100 proof offered by the Dimmycrats.
   
   After page 64, LA offers a complete whitewash. Wilson's utter disaster - still visited upon all of us, and re-uttered in the inaugural addresses of Kennedy I and Bush II - was, or course, his entry into World War I, with all the suffering that this decision caused. LA can only find sympathy for Wilson's views, and wastes a whole chapter of this short book demonizing Lodge. I am reminded by the estimable Clyde Wilson (no relation, certainly!) that Woodrow Wilson was our only Ph. D. president. LA offers nothing better than the socialist and PHuddy-Duddy camorra presiding in our Potemkin universities
   
   So, as we wait for a good biography, anyone who really wants to know the truth of the Old Fool should save his money and buy instead Jim Powell, _Wilson's War_, and Thomas Fleming, _The Illusion of Victory_.
   
   Two stars for being mercifully brief with readable prose.



4. Enjoyed the taped version of WOODROW WILSON by
   Louis Auchincloss . . . it is a brief account of our 28th President
   that gave me insight into how a professor and then college
   administrator could make the leap into politics . . . hearing it
   reminded me a bit the Classic Comics that I read when
   younger, in that much detail was left out . . . however, you
   got just enough information . . . I'd recommend this book
   by Auchincloss, especially for the fascinating tale it told
   of how when Wilson became sick, his wife practically ran the nation.



5. In the annals of American history, few presidents have a more interesting story to tell than Woodrow Wilson. Despite this truth, Wilson's legacy has produced such a terrible collection of biographies. This book is a continuation of that standard of trampling the legacy of the greatest idealist to reside in the White House.
   
   While this book is intended to be a brief biography of Wilson, this characteristic would seem to cause more focus on landmarks in Wilson's life. This does not stop Louis Auchincloss from going off topic for pages at a time. The author repeatedly references Bill Clinton, whose most striking similarity is being a democrat. There also seems to be a lot of speculation on the part of the author, such as speculating that Wilson's childhood illnesses were psychosomatic (p. 7). Like the original source of this fact, he lacks tangible support for his agrument. It is nothing more than an educated guess. Just like the guess that Wilson suffered from dyslexia (p. 6). The chapters on World War I are clumsy because of the digressions. The better chapters focus on Wilson's first and second wives, as well as his years at Princeton.
   
   I initially thought the author loathed Woodrow Wilson, but softened in this stance as the book progressed. Still I wondered why one would write a book about a seemingly undesirable topic? Not that I expected much from this book, but I, like many readers of history, am still waiting for an outstanding biography on Woodrow Wilson.

1 comments about Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady (Modern First Ladies).

1. Gil Troy's book is well researched and written. It is full of interesting insight and wit. Buy and read it today. Support quality historical writing!

1 comments about Benjamin Franklin (Lives and Legacies).

1. Professor Gaustad has written another outstanding biography in the Lives and Legacies Series by Oxford University Press. I recommend highly his biographies of Roger Williams and Benjamin Franklin. While geared towards "young adult" readers, anyone interested in American history should read this book. Franklin was the prototypical American whose ideas and actions shaped so much of our republic's early development.
   
   It is not a "kids" book. It combines first-rate scholarship in a concise (125 pages) format with clear, non-academic writing. This makes it accessible to readers of all levels and ages. It should be used in high school and under-graduate colleges and universities. While recent commendable biographies of Franklin by H.W. Brands, Edmund Morgan and Walter Issacson abound, this one is the best!
   
   I hope that Professor Gaustad can contribute another work to the Lives and Legacies series. We need a new biography of William Penn.

No comments about The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, Volume 13: 1 June-31 August 1793 (Papers of George Washington).

No comments about Bull Moose on the Stump: The 1912 Campaign Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt.

4 comments about King Zog of Albania: Europe's Self-Made Muslim Monarch.

1. Obscure subject, but a wonderful book -- thorough, well-researched, and well-written. If you're a history buff, this is a must-read.



2. In hindsight, it was probably inevitable that King Zog of Albania would be driven from his throne in 1939. A British diplomat who worked with Zog found him amusing, but believed the King would probably end up assassinated. The conditions in Albania made that a very likely fate. It is a time and place well described in this groundbreaking biography of King Zog written by Jason Tomes.
   
   When Albania broke from the Ottoman Empire in 1913, it was a poor and rural country. The Ottomans had forbidden the teaching of the Albanian language in the schools and many of the people were illiterate. There had been very little done in recent years to develop the country and it was isolated from neighboring Europe by its mountainous terrain and perhaps because it was largely a Muslim country.
   
   The Ottoman system of benign neglect did nothing to discourage the clannishness of the Albanians. Europeans were skeptical that there could even be an independent Albania. Zog saw that it was necessary to make Albanians into citizens, instead of clansmen. This would not be an easy task. The "average Albanian knows nothing about nationality," Zog said. "He has always looked up to the head of his tribe, or his Bey, as the supreme authority."
   
   Ahmet Zog was born in 1895 in Mati environs. He spent some of his adolescence in Istanbul, soaking up the political atmosphere of the Young Turks. He returned when Albania was liberated and later fought alongside the Austrians against the Italians who were occupying part of Albania. The Austrians, who had designs on Albania, considered the young chieftain useful enough to keep in Vienna in case they would need him after the First World War. Later, Zog staged a coup d'état with the help of Yugoslavia and, during his reign, he made Albania into an Italian satellite state.
   
   Zog picked up foreign languages and some sophistication that many of countrymen didn't have, but he also needed to maintain his Albanian roots. Zog was born the son of a Mati Chieftain and his clansmen were his power base. As described in Edith Durham's "High Albania," northern Albania was the land of the blood feud, a place reminiscent of the West Virginia of the Hatfields and the McCoys, where people asked not what their neighbor died of, but who had killed him. His clansmen were both credits and debits to him. It was with their help (and well distributed gold) that Zog was able to overthrow the republican government of Fan Noli. Yet, even when he was trying to introduce laws outlawing blood feuds, he was obligated to participate in them to keep face with his clansmen.
   
   The story of Zog's reign is mostly one of manipulation by the Italians. The Greeks and Serbs were both interested in carving up Albania, but the Italians were the neighbors with the most money. The Italians built roads and sold the Albanians weapons (often hopelessly obsolete) and made Zogist Albania into a puppet state. For his part, Zog got a good deal of loot, including funds for "a white silk tunic with gold frogging, epaulettes...a white fur hat with plume, a black cloak, and white patent leather boots with gold spurs." Besides looking the part of a king, he became rich as one by often getting the better part of a deal, as when he pocketed 300,000 lira selling the Italians inaccessible forestlands in Mati. He always regarded refusing a bribe as looking a gift horse in the mouth, Tomes writes. After Zog was exiled from Albania, he moved from country to country burdened with the many cases of gold that he had acquired during his regime.
   
   Besides being a biography of a scoundrel dominated by an even bigger scoundrel (Mussolini), Tomes gives some interesting descriptions of Albania in the 1920s and 1930s. He describes the capital of Tirana as city that smelt of mutton and coffee grounds, which was covered in a cloud of dust in the summer and slimy mud in the winter, and where school children were required to recite a catechism that included the lines "where does the mud seem sweeter than honey? In Albania." Many Albanians were more Turkish in manner than the Turks in Atatürk's new republic, yet they were still drawn to European and American culture. Tomes writes about moviegoers who boggled at the fancy-dress films of Greta Garbo while scoffing at westerns and war movies as being hopelessly unrealistic.
   
   Zog was a hard-working ruler and physically brave, but when the Italians overthrew him, the people hardly noticed. Tomes even writes that the invading Italians made the country more prosperous. When Zog (or "bird" in Albanian) became king and rather hopefully named himself King Zog the first, he was mocked abroad as King Bird I. Yet he couldn't name himself "King Ahmet" because he didn't want to be seen as a Muslim ruler and yet he couldn't disavow Islam. Looking at Zog's reign, it is easier to understand how later Albanian rulers became suspicious of foreign powers and organized religion.
   
   After Zog and the Second World War, the communists came to power under the Stalinist Enver Hoxha. His regime was so repressive that many Albanians today hold King Zog in some esteem. Tomes calls this a sobering thought.



3. Noel Malcolm calls it fantastic - this should be enough of a reason for anyone who has interest in Balkan history and politics to read this book. Well researched, balanced but witty and with a tat of the usual Western cynical eye describing Balkan events, people or politics. I doubt there is a more well researched book ever written, in any language, on King Zog and the period of the Albanian Monarchy.



4. Ahmet Zogolli (Zogu, King Zog) is one of the great 'characters' of the early twentieth century. Born into a powerful clan in Northern Albania, he was destined to be a leader of men from birth. But Zog wanted to be more than just another petty warlord, he wanted to be a King. Jason Tomes has done a yeomanlike job of turning this 'myth' into a real person, he has shown him (as much as possible) with all his faults and gifts; trying his best to see through the smoke screen that swirls around him.
   
   The man who at 22 was a colonel in the Austro-Hungarian Army, Minister of the Interior at 24, President at 29, King at 34 and ex-King at 45, is not an easy one to pin down. Like Albania during the second half of the twentieth century, little was published or known of the goings on during the early days of the Republic/Kingdom. Even today, few people could tell you much about Albania, much less find it on a map. It was the only country carved out of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1 that did not have a nationalist movement. The country was created more to keep it out of the hands of Greece and Yugoslavia than anything else.
   
   Under the Ottomans, the valleys were divided up into separate administ- rative area that were each ruled by a Bey who then reported to a Pasha who had power over a larger district. Albania was made up of more than six districts one of which was Kosovo. When the Balkans were divvied up at Versailles, Albania ended up over 90% Albanian, but, leaving more Albanians living outside of the country than in. The Greeks wanted the South which was Greek Orthodox, and the Yugoslavs wanted the north which was Roman Catholic (as part of Croatia).
   
   Zog managed to set-up a government in Tirana (which was the middle of nowhere) and stage manage a government by playing off the different Beys against each other. He relied heavily on a gendarmarie that was primarily made up of his historical supporter (from the Mati Valley). While holding off both the Greeks and Serbs (Yugoslavs) he became more and more indebted to the Italians and finally lost his Kingdom to Mussolini in 1939.
   
   As an ex-King he only was acknowledged by Turkey and Egypt, and during his time in England during WW2 he was never given any recognition or money for guerilla warfare from the Allies. The country was handed to the communist insurgents under Enver Hoxha (with a lot of help from Stalin and Tito) at the end of the War. He finally died a recluse in the south of France.
   
   Tomes shows the tragedy of how Albania never was important enough to anyone but the Italians (and then as a colony) for Zog to be able to create a viable government. He talked as if he wanted to create a constitutional monarchy, but first he had to create a country and an educated middle class. He was not altogether altruistic, since he probably stole half the money that came into the country as aid from the Italians, but then he strikes one as a realist and put himself in the forefront whenever he could.

No comments about Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (Jeffersonian America).

No comments about Abraham Lincoln (Grandes biografias series).