Wednesday, June 26, 2019

ecce homines, pars VII

Continuing my three-volumes-at-a-time survey of the American Presidents series, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. This installment covers the presidencies of 1877-1885.

Now we are well into the period that Mark Twain called the Gilded Age. Despite the infamous corruption of politics in this period, our authors consider all three of their subjects to be basically honorable men and competent presidents, which marks a major distinction from the bad presidents of the decade preceding the Civil War.

Hans L. Trefousse on Rutherford B. Hayes is a dull book on a dull man. Trefousse, an academic historian, gives us every move or action Hayes took during the war (most of which he spent as a regimental colonel, and the detail is incomprehensible if you're not familiar with the campaigns in which he served), as congressman, governor, president, and even in retirement. But all this detail adds up to ... nothing. Trefousse's few excursions into a larger picture are jejune ("The Hayeses also tended to dine out, meeting interesting people," p. 126), and he outsources his entire evaluation of Hayes's presidency to a New York Times editorial of the period (p. 129-31). Even his account of Hayes' contentious election is dull, and the theory that Hayes was allowed to take office peacefully on condition that he end Reconstruction gets no play in this book. Trefousse claims that Hayes was forced into removing the troops by unexplained actions of the preceding Grant administration, and only chastises Hayes with exceeding mildness for being naive enough to believe Southern whites' promises that they'd respect blacks' civil rights. This seems just too pat.

Ira Rutkow on James A. Garfield is a medical historian's account, which is less weird than it seems. The most important thing about Garfield is, not his assassination, but the medical care he received, or more accurately didn't receive, for eleven weeks after it as he slowly and agonizingly died of infection. Rutkow cites the assassin's claim at his trial that it was the doctors who killed Garfield; the gunman merely shot him. And Rutkow can't really disagree with this assessment. It's kind of stunning to learn with what brisk dispatch Garfield would have been patched up and sent home had he been shot like that today; the wound wasn't that serious. Rutkow devotes an entire chapter to the state of American medicine at the time, in a futile attempt to explain the incompetence and arrogance of the chief physician, who appointed himself to that rank over the objections of Garfield's family - and those of his actual doctor, who got physically dragged out of the White House. The half of the book taking place before the shooting is adequate but less energetically written, and it doesn't really convey the intensity of the political warfare interrupted by the event. Nor does it cover everything one might expect. The detail-obsessed Trefousse manages to discuss Garfield's one Supreme Court appointment; Rutkow doesn't mention it.

Zachary Karabell on Chester Alan Arthur is the work of an author with academic historical training but whose writings are mostly popular history and current affairs. His view is lucid and clearly presented. Arthur had started out as a vigorous anti-slavery civil rights lawyer, and then mutated into a personally competent top henchman for a corrupt political machine. Then as president, succeeding on Garfield's death, he broke with the machine and favored civil service reform with all the energy he had left after a gradually encroaching kidney disease started to have its way with him. Karabell explains these shifts of character by simply pointing out that as servant of the machine Arthur wasn't his own boss; but as president he could revert to his true self of the young upright lawyer. Karabell is also far clearer than Rutkow on the political controversies of Garfield's administration, though it's Rutkow who points out that Garfield distrusted Arthur, and with good reason. Karabell concludes that Arthur presided over an uneventful period with honesty and competence, and we can't expect much more than that. There's some whitewashing here, as there is with Hayes, but the argument basically hangs together.

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