Looking at the title of this post, I can hardly imagine anything more boring and off-putting. So please, if it strikes you that way, feel free not to read it. I just thought I'd like to record my thoughts on the presidential biographies I read this year, and how my presidential biography reading project is going in general.
First I want to reiterate that my project would have floundered long ago were it not for this site: https://bestpresidentialbios.com/. Its official title is "My Journey through the Best Presidential Biographies" and it's wonderful. Written by a guy called "Steve." Definitely visit it if you're considering a journey like this, or if you'd just like to read a few presidential bios. He has great advice, and lots of people comment on his posts and offer their own suggestions. It's a community of serious armchair intellectuals, but not snobby at all.
I read books about four Presidents from the late 1800s this year. I knew almost nothing about any of them beforehand. Their terms were oddly intertwined with my grandparents' births. To wit:
- James Abram Garfield, 20th President. He was elected Nov. 1880, and a few weeks later my mother's father was born and given the name Garfield (Garfy for short). President Garfield took office in March 1881, was shot by an assassin in July 1881, and died Sep. 1881. I wonder whether Garfield's extremely disappointing presidency had any effect on the disappointing life of his namesake (my grandfather).
- Chester Alan Arthur, 21st President. As Vice President, he took over in Sep. 1881 and served out the remainder of Garfield's term. He was not chosen as the Republican candidate in the 1884 election, and left office in March 1885, a few weeks before my mother's mother was born in April.
- (Stephen) Grover Cleveland, 22nd President. He took office in March 1885, but lost his reelection bid in Nov. 1888, and left office in March 1889, a week or so after my father's father was born in February.
- Benjamin Harrison, 23rd President. He took office March 1889, but lost his reelection bid in Nov. 1892, and left office in March 1893.
- (Stephen) Grover Cleveland, 24th President. He was reelected in Nov. 1892, took office in March 1893, and finally left office for good in March 1897 (my father's mother was born during this second term, in August 1894).
So three out of my four grandparents were born while Grover Cleveland was in office.
Pretty neat, no? Who was President when you were born? Your parents? Grandparents?
Almost nobody thinks about any of these guys anymore. I recently read an article about how if Trump is re-elected in 2024 (God forbid), he'll be like Grover Cleveland, serving nonconsecutive terms. That's what Cleveland is known for, being both the 22nd and the 24th President. Arthur is known for -- nothing that I can think of. Benjamin Harrison is known for being President William Henry Harrison's grandson, and also for serving that one term in between Cleveland's two terms. And Garfield is known for being one of the four U.S. Presidents to be assassinated.
I didn't know any more than that. So I had a lot to learn about them. Here's how it went.
Steve highly recommends this book too, but feels that "it falls somewhat short as a presidential biography" of James Garfield. I disagree. I thought it was the perfect biography. In fact, after reading it I decided that I would seek out this sort of biography in future. I want the drama, the color, the human interest. The dry dull facts are not interesting to me.
Unfortunately, most Presidents have not been profiled by Candice Millard.
***
I'm serious -- I can see it now. Act 1 would begin with Arthur and the rest of Roscoe Conkling's "machine" gang swaggering around and singing about how much money they were stealing from the Customs House (Arthur was the Collector). At some point there would be a brief scene with his wife (a mezzo?), showing how he mostly ignored her and hung out with his buddies till all hours. Then he's fired as Collector, then his wife dies -- he would have a sad song there, the first sign that he's changing. Then he's elected Vice President, which is mostly a joke, back to the ha ha ha of Act 1, Scene 1. Then Garfield is shot and Arthur becomes President -- oh, the devastation he felt! That would make a wonderful dramatic aria. Then there's Julia Sand, the woman who wrote to him out of the blue and encouraged him to do the right thing. She would be a soprano. They could sing a duet, each in a different room (I can just see the staging). Finally, after doing many good deeds, Arthur would leave office and die of Bright's Disease, and on his deathbed sing one last aria about how he hopes he has done enough to redeem himself for his bad behavior.
I wish I were a composer and could write this opera. Someone should.
***
Grover Cleveland: A Study in Character by Alyn Brodsky. Another surprising story, more things to learn. My first surprise came in the introduction -- or was it a preface? I don't have the book here to check. Anyway, the author refers to himself and someone else as "Grover Cleveland fans." I did not know there were people who identify themselves as such. It turns out that Grover Cleveland was a very honorable man, with high moral standards. He worked hard to get rid of the "spoils system," whereby Presidents handed out civil service jobs to pay back debts, ignoring whether people were actually qualified to do the jobs or not.
Much of the book I read dealt with two big issues in Cleveland's presidency: the tariff and bimetallism. The tariff, I finally figured out, was a tax on imported goods, and the controversy was over how high it should be to protect American goods from cheap foreign imports. But I never did understand bimetallism. The two metals in question are gold and silver, so it was about whether the country should just have the gold standard or whether it should have a gold standard and a silver standard, which states like Colorado wanted because they produced a lot of silver. I just don't understand what that means, and Alyn Brodsky, the author, didn't bother to explain. I guess he felt that if anyone was weird enough to want to read a biography of Grover Cleveland, they must understand how money works.
What I found most interesting about Grover Cleveland was his personal life. He married his best friend's daughter, who became his ward when the friend died. He waited until she was 22 and had graduated from college and then he swept her off to the White House to be his bride (he was nearly 50). I wanted to hear more about that, but Alyn Brodsky just gave me more about bimetallism.
This was a very boring book.
***
The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison by Homer E. Socolofsky and Allan B. Spetter. This is the book I just finished and my, it was dull. (Duller than the Cleveland book? Hard to say. Maybe. They were both extremely dull.)
Steve admitted that there weren't a lot of good choices for this President. He recommended the first two volumes of a three-volume biography, with this book substituted for the third volume. Well... I didn't want to waste that many hours of my life reading about Benjamin Harrison, so I just went with this book. It was (barely) bearable. I made it through.
One problem I had with the book is that it is organized topically rather than chronologically. This was probably necessary because there were two authors, one who focused on domestic issues and the other on foreign affairs. But it meant that certain events were mentioned multiple times, e.g., the illness and death of Harrison's Secretary of State, James G. Blaine. Over and over, Blaine's incapacity was mentioned, and I kept having to calculate -- how sick is he at this point? when is he going to resign? when is he going to die?The index lists Blaine's death as happening on page 193. But his illnesses, eventual resignation, and death are mentioned in several other places. Other events that are mentioned repeatedly include the death by fire of the Secretary of the Navy's family, the death of the Secretary of the Treasury, and the death of Harrison's wife. (His was a very gloomy administration.)
This book is really a biography of Harrison's presidency, not the man himself, and the authors apparently felt they would be shirking their duty if they didn't discuss every single thing that happened from November 1888 to March 1893. Thus there is a long boring section about pork tariff disputes with Germany and another boring (and rather distressing) section about hunting the seal herd in the Bering Sea.
I was horrified to read about Harrison's four Supreme Court picks, which helped to turn the court very conservative. I may have been reading this wrong, but it seemed as though the authors were pleased about this:
In a series of dramatic decisions over a four-month period in 1895--representing perhaps the high point of judicial supremacy in all of American history--the Supreme Court upheld the use of the injunction against strikes, seriously weakened the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and declared invalid the income tax, which was part of the Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894.
The high point? Not the term I would have chosen. This court was also responsible for Plessy v. Ferguson "which in 1896 established the validity of segregation in the United States." (Doesn't that sound as though the authors think segregation really is valid?)
Oh well. The main thing I remember about Benjamin Harrison isn't from this book. It's the statue of him we saw in Rapid City, South Dakota, when we went there with the twins to see Mount Rushmore, back in 2015, was it? 2016? Anyway, Rapid City has statues of all the US Presidents scattered around its downtown streets, and I remember the one of Benjamin Harrison because he's seated on a bench feeding birds. There's a good picture of it here.
There wasn't anything about him feeding birds in this biography. It was mostly about the tariff, bimetallism, and James G. Blaine's health, and about how Harrison was kind of a jerk and offended everyone. I'm glad to be done with him and this book.
***
Next year, if all goes well, I will read biographies of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, which will really bring us into the modern era. Studying Steve's reviews, I think I may count Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit as my bio of both Roosevelt and Taft. We'll see.
I started this presidential biography project back in 2011. This is how it has gone so far:
- 2011: Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow
- 2012: John Adams by David McCullough
- 2013: Thomas Jefferson by R.B. Bernstein
- 2014: Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham; James Madison by Richard Brookhiser; The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation's Call to Greatness by Harlow Giles Unger; John Quincy Adams: American Visionary by Fred Kaplan
- 2015: Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times by H.W. Brands
- 2016: Martin Van Buren by Ted Widmer
- 2017: William Henry Harrison by Gail Collins; John Tyler by Gary May
- 2018: James K. Polk by John Seigenthaler; Zachary Taylor by John S.D. Eisenhower; Millard Fillmore by Ted Gottfried; Franklin Pierce by Michael F. Holt
- 2019: James Buchanan by Jean H. Baker
- 2020:
- 2021: Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Abraham Lincoln); The Presidency of Andrew Johnson by Albert Castel; Grant by Jean Edward Smith; Rutherford B. Hayes by Hans L. Trefousse
- 2022: Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard (James Garfield); Gentleman Boss: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur by Thomas C. Reeves; Grover Cleveland: A Study in Character by Alyn Brodsky; The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison by Homer E. Socolofsky and Allan B. Spetter
Never thought it would take me so long, but it's been fun and I hope it will continue to be fun.
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