Masks in a Pageant
by , New York: The Macmillan Co. 1928. 8vo. xvi+507 pp. $5.00.
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE, is a journalist who would do credit to the press of any nation. In American letters his place is one of honor which has been long sustained, His latest volume, Masks in a Pageant, is entertaining and often brilliant. But Mr. White, with all the valuable qualities which his work possesses, is not invariably accurate in historical detail, Let me cite a few examples.
Mr. White assigns the famous mugwump campaign to 1888, on Mr. Cleveland’s renomination for the Presidency. In fact it was when Cleveland opposed Blaine in 1884 that the real revolt came, rather than when he ran against Harrison, to whose standard many Republicans in 1888 returned. Mr. White’s plan of merging the two Cleveland administrations into one picture, rather than presenting each in its own setting, does not wholly excuse much that is slipshod in his assembling of facts. He emphasizes Cleveland’s veto of the Seigniorage Bill, which he assigns to 1893, and which he describes very inaccurately, The veto bore date of March 30, 1804. It was relatively unimportant beside the great battle for the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchases Act, which did take place in the special session that the President called for the purpose in the summer of 1893.
Mr. White follows McElroy in giving an altogether undue prominence to William J. Bryan in this silver battle. He was a new Congressman, serving in all but two terms and only one of these in the Cleveland administration; but, because of Bryan’s subsequent leadership of the silver cause, the biographers have given him a prominence which he did not at the time possess.
White designates the President’s mother as Anne Nealy, whereas her name was Ann Neal, and ascribes to Charles A. Dana the appellation ‘the stuffed prophet’ which the latter’s editorial associate, the late Edward P. Mitchell, has acknowledged.
Mr. White’s account of President Cleveland’s answering the telephone directly in his own White House office is altogether mythical. Telephony has come rapidly in recent years. It was not until Mr. Cleveland’s second retirement that there was more than one telephonic receiver in the White House and that was in the telegraphers’ room, many steps from the President’s own office, Mr. White tells of Mr. Cleveland’s going, after his second retirement from the Presidency in 1897, to New York ’three or four times a week, in a law connection, to earn an honest living.’ Four years earlier he had disposed of his law library. He was not actively in the practice of his profession even in the period between the two presidential terms, although maintaining an office with a law firm, and serving as referee in some elevated-railway cases. Most of his time was given, by his own testimony, to receiving and corresponding with Democrats from all parts of the country, in connection with his expected renomination in 1892. The trips he made to New York following his second retirement, to which Mr. White undoubtedly refers, were in connection with the reorganization of the Equitable Insurance Company. In fine, the Cleveland chapter lacks accuracy. But accuracy is not Mr. White’s long suit; readability is, and in that he admirably succeeds.
In his study of President Harrison the author alludes continually to the latter’s small stature, to his full beard, and to his distinguished ancestry—all undoubtedly factors in his career, but by no means so all-engrossing as Mr. White, with a sense of the dramatic, seems intent on making them. Nor is he altogether just to the recent Democratic candidate for the Presidency in this sentence: ‘The Tammany which trained young Croker, which trained Charles Murphy, Craker’s successor, and which trained Al Smith, Murphy’s successor, is a human institution.’ There is much humor in many of the author’s comments, for example in his saying that Harrison believed ‘in the God of his times — a good God who kept books and tolerantly charged off many bad accounts.’
Every reader will enjoy the book even if he regrets some of its easy-going ways. Its chapters on Wilson, Roosevelt, and Coolidge are the best, because they are nearer to the author’s observation and because they are in effect condensations of his more ambitious studies.
ROBERT LINCOLN O’BRIEN