Untitled Book Review

WE have asked Claude M. Fuess, biographer of Daniel Webster and Carl Schnrz, to give us his estimate of two recent political portraits.

THESE excellent political biographies, one of John Quincy Adams, the other of Grover Cleveland, deal with two of the sturdiest, bravest, least ostentatious, and most independent of American statesmen. In notable respects they were unlike. Adams was scholarly, vibrant, and contumacious; Cleveland was unliterary, stolid, and amiable. Adams was a National Republican and a Whig; Cleveland was the heir of Jefferson and Jackson. But they were similar in their devotion to duty, their incorruptibility, and their obstinacy. Neither would yield an inch when a principle was at stake. Each, after one term in the White House, was relegated by the voters to private life, but ultimately earned a vindication— Adams as the ’Old Man Eloquent’ in Congress, defending nobly the right of free petition, and Cleveland through a triumphant reëlection to the Presidency in 1892, followed by a decade at Princeton during which, in his old age, he was respected and consulted by men of all parties.

Adams was more picturesque than Cleveland, with a far wider range of interests, a more corrosive tongue, and a greater gift for making enemies. Mr. Bennett Champ Clark’s John Quincy Adams (Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown, $3.75), the best volume yet published on the subject, is, on the whole, sound in its judgments and accurate in its portraiture; the reader will derive from it a fair, well-proportioned picture of the irascible Adams and his stormy times. It is an amazingly good first biography, enlivened by little sketches, such as that of the old Patroon, Stephen Van Rensselaer, influenced by divine interposition to change his vote in 1825 from Crawford to Adams; of the sixtyyear-old President’s narrow escape from drowning in the muddy Potomac; and of his patient, indefatigable struggle in 1844 to rescind the gag rule in the House of Representatives. Mr. Clark is at his best in his analysis of the candidates for the Presidency in 1824 and in his paragraphs dealing with the complicated New York politics of that campaign. In his introductory chapter, after conceding Adams’s ‘petty meannesses, his malice towards all his associates . . . his unctuous selfrighteousness, his constant imputation of the worst of motives and conduct,’ he concluded by emphasizing Adams’s ‘spotless probity, his robust Americanism, his fearless patriotism, his high statesmanship.’ This is a generous tribute by a Missouri Democrat to a Massachusetts Whig.

It is no small commendation of Mr. Clark’s work to say that it is worthy of being considered with Mr. Allan Nevins’sGrover Cleveland (Dodd, Mead, $4.00), written by one of the best-informed and most skillful biographers of our generation. Although Mr. Nevins’s book contains 766 pages of text, it is never prolix or unnecessarily elaborated, and he handles his narrative with an ease which is the happy product of ability made more effective by experience. He avoids the dangerous extremes of ridiculous adulation and prejudiced disparagement, and is seldom tempted into irony.

From Mr. Nevins’s pages we get the impression of a Cleveland who, even in his youth, had two moods— one of ’care-free banter, the other of ’work and responsibility.’ The adjectives applied to him by his admirers were ‘ dogged,’ ‘stubborn,’ and ‘reliable.’ No one ever called him brilliant or clever. He was a man’s man, endowed with primitive, strong tastes and emotions and deficient in imagination and tact. Yet this slowmoving, phlegmatic lawyer rose to dizzy heights with dazzling speed. On March 5, 1882, be was merely mayor of Buffalo; three years later he was President of the United States. In his progress upward he made no concessions or compromises. He quarreled with Tammany Hall, thus apparently ruining forever his political chances; he defied the Grand Army of the Republic on the pension issue; he refused to lend his name to the free-silver heresy. Yet on he went, pursuing his own policies, writing verbose and ponderous state documents, sometimes annoying to his supporters and always adamant to his foes, winning the grudging esteem of thinking citizens. Cleveland was no impassioned and crusading idealist meditating plans for reconstructing an imperfect universe, but rather a realist, facing each problem as it came along and suspicious of theories evolved in a vacuum. His unassuming and stalwart integrity was precisely the virtue most required in Washington during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

These volumes, revealing history as illuminated in two different periods by two striking personalities, are stimulating reading for the winter fireside. It is pleasant to add that the authors have not resorted to ‘fictionized conversation’ or the other tawdry devices of sensationalists. Mr. Clark and Mr. Nevins have learned that the story of a great man’s life can dispense with the spice of melodrama and the perfume of fancy. The truth is in itself sufficiently vivid.

CLAUDE M. FUESS