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PDF EPUB} Two Americans Truman Eisenhower and a Dangerous World by William Lee Miller William Lee Miller, Scholar on Abraham Lincoln, Is Dead at 86 Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Two Americans Truman Eisenhower and a Dangerous World by William Lee Miller William Lee Miller, Scholar on Abraham Lincoln, Is Dead at 86. William Lee Miller, a historian and ethicist whose work examined the rocky landscape where religion, morality and American political leadership meet, died on May 27 in Manhattan. He was 86 and lived in Brooklyn. The cause was congestive heart failure, his wife, Linda, said. Professor Miller, who had taught for many years at the University of Virginia, was known in particular for his books, written for a general readership, about the roiling national debate over slavery. “Lincoln’s Virtues,” perhaps Professor Miller’s best-known book, traces the roots of its subject’s storied moral character. Those roots, Professor Miller argued, were evident early on: as a youth, Lincoln eschewed many of the rituals of frontier manhood, including drinking, gambling, smoking, hunting and swearing. A brilliant autodidact — he had little formal education — Lincoln augmented his innate moral code through vast book learning, as Professor Miller showed through a painstaking analysis of Lincoln’s better- and lesser-known writings. The volume, which follows Lincoln through law practice, his single term as an Illinois congressman and his growing acumen as a politician of national stature, ends in 1861 as he assumes the presidency. (In Professor Miller’s sequel, “President Lincoln,” he continued his examination of his subject’s moral fiber through the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination.) Reviewing “Lincoln’s Virtues” in The Washington Post, the journalist Edwin M. Yoder Jr. called it a “marvelous ‘ethical biography,’ ” adding, “In this journey through a great and uncommonly large sensibility, we feel we are in the hands of a Virgil worthy of the trip.” In “Arguing About Slavery,” Professor Miller revisited a vitriolic though relatively little-known chapter in the national debate: the “gag rule,” which was in effect in Congress in the 1830s and ’40s. Under the rule, no antislavery petition could be introduced, much less discussed, on the floor of the House of Representatives, effectively silencing abolitionist voices. Professor Miller chronicled Adams’s nine-year battle to overturn the rule, from 1835, when the fighting over it began, until its repeal in 1844. (Adams had long since left the presidency and was by then a Massachusetts congressman.) Weathering censure and assassination threats, Adams shrewdly sidestepped addressing the morality of slavery, instead embarrassing Congress into upholding the right of free debate. William Lee Miller was born on April 21, 1926, in Bloomington, Ind. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and the family moved wherever his pulpit took him — to Laramie, Wyo., Hutchinson, Kan., and Lincoln, Neb. The young Mr. Miller earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska and a second bachelor’s from Yale Divinity School. After serving as the chief speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson’s unsuccessful presidential campaign of 1956, he received a Ph.D. from Yale in religious social ethics in 1958. Professor Miller taught at Smith College, Yale and Indiana University before joining the religious studies faculty at the University of Virginia in 1982. On his retirement from Virginia in 1999, Professor Miller was Commonwealth professor and Thomas C. Sorensen professor of political and social thought; afterward, he was a scholar in ethics and institutions at the university’s White Burkett Miller Center, which studies politics, policy and the presidency. Professor Miller’s other books include “Yankee From Georgia” (1978), about Jimmy Carter; “The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic” (1986); and “The Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society” (1966), based on his own experience as a three-term city alderman in New Haven. His most recent book, “Two Americans: Truman, Eisenhower, and a Dangerous World,” was published by Alfred A. Knopf in April. Professor Miller’s first marriage, to Lou Horton, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Linda Moore Miller; four children from his first marriage, David, Andrew, Rebecca Miller Uchida and Cynthia Miller Coffel; two siblings, Norman Miller and Beatrice Romer; two stepdaughters, Jennifer Curtis Bernstein and Sarah Bernstein Steven; six grandchildren; and four stepgrandchildren. Though Professor Miller’s Lincoln and Adams books are nominally about different statesmen, the debate over slavery — one of the most divisive issues in the 19th century, if not all of American history — linked them. Professor Miller made the connection almost cinematically vivid in “Arguing About Slavery” when he recounted how Adams died in February 1848 after collapsing on the floor of the House: “It is altogether fitting and proper, for the purposes of the inner history and collective memory of the American people,” Professor Miller wrote, “that on the day that Adams fell there was seated, in a not very good seat in the back row of the House chamber, a Whig congressman from Illinois serving his first and only term.” Rooftop Reviews. Reviews of books that have held my interest. And things that happen along the way. I have made it simpler to leave a comment. Just hit the comment selection and choose anonymous at the bottom- Or at my yahoo; [email protected] And let's not forget my friends at the Public Libraries!Most of my selections come from the Libraries listed on my sidebar. They are a great resource and a wonderful use of our tax dollars. Have you hugged a Librarian today? Monday, August 27, 2012. "Two Americans" by William Lee Miller (2012) On the surface Presidents Truman and Eisenhower would seem to have little in common. One was a former artilleryman who saw combat in World War One, going on to become a failed haberdashery owner, before entering politics and becoming President of the United States. He was the last President to have not attained a college degree. The other was a product of the military academy at West Point who never saw combat, but went on to lead the Allied Powers to victory in the Second World War. Both of their Presidencies were bracketed by Harvard graduates. What makes this book so interesting, and the perfect companion to last week’s selection “Red Scare” by Griffin Fariello, is the time in which both men lived and how they handled some of the same problems in uniquely different ways. Two Americans. During the pivotal immediate post-World War II period—the beginning of the Cold War and the dawn of the age of nuclear weapons—the U.S. was led by two quite different presidents from the Middle West. Their decisions during the nearly 16 years of their presidencies affected the lives of millions of people for decades to come. William Lee Miller, perhaps best known for his two acclaimed Abraham Lincoln volumes, Lincoln’s Virtues and President Lincoln , compares and contrasts the public and private lives of these two men in his well-researched and wonderfully readable Two Americans: Truman, Eisenhower, and a Dangerous World . The interweaving between Miller’s two subjects, their similarities and differences, makes for fascinating reading. A scholarship to West Point took Dwight Eisenhower away from Abilene, Kansas; eventually he found great success as a commander in World War II. A lack of money kept Harry Truman from attending college. But unlike Eisenhower, who remained in the United States during World War I training officers and learning much about tank warfare, Truman left the family farm near Grandview, Missouri, and volunteered for the army. He served with distinction as a captain in a field artillery unit in France, and his service in the war became the foundation for his leadership of a Senate committee investigating war production abuses. Truman was a lifelong politician and a candidate eight times at the county, state and national levels. Eisenhower disdained politicians and, as far as we know, did not vote in any election until he was almost 60 years old. That refusal to vote was a tradition among the army’s officer class. At the same time, both men had Franklin Delano Roosevelt to thank for their elevated roles at key moments in history. When James Roosevelt, FDR’s son, asked his father why he had chosen Eisenhower to command the D-Day operation, FDR replied that “Eisenhower is the best politician among the military men,” a “natural leader” who could convince others to follow him. Miller writes that Eisenhower’s performance at that time was the supreme moment in his career, much greater than anything he achieved as president. As for Truman, FDR had several other options for his running mate in 1944, but he dropped his sitting vice president, Henry Wallace, from the ticket, passed over Senator James Byrnes, who was regarded as the likely choice, and, after meeting with Democratic Party leaders, agreed to their consensus selection of Truman. Until the presidential campaign of 1952 the two men appeared to have a positive working relationship. But during that campaign, the relationship soured. Candidate Eisenhower criticized foreign policy positions that he had helped to develop during the Truman administration, and in a campaign appearance, he was convinced, for political reasons, to delete from a speech a paragraph praising General George Marshall, Truman’s former secretary of state, who had been instrumental in advancing Ike’s career. Truman believed that the omission was a “shameful” and disloyal decision. Miller has an especially insightful chapter on the subject of race. His conclusion is that Eisenhower finished what Truman started with regard to integrating the federal workforce and the armed forces. When the latter established his extraordinary Committee on Civil Rights, the first such body in American history, in 1946, its report recommended actions that were to come in the next 20 years.
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