Book Reviews Ball State University, Muncie Hesseltine, Ulysses S
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Book Reviews 69 of the values of suburban dwellers. Both books are successful and important. Unfortunately, combining the two makes a vol- ume that can, at times, be tedious, complex, and difficult to read. Despite these caveats, however, Suburb is an important book. Ball State University, Muncie Dwight W. Hoover Grant: A Biography. By William S. McFeely. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981. Pp. xiii, 592. Illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, index. $19.95.) Ulysses S. Grant has not suffered for want of biographers. Few men of his century were so written about, while the pre- sent century has produced both the 1935 classic by William B. Hesseltine, Ulysses S. Grant, Politician, and the remarkable trilogy on Grant’s military career by Lloyd Lewis and Bruce Catton. Grant is worthy of such attention. He was the greatest general of the nation’s most terrible conflict and served as president for eight of the nation’s most critical years. William S. McFeely falls short of the mighty prose of Lewis and Catton and also fails to match the brilliant political anal- ysis of Hesseltine. He does, however, achieve something that his predecessors failed to accomplish. His goal in writing Grant: A Biography was to make this most representative of nineteenth-century Americans understandable-in human terms-to today’s generation. Americans, McFeely declares, “deserve to know a man they would recognize if they met him in a crowd” (p. 522). McFeely’s triumph, and the great worth of this fine biography, is that Grant’s heart and mind-or at least the author’s interpretation of them-are opened for all to see. It is a melancholy revelation, and no one who reads this book can fail finally to have compassion for this tragic, familiar man who “became general and president because he could find noth- ing better to do” (p. xii). Strangely, for the biography of a great general, this book will hold few rewards for the military historian or buff. McFee- ly’s account of the war is essentially Russell Weigley’s strategy of annihilation interpretation. His few descriptions of battle are lackluster and give the reader no true sense of just what was going on. There is hardly, for instance, one word on the desper- ate fighting during those final days before Appomattox, while three pages are devoted to the actual surrender. McFeely is not interested in the details of battle, only the results. He spends 70 Indiana Magazine of History his narrative chronicling the man, Grant, not the carnage that surrounded him. His point is to convey to the readers a sense of why “war, for a man like Ulysses Grant, was the only situation in which he could truly connect to his country and countrymen and be at one with them and with himself” (p. 68). McFeely, who wrote previously on Oliver 0. Howard and the Freedman’s Bureau, has a special concern for the plight of black Americans. His discussion of Grant’s seemingly inconsis- tant relationship to the people who viewed him as a liberator is among the high points of the book. This emphasis on black history, however, occasionally leads the author away from his subject. A twelve-page digression to discuss some eventually irrelevant 1865 peace negotiations (with emphasis on their re- lation to the emancipated slaves) and a five-page discussion of early attempts to integrate West Point are the most glaring examples. Such digressions would be understandable if more important matters, such as the Appomattox campaign and the Belknap impeachment, were not passed over too quickly. Such caveats notwithstanding, this book is worthy of the acclaim accorded it by the popular press. McFeely succeeds admirably in presenting the roots of Grant’s mighty successes and monumental failures. The reader cannot fail to empathize with this most human of generals and presidents. McFeely indeed makes Grant recognizable. This book will not replace Hesseltine or Lewis and Catton, but room will most certainly have to be made for it on the shelf with them. McFeely has clearly written the standard one-volume account of Grant’s en- tire career. Utah State University, Logan Paul A. Hutton The Presidency of William McKinley. By Lewis L. Gould. (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1980. Pp. xi, 294. Notes, bibliographical essay, index. $15.00.) Was William McKinley a spineless politician who weakly succumbed to public pressure for a needless war while serving as the compliant tool of big business and Mark Hanna, or was he a masterful wartime leader who, as the first modem presi- dent, established important precedents for his successors? Lewis L. Gould has assembled impressive evidence to refute the stereotyped view of McKinley as simply a mediocre prelude to the dynamic Theodore Roosevelt. This interpretation of McKin- ley as a strong president was first advanced twenty years ago .