America's great debate

Bordewich, Fergus M. (2012). America's great debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the compromise that preserved the Union. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Happened up on this book. Fascinating piece of American history. Far too detailed and long of a book, descending into a miasma of minutiae. Nonetheless, in places the narrative crackles, enlivened by giants from the 19th century: Clay, Houston, Benton.

General of the Army

After reading the H.W. Brands biography of FDR, I read Partners in Command, by Mark Perry. I was left with a feeling of not knowing enough about George Marshall, and sought out a biography. Ed Cray's book does justice to the man.

George Marshall was both ambitious and selfless, something of a contradiction of terms and characteristics. From and early age he wanted to be a soldier, and served in the military for nearly six decades. Command of fighting soldiers is what he always sought, and was nearly always denied, for he turned out to have an uncanny talent for administration and planning. Pershing became his mentor and model, Fox Conner his teacher. From them he learned how to command and how to devise military strategy. FDR would grow to rely on him, to such a degree that he could not abide letting him go to serve as field commander.

After serving as Chief of Staff during WW 2, GCM went to China on President Truman's behalf, to try and get the Nationalists and Communists to compromise and form a government of national unity. That would become the basis for McCarthy and others of his ilk to charge Marshall with treason, an idea so palpably absurd that only a fanatic could entertain its veracity. The China Lobby could and would not understand that it was Chaing Kai Shek who "lost" China, and found scapegoats in Truman and Marshall.

GCM also served as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. It was his misfortune to have to deal with Douglas MacArthur for most of his life and career. Yet Marshall understood that MacArthur needed to be handled gingerly, and always figured out how to do so.

Cray does a magisterial job of tracing GCM's life and career. The book is also very well edited. It reads easily, for one interested in a sweep of 20th century US history.

FDR

An American Experience film, nicely done.

American history

Three books about different facets of U.S. history: Whiskey rebellion in the 1790s; Founding Fathers as gardeners; Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives at end of XIXth century.

The Whiskey Rebellion : George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the frontier rebels who challenged America's newfound sovereignty by William Hogeland. Very detailed, painstakingly so. Did not read easily. Alas, Alexander Hamilton comes off looking none too well: ruthless, ambitious, power hungry, he was not beyond manipulation and using even his benefactor, George Washington. His great nemesis (one of many), Thomas Jefferson (himself no angel), seems to have disliked him intensely and opposed him at every possible turn. James Madison emerges as an enigma. GW himself looks fine; another instance of how lucky the young nation to have him, and not anyone else, in a position of power. Stopped at page 197.

Founding gardeners : the revolutionary generation, nature, and the shaping of the American nation . by Andrea Wulf. What a wonderful and unique idea. Indeed, Washington, Madison, Jefferson and Adams were devoted gardeners. The first three, Virginians all, were plantation owners, slave owners; Adams owned and worked his own small farm. Yet all shared a passion for trees and plants and shrubs. and all wanted to make gardens uniquely American, different than the English gardens popular in their day. The book drags. Wuld gives a historical narrative, to put in context the efforts and wonts of the Gardeners, yet the narrative sputters and stalls. Stopped at page 142.

Mr. Speaker! : the life and times of Thomas B. Reed, the man who broke the filibuster.by James Grant. Reed is one of the obscure figures in US history that actually played a significant role therein, during his time. Teddy Roosevelt was, at one point, his ardent supporter and admirer, before catapulting above Grant (and most everyone else) to become the accidental president. The book is far too detailed, reads stiff, and was a challenge to finish. As I was reading all three concurrently, I decided to finish the one that I was the furthest along, and had most interest, and, by default this was it.

Matinee

Fun movie to watch, many familiar faces. Ebert gave it three and a half stars. "Matinee," a delightful comedy and one of the most charming movies in a long time, takes place exactly at a moment when that innocence may have ended.

Honeydripper

A John Sayles work. Worked nicely. Stacey Keach played a racist sheriff who was not an ogre, yet enough of a son-of-a-bitch to seem real. Ebert writes about it with praise.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080117/PEOPLE/648662905/1023

Seven Days in May

1964 film about a rogue Air Force general who opposes the President's treaty with the Soviet Union, and puts in place a plan to overthrow the President and take power to save the nation. Burt Lancaster is cold and calculating, Kirk Douglas spry as his aide, Ava Gardner subdued as his mistress, Frederic March understated yet passionate as the President. Clichés eventually seep in, of course, but it remains a powerful film. I'd love top see it reprised

Books on Alcohol

These books on booze deserve a toast, says Daniel Okrent


1. The Alcoholic Republic. (1979). W.J. Rorabaugh. Oxford.

This excavation of the most drink-sodden era in U.S. history (1790-1840) is as damning as it is enlightening. At a time of easy access (there were 14,000 American distilleries by 1810), rough frontier mores and poor water quality, liquor seeped into every corner of national life, writes W.J. Rorabaugh. Americans "drank at home and abroad, alone and together, at work and at play, in fun and in earnest. They drank from the crack of dawn to the crack of dawn." If you wish to understand the temperance movement's nobler impulses—that is, those that were untouched by the xenophobia and political cynicism that later drove the campaign— you might start here.

2. Domesticating Drink. (1998). Catherine Gilbert Murdock. Johns Hopkins.

Despite her subtitle, "Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940," Catherine Gilbert Murdock's primary subjects are female and her perspective decidedly feminist. But by focusing on women and drink—territory previously unexplored by scholars of her ability—she is able to tease out some of the puzzling and persistent anomalies and contradictions in American attitudes toward booze: women soldiers of the temperance movement co-existing with matrons who chugged Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound (20.6% alcohol!) to alleviate their "female complaints"; the instant acceptance of women into the speakeasy, after they had been barred for decades from the saloon; and the absolutely decisive role of women in bringing about Prohibition's repeal, just they had been critical to its creation.

3. Noble Experiments.  "Judge Jr."  John Day, 1930

This pocket-size oddity—chiefly a compendium of novel cocktail recipes— tells you how impotent Prohibition had become during its waning years, at least in the big cities and other places where the wish to obey the law ran a distant second to the wish to imbibe. Published three years before the arrival of Repeal, "Noble Experiments" (the title was taken from Herbert Hoover's characterization of Prohibition) wasn't about the appreciation of fine liquors and wines. A typical concoction (gin, brandy, apricot brandy, lime juice) was known as "The Bridge Table," the pseudonymous author tells us, "because 8after a few of these your legs will fold up." Among those who contributed recipes were journalist Heywood Broun, actor Roland Young and impresario Florenz Ziegfeld; among those who declined was the usually ombibulous H.L. Mencken, who in a rare moment of moderation said he'd rather make the argument for wine and beer.

4. The Speakeasies of 1932. (1932). Al Hirschfeld and Gordon Kahn. Dutton.

More than a decade before he began to insinuate his daughter's name, Nina, into his grand caricatures of entertainment figures and other celebrities, the 29-year-old Al Hirschfeld devoted a good chunk of a year to prowling some of the 32,000 speakeasies tucked into every corner of New York. ("This may be the best damned researched book ever," he wrote in a preface to the 2003 edition, when he was 99.) Ranging from Bowery dives to the "all marble and gold" Bath Club on West 53rd Street, where the entertainment was chamber music, Hirschfeld produced a portrait of speakeasy life infinitely more reliable than the distorted renderings concocted for film and television.

5. Martini, Straight Up. (1998). Lowell Edmunds Johns Hopkins.

In the midst of his distinguished career as a classicist, Lowell Edmunds paused to focus his critical talents on a cultural artifact packed with just as much meaning as a Minoan terracotta or an Ionic capital. Originally published in 1981 as "The Silver Bullet: The Martini in American Civilization," Edmunds's book finds seven meanings in the martini (among them: "The Martini Is Optimistic, Not Pessimistic," "The Martini Is the Drink of Adults, Not of Children") and four ambiguities ("The Martini Is Sensitive—The Martini Is Tough"). He's not quite the cocktail snob that I am—he is willing to consider that a martini can be made from vodka—but one suspects that Edmunds does prefer his bullets straight up and very dry.

— Mr. Okrent is the author of "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition." He writes a monthly book-review column for Fortune.Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W8

5 moguls

T.J. Stiles says these mogul biographies offer rich rewards

1. Andrew Carnegie. Joseph Frazier Wall. Oxford, 1970

In the past few decades we have seen a sweeping reassessment of the so-called robber barons of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The trend began in 1970 with Joseph Frazier Wall's "Andrew Carnegie"—a groundbreaking work that remains a pleasure to read. By turns a thoughtful sifter of the evidence, a sharp and amusing portraitist, and a storyteller with real panache, Wall brings a gift for clarity to both historical context and the blow-by-blow of business battles. His tales of intrigue among Carnegie's partners are particularly vivid. Carnegie wore many guises—he got his start as an entrepreneur through sweetheart deals, proved a ruthlessly efficient steelmaker and aspired to influence world affairs—and this book artfully integrates them all.

2. The Life and Legend of Jay Gould. Maury Klein. Johns Hopkins, 1986

Jay Gould's "reputation for being cold and aloof," writes Maury Klein, "owed much to the fact that he was a shy, reserved man whose emotions registered on so small a scale, such as tearing bits of paper or tapping a pencil, that only initiates recognized them." Such insight and literary grace explain why Klein's "The Life and Legend of Jay Gould" remains the definitive work on this controversial tycoon. The author narrates with wry humor and verve such episodes as the corruption-riddled battle among financiers for control of the Erie Railroad in 1868 and Gould's attempt to corner the gold market in 1869. But Klein's greatest contribution may be in describing Gould's later years, when he proved a master corporate strategist, building an empire around the Missouri Pacific railroad.

3. Morgan  Jean Strouse. Random House, 1999

As America's leading banker, J.P. Morgan played a role unlike any other business titan of his age, influencing one industry after another. He reorganized the chaotic railroads and forged U.S. Steel and General Electric—in other words, he was the father of the trusts that others set out to bust. "When the federal government ran out of gold in 1895, Morgan raised $65 million and made sure it stayed in the Treasury's coffers," writes Jean Strouse in this elegant biography. "When a panic started in New York in 1907, he led teams of bankers to stop it." Strouse is masterly, whether addressing finance, family, art or the human condition. Her portrait of Morgan's first rare-book librarian, Belle da Costa Greene—the daughter of Harvard's first black graduate, she passed as Portuguese—is but one example of Strouse's literary gifts and appreciation for the importance of secondary characters in a good biography.

4. Fallen Founder. Nancy Isenberg. Viking, 2007

It is not easy to get a fair hearing when you have killed the man on the $10 bill. But Aaron Burr is treated with scholarly care and writerly sympathy by Nancy Isenberg in "Fallen Founder." A hero in the American Revolution and the country's third vice president, Burr founded the forerunner of J.P. Morgan Chase: the Manhattan Co., a water company and bank. He pioneered modern political methods by systematically identifying and organizing voters, contributors and activists. Isenberg offers evidence that Burr was no villain in the 1804 duel that killed Alexander Hamilton. Three years later, Burr was arrested for what his enemies called a conspiracy to set up an independent state in the west; he was tried for treason and exonerated, then went on to become an influential New York lawyer. An astonishing life.

5. Pulitzer. James McGrath Morris. Harper, 2010

Today's reporters and media tycoons would do well to study James McGrath Morris's life of Joseph Pulitzer, the journalist, editor and entrepreneur. A proverbial penniless immigrant (a German-speaking Hungarian Jew), Pulitzer fought for the Union in the Civil War, then moved to St. Louis. There he learned English and the news business. His rapid rise in journalism was interwoven with politics, a natural twist, since newspapers were overtly partisan. He briefly held elected office but found greatness as a newspaper owner. Morris is fascinating on Pulitzer as a working (make that hard-working) reporter and editor who understood how to grab his readers—and saw where his industry was going (or could go).

—Mr. Stiles is the author of "The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt," winner of the 2009 National Book Award and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, now available in paperback from Vintage.Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W8
22 May 2010

Five Best Baseball Books

These baseball books belong in your reading lineup, says Peter Morris.

1. The Glory of Their Times. Lawrence S. Ritter. Macmillan, 1966. 796.357 R

Spurred by the death of baseball legend Ty Cobb in 1961, Lawrence Ritter, an economics professor, made it his mission to tape-record the memories of other players from Cobb's generation before these men were also gone. The result is an invaluable record of what it felt like to play big-league baseball in the early 20th century. Former New York Giants outfielder Fred Snodgrass, for instance, recalled what would happen when the umpire tossed out a new ball: Helpful infielders would throw the ball around a few times—until it came back to the pitcher "as black as the ace of spades. All the infielders were chewing tobacco or licorice, and spitting into their gloves, and they'd give that ball a good going over before it got to the pitcher." Eagle-eyed observers have detected some errors in the recollections, but that scarcely matters. Hundreds of baseball books get the minutiae right. None has ever captured the spirit of an era better than "The Glory of Their Times."

2. Baseball's Great Experiment. Jules Tygiel. Oxford, 1983.   796.3572 Robinson T

Jackie Robinson's re-integration of organized baseball after a half-century of tacit segregation remains the most remarkable chapter in the game's history. Yet the magnitude of Robinson's courage makes his story difficult to relate without rendering him a paragon of saintly virtue and the events of his life a pat melodrama. We are thus fortunate to have Jules Tygiel's thoughtful portrait of baseball's "great experiment." We see the disturbing broader context of racism in the sport, but we also encounter Robinson as a real person. Turning the other cheek did not come naturally to him: "With Jackie's temper being the way it was," recalled fellow Negro Leaguer Quincy Trouppe, "it didn't seem likely that a major league team would be willing to take a chance with him." Robinson emerges as an inspiring, entirely human hero whose triumph meant conquering his imperfections.

3. The End of Baseball as We Knew It. Charles Korr . University of Illinois, 2002.   331.8904 K
                                                                                                         [331 - Labor Economics]

Mining the archives of the Major League Baseball Players Association might sound like an unpromising research project, but Charles Korr turned his findings into a compulsively readable book about how a submissive "house union" was transformed during the 1970s into a union with extraordinary power. For some, that revolution gave ballplayers their long-overdue fair share of the pie. Others saw it as baseball's apocalypse, turning players into rootless guns-for-hire and spoiled millionaires. Korr's splendid study may not sway the true believers in either camp, but it will furnish any reader with a better understanding of the events that shaped the free-agent era.

4. Dollar Sign on the Muscle. Kevin Kerrane. Beaufort, 1984.  796.35702 K

A baseball scout, in Kevin Kerrane's unforgettable portrait of the profession, is part traveling salesman, part spymaster and part hunter for that mythical creature known as "the arm behind the barn." Most of all, it seems, scouts—after all those hours of hanging around ballparks—are consummate storytellers. Kerrane shares their love of a good tale, and the result is a lyrical study of the world of baseball scouting. The 1965 arrival of the amateur draft changed the profession forever, replacing cloak-and-dagger tactics with bureaucracies. But the scouts in "Dollar Sign on the Muscle" are exhilarating to read about: No matter how many disappointments they endure, these men remain steadfast in their belief that the next phenom is just waiting to be discovered.

5. The Dickson Baseball Dictionary. Paul Dickson. Norton, 2009 (3rd ed.)   R 796.357 D

Dictionaries aren't usually thought of as works of history, let alone as fun reads, yet "The Dickson Baseball Dictionary" manages against all odds to be both. With each new edition it evolves and expands—the recently released third edition includes more than 10,000 entries and sprawls to nearly a thousand pages. The authoritative entries make it a valuable guide to baseball terminology and history, but what really distinguishes this reference work is its sharp eye for telling anecdotes, apt quotations and succinct definitions. Lord Charles: "An appreciative name for a superb curveball, which elevates an Uncle Charlie to a regal level." The dictionary is itself royalty among baseball reference works.

—Mr. Morris is the author of "A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball."   796.357 M

A Time to Remember

The Publisher. Alan Brinkley. Knopf, 531 pages, $35

Luce is one of the original 20th century right-wing blowhards who used his position in the media to push not objectivity but his own agenda. He did hire Margaret Bourke-White to shoot photogrpahs he included in Fortune magazine from its very beginning; her photogrpahs were also prominently published in Life magazine for many years.

Alan Brinkley's "The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century" marshals all the material for a devastating portrait of Luce as a bombastic, autocratic press lord who was full of idolatry for "Great Men" like Chiang Kai-shek and Gen. Douglas MacArthur and who made his magazines mouthpieces for his own ideology and obsessions. Instead, Mr. Brinkley has told Luce's saga with scrupulous fairness, compelling detail and more than a tinge of affection for his vast ambitions and vexing frailties. The author chronicles how Luce built the spindly Time into the world's greatest media empire of its era, with influence unmatched by any other American magazine. Still, Luce emerges as a man of manic energies and enthusiasms who, for all his fervent yearning to do good, bent the journalism of his magazines to propagandize for dubious crusades, most famously urging the "unleashing" of Chiang in the late 1940s to recapture a China lost to communism.

That was the sort of myth that the right wing of the Republican and Democratic parties used for years to bludgeon President Truman, FDR's memory and legacy, and subsequent Democrats: that they had lost China, as if it was for the US toi keep or lose.

at a "Turkish ball" at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1934, he met Clare Boothe, the bright, beautiful daughter of a kept woman, and Luce had a coup de foudre. For all his righteous scruples, he dumped his wife of more than a decade and mother of his children, embarking on a tempestuous marriage with Clare that lasted until his death in 1967. They competed with each other, cheated on each other, tormented each other and nearly divorced a dozen times.

[coup de foudre: a thunderbolt; a sudden, intense feeling of love.]

Perhaps it is from this man who ignored his own "righteous scruples" that Rudolf Guiliani learned the trick of dumping his wife and mother of his children for another woman. And after such effrontery to the morality they so busily lectured others on, and after violating its very basic tenets, they continued to appear in public without the least show of shame.


Mr. Brinkley, who teaches American history at Columbia University, neatly captures the tone of the couple's skyscraper-in-the-clouds idyll. Luce once bragged to Clare, the author of "The Women" and onetime U.S. ambassador to Italy, that he couldn't think of anyone who was his intellectual superior. Clare replied: What about Einstein? Well, countered Harry, Einstein was "a specialist."

Modet, too.

Clare had proposed a picture magazine called Life to Condé Nast—the man, not his company—when she worked as the managing editor of his Vanity Fair in the early 1930s. Luce had the same idea, and the triumph of Life gave him an unmatched pulpit where he could preach his increasingly right-wing vision for the U.S. and the world.

What a bully pulpit, too.

It was Luce's impatience with Franklin Roosevelt's tip-toeing into the war before Pearl Harbor that spurred him to take an active role in presidential politics. He fell hard for the Republican Wendell Willkie in 1940 and made his magazines such partisans of every successive GOP candidate for the White House that many of his editors despaired. Time Inc. magazines not only liked Ike, they slobbered over him. Luce did respect John F. Kennedy (although he backed Nixon) and succumbed to Lyndon Johnson's transparent flattery. An old-school anti-communist, Luce had "a strong distaste" for Joseph McCarthy, Mr. Brinkley writes, as a "crude and coarse man" whose "excesses threatened to discredit more legitimate anti-Communist activities," and the publisher never warmed up to Barry Goldwater's frontier conservatism.

Well, nt altogether a distasteful man, at any rate.


Mr. Brinkley has told the cautionary tale of the Luce Half-Century with the rigor, honesty and generosity that Luce's own magazines too often sacrificed to the proprietor's enormous ego and will to power.

Seraphim Falls

MPAA rating: R; for violence and brief language.

 Brief language?

The American Civil War has ended, but Colonel Morsman Carver accepts one final mission. He has to kill Gideon no matter what it takes. Launched by a gunshot and propelled by rage, the relentless pursuit takes them both far from the comforts and codes of civilization, into the bloodiest recesses of their own souls.

A former Confederate (Neeson ), or a Southerner, Carver, anyway, who is out for revenge: a Yankee colonel, Gideon (Brosnan), ordered the torching of his house, in which perished his wife and child, they having gone back inside to rescue the overlooked baby. It is 1868 in snowy country which remains unnamed (though at one point Carver uses the name of a place that vaguely conjures up Nevada). A shot rings out, and the second wounds Gideon. He runs, not knowing what is going on, but fearful for his life. He is being chased by a posse of four hired guns, led by Carver, who has promised to pay them when they capture Gideon.

How he knows where to find the Yank 4 years after the fact is preposterous enough, but it would not matter much if the movie worked. It doesn't. Neeson's accent fades in and out. There does not seem to be any purpose to the violence except to have violence. Sure, such a hunt would be violent in intent, both by the hunters and the prey, but there is little emotional depth to any of the characters. Brosnan is the only bright light in the cast. 2 stars of 5.

Appetite for America

Denver Public Library - The Fred Harvey restaurant at Dearborn Station in Chicago opened in 1899.

In 1946, when Judy Garland starred in a movie called "The Harvey Girls," no one had to explain the title to the film-going public. The Harvey Girls were the young women who waited tables at the Fred Harvey restaurant chain, and they were as familiar in their day as Starbucks baristas are today. In many of the dusty railroad towns out West in the late 1880s and early decades of the 1900s, there was only one place to get a decent meal, one place to take the family for a celebration, one place to eat when the train stopped to load and unload: a Fred Harvey restaurant. And the owner's decision to import an all-female waitstaff meant that his restaurants offered up one more important and hard-to-find commodity in cowboy country: wives.

It was a brilliant formula, and for a long time Fred Harvey's name was synonymous in America with good food, efficient service and young women. Today, though, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone aware of the prominent role Harvey played in civilizing the West and raising America's dining standards. His is one of those household names now stashed somewhere up in the attic.

Helen Harvey Mills
Fred Harvey in the early 1880s.

 

In "Appetite for America," Stephen Fried aims to give Fred Harvey his due, making an impressive case for this Horatio Alger tale written in mashed potatoes and gravy. Fred Harvey restaurants grew up with the railroads in the American West beginning in the 1870s, with opulent dining rooms in major train stations and relatively luxurious eating spots at more remote railroad outposts. Eventually, the Fred Harvey brand spread to 65 restaurants and lunch counters, 60 dining cars and a dozen large Harvey-owned hotels. And Harvey understood that the reputation of his brand depended on his own personal standards for excellence—which is why he called his company simply "Fred Harvey," not Fred Harvey Co. or Harvey Inc.

He built "the first national chain of anything," writes Mr. Fried. He tells his story in crisp prose and delightful detail, from staggering statistics—in 1905, when moving fresh food across the country was still a challenge, Harvey restaurants served up 6.48 million eggs and two million pounds of beef—to savory recipes, including those for "Plantation Beef Stew on Hot Buttermilk Biscuits" and "Finnan Haddie Dearborn" (smoked haddock). Mr. Fried also deftly captures the significance of how Harvey remade the American rail experience: For the first time in the U.S., a traveler could step off his train and know exactly what to expect: hot coffee, good food and friendly service—all of it delivered in time to get him back on the train before it pulled out of the station.

When Harvey left his home in England at age 15 in 1850, he later recalled, he had two pounds in his pocket and no particular plan of action. He soon found work as a "pot walloper," or dishwasher, at a restaurant on the Hudson River piers in New York. And like so many pot wallopers, then and now, he worked his way up: busboy, waiter, line cook. Eventually, in another classic move, Harvey headed west. In Kansas he worked two jobs, as a railroad ticket agent and as a newspaper ad salesman. With the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 and the arrival of a postwar business boom, rail commerce thrived—as did Fred Harvey. He became a freight agent, traveling the countryside and arranging with farmers, manufacturers and miners to ship their goods.

Appetite for America

By Stephen Fried
Bantam, 518 pages, $27

Book excerpt.

Enduring the endless smoke, soot, stale air and unappetizing food that typified train journeys of the era, Harvey decided that he at least could do something about the food. In the 1870s George Pullman was building elegant sleeping cars and handsomely appointed dining cars, but the dining cars were unsuccessful: On trains of that time passengers couldn't walk between cars, so hungry travelers were unable to reach the dining car except when the train stopped—and diners long finished with their meals had to wait to go back to their seats. Passengers unable to afford the expensive fare were at the mercy, as Mr. Fried writes, "of stomach-turning depot meals." Harvey believed there was money to be made: "Fred was certain it was possible to serve the finest cuisine imaginable along the train tracks in the middle of nowhere."


It was this ambition—to serve not just fast food but the best possible fast food—that would mark his true contribution to American business. Before there were four-star hotels or restaurants, he set out to create a brand that delivered the goods quickly without cutting corners on quality. He ran his railroad-restaurant business, operating along the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe lines, like a military operation. His waitresses lived in company housing and kept curfew. On and off the job, they were expected to follow rules: "Have a Sincere Interest in People" was the first on a list that Mr. Fried reprints. Another reminded employees that "Tact is an Asset and HONESTY is still a Virtue." Harvey's decrees didn't necessarily apply to Harvey: A newspaper in 1881 reported that when he fired the manager of a train-station restaurant in Deming, N.M., Harvey threw the man out the front door onto the train platform "and the dining room equipment followed after him in quick order."


As his empire expanded, Harvey built the first national chain of hotels and the first chain of bookstores. He also helped establish the Grand Canyon as a major tourist destination and sparked some of the country's early appreciation and preservation of Native American culture.


The tale of Harvey's rise, as told by Mr. Fried, is a business story and a sweeping social history populated with memorable characters. We meet, for instance, David Benjamin, who was a 22-year-old bank teller in Leavenworth, Kan., Harvey's base of operations, when the businessman offered him a job in 1881. Soon the matter-of-fact Benjamin was the mercurial Harvey's right-hand man, "creating elaborate systems to put Fred Harvey's demands and dreams into memo and manual form, making 'the standard' easier to understand."

University of Arizona Library - A 'Harvey Girl' in Emporia, Kan., where the restaurant opened in 1888. Fred Harvey also owned a farm in Emporia.


When Harvey dies in 1901, we watch his son, Ford Harvey, execute such a smooth transition and maintain such a low profile that hardly anyone knows the company's namesake is gone. Ford Harvey has all of the old man's obsessive attention to detail. When he receives a letter from a patron claiming that another establishment serves better olives than Fred Harvey's, Ford is taken aback and writes to the rival, asking for a bottle of the olives. When the bottle arrives, he announces to his top staff the good news: The olives are the same as the ones served in the Harvey chain—the letter-writer "just thought those olives tasted better."


The Fred Harvey company lasted the better part of a century and through three generations of family management, but as automobile travel rose in popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, the age of the passenger train began to wane, taking with it the Harvey empire.


When Judy Garland played an onscreen Harvey Girl in 1946, the movie was a great success, and one of its songs, "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe," became a No. 1 hit. There were hopes that the movie might somehow spark a revival in the Fred Harvey fortunes, but by then another hospitality genius was on the scene, and Howard Johnson had set up shop beside the nation's highways.


By Jonathan Eig


—Mr. Eig's "Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster," will be published next month by Simon & Schuster.

Faulkner Link to Plantation Diary Discovered

Southern Historical Collection/Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Francis Terry Leak’s diary was read by Faulkner. A page from 1856 records a slave sale.

 

February 11, 2010
Faulkner Link to Plantation Diary Discovered
By PATRICIA COHEN

The climactic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel “Go Down, Moses” comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their “scarred and cracked backs” and “yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink” — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered.

The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he “was always taking copious notes.”

Specialists have been stunned and intrigued not only by this peephole into Faulkner’s working process, but also by material that may have inspired this Nobel-prize-winning author, considered by many to be one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th century.

“I think it’s one of the most sensational literary discoveries of recent decades,” said John Lowe, an English professor at Louisiana State University who is writing a book on Faulkner. He was one of a handful of experts who met Dr. Francisco at the hand-hewn log house in Holly Springs last month. There they saw the windowpane where a cousin, Ludie Baugh, etched the letters L-U-D-I-E into the glass while watching Confederate soldiers march by — a scene that appears in several Faulkner works.

During the gathering Dr. Francisco, known in childhood as Little Eddie, described how Faulkner stood in front of that window and said, “ ‘She’s still here,’ like she was a ghost,” Professor Lowe recalled.

Dr. Francisco, speaking by telephone from his home in Atlanta, remembered hearing Faulkner rant as he read Leak’s pro-slavery and pro-Confederacy views: “Faulkner became very angry. He would curse the man and take notes and curse the man and take more notes.”

Sally Wolff-King, a scholar of Southern literature at Emory University who uncovered the connection between the author and the journal, called it “a once-in-a-lifetime literary find.”

“The diary and a number of family stories seem to have provided the philosophical and thematic power for some of his major works,” she added.

Names of slaves owned by Leak — Caruthers, Moses, Isaac, Sam, Toney, Mollie, Edmund and Worsham — all appear in some form in “Go Down, Moses.” Other recorded names, like Candis (Candace in the book) and Ben, show up in “The Sound and The Fury” (1929) while Old Rose, Henry, Ellen and Milly are characters in “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936). Charles Bonner, a well-known Civil War physician mentioned in the diary, would also seem to be the namesake of Charles Bon in “Absalom.”

Scholars found Faulkner’s decision to give his white characters the names of slaves particularly arresting. Professor Wolff-King said she believes he was “trying to recreate the slaves lives and give them a voice.”

Dr. Francisco says he is still very uncomfortable that his family’s connection to Faulkner has come to light. “I wouldn’t have done it at all,” he said about publicizing the diary. “My wife urged me until I finally did it,” he said of Anne Salyerds Francisco, his wife of 50 years. “She pushed and Sally pulled.”

“There were long-repressed things that Faulkner uncovered that I didn’t know were in the family,” Dr. Francisco explained, adding that his father never talked about Leak and his slave-owning past. “I just bottled all that up and forgot about it.”

Dr. Francisco said that neither he nor his father ever read much of Faulkner’s work, including “Go Down, Moses.”

“I tried to read that book years ago,” he said, “but I got so angry I threw it across the room, and it stayed there for months.” He said he now might give it another go.

The mothers of Faulkner and of Dr. Francisco’s father were close. The boys went to each other’s childhood birthday parties. Later they double dated and became hunting and drinking buddies, remaining friends until their 40s, when they drifted apart, a situation probably encouraged by Mr. Francisco’s wife, who did not approve of Faulkner’s drinking, smoking and cursing.

Professor Wolff-King had been working on a book about people who knew Faulkner and ended up connecting with Dr. Francisco because he was an alumnus of Emory. When she visited his home in Atlanta, his wife suggested he show the professor a typescript copy of the ledger. Included was a facsimile of a page that listed dollar amounts paid for individual slaves.

“At that moment I realized this diary may not only have influenced the ledger and slave sale record in ‘Go Down, Moses’ but also likely served an important source for much of William Faulkner’s work,” said Professor Wolff-King, who has spent 30 years studying the writer.

A short preview of her findings is in the fall 2009 issue of The Southern Literary Journal; her book “Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Diary,” is due out in June from Louisiana State University Press.

Professor Lowe reviewed the manuscript before publication. To protect against leaks the editor arranged a meeting in a coffee shop. “He gave me the manuscript in a plain brown wrapper, and I was sworn to secrecy,” he said.

“I was electrified when I was reading it,” he said. “Faulkner had a very intense and intellectual relationship with Dr. Francisco’s father,” which seems to have formed “the basis of some of the conversations you find in ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ and ‘Go Down, Moses.’ ”

The Leak papers are not unfamiliar to scholars. The family donated the journal, which includes the plantation accounts as well as descriptive sections, to the University of North Carolina in 1946 and received a typescript copy of the material that runs 1,800 pages. The original documents have been used by Southern economists and social historians for their insights into Mississippi’s plantation life, but no one has previously been aware that Faulkner, who died in 1962, had any connection to them.

Professor Wolff-King argues that elements and terms from the diary repeatedly surface in Faulkner’s work, including the ticking sound of a watch that Quentin Compson is obsessed with in “The Sound and the Fury”; descriptions of building a plantation match Thomas Sutpen’s in “Absalom, Absalom!”

Noel Polk, the editor of The Mississippi Quarterly and among the deans of Faulkner scholars, said, “I was surprised at the discovery of what is so clearly a major piece of information about his life, and maybe his work.”

He and others said it was still too early for them to gauge just how significant the diary is without reading Professor Wolff-King’s book and examining the ledgers themselves, especially when it comes to the more common details about the antebellum and Civil War eras.

“Almost every document that you can come up with that Faulkner used is interesting, but the question is what do you do with it,” Judith L. Sensibar, whose biography “Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art” was published last year. What does it tell us, for instance, about his “obsession with the ways in which slavery has disfigured the lives of both the slaves and their masters?” she asked.

Although literary experts have been taken aback by this unexpected find, Faulkner more than anyone would have understood how the past can unpredictably poke its nose into the present.

Books on Finance During Trouble

1. The House of Morgan Ron Chernow. Atlantic Monthly, 1990. 332.12 C


Can a bank actually be heroic? Ron Chernow suggests as much in his exhaustive history of J.P. Morgan and its instrumental role in the development of the industrial Western economy from the late 19th century to the end of the 20th. But the clear-eyed Chernow does not ignore the less-than-heroic in this National Book Award-winning title, which is as much a social and political history as it is the story of the Morgan dynasty. Of the fallout from the Crash of 1873, Chernow writes: "Not for the last time, America turned against Wall Street with puritanical outrage and a sense of offended innocence." When World War I erupted: "Wall Street, which prided itself on its prescience, was once again caught napping by a historic event." Both tendencies remain in place today. What we do not have is a Wall Street king like John Pierpont Morgan, the man who built the banking dynasty and who had the power to intervene personally in the Panic of 1893 and save the U.S. Treasury by launching a syndicate to replenish the nation's gold supply.


[Emphasis added. Seems some things never change.]



2. The Go-Go Years.  John Brooks. Weybright & Talley, 1973. 332.645 B

Just as the stock market moves in cycles, even though each new generation seems to think each new high and low is happening for the first time, so, too, do market players often imagine that they're breaking new ground when most are not. Today's high-flyers are pretty much the same as those depicted by John Brooks in "The Go-Go Years," his account of how the stock market changed during the 1960s. At the very moment when stocks were truly going mainstream in America, Brooks produced one of the most enjoyable and insightful books ever written about the tribes and tactics of the stock market. Chronicling the escapades of almost-forgotten swashbucklers such as Gerald Tsai and Saul Steinberg, he produced incomparable observations about Wall Street's merry-go-round of triumph and tragedy. He describes 1968 as the year "Wall Street had become a mindless glutton methodically eating itself to paralysis and death," something that happened again in the period 2004-07. And what of our capacity to learn from our mistakes? "Reform is a frail flower that languishes in the hot glare of prosperity," he observes. Given that prosperity still looks a while off at this point in 2010, maybe reform will actually bloom.

3. The Bubble Economy. Christopher Wood. Atlantic Monthly, 1992. 332.6322 W

"What everybody knows is seldom worth knowing," begins "The Bubble Economy," an incisive, readable assessment of the Japanese real-estate boom and bust of the 1980s. Christopher Wood, the former Tokyo bureau chief for the Economist, writes with such flair that it's a shame he gave up journalism, becoming a financial analyst and the publisher of the newsletter Greed & Fear. His book has aged well; swap out names and institutions and it might have been written last year. "Isaac Newton actually arrived in Japan in 1990," Wood writes. "His presence did not prove a pretty sight in a country where too many people had concluded that the laws of gravity, when applied to their own financial markets, had somehow been suspended." Like a faded rock star, the 367-year-old Newton is back for another world tour.

4. When Genius Failed. Roger Lowenstein.  Random House, 2000. 332.6 L


A raft of books have been written—and are still being written—trying to explain the complex financial products, such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, behind the near collapse of Wall Street about 16 months ago. The last time something this complicated took the system to the brink, it was the crash in 1998 of the gigantic hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, when its "relative value" trades went bad. Luckily Roger Lowenstein was on the case—there is no better writer for explaining the intricacies of finance in eminently understandable terms. His description of how Wall Street reached its precarious state in 1998, necessitating a rush to bail out LTCM, captures the birth of the "too big to fail" doctrine: "Almost imperceptibly, the Street had bought into a massive faith game, in which each bank had become knitted to its neighbor through a web of contractual obligations requiring little or no down payment." A decade later, we'd done it again. If more people had read "When Genius Failed," today's miseries might have been avoided.

5. Point of No Return. John P. Marquand. Little, Brown, 1949.  FIC Marquand

While Wall Street hardly has trouble generating stories that seem straight out of a novel, there are a handful of sublime works of fiction that capture the spirit of its strivers in ways that nonfiction cannot. These novels, like Tom Wolfe's excellent "Bonfire of the Vanities," show us what the traders were thinking as well as what they were doing. Nearly four decades before "Bonfire," John P. Marquand wrote "Point of No Return," a lost masterpiece that shines a bright light on the mind-set of that species of Banker Americanus that helped to build the modern financial-services edifice and that colonized suburbia. Marquand's protagonist, Charles Gray, managed not just to survive but to thrive in the 1929 stock market crash, the Depression and its aftermath, and he has collected an enviable set of trophies: the new house in Westchester County, the wife, the two kids and the country-club membership. But "Point of No Return" is hardly a cheerful success story. Instead, it's a gripping portrayal of a man obsessed with roads not taken and of the insecurities that lie just beneath a veneer of seeming achievement. "The more you get, the more afraid you get," says Gray. "Maybe fear is what makes the world go round."

— Mr. Duff McDonald is the author of "Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase" (Simon & Schuster, 2009). He is a contributing editor at New York magazine.

Wizard of Tuskegee

After decades of neglect, Booker T. Washington is the subject of a timely reappraisal


Up From History. Robert J. Norrell
(Harvard University Press, 508 pages, $35)

A century ago, the most consequential black person in America was a biracial man who had been abandoned by his father and raised by his mother, and who favored a nonconfrontational style of politics. Sound familiar?

Bettmann/Corbis

Booker T. Washington in 1906

Yet to the extent that Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) is remembered at all today, he is usually misremembered, which is a travesty. In 1881, Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, a normal school in Alabama dedicated to educating recently freed slaves. He gained national prominence in 1895, after a famous speech in Atlanta where he called for racial conciliation and urged blacks to focus on economic self-advancement. The address would make him the central figure in American race relations for the next two decades.

Washington went on to advise four U.S. presidents and he dined at the White House with fellow Republican Theodore Roosevelt, a black first. His 1901 autobiography, "Up From Slavery," was translated into seven languages and became the best-selling book ever written by a black. Andrew Carnegie called him the second father of the country. Many of America's other moneyed men, including John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, were admirers and major benefactors. Harvard and Dartmouth gave him honorary degrees. Mark Twain and William Dean Howells sang his praises, the latter calling him "a public man second to no other American in importance."

For two generations after his death, Booker T. Washington remained widely appreciated. Scholarly assessments of his achievements noted that Washington "alone represented a well defined school of opinion which was supported by the rank and file of the race" (Horace Mann Bond). And that "no president of a republic, no king of a country, no emperor of a universal domain of that day approached anywhere near doing as much for the uplift of humanity as did Booker T. Washington" (Carter G. Woodson).

Numerous schools, parks, streets and black-owned businesses were named in Washington's honor. He was the first black to have his likeness appear on a U.S. postage stamp and commemorative coin. In 1942, a Liberty ship was christened the Booker T. Washington. And in 1956, marking the 100th anniversary of Washington's birth, President Dwight Eisenhower created a national monument to the former slave.

But Washington's star began to dim in the 1960s, when the style of civil-rights advocacy was given over to protest, condemning authority and challenging the status quo at every turn. The thrust of Washington's message was self-improvement. His focus was the development of the black population of the rural South. His unwillingness to practice protest politics, however, has earned him the scorn of many modern-day critics, who dismiss him as too meek in his dealings with whites.

• Excerpt from "Up From History"

In "Up From History," a compelling biography, Robert J. Norrell restores the Wizard of Tuskegee to his rightful place in the black pantheon. Just as important, Mr. Norrell explains how ideological imperatives can cloud clear thinking, even among historians who should know better. We might forgive John Lewis, the 1960s civil-rights activist and current congressman, for suggesting that Washington deserved to be "ridiculed and vilified by his own people for working so closely with white America." Mr. Lewis, after all, earned his fame in a confrontational moment in American race relations. But when influential historians like John Hope Franklin, Rayford W. Logan and C. Vann Woodward -- all of whom wrote about Washington after World War II -- disparage the man, refusing to assess him fairly within the context of his time, something is amiss.

[Up From History] Shira Kronzon

Woodward -- who died in 1999, having inspired a generation of academic historians of the South -- faulted Washington for not attacking the "prejudices and injustices of the caste system and the barbarities of the mob (subjects he rarely mentioned)." And Woodward sneered: "The businessman's gospel of free enterprise, competition, and laissez faire never had a more loyal exponent than the master of Tuskegee." Woodward also criticized Washington's hostility to unions and close ties to people like Carnegie. In Woodward's view, according to Mr. Norrell, Carnegie "had perpetrated a weak, colonial economy on the South."

"Woodward," Mr. Norrell writes, "surely knew that throughout his career Booker was fighting a defensive battle to save black education from official abandonment. But the historian refused to grant that much black education would not have existed but for the northern philanthropy that Washington promoted. To have acknowledged the good works of the rich men would have undermined his argument about the evil influence of big corporations on the South."

Mr. Norrell, a history professor at the University of Tennessee, says that this "present-mindedness of historians writing about race" is a function of the fact that many had themselves been activists and admired the accomplishments of civil-rights protest. "A presumption entered the thinking and writing that protest was correct," he writes, "and for most the only legitimate, means of improving minority conditions. By the mid-1960s Washington was understood to have been the enemy of activism, the Uncle Tom who delayed the day of freedom."

Aside from the intellectual dishonesty of judging Washington from the vantage point of modern times, it also happens that many of these assessments are wide of the mark. Far from condoning the racial injustices of his day, Washington said: "It's important and right that all privileges of the law be ours." He believed that "political activity alone" would not bring black progress, but he quietly financed court challenges to Jim Crow laws. Mr. Norrell notes that Washington made public protests against "lynching, disenfranchisement, disparities in education funding, segregated housing legislation, and discrimination by labor unions." And in 1899 he wrote: "I do not favour the Negro giving up anything which is fundamental and which has been guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States."

Many criticisms of Washington in more recent decades have echoed those of his contemporary black nemesis, W.E.B. Du Bois, the political activist and social critic who belittled Tuskegee as "the capital of the Negro nation." Where Washington wanted to focus on the achievement of self-determination through independent black schools and businesses, Du Bois argued that civil rights were more important because political power was necessary to protect any economic gains.

Much has been made of this rivalry, but the relevant point is that the two men differed mainly in emphasis, not goals. Washington never renounced equal rights, and Du Bois acknowledged the need for vocational education as a means to self-improvement. Putting their differences into proper perspective is yet another way that "Up From History" serves as a useful corrective.

Jason L. Riley is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W10

Presidential command

In a recent interview, Vice President Dick Cheney outlined his view of presidential power by noting that the American president is followed at all times by a military aide carrying the so-called nuclear football, which can be used to launch an immediate nuclear attack. "He could launch the kind of devastating attack the world has never seen," Mr. Cheney said. "He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in."


The president may have the power to annihilate the world, but the experience of the past half-century shows that he may find it harder to get his own cabinet agencies to do what he wants. Peter Rodman's "Presidential Command" is a brilliant tutorial on the way presidents, regardless of party or ideology, have struggled to control the vast national-security bureaucracy that they inherit after taking the oath of office.

Mr. Rodman, who died in August at the age of 64, knew this world as well as anyone. Beginning as a 26-year-old assistant to Henry Kissinger in President Nixon's National Security Council, he worked under five presidents in the State Department, the Pentagon and the NSC. "Presidential Command" should be required reading for President-elect Barack Obama's national-security team and, if he has the time, for Mr. Obama himself.

"Every President in our history," President Truman wrote in his memoirs, "has been faced with this problem: how to prevent career men from circumventing presidential policy." Truman faced the problem most dramatically in 1948, when he recognized the state of Israel over the objections of virtually everybody at the State Department, from the secretary on down. "I wanted to make it plain," he explained, "that the President of the United States, and not the second or third echelon in the State Department, is responsible for making foreign policy, and, furthermore, that no one in any department can sabotage the President's policy."

Presidential Command
By Peter W. Rodman
(Knopf, 351 pages, $27.95)

President Nixon's approach was to pretend that the State Department didn't exist. He conducted policy through what Mr. Rodman calls "a committee of two." When Nixon met with foreign leaders, Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, was frequently the only other person in the room (aside from an interpreter). Transcripts would be forwarded to State, but they were often edited. The transcripts of Nixon's early exchanges with the Soviets, for example, left out references to a summit meeting he was secretly trying to arrange.

The secrecy was driven by Nixon's paranoia about press leaks but also by his well-founded belief that the senior ranks of the State Department were hostile to his policies. When the possibility that Nixon would pursue a diplomatic opening to China became public, Mr. Rodman writes, "delegations of senior State Department diplomats even came to the White House to counsel him against it, since it risked provoking the Soviet Union."

The "committee of two" approach brought coherence to Nixon's policy, but at a cost. The Pentagon set up a spying operation to figure out what President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were up to. They even placed a "mole" on Mr. Kissinger's NSC staff. Pentagon officials learned about Mr. Kissinger's plans to visit China only because their spy had rummaged through papers in Mr. Kissinger's hotel room while on a trip to Pakistan.

Nixon's abuses of power led to an effort to rein in the "imperial presidency." President Gerald Ford also had to deal with fallout from the investigations of the Senate's Church Committee, which revealed publicly, for the first time, the assorted misdeeds of the CIA. As Congress attempted to assert control over intelligence operations, Mr. Ford's CIA director, William Colby, decided that the CIA was more beholden to Congress than the White House because, he later explained, "the center of political power had moved to Congress." Colby defied a presidential order not to give highly classified documents to the Church Committee by "lending" them instead.

Like Nixon, Jimmy Carter installed a strong national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. But for balance he also picked a strong secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, who held often opposing views. This meant loud disagreements over policy and theoretically gave the president a wider range of options to choose from. Mr. Carter's approach made sense on an organizational chart, but in fact, Mr. Rodman contends, it "only enshrined the philosophical schizophrenia of its chief."

Mr. Rodman's central argument is that presidents perform best when they are consistently engaged in matters of national security and when they empower subordinates to impose policy on the bureaucracies at State and the Pentagon. President Clinton's successes, for example, came when he gave clear direction and appointed a powerful envoy -- George Mitchell for Northern Ireland and, eventually, Richard Holbrooke for Bosnia. President George W. Bush called himself the "decider," but Mr. Rodman argues that many of his foreign-policy failures -- including the incoherence of his approach to North Korea or the absence of a workable plan for postwar Iraq -- came in part from "a systematic failure to manage conflicts among his advisors."

We don't know what Mr. Rodman would think of Mr. Obama's incoming national-security team. He didn't know that Hillary Clinton would be heading the State Department when he wrote that the "pivotal" figure is a "strong and loyal Secretary of State." And he wasn't writing about Mr. Obama when he warned: "The risk involved in the future is that a president who is not a master in foreign affairs may have a difficult time keeping an energetic secretary under control."

Much has been made of Mr. Obama's Lincolnesque "team of rivals" approach to assembling his cabinet. Mr. Rodman's history lesson suggests that installing strong people to challenge the president can be a good thing -- if leadership ultimately comes from the top. Mr. Rodman offers the apocryphal story of Abraham Lincoln asking his cabinet to vote on whether to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. After all his cabinet secretaries voted "no," the story goes, Lincoln declared: "The ayes have it!"

Mr. Karl is the senior congressional correspondent for ABC News.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A11

* BOOKS
* JANUARY 12, 2009

Bookshelf
Team of One
How a president must manage his 'rivals' at the Pentagon and State Department.

By JONATHAN KARL