Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.
Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and Their War
by Eric Larrabee; Harper & Row; 723 pages; $25.00.
After a good deal of wrangling between the British and the Americans at a meeting early in 1942, it was decided that instead of two committees directing the war—one here, one in London—there would be just one. Lord Moran, Churchill’s physician, was there, and he knew instantly what this meant: “The Americans have got their way,” he wrote, “and the war will be run from Washington.” So it was, and how it was is the subject of this big and utterly absorbing book.
As the title suggests, FDR dominates the account. Some historians have asserted that the President pretty much left the running of the war to the military; Larrabee believes he took the title of Commander in Chief with the greatest seriousness, and that he was the moving force behind the long process that brought us to victory.
But since much of FDR’s prowess as a leader lay in his ability to pick the right subordinate and then stick by him, this is also very much about FDR’s lieutenants. In fact, the book is composed of nine biographies of the top chiefs, the story of each spanning the entire war, yet each advancing the narrative so artfully that in the end we are given a lucid and comprehensive picture of the whole titanic undertaking, from Midway to the Kasserine Pass, Guadalcanal to Berlin.
Larrabee writes of complex things with admirable clarity: whether he’s telling about the Ploesti raid or the terrible night action off Guadalcanal, he is at ease with the action on both the strategic and the tactical levels, and while he is concerned with those who were highest in command, he never loses sight of the men in the turrets and the foxholes. He is frank in his judgments (he thinks that MacArthur as a military commander was a posturing second-rater, and that Roosevelt treated Joseph Stilwell both poorly and stupidly), and the writing throughout is spirited, idiomatic, and relaxed without losing touch with the grandeur of the subject. It all adds up to a book that is every bit as entertaining as it is valuable—and it is very valuable indeed.
Painted Ponies: American Carousel Art
by William Manns, Peggy Shank, and Marianne Stevens; Zon International Publishing Co.; 256 pages; $39.95.
The carousel is the heart of any amusement park. The roller coaster, with its supple geometry, may be more regal, and virtually every other ride is scarier, but it is the flash and holler of the merry-go-round that breathes life into a park.
The title of the book refers to carousel “art,” and so it is: the carved animals—horses, of course, but also lions, elephants, dogs, and even the occasional ostrich—have come to be perceived as American folk sculpture of the first order, and one recently went at auction for fifty-six thousand dollars. This sumptuous book both displays the animals with the gravity fine art demands and shows them in their gritty, punishing working life in parks and fairgrounds at the century’s turn.
During the six or seven decades that carousel figures were carved in this country, they evolved into three general styles: County Fair Style, simple and utilitarian and suited to a life on the road; Philadelphia Style, which was literal down to the bulging veins in the horses’ necks; and Coney Island Style, whose figures were flamboyant and stylized—as befits that most flamboyant place, which, with twenty-three of them spinning away in a three-block area, was the carousel capital of the nation.
Painted Ponies offers many examples of each style, along with biographies of the men who carved them. With color on every page, the book is so unstintingly produced that it manages to impart a real feeling of the lushness of the machines themselves. But of course the most satisfactory way to view a carousel is to climb on one, and if you’ll send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to William Manns, c/o Zon International Publishing, P.O. Box 47, Millwood, NY 10546, the author will send you free a directory of the old carousels still working in your part of the country. After all, as Manns says, “Where else can you spend fifty cents and be allowed to jump up and down on an antique worth between $20,000 and $30,000?”
The Adams Women
by Paul C. Nagel; Oxford University Press; 310 pages; $19.95.
While writing his best-selling biography Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family, Paul Nagel came to realize that the Adams women—minor characters in that book—“deserve at least as much attention from a biographer as their male counterparts.” And unlike most women of their time, they left abundant testimony about their lives and feelings, as they were prodigious correspondents and writers. The author could read their “perceptive observations about human nature … their recipes for making rouge … or for treating piles.” They judged keenly the strengths and weaknesses of males, compared methods of enduring menopause, and shrewdly argued politics. And ever present was their indignation at the way in which their maledominated society treated women. In this admiring and delightful book, Nagel seeks to right the historical balance between male and female Adamses.
The most fascinating of the Adams women was perhaps Louisa, John Quincy’s wife, whom her grandson Henry Adams called an “exotic,” a woman of unique philosophical and literary talents. John Quincy was a difficult husband—her patience with him was saintly—and Abigail was for many years a hostile mother-in-law. It is to the credit of both women that eventually they became close, supportive friends.
Neither Abigail nor Louisa liked the First Lady role, and though Louisa had always been a brilliant hostess, she found the White House a “dull and stately prison” that depressed her spirits. Nor was she happy that John Quincy chose to go back to Washington as a congressman after his term of office as President. That she made a success of even that unwanted role is attested to by the fact that on her death both houses of Congress adjourned in tribute. It would have mollified Louisa’s indignation about her status as a woman to know that she was the first American “female whose death would bring the nation’s legislators respectfully to observe a day of silence.”
