Books: Ballot Barons

THE PRESIDENT MAKERS—Matthew Josephson—Harcourt, Brace ($3.75).

With the implacable serenity of a man with a thesis who does not at all mind being a bore, Matthew Josephson continues to tell Americans that their administrators and respectable citizens are a bunch of crooks. He does not always use epithet. In a really crushing mood he just calls them politicians and businessmen. In The Politicos (1938) he exposed the politicians; the capitalists caught it in The Robber Barons (1934). This being election year, Historian Josephson explores the devious ways by which the electorate is hoodwinked while Presidents are made in smoke-filled rooms.

Historian Josephson is a former editor of The New Republic. In 1932 he strove in company with the League of Professional Groups to elect Communist William Z. Foster President. Outside of this, his firsthand experience of President-making is small. But what he lacks in experience he makes up in learning and distrust.

His distrust begins with Republicans. Heywood Broun had a story about his Republican grandmother, who, when told that raging floods were sweeping New England, snapped: “Democrats!” While never entirely absolving the Democrats when anything goes wrong, Josephson is more inclined to snap: Republicans! First Republican President maker in this book, which covers the period from 1896 to 1919, is Marcus Alonzo Hanna, the Ohio boss credited with electing McKinley and coming the expression: Stand pat! Second Republican President maker is Roosevelt I, who in so far as McKinley’s assassin did not make him President, made himself President. He also made Taft, who occupies quite a section of the book.

Democratic President makers are Colonels House and Harvey. Publisher George Brinton McClellan Harvey, president of Harper & Bros., charmed by Wilson’s phrasemaking, promoted the president of Princeton from wrangling with the college trustees to the Governorship of New Jersey. For this, Wilson, afraid Harvey’s Wall Street connections might injure his role of reformer in the eyes of the masses, soon kicked his backer downstairs. President Maker House was a soft-footed, soft-voiced, soft-eyed Texan who finessed Wilson into the White House. Later Wilson broke with him too.

Historian Josephson doles out a few drops of carefully measured praise for Wilson’s New Freedom, partly incorporated in the New Deal. It is for Roosevelt I, the subject of the first half of the book, that Josephson reserves his more withering disapproval. Irked by T. R.’s nationalism and strong foreign policy, unable to call him either politico or robber baron, Josephson calls him an aristocratic bureaucrat, backs it up by statements of aristocrats at the Habsburg court.

Only politicians for whom Josephson has a kind word are onetime Governor Altgeld of Illinois, onetime Senator Dolliver of Iowa, Senator La Follette of Wisconsin. He also utters qualified praise for Brooks Adams (T. R.’s political mentor), and his brother Henry Adams, who wrote prophetically in 1905: “We have got to . . . fortify an Atlantic system beyond attack; for if Germany breaks down England or France, she becomes the centre of a military world, and we are lost.”

More than history of the making of Presidents, Josephson’s book is a history of what he calls “the central task of modern capitalist statesmen to save society from revolutionary break-up.” He tells this story of their efforts and of U. S. social unrest in great detail, makes a brave try at controlling his irritation when the revolutionary break-up does not progress faster.