Books: Statesman Among Scoundrels

HAMILTON FISH; THE INNER HISTORY OF THE GRANT ADMINISTRATION — Allan Nevins—Dodd, Mead ($5).

On March 11, 1869 tall, stately, curly-haired Hamilton Fish at home in Manhattan received a laconic letter from President Grant saying: “I will have to make another selection of Cabinet officer from New York. I have thought it might not be unpleasant for you to accept the port folio of the State Dept.” The week before the 61-year-old Fish had read the list of Grant’s amateurish Cabinet selections with alarm, noting that one choice was plainly illegal, others were determined by the President’s desire to aid his old friends from Galena, Ill., all by a naive concept of the President’s responsibilities.

Fish had virtually retired from political life. He had been a capable but undramatic Congressman, Senator and Governor of New York, a party leader of the Whigs at the time of their collapse, a studious and cultivated man for whom retirement held no terrors. He discussed Grant’s letter with his wife, wired back: “I cannot.” But Grant had made such a mess of his first appointments that he was determined to have Fish in the Cabinet, sent his nomination to the Senate and said he had not received the New Yorker’s refusal until too late. Fish then agreed to serve until after Congress adjourned. But as he plunged into work, at his little office in the Orphan Asylum on 14th Street, with as many as 400 callers a day, as the monumental confusions of Grant’s Administration piled up, as scandal followed scandal and Grant’s waywardness became more obvious, Secretary of State Fish soon be came one of the few uncompromised individuals in the Government.

Last week Allan Nevins, whose biography of Grover Cleveland won him the Pulitzer Prize for 1932, offered a full-length portrait of the Secretary that clarified the disorder of Grant’s regime, revealed aspects of U. S. political life of which few voters have been aware. Fish was an excellent choice as central figure for such a study. Unchangeable, incorruptible, with his prejudices, political views and limitations firmly fixed by the time he took office, he served as a standard of consistency against which the dishonesties and irresponsibilities of his colleagues could be measured. Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration is an exhaustive, scholarly, 1,000-page volume, based on the huge manuscript diary kept by Fish and containing much unpublished material. No book for hasty readers, it is likely to impress most students as a solid historical achievement, slow-moving but not dull, a biography for those who like facts regardless of the animation with which they are presented.

Author Nevins devotes five chapters to Fish’s early career, divides the remainder of this fat volume between accounts of foreign affairs and domestic scandals, quotes copiously from Fish’s factual, objective diary. Born in 1808, the son of a distinguished Revolutionary officer, Fish’s first 60 years were relatively uneventful. In the next eight he packed a lifetime of effort into the negative task of preventing trouble. He kept his head while around him plotters, many of them with Grant’s support, worked for war with England and Spain, the annexation of Santo Domingo and Canada. The one real achievement of Grant’s Administration was the settlement of the Alabama Claims by the first great arbitration of modern history, in which Fish, able, conciliatory, determined, blocked Sumner’s extravagant demand that England pay for the prolongation of the Civil War in the same fashion that he blocked Secretary of War Rawlins’ demand for an attack on Spain. By patience, vigilance and frequent threats to resign, he prevented worse Presidential blunders than those that disgraced Grant’s two Administrations.

One of Grant’s reasons for appointments to foreign posts was because he wanted to get someone out of the country. The high point of Hamilton Fish is in its picture of the strange and lonely President, who would send his old friends to Fish with a card stating his willingness “to give the bearer . . . one of the best consulates now vacant,” who confided State secrets to strangers and who was so inattentive that after weeks of discussion he would suddenly ask a question that betrayed complete ignorance of the subject discussed. After 27 months of the Cuban revolt, when Spanish armies had been sent to that island, a popular move for U. S. recognition of the rebels blocked by Fish, the U. S. policy carefully worked out, Grant abruptly asked his Secretary of State: “I hear that Spain is sending troops out to Cuba, is that a fact?”

Author Nevins’ 200-page study of the corruption of Grant’s Administration, and his two chapters devoted to the President, only deepen the mystery of Grant’s personality, although they reveal more clearly than any previous work the character of his weaknesses. Telling again the story of the Whiskey Ring exposure, the panic of 1873, the affair of the U. S. Minister to England who floated a dishonest mining corporation, of Attorney General Williams who paid his large household expenses with Federal funds, of Grant’s scheme to annex Santo Domingo for the benefit of his friends, Author Nevins clearly establishes his thesis that Grant looked on the Presidency as “a reward not a responsibility.” Loyal to his friends even after their dishonesty was proved, Grant blocked the impeachment of Secretary of War William W. Belknap after the Secretary had been convicted of accepting bribes, and during the Whiskey Ring exposure, when his confidential secretary Babcock was on trial, only the stubborn interference of Fish and other Cabinet officers prevented Grant from rushing to St. Louis to defend his disgraceful assistant in person.