by Drew R. McCoy; Cambridge University Press; 376 pages.
In 1772, when he was twenty-one, James Madison wrote, “My sensations for many months past have intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life.” He glumly proclaimed himself “too dull and infirm now to look out for any extraordinary things in this world.” Yet the morbid young man went on to lead an indisputably extraordinary career as a framer of the Constitution, as a co-author of The Federalist Papers, and as a two-term President of the United States. After leaving office in 1817, Madison enjoyed a long and productive retirement until his death in 1836 at the age of eighty-five.
Drew R. McCoy focuses on this final period of Madison’s life, when the last surviving constitutional signer endeavored, in McCoy’s words, “to convey to a new generation the meaning of a Revolutionary past that was fast receding from memory.” The 1787 Constitution represented a bold experiment in government, but lax and self-serving interpretations of the founders’ original intent variously threatened to plunge the young republic into either tyranny or anarchy, as in the nullification crisis, which roused Madison from a long public silence in the late 1820s.
The nullifiers, a group contesting the federal government’s right to impose tariffs on imported goods, asserted the right of states to nullify federal laws they deemed unconstitutional and, if necessary, withdraw from the Union. Madison was horrified by this loose reading of the framers’ legacy, calling it “a preposterous and anarchical pretension” that could render the Constitution as impotent as the Articles of Confederation that had preceded it.
Using this and other issues, McCoy explores the theoretical framework for the elegant contrivance of checks and balances that Madison had helped put in motion. By the 1830s Madison’s undilutedly eighteenth-century political outlook had begun to look a bit antiquated to an industrializing, expanding, railroad-building nation. His non-ideological, somewhat mechanistic view of government occasionally put him into unusual positions: Madison detested slavery, but his unwaveringly strict interpretation of state prerogatives prevented him from advocating federal regulations limiting the expansion of slavery into the Western territories. Nevertheless, in his last years Madison played a crucial role in maintaining, in the midst of a period of growth and reassessment, the efficacy of a document that reflected the singular talent of his political mind, of “snatching order from the jaws of chaos.”
Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Missionary for the Modern
by Alice Goldfarb Marquis; Contemporary Books; 431 pages.
When Alfred Knopf asked Alfred H. Barr, Jr., to write his autobiography in 1963, the usually humorless founding father of the Museum of Modern Art replied that other unfinished projects would “fortify” him against “the folly of autobiography.” “Should senility overtake me,” he assured the publisher, “I will keep Knopf in mind.” Now, eight years after Barr’s prolonged struggle with Alzheimer’s disease ended in death, Alice Goldfarb Marquis has undertaken the task of telling the fascinating life story Barr refused to recount.
As the guiding spirit behind MOMA for nearly forty years, Barr changed the way Americans thought of art, introducing them to the study of architecture, film, photography, and commercial design as legitimate forms of creative expression. His immensely popular shows helped build the reputations of artists ranging from Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso to Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol.
Barr’s groundbreaking work brought him into conflict with political leaders such as Harry S. Truman (who told Barr that viewing modern art put him “in almost the same frame of mind as after I have had a nightmare”) and Nikita Khrushchev. Earlier, Barr’s travels took him to Hitler’s Germany, where he sought to rescue artists from the Nazi onslaught, and to Stalin’s Russia, where he warned the movie director Sergei Eisenstein of what he saw as Hollywood’s own form of censorship: “timidity, vulgarity, prudery and … a severe temptation to cheapen … art.”
Barr’s all-consuming passion for his work had its dark side. Although he enjoyed a fruitful working relationship with his wife, Margaret (“Marga”) Scolari-Fitzmaurice, their daughter Victoria received little attention from either of her too-busy parents. On the job Barr became a lightning rod for criticism both of his sloppy managerial style and of his consistent disdain for the work of American, female, and minority artists.
In her narrative Marquis makes much of Barr’s strict Protestant upbringing and family legacy of theological duty. Casting Barr in the role of a proselytizing prophet, she reveals him as both a visionary and a zealot. His pulpit was the Museum of Modern Art, and under his authority it became “a center for all that was new and provocative in the visual arts, a missionary chapel proclaiming the gospel of Modernism, loudly and persistently.”
George Washington Slept Here
Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876–1986
By Karal Ann Marling; Harvard University Press; 445 pages.
George Washington has been the constant figure in American life since the day he became President. In a witty, irreverent look at how Americans have viewed the father of our country, Karal Ann Marling traces Washington in our culture from 1876, the date of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, to the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan recalled erroneously our nation’s first leader praying on his knees in the snows of Valley Forge.
Washington is a symbol of unity in an often divided society, and he has been since the Civil War. Marling shows him as a lover and a poet in the 1901 play Washington and the Lady and as the very model of the modern man in advertisements from the 1920s. His idealized rural boyhood was the blueprint for a generation of politicians; Herbert Hoover used it in the election of 1928. Following World War II Washington became a pop idol; today he serves both as an automobile salesman and as the benevolent patriarch who beckons us to sales in February.
Marling has pursued Washington from Mount Vernon to the Super Bowl and through flea markets to meetings of the D.A.R. She has found him in historical romances, in Hollywood epics, and on pin trays; his influence extends to furniture design and national pageantry, to flatware and modern art. The remarkable illustrations are varied and well integrated into the text. Combining historical analysis with art history and cultural criticism, Marling has provided a lively new view of a hero turned into an icon.
Andrew Johnson
A Biography
by Hans L. Trefousse; W. W. Norton & Company; 443 pages.
The story of Andrew Johnson’s life reads like one of the Grimms’ more tragic fairy tales. Born in a log cabin in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808, Johnson grew up fatherless and without formal education. After drifting into the tailoring business, he embarked in 1829 on a remarkable political career that took him from village alderman to U.S. senator, with terms as U.S. representative and Tennessee governor as intermediate political steppingstones. He was Abraham Lincoln’s running mate in 1864, ascending to the Presidency when Lincoln was assassinated the following year. Then, just as dramatically, Johnson lost it all, becoming the only Chief Executive in history to face impeachment proceedings.
Hans L. Trefousse’s excellent biography shows that the key to Johnson’s startling success—his political cunning—helped lead to his fall. Machiavellian tactics dictated some of the most important political decisions of his career: his alliance with the Democratic party in 1839, his unconditional support of the Union in 1860, and his gutting of Lincoln’s plan for Reconstruction beginning in 1865. But effective as they were, these self-serving maneuvers made Johnson many enemies. When outside pressure mounted during the declining years of his Presidency, he was left without a solid base of political support.
Nowhere was Johnson’s duplicitous nature more cruelly evident than on questions of race. The man who in 1844 stated that black suffrage “would place every splay-footed, bandyshanked, hump-backed, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, wooly-headed, ebon-colored negro in the country upon an equality with the poor white man” promised a group of freedmen during the 1864 election campaign, “I will indeed be your Moses, and lead you through the Red Sea of war and bondage to a fairer future of liberty and peace.” As President, Johnson made a mockery of this pledge, writing, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”
Trefousse resists the temptation to moralize. He puts no credence in the rumors of Johnson’s alcoholism (despite his drunken speech before Congress on Inauguration Day, 1865) and dismisses stories about Johnson’s relationships with women other than his wife, Eliza. Instead, Trefousse lets the facts paint their own unflattering portrait of one of history’s least respected Presidents.
