Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America, and: Tweed's New York: Another Look (review)

BOOK REVIEWS185 the trial of President Garfield's assassin, Charles Julius Guiteau, for the light which that trial sheds upon late nineteenth century concepts of law, psychiatry and moral responsibility. Guiteau was certainly an odd bird: merely to list his more colorful eccentricities would consume the space alloted for this review. But was he odd enough to escape hanging? The long-established legal standard—the Mc'Naghten rule—said that he was not. According to that rule, any criminal who understood the consequences of his acts was sane enough to be punished for them. Guiteau's case exposed a weak link in the Mc'Naghten rule. Although he understood the legal consequences of his deed, he insisted that God's commandment to "remove" the President took priority over merely human legislation. The prosecution enlisted the psychiatric establishment, consisting mainly of asylum superintendents, to testify that Guiteau was depraved but not insane. The defense experts, young, Germantrained and up-to-date, countered that Guiteau's insanity was obvious in view of his hereditary taint, his lumpy skull and his inability to stick his tongue out straight. Their arguments were unavailing. After a lurid seven-week long trial, the jury took only an hour to find Guiteau to be both sane and guilty. Considering the veneration for the late President and the widespread distrust of what was called "the insanity dodge," no other verdict was likely. Yet by dramatizing the issues, the trial helped pave the way for acceptance of new concepts of criminal insanity and moral responsibility . Professor Rosenberg recounts this episode with verve and wit, displaying a solid grasp of legal, medical, political and psychological aspects of the Gilded Age. The result is a model of that vanishing breed, the monograph, small in scope but infinitely suggestive in its wider implications. Allan Peskin Cleveland State University Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America. By Morton Keller. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977. Pp. ix, 631. $17.50.) Tweed's New York: Another Look. By Leo Herschkowitz. (Garden City: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1977. Pp. xx, 409. $12.50.) The two books under review differ markedly in subject and scope, methodology, and quality. Morton Keller's Affairs of State is a masterful synthesis of printed sources and recent scholarship on late nineteenth century public life. Of the book's sixteen chapters, readers of this journal will be most interested in the first seven 186CIVIL WAR history which consider the political and governmental impact of the Civil War and the postwar polity from 1865 to 1880. The remainder of the book deals with the years from 1880 to 1900 when industrialization replaced race, reconstruction and restoration as the major theme in American life. The war bred a commitment to an expanding, more interventionist conception of government and a more inclusive definition of citizenship. Keller demonstrates how these conceptions influenced public policy on the national, state, and city level in the immediate postwar years. On all levels, and in a variety of areas—promotion of economic activity, social welfare, and regulation of behavior, as well as southern reconstruction—government undertook new responsibilities and spent more money. Keller views the activism of the late 1860's as contrary to the basic tendencies of nineteenth century American culture—localism, racism, a devotion to laissez faire and restricted government. It is not surprising, therefore, that the political activism of the 1860's gave way to more limited government in the 1870's with the abandonment of the federal presence in the southern states, tighter state and city budgets, a waning interest in civil rights, diminished public aid to private enterprise, and a political structure oriented more to the maintenance of party organizations than to struggles over principle. Keller's approach is not presentisi in any way, nor is he involved in a search for a usable past. His model of the historian is the Olympian dispassionate observer out to recreate and understand the past in its terms, not ours. What he is attempting may be theoretically impossible, but Keller's enormous industry, the lucidity and balance of his mind, his ability to see the common threads in divergent areas of public...