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  • The Life of Pennsylvania Governor George M. Leader: Challenging Complacency by Kenneth C. Wolensky with George M. Leader
  • Gregory S. Wilson
The Life of Pennsylvania Governor George M. Leader: Challenging Complacency. By Kenneth C. Wolensky with George M. Leader. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011. 189 pp. Hardbound, $63.00.

As the title suggests, this work covers the life of George Leader, Democratic governor of Pennsylvania from 1955 to 1959, who died in May 2013 at the age of ninety-five. About one-third of the book is devoted to Leader’s term as governor, while the remainder covers his life before and after his time in office. The book serves as a biography and is structured as a conversation between the author, historian Kenneth Wolensky, and Leader, as well as Leader’s brother and legislative secretary Henry, his wife Mary Jane, and his children. Wolensky provides some background and historical context, but most of the book contains Wolensky’s questions and Leader’s answers related to various topics and issues over Leader’s life. Rather than analyze, Wolensky states that he prefers to “let the storyteller speak” (6).

Wolensky and Leader became fairly close. Not surprisingly, Wolensky admires Leader and offers a supportive and positive biography of the former governor. Wolensky first met Leader in the 1990s while the author worked for Democratic governor Robert Casey. Wolensky, who by then had moved to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, then interviewed Leader in 2001 for an article on the governor. Following this, the two continued their connection, and in 2008 Leader asked Wolensky to help write his biography. This book is the result. Wolensky conducted additional interviews in the spring and summer of 2009. Leader opened his own Leader Library in his hometown of [End Page 475] York, Pennsylvania, and Wolensky helped organize the archival material there. Wolensky deposited copies of his interviews at the Leader Library and at the Pennsylvania State Archives.

The book breaks no methodological ground as Wolensky adopts a straightforward approach to his subject. Wolensky’s questions are thorough and he covers the major biographical highlights of Leader’s life in chronological order, from Leader’s childhood, through his time in college, the Navy in World War II, his political career, and finally his post-gubernatorial life. Wolensky structures the book in a question-and-answer format. While allowing Leader to shape the narrative and delivering insights into Leader and the larger political events of the 1950s and 1960s, Wolensky’s approach means that there is little scholarly engagement with Leader as narrator, the events discussed, or oral history as a methodology. Nevertheless, Wolensky’s questions and Leader’s answers create an informative work that provides valuable information on Leader, as well as Pennsylvania and US politics in the mid-twentieth century.

The book opens with Wolensky providing historical context to York County and then a brief history of the Leader family, which entered York County as early as the 1780s. George was born in 1918 and his father, Guy, became a leading poultry farmer; George followed his father into the family business. This chapter and the next follow a path, with Wolensky asking questions and Leader providing answers, through Leader’s college years, marriage, and his time in the Navy aboard the aircraft carrier USS Randolph.

Following World War II, Leader made a successful run for the Pennsylvania Senate in 1950. Here, Leader pushed a number of bills to support liberal causes, including organized labor and social welfare; none made it through the Republican legislature. Wolensky covers briefly the second Red Scare in Pennsylvania. Leader, a Democrat, was one of the few legislators to oppose a loyalty oath bill in 1952 that eventually passed. Next, Leader failed in his bid for state treasurer in 1952, but this gave him experience and a base from which to launch his successful bid for governor in 1954.

It is Leader’s time as governor that will likely draw the most interest from readers. He was thirty-six when elected, second youngest ever to become governor of Pennsylvania and only one of a handful of Democrats in the twentieth century. His administration was also among the most...

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