A Republic, If You Can Keep It: The Foundations of the American Presidency, 1700–1800 by Michael P. Riccards (review)

276 Shorter Book Reviews completed his Ph.D. thesis on the Chinese laundryman as sojourner. This New York University edition is the late Paul Siu's unrevised Ph.D. thesis. As a graduate work, it is compelling, certainly ahead of its time (the 1950s) in research techniques and conclusions. Most notable is the anecdotal exploration of the Chicago Chinese laundryman in his physical, psychological, social and sexual compexities. There are also chapters on the origin of the Chinese laundry, the laundryman's images of America, America's image of the laundryman, the laundryman as immigrant, gambler and, more provocative, as deviant. If this work had been published in the 1950s, it would have become a classic, mainly because nothing of this nature on Chinese America had ever been attempted. But to publish this volume thirty-four years after its completion merely perpetuates the obviously insidious stereotypes of the Chinese inherent in Siu's basic conclusions. They are sex-starved and deviant lonely men, whose visits to prostitutes and gambling with friends serve to fillthe rare non-working days while they wait fruitlessly for that fateful return to the ''Celestial Kingdom.'' As a piece of history with sometimes startling empirical evidence, the book is a gem of information. But any researcher, and especially students using this work should be wary of the many racial stereotypes that more recent writers have attempted to dispel. But there is an irony in the 1987 publication of this book on the Chinese as sojourner. The recent influx of Hong Kong Chinese immigrants to Canada and the United States has created the notion of the Chinese as sojourner. This is founded in reality, because many Hong Kong Chinese immigrants are using Canada or the United States as a mere sojourn, as a passport haven, before returning to Hong Kong or, more practically, as a temporary place while they watch developments unfold before China reclaims Hong Kong in 1997. Paul Siu' s theory, then, has become an observable fact. But the major players today are more sophisticated, and definitely wealthier, than his Chinese laundrymen. Anthony B. Chan Department of Mass Communication California State University, Hayward Michael P. Riccards. A Republic, If You Can Keep It: The Foundations of the American Presidency, 1700-1800. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987. xv + 227 pp. Students of American politics and history have frequently observed that while we know a great deal about American presidents, we know much less about the Shorter Book Reviews 277 American presidency. The flood of books on the presidency in the aftermath of Viet Nam and Watergate went only part way toward filling that gap. Many of them concentrated on the development of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., dubbed the '' imperial presidency.'' In almost all cases, quite understandably, recent studies have focused on the contemporary or at least ''modem'' presidency, with cursory attention to its foundations. Thus, a book sub-titled The Foundations of the American Presidency, J700-1800 was much to be welcomed. Written by a political scientist, yet informed by an appropriate historical perspective, the book sets out to explore how Washington ''not only put together the office, but also created, by conscious design and pragmatic decisions, a specific style of executive leadership that has proven to be useful at other times in the republic's history." Treating both "the origins of executive authority" and "the Washington administration," Michael Riccards promises to deepen our understanding of the presidency as an institution through an exploration of its philosophical and political genesis. Regrettably, the book creates expectations that it does not satisfactorily fulfill. The author is quite right when he says in his epilogue that the ''presidency, more than any other political innovation, is a unique American contribution to the art and science of government.'' When one arrives at that statement in the last pages of the book, one wishes one could put a Q.E.D. after it, in the satisfaction that one had garnered a great deal of new insight. Instead, this reviewer had the sense of having completed simply the reading of a reasonably adroit synthesis of rather familiar materials. For a book by a political scientist, A Republic, IJYou Can Keep It is remarkably bereft...