Henry Wilson: Practical Radical. A Portrait of a Politician (review)

book reviews351 ing Marble of the charges of attempted bribery while acting as one of the "visiting statesmen" to Florida during the Hayes-Tilden disputed election. Yet he hesitates to pound home die pitiful weaknesses revealed by Tilden in the crisis. He also is reluctant to pass judgment on Marble's self-defeating insolence and political stupidity in supporting the election of Michael Kerr of Indiana as Speaker of the House of Representatives in December, 1875, when it was obvious to his friends that the ravages of tuberculosis would prevent him from performing his duties and lead to his death in less than a year. The moral and political arrogance of Marble and his swallow-tail Democratic millionaire colleagues in the Manhattan Club is chronicled faitiifully in this biography, but the debilitating effect of such domination on the outlying regions of the Democratic party does not seem to be sensed by the audior. Mantón Marble, without his fourteen year span as owner-editor of the New York World, would not have amounted to much as a force in American society and politics. Thus, a careful marshalling of the events contributing to the growing financial decline of that journal and its eventual sale to Thomas A. Scott and his front-man, William Henry Hurlbert, is in order. The details of its demise are all there, but the reader is left with the impression that these events were all bad luck and that Marble was blameless. A strong case might be made for a contrary view. Artistic license and the glories of a free soul are for artists, not for businessmen and practicing politicians. Marble had difficulty adjusting to the fact of his reduced political clout after the sale of his newspaper and the rapid disillusionment of the electorate with Tildenism after 1877. To his great credit, he was able by the 1880's to throw his remarkable energies and intellect into a global study of gold and silver coinage and currency problems and practices. The final chapters of the study, describing and analysing Marble's conversion to the theory of bimetalism, are superb. Albert V. House State University of New York at Binghamton Henry Wibon: Practical Radical. A Portrait of a Politician. By Ernest McKay. (Port Washington, N.Y., and London: Kennikat Press, 1971. Pp. 257. $11.00.) "Poverty,'' said George Bernard Shaw, "has a smell which will not wash off." For all his success as a shoe manufacturer and as a politician, Henry Wilson never lost the hard instinct for survival in a pitilessly competitive world which had been instilled by the privation and toil of his childhood. Nor would his patrician colleagues of the antislavery movement let him forget the difference between his origins and theirs, or between the opportunism engendered by his need to scramble to the top and their moral absolutism buffered by inherited wealth. "Henry Colbraith makes me sick," wrote Richard Henry Dana in the 1870's, 352CIVIL WAR HISTORY mistaking Wilson's family name. "Having discarded his trade as a shoemaker thirty years ago, he has tried to live as a gentleman, on politics, ever since." Since that time historians have shown a marked preference for the patricians of the antislavery movement, such as Charles Sumner and Charles Francis Adams, over their "self-made" colleagues, like Ben Wade, John Hale, and William D. Keiley. What makes the preference remarkable is that politicians of Wilson's origins and character were the living embodiment of the Radical Republicans' social ideals. They had demonstrated in practice that the "free labor system" allowed men of humble origins to rise by their own grit and wit to positions of great eminence and power in society. The contrast between their careers and the fixed lot of the slave was the very essence of their critique of the South's peculiar institution. For Henry Wilson, who adopted that name at the close of the four years of service to a New Hampshire farmer to which his destitute family had bound him, the lust for fame and prosperity demanded that he apply himself tirelessly and single-mindedly to his goal. He quickly learned to solicit the sponsorship of clergymen, editors, prominent Whigs...