Robert Worth Bingham and the Southern Mystique (review)

roast coffee) and festivals (Mardi Gras, Fais-do-dos, and the blessing of the shrimp fleet). Potential visitors will encounter many other things they will want to experience and places theywill want to go. To help visitors find them, De Caro andJordan have added at the end ofalmost every chapter marvelous, well-written travel "updates." They provide current information on places mentioned in the selections, offer other advice for would-be visitors, and recommend additional guides and reading on the subject. Anyone planning to visit south Louisiana will profit from reading the editors' and the travelers' accounts and will enhance their trip by traveling, literally, with I^ouisiana Sojourns. And those not planning to visit or who already live there will enjoy traveling, figuratively, with its authors. Robert Worth Bingham and the Southern Mystique By William E. ElUs Kent State University Press, 1 997 258 pp. Cloth, $24.00 Reviewed by Walter E. Campbell, an independent scholar living in Durham, North Carolina. It was tragedy, chance, and circumstance that enabled Robert Worth Bingham to shape a journeyworthy ofa full-length biography, and this dioroughly researched and elegandy written book provides a welcome contrast to the celebrity journalism that defined the spate of writing about the Bingham family published between 1987 and 1991. William Ellis substitutes fact for fiction and history for legend in presenting Robert Worth Bingham's career "as a southerner, lawyer, reformer , businessman, publisher, political figure, and diplomat." Bingham was born in North Carolina in 1871, but moved to Louisville, Kentucky , in 1 896 to marry Eleanor Miller, whose father, a wealthy Louisville businessman , had committed suicide the previous year. A bright, handsome, and ambitious man, Bingham used his personal skills and social connections to become a successful attorney and part-time local politician. He made his first and most direct political contribution to Louisville in 1907, when, as the city's interim mayor, 82 southern cultures, Fall 1999 : Reviews he joined anti-saloon activists in challenging the "bossism" and "corruption" of the city's entrenched Democratic machine. Though the challenge failed, Bingham 's efforts "suggested the type of urban Progressivism displayed by many American cities and hinted of his independence." In 1916, three years after his first wife's death in a car-train coUision, Bingham married one ofthe world's wealthiest women, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler. Mary Lily died eight months later, however, and in August 191 8, Bingham purchased the Louisville Courier-journal and the Louisville Times witii part of the $5 million she had left him in a codicil to her will. From then until his death in 1937, Bingham used his wealth and newspaper power to pursue what ElUs describes favorably as "Wilsonian progressivism" and "enUghtened southern leadership." In developing diis argument, the author focuses on three of Bingham's most notable pursuits: his clashes with Kentucky's "antiprogressive" poUtical factions, especially the state's "bipartisan combine"; his "business progressivism" in supporting the (failed) agricultural cooperative movement ofthe 1920s; and his diplomatic activities in England as American ambassador to the Court ofSt. James's from 1933 until 1937. ElUs's findings will interest but not surprise most historians of the Progressive Era, while his conclusions regarding Mary Lily's death will surprise and disappoint legions of readers who beUeve that Bingham had something to do with her demise. The notion of Bingham's guilt was first advanced by journaUst David Leon Chandler and his wife, Mary Voelz Chandler, in their 1987 book The Binghams ofLouisville. According to the Chandlers, Bingham aided and abetted Mary Lily's death, either by willful conduct or neglect, in order to claim the inheritance that enabled him to purchase the Courier-Journal and the Times. Although the Chandlers based their sensationaUst soap opera entirely upon hearsay, contrivance , and faulty research, their assertions served as the starting point for three more books about the Bingham family: Marie Brenner's House ofDreams (1988), SaIUe Bingham's Passion and Prejudice (1989), and Susan Tift and Alex Jones's The Patriarch (1991). ElUs reaches a very different conclusion about Bingham and Mary Lily. He finds "no evidence that, either by omission or commission, [Bingham] contributed to her death." Nor has he found...