Captain James A. Baker of Houston, 1857–1941 by Kate Sayen Kirkland (review)

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Historical biography is a tricky genre to master. Biographers must not only avoid becoming too close to their subjects, but they must also be certain to contextualize those subjects’ lives within a particular era. Put differently, a well-written biography is as much a history of the time and place in which a person lived as it is a history of the person themselves. Unfortunately, based on these exacting criteria, Kate Sayen Kirkland’s new biography of early Houston civic leader Capt. James A. Baker falls short of the mark.

Born in Huntsville on the eve of the Civil War, Baker’s upbringing seemingly belied his frontier origins. His parents—a landowning lawyer with close ties to the railroad industry and a former headmistress of a local girl’s school—are said to have instilled in him both a love for education and a belief in civic duty. After graduating from the Texas Military Institute, Baker moved to Houston and joined his father’s namesake firm, Baker & Botts, where he quickly rose to prominence as a skilled courtroom litigator. Though she does provide a glimpse into the ongoing professionalization of law in the late nineteenth century, Kirkland provides few details on how Baker himself related to the most important events of the era. The young lawyer’s impressions of the Populist revolt, for example, a movement that must have affected his many corporate clients, are left largely unexplored. Kirkland also misses an opportunity to examine the deeper implications of Baker’s leadership in the neo-Confederate Houston Light Guard, insisting instead that the experience was more about cultivating business connections than restoring southern power and honor. This inability to probe Baker’s thoughts—a by-product, Kirkland explains, of his failure to keep a journal and his lifelong wariness of politics—presents a recurring problem that scholars will find frustrating.

One area of Baker’s life in which there is an abundance of source material was his effort to safeguard the fortune of murdered millionaire William Marsh Rice. Over the course of several years, Baker exercised his authority as executor of the estate by assisting in the trial of Rice’s killers and contesting the validity of the fraudulent will they had drafted. Once these issues were settled, Baker then set out to fulfill Rice’s dream of creating a world-class institution of higher learning in Houston, an effort that continued for more than four decades. Kirkland’s retelling of Rice University’s founding years is perhaps the strongest section of the work and provides interesting insights on the evolution of American higher education, particularly the roles played by benefactors and trustees in the administration of private universities. Even here, however, Kirkland stops short of asking hard questions about her subject, the most important being why Baker was such a tireless advocate of his client’s posthumous interests. The same holds true for her account of Baker’s extensive philanthropic ventures—unable to locate a source explaining his progressive civic outlook firsthand, Kirkland uncritically asserts that Baker’s actions reflected a “non-judgmental humanitarian concern...