The International Herald Tribune: The First Hundred Years by Charles L. Robertson (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 387 nationalism as important elements of Jeffersonian thought, Nelson offers a comprehensive altnerative to the interpretations associated with J.G.A. Pocock, John Murrin, Lance Banning and especially with Drew McCoy's The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (1980), which uses republicanism, with its roots in civic humanism, as a synthesizing concept, and stresses the fear of luxury, social decay and corruption as the dominant concerns of the Jeffersonians. The book also contains a careful critique of Hamilton's Report on Manufactures which helps explain why so many artisans, mechanics and other advocates of the development of manufactures moved into the Jeffersonian ranks. The interpretation offered by Nelson is not without its problems. His research into primary sources is limited almost exclusively to the writings of Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin, while the rest of his argument is based on the selective use of an uneven body of secondary sources. The interpetation also overemphasizes the political and economic influence of the manufacturing sector of the economy for the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. As a consequence , more significant issues such as the development of the West, federal and state land policy, and the growth of banks on the state level are ignored. Nor does Nelson deal adequately with the internal improvements question, involving as it did a complex interplay of ideological, constitutional and economic considerations. Perhaps the biggest limitation of Nelson's interpretation is that it simply has no room for the agrarian and Old Republican wing of the Jeffersonian party. Nelson gives all his attention to the commercial and entrepreneurial elements in the Jeffersonian coalition, to be found mainly in the mid-Atlantic states and in certain parts of New England, and generally ignores what is going on in the South and West, where the Republican party was strongest. Any interpretation of political economy and the Jeffersonians in power that cannot make room for John Taylor, John Randolph, Nathaniel Macon, George Clinton, Simon Snyder and Daniel Tompkins is both incomplete and limited. Richard E. Ellis Department of History State University of New York at Buffalo Charles L. Robertson. The International Herald Tribune: The First Hundred Years. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. xi + 472 pp. Illus. Charles L. Robertson has produced, in this firstcomprehensive history of a unique newspaper, a work that is neither thoroughly academic nor completely successful as a popularization. Currently Professor of Government at Smith College, he 388 Shorter Book Reviews apparently has tried to write this book for the wide audience that has read and fondly remembers the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune, while retaining something of the detachment and attention to detail of the scholar. The result is a surprisingly lacklustre hybrid. This is surprising because the story, like the newspaper itself, is one of the more dramatic and romantic of newspaper sagas. The International Herald Tribune of our own era, based in Paris but with facsimile editions around the world, is the descendant of the European Edition of the New York Herald launched in 1887 by the wealthy expatriate American publisher James Gordon Bennett, Jr., with a fondness for alcohol and outrageous social behaviour that had excluded him from New York society, despite his millions, the exiled Bennett, according to this history, also possessed, in addition to his newspapers, houses and hunting lodges all over Europe, an ocean-going yacht with a crew of 100, and '' a certain contempt for journalists.'' In its early years, Bennett's Parisian newspaper shared many of the tastes and eccentricities of its publisher and other wealthy Americans of that period, who regarded Europe as a playground, museum and occasional place of business. It was "the most frivolous of serious newspapers," publishing news of wars and revolution alongside reports from "Merry Montreux," "Society, Hunting, Kennel , Theatrical and Racing News,'' andrepeated appearances of a letter asking for information about Centrigade-Fahrenheit conversion from an ''Old Philadelphia Lady'' -a letter that was published every day for nineteen years on the instructions of Bennett, who perhaps had written it himself and who continued to reprint it as a personal joke. When World War I brought an army of Americans to Europe, the Paris Herald...