In a League of His Own

...But does that make him "great...

...Not so fast, said Mood...

...He never succumbed to the languor of academe, and its precious comedy of manners...

...78 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2005 BOOKS IN REVIEW of history, where the facts dictate what the conclusions should be, and not the other way around...

...Mood made him read and take notes on every statute enacted by the British Parliament between 1763 and 1783...

...His nemesis stared directly in his eye and said: "Eugene Campbell Barker is a senile old man...

...Moreover, the landholders just as often supported the issues of the aggrieved as they did their own personal interests...

...His plan was to track down every records repository from Georgia to New Hampshire and "make full notes of anything I could find pertaining to the political, economic, social, constitution, and legal developments, state by state, from the Revolution to 1790...

...His opponent, Darius II, did flee the Alexander: The Ambiguity of Greatness by Guy MacLean Rogers (RANDOM HOUSE, 383 PAGES, $26.95) Reviewed by Brandon Crocker JULY/AUGUST 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 79...

...What the Whig historians were doing was to establish a filter based on their own social convictions which handpicked certain events and set good guys against bad guys to suit contemporary propaganda...

...It is this down-to-earth, fact-filled quality that has made McDonald the premier American historian writing today...

...And there is a lot more in here, about his 14 other books, about his migration from being a supporter of Harry Truman to voting for Barry Goldwater, and about his love for the Founding Fathers...

...As a result, McDonald decided to do his master's thesis on proving that Beard was wrong, and Barker was right...

...I read the Times' account of every major league game during that period...

...He left baseball sorrowfully, but when he went into history he soon learned to hit every curve ball thrown at him...

...Most have given Alexander his due and have concluded that his various failings were more than offset by his virtues...

...Then he had to do the same for the 13 colonies/states...

...Rejecting Beard's thesis that the Founding Founders were a cabal of landowners and speculators out to disenfranchise and rob the small farmers and workers, McDonald demonstrated that proponents and critics of the Constitution were equally divided between landholders and the aggrieved...

...All he had to do was look up the land records on the 1,700 persons involved in the Philadelphia Convention and in the 14 state-ratifying conventions (North Carolina had two) and examine how they participated in the debates and voted...

...No stranger to hard work (he had a job delivering newspapers 40 hours a week, while taking a full course load, and getting straight A's), he hitchhiked from Austin to Washington, D.C...

...It marked the end of an age of innocence...

...The good news is that there is more to come...

...ik't Measuring Greatness THE MODEL ANCIENT SET-PIECE BATTLE is not any of Alexander the Great's victories, but Hannibal's encirclement and annihilation of a numerically superior Roman force at Cannae in 216 BC...

...True, at Granicus and Hydaspes he also had numeric superiority (in addition to superior troops), but at Issus and Gaugamela he faced much tougher odds, being vastly outnumbered...

...His nemesis stared directly in his eye and said: "Eugene Campbell Barker is a senile old man...

...Meanwhile, he spent all his time in the university's newspaper collection reading everything he could get his hands on about baseball...

...Told by a man who is keen on evidence, his tale is just matter-of-fact...

...The historian who writes with a grandiloquent flourish, consulting only emotions, ideology, or popular prejudices is an entertainer, not a historian...

...Well, said Butterfield, history was more likely the interaction of forces which neither side then imagined, and it was the business of the historian to look at events from the standpoint of the protagonists and not to invent a myth that suited the correctness of modern politics...

...doubt, "the greatest conqueror in the history of Western civilization...

...He was also innovative...

...His methodology was simple...

...Later trips to New York and New England left him with a deposit of some 5,000 pages of handwritten notes...

...Academic historians wrote monographs on esoteric and insufferable dull subjects not for an interested public but for an elite of eggheads...

...Archives, taking notes furiously...

...A hot topic of philosophical debate in the ancient world, post-Alexander, was whether his successes were the result of luck or virtue...

...Then it was on to Raleigh, Richmond, and the National Archives in Washington, D.C., working 12-hour days, always conscious of his time and his money running out...

...When Forrest McDonald stepped upon the stage of historiography in America, he had no idea he was entering a similar battle...

...He writes: "I read the entire file of the New York Times from 1900 to 1944, summers only, sports pages only...

...Alexander, however, was, beyond Brandon Crocker is a real estate executive, writer, and armchair classicist living in San Diego...

...Long, long ago, when the golden hours of graduate school seemed to hold out the promise of reading any book, indeed, all books, this reviewer's hand fell upon a similar little volume, Herbert Butterfield's already classic The Whig Interpretation of History...

...He gladly tells us how delighted he was to get an advance on one of his books because it enabled him to go out and get a pick-up truck for his farm...

...As a result, McDonald decided to do his master's thesis on proving that Beard was wrong, and Barker was right...

...Nonetheless, Rogers clearly gives Alexander credit for his military triumphs, extolling his qualities as a tactician, innovator, and leader of men...

...At the battles of the Granicus River, Issus, Gaugamela, and the Hydaspes, Alexander was clever and bold...

...Guy MacLean Rogers, a renowned classical scholar and former chairman of the Department of History of Wellesley College, objects to this "new orthodoxy" that compares Alexander with modern totalitarian tyrants...

...Noting that Beard, in formulating his economic interpretation of the Constitution, had admitted that documentation was lacking to prove much of what he was saying, McDonald decided he would dig up the facts to fill in Beard's gaps, and thus prove once and for all whether he was right or wrong...

...That dream was dashed when he discovered that he was a great outfielder (an opinion he has never given up), but couldn't hit a curve ball to save his life...

...Scraping together two or three thousand dollars in grants and loans, he parked the family at grandma's, bought an old jalopy (no more hitchhiking around the galaxy), and headed east...

...Butterfield's book, written in 1931, is still in print, and still a good handbook for explicating the editorials of the New York Times...

...and pored over old Treasury documents in the U.S...

...But the vigor of his effort set the tone for his more mature work...

...Rogers also cannot help but engage in the analysis of whether Alexander was good or lucky...

...BY 1951 HE WAS STILL an impecunious graduate student with a wife and two kids...

...It would be a disservice to McDonald to suggest that Recovering the Past is any kind of a personal whine or exercise in self-puffery...

...Indeed, it was a drop in the bucket for what was yet to come...

...That conviction led them to view the past in terms of struggles between good people, whose goals squared with what they regarded as desirable, and bad people, whose goals did not," says McDonald baldly...

...Preparing for his doctorate under his mentor Fulmer Mood, McDonald decided to take on Beard full blast...

...He started in Atlanta at the Department of Archives and History, then on to Savannah, Charleston, Columbia, sifting through records of state finances, and imports and exports...

...At the time when McDonald began his graduate studies in earnest, the so-called New Historians were soundly entrenched, men such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Carl Becker, and Charles A. Beard who believed that economic and social forces underlie and condition events...

...One such post was at Wayne State University in the wasteland of inner-city Detroit...

...that was only so he could start sensibly to do research on the dissertation...

...Alexander's conquests had important, and sometimes overlooked, consequences for subsequent world history, but it is difficult to say that they were more consequential than Scipio's conquest of Carthaginian Spain and North Africa, which ensured Roman domination of the Mediterranean—a domination that would last for more than 600 years...

...The final 272-page paper, he now says, was "stunningly puerile...

...Rogers runs through Alexander's life chronologically, outlining some of the main contradictory theories about important events...

...Thus McDonald's work-based success and prodigious output as a historian made him more and more unsuitable for the company of other members of his profession...

...But when a subsequent professor presented Beard's views as his own, McDonald, then a feisty graduate student, nailed the plagiarism...

...Never offered cushy appointments in the Big Name schools, he was forced into exile, like Ovid being sent to the desolate shores of the Black Sea...

...At least, that was the case until the mid-20th century when a growing number of historians started to treat Alexander more roughly, judging him a bloodthirsty, maniacal aggressor...

...Much later I realized that I had been doing historical research and had become a veritable encyclopedia of the history of the sport...

...Then he hitchhiked back, all in a week...

...The result was We, the People, one of those books that appear two or three times in a century and completely change the landscape...

...If the quest had been to unhorse Beard, it was a deed that eventually could be blown off in one chapter only because the rest of the book was so sound...

...Later he escaped to a more comfortable existence at the University of Alabama...

...Butterfield urbanely turned the tables on the Hallams, the Carlyles, the Macauleys, and such whose tapestries described the inevitable sweep of Progress and Liberty brought about by Protestantism and Whig political principles...

...The historian who consults only the diktat of the academy is a charlatan...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW Ina League of His Own FORREST MCDONALD'S Recovering the Past is a hitchhiker's guide to the historian's galaxy, an account of a lifetime spent in correcting the errors of his profession...

...But, said Butterfield, rather than seeing Martin Luther as the apostle of liberty, bringing down a corrupt and oppressive religious domination, wasn't it just as likely that Luther was a medieval man calling upon the German princes to establish a godly, but equally oppressive union of church and state, throwing down the secularized bastions of the Romish pope...

...They also disclose that history is hard work, recovered from original sources...

...Only then was he able to start writing...

...The result is a fresh and even-handed new biography, Alexander: The Ambiguity of Greatness...

...At that point he got his first dose of academic collegiality...

...Recovering the Past: A Historian's Memoir by Forrest McDonald (UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KANSAS, 198 PAGES, $24.95) Reviewed by James P. Lucier JULY/AUGUST 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 77 BOOKS IN REVIEW Having taken an undergraduate history course under Eugene Campbell Barker, McDonald had become well aware of the shortcomings of Beard's economic interpretation of history...

...The majority of Rogers's work is a retelling of the history of Alexander's rise to the throne of Macedon and the subsequent conquest of the vast Persian Empire and beyond...

...If you want to know what happened in 1787-88, you had to start in 1776...

...They came increasingly to believe that historians must justify their existence by pointing their research toward the furtherance of a present public-policy agenda that they regard as desirable, and to insist that historians can behave in no other way...

...The exploits briefly recounted here are mentioned only because they disclose a true philosophy At that point he got his first dose of academic collegiality...

...None of that was for his dissertation...

...And would any of those freedom-loving Whig historians who praised the business-friendly virtues of Calvinism be at all comfortable if they were whisked back to live in Calvin's New Jerusalem in Geneva...

...He had to read and record the votes, by members, of everystate legislative session from 1781 to 1790...

...James P. Lucier is a writer who lives in Leesburg, Virginia...

...He just wanted to get Recovering the Past out of the way, so he could set to work on an undisclosed work in progress somewhere down the galaxy...

...He notes that much of Alexander's military success was the direct result of the highly disciplined and professional army that he inherited from his father, Phillip II, and that Alexander was also lucky that his inherited army had highly competent commanders, such as Parmenio and Cleitus...

...A callow youth from Orange, Texas, he came to the University of Texas with one goal, to become a major league baseball player with its highly rated baseball program...