A STRANGE KIND OF ' HISTORY'

Coleman, Mcalister

A Strange Kind Of 'History VICTORY WITHOUT PEACE, by Roger Burling-ame and Alden Stevens. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.75. Reviewed by McAlister Coleman THIS is a "popularized" history of the...

...Obviously a book which gets off to such a start, with dreamed-up conversations, omissions of important facts that throw light on Wilson's character, and a ridiculous over-simplification of confused and subtle issues can have no great value as history whatever the propaganda use to which it is put...
...The truth is that during his Jersey tenure of office he was running for nomination for President of the United States and that the constructive measures which were passed were mostly written for him by the state's progressives...
...It is also a piece of special pleading for reviving the demand for the sort of Capitalist International after this war which the old League of Nations turned out to be...
...This will be a surprise to old Jerseyites who know the well authenticated story of Wilson's going personally to Smith's house to ask the boss to get him the nomination...
...Burlingame and Stevens tell us that in "certain scenes we have reconstructed conversations . . ." and, boy, how they have "reconstructed" them...
...Reviewed by McAlister Coleman THIS is a "popularized" history of the last days of World War I and the struggle for the League of Nations which followed...
...Though the publisher's blurb states that, this is a "hew kind of history" and that the parallels the reader will draw "are as compelling as the story itself," the reader with any acquaintance with the times the book describes will be more impressed with the biased and sometimes completely erroneous treatment of events and personalities than by the novelty of the authors' methods...
...They open, for example, with the report of a White House conversation between Wilson and Col...
...THEN we go back a little to Wilson's nomination for governor of New Jersey and are told that the Jersey Democratic bosses, Jim Smith and Jim Nugent, "had stood, hats in hand, and knocked at the front door of the president's mansion at Princeton University," to offer him the nomination...
...Harvey of Harper's Weekly got the backing of J. P. Morgan for Wilson, but you wouldn't know that from this book...
...At the end of the talk the President pulls the Hammond over and begins to write his "Fourteen Points," just like that...
...Messrs...
...Of course Wood-row Wilson is the book's hero, marching, with head held high, to his crucifixion at the hands of the Senate "irreconcilables," led by the villainous Henry Cabot Lodge...
...House, all in direct quotes as though the authors had been crouched beneath the desk on which perched the President's "little, old Hammond typewriter...
...Nor would you know that it was not until he wa3 prodded into it by the intrepid George L. Record that Wilson finally denounced boss rule, nor that he had so little concern for the affairs of the state over which he presided that he read no Jersey papers and got his information about Jersey doings from a man planted on the staff of the New York Evening Post by the faithful Tumulty...
...The matter was clinched when Col...

Vol. 8 • May 1944 • No. 21


 
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