A new study or the 1948 election that has long been called the greatest upset in American political history. Donaldson, (History/Xavier Univ.) provides persuasive analyses of postwar politics, the tactics of contending political parties that marked the breakup of the old FDR New Deal coalition after WWII. To many voters, “Plain Harry” Truman was a drastic letdown after the charismatic and innovative FDR. Truman had little use for New Dealers and was heard to call them “crackpots” and “the lunatic fringe”. He replaced the FDR cabinet with his political cronies and old war buddies. Donaldson finds that only FDR could hold together his unlikely coalition of leftists, liberals, aggressive labor unions, conservative farmers, newly united northern African-Americans, professionals and right-wing southern white supremacists. Truman walked a tightrope between these contending forces. In addition, Donaldson points out that Republicans drew away many old FDR voters who perceived the Yalta conference as a sellout to the Soviet Union. The GOP captured Congress in the 1946 elections as Truman’s popularity declined. All polls predicted a Republican landslide in 1948. Truman found he couldn—t please all factions and decided to abandon the far leftists and the extreme southern white supremacists, both of whom formed new parties led respectively by Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond. Truman’s feisty “whistle stop” train campaign and “give them hell, Harry” speeches endeared him to millions of Americans In the west and south and in large cities. He regained many lukewarm voters with no other place to go except to the newly animated Harry. Donaldson argues that the overconfident Dewey lost the election with his bland, boring campaign speeches as much as Truman won it in a close popular vote. An excellent history of a remarkable event in a tumultuous time in America. (For another look at this election, see Harold I. Gullan, The Upset that Wasn’t, p. 1432.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8131-2075-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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