Book Reviews
69
of the values of suburban dwellers. Both books are successful
and important. Unfortunately, combining the two makes a volume that can, a t times, be tedious, complex, and difficult to
read. Despite these caveats, however, Suburb is an important
book.
Ball State University, Muncie
Dwight W. Hoover
Grant: A Biography. By William S. McFeely. (New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1981. Pp. xiii, 592. Illustrations, notes,
selected bibliography, index. $19.95.)
Ulysses S. Grant has not suffered for want of biographers.
Few men of his century were so written about, while the present century has produced both the 1935 classic by William B.
Hesseltine, Ulysses S. Grant, Politician, and the remarkable
trilogy on Grant’s military career by Lloyd Lewis and Bruce
Catton. Grant is worthy of such attention. He was the greatest
general of the nation’s most terrible conflict and served as
president for eight of the nation’s most critical years.
William S. McFeely falls short of the mighty prose of Lewis
and Catton and also fails to match the brilliant political analysis of Hesseltine. He does, however, achieve something that
his predecessors failed to accomplish. His goal in writing Grant:
A Biography was to make t h i s most representative of
nineteenth-century Americans understandable-in h u m a n
terms-to today’s generation. Americans, McFeely declares,
“deserve to know a man they would recognize if they met him
in a crowd” (p. 522). McFeely’s triumph, and the great worth of
this fine biography, is that Grant’s heart and m i n d - o r a t least
the author’s interpretation of them-are opened for all to see. It
is a melancholy revelation, and no one who reads this book can
fail finally to have compassion for this tragic, familiar man
who “became general and president because he could find nothing better to do” (p. xii).
Strangely, for the biography of a great general, this book
will hold few rewards for the military historian or buff. McFeely’s account of the war is essentially Russell Weigley’s strategy
of annihilation interpretation. His few descriptions of battle are
lackluster and give the reader no true sense of just what was
going on. There is hardly, for instance, one word on the desperate fighting during those final days before Appomattox, while
three pages are devoted to the actual surrender. McFeely is not
interested in the details of battle, only the results. He spends
70
Indiana Magazine of History
his narrative chronicling the man, Grant, not the carnage that
surrounded him. His point is to convey to the readers a sense of
why “war, for a man like Ulysses Grant, was the only situation
in which he could truly connect to his country and countrymen
and be at one with them and with himself” (p. 68).
McFeely, who wrote previously on Oliver 0. Howard and
the Freedman’s Bureau, has a special concern for the plight of
black Americans. His discussion of Grant’s seemingly inconsistant relationship to the people who viewed him as a liberator is
among the high points of the book. This emphasis on black
history, however, occasionally leads the author away from his
subject. A twelve-page digression to discuss some eventually
irrelevant 1865 peace negotiations (with emphasis on their relation to the emancipated slaves) and a five-page discussion of
early attempts to integrate West Point are the most glaring
examples. Such digressions would be understandable if more
important matters, such as the Appomattox campaign and the
Belknap impeachment, were not passed over too quickly.
Such caveats notwithstanding, this book is worthy of the
acclaim accorded it by the popular press. McFeely succeeds
admirably in presenting the roots of Grant’s mighty successes
and monumental failures. The reader cannot fail to empathize
with this most human of generals and presidents. McFeely
indeed makes Grant recognizable. This book will not replace
Hesseltine or Lewis and Catton, but room will most certainly
have to be made for it on the shelf with them. McFeely has
clearly written the standard one-volume account of Grant’s entire career.
Utah State University, Logan
Paul A. Hutton
The Presidency of William McKinley. By Lewis L. Gould.
(Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1980. Pp. xi, 294.
Notes, bibliographical essay, index. $15.00.)
Was William McKinley a spineless politician who weakly
succumbed to public pressure for a needless war while serving
as the compliant tool of big business and Mark Hanna, or was
he a masterful wartime leader who, as the first modem president, established important precedents for his successors? Lewis
L. Gould has assembled impressive evidence to refute the
stereotyped view of McKinley as simply a mediocre prelude to
the dynamic Theodore Roosevelt. This interpretation of McKinley as a strong president was first advanced twenty years ago