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Over what was an unusually long winter, I took on two biographies: Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H.W. Brands and American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham. Both have garnered a great deal of critical praise with several reviewers terming Brands’ book the best one-volume biography of FDR.
Not surprisingly, both appeared on the best-seller lists, because biography has become the dominant mode of popular history, the nonfictional genre that consistently appears on bookstore displays along with the usual confessionals and personal memoirs.
Ours is an age that craves sagas, hero tales about leaders who like the heroes of old Norse tales overcome personal adversity to rescue the people from a grave crisis. The plots are so familiar we know them as intimately as did those who had only memory and the skill of great story-tellers to pass on the tales.
Maybe it has something to do with peril and darkness. Those who listened to the early sagas heard them huddled in shadows around the fire circle as the embers unwittingly punctuated the telling along with the shrieks of the wind and the icy fingers that penetrated through the strongest defenses. It was an uncertain world where twenty-four hours could mark a boundary between survival and loss, something that resonates with many of us living in today’s crisis.
While we think of sagas as mostly fiction, tales invented in a void that consciously struggled to bring light to people living on the edge, their power hung on the historical accuracy of their oral tradition. People knew the stories intimately so woe to the “biographer” who made a mistake with even the smallest detail.
Similarly both these biographies are meticulously researched, each accompanied by pages of detailed notes from primary sources that can be as entertaining as the main text. If you are telling a hero saga in the age of media hype, people want to be sure you have your details right, just like long ago Viking audiences.
The public does not read these pages of notes so much as weigh them. The thicker these pages are, the more creditable the story-teller. The popular audience may be totally unaware of controversies raging among academic historians about issue such as Jackson’s battle with the bank or FDR’s handling of the New Deal.
Their Structure
While I would recommend both these biographies to casual readers without much background about the two men, for those who know either one fairly well, neither biography adds anything new to what is already out there. Robert Remini’s Andrew Jackson will remain the best single volume on him for this generation. as for FDR, Conrad Black’s may rank as the better recent book, but in my estimation James MacGregor Burns’ half-century old The Lion and the Fox still rates as the single must-read FDR book.
If there are better books out there–and better recent ones–it is fair to ask why were these published and why are they attracting such attention? There is no question both are well-written. Meacham, in particular, knows how to tell a good story, weaving through the book the themes of Jackson’s long-standing family troubles, his sometimes mercurial personality and his faith in popular sovereignty. Brands’ book reads more like a series of incidents that re only loosely woven together by any overall theme.
This is interesting because Brands, the professional historian, has written a biography more like something you might see on the History Channel or Public Television, while Meacham, the Newsweek editor, has written the more unified work.
On a deeper level they share a common rhetorical structure with many other recent biographies, for each is about the hero overcoming great adversity–in this case Roosevelt his polio and Jackson the sudden death of his wife. Each is also portrayed as having to overcome the sometimes petty politics of staff, Congress and the opposition.
Unlike James MacGregor Burns” famous lion and fox analogy of Franklin Roosevelt, both these books see conventional politics as at best something to be overcome and at worst as the enemy. The dramatic structure of both books centers on the heroes struggle against political obstacles that constantly threaten to undermine anything they have worked to accomplish.
Politics as Villain
Politics as villain is, of course, a strong theme in our own times. It certainly has become the stock tactic of political consultants who cannot think of anything better to center a campaign around. Politics as villain is perhaps the one belief that unites both left and right, which explains why these books and others which follow a similar dramatic structure enjoy popularity.
In this they also share something with the old sagas which always evoked adversaries with superhuman characteristics–monsters, demons, evil spirits. That certainly fits the contemporary image of politics which routinely ranks at the bottom of lists of occupations failing somewhere near used-care sales people–and probably in these days, mortgage brokers.
The politician as shyster and manipulator is nothing new. Jackson’s own Vice-President, Martin Van Buren earned the nickname of The Fox for his political skills. In “Stump Speech,” George Caleb Bingham, that artist of nineteenth century rural America, cast his political orator in an ironic Biblical light.
Yet almost exactly a century apart one of both Jackson and FDR’s major achievements was their remaking the Democratic Party. In fact, next to their Democratic predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, the two probably rank as the greatest partisan leaders this nation has produced.
Reading these two biographies–especially Brands’–the partisan aspect of these two lives seems subdued. The two biographers echo James Madison’s fear of faction that is the main focus of last month’s review. Yet unlike Madison who accepted faction and focused on dealing with its seamier aspects, Brands and Meacham paint faction as the ogre of their sagas.
The opposite of partisan leadership is, of course, individualistic leadership and both these volumes deal with charges that are still repeated that both men had their dictatorial moments, Jackson most notably with the Cherokee Removal and Roosevelt with his Supreme Court packing scheme.
There are important lessons here for our own times, especially an era in which the previous administration subverted national international and moral law. The defenders of these despicable actions evoke the image of strong leadership as projected by Jackson and Roosevelt as a defense, saying the circumstances demanded going beyond legal boundaries in order to protect the nation.
If politics is viewed as a sleazy practice, then authoritarianism rushes in to the vacuum. There seems little doubt that the dangerous growth of executive power in our times is a direct result of the cynicism and dismissal of politics. Saga biographies represent another aspect of this ethos.
Transformational Leadership
Burns got it right, noting that great leaders are also great politicians, but that was back in the years after World War II when authoritarianism still evoked the visceral fears that politics does today. Later Burns would construct an entire theory of transformational leadership around this idea. Burns rightfully distinguished between transactional leaders who get things done by wheeling and dealing (think Nancy Pelosi) and transformational leaders whose actions are based on values.
Neither of these biographers appears to have much interest in or knowledge of that perspective, which is a shame because what the world does need are some updated biographies of leaders like Jackson and FDR that draw on the now-considerable research on transformational leadership. In this these biographies and other similar sagas seem as primitive as those old Norse tales.
Bernard Bass, the other researcher whose name is most associated with transformational leadership, outlined four qualities all such leaders share. In his essay The Ethics of Transformational Leadership he wrote:
Leaders are truly transformational when they increase awareness of what is right, good, important, and beautiful, when they help to elevate followers’ needs for achievement and self-actualization, when they foster in followers higher moral maturity, and when they move followers to go beyond their self-interests for the good of their group, organization, or society. (p.2)
Bass goes on to point out:
If the leadership is truly transformational, its charisma or idealized influence is characterized by high moral and ethical standards. Its inspirational motivation provides followers with challenges and meaning for engaging in shared goals and undertakings. Its intellectual stimulation helps followers to question assumptions and to generate more creative solutions to problems.
That in these times of the saga and the imperial presidency we seem to have forgotten these characteristics of leadership is ominous, for like the sagas of old today’s ideas of leadership are about power. So biographies become studies in the use of power, their heroes like those of the sagas who overpower their adversaries.
Burns and Bass both would see this as dangerous and narrow-minded. We seem to have forgotten the values aspects that are central to the transformational leadership that they extol. The entire last Presidential campaign passed without anyone probing two deeply into the values of either candidate. No one asked a values question during the debates.
In a time that ignores principles, principles become sacrificed for pure power. Hence we end up with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who felt it was necessary to waterboard someone over a hundred times in order to extract “information” from them. Curiously as I was writing this I happened to catch an interview with one of the officers who objected to such techniques. He told the story of walking in on an interrogation in which the interrogator kept slapping the suspect across the face while a soldier stood behind him and brandished a metal rod, like a “gangster in a B movie.” He ordered the interrogation stopped. In his words, this was not an interrogation, but retribution. It was about power, not purpose.
There is a far deeper resonance these volumes show with others that reverberates back in time. A subplot running through both volumes is the
The End of History
There is more going on here than a mere run of best-selling biographies, for we seem to crave these sagas even as we have become as distrustful of history as we are of politics. It is noteworthy that a goodly number of these books are written by non-academics, for never has the gulf between academic history and the public seemed wider.
Along with the distrust of politics that has grown up over the last half-century there has also grown up a distrust of academia. Much as politicians are seen as manipulating the minute details of polling, organizing and press relations, academics are seen as focusing on the petty details of history; filling their books with footnotes that overwhelm any chance they will be seen as sagas.
Unfortunately academics have encouraged some of this. I received a reminder of this during the past weekend when I attended the retirement party of the professor who had been one of my mentors in college. Whoever was in charge of this event had organized it like an academic conference with a panel of speakers that were supposed to talk about this person’s intellectual legacy.
This is a person recognized as one of the giants in American history and yet you would have thought these people on the panel had not absorbed anything of consequence from studying under him. George Santayana’s old aphorism, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” may have become a cliche–even a much-abused one–but to several generations of historians it contained a core element of truth.
For these historians, the past was connected to the present and part of their mission was to explore these interrelationships, not in the simplistic way of using history to preach sermons that justify some contemporary action, but in the deeper sense of understanding the forces and motivations that lie behind events. Among these were principles.
But today values and principles are a bad word among many academics or the study of them has become ritualized or trivialized into more footnotes.
Barack Obama
These days, as it must, any discussion of Presidential leadership must come eventually to Barack Obama. The question one should ask biographies like these is do they help us to better understand Obama and what he is up against. Jackson fought the bankers. FDR brought us out of the Great Depression. What do they have to teach us about dealing with today’s crisis?
I must confess that after reading both of these books I do not have any better idea than I did before reading them. This is why Burns and Bass are so important because their work on transformational leadership does help us to understand not merely the qualities of such leaders, but the ways that they apply their principles.
Roosevelt was both lion and fox and Burns’ perceptive analysis of when he should have been more one than the other is still enlightening. What these two biographies tell us is that it is time for more serious analysis and less saga.
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