An engrossing story that hints at the fragility as much as the triumph of democracy.
How a high-stakes 1937 power struggle transformed America’s judiciary and government.
In the mold of Anthony Lewis, National Journal correspondent Solomon (The Washington Century, 2004, etc.) conveys the excitement and significance of a core battle over the U.S. Constitution. While he gives little attention to the structure and mechanics of national government, he neatly captures the political dynamic of interacting personalities. In the depth of the Great Depression, the Supreme Court remained tethered to the laissez faire ideology that had fueled the boom times of the ’20s. However, the Court was deeply divided. Four staunch conservatives, dubbed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, faced three consistent liberals; Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and unpredictable Owen Roberts held the swing votes. In 1933, Roberts sided with the liberals to end an era of judicial activism in which the Court had aggressively and inhumanely protected property rights. In 1935, he reversed course and joined the Four Horsemen to overturn the Railroad Retirement Act. Weeks later, the Court threw out the National Industrial Recovery Act, a centerpiece of New Deal legislation. Roberts continued to combine with the conservative judges in 1936, bringing the New Deal to its knees. Following a landslide reelection that year, President Roosevelt and Attorney General Homer Cummings plotted revenge. FDR announced a plan in 1937 to expand the Supreme Court to possibly 15 judges, and most New Dealers rejoiced. But Montana Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, a previous Roosevelt loyalist, stood firm against this undemocratic plan to “pack” the Supreme Court with liberals. At a crucial moment of political impasse, Roberts switched sides and swung the Court behind the New Deal. Roosevelt’s main rationale for reform was removed, and the nine-man bench was preserved. Having failed to dominate the judicial branch, Roosevelt was similarly unsuccessful in removing conservative Democrats from the senate in 1938. These twin defeats perhaps knocked some moderation into the president. Certainly, the 1937 constitutional fight revolutionized the federal judiciary, which entered the ’40s emboldened and independent.
An engrossing story that hints at the fragility as much as the triumph of democracy.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1589-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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