My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

I think the term trauma is perhaps a bit overused. I don’t mean to downplay anyone’s specific trauma, but the idea has been discussed to the point of diminishing returns, and we’ve begun to have difficulty differentiating types of trauma. There’s a difference between not getting the Christmas present you wanted and being assaulted. Both events may be traumatic, but they don’t leave equivalent scarring.  However, I also worry that backlash to this term is simply a societal defense mechanism to avoid dealing with how traumatic events (both micro and macro) shape us and the world around us.

With this in mind, I want to talk about an absolutely brilliant novel released in 2020, My Dark Vanessa. It was written by Kate Elizabeth Russell, and I cannot believe it took me this long to find it. The novel is about a fifteen-year-old girl who is groomed and raped by her forty-two-year-old English teacher. It is gripping, propulsive, terrifying, and, like all truly great novels, it stays with you after you finish reading.

Russell effectively uses history and pop culture to reflect this individual story back on our larger society. She mentions Fiona Apple, a survivor who was raped when she was twelve and became highly sexualized in her late teens as a pop star. There are references to Britney Spears, the most obvious example of how our society fetishizes young women (going so far as to dress them as schoolgirls) only to discard them later when they age. Worse, when they show long-term trauma (that word again) from having their childhoods stolen and being treated as disposable adolescent sex objects, we mock them. We follow them with cameras as they break down and go online to make fun of them. We blame them for this collapse because that’s easier than holding the mirror up to ourselves and the society we’ve created.

How do these representations affect a teenage girl? Does seeing an adolescent pop star treated as an object of desire drive young girls to seek the same kind of attention? Does it normalize that abhorrent behavior to the extent that they will excuse and even romanticize abuse?

Russell sets her novel during the latter days of the Clinton presidency and refers to the Lewinsky scandal. Even that, referring to it as the Lewinsky scandal, is a remnant of how horribly we treated her. No, she wasn’t a child, but she was 27 years younger than her boss, the most powerful man in the world. And somehow, the blame fell on her, and people joked about Bill being Bill while they shamed this young woman for her actions.

Could that have led to other women keeping quiet? Could that have scarred a generation of women into silence?

Those are just a few real-life events that leak through the foundation of this exquisitely composed novel. It shifts eras jumping from the present – where other victims are accusing her abuser during the height of the MeToo movement – to the past – her as a fifteen-year-old being groomed and abused by a man three times her age. Vanessa, our narrator, has romanticized her abuse as a defense mechanism. She pretends that this was some remarkable love story thwarted by society. By framing the story this way, Russell shows how Vannessa’s trauma is still unprocessed, creating a transparently unreliable narrator. There’s no question in the reader's mind whether this was romance or abuse. No trace that this is a societal hang-up.

Strane, her abuser, is manipulative, possessive, and revolting in every possible way. It's hard for me to think of a character I find more despicable in literature. It is not just the abuse, which is horrid enough, but how he poisons Vanessa’s mind. The way she stands up for him and refuses to acknowledge what he did both outwardly and to herself.

This novel is a perfect example of what fiction can accomplish that non-fiction has a more challenging time with. The world is not a place of clean lines. There are things that we can definitively state are right or wrong. Take, for example, a high school English teacher sexually abusing one of their students. There is no moral ambiguity there, but great fiction manages to show you the moral complexity of the world we live in. Russell does that with this novel.

In the present, Vanessa is contacted by another survivor of Strane’s abuse and a journalist trying to write an article on this story, but she doesn’t want to come forward. Initially, she frames this reluctance as a rejection of the premise itself. She claims she wasn’t abused. Furthermore, she doesn’t believe that the other victims were abused. She believes that they wanted it.

It's hard to read these sections of the novel. Almost as hard as it is to read the sections with Strane, which makes your skin crawl and your stomach contract. She’s blaming the victims. Calling them liars and accusing their teenage selves of lusting after their abuser. It’s horrible. But that’s what happens with unprocessed trauma. That is the wreckage that abusers leave in their wake. It’s not clean. It’s not all fixed by sitting down with a therapist and having a good cry. It’s dirty and messy, leaving carnage littered across the victims’ lives.

There’s a particularly infuriating passage in the novel where her mother sees proof of the affair. Vanessa has just been expelled from her boarding school after claiming she fabricated the story of Strane abusing her (always framed as a relationship). They’re cleaning out her room, and a Polaroid of her and Strane falls out. It’s not a sexual Polaroid (he kept those) but one that demonstrates that their relationship was more than a typical student/teacher one. Vanessa holds the photograph to her chest, refusing to let go of the fiction it displays – a world where they’re just two people in love who take long drives and commemorate those days with a photo. Her mother acknowledges what the photo is and what it means, but she lets her keep it. She continues to pack the room, and they leave.

I wanted to scream when I read this. Vanessa is a child who’s been abused. You don’t blame her for what’s happened, but her mother is an adult standing in the room with proof of her daughter’s abuse just an arm’s length away. I don’t have children, but I can only imagine what I would do if this situation presented itself with my partner or a family member.

I spent most of the rest of the novel hating her mother. Blaming her not only for Vanessa’s continued abuse – she keeps seeing Strane and allows him to dictate so much of her life – but for all the other victims. I pointed to this woman as the culprit. Not more than Strane, of course, but I assigned her considerable responsibility.

But, and this is just one of many examples of the brilliance of this novel, we go to see the mother in the present. We go to her house for Thanksgiving and see it in the same disarray that Vanessa keeps her apartment in. We see the fragile woman her mother has become. We see all the tell-tale signs of trauma that have been so apparent in Vanessa throughout the novel. This event, this horrific abuse, didn’t only scar Vanessa. It had ripples. I had to stop reading and think about how terrible that would be. To know that you allowed your daughter’s abuser to get away with it. That you failed your daughter, and all those future victims, in such a colossal way. It was horrible. Horrible and brilliant.

That’s what this novel is and what great fiction does. It shows the gray area in a world that has tried to draw clean lines. It allows you to be angry that Vanessa won’t support her fellow victims but understand that it is ultimately her decision. It allows you to rage against her mother while also seeing her as a victim. It shows you that we long for these clean lines because, without them, the world's chaos is too overwhelming.

This novel forces you to ask questions that only spring more questions, and in doing so, it’ll never leave you. I’ll think about My Dark Vanessa for years to come. I’ll find myself wondering how many victims stayed quiet after watching what happened to Lewinski. Or I’ll wonder what larger social responsibility a victim has to come forward. I don’t have the answers to these things now, and I won’t then, but that’s what fiction can do. It makes you think about problems without solutions, it stays with you, and it shows you the moral complexities that define our world.

James K. Polk

Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America by Walter R. Borneman

Tier 3

This book was one of the most pleasant surprises I encountered during this project. I knew nothing about Polk and expected it to be another in a line of disappointing biographies. As I mentioned previously, the period between Jackson and Lincoln is mainly defined by men who never became president (Clay, Webster, and Calhoun), meaning I didn’t expect much from Polk.

But I was mistaken as Polk, and this biography proved fascinating.

Polk was one of many young politicians who formed themselves in the shadow of Jackson. It was hard to live through the Jackson era and not come to either love or hate him, and Polk was in the former camp. Jackson, too, had a fondness for Polk, going so far as to dub him “young Hickory.”

He was born in North Carolina and grew up in Tennessee. He served in the Tennessee legislature and later in the House of Representatives before becoming Governor of Tennessee. He is the only Speaker of the House to go on to become president.

Now, I don’t particularly care for presidential rankings, but if you look at them, you’ll find Polk often near the top. This is surprising as he’s typically in lofty company. Everyone knows about Washington and Lincoln and the Roosevelts, but what’s James K. Polk doing that high on those lists?

Well, it’s multifaceted, but I think a driving force behind his reputation is that he delivered what he promised during his campaign. He focused on four points:

1.     Re-establishment of the Independent Treasury System

2.     Lowering Tariffs

3.     Acquisition of Oregon

4.     Annexation of Texas

Check, check, check, and check. The idea of a president fulfilling his campaign promises in today’s world is so unthinkable as to be comical, but at the time, Polk managed to do just that. As to whether or not you agree with those policies and actions, that’s a different story. The point is that he ran on specific promises popular enough to get him elected, and he followed through on those promises. That’s kind of how it's supposed to work in a democracy.

Now, let’s dig a bit deeper into those four points.

First, we have the re-establishment of the Independent Treasury System. Federal banking was a constant discussion during this period in the United States. People ran on abolishing or instituting these banks every election cycle. Polk felt it was a poor idea for the United States to leave its funds in private banks. He felt there was a risk of bank failure and wanted the government to control its finances. Once elected, he worked with Congress to pass legislation to re-establish the Independent Treasury System.  

Second, we have the other pillar of his domestic economic policy, lowering tariffs. I’ve mentioned in past posts about the nation’s absolute fixation on tariffs. The debate was fairly static. Some people wanted high tariffs to promote and prioritize American industry. Others felt high tariffs hurt consumers by raising prices and limiting competition. In many ways, we’re still having this debate. Polk favored lower taxes and, upon being elected, worked with Congress to pass the Walker Tariff of 1846.

Next, we have the Acquisition of Oregon. This was in keeping with his fervent belief in manifest destiny. He saw the North American continent as the rightful possession of the United States, and all his foreign policy as president was contingent upon this belief. He wanted to expand westward, promote American influence, and secure the nation’s borders. These things seem unsavory to a modern reader; however, it was very much the nation's position at the time. Again, democracy is meant to reflect the people’s will, and Polk’s expansionist vision was in line with the people.

 Finally, we have the annexation of Texas. You can see most of the points above. Polk was also interested in flexing the nation’s military might against Mexico and was far from upset when this annexation led to war. It’s important to note here that Texas at the time was not solely the state that we now know but also stretched to parts of current-day New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming.

Polk followed through on all of these promises, which is largely why his place among historians is high.

The annexation of Texas, and Polk’s further expansionist aims, led to the Mexican-American war. Polk was thrilled to fight this war, and overall, it was popular. Was it right? Was it morally correct to attempt to buy land from another nation and, upon that offer being rejected, station troops on their land? Was it right to provoke a fight and then use that fight to justify war?

No. None of that was right. None of that was correct or appropriate. Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail for refusing to pay poll taxes that supported the war and later wrote Civil Disobedience based on that experience. Frederick Douglass was a vocal critic of the war, as was a lanky, young Whig Congressman named Abraham Lincoln.

Polk firmly believed in the expansion of the United States and executive power, and the office he took over bore little resemblance to the one he left. Another campaign promise of his was only to serve one term, and despite his overwhelming popularity, he stuck to that promise.

As for Borneman, whom I realize I have hardly discussed here, he is an excellent biographer. He focuses mainly on Polk’s presidency, but that makes sense here. People know very little about him, and his term in office is incredibly consequential. Borneman does a great job with the book’s pacing and even manages to incorporate some humor, notably with the Santa Anna double cross, a notable moment in the Mexican-American war that involved General Santa Anna promising to help the US if he was released only for him to immediately return to Mexico and resume his position as General in their army. It’s a great read and an excellent biography to choose if you want to learn more about the United States in the period between Jackson's and Lincoln’s presidencies.

Polk was far from a perfect man (he is another in a long line of slaveholding presidents), but he was a reasonably good president. I may not agree with his expansionist policies or how his presidency added kindling to growing national tensions that would culminate in the Civil War. Still, he did what he promised, and that is something only he can say. No other president has fulfilled all their campaign promises. I would contest that being president often involves making unpopular decisions and altering course to ensure the nation’s future. As such, I certainly do not see Polk as perfect, but he’s far from the worst.

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

Perhaps my favorite kind of novel lives on the razor’s edge between literary fiction (whatever that means) and genre fiction. A romantic comedy that makes me think about romantic comedies, a thriller that discusses the fraught political situation of our nation, historical fiction that resides in the present as much as the past. These are my favorite kinds of novels, and Rebecca Makkai’s brilliant novel, I Have Some Questions for You, is precisely that kind of novel.

I’m not alone in having gone through a prolonged true crime phase. I won’t say I’m entirely out of it, either. From time to time, my partner and I will take a break from our regularly scheduled programming and fall head-first into the darkness of a (well-made) true crime documentary. There’s something about it. It hits differently.

I used to work a job that was primarily data entry, and I’d sit at a computer for hours a day listening to things: podcasts, books, anything. Music won’t cut it when you need to fill eight hours a day. During this period, I discovered true crime podcasts: serial killers, missing persons, unsolved crimes. I devoured them all. I filled days spent at that job, commuting, and cooking, listening to the horrifying details of murder. When I couldn’t sleep at night, I would find myself scrolling through Wikipedia pages and Reddit threads on these same topics.

Is there something wrong with me? Probably. Hard to think that one could digest that much violence and not even blink. That you could hear the grizzly details of Jeffrey Dahmer and not turn away in horror but, perversely, want more.

I know I’m not alone in this fascination. At any given moment, about half of the most listened-to podcasts in the country are true crime. Netflix seems to have shifted its entire model toward serving this insatiable national appetite for violence. Why pay writers when you can just run miniseries about murder?

I can claim that my fascination stems from distrusting our criminal justice system, and I have since spent hours listening to brilliant books that detail that system and its failings. But we all know that it's not just that. We don’t listen and watch these things solely because we want to see justice done.

In her brilliant book Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (If you want more on this book, check out my previous post on it and Emma Cline’s novel The Girls), Amanda Montell discusses how psychologists liken our obsession with these types of media to rubbernecking. You slow down to see the accident partly because you understand it could’ve been you. There’s a peculiarity about true crime content in that it predominantly features violence done to women, and its primary demographic is also women. That’s what comes from living in a society where there’s always a latent sense of fear and danger. A man on a bus, a stranger walking down a beach, a lingering stare. They could all be innocuous, but sometimes they aren’t, and these documentaries and podcasts show when they aren’t.

This is one of the primary themes of Rebecca Makkai’s stunning novel. The book is about a woman (a successful podcaster in the mold of Karina Longworth (LISTEN TO YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS, ITS SO GOOD!)) who returns to her high school boarding school to teach a short course on podcasting. When she was a student there, one of her classmates was killed, and returning to the school dregs up that seemingly solved case.

You can imagine where it goes from here—at least the basic strokes of it. You’d never be able to guess the twists and turns it takes, the way she frames it as a letter to an initially unknown suspect in the case, the gripping way you can’t possibly put the book down for even a second. I can’t speak highly enough about how this novel captivates the reader, but when you finish, It won’t leave, and the ideas that get stuck in the back of your brain aren’t about the plot. They’re about the subtext.

Makkai explores the nature of true crime. Her podcast (again, really listen to You Must Remember This) explores early Hollywood starlets. Anyone who knows anything about this era and those women knows how the studios treated them as disposable, how they were seen as young, pretty faces, only to be prized until the next one came along. Makkai brilliantly connects this period of Hollywood, and those women, to our current true crime obsession. When a young woman is murdered, she is forever the age she was when she died. She is preserved as she was then, just as those starlets are preserved in film.

Our narrator, Bodie Kane, constantly reflects on her position in this crime and whether she’s the right person to tell this story. She wonders if she’s trying to insert herself into the story for selfish reasons or if she’s genuinely trying to write a wrong. It’s a fascinating dissection of our modern world and how the #MeToo era interacts and coincides with our national true crime addiction.

There are so many excellent literary devices in this novel – the way its framed as a letter of sorts to a suspect whom the narrator knew while at school, the way it references prominent cases of sexual assault that were in the media at the time the novel is set, and the way it breaks for Covid emphasizing the way the world itself (and the movement) was put on hold during the pandemic. It’s a really mature and carefully constructed novel by a superb writer. 

She uses these devices to anchor the novel to a time and place while also giving it a timeless essence. The tragedy of the era she sets her book in is that it's constantly repeating itself. How many of the headlines she references, always vague but specific, will appear again? How many more women will face predatory violence from people in power?

I can’t recommend this book enough. Its characters are rich and alive, its setting textured, the writing often funny and always enthralling. It’s everything I want in a novel, and it’s a must-read both for its macro ideas and its ability to keep you glued to the page.

William Henry Harrison

Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy by Robert M. Owens

Tier 5

First, I must apologize to all of you. I missed Mr. Harrison. I suppose I was too eager to get to John Tyler and just skipped right by him. In a way, this is quite appropriate given his short term of office, but I do apologize.

Something I’ve mentioned before (and will mention again) about reading presidential biographies is learning that the man is not defined solely by his term in office. You learn about who the person was before and after they served as President. Most have uneventful post-presidencies, but they all bring something with them into it: baggage, reputation, an aura. There’s something that drove them to the highest land in the office.

This is important to remember as this week’s President, William Henry Harrison, died just thirty-one days into his term. This is still the shortest presidency we’ve had, and it’s a record I think unlikely to be broken any time soon. As such, Harrison is defined more by his death than his life. Some may say this is unfair, but that’s the life of a public figure. You don’t always get to shape your legacy.

I don’t mean to be harsh, as I know how difficult it is to write a book, but I have to say this one wasn’t good. It was flat and plodding, and I felt Owens was trying to attach Harrison to other more interesting figures (most notably Jefferson). I understand he thought his subject lacked the gravitas to carry a biography, but that’s the historian's job.

Harrison is known historically for a few things.

First, his death. Thirty-one days is not a long time. It’s so short that he’s often omitted from presidential rankings. His death was brought on by not wearing a coat and hat, giving mothers everywhere solid evidence for their claims that you’ll catch your death of cold. It seems he got caught in a rainstorm and refused to change out of his wet clothes upon returning to the White House. The treatment that followed is almost comically absurd – bloodletting, heated cups applied to the skin, mustard plaster on his stomach, laxatives, castor oil, inducing vomiting. He contracted pneumonia, and after severe diarrhea combined with other symptoms, he passed away. These events happened so early in his presidency that his wife was still in Ohio, packing to come to Washington.

His death made him the first president to die in office—a dubious honor for sure, but a legacy all the same. There was a bit of a scramble to decide who would succeed him as President, as there was some debate regarding the wording of this clause in the Constitution. The argument centered on whether the Vice President became the President or whether they simply remained Vice President, with all the powers and duties of the office of the President.

This seems obvious to us now, but it caused a great deal of discussion at the time. John Tyler, his Vice President, obviously fought to become President, and the argument was short-lived. This set a precedent that has been observed in every succession since then.

Second, his presidential campaign. “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” is an undeniably catchy slogan that still rings well today. But it isn’t only this slogan that demonstrates the lasting memory of this campaign. It introduced several campaign tactics that are still prevalent today.

One of these tactics was the idea of mass rallies held in various locals. This wasn’t an aspect of campaigning before Harrison and is now commonplace.

Another was a wide distribution of campaign materials. He had people hand out pamphlets, banners, and buttons (often using his slogans).

And the final, and perhaps most consequential, was the idea of framing a candidate as an everyman. Harrison was born wealthy to a plantation owner in Virginia but painted himself as an outsider who came from nothing to achieve success in the wild frontier. They homed in on criticism from the Van Buren camp that Harrison would rather “sit in his log cabin drinking hard cider” than run the country. Harrison’s campaign used this to appeal to the everyman, framing their candidate as one of the people opposing the wealthy elitist Van Buren. Sound familiar?

Finally, Harrison is remembered for shaping what we now know as the Upper Midwest. He conducted treaties with and military campaigns against Native American tribes in those areas, securing vast tracts of land for the United States. As you can imagine, Harrison was not kind to the Native people who lived on those lands. He’d negotiate with one tribe (who often didn’t even live on the land in question) and then move to eradicate any other tribes living there. Some of these actions were instrumental in the start of the War of 1812. As with most of his contemporaries, Harrison had little regard for the lives of American Indians, and his policies were in keeping with that indifference bordering on hatred.

That’s basically all I’ve got on Harrison. His grandson would also go on to be president, but we’re not there just yet. Don’t read this book.

The Turnout by Megan Abbott

This book is a wild ride.

The basic plot surrounds two sisters who, along with their surrogate brother (who married one of them), inherited their mother’s ballet studio. All three studied ballet as children, and the novel deals with them getting the studio remodeled after a fire.

Now that may not seem like a particularly incandescent book, but it really is.

It reminded me of a haunted house movie subbing the studio for the house (though there is also a great deal of time spent in their actual home). There’s a villain in the house – presumably the contractor –but they can’t leave. Their life is in that house. It represents their livelihood, and more than that, it’s who they are. They are ballerinas and teachers. They are the heirs to an institution. They are there to teach these young boys and girls how to be ballerinas.

And, like any good haunted house fiction, they give the building itself a life. It’s not just a place but a living being that houses their memories and traumas. It burns and floods but doesn’t buckle. It consumes all who enter it in one way or another and looms large in the lives of our main characters.

The horror themes extend beyond the haunted house. There is an eeriness to the contractor, an unsettling sense that he is burrowing himself into their lives. It’s odd because – no offense to contractors –it’s no surprise that he’s trying to swindle them. All the characters in the novel seem to acknowledge this certainty. But from the beginning, there’s a sense that he's taking more than money and time. By entering and redoing the studio, he’s inserting himself into their lives. He’s attaching himself to the allegedly healthy host and destroying it from the inside.

I loved how Abbott subtly plants seeds in the reader's head. Often an author is too heavy-handed with something like this. They put their finger on the scale and annoy the reader into realizing something, constantly poking you to point out, “THIS IS SYMBOLISM,” but not Abbott. She organically foreshadows events to come. One such instance is the way she shows how the children (the girls in particular) taking ballet are often living out their parent’s unfulfilled dreams. This seems, at the time, like an innocuous reflection on their occupation, but later blooms into something you could never have seen coming. Only, when you look back, it seems apparent that she was delicately leading you there the whole time.

This is masterful writing.

I enjoyed spending time in the world of ballet. I can’t say I know much about it (aside from seeing it once or twice and a movie or two that discusses it), but I am interested in it. The athleticism matched with artistry. The sacrifice to one’s body. The endurance of pain. Abbott handles all these things with a deft touch. She focuses on a ballerina's feet, showing how they become worn and mangled, calloused to the point that they seem like they could walk across the glass and not flinch. This is contrasted brilliantly with ballerinas' polished, elegant, almost dainty outward appearance. The way casual viewer watch their light touches and thinks that they are practically floating on air. But they aren’t. They’re dancing on their rough, worn feet. She uses this to allude to aspects of being a woman and the difficulties of childhood.

But she doesn’t stop there. She pushes further, likening ballerinas' pain tolerance to construction workers. I particularly enjoyed how she bridged those worlds, taking something seen as high culture and connecting it with the blue-collar world.

Aside from the specific focus on a ballerina's feet, Abbott spends a great deal of time discussing their shoes. I’d never thought of them. When I think of basketball players or runners, shoes come to mind, but with a ballerina, it never occurred to me to think of shoes. Apparently, they go through countless of these pointe shoes. And they need to work each of them into shape, as one does with a new baseball glove. You need to bend and beat them until they’re worn. You cut the soles with razor blades to give them grip. It’s a laborious, violent process that Abbott details beautifully. As with the descriptions of their feet, this is a metaphor for how one must constantly shed their skin and begin anew, breaking the new one in so that it can handle the stresses of life. At least, for the characters in this novel, that seems to be the case.

As for our protagonists – Dara and Marie, they’re sisters, but more than that. They’re complimentary pieces of the same puzzle. They exist to fill out the other. Dara is stricter, harsher in some ways. Marie is more comforting. They each have their group of aspiring ballerinas to attend to. Marie teaches hers – the younger ones – through compassion and instills a friendly adoration in them. Dara, on the other hand, rules through discipline. She won’t touch her students to guide them, not even when they beg her for it. She doesn’t see ballet as a place for coddling. Her students learn to respect and idolize her for her strength while working to achieve her approval.

These two different personality types are responses to shared unresolved trauma. Some recent books, movies, and shows tend to lean on trauma in a way that can feel trite or topical. Abbott avoids that pitfall by using a deft touch to lead us to the source of this trauma without telegraphing it. She walks you down paths where you believe you know what’s coming, only for you to be shocked by the reality of the situation. In short, the revelations feel earned. You’re surprised but also not. You understand that you’ve been building to that climax the whole time, and you can see the previous action of the novel clearly through the lens of the resolution.

I know I’ve painted a pretty grim novel, but it isn’t. It moves quickly, and you won’t be able to put it down. Abbott has a brilliant, expressive voice, and her characters feel alive in a way that not all literature manages. I highly recommend this novel. It takes you inside a fascinating world and grips you right from the start while leaving you to contemplate larger societal forces.

John Tyler

John Tyler by Gary May

Tier 4

There is no more accidental president than John Tyler. There have been other instances of Vice Presidents assuming the role of President, but Tyler was the first and, as such, the most surprising. As I mentioned in my previous post, the rules for succession weren’t agreed upon when Harrison died. It was such a foreign idea that people considered the Vice President immaterial.

Tyler was likely only selected for the role to provide geographical balance to the ticket – Harrison resided in the northern frontier states, Tyler lived in Virginia. As a slaveholder, he assured voters that any rumors of Harrison’s abolitionist tendencies were false, but aside from that, he presented little.

But those are the odd twists of fate on which the nation turns. An afterthought became President.

I don’t have much nice to say about Tyler. I don’t like him. I think he was a bad person and an indifferent president. But our nation’s history is littered with these men, and it would be a dereliction of my self-appointed duty to gloss over people like Tyler.

Given the lack of deliberation that went into nominating Tyler as VP, no one seemed to have much of a handle on what he’d do as President. Henry Clay, the nominal leader of the Whig Party, assumed he’d be able to control the White House from the Senate. At this point in the nation’s history, Congress was the preeminent of the three branches of power. Tyler was a Whig of far less standing than Clay and even supported Clay’s bid to become the Presidential nominee over Harrison. But Clay was wrong.

Tyler proved to be a strident advocate of executive authority. He believed it should be the President, not Congress, who drives the direction of the nation. He contended that Congress should draft legislation and pass it on to the President, who could use his veto to direct policy. As one could imagine, this was very unpopular in Congress, leading to the first-ever President to have his veto overridden by Congress.

In general, Tyler seemed to annoy seemingly everyone he encountered. Upon becoming President, he decided to keep on Harrison’s Cabinet in a display of continuity. This was a poor decision, as many members of this Cabinet openly despised Tyler.

After another argument about a national bank (seriously, it’s like all anyone talked about from 1820 – 1850), with Tyler repeatedly vetoing Clay’s proposed bills to establish one, his Cabinet resigned en masse. Next, his own party expelled him and refused to allocate money desperately needed to repair the shambolic White House. So, as you can see, he was a really popular guy.

John Tyler was a strict constructionist. This essentially means that he believed that the Constitution should be strictly followed. More directly, in the 1840s, this translated to him supporting “state's rights” (slavery). He wanted to expand slavery to newly added western states, take more land in the west, and annex the newly formed independent nation of Texas. It all circles back to slavery with these people. Tyler was a virulent racist who wanted to define the nation by that racism.

There was little hope for him in terms of re-election. The Whigs had expelled him, and the Democratic Party had little love for him. He threatened to run as a third-party candidate, which would’ve cannibalized Democratic votes, to gain congressional support for the annexation of Texas. He received this, and after some maneuvering, Texas was offered and accepted statehood.

For most, his legacy is Texas and being the first Vice President to assume the presidency. But not for me. Because a president’s life does not end when he leaves office, and there might be no more detestable post-presidency than that of John Tyler.

As the Civil War neared, Tyler was named presiding officer of the Washington Peace Conference – a last-ditch effort to avoid war. Despite being a leader of this Conference, he opposed its resolution, fearing it did not do enough to protect and ensure the continuance of slavery. He then became a vocal advocate of secession, even going so far as to claim it wouldn’t trigger a war. The stupidity of this claim is staggering.

After Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s response, Tyler ensured that Virginia joined the newly formed Confederacy. Next, he was elected to the Provisional Confederate Congress and later the Confederate House of Representatives.

Unfortunately, he died in 1862. I don’t say this because I mourn his death, but rather because I wish he had lived long enough to see the Confederacy in ashes. Jefferson Davis, the cowardly President of the Confederacy, gave him a grand funeral and buried him under the Confederate flag.

This is as good a time as any to grant you all fair warning for what is to come. The Civil War is the primary incident in US history, and I am unequivocal in my hatred of the racist failure that was The Confederate States of America. If you are one of those people who love the Confederacy, this is not the series for you, and I would suggest you take a hard look at why you venerate such a pathetic and hateful failed state.

Sorry if that got a little serious there. This biography wasn’t very good. It’s part of a series of biographies on the American Presidents. I used this series when I couldn’t find a different biography, and I think it’s a good idea in principle. They’re short books that manage to convey basic facts about a president but do not dive deep enough for my taste.

The Kudzu Queen by Mimi Herman

I love a novel that teaches me something. It can be something about myself or life but also about a historical moment or an ecological oddity. There’s something powerful about learning through fiction. The way it sticks to you by attaching itself to the narrative. Mimi Herman manages this with alacrity in her excellent coming-of-age novel, The Kudzu Queen.

I had never heard of kudzu before reading this book. I'd have believed you if you had told me it was a mythical monster or a chemical compound manufactured by J & J. It isn’t either of those things. It’s a plant. A vine that consumes all life around it. It blocks out the sunlight and kills the plants underneath it. It’s incredibly resilient and is classified in the United States as an invasive species.

It can also be eaten or used in various forms of folk medicine or woven into baskets or, well, any number of other uses.

During the Dust Bowl, the Soil Conservation Service paid farmers eight dollars per acre to plant kudzu on their land to stave off the erosion that caused the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl, of course, coincided with The Great Depression, and eight dollars per acre was an offer few could pass up.

Naturally, people capitalized on this opportunity. Men traveled the south, promoting the crop and encouraging people to plant it. Think of The Music Man (or the Phil Hartman voiced Lyle Lanely in The Simpsons episode Marge vs. the Monorail) but with a noxious weed instead of a band.

That’s the background for this novel, though you didn’t need me to tell you all that, as Herman manages to detail it in the book (and honestly does a much better job of it). She weaves in the history and context with the careful ease that so much excellent historical fiction manages. After you finish the novel, you’re left with many thoughts about kudzu and the nation. What are the consequences of short-term thinking? When is the solution worse than the problem? How does this novel reflect on our current ecological disasters? And how does the kudzu represent capitalism and the increasingly unachievable American dream?

That’s one of my favorite things about good historical fiction. They use the past to reflect on the present without making it obvious. Herman manages that with a deft touch. You never feel like you’re being preached to or like she’s trying to teach you a lesson. She uses a coming-of-age story to package these macro ideas without sacrificing the heart of the novel – our teenage protagonist.

Mattie, our precocious and charming narrator, is on the cusp of adulthood, an age that lends itself well to a novel about change. She’s straddling multiple worlds, sometimes forced to act as an adult and other times slipping seamlessly into the comfort of childhood. Herman dances between these two worlds with elegance and beauty.

I was particularly taken by the way she demonstrates Mattie’s feelings towards the Kudzu King – the music man who comes to town to sell them kudzu. She begins the novel being enamored with him. She longs for something… to do something with him, though she’s not quite sure what. It’s not that she’s unaware of what adults do, but she doesn’t know how far she wants to go. I won’t spoil anything, but her emotions regarding him and her pending adulthood change throughout the novel.

This relationship works on a metaphorical level as well. The Kudzu King represents a seedy version of capitalism that still festers in our nation. She’s drawn to it - the wealth, the charm, the vibrancy - and longs to be a part of it. But she discovers the squalid underbelly of this form of capitalism – how a man like the Kudzu King uses and exploits innocent, trusting people.

The Kudzu Queen possesses beautiful moments of compassion and humanity. It shows the effect that poverty and neglect can have on children and how love can be found even in the darkest times. It’s a beautiful novel that illuminates a time and place in our nation and speaks to something universal in all of us. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s a vivid portrait of the South during The Great Depression, and more than that, it’s a timeless story of growing up in the face of adversity.

Martin Van Buren

Martin Van Buren and the American Political System by Donald B. Cole

Tier 4

Ok, we’ve hit a flat patch. I don’t mean to insult the great MVB, but this section of the list leaves something to be desired in terms of political biographies. There are many reasons for this. One that I find particularly compelling is that the years between Jackson and Lincoln were dominated more by the legislative than the executive branch. People like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun were more responsible for the nation's direction than the president. Because of this, historians don’t seem to be clamoring to write biographies on these pre-Civil War presidents.

With MVB, I find this to be a shame. No, he didn’t have the magnetism of a Jackson or the brilliant international career of a Quincy Adams, but he was fascinating in his own right. When one thinks about it, it’s far more impressive for a Van Buren to become president than a Jackson. Jackson instilled love (and hate), captivated the nation, and left an indelible mark. As for Van Buren, he was such an obscure president that Seinfeld chose to use him as a punch line.

MVB was a classic politician. He rose through the ranks of the Democratic party (of which he was a founding member of), serving as New York’s AG, a senator, governor, minister to Great Britain, Secretary of State, and finally, Andrew Jackson’s Vice President before taking the top office in his own right. He is credited with building the Democratic political machine and reestablishing a two-party system after the chaos of the 1824 presidential election. He was a staunch supporter of Jackson, making him one of many bland politicians who latched onto a more compelling individual and rode that attachment to the presidency.

As opposed to some other forgettable presidents, MVB left a lasting legacy. His work towards entrenching a two-party system and building up the Democratic Party is still seen in our political system.

Even with his diligent work toward helping Jackson secure the presidency, there was no reason to believe Van Buren would become president as late as 1832. John C. Calhoun was Vice President and was seen as Jackson’s heir apparent. And then came the infamous Petticoat affair.

The Petticoat affair centered around Secretary of War John Eaton’s new wife, Peggy. Peggy had been previously married, and there was some dispute regarding when her relationship with Secretary Eaton began. There were claims that before her husband committed suicide, she had already started seeing Secretary Eaton. Additionally, there were rumors regarding her other dalliances. As to the validity of these rumors, I cannot speak to that. Peggy would be far from the first woman smeared as a harlot on dubious grounds.

Due to her scurrilous reputation, the wives of Jackson’s Cabinet decided to ostracize Peggy. They refused to invite Peggy to their social gatherings and wouldn’t speak to her at joint functions. One of the women who led the boycott of the new Mrs. Eaton was Floride Calhoun, the wife of the Vice President and heir apparent.

A bit more relevant background is that Jackson’s wife, Rachel, had been the victim of heinous attacks on her character. She had still been technically married to another man when she and Jackson eloped. They believed her ex-husband had secured a divorce, but he hadn’t. This made their marriage bigamous, and they were forced to remarry after her divorce was finalized. During the contentious election of 1828, Adams’ supporters used this information to launch vicious attacks against Rachel that Jackson blamed for hastening her death.

As you can imagine, Jackson never forgot how these rumors could destroy a person, and when the Petticoat affair broke out, he sided with the Eatons. Calhoun entrenched his position and, in the end, nearly all of Jackson’s Cabinet resigned.

Now, I know this all sounds a bit Mean Girls-y, but it does illustrate how important social politics were (and are) to the fabric of our national political system. This spelled the end of Calhoun’s presidential hopes, transforming him from a national to a regional figure, and likely made him even more hateful toward the North. Calhoun is a crucial figure in the lead-up to the Civil War and, along with Clay, the most important political figure of the nineteenth century to have not been president.

If not for the Petticoat affair, how would the nation have evolved? Would Calhoun have been president? Would he have further entrenched slavery as a part of our national identity? Would this have hastened the Civil War or forestalled it? How many more innocent men and women would have been sold into bondage under a Calhoun presidency?

It’s truly amazing the seemingly minor things on which the nation turns. An inconsequential Secretary of War marries a woman with a reputation, and as a result, one man becomes president, and another becomes the most hateful Senator in US history.

As for Van Buren, he was named Vice President on Jackson’s 1832 presidential ticket and became president in 1836. His presidency was marred by the Panic of 1837, which it has to be said he handled terribly. This panic was another in a long line of arguments about centralized banking, and it doomed his re-election bid.

He likely would’ve still managed the 1844 Democratic nomination if it hadn’t been for his opposition to the annexation of Texas and his growing anti-slavery position. He again contemplated a run in 1848, but his anti-slavery stance only made him less palatable in 1848 than in 1844. He ran on the third-party Free-Soil ticket in 1848 (quite the statement for a man who fought so hard to entrench the two-party system), which only helped doom Democrat Lewis Cass and elect Whig Zachary Taylor.

After that election, he returned to the Democratic party but no longer felt connected to its ravenously pro-slavery form. He supported Lincoln during the Civil War and died in 1862, with the nation ripped open amid that war.

He’s not a figure that inspires much devotion, and he’s not someone who is often discussed in the history of this nation. But he was consequential. He left a lasting legacy and was present for many critical moments in our history. I only wish there was a better biography of him. There’s plenty of intrigue, and his life awaits a great biographer to remind the nation of MVB.

I will leave you with his Seinfeld reference.

Andrew Jackson

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham

Tier 2

Two posts in one day?!?! Sorry about that, but I was on vacation last week and decided to post them both this week.

Fortunately, the two presidents I will post about today fit well together. Andrew Jackson nearly won the 1824 presidential election that put John Quincy Adams in office. I discuss this in my previous post, but I’ll mention some of the basics for posterity. Jackson won the popular vote and the electoral college but failed to win a majority of the latter. As such, the election was sent to the House of Representatives, where John Quincy Adams was elected. Let this be a small lesson for everyone who clamors for a third party in this country. I’m not saying I disagree with it, but other rules would have to be adjusted to avoid the House deciding every presential election.

Jackson would comfortably win the 1828 election when it was a race between himself and the incumbent Adams. The two men could not be more opposite. Adams was as blue-blooded as they come – the son of a founding father and the second president, an ambassador to European nations, educated at the finest schools. He was also opinionated and ornery, instilling little love or devotion from even his most loyal supporters. On the other hand, Jackson was born to Scotch-Irish immigrants in the Carolinas. He rose to become first a frontier lawyer and later a Tennessee Supreme Court Justice before turning his sights to the military. He led soldiers in Creek War and later in the First Seminole War. He was a fierce advocate of democracy (at least his specific vision of it) and engendered a godlike following. The two figures could not be more dissimilar.

Due to this stark parallel and their indelible link in history, Jackson’s presidency is seen as a clear line of demarcation. He took aspects of Jefferson’s populism but pushed it much further than his predecessor could’ve imagined. Jefferson, for all his lofty ideas of democracy, was an aristocrat. Jackson was not.

Meacham’s biography of Jackson is, in many ways, masterful. Again, there is a later one of his on this list that I prefer, but I think this is his defining work. Much like his biography of Jefferson, it is a bit short for my taste, but this isn’t on Meacham. He makes it clear in the title that this is a book about Jackson’s time in the White House and not an exhaustive biography of the man. As such, Meacham doesn’t waste too much time on Jackson’s early or later years. We don’t receive a detailed discussion of his military accomplishments (wildly inflated by Jackson himself). What we do get is a beautiful tapestry of the American political scene during his presidency and a detailed portrait of the complicated man, Andrew Jackson.

I should mention that going into this book, I did not like Jackson. I still don’t. I find it impossible to look past his horrific racial stances and the genocide he codified into law with the Indian Removal Act. I also find his particular brand of populism to be dangerous and troubling. We have seen his like many times since, and it is always a problem.

That being said, I truly enjoyed this biography. Meacham doesn’t claim his subject to be an angel. He doesn’t excuse his treatment of Native Americans or blacks. I’m not even sure that Meacham likes Jackson (not that this should matter in a biography). But it would be impossible to tell the story of the United States without talking extensively about Jackson and his presidency.

Jackson is a figure that divides opinion as much as any US President. You will see people defending him as a champion of democracy and a fiscal conservative who was intent on restoring the nation to its people. You will see others who decry him as a racist and an egomaniac bent on seizing as much power as possible. (It’s incredible how often history repeats itself, isn’t it?)

A wonderful section of this book discusses the period during his presidency when a civil war nearly broke out. This was known as the nullification crisis and centered on a controversial tariff (you have no idea how much of these early biographies were about tariffs and banks). I won’t get into the weeds here but suffice it to say the nation teetered on the brink of a Civil War. Things got so contentious that Jackson’s Vice President, the despicable John C. Calhoun (there’s a fantastic biography of him I’ve listened to and might write about after we get through the presidents), resigned and ran for Senate to better argue for nullification.

How did Jackson handle the situation? With strength. He told South Carolina that they would be met with fire and brimstone if they continued down that path. In the end, South Carolina acquiesced to a compromised Tariff, and both sides claimed victory while kicking the can down the road.

This is emblematic of much of the pre-Civil War period in the United States. The issues that would eventually lead to war constantly showed themselves, only to be temporarily resolved. A fracture was clearly coming, and these political battles were like tremors preceding an earthquake.

Did Jackson do well to avert a Civil War? Did he instead teach a generation of Southerners that war was coming and that they would do well to prepare for it? Would the abolitionist Adams have incited a war? Would we, as a nation, have been better off getting this inevitable war out of the way before military power advanced to the level it did in the 1860s?

These are questions largely without answers. It is my opinion that war was always coming. Jackson forestalled it, and a different president, one without the military background and reputation for reactionary violence, may not have been able to do that. I don’t think you can blame him for avoiding war. Still, he wasn’t interested in tackling the systemic issues (notably slavery, which lurked in the shadows of all pre-civil war discussions) that were endemic in the nation.

His reputation has, appropriately, waned in the past decades, but if you were to discuss the most consequential US Presidents, he would have to be in that conversation. As such, this biography is essential to someone interested in learning more about US history. It shows you Jackson and brilliantly portrays his presidency. It’s not as exhaustive as some other biographies, but it’s magnificent at handling the subject matter it chooses to discuss. Sometimes that’s better. Meacham focuses on a specific period of Jackson’s life and uses that era to illuminate the individual and his time.

(I still don’t like him.)

John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit by James Traub

Tier 2

Much like the one on Monroe, this biography was a pleasant surprise. I knew a little about John Quincy Adams from the biography of his father and the film Amistad, but let’s be honest, no one’s getting too excited about a book on our sixth president. Andrew Jackson is looming in the wings, and I expected to have to power through this one. And, once again, I was completely wrong.

JQA was an indifferent president. There’s no need to pretend otherwise, and I think Traub would openly admit this. But one of the beautiful things about this project is seeing that their presidency does not solely define the men who have served as president. JQA is the president that most exemplifies that idea.

There’s a concept in management known as the Peter principle. Essentially it states that in a hierarchy, people tend to rise one level above where they should. You are continuously promoted based on your performance at a certain level until you reach one where you are no longer competent.

This concept defines JQA’s presidency. He was a brilliant diplomat and secretary of state who made for a forgettable president largely due to his inability or unwillingness to form coalitions and compromise.

I don’t say that as an insult. I don’t believe that being president should be the ambition of every politician, and I think that very idea has been quite damaging to our nation. There’s nothing wrong with being a congressperson and diligently serving your constituency in the best way possible. There’s a saying in Washington that every congressperson wants to be a senator, and every senator wants to be president. That creates a system where everyone focuses on the next job rather than on how best to accomplish their current one.

This wasn’t an issue for JQA. Two ideas drove his desire to become president. First, to rewrite his father’s legacy. Second, to have more say in international diplomacy. He genuinely didn’t seem to crave the power or want to inflate his ego. This, I don’t need to tell you, is incredibly rare in a president.

After getting walloped by Andrew Jackson in the 1828 election, Adams didn’t retire or disappear. He instead served in the House of Representatives for nearly two decades. While there, he defiantly fought for what he felt was right –notably as one of the most prominent abolitionists in the country. Again, as with his earlier diplomatic career, this station suited him. He didn’t feel the need to play games or compromise his beliefs while in the House of Representatives. He could, instead, be cantankerous and intractable, and no one can do anything about it.

Speaking of Jackson, JQA’s election is perhaps the most contentious in US history (yes, even more so than the recent ones). The basics are that four people ran for president – JQA, Jackson, Henry Clay, and William Crawford – effectively splitting the election. Jackson won both the popular and electoral votes but failed to win a majority of the latter. When this happens, the vote is then sent to the House of Representatives, where they select from one of the top three electoral vote-getters. Due to the three-fifths compromise (which inflated the southern states' voting power due to the number of enslaved people imprisoned in those states), Clay finished fourth and was not eligible for the House of Representatives runoff. He likely would’ve won that vote being an immensely popular figure in that body. As he wasn’t eligible, he threw his support behind Adams, who prevailed.

Confused? Me too.

Suffice it to say that Jackson felt he got robbed and immediately began a campaign against JQA and the “rigged” election of 1824. This culminated four years later in Jackson trouncing Adams and beginning his presidency.

Did Jackson have a point? Perhaps. I’m no fan of the man, but he did win the popular vote, and it seems to me that in a supposed democracy, that should count for something. But then again, as I mentioned previously, his electoral votes were inflated by slaveholders claiming to speak for the people they owned and imprisoned. Adams would’ve bested him in the electoral college if not for the three-fifths compromise.

So where do we land on this? Mainly that it was a mess, and the electoral congress is dumb.

That was essentially the most exciting part of JQA’s presidency. He had an ambitious agenda but failed to get things done. He continued the expansionist foreign policy he laid out as Monroe’s Secretary of State and, aside from that, didn’t leave much of an imprint.

He does serve as a presidential bridge between the founding generation and Jackson – a man who would be seen for many years as one of the most influential figures in US history. Adams had a connection to the founding generation – through his father and his time as a diplomat –and ultimately gave way to Jackson, who ushered in a new populist politics to our nation. (I’ll talk more about Jackson’s stature next week, suffice it to say he was held in much higher regard by previous generations.)

But that’s not what this biography was about. It’s about the man who traveled with his father to France and the Netherlands during the revolution. The man who read voraciously and was hailed as one of the finest minds of his generation. The man who made many of the same mistakes as his father – a middling presidency and some significant failures as a parent – but also learned from that man’s principles. The man who negotiated the treaty that ended the War of 1812. The man who spent his life violently opposed to slavery and dedicated much of his later years to working toward its eventual abolition. The man who suffered from extended bouts of depression brought on by the crushing expectations of his father and mother.

That is the man found in the pages of this wonderful biography. And that is a man we should remember as more than the answer to a trivia question.  

Traub’s biography isn’t the most artfully written book I’ve ever read. It’s not bad in this respect, but it doesn’t possess the novelistic rhythm that some of the other biographies I’ve read do. Still, that’s just a slight knock on an otherwise excellent book. The true power of this one is found in the brilliant stories of this fascinating man’s life. And, unlike with a biography of, say, Washington or Lincoln, these are stories you may never have heard otherwise, like how JQA loved to start his morning as president by walking down to the Potomac and taking a swim in it – naked.

I think that’s a fitting image to leave you with.

As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack, website, or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!

Children of Men

A little bit of a throwback this week, I’m going to discuss the brilliant Alfonso Cuarón film, Children of Men.

When I was younger, I spent considerable time making pop culture lists as if I were a character from Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity. I understand that the point of this novel is that this particular obsession isn’t healthy and is a symptom of these characters’ states of arrested development, but what can I say? I was a teenager.

Ok, maybe it lasted into my twenties.

I no longer obsess over these things, and I can now acknowledge that comparison in art is a largely futile and caustic exercise. I’ve come to detest the absurdity of award shows that attempt to grade acting performances as if they were sporting events.

Having said that, if you made me list my favorite films of all time, Children of Men would be high on that list.

There used to be a litany of movies I repeatedly returned to as one would to a security blanket. Regardless of whatever chaos I had created in my personal life, I could always turn on a familiar movie and fall into it for a few hours. Children of Men was one such movie.

These movies have an odd place in my heart. They’ve become tethered to my rather regrettable past and are tainted by that. When I think of them, I don’t simply think of the film but instead of the person who used to watch that film obsessively. As such, it’s nice for me to revisit these films now with my wonderful and brilliant partner. I reclaim them from that muddy past and frame them in a new light. I also see them through her eyes and hear how she interprets them through a modern lens.

(I’ve learned that it’s not appropriate to stare at her as we watch these movies and ask after every scene if she’s enjoying herself. Apparently, this is not the ideal way to view a film.)

Children of Men is a film I’ve spoken to her about many times. It's one of those movies that’s iconic to those who have seen it and, according to my partner, invisible to those who haven’t. Aside from me, she’d hardly heard of it.

I won’t turn this into a pop culture critique or a pretentious dissection of what’s wrong with our current media-consuming society. There’s nothing more nauseating and overdone than a white man in his thirties informing you that your taste isn’t valid.

Instead, I’d rather just say that you should watch this movie. It’s terrific. It holds up remarkably well and, unlike some great films, it’s a lot of fun.

Despite a previous post regarding my annoyance with spoiler culture, I will do my best to avoid blatant spoilers. That being said, there’s a significant plot point that’s technically a spoiler that I will discuss. It’s revealed early in the film and is mentioned in most descriptions, but still, I thought I’d warn you.

Ok, now is everyone who doesn’t want it spoiled gone? Good. Let’s continue.

The film's basic premise is that no one can have children, which has, rather predictably, thrust the world into chaos. Theo (played by Clive Owen) is tasked with transporting a young woman to a group that works to fix society and plan for its future. We discover (SPOILER) that the woman he’s transporting is pregnant – the first pregnancy in eighteen years.

Part of our motivation for watching this was the recent HBO series The Last of Us which shares a similar premise. I won’t compare the two but suffice it to say Children of Men emphasizes different aspects of a world in chaos.

Watching a movie years later is always an interesting experience. A part of you worries it won’t hold up in today’s world. That it will feel dated or stale in some way. This movie is much the opposite. It feels as current today as it did when it came out, and, in some ways, I think it’s more apt to today’s world.

Cuarón builds a beautifully textured world without doing much explanation. The opening scene illustrates everything you need to know for the film. It shows you the world rather than telling you about it. You see that there hasn’t had a new baby in eighteen years, that people are going about their daily life (working soul-crushing office jobs and getting coffee in the morning), and then, through an explosion, you see how chaotic the world has become. Chaotic but predictable, as even the people with debris on their jackets go to work.

The mundane nature of the apocalypse is remarkably current. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had in the past few years about how we were all still working despite so much of the world collapsing and what it would take for us to stop. In this way, the world of Children of Men is far more authentic than the dystopian visions of so many other films. Whatever comes, whatever catastrophe befalls us, we seem to keep going. We complain and feel our lives slipping away, but we go to work every day (remotely or otherwise). We do the laundry and clean the bathroom. Life goes on.

We do this out of perverse comfort. To give up the daily grind would be to acknowledge that chaos. It would be to admit that things are hopeless.

Guns are a fascinating aspect of this film. Where something like The Last of Us glories in the importance of guns in an apocalyptic society, Theo never touches a gun in Children of Men. This is a fascinating decision for a movie like this. Others carry guns, and there’s an iconic firefight (one of the great scenes in film history), but our protagonist never sees the need for one. He never picks up a discarded gun, never points one at someone’s head in anger or calculation, his weapon doesn’t define him as is so often the case for protagonists in these kinds of films.

This decision places Theo outside the two warring factions that define the world – the revolutionaries and the military. He doesn’t support either. He doesn’t care about who gets to shape the future. He simply wants a future, and the film illustrates that guns only deter that future.

There’s a steady, insistent fascism that lives in the film, which is highlighted by the immigrant camps, militaristic police, and media propaganda. Again, this feels even more apt to today’s world than it did in 2006. They were dealing with the post-9/11 racism and fearmongering of the Bush era, but it's hard to argue that those aspects have lessened in the nearly two decades since.

Another prescient aspect of this film is the core crisis – infertility. No one knows what’s caused it or how to fix it, but it's there. Over the past few months, there has been increasing discussion about declining birth rates. It isn’t the same crisis that the film depicts, but it’s similar. Much like in the film, there are many possible reasons for declining birth rates, but instead of addressing any (economic inequality, uncertainty over the future, environmental impacts), the world of Children of Men turns to authoritarianism and fear.

Despite what I’ve described above, this movie is terrific. It's funny and warm at points in a way that so many dystopian works cannot manage. My mother has a great adage that every movie should have some humor. I’m sure there are exceptions to that rule, but nothing’s duller than a movie that takes itself too seriously and can’t admit that there’s humor even in the darkest times.

If you’ve never seen it, go watch it. It's exciting and funny, and upsettingly relevant to our world.

Now next Thursday, I will not be making a post. I will be on vacation (try to manage for a week without me). I will endeavor to have the presidential blog post up on Wednesday, but if it doesn’t happen, you’ll get two for one the following week.

As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack, website, or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!

James Monroe

James Monroe: A Life by Tim McGrath

Tier 2

As mentioned last week, I went into this project with substantial momentum. And then I finished the disappointing Madison biography and was left with the prospect of James Monroe to follow. Not the most exciting proposition.

James Monroe was most famous for a doctrine named after him that was used to justify future imperialist presidential action. He’s also renowned for confusing generations of schoolchildren who can’t seem to distinguish him from his similarly initialed predecessor.

Aside from that, I knew very little about him.

As you can imagine, I wasn’t excited about this biography.

But that’s the beauty of a project like this. Yes, it’s fun to listen to Chernow’s book on Washington. It’s a masterclass in the genre, an unimpeachable work. But everyone knows that. The most famous biography of the most famous president, written by one of the great biographers of our day, is bound to be good. Where’s the fun in that?

It’s a book like this, Tim McGrath’s impeccable biography James Monroe: A Life, that makes a project like this come to life. I’d never have decided to listen to this unprompted. I had no interest in Monroe and assumed he was just a historical footnote. And what I found was quite the opposite.

As some of you know, I’m a fiction writer as well. I have a novel coming in 2025 and have had some stories published. I don’t mention this as shameless self-promotion (patrickrodowd.com patrickrodowd.compatrickrodowd.com) or to brag, but rather to say if I were going to write a historical fiction novel of one of the early presidents, it would likely be Monroe. The ebbs and flows of his life, the things he saw, the people he interacted with. It’s a story of undeniable narrative scope.

And McGrath tells that story beautifully.

Monroe was the last president of the revolutionary generation (this fact is punctuated by his successor being a child of one of that generation) and, as such, is often cosigned to a lesser position. He would never be Washington in his godlike grandeur, and he doesn’t possess the intellectual presence or lasting impact of Jefferson, Adams, or Madison. But he lived through exciting times and, in the end, served (mainly) admirably.

He was a soldier in the revolution, dropping out of college to serve under Washington. The position of soldier readily defines much of his later life. He went where he was told – France during the revolution and England later. He followed his commanders – Washington at first and later Jefferson. He waited his turn when he considered a run for president in 1808, understanding that it was Madison’s turn and he must fall in line with his party.

These traits rarely set a person out for note in history, but we need these people in a representative democracy. Someone who takes orders and votes the party line. We don’t like to admit it, but nothing would ever get done without these party stalwarts.

And it would’ve been simple for McGrath to write off much of Monroe’s political life to this. He could’ve described him as a historical afterthought—the last of his generation, a copy of a copy of a copy. I feel Brookhiser’s biography of Madison takes this path in many ways. It attaches Madison first to Washington and later Jefferson neutering its subject to remain expedient.

McGrath doesn’t take that path. He shows how Monroe internally disagreed with his bosses – notably, he negotiated a trade deal with Great Britain that Jefferson proceeded to reject. And he reveals in the drama that so defined his life.

Overall, Monroe went along with the stream of Jefferson’s party. He toed the line and waited his turn. But McGrath paints those periods with a vibrant brush. He shows him revolutionary France growing discontented with the wanton violence and anarchy. He shows Monroe rallying troops during the War of 1812. He creates a person, nuanced and flawed but always captivating.

While the previous biographies I listened to in this series were hyper-focused on glorifying their subject, McGrath seems willing to admit to Monroe’s deficits. He doesn’t claim Monroe to be some brilliant philosopher or political tactician. He wasn’t a Renaissance man like Jefferson or a legal genius like Adams, and I found this candor refreshing and all too uncommon in presidential biographies.

As for Monroe’s presidency itself, it was a mixed bag. Most presidencies are. We like to imagine that there’s a person out there who could bat a thousand and nail every decision, but it's not reasonable. People are imperfect, presidents, most of all.

Monroe is primarily remembered historically for the aforementioned doctrine – which I would assume he never could’ve imagined being used in the way it has been – and for The Missouri Compromise. This decision is now seen as an early fault line leading to the Civil War. It allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, despite being in the North. It would take dozens of pages to discuss the various political entailments of a compromise like this, but I believe the blame shouldn’t be laid solely at Monroe’s feet. The country was always going to grapple with slavery and the general divide between an increasingly industrialized North and an agrarian South. To put too much of that on Monroe feels unfair.

Overall, his presidency coincided with what is known as the Era of Good Feelings. This was a time after the collapse of the Federalist Party when partisan politics were often put to the side in favor of the nation overall. This wasn’t universal, and party politics always rear their ugly head in our country, but this was a period where much of that was put aside. Monroe, a staunch Jeffersonian Democrat, led this charge. He put the nation first, which seems like it should be the minimum requirement for being president, but as we all know from recent history, this is not always the case.

I believe Monroe’s general lack of brilliance in any one field allowed him to put the nation first more easily. Someone like Jefferson had trouble with that as he saw the country as his to mold. Monroe didn’t see it that way. I don’t think he felt the nation should be defined in his image. In the end, this is perhaps a better way to govern. The cult of personality that characterizes so many of our presidents is dangerous. It's high variance. Even the good ones allow that godlike presence to affect many of their decisions negatively.

There is so much more in this biography that I couldn’t even touch on here. I would highly recommend reading or listening to this book. It gives you a different perspective on the Revolution and the early years of our nation while being well-written and enthralling.

As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack, website, or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!

Cults

Cultish - The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell & The Girls by Emma Cline

This week I want to talk about two books I read a few years ago and just revisited. They pair well like the chocolate and peanut butter of cult-related writing from the past decade. Emma Cline’s stunning debut novel, The Girls, and the equally enthralling nonfiction work by Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism.

I’ll admit it, I’m into cults. I’d never join one (I hope), but they fascinate me. My partner and I will fall into rabbit holes from time to time where we watch tv documentaries about cults and discuss the absurd fascination our society (ourselves included) has with them. We’ll wonder what defines a cult and why they continue to crop up, even post-internet, where you’d assume everyone would’ve learned to avoid them.

Montell discusses our attraction to these shows by recalling how psychologists describe rubbernecking as a physiological response. You enter fight or flight mode even though you weren’t in the accident. You see the carnage, and your brain kicks into gear. It’s the same with cult documentaries (and their obscenely popular serial killer cousins). There’s a morbid fascination not only in wondering what drove those people to wind up in a cult but in considering if you, too, could’ve followed the same path.

This is part of the enchantment that comes with reading The Girls. Cline is very clever in the way she yo-yos you back and forth between the cult – a fictionalized version of the Manson family – and the bland suburbia of the 70s. I think if her novel had been complete immersion, taking place from the perspective of a full-blown cult devote, it would’ve become oversaturated. She would’ve had to constantly up the stakes regarding violence and sexual depravity to keep the reader enthralled.

Instead, Cline juxtaposes the reality of California in the 70s with the cult. She shows the mundane life that Evie, Cline’s teenage narrator, has outside the cult. Her parent’s divorce and their desperate attempts at relationships post-marriage, her girlhood friend who turns on her over a boy, the brilliant descriptions of banal domesticity. Even with Cline’s genuinely excellent writing, the reader doesn’t want to spend time there. You want to return to the cult, so you understand why Evie longs for the same thing.

The draw for Evie is something that Montell discusses in her book, loneliness. She’s a young girl cast adrift by her parent's divorce and her childhood friend’s abandonment. The novel is framed so that a middle-aged Evie is thinking back on her summer spent in the orbit of this cult, and when we’re with this adult version of our narrator, she’s still adrift. Still searching for something, a connection, a sense of belonging.

Cultish discusses how the rise of cults in the 70s coincided with what some now call the Fourth Great Awakening. There was a marked rise in the late 60s and early 70s in megachurches and evangelicalism in the United States, which is mostly what this term is used for. But there was also a concurrent rise in less mainstream forms of spiritualism. Some were eastern religions or fitness trends, but others were cults. Montell points out that these moments where people turn to spiritual gurus typically coincide with unrest. The Fourth Great Awakening had social and political turmoil to feed on; it could use this uncertainty to draw in followers.

That tumultuous world is Evie’s world.

The Girls briefly touches on Vietnam and the constant worry that young men have of being drafted, sent overseas, and coming back changed. It’s a way to remind the reader of the time and place while showing how men have entrenched communities to guide them. I’m not saying that going to Vietnam was a positive experience, but Cline seems to be making a corollary between Evie falling in with a cult and young men being sent off to war. Specifically, that war.

This is emphasized by the way the novel is framed. A still lost middle-aged woman looking back on these events feels eerily similar to the way movies often deal with Vietnam veterans. The haunted past that you can never truly escape. A scar that never leaves you. The cult is that for Evie.

Montell’s book primarily focuses on the language cults use and how it has spread throughout our society. She shows how Midlevel Marketing companies, fitness brands, and social media influencers have learned and adopted their strategies from cults. It's hard to read either of these two books and not think we are living through another awakening. I don’t know if scholars will consider this the Fifth Great Awakening, but it certainly feels like something is happening. We have all the markers – the turmoil, the uncertainty, the longing to be led combined with a distrust (or downright hatred) of our leaders.  

We have the bland, corporate, late-stage capitalism version of cults. No, we shouldn’t glamorize something like The Manson family (even though people do), but there was something different about them. There was a defiance, a separation from mainstream society. They were subversive. Also, there were drugs and sex and all that which people glamorize.

Today, we have people worshipping at the altar of Lululemon and Mary Kay, and I have to say I’m disappointed in us all. It's just another example of the boring dystopia that we seem to live in.

I don’t want the cults of the 60s and 70s to return. I find the way we glorify them to be nauseating and the way we trivialize them (Jonestown is essentially a punchline at this point despite almost a thousand people losing their lives) to be troubling. The old maxim that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, is on display here. Though perhaps instead of farce, the modern repetition, in this case, is just boring and depressing.

Would Charles Manson be the CEO of a start-up or a social media influencer these days? Would Squeaky Fromme be selling Mary Kay or overpriced leggings on Facebook? It’s hard to say, but it seems possible.

I highly recommend both books. They deal with a wide array of issues I haven’t touched on here. Once you read about cult language, you start to see it everywhere. Sometimes it's comical; other times troubling. And Cline’s book is a beautiful piece of historical fiction that grows timelier with every passing year. They’re both excellent and, as I said before, they pair well together.

As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack, website, or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!

James Madison

James Madison by Richard Brookhiser

Tier 4

When I started this project, I was full of vigor, like we so often are at the beginning of a new endeavor. I was ready to climb metaphorical mountains and conquer the knowledge of US Presidential history. I wouldn’t take any shortcuts, and I’d lean into the hard work ahead of me.

And at first, it went brilliantly. The Washington and Adams biographies were excellent, and the Jefferson one was informative, if not exactly what I wanted. I was still going strong, still prepared to dive head-first into the breach.

Then I looked at my prospective list of biographies and became discouraged. Even listening to these books while I cooked and cleaned and went to the gym, I began to worry about how long this project would take me. Naturally, this was a terrible way to view this. I had no time constraints. If it took a year or ten, it didn’t matter. But I’m human, and I decided, with James Madison, to take the easy road.

There’s a different biography of him by Noh Feldman that’s 34 hours long. It is, by all accounts, excellent. Comprehensive and exhaustive. It breaks Madison’s life into three separate spheres and dissects each with careful consideration.

But a few years ago, when I was undertaking this project, I didn’t choose to listen to that book. Instead, I picked Richard Brookhiser’s biography, which clocks in at a digestible 10 hours and 10 minutes. If you speed that up, it’s a workday. I told myself that I already knew a great deal about Madison. He was featured in all three of my previous biographies and extensively covered in the Jefferson one. I decided I didn’t need to exhaust the subject further.

I genuinely regret this decision.

Sometimes I have found myself knee-deep in a book I didn’t want to finish. I’ve been reading or listening, wondering why I cared about the subject but unwilling to cut bait and give up. This book was much the opposite.

It is short. Much too short. And where Meacham’s book on Jefferson is efficient and novelistic, this one to me was just brief. It seemed to feel either that its subject wasn’t exciting or charismatic enough to carry a longer text, or it just didn’t want to get into the weeds. Either is a failing, in my opinion.

Yes, some biographers are gifted with brilliant subjects. For example, writing a boring biography about Teddy Roosevelt would be nearly impossible. And Madison was far from Roosevelt. But we still have the time and the events he imprinted himself on. I think of how Chernow covers many of these same events (in both his Washington and Hamilton biographies), and I can’t help but feel that Brookhiser left a lot of meat on the proverbial bone.

As for Madison, he was the father of the constitution and, according to Brookhiser, the primary catalyst for the party system that has defined our nation’s political history. These two things could have shaped our young nation as much as any.

The Constitution, for better and worse, is practically a religious text at this point. Its initial intention has been wholly obscured over centuries of mythologizing. And no single person had a more significant part in shaping it than Madison. He was there at every step, wrote vast portions of it, and fought for its adoption.

He and Jefferson formed the Democratic-Republican Party, which inaugurated our nearly inescapable two-party political system. I get the impression that he became the face of this partisan politics largely to obscure the role his mentor and idol, Jefferson, played in it. He became a fierce adversary of his former Federalist Paper collaborate Hamilton and, in the end, emerged the victor from that contentious period.

As he grew in stature, his politics shifted. Where the first three presidents were seen to be immovable in their principles (even though this was never truly the case), Madison was malleable. In the 1790s, while fighting with Hamilton over seemingly everything, Madison opposed the national bank, a strong navy, and direct taxes. But once president, he changed his tune.

Is this a good quality? What do we want in our politicians? Would we rather have Adams’ stubborn intractability? Or Madison’s fluidity?

As with everything, it's situational. Madison was right to support those policies. The utopian ideals Jefferson claimed to hold dear needed to be more practical. A strong union was essential in maintaining the grand experiment of the early United States.

That experiment was most seriously tested during Madison’s presidency with the War of 1812. Many historians argue that this was an entirely preventable war handled poorly by a miscast president. He was obsessed with using trade as a pseudo-military lever, and it wasn’t often an effective strategy.

Madison was the right person at the right time. He was hard-working, affable, and clever. He saw changing political tides and shifted accordingly. He tied himself first to Washington and Hamilton, then later to Jefferson. He wasn’t a man to chart his own path, but a young nation still needs figures like Madison.

Like many presidents, he became obsessed with his legacy in his later years. He rewrote personal documents (even potentially forging Jefferson’s handwriting) to put his accomplishments and decisions in a more favorable light. Yet, despite these efforts, he’s a lesser founding father and a below-average president.

As I alluded to before, this was also a below-average biography. It didn’t quite hit my lowest rating, but it wasn’t far off. Whether someone is a good or bad president doesn’t impact the ability to write a good biography on them. Later in this series, we’ll see that in great clarity. There are presidents I despise who have lovely biographies.

Madison wasn’t a great orator and didn’t inspire the type of love or devotion that Washington or Jefferson did, but his life was certainly interesting. He was a founding father who presided as president over our first national war. He expanded the nation and served alongside Hamilton and Jefferson (two fascinating figures). He wrote much of the Constitution and had complex, contradictory opinions on slavery.

And yet, with all that material to work with, Brookhiser’s book manages to be dull. It was short but felt longer than Chernow’s book on Washington. It dragged, despite being a mere ten hours long. I’m sorry to be harsh, but I need to be honest. Skip this book. After the series, I’ll listen to Feldman’s biography and tell you what I think. I have to imagine it was better than this.

As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack, website, or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!

The Trip to Echo Spring - On Writers and Drinking Spring by Olivia Laing

This week I listened to one of my favorite books. It’s called The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking by Olivia Laing. As you could likely guess, it's a book about writers and alcoholism. She details the lives of six American authors – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman, and Raymond Carver. Each of them an alcoholic. Each an iconic writer.

I want to preface this post by saying I will not come close to accomplishing what she did in this book. It’s a flawless text. She writes non-fiction like Joan Didion, a novelistic approach to fact. Her language is beautiful, and the book flows like one of the great works by the authors she’s discussing. I won’t manage to do here what she does in her book, but I can talk a little about what it means to me.

Some of you likely already know that I’ve struggled with addiction. I’m happy to say those struggles are long behind me, but a book like this speaks to something in me as a writer who spent too many years drinking.

If I’m being honest, I think part of the romanticization of alcohol for me – which was essential in my drinking – came from stories about the authors Laing details in this book. I had a vague notion that I wanted to be a writer and saw alcohol as an essential part of that. After all, what makes one an author more than drinking?

Well, writing, obviously, but I wasn’t about to do that. To write would be to try. It would be to take a risk, to put myself out there, to show the courage of my conviction. If I picked up the proverbial pen and began to write, I might fail. I might discover it wasn’t in me, and then… what then?

So, instead, I drank. If I couldn’t write like Hemingway, I could at least drink like him. And I told myself that, like these icons of American letters, I was troubled. Deep, ponderous questions lived in me and could only be exercised by writing or drinking.

It’s incredible how ridiculous the mind of an addict is. The way we rationalize. The way we excuse our horrible behavior and continue to destroy ourselves.

Now, I never wrote anything when I drank. I told people I wrote. That wasn’t hard because I, like all alcoholics, was a liar. It’s an unavoidable hazard of the occupation. Sometimes I’d take a notebook on a family vacation, sit at a table, drink coffee, and pretend. I liked that. Pretending. I wanted to imagine I was something else, someone else, something other than an embarrassment.

It wasn’t until I got sober that I began to write.

And therein lies the paradox. Because I’d come to believe that a writer needs to drink and that the two occupations are inextricably linked. But I found it to be the opposite.

Had I been lied to? Had I concocted a false narrative?

Yes, obviously. It’s a narrative that stretches far beyond writing. There are countless other fictions about successful people and their connection to addiction (alcohol and otherwise). We’ve been taught, for some reason, that drinking is what one does. That a successful person is entitled to sit down at the end of a hard day and drink. This is what a man does. This is what’s expected.

If you ever needed to be disabused of this fiction, read Laing’s book. Yes, these authors managed some writing while they drank. Some of Carver’s early stories are quite good and were written before he got sober. Cheever was drinking as he wrote some of his iconic work, including perhaps the most remarkable of all stories on alcoholism – The Swimmer. But it wasn’t because of booze that they wrote. It wasn’t the thing that made them good. It didn’t help. And in the end, it destroyed them.

Hemingway’s most significant periods of writing always seem to coincide with stretches when his drinking tailed off. And it's no coincidence that Fitzgerald and Williams ended their careers having gone years without producing anything of substance. They’d succumbed to the bottle and, in doing so, had lost their spark.

Laing’s book is part biography, part memoir, and all genius. She paints vivid depictions of these men, highlighting similarities and touching on broad-scale thoughts about alcoholism. Sometimes our characters spend time together, and we see how alcoholics interact and deflect. She shows they’re all similar, but no two are identical. I think that’s always important to realize. We may all share a trait, but that doesn’t mean we’re the same people.

She discusses her connection to alcoholism and why she used only men in this work. She mentions the litany of other alcoholic authors she could’ve picked and leaves you, after a book so full of futility in the face of alcohol, with hope.

Carver, the last author she details, stayed sober. He resurrected his life from the depths of despair. He got to the other side. He made it.

I don’t know what will come of my career as a writer. It’s only beginning, and while I am excited by the potential, I understand it’s a hard road and the odds are against me. But I know that my life is better sober. I’ve experienced the pain, and the destruction alcohol can leave in its wake. I felt these stories that Laing details. I saw myself in those men, not in their highs, but in their lows. The waking up full of horror and uncertainty over what you’ve done, knowing you need to quit but being unable to take that step.

Laing finishes the book by referencing one of Raymond Carver's short stories, Nobody Said Anything. It’s about a boy who pretends to be sick to skip school, goes fishing, and brings home a fish. He’s proud of this fish and shows it to his parents, longing for their approval, only for it to be met with disgust. She writes about this story and alcoholism:

“We’re all of us like that boy sometimes. I mean we all carry something inside us that can be rejected; that can look silver in the light. You can deny it, or try and throw it in the garbage, by all means. You can despise it so much you drink yourself halfway to death. At the end of the day, though, the only thing to do is to take a hold of yourself, to gather up the broken parts. That’s when recovery begins. That’s when the second life – the good one – starts.”

It's such a hopeful way to end this book. It is, in my experience, true. I know many of you don’t struggle with addiction, so I appreciate you putting up with me. But if anyone is reading this and wondering if they might have a problem, please know it does get better. There’s another life, and I can’t tell you how wonderful it can be.

If you’re a person like that, please don’t hesitate to contact me. You can contact me through my website, patrickrodowd.com. Alternatively, there are countless resources online or in person, and, of course, you can read Laing’s brilliant book. I came to it post-sobriety, but I’m sure it could help you see the light.

As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack, website, or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

Tier 3

Now would probably be a good time to let you know that I’m a bit of a masochist when it comes to biographies. I don’t want some nice, cursory reflection on an individual. I want an exhaustive tome. I want to look down at my audiobook app and see that I have days left to listen. My favorite presidential biographies on this list are multivolume ones. My favorite of all of them – Robert Caro’s still unfinished series on Lyndon Johnson – currently clocks in at around 150 hours.

And I want more.

I want to have a biography full of mini-biographies. I want to hear about their childhood and failures in excruciating (though well-written) detail. It’s part of what I loved about this project. To watch these biographies overlap to meet future and former presidents. I love for a biography to show the person and the time, and to do that, you need scope. And, in my experience, a short biography often lacks that scope.

I think it’s important to mention this as we continue through these biographies because it’s not Jon Meacham’s fault that he wrote a digestible book. For comparison Chernow’s book on Washington is about 42 hours long, McCullough’s on Adams about 30 hours, and Meacham’s book on Thomas Jefferson is just under 19 hours.

I know that he could’ve written a longer book. I do not doubt his ability as a researcher or his knowledge of his subject. He’s the only biographer in this series to appear three times and has won a Pulitzer Prize (two honors that I assume he considers equal). He writes in a beautiful style that often feels novelistic. My middling grade for his biography of Jefferson says far more about me than it does about him.

But this is my list, and everyone can’t be in tier one.

My problem with this book is its length. Or maybe not its length exactly, but the speed through which certain events are dealt with. I know this was intentional. Meacham and his publisher surely discussed the length, and making a more reasonably sized biography is, in many ways, better. More people will read this book than Caro’s Master of the Senate. And they should because, despite my criticism, this is still a very good book.

I simply wanted more. For such a mammoth figure in our nation’s history, I wanted to dive deeper. But, again, that’s my fault. And I will find a more exhaustive biography of Jefferson in the future, but for now, we have this.

Now onto Jefferson. Where to begin? Sally Hemming? His seemingly cowardly retreat from Richmond during the Revolutionary War? The Declaration of Independence? The Louisiana Purchase? His time in France?

There’s too much. Too varied a career to spend much time on individual moments.

Instead, what I wish to discuss is the idea of specialization. We live in an era of hyper-specialization. We’ve been trained that it’s better to excel at one thing than dabble in many. There’s more money in specific expertise. More prestige. We’ve come to believe that specialization makes for a better person and professional.

And I hate that.

Maybe it’s better. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I find this over-specialization dull.

Thomas Jefferson was, for his many faults, a man who dabbled. Some may argue he did more than merely dabble. That his exploits in various fields, from architecture to agriculture to politics to philosophy, were more expert than amateurish. But I would attest that’s only because he spent time working in so many varied pursuits. It teaches you to think differently and see problems and the world through a mixed prism. It builds curiosity and teaches humility by showing that someone else knows more than you in a given field.

And most importantly, it emphasizes improvement. If you always have a new challenge to tackle or a new hobby to investigate, you’re never a finished product. And we should constantly be improving. We should never see ourselves as finished.

Jefferson is remembered a bit differently due to his status as a renaissance man. People loved him for it, and they sought to emulate and glorify him for his varied skills. Later, those same people would violently protect his reputation and shape the image of him that we have today.

He’s remembered as someone who was above petty politics when he essentially started them in this country by forming one of the first political parties and smearing his opponents. He’s remembered as aloof, a philosopher prince attempting to shape the United States in the mold of enlightenment France, and yet, he could be as vicious and calculating as anyone. He’s remembered for the brilliant Louisiana Purchase, showing him as a seeming virtuoso in international diplomacy, but we aren’t taught about the 1807 Embargo, which was an unmitigated disaster.

In short, he contained multitudes. He wasn’t one thing. It’s tempting to boil these people down to their finest particle and to paint someone like Jefferson as either a god or a devil. But the truth is he was neither.

His treatment of Sally Hemming was horrific. It was then, and it is now. I won’t hear about him being a product of his time. His time was full of discourse on the inhumanity of slavery. His willingness to balance the perceived notions of human freedom and equality while simultaneously being a master over dozens of enslaved people is abhorrent and contradictory on the highest level. That isn’t to mention the litany of errors he made as president.

But he wrote the Declaration of Independence, fought for religious freedom, and founded the University of Virginia. He inspired generations of politicians to follow. Meacham saliently argues that more than any other founding father, he shaped the nation through those who followed him. Few individuals in our nation’s history can truly be said to have molded it, and he’s one of them.

In the end, Meacham chooses to lionize Jefferson. As I mentioned in a previous post, biographers often do this. You want to believe the person you’re writing about was a good person, and biographies tend to skew toward idolization. That’s not a knock on Meacham, and he’s not alone in this. There’s no such thing as an unbiased biography. Every writer leaves fingerprints on their book.

And as for Jefferson, in many ways, he is the perfect embodiment of this nation, the living contradiction that we can never escape. A country founded on the premise of freedom and equality that enslaved countless souls and ignored the rights of women. He encompasses our loftiest visions and our dirtiest truths. He’s been molded to fit the time more than any other president. A hero of slave-owning states' rights traitors during and after the Civil War. He was an enemy of the conservative establishment in the late 19th century due to his populist views. He was a hero of New Deal democrats, only to be later (correctly) demonized for his slaveholding. He is, much like the United States herself, whatever you want him to be. He’s shaped in your image, he changes with the time, but his influence remains.

Fun fact(s): He loved pasta and ice cream; he was constantly in debt, including dying with between one and two million (in today’s dollars) owed; and he wrote his own gravestone, which mentions writing The Declaration of Independence and the Statue of Virginia for Religious Freedom, as well as being the father of The University of Virginia, but doesn’t mention being president.

As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack, website, or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!

The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

This week I finished The Leftovers, a phenomenal novel by Tom Perrotta. This book was the source material for one of my favorite television shows of all time, and I’ve always meant to read the book. The show was a substantial inspiration for some of my writing and my general desire to be a writer, but because I’m an idiot, I only just got around to the book.

Despite initially kicking myself for waiting so long to read what I can now say is one of my favorite books, I have come to feel it was for the best that I waited. If I’d read this book back when I watched the show, I would’ve had a completely different reading because I was a different person in a different world, and that always shapes ones reading.

I always felt that, in some ways, the show The Leftovers was a discussion about the aftermath of 9/11. I’m sure I’m not original in this thought, but, as Pete Campbell once famously claimed, I came to it independently. The way that loss is handled, particularly in the first season, which is the only one that follows the novel, always struck me as a good parallel for that horrific event. The almost competitive nature of grief. The way people who lost no one could seem more rattled than those who lost everything. The way people tried to own the tragedy and coopt it to their own devices.

But listening to the book now, with Covid the fresh catastrophe in my mind, I found that it wasn’t as simple as a novel about 9/11. It was about any cataclysmic moment. It was about the way that we, as a society, deal with these disasters.

In an excellent interview with the author that followed the audiobook (I love when audiobooks have these!), Tom Perrotta discusses how the novel was primarily influenced not by 9/11 but by the 2008 financial collapse and the sense of uncertainty in the future that followed it. During that interview, he discussed wanting to write about “[a] world where characters no longer felt their futures were guaranteed or predictable or comprehensible.”

He certainly captured this in his novel, which is at times funny and suspenseful, and always beautifully written. Each character gives you a separate view of the tragedy and its aftermath. He focuses on a small town and the people in it as opposed to trying to deal with large-scale institutions. This is effective. We have too many stories – zombies, disasters, superheroes destroying cities – that deal with the macro. They often become unwieldy and beat us over the head with the allegory. They lack subtlety and nuance. They lack a soul.

Perrotta avoids that trap. He sticks to the micro, to a family torn open by a tragedy and a woman dealing with the immense grief of losing everything. In doing this, he shows us the truth. Shows us how we actually deal with a catastrophe.

If this novel worked in some ways as a discussion of 9/11, the 2008 financial collapse, or any other disasters, I can’t imagine that even Perrotta saw how well it would fit Covid.

One of the primary themes of this book is how, after everything seems to have fallen apart, life goes on. The simple tragedy of having to forget and get on with your life. This is easier for some. If you didn’t lose anyone during Covid, you might feel that we all need to move past it. Get the country back up and running, resume the daily banality of our lives.

But that isn’t the case for everyone. Not for those who lost people. Not for those whose lives are irrevocably altered in some way by the virus. Sometimes these people aren’t the ones directly affected. Someone might have never contracted it, didn’t lose anyone, seemed untouched on the surface, but still can’t move past it because it isn’t only physical loss that stays with us. It’s that very uncertainty that The Leftovers captures so well.

 Many people felt their futures weren’t guaranteed, predictable, or comprehensible before Covid. I don’t think many of us have any illusions about the stability of the structures around us. Not anymore. But Covid laid those flaws bare in the same way that Perrotta’s rapture did.

Everyone in The Leftovers was affected by the rapture. Whether they lost someone or not, they felt it, it left a scar. And after it was over, they felt a clawing inability to return to their daily lives. This spawned cults and movements and sexual exploration. It caused some to give up everything and others to try to lie their way back to normality. Some used this tragedy to gain wealth and power, while others sought to destroy themselves. Existing societal divisions were heightened, and people who once seemed rational turned to irrationality in the face of chaos. And in the end, slowly, the world tried to forget.

Sound familiar?

I recommend that you read (or listen to) this book. Despite what this post may indicate, it really is funny at times. It’s sweet and compassionate and builds unforgettable characters. It lives in you even after you’ve finished it.

If you have already read it, I’d say try it again. It might look different today.

Sometimes I’m wary of going to a source text for something I love. It’s an odd experience. I remember listening to The Godfather a few years ago and being supremely disappointed. All the good things that the book does are done better in the movie, and all the remaining parts that didn’t make it into Coppola’s masterpiece were left out for a good reason.

This isn’t that. This is a book that stands on its own. It is, naturally, like the show, but it makes different choices and leaves you with a distinct aftertaste. They’re two iconic pieces of culture from the twenty-first century, and both seem to be only getting better with time.

I’m debating rewatching the show and doing periodic posts on it. I think it, like the book, would show itself in a new light in our current world. I’ll let you know if I decide to do that.

As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack, website, or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!

John Adams

John Adams by David McCullough

Tier 2

Here we have David McCullough, another iconic historian, and biographer. Like Chernow, he’ll have two entries in this project and is known as a master of this particular craft. A good biography, at least for me, reads much like an epic novel. It’s sprawling and expansive and detours into others’ lives. It seems, at times, to get lost, to be focused on something extraneous, only to return to its subject with the reader understanding the world more thoroughly. It paints a vivid portrait of a time and place as much as a person.

This biography meets that criterion. McCullough is an excellent writer. He doesn’t mind a meandering passage or a momentary flourish. He’s an outstanding researcher but understands that one must entertain as well as inform.

Like Chernow, I prefer another of his biographies, but that shouldn’t take anything away from this one. This book may not be tier one (at least for me), but it’s certainly worthy of your time.

Now, as for John Adams, he was… singular. He’s the type of man who would never be president today. The many steps one must take to even put themselves in consideration in 2023 involve countless compromises and a certain charm. Adams would’ve been unwilling or unable to make those compromises. He was a man of principle, for better or worse. As for the charm, I do think it existed, but it wasn’t often on display. It was reserved for private correspondences and intimate moments.

I know people who have read this biography and left it hating Adams. They see him, much as Franklin did, as a crotchety old man devoid of humor or charm. I know others who read this book and left enamored with Adams. They saw a man of principle whose contributions to The Revolution and the early United States have been blocked out by the massive shadows of his contemporaries – Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton.

As with most things, the truth is in between. He was a man prone to melancholy and pettiness. He was obsessed with his place in history (a common trait for most founding fathers). Coming from Massachusetts, Adams, much like that state, carried an inferiority complex. The southern states, Virginia in particular, saw themselves as the regal center of the nation. The money, through slavery, came from there, and they carried themselves with a distinct air of superiority. They were the heirs of enlightenment France in all its pomp and circumstance. Massachusetts couldn’t stand this. Particularly not after the formative role they played in the cause of independence. The blood they shed, the action they put into place.

Adams carried this sense of inferiority with him everywhere he went. It influenced his time as an ambassador in France, England, and the Dutch Republic. It informed his time as Vice President, a job he detested, and then as President, a job he didn’t perform well. He was obsessed with his legacy, something that shines through in his later life correspondence with his former rival Thomas Jefferson.

Of course, all those fears and insecurities came true. Adams' reputation and contributions have been revived by this biography (and the excellent HBO adaptation that followed), but for many years he was glossed over. It wouldn’t have been surprising for much of U.S. history for people to assume Jefferson was the second president and for Adams to be seen as a mere footnote.

Now, part of this was his own doing. He wasn’t a president who covered himself in glory. Some of this wasn’t really his fault. He opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts every step of the way, but in the end, he still signed them and, as such, was tainted by their legacy. He kept us out of a war with France in the aftermath of the XYZ affair, but he hardly inspired much confidence during that period. Overall, this was his problem. He lacked Washington's charisma and stature and Hamilton's cunning and persuasiveness. The federalist party didn’t love him, and he knew it. Combine that with the Republican hatred of him and all things Federalist, and you have a president set up to fail.

But I’m not interested in droning on about his presidential achievements and failures. I’m not even interested in discussing his diplomacy or his crucial role in adopting the Declaration of Independence (yes, Jefferson wrote it, but Adams was the critical figure driving its adoption).

Instead, I left this book thinking about Abagail, his wife, adviser, and confidant. This isn’t to say that John didn’t leave a sizable imprint on me, he did, but what stands out in this biography is their relationship and what that says about gender and history.

Abagail would've been president at a different time (at least, I hope, as it hasn’t come yet). She would’ve been a diplomat and sat at the congressional congress as a representative of her state. It’s not that John wasn’t qualified or competent or that he didn’t earn his seat at those proverbial tables. It’s simply that she was every bit the person, thinker, and visionary that her husband was.

We’re only aware of her impact on her husband’s thinking and actions due to their copious letters. It leaves one to wonder how many other women in history have had a similar impact on their husbands. How many times has a woman simply not written down her advice? How many times were letters burned? How many times has a great man stood on his wife's shoulders and failed to acknowledge her impact? And, perhaps most importantly, how many great leaders have we lost due to our inability to look past the imagined supremacy of a penis?

Adams is one of many presidents who was a better man/historical figure than president. He shouldn’t be remembered as a great or iconic leader. He wasn’t either of those things. He was a brilliant thinker and revolutionary. He (mostly) stood by his principles even when to do so was a poor political decision or courted the contempt of his friends. He’s a cautionary tale in many ways, an all too visceral example of why the best among us are not always the best presidents.

But mostly, you should read this book for his relationship with Abagail. The way it brings out his humor and humanity. The way he confides his frailties to her and the way she guides him (usually correctly) to be the best man he can be. It’s a loving, intimate portrait of a marriage that helped to found this nation. Hopefully, before too long, we can live in a world where a First Man of John’s ilk offers support and advice to his wife, President Abigail. But until then, we have this book to remind us of the role women have already played in our national founding and governance.

Fun fact(s): he was the only non-Virginian of the first five presidents, he once shared a bed with Ben Franklin, he was a terrible dancer.

As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack or my website or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!

The Last of Us Takes the Easy Way Out

I’ve been watching and (mostly) enjoying HBO’s The Last of Us. Now, full disclosure, I never played the game and as such cannot refer to that for context. I do, however, have a close friend who loves the game. He told me recently that one of the major differences between the show and the game is the relationship between Joel and Ellie. From what he says in the game Joel doesn’t show much warmth towards his “cargo,” where in the show that relationship is paramount.

I think this is good, effective storytelling/adaptation. I don’t think people would want to watch this show if there wasn’t something between our protagonists that’s more than a simple transaction. However, I think this introduction of sentimentality, for lack of a better word, led them to making some poor decisions in this week’s episode.

Now, despite a previous post about my distaste for spoiler culture I will give you a spoiler warning here. I’m going to discuss the most recent episode of The Last of Us below, so please stop reading if you haven’t watched.

I’ll wait.

Everyone gone?

Good.

Ok, so the most recent episode – episode 8 titled “When We Are in Need” – deals with a religious cult and their preacher. He encounters Ellie when she’s hunting and we come to learn that the man who stabbed, and was subsequently killed by, Joel in the previous episode was a member of this preacher’s community. I won’t bore you with a recap as presumably you’ve either seen the episode or don’t care.

My issue here is specifically with the treatment of the preacher. I certainly don’t mind a villain and have no issue with positioning an alleged man of God in that role, but I feel the show had an opportunity here that it failed to seize. It could’ve used this encounter to discuss the moral ambiguities and difficult decisions that would arise in the world of The Last of Us.

The writers clearly wanted to end the episode with Ellie covered in blood having just brutally murdered the preacher and Joel comforting her. They opened with her caring for him after the injury and its fitting to bookend it with Joel caring for her as she’s covered in blood. That’s fine, it’s a nice image. If there’s anyone who understands what it’s like to kill, its Joel and we again, hopefully for the last time, are reminded that they are now essentially family.

But, for some reason, the writer’s decided that they needed to take the preacher from a regular, somewhat evil or misguided person and turn him into an absolute monster who’s trying to rape the 14-year-old Ellie while the building burns to the ground around them. Why? Why was this necessary? How does this help the show?

In my mind, it’s far more interesting to present the preacher as a mildly bad person who’s simply in opposition to Ellie and Joel’s objectives. They could’ve had him tell Ellie that he can’t save Joel, but he can save her. This would’ve worked as both him physically saving her from his blood thirsty followers, and a spiritual salvation. It would present her with a choice – abandon the quest and Joel, take the relative safety presented of the preacher, or chose the violent, morally ambiguous alternative. It would force Ellie, and the audience, to contemplate the dilemmas this world presents.

Naturally, we know what she would choose. She loves Joel and wouldn’t leave him, but presenting the preacher as a real option would’ve meant that killing him was a morally compromised choice.

Instead, they took the easy way out. They transformed the preacher’s character from your run of the mill cult leader into the embodiment of evil. If she didn’t kill him, he would rape and then likely kill her. So what choice was there? What moral dilemma did she face?

Yes, I’m sure killing someone, especially in that manner, takes something out of you. I’m sure it leaves its imprint, changes you. But it would’ve had a different, stronger impact if she’d killed a less evil man who was simply standing in her way. That would’ve created a bond between her Joel – a man who we’re repeatedly told had done terrible things (like killing sort of innocent people) in the past. It would’ve shown us what it takes to survive in that world.

But they didn’t want to do that. They created a monster and had her slay him. I think they’d have done better to trust their audience. To lead them down a dark path and show the moral complexities of survival in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

I don’t plan for all these posts to be about television, so I apologize if the early ones have been a bit one note. As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack or my website or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!

George Washington

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

Tier: 1 (Instead of doing a star rating or X out of ten, I’m going to do tiers. 1 – 5, 1 being the best/must read, 5 being the worst/skip)

I got started on this project with a bang. It was to be expected. Sometimes there are good biographies about bad presidents, sometimes there are bad biographies about good presidents, but with the plethora of options for old Cincinnatus, I was expecting a good one. And I got it.

Chernow is one of the few biographers who have two entries in this project. He is also on the short list for best biographers that I’ve ever read. You may know a fairly popular adaptation of another of his works about a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman. This book is about as good as you’ll get for a single volume biography (I think I prefer another of his, but you’ll have to wait for that one). He manages to give you an even portrait of a seemingly mythical man in an exciting and informative manner.

One thing I found while listening to these books was that biographers tend to fall in love with their subjects. It’s understandable and in most cases excusable. If you spend years researching a person, it probably helps to like them. There are times that Chernow falls into this trap, where he skims over troublesome moments or frames things in a favorable light, but he mostly manages avoid this and give you an honest depiction. He’s willing to hit GW when its warranted and avoids overt editorializing. His prose is strong and moves quickly, he avoids the excessively academic nature of some biographies while keeping you gripped to the page.

There are failings to this book. Any single volume biography is going to skirt over aspects of the subject’s life, particularly one with the stature of Washington. I would’ve liked more on his early life and colonial military career (the time he basically started a world war is covered in like a dozen pages), but overall, it’s hard to complain here.

Washington was a bit of a late bloomer. If you told someone in 1774 (when he was already 42) that he would go down as one of the iconic figures, and military leaders, in world history, they’d have laughed in your face. He wasn’t a spectacular or even particularly notable man aside from the aforementioned fiasco (possible war crime) that began the French and Indian War. He wasn’t some military virtuoso or political visionary. He was rather the right man at the right time.

I think this is a valuable lesson for all of us. We tend to venerate prodigies and exceptional talents. We gravitate towards them and turn them into gods. But the smartest, most talented person isn’t always the best leader. I think there’s a valid argument to be made that someone who’s met nothing but success in their life is totally unprepared for something like the job of being president. Failure is important. It builds humility, it gives one perspective, and it teaches you to listen. Washington never would’ve been the president he became without those early failures.

Another thing that stood out to me during many of these biographies was the idea of partisanship. We often hear politicians yearn for some past where political adversaries were cordial in their hatred. If this era existed, I haven’t found it.

For Washington’s part he faced vicious criticism particularly in his second term. This included, but was not limited to, cartoons depicting him being beheaded, accusations of being a turncoat with regards to the French Revolution, and the recurrent claim that he was making himself king (something he probably could’ve done if he’d wanted to).

He sought, for a period, to remain above this petty partisanship. Along with many of his contemporaries, he reviled political parties and the factions that they created. But in the end those same men who demonized parties (looking at you Jefferson), were the ones to form them and subsequently attack their opponents. Washington’s partisan Rubicon seemed to be the Whiskey Rebellion after which it became impossible for him to avoid the factions that had torn open his cabinet and laid fault lines across the nation.

Given that the proverbial father of our nation couldn’t avoid libelous attacks and political parties, I think we should put this myth to bed once and for all. There was no idyllic time when politicians respected their opponents. Perhaps there are instances you can point to, but on the whole enemies detest one another. They did then just as they do now.

If a one volume biography falls short of explaining the complex man that was our first president, then my little blog has no chance to fully encompass him. What I can say is that you should read this biography. It’s excellent and Washington is a lesson to us now just as much as he was then. He wasn’t perfect, none of us are, but he’s certainly someone worth studying.

Fun fact(s): he loved dogs, he had to borrow money to attend his first inauguration, and he didn’t, as is so often claimed, have wooden teeth (he had issues with his teeth and lots of dentures, but they were more often ivory and probably even slave teeth at some point).

As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack or my website or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!