Churchill and Empire: A Portrait of an Imperialist

By Lawrence James. Pegasus Books, 452 pages, $28.95

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

An imperialist from birth, Winston Churchill held firm to the notion that the British Empire was a great gift to the world, that it raised primitive people out of the torpor of aimless existence and pointed them toward useful lives, and that India was the crown jewel of it all.

Churchill’s greatest glory while he was British Prime Minster was in rallying his people, both at home and across the Empire, against Adolf Hitler in 1940, convincing them to hold fast until the free world caught up to him. His heart and soul were firmly rooted in the best that Victorian England had to offer and he used those roots to urge England and the Empire on to victory.
British historian Lawrence James has written two other books on the empire. In this one, he studies Churchill, who has frequently been ranked as the greatest man of the 20th century. Agreeing with that assessment, James first turns to Churchill’s years in the colonies for validation.

Imperial geo-political considerations were always uppermost in Churchill’s mind whenever he had to make major strategic decisions in World War II. Domestic matters were included only when they intruded on Churchill’s imperial preoccupations.

Churchill’s first posting was to Gen. Sir Herbert Kitchener’s staff in 1898 in India just before the battle of Omdurman. “Imperial glory was followed by imperial shame,” James writes, as injured Dervishes were left to die or were shot and bayoneted.
Kitchener’s “callousness after the battle appalled a young man with quasi-religious faith in a humanitarian Empire.” As a Cabinet minister he battled “frustrated and vengeful subordinates who suspended the moral principles which he believed were the foundations of Empire.”

James writes, “Churchill repeatedly insisted that the Empire was a precious asset, not just for Britain, but for civilization as a whole.” James argues that the British Empire, for all its faults, was more benign in its treatment of native peoples than the empires of Germany, Japan Italy, and even France.

Churchill absorbed the credo of the Anglo-Saxon imperialist and early on sought fair treatment for all peoples, albeit with the additional caveat that the Crown always knew best.

While World War I was very much about empires, James writes that World War II was also an “imperial war…whose [Axis] objectives included the elimination of British influence in the Mediterranean and Middle East and the annexation of British colonies in Africa, the Far East and the Pacific.

James argues, “[I]mperial geo-political considerations were…always uppermost in Churchill’s mind whenever he had to make major strategic decisions” in World War II. Throughout his career, “Domestic matters [were] included only when they intruded on Churchill’s imperial preoccupations.”

That imperial emphasis inevitably helped lead to Churchill’s defeat at the polls in the summer of 1945. The British people, having endured and won the war after six years, were ready to look inward to their own needs, rather than worry about what was happening in colonies and dominions.

When the prospects in World War II were at a low point in 1942 and there was clamoring for freeing India and other possessions, he declared, “I have not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”

And yet, that was precisely what happened after the war. By the time of his death in 1965, India was two free nations, African colonies were gaining their independence, and British control of Middle Eastern oil had passed to the United States.

James succinctly describes the tensions in relations with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet Marshall Joseph Stalin. Churchill’s view was always an imperial one.

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

The Grapes of Math: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life

By Alex Bellos. Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $25.99.

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

Get most people past addition and subtraction and you’re achieving something. Alex Bellos loves math, loves to play with numbers and would really love to get the rest of us to love them, too. Actually, we play with numbers every day though we may not realize it.

Bellos holds a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from Oxford University. An earlier book on math is Here’s Looking at Euclid. Now, Bellos is expanding his mathematical horizons, though he may not be successful in expanding ours.

Still, if you approach The Grapes of Math with a devil-may-care mind and light smile, there is a lot to enjoy. You just have to pick and choose what you want to tickle your fancy. Bellos has a light touch with his language, which helps getting through some of the tougher material.

Freeway exits, like amusement park roller coaster, are examples of clothoids, says Alex Bellos.

He suggests that the next time you’re on a roller coaster or exiting a freeway, keep in mind that you’re dealing with a clothoid. It turns out that a clothoid is a curve that becomes tighter, the closer you get to the middle.

The rules of physics—that’s a game we won’t get into here—make the roller coaster go faster as the arc tightens. Then, when it begins to expand again, you regain control of your innards and move on to the next thrill.

On highways, as you drive around one of those spaghetti interchanges to get off or on, you have to keep turning the wheel to stay where you belong. Then, you ease the wheel back as your exit nears. And you never knew you were copying a roller coaster!

Let’s turn now to pi, that great number that states the circumference of a circle is 3.14 times its diameter. We may or may not remember that 3.14 is only the start of pi, a number which goes on forever. Bellos upsets us by saying that we’re using the wrong number.

He explains that a circle is drawn by rotating a radius all the way around, back to its starting point. The radius, he contends, quoting another mathematician, is the better figure, since without it, you can’t create a circle. So, before multiplying by pi, would you divide the diameter by two, then multiply the radius by two? Why, I might ask?

While you join me in scratching your head at that, try this: Cut a strip of paper half an inch wide off a sheet of stationery and make a circle out of it. Before pasting the ends together, turn over one end then paste them. Now run your finger all the way around one side. You come out on the other side.

How did this happen? Read about 19th Century German mathematician August Ferdinand Moebius.

Favorite numbers can even be risqué. One young lady likes the number 24 because she “sleeps with her left leg kicked out like a 4 and her boyfriend sleeps like a 2 on his side.” (But, shouldn’t she have picked 42? Or does the number depend upon who sleeps on which side of the bed?)

Bellos has 282 pages of fun like that; you don’t have to try the calculus and logarithms. Stick to the easy stuff and poke your nose into the fancier material every now and then.

Try it! You may like it!

Jules Wagman enjoys playing with numbers on a very elementary level (1+1=2).

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

Scalia: A Court of One

By Bruce Allen Murphy. Simon & Schuster, 656 pages, $35.

Reviewed By Jules Wagman

Of all the subtitles given to a book, “A Court of One,” is arguably the most apt. It certainly fits this thoroughly readable biography of ultra-conservative Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. Named by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, he is the longest-serving associate justice.

Prof. Bruce Allen Murphy of Lafayette College has written three books on other Supreme Court justices. Of Scalia, he believes that he “will continue to be torn between his originalism and textualism decision-making theories, his traditionalism as dictated by his religious beliefs, and the partisan conservative results that he wishes to achieve…”

Scalia does not lead the Supreme Court’s conservative wing, but Murphy writes the associate justice has every reason to believe that he is not done yet.

When he joined the Court, Scalia’s associates and friends saw him as a unifying and compromising force. Murphy comments, “Scalia was indeed ready to serve on a court that spoke ‘with a single voice,’ so long as it was his voice.”

Scalia quickly ruffled feathers. Attorneys get only 30 minutes for argument, so justices limit their questions. In his first appearance, he used more than four minutes on 10 questions. That prompted Lewis Powell to whisper to Thurgood Marshall, “Do you think he knows that the rest of us are here?”

Scalia is not averse to blunt language in his opinions and his words can sting associate justices. Early on, he lost points with Sandra Day O’Connor and Powell, when he wrote in a draft opinion that she “mistakes the object of the inquiry” and “misidentifies the interests to be balanced.” Powell was “offended by the personal attack on O’Connor” and “scrawled ‘I don’t like this,’ on Scalia’s draft.”

Murphy describes in detail Scalia’s “originalism” approach to the Constitution. Scalia stands by what the Framers wrote and what the words meant at that time. He rejects the liberal thesis of a “living Constitution,” adapting to meet contemporary conditions.
Scalia resists compromise, wanting colleagues to yield points to him, while he yields up little or nothing. By the end of the 1991-92 term, Murphy notes a widening gap between Scalia and centrists O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, but he seemed oblivious to it.

By the time Murphy gets to the 2000 election and Bush v. Gore, his tone has changed from one of cautious approval of Scalia to that of growing criticism. He sees Scalia as increasingly isolating himself from the rest of the Court through his acerbic opinions, especially when he is in the minority.

Scalia always had his eye on the Chief’s chair. He addressed law groups to further his quest. But, Murphy writes, his campaign backfired. When O’Connor stepped down, John Roberts was named to her chair. Then, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died and President George W. Bush had another chair to fill.

Scalia was so conservative that he was deemed unable to lead the court to consensus decisions. Bush, looking to his own legacy, wanted someone who would be Chief Justice for a generation or more. That was Roberts. Samuel Anthony Alito Jr., filled the ninth chair.

Kennedy’s swing vote ruled the Roberts Court until the Health Care case. Roberts changed his vote to allow the 2012 election decide its fate.

With Roberts as Chief Justice, Scalia does not lead the conservative wing but “[d]espite his admitted role as a loner on a conservative Court, Scalia has every reason to believe that he is not done yet.” Perhaps some day his teachings will become “the law of the land.”

Then Murphy ends his book with “Or, perhaps not…”

Jules Wagman has reviewed books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

D-Day: From Conception to Bloody Omaha Beach

The Dead and Those About to Die: D-Day: The Big Red One at Omaha Beach, by John C. McManus. NAL Caliber, 400 pages, $27.95.
Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings, by Craig Symonds. Oxford, 464 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Jules L. Wagman

Here are two books to satisfy any Overlord (70 years ago, June 6) aficionado. Neptune relates the planning and preparation for the invasion and continues with a fine summary of D-Day as well as the early days following until the capture of the port of Cherbourg at the end of June.

The Dead and Those About to Die describes the landing of the First Infantry Division on Omaha Beach and the terrible battle it had until small units were able to move off the beach before nightfall. The book combines after-action military reports, interviews, letters, and memoirs into a cohesive and coherent relating of events that illuminates the stress and fog of battle.

Robert Capa’s iconic photo of the D-Day invasion. Two new books will satisfy any Overlord aficionado.

Neptune is a balanced, measured study of what was required to turn the idea of an invasion into reality. Active planning began in March 1943, but Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was not named invasion commander until December, after the bulk of the planning was done.

Historians John C. McManus and Craig L. Symonds both have published many books on World War II, including several on Overlord.

McManus took the title for his book from Col. George Taylor, commander of the 16th Infantry Regiment leading the assault on Omaha Beach. Ignoring withering fire, Taylor strode the beach, exhorting his men: “Only two kinds of people are going to be on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die. Now get moving!”

The invasion timetable began to come apart even before the first boats hit the beach. Weather delayed the invasion one day and so the later tide forced the landings to start half an hour later. But nothing else could be delayed with the result that demolition teams had less time to clear mines and obstacles, with horrifying consequences.

McManus says the naval bombardment intended to soften up German defensive positions overshot their targets and the aerial attack bombed the wrong places. Only five of the 32 tanks designed to navigate on canvas floats reached the beach through the rough water. Unlike the other beaches, high bluffs at Omaha favored the defenders.

Infantrymen carried 60 pounds of equipment, impeding their movements. A post-action report said, “It was the feeling of the men that their losses would have been cut in half had their loads been cut likewise.”

The generally weak German defenders were augmented by a crack division which, unknown to the Allies, happened to be training there. “There was no supporting fire on the beach defenses at all when the company landed.”

The first invasion wave was all but pinned down, most radio equipment was lost in the landings, and there was no clear way off the beach. Even so, men and equipment continued to pour in, increasing congestion—and the tide rolled in, inexorably shortening the beach.

“[T]he dearth of functioning radios was a major reason why the initial waves at Omaha beach were so badly bogged down—commanders were out of communication and this created confusion, ignorance and inertia,” McManus writes. He quotes a GI to describe the carnage: “All I could see of him were three hunks of his body flying through the air.”

Symonds writes in Neptune that by 8:30 a.m. First Division Commander Gen. Clarence Huebner felt the situation was dire. Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of the American Army, “gained the impression that our forces had suffered an irreversible catastrophe,” though troops on the other beaches were advancing.

Around 9 a.m. the naval destroyers which led the original landings were ordered back to the beach to shell the heights. More than a dozen responded and, Symonds continues, the destroyers “over the ensuing 90 minutes…turned the tide of battle on Omaha Beach.”

Their shelling silenced most strong points. By 11:30 a.m., Germans were beginning to surrender. After the war Bradley wrote, “[T]he Navy saved our hides.” Troops on Omaha Beach were able to move up the gullies, gain the high ground and mop up the German strong points.

McManus’s book is the more exciting—and gory. Symonds takes a quieter approach, but he spices his narrative with sharp asides and comments.

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

By James Webb. Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, $27

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

I Heard My Country Calling, a memoir of James Webb’s early years, relates “a love story—love of family, love of country, love of service.” He combined military and political service with a facile pen—James Webb is an uncommon man.

Webb served one term as a U.S. senator from Virginia. He is a decorated marine, was Secretary of the Navy and an assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, and is author of 10 books, including Fields of Fire, a novel based in Vietnam.

He combined military and political service with a facile pen—James Webb is an uncommon man.

His memoir mostly ends with Vietnam. There, as a junior officer, he was awarded the Navy Cross, Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts, the second of which resulted from a leg wound that led to his medical discharge.

Webb’s father was a World War II bomber pilot, later flew in the Berlin Airlift and eventually was grounded by ear trouble but remained in the Air Force.

He was a stern taskmaster and Webb recalls the three shut-up rule. Four children filled the back seat of the car—a recipe for trouble. “Shut up!” On the third “Shut up!” the right arm would swing back from the driver’s seat, encountering anyone in the way among the two boys and two girls in back. No one wanted to sit on the left side.

Webb grew up surrounded by women.

Of his mother’s childhood: “Vera Lorraine Hodges grew up in the steamy, poverty-stricken cotton fields and strawberry patches of rural East Arkansas…She had grown up without indoor plumbing or electricity. She usually went barefoot. She brushed her teeth with twigs. She started working in the fields as a child, chopping cotton, picking strawberries, cutting and ‘ricking’ wood…She never had a chance to finish grade school.”

Of his grandmother: “Granny was imbued with a steady, quiet invincibility. If she was angry, she could scare your socks off without even raising her voice. But if you were scared, she would nestle you up against her and calm you down, talking the demons away in her slow, slow Arkansas drawl.”

About Aunt Dot: “She did not exactly drip with sentimentality. You did not want to be across the table from her in a gambling casino.”

He adds, “How ironic it is, in retrospect, that my young years were filled with continuous family dislocation but that in my entire life I had never spent any time way from the warm cocoon of someone in my family—my mother, Aunt Carolyn, Granny or my father—for any long period of time.”

At the start of a posting in England they stayed in London: “In my young imagination this must have been the neighborhood where Peter Pan had stolen Wendy and her brothers away to Never-Never Land, all of them sprinkled with Tinker Bell’s pixie dust.”

He attended more than a dozen schools from coast to coast as well as England. School discipline there? The teacher had “a very large and smooth-soled tennis shoe…on his desk” which he called Mr. Benjamin. “Those who spoke out of turn or were otherwise unruly were called to the front of the class for a visit with Mr. Benjamin.”

Webb’s writing transforms the reader into the proverbial fly on the wall but for some unstated reason, he hardly writes about girls or his first two marriages.

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966. 

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

 

The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song that Marches On

By John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis. Oxford, 380 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

Arguably the cornerstone of America’s civil religion, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” stands tall—in words and music. Harvard Prof. John Stauffer and George Mason University Fellow Benjamin Soskis examine its roots and the role it still plays.

The poem came about in a burst of inspiration by Julia Ward Howe. She was accompanying her husband, Samuel, on an inspection tour of troops in Washington, D.C., in November 1861.

As the soldiers marched they sang “John Brown’s Body,” the popular Union song. She joined in, her “strong mezzo-soprano” soaring above them. They shouted, “Good for you,” and a minister in the reviewing group “suggested that she ‘write some good words for that stirring tune.’”

That night, she later recalled, “I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight, and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind…I said to myself, ‘I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.” And so, she did.

Howe had read the Bible daily from childhood. She borrowed from Revelation and, to a lesser extent, from Isaiah, Ezekiel, Joel and Daniel.

Howe had read the Bible daily from childhood “and thus had ready access to its vast storehouse of idioms and images.” The words came easily.  She borrowed “from Revelation and, to a lesser extent, from Isaiah, Ezekiel, Joel and Daniel.”

The tune came from a hymn, “Say Brothers.” It was included in an 1807 hymnal, which grew out of a Virginia camp meeting. “It seems possible,” the authors write, “that the origins of ‘Say Brothers’ were as much African as white American.”

In 1861 Union soldiers in Boston sang “John Brown’s Body” to the tune of  ‘Say Brothers.’ Julia Ward Howe wrote the lyrics of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to that song.

And so, the authors conclude, “If ‘Say Brothers’ originated in the soul, as [the camp-meeting minister] claimed, then, in a larger sense, these ‘battle hymns’ expressed a national soul that united a southern camp meeting hymn with northern lyrics.”

“John Brown’s Body” eulogizes the abolitionist John Brown who led a raid in 1859 on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va. He thought he could incite a general slave uprising but failed and was hanged.

The song was first sung by a Massachusetts regiment in 1861. A soldier in the regiment was named John Brown and his comrades made “sport of the incongruities between the severe John Brown who had raided Harpers Ferry and their jovial John Brown.”

Arguably the cornerstone of America’s civil religion, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” stands tall.

The militant song spread through the Union army, becoming its anthem. The passing years have all but obliterated its original meaning. The tune was adapted to the union anthem, “Solidarity Forever.”

Today, there are parodies: “John Brown’s baby had a cold upon its chest…”

Or: “I wear my pink pajamas in the summer when it’s hot/ I wear my flannel nighties in the winter when it’s not/ And sometimes in the springtime and sometimes in the fall/ I jump right in between the sheets with nothing on at all.”

The Battle Hymn, meanwhile, has grown both in stature and grandeur. Winston Churchill asked that it be sung at his funeral in honor of his American mother. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang it on its European tours. It was the closing hymn at the Washington National Cathedral service following the 9/11 attacks.

It still resonates today.

Both parodies are from the 1948 Intercollegiate Outing Club Association’s songbook.

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

©2014 Jules L. Wagman

 

The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island

By Mac Griswold. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 304 pages, $26.

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

A plantation? With slaves? On Long Island? Thirteen proprietors? All in the same family? For 11 generations? Down to today?

All true, and landscape historian Mac Griswold (Washington’s Gardens at Mount Vernon) takes us on an improbable voyage of discovery. A resident of nearby Sag Harbor, N.Y., she found the manor home in 1984, rowed there by a friend.

The house slaves slept in the attic, up their own steep, circular staircase. There is no indication as to how they were treated.

They drifted along the shore of Shelter Island until “we first see the big yellow house. From its hip roof and big brick chimneys to its well-proportioned bulk, the house confidently acknowledges its eighteenth century origins.” Centuries-old boxwood shrubs validate the manor’s age.

In 1651, Nathaniel Sylvester and three partners acquired Shelter Island from New Haven colony. They planned to build a provisioning base for their Barbados sugar plantations. Two years later he and his teenaged bride, Grizzell Brinley, sailed from Newport, R.I., to the house he had already built. Shelter Island is deep between the North and South Forks of eastern Long Island.

Today’s manor was built in 1733 by “fashionable Brinley Sylvester, born in Newport,” grandson of Nathaniel and Grizzell. In colonial days, eastern Long Island looked more closely to Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut than distant New York.

In 1984 Andrew Fiske, the owner, and his wife, Alice, both now dead, invited Griswold in, showed her around and provided the basic history, including slave stories. But that was not all.

He took her into the home’s walk-in vault, crammed with historic papers, deeds and documents: a letter from Thomas Jefferson, a 1654 Indian treaty and the 1666 award of the 8,000-acre island from Richard Nicolls, first British governor of New York colony.

When Nathaniel Sylvester died in 1680, 24 slaves were listed in his will, the most of any place in New England, Griswold notes.

Northern life, commerce and farming did not lend itself to slavery as in the West Indies and southern U.S. Slavery lasted in New York State until 1827. At the manor, the house slaves slept in the attic, up their own steep, circular staircase. There is no indication as to how they were treated.

The 1790 census listed 10 slaves at Sylvester Manor. New York gradually eliminated slavery, but at least one person of color at the manor, Matilda, remained in virtual peonage. Free since 1795, she borrowed $75 to build a house on the island. She paid that debt, but could not cover the $10 annual rent for the land it was on and died in 1818, still in debt.

In 1859 Samuel S. Gardiner, the seventh owner, died and three daughters shared ownership. The manor became a summer home, remaining such until Andrew Fiske moved in year-round in 1949.

In 1991, one of Fiske’s nephews, Eben Ostby, inherited the manor and the remaining 243 acres. One of Ostby’s nephews, Bennett Konesni lives there now and established an organic farm. Ostby is also organizing conservation districts and donating land to the state and federal governments.

Griswold acknowledges her narrative has unavoidable gaps. Her writing is sometimes involved, sometimes poetic: “A blue heron stands in the shallows, washing. Swallows swoop through shining clouds of gnats, open-beaked catching a meal. A fish lunges up at a fly… A poem of a place: woods, water, pasture, sheltered harbor for small craft.”

This is a fascinating, delightful book, especially loaded with Native American and colonial lore.

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table

By Cita Stelzer. Pegasus, 303 pages, $27.95 

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

So you thought there was nothing more to write about Winston Churchill? Think again. Dinner with Churchill is a first-class treat, from soup (clear, please; never cream) to nuts (but he preferred ice cream).

Freelance editor, journalist and researcher Cita Stelzer’s efforts are worth all the Michelin stars in the world. Dinner with Churchill is delicious, from beginning to end. Even better, you get all this great gustatory enjoyment WITH NO CALORIES!

The real point behind Churchill’s dinners was how to get his guests to come around to his way of thinking.

The book is more than a recitation of who and what showed up at and on Churchill’s tables. Ms. Stelzer discusses the planning he put into his dinners, building them around solid British food, good wines, brandy, whisky, fine conversation and—the real point behind his dinners—how he could bring his guests around to his way of thinking.

But it didn’t always work. Churchill looked forward to the 1943 Teheran Conference in Iran because he would have U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet dictator Marshal Joseph Stalin together. His gala dinner was Nov. 30, also Churchill’s birthday. It didn’t go well.

“Stalin arrived in a bad mood. [He] turned down one of Roosevelt’s infamous cocktails, refused to shake Churchill’s hand, and criticized the confusion created for him by the profusion of silverware… Clearly, Churchill’s table was ‘set with British elegance.’” FDR was to Churchill’s right, Stalin on his left.

The menu: “Persian soup. Boiled salmon trout from the Caspian. Turkey. Persian lantern ice. Cheese soufflé.”

Toasts throughout dinner “allowed Churchill that night to set aside the multiple irritations inflicted on him by both the President and the Marshal and to praise both.” The night before at Stalin’s dinner, there were “taunts and barbs that Stalin threw at the Prime Minister, aided by the President.”

The Persian Lantern Ice was “an enormous ice cream perched on a large block of ice.” The waiter paid more attention to Stalin and, according to an attendee, “instead of holding the dish straight he allowed it to tilt more and more dangerously, and by the time he reached Pavlov the Russian interpreter, the laws of gravity could be denied no longer and the pudding descended like an avalanche on his unfortunate head… His translation never checked.”

But the dinner wasn’t a total failure. The Big Three met for lunch the next day and agreed on the broad strategy for the war which called for Overlord—the European invasion—to be launched in May 1944.

Churchill was reputed to be a heavy drinker but a close examination of the evidence shows differently. He was rarely without a glass of whisky and water or soda—but it was lots of water or soda, only slightly flavored with whisky. His favorite at lunch or dinner was champagne.

Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Churchill came to Washington and stayed at the White House for three weeks, which gave him plenty of time to bend FDR’s ear for a Germany-first war policy. Winning Roosevelt over was not difficult since FDR had already all but decided on that.

More difficult was the White House food, which Churchill, despite rationing at home, found  all but unpalatable. Henrietta Nesbitt, the principal housekeeper, is described by Ms. Stelzer as “Famous for her substandard cuisine.” Her soups were creamed—she served celery and green pea, among others.

Scattered throughout the book are reproductions of original menus, including several that were autographed by the diners. Also reproduced are royal shipping tags for pheasants, partridges, and hares.

—Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency

By James Tobin, Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $30

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

Eighty-one years ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a cripple (that was the usage then), was elected president of the United States in the depths of the Depression. Today, there is an increasing belief that he hoodwinked voters into electing him without knowing that he could not walk.

Journalism professor James Tobin examines his life between August 1921, when he was stricken with poliomyelitis, and his election as president. FDR is quoted as saying at Warm Springs, Ga., in 1926 that he wanted to “‘walk into a room without scaring everybody half to death’ and to ‘stand easily enough in front of people so that they’ll forget that I’m a cripple.’”

That, he did.

People knew that polio paralyzed his legs, but they didn’t know how badly. What they saw in newsreels or in person was a man with a huge smile and a barrel chest, seemingly in the best of health. They didn’t realize he was standing in locked braces because his legs had withered into uselessness.

His upper-body strength was legendary. Reportedly once, sitting between two sons at the White House pool, he flipped them both into the water. But he walked with a cane in one hand and gripped a son’s arm in the other. He walked by turning from side to side, swinging each locked leg out, around and forward in ballet-like steps.

FDR fell ill at Campobello, his Canadian vacation home just east of Eastport, Maine. Tobin believes he picked up the poliovirus two weeks earlier at a Boy Scout encampment at Bear Mountain State Park, 40 miles north of New York City. He had just been elected chairman of the Greater New York Council of the Boy Scouts of America.

Tobin, who provides a detailed, layman’s view of how the poliovirus strikes and what it sometimes does to a body it invades, relates that it takes about two weeks for the virus to affect muscles—if it will do so at all.

He adds that the growing understanding at that time of public sanitation and health ironically added to the polio risk by reducing the general prevalence of the virus, thus reducing the build-up of immunity.

FDR began therapy less than a year after being stricken. Tobin says he was determined to walk normally again. The regimen built his upper body but work on his legs produced little results. “His mother wrote later, ‘He was determined to ignore his disability and carry on from where he had left off.’”

Tobin describes how FDR’s wife, Eleanor, recalled the only time she cried during those years of recuperation. He jubilantly showed her his latest achievement. He rolled onto the floor, face down, and pulled himself forward and out the door. He could save himself in case of fire. She burst out crying.

Franklin Roosevelt is helped out of his car during a campaign stop, probably in 1928. His leg braces are barely visible in this photo, one of the few which shows FDR with his braces. National Archives photo.

A supporter of Al Smith, Roosevelt, the 1920 vice-presidential nominee, electrified the Democratic National Convention in 1924 with his nominating speech for Smith. In 1928 he was prevailed upon to run for governor of New York to aid Smith, who was running for president against Herbert Hoover. Smith told reporters, “[T]he governor of the state works with his head, not his feet.”

FDR won but had to give up the strenuous physical work that was gradually building up his legs.

Tobin believes FDR made no special effort to conceal his disability, but news photographers, especially, refrained from showing his infirmity.

Reviewer Jules Wagman lost a first cousin in a 1949 polio epidemic.

©2014 Jules L. Wagman

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

(By Ben Tarnoff, Penguin Press, 321 pages, $27.95)

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

They were four aspiring authors, two poets and two short-story writers. They met in San Francisco in the early 1860s, and for four years their friendships bloomed as their hopes and fortunes both grew and faded. They became known as Bohemians.

They were Bret Harte, already a promising author; Mark Twain, fresh from Virginia City, Nev., and still seeking his direction; struggling gay poet Charles Warren Stoddard; and Ina Coolbrith, also a poet but limited by family needs to the role of mother hen.
San Franciscan Ben Tarnoff, author of A Counterfeiter’s Paradise, writes with clarity, deftness and a sense of presence in describing the opening of Twain’s career and the collapse of Harte’s.

Relating Twain’s introduction to San Francisco in 1863: “Its grandeur and festivity exhilarated him, and he gorged himself with abandon. He drank champagne…[and] toured the pleasure gardens on the outskirts of town. He met a pretty girl named Jeanne, who snubbed him when he said hello and said hello when he snubbed her. He rode to the beach and listened to the roaring surf and put his toes in the Pacific. On the far side of the continent, he felt the country’s vastness.”

Harte, several years older, arrived in San Francisco in 1860 and began writing for the Golden Era, a weekly whose editor recognized his gift and encouraged him. In 1864, he was the co-founder of a literary magazine, The Californian.

Stoddard, a clerk in 1862, submitted poems to the Golden Era under the pseudonym of Pip Pepperpod where they caught the eye of a celebrated Boston preacher, lecturer and critic.

Coolbrith came to Los Angeles as a child. Her first poems were published when she was 15. At 17 she made a bad marriage which ended in divorce and the death of her infant. She moved to San Francisco in 1862 and became an English teacher, writing only sporadically.

Tarnoff describes the quartet: “Twain concealed his insecurities with bravado and wit. Harte hid behind a fastidious exterior and a hermetic home life. Coolbrith remained guarded after her recent trauma. Yet Stoddard aired his passions in public—and they all loved him for it.”

All four wrote for the Golden Era. “To the young writers…Bohemia offered a home, albeit an imaginary one.” In Coolbrith’s parlor, “They belonged to Bohemia because they didn’t belong anywhere else.”

Harte’s break came in 1863 with a story in Atlantic Monthly. His “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” came in 1868. An 1870 poem, “Plain Language from Truthful James,” also known as “The Heathen Chinee,” was his best-known piece.

Twain’s “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” ran in the New York Saturday Press in 1865. Tarnoff calls it “a fable of the frontier…changing the course of American literature forever.” It is better known as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” part of Twain’s popular 1867 sketch book.

Stoddard’s stories of his Hawaiian sojourns gained him no more than regional fame. Coolbrith, having to care for her aging mother, never developed into the poet she hoped to become.

Converting mining-camp vernacular into literature, Twain was established as the leading American author and lecturer by the early 1870s. He married Olivia Langdon in 1870 and they eventually settled in Hartford.

Tarnoff is well up to the task of portraying all four Bohemians.

Jules Wagman thinks his sunset years are a good time to read Huckleberry Finn for the fourth time.

©2014 Jules L. Wagman