Author: Craig Fehrman

Craig Fehrman is the author of Author in Chief (February 11, 2020). Find out more at his website http://craigfehrman.com.

A Review of Edmund Morris’s Colonel Roosevelt

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Dissertation ephemera

[Boston Globe]

In yesterday’s Boston Globe, I published a review of Edmund Morris’s Colonel Roosevelt, the third and final volume in his TR trilogy. The book’s been widely and positively reviewed, but it still seems to me that most people are failing to appreciate how fascinating and unique and just plain weird Morris is. I give one example in my review that dates back to the writing of Morris’s first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. But there are many, many more, and I’ve got no idea why anyone was surprised — least of all the Reagans, who put Morris up to it — when Dutch turned out to be an unorthodox book. (It’s an underrated book, too.)

Another example of Morris’s eccentricity came a few weeks back, when he went on Face the Nation to promote Colonel Roosevelt. After Bob Schieffer asked Morris (for a second time) what TR would make of today’s political scene, Morris replied: “You keep asking these presentist questions, Bob. As the immortal Marisa Tomei said in My Cousin Vinny, ‘That’s a bullshit question!'” Morris gave a more precise and politic version of this answer to a Wall Street Journal reporter: “No. Absolutely not. And I don’t speculate on what he would do now if he were alive because that’s just dreamland.” And yet, just two years ago, Morris wrote a wonderful Op Ed for the New York Times in which he crafted a faux-interview with TR out of 2008 questions and historical quotations. Here’s a sample:

Q. Do you blame the House Democratic majority?
A. A goodly number of senators, even of my own party, have shown about as much backbone as so many angleworms.
Q. I hope that doesn’t include the pair running for the presidency! What do you think of Senator John McCain? He often cites you as a role model.
A. He is evidently a man who takes color from his surroundings.
Q. Weren’t you just as unpredictable in your time?
A. (laughing) They say that nothing is as independent as a hog on ice. If he doesn’t want to stand up, he can lie down.

This was surely a send up of the kind of questions Morris has had to deal with during his latest promotional cycle. But it was also further proof that he is someone who has been completely and utterly romanced by the past.

More Mark Twain

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Academia, Books, The Media

[On the Media]

Well, now Mark Twain’s Autobiography has really arrived. On this week’s Saturday Night Live, Bill Hader trotted out his terrific Julian Assange impression. “If I am falsely imprisioned for one more day,” Hader-slash-Assange says, “anyone purchasing Mark Twain’s new autobiography on Amazon as a Christmas present for their father will instead send him the book Everyone Poops.”

The joke makes sense, as enough people are buying the book to keep it on the New York Times best-seller list, hovering between second and third. But Twain’s success started long before the holiday shopping season. This summer, the media came together and anointed the Autobiography’s forthcoming edition as a major literary event. The Times didn’t get there first, but it did put Twain on the front page. And its story is wholly representative: coming this fall, after a century-long embargo, readers will finally meet a realer, darker Mark Twain. A few weeks later, Newsweek devoted its entire cover to Twain and his upcoming book (“Now we must get reacquainted all over again”). Thanks to the coverage in the Times and Newsweek and elsewhere, Twain went viral.

But there’s success, and then there’s success. And Twain’s book has exceeded everyone’s expectations. Plenty of bookstores have run out of copies and had to create wait lists, as the Times noted in another lengthy story. In fact, Twain’s autobiography has become a holiday success story with a full roster of heroes: the author (a serious literary figure), the publisher (an ideas-driven university press), and the printer (a small, employee-owned press based in Michigan). The book got an initial print run of 7,500, but there are now more than 500,000 copies in print — still only a third of the initial print run for authors like George W. Bush and John Grisham, but enough to turn heads even in publishing’s blockbuster age. To keep up with the demand, Twain’s Michigan printer has kept three shifts going — it even rehired some of the people laid off during the recession — and taken to shipping the book off in semi trucks packed with 10,000 copies each.

So, again, it’s a holiday success story, and I don’t want to sound like a literary grinch.  But it’s worth examing how, exactly, the book became such a hit. The media continues to commission tons of reviews, but here, at least, reviews never seemed to matter since the book debuted on the best-seller lists at a time when only one or two had been published. Instead, the book seemed (and seems) to benefit from its pre-release hype — the kind of embargo-powered nonsense that led Saturday Night Live to describe it as a “new” book. A few weeks back, I wrote a story for Slate outlining why the embargo was nonsense, and some of the better reviews — the New Yorker‘s, the Washington Post’s —have also pushed back against the hype. In this week’s Times Book Review, Garrison Keillor goes a step further, in a review that might be best described as affably brutal: Twain’s Autobiography is “a wonderful fraud on the order of the Duke and the Dauphin” and, later, “a powerful argument for writers’ burning their papers.”

I also don’t want to sound like I’m taking credit for this; if you review a 736-page “autobiography” that, thanks to various scholarly apparatuses, amounts to only 264 pages of text, you damn well better point it out. But the bigger point is that nothing the media has done can stop the media’s snowballing hype. Let’s remember that, this summer, the editors from the Mark Twain Project, which handles Twain’s literary estate and receives his royalties, gave the Times a few juicy quotations and some “exclusive” online excerpts of Twain “speaking from the grave.” As recently as 2009, the Project was in deep financial trouble. Clearly, that’s no longer the case — and all it took was the Project sacrificing its scholarly integrity. I’ve had chances to follow up on my Slate story with interviews on CBC’s Q show and on NPR’s On the Media, both of which you can find on my handy new media appearances page.

And speaking of financial trouble: it doesn’t bode well for Tina Brown and Newsweek that I completely missed that cover story while researching my original story.

Glenn Beck, Author

by Craig Fehrman, posted in All History is Local History, Books, Features, Politics

[New Haven Advocate]

In this week’s New Haven Advocate, I’ve got an essay on Glenn Beck-as-author, disguised as a dispatch from his latest simulcast book event. Through his radio and television shows, Beck can deliver huge sales boosts to obscure political treatises and to mass-market thrillers — and this gets at what the publishing industry calls his “platform.” It’s why he sells books. But why does he write them? I come to a pretty cynical conclusion in my essay, but other explanations do exist. Still, Beck’s books don’t fit with his off-the-cuff nature. At the book event, he turned a Primanti Brothers sandwich, a Pittsburgh delicacy made up of beef, french fries, and cole slaw, into a metaphor for America’s budget crisis. This metaphor allowed Beck one of his few Obama attacks — he introduced the sandwich as “Michelle Obama’s worst nightmare” — but it also reveals how, um, adaptable he can be. It seems Beck didn’t call Primanti Brothers until six hours before the show. He ordered 300 sandwiches.

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Dissertation ephemera, The Media

[Boston Globe]

In today’s Boston Globe, I’ve got a review of George W. Bush’s Decision Points. The presidential memoir has become a very odd and very unique media event — an event where the book’s release matters more than the book itself. So the question I kept returning to was this: How does Bush’s book work as a book? That is, does it offer something as a narrative, linear reading experience that the hype does not? The short answer is, yes, it does (Bush’s book is much better than most presidential memoirs); but, no, it’s not always for the best (one reason it’s better is that it captures Bush’s voice and mien, which will turn off plenty of readers).

Anyway, I’ve been making the release vs. book point a lot in the last few weeks — writing about presidential memoirs and TV and, on CBC’s Q radio show, talking about Mark Twain’s autobiography. But I did want to single out one example from Bush’s book. Other than the Kanye West kerfuffle, which I won’t even dignify with a post, the juiciest Decision Points item has been that Barbara Bush showed a young George her miscarried fetus. This story began to circulate even before Bush’s first author interview with Matt Lauer — the New York Post ran a story based on a DVD of the pre-taped interview that it had “exclusively obtained” — but Lauer’s interview really got the ball rolling. MSNBC gave the story the following headline: “Bush: Mother’s miscarriage shaped pro-life views.” The Huffington Post went with: “Bush’s Opposition to Abortion Grew After Mother Showed Him Dead Fetus in a Jar.” The Daily Beast assembled a team of psychoanalytic experts to parse the revelation. The New York Times promised Bush had “started a national conversation — both about his mother, Barbara Bush, and about the complex psychological fallout from miscarriage.”

But the Times did so in a story that was making every effort to prop up this “national conversation.” And that’s how this stuff works. The Bush headlines and absurdist post ops share a tenuous relationship with reality — and no relationship to the former president’s book. First, Lauer was the one who kept pushing the abortion angle. (Bush’s exasperated response: “The purpose of the story really wasn’t to try to show the beginning of a pro-life point of view. It was really to show how my mom and I developed a relationship.”) Second, the Decision Points version says nothing about abortion or the brandishing of a fetus. Here’s the entire (and entirely mild) episode from the book:

One day, shortly after I learned to drive and while Dad was away on a business trip, Mother called me into her bedroom. There was urgency in her voice. She told me to drive her to the hospital immediately. I asked what was wrong. She said she would tell me in the car.

As I pulled out of the driveway, she told me to drive steadily and avoid bumps. Then she said she had just had a miscarriage. I was taken aback. This was a subject I never expected to be discussing with Mother. I also never expected to see the remains of a fetus, which she had saved in a jar to bring to the hospital. I remember thinking: There was a human life, a little brother or sister. [Bush’s emphasis]

In Bush’s book, this is a genuinely affecting moment — not only on its own, but also because Bush describes the death of his younger sister Robin a few pages earlier. In our media ecosystem, however, it has become a perfect example of how the reaction to presidential memoirs plays out — very little initial substance, followed by a string of stories offering diminishing returns, often in the form of metacoverage (reaction about the interview which was about the book, etc.). Like I said, very odd, though maybe not very unique.

Reagan and/as Palin

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Dissertation ephemera, Politics

[Los Angeles Times]

In today’s Los Angeles Times, I’ve got an Op Ed on Sarah Palin’s constant invocations of Ronald Reagan. Every Republican does this, of course, but I argue that Palin invokes Reagan in a uniquely shallow way. In fact, her use of Reagan mirrors the Tea Party’s use of the Founding Fathers, and I suspect my thinking on Palin owes a lot to Jill Lepore’s book about the Tea Party.

It doesn’t hurt that Palin connected all the dots in a recent essay for the National Review:

The Tea Party reminded us that Reaganism is still our foundation. I think the Gipper is smiling down on us today waving the Gadsden Flag.