A Man for All Seasons: Monroe Sweetland and the Liberal Paradox. By William G. Robbins.

Abstract

A Man for All Seasons: Monroe Sweetland and the Liberal Paradox . By William G. Robbins. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015. xii + 300 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $24.95, paper.) Professor William G. Robbins has written a well-documented biography of Monroe Sweetland, whose public life illustrates how a gadfly with a commitment to social justice navigated the tumultuous mid-twentieth century. Born in 1910 in Salem, Oregon, where his father was both a young medical doctor and a football coach at Willamette University, Sweetland grew up in small-town locales in Oregon and Michigan. Family connections led him to law school at Cornell University in the depression-ravaged 1930s, where he was drawn to the activism of Norman Thomas and the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), whose focus on racial justice permanently affected him. Robbins draws on Sweetland’s private papers … bill_toll{at}yahoo.com