Public Man Research Articles

Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer

Robert Fighting Bob La Follette (1855-1925) was one of the most significant leaders of American progressivism. Nancy Unger integrates previously unknown details from La Follette's personal life with important events from his storied political career, revealing a complex man who was a compelling mixture of failure and accomplishment, tragedy and triumph. Serving as U.S. representative from 1885 to 1891, governor of Wisconsin from 1901 to 1906, and senator from Wisconsin from 1906 to his death in 1925, La Follette earned the nickname Fighting Bob through his uncompromising efforts to reform both politics and society, especially by championing the rights of the poor, workers, women, and minorities. Based on La Follette family letters, diaries, and other papers, this biography covers the personal events that shaped the public man. In particular, Unger explores La Follette's relationship with his remarkable wife, feminist Belle Case La Follette, and with his sons, both of whom succeeded him in politics. The La Follette who emerges from this retelling is an imperfect yet appealing man who deserves to be remembered as one of the United States' most devoted and effective politicians.

Wading Knee Deep in Words, Words, Words": Senatorial Rhetoric in the Johnson and Clinton Impeachment Trials

In the only two presidential impeachment trials in American history, 30 senators of the 40th Congress and 88 senators of the 106th Congress provided statements about their respective decisions. We use computer-assisted stylistic analysis and a close reading of the texts to analyze the accounts they offered in these statements. We address three main issues. First, did the senators of the Johnson and Clinton trials, separated by 131 years, explain themselves in more or less the same way or are there basic differences between the two proceedings in what they said and how they said it? Second, can we trace differences in the style, tone, and substance of senators' rhetoric to their positions, pro or con, on impeachment? And third, what do the form and substance of senators' statements tell us about their motives for speaking? This trial has developed, in the most remarkable manner, the insane love of speaking among public men.... [W]e have been wading knee deep in words, words, words...and are but little more than half across the turbid stream. I verily believe there are fierce impeachers here, who, if the alternative of conviction of the President coupled with their silence, and an unlimited opportunity to talk, coupled with his certain acquittal, were before them would instantly decide to speak. James A. Garfield (R-OH) describing the plodding pace of Senate proceedings during the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson (quoted by Benedict 1999, 124).

Jane Marcet and the limits to public science

This essay examines Jane Marcet's 1806 Conversations on Chemistry in the context of a newly emerging ideology of science. As part of this emergence, a new public for chemistry had to be formed and clearly demarcated from that of ‘public men’ of science. Although this essay examines Marcet's relation to Humphry Davy's public lectures on chemistry, it focuses on the encouragement she received from the highly intellectual Geneva elite, to whom she was related. Comparing her work to the influential Bibliothèque britannique founded by members of this elite, it asks why a group of patrician intellectuals would want to cultivate women's interest in chemistry and encourage the popularization of science in the aftermath of a revolution which threatened their national identity and power. It suggests that the answer may lie in the recourse to science to establish moral and political authority in the aftermath of this very revolution.

Ken Saro-Wiwa: Writer and Political Activist

Biography and Literature, C. Lock. Part 1 The Literary Experiments: Literary Memoirs - On a Darkling Plain and Month and a Day, C.W. McLuckie Poetry - Songs in a Time of War, T. Ojaide The Short-Fiction - Forest of Flowers and Adaku and Other Stories, A. McPhail The Prison Novels, F. Aleba Sozaboy - A Novel in Rotten English, M. Roy Sociopolitical Awakening in Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy, M. Eke. Part 2 The Public Man: Pipe Dreams - Ken Saro-Wiwa, Environmental Justice and Micro-Minority Rights, R. Nixon A Political Assessment of Genocide in Nigeria - the Ogoni Tragedy, J. McLaren Saro-Wiwa in Business -the Publisher, L. Neame State-Sponsored Death and the Absent Body of Ken Saro-Wiwa, M. Bastian. Part 3 Popular Media: Saro-Wiwa as Journalist, Ezenwa-Ohaeto The Children's Series, J. LeBlanc The Stage and Television Drama, J. Gibbs.

The Road to Egdon Heath: The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature by Richard Bevis

ESC 27, 2001 mitment, qualities that, rather than being private matters, are important aspects of the public man, especially when publicly honoured. From Arabye to England is a finely integrated exploration of mediaeval intercultural permeation, nicely put together, enter­ taining, and very informative— in short, an entirely appropri­ ate homage to one of Canada’s most distinguished academics. DAVID WILLIAMS / McGill University Richard Bevis. The Road to Egdon Heath: The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. xv, 409. $75.00 cloth. This book takes its origin from Thomas Hardy’s discussion in the first chapter of The Return of the Native (1878) of what he considered a major shift in aesthetic attitudes to the natu­ ral world. The traditional idea of the Vale of Tempe—a gentle pastoral world of fields, woods, and streams —was giving way to a very different landscape represented by Hardy as “a gaunt waste in Thule,” a harsher world of mountain-peaks, deserts, boundless seas, and infinite space. “The time seems near,” he wrote, “if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sub­ limity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.” Richard Bevis, now professor emeritus of En­ glish at the University of British Columbia, decided to explore the intellectual and historical background to this proposition, and The Road to Egdon Heath is the result. This ambitious quest led him, as we might expect, into philosophical discussions of the sublime and the beautiful from Longinus to Burke, although Bevis prefers “the Great,” a term employed by Addison, which he finds more useful and less con­ fusing. Citing English, continental European, and North Ameri­ can examples, he also tracks down the germ of such an aesthetic response in earlier poetry, fiction, and travel-literature, and fol­ lows less familiar but intriguing paths, including the gradual description of the geological record; he even dips into the liter­ ature of Alpinism. (It is no coincidence, by the way, that Leslie 512 REVIEWS Stephen, Hardy’s friend and literary adviser, was an enthusias­ tic mountain-climber.) All this involves what Bevis himselfcalls “a sprawling mass of material” (xiii), so he wisely established a cut-off point at the date of Hardy’s novel. An exploration of the twentieth-century cult of the wasteland is promised in a sequel. The Road to Egdon Heath, then, is “a history ofideas book” (xiii); indeed, it is the twenty-fifth volume in the McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History ofIdeas. Now it needs to be acknowledged at once (although professors are not supposed to say this kind of thing) that “history of ideas” all too often becomes an excuse for lack-lustre academicism and dryasdust pedantry. It is, there­ fore, a pleasure to report that Bevis writes lucidly and freshly. He inevitably has to deal with a mixture of familiar and un­ familiar material, and is able to explain the latter clearly and bring new insights to the presentation of the former. Unlike many academics, he knows how to limit himself to the relevant parts of a text and avoid unnecessary digression. As a result, he succeeds in making “the road to Egdon Heath” (which might otherwise threaten to be as meandering as G.K. Chesterton’s rolling English road) both direct and well-signposted. What is most endearing about Bevis’s approach is his hon­ esty: he does not try to fake a response he cannot feel. Thus of Ossian he writes: “The narrative and speeches use Great and barren landscapes as backdrops, but it is all much of a piece, and a little goes far. To me it reads like a bad translation or imitation of Homer, with less plot and more decoration” (69). Knowing that his subject could become tedious when traced in such detail, he is careful to vary his stylistic tone. He can be pithy: “[Richard] Savage had a vivid imagination with a low flashpoint” (61). He can be suave: “[Benoît de Maillet] clearly tries to reason from his evidence and tiptoe around Genesis” (76). He...

Editorial

In October 1860, the New York-based magazine, Harper’s New Monthly, offered its readers this scathing commentary on the apparently morbid tendency among their British cousins to delve into the private lives of famous men and women. The magazine’s onslaught was both topical and contentious. The pleasures and punishments of fame experienced by such victimised ‘lions’ as Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton, together with the public’s apparent right to ‘know’ everything, struck the writer as not only ‘vulgar’ but as clear evidence (if any were needed) of a degenerate culture. The situation was bad in America but much worse in Britain for there, as Harper’s noted, ‘John Bull is very fond of . . . talking about the private history of public men – prying into their bathing-tubs and counting the moles upon their necks.’ In the name of both art and decency, Harper’s made the following plea: ‘For the honour of the guild – for the fair name of literature – let us have done with peeping through keyholes and listening at cracks.’

What Happened to Sex Scandals? Politics and Peccadilloes, Jefferson to Kennedy

Any man familiar with public life realizes which ripples under about almost every public man, and especially about every President, observed Theodore Roosevelt in 1913. Varieties of foul gossip have plagued officeholders from founding of Republic to present day, as Roosevelt suggested. Yet nature, effects, and reach of have undergone curious and sometimes striking transformations over years. Think of one especially common topic of discussion: a politician's reputation for sexual rectitude. In early republic and throughout nineteenth century, American political culture subjected sexual character of officeholders to close, steady, and often unflattering scrutiny, as most voters insisted a man of virtue constituted the only safe depository of public trust.'1 By beginning of twentieth century, by contrast, revelations of sexual turpitude among most prominent elected officials had begun to disappear from public life. Whereas Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, and other members of nineteenth-century political elite negotiated their reputations among a broad array of publics, in new era men such as Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy benefited from this more circumspect pattern in political speech. Theodore Roosevelt's remark is doubly useful in this respect. For if foul gossip could still circulate in 1913, it had already started to travel, not openly, but rather just under surface of public life. What explains this transformation? Historians regularly observe that during first decades of century, gossip, confession, and exposure arose as distinctive attributes of mass communication, corroding Victorian modesty in virtually every

The Masculine Mystique

The Masculine Mystique Richard Kaye Review of: Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. When former Republican senator and one-time presidential aspirant Robert Dole appeared on television last year extolling the benefits of the drug Viagra, a fundamental module in the imagery of American masculinity would seem to have been dislodged. To be sure, Dole never uttered the word “impotence,” preferring, instead, to invoke a clinical demurral, “E.D.”—Erectile Disfunction—but there, nonetheless, was the surreal specter of an icon of American conservatism speaking what had hitherto been unspeakable amongst the golf-and-martini set. The austere setting in which Dole appeared (a senatorial library, perhaps) reminded viewers that this particular E.D. sufferer was speaking from a place in the culture far removed from that of most Americans. Yet in some ways Dole was the ideal poster guy for breaking the silence on E.D. Although the syndrome affects men of all ages, men of Dole’s generation—veterans of World War II, men who had heroically sacrificed their bodies in battle—have been famously reluctant to discuss their physical frailties. Dole’s hand injury from an explosion during World War II had been powerfully if somewhat quietly deployed throughout his campaign against Bill Clinton. It was, of course, the noncombatant Clinton who would prove the better campaigner, despite a soft body given over to fast food; the generational gulf between silent virility before Fascism and weak child of the Sixties was registered during the presidential race. Clearly, it takes a Republican to achieve what no mere Democrat can accomplish: arguably Dole’s appearance in a television ad for Viagra accomplished on the domestic front what Nixon’s 1972 visit to China did for international diplomacy—helping to end, as it were, another Cold War. At the moment, the body of the American male is being subjected to more scrutiny than ever before as an ever-wider array of new images of the male physique permeates the culture. Television shows like Ally McBeal and The View depict fictional and real-life women giddily discussing male performance and penis size, magazines devoted to male fitness and health break circulation records, and advertisers become bolder and bolder in purveying hardened übermenschen. Adolescent boys—the newest focus for worried psychologists and social workers, according to The New York Times Magazine—fret over the relative scrawniness of their physiques, worrying over ab definition and penis size much as young women worry over breast size and fat. In a democracy, evidently, everyone gets to be anxiety-ridden about his or her physique. The utopia of androgynous bodies that the counterculture welcomed in the 1960s has been supplanted by an androgyny of a fierce corporate culture, so that women must now have hard physiques to arm themselves in the jungle of business culture and males are encouraged to eliminate wrinkles and invest in Propecia, lest they be considered too old for the youth-dominated world of computer-era innovation. The writer Susan Faludi has turned from the backlash against feminism to the backlash against the American male. Her latest book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, excerpted as a cover story in Newsweek, has been greeted as a startling turnaround for a feminist—a laudatory truce in the war between the sexes. It is a key point of Faludi’s book that the average American guy has been forced to develop “womanly” skills such as communication—not by his female mate, but by corporate culture. All of this concern for the fragility of American men has fomented its own backlash. In a recent cover essay in The Times Literary Supplement, the conservative political scientist Harvey Mansfield decried the low repute into which “manliness has fallen in our culture” (14). Meanwhile, Masculinity Studies is experiencing a boom. In the latest issue of American Quarterly, Bryce Traister writes of “the new phallocriticism in American literary studies” and declares that “judging from the sheer number of titles published, papers solicited, and panels presented in the last ten years,” it would appear that “masculinity studies has emerged as a discipline unto...

Scientist, teacher, and public man (Dedicated to the 70th birthday of D. Kh. Khamidov)

Scientist, teacher, and public man (Dedicated to the 70th birthday of D. Kh. Khamidov)

No Unconditional Surrender: The Historian as the Public and Private Man, Don E. Fehrenbacher

No Unconditional Surrender: The Historian as the Public and Private Man, Don E. Fehrenbacher

Alan Kidd and David Nicholls, eds. Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-Class Identity in Britain 1800–1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press; dist. by St. Martin’s Press, New York, N.Y. 1999. Pp. xiv, 223. $79.95. ISBN 0-7190-5267-X.

Alan Kidd and David Nicholls, eds. Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-Class Identity in Britain 1800–1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press; dist. by St. Martin’s Press, New York, N.Y. 1999. Pp. xiv, 223. $79.95. ISBN 0-7190-5267-X. - Volume 32 Issue 4

Agustín R. González y su Historia del Estado de Aguascalientes. Un análisis historiográfico

El artículo en un primer acercamiento al libro de Agustin R. González, Historia del estado de Aguascalientes, desde una perspectiva historiográfica. A partir de una breve descripción de su vida y trayectoria como un hombre público, se ubica al autor en el ambiente político e historiográfico que lo rodeó, para, posteriormente, pasar al análisis de su obra histórica más importante. A lo largo del texto se toman en cuenta aspectos como su idea de la historia, los objetivos que tuvo al escribir, las fuentes que utilizó y la manera como justificó la hechura de una historia local cuando lo que buscaba en esos años era la consolidación de un sentimiento nacionalista.

BLAKE AND A ‘CURIOUS HYPOTHESIS’

Alexander Gi;christ, in his Life of William Blake, relates how an unnamed friend of Blake's reported to him the artist's - curious hypothesis 'that the Bonaparte of Italy was killed, and that another was somehow substituted from the exigent want of the name, who was the Bonaparte of the Empire! He referred to the different physiognomies (as he thought) in the earlier and later portraits. But stranger still, he gave me the (forgotten) name of some public man - ambassador, or something of the sort - who assured him such was the case. And a very plausible story he made of it,' says the same friend.

Politics and the Technology of Honor: Dueling in Turn-of-the-Century Mexico

Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, dueling beame increasingly frequent among Mexican elite men. The duel was associated with modern science and the cosmopolitan culture of the national ruling class. Authorities refused to prosecute duelists. The translation and production of texts on dueling, as well as the influence of some experienced duelists, conveyed to public men the importance of a technology of honor. This technology, which involved the use of pistols and the knowledge of codes of dueling, sought to establish a space in which all members of the political elite, regardless of their ideological affiliation, could claim the same kind of honor. After the 1910 Revolution, as violence became widely associated with politics, duels became less frequent, but the concern among public men about honor and virility expressed by violence remained visible in political life, as witnessed by several episodes in Congress. The technology of honor was a central piece in the construction of a modern public sphere in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexico. It granted equality to educated men, while excluding women and the poor from having a voice in politics. These lacked honor because they could not legitimately use violence to defend it.

Ontario - Yours to Discover

Looking for Old Ontario: Two Centuries of Landscape Change. Thomas F. McIlwraith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Ninety Fathoms Down: Canadian Stories of the Great Lakes. Mark Bourrie. Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1995. Free Books for All. The Public Library Movement in Ontario, 1850-1930. Lome Bruce. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1994. Property and Inequality in Victorian Ontario. Structural Patterns and Cultural Communities in the 1871 Census. Gordon Darroch and Lee Soltow. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Language of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791-1850. Cecilia Morgan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Inventing the Loyalists: The Ontario Loyalist Tradition and the Creation of Usable Pasts. Norman Knowles. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. The primary aim of the University of Toronto Press's Ontario Historical Studies Series (1971-1993) was to describe and analyse the historical development of Ontario as a distinct region within Canada. This was necessary, it was argued, because for many years the main theme in English-Canadian historiography was the emergence of the Canadian nation. Ontario's role in the country's development precluded it from being perceived as a region. Contributor Paul Craven claimed, Almost unconsciously, historians have equated the role of the province with that of the nation and have often depicted the interests of other regions as obstacles to the unity and welfare of Canada (vii). The series also hoped to encourage historians not directly involved in the project to turn their attention to the province. Judging by the books reviewed here, its directors succeeded as writers continue to be interested in Ontario's past. While several aspects of the province are studied, however, in the works reviewed the extent to which the authors convey a sense of a distinct province varies from book to book. In Looking for Old Ontario: Two Centuries of Landscape Change, geographer Thomas McIlwraith examines vernacular features of southern Ontario's built environment and the social meanings they convey. The result is a highly readable and well-illustrated book with chapters on surveying building materials, houses, barns, fences, grave markers and many other seemingly mundane topics. As McIlwraith points out, it is regrettable that the ordinary is often taken for granted because routine features of the human environment provide insights into the way in which people interacted with their environment. It will be difficult for anyone who reads this book to look at roads, mills, houses, etc., without trying to determine when they were constructed, by whom and for purposes. Choosing sections of McIlwraith's book to highlight in a review is not easy, because most of them are worth mentioning. One chapter, for example, provides a good account of surveying techniques and the problems associated with the profession in the province's early years.1 McIlwraith adds a human dimension by observing that place names reflect what successive administrators deemed to be meaningful in their (65). There is a useful map and a table tracing the types of place names these officials used. In his chapter on building materials, McIlwraith points out some of Ontario's particularities. In 1931, for example, 27 per cent of the buildings in the province were made of brick, compared with six per cent for Quebec and between one and two per cent for the rest of Canada.2 McIlwraith's ideological position is not explicit but it is clear that his sympathies are with those whose lives and accomplishments usually go unmentioned. In his discussion of grave markers, for example, McIlwraith notes that extant markers identify a biased sample of Ontarians (230) because paupers and those less well-off (half the population, he estimates) could not afford stone monuments. …

Population and Political Ethics: Thomas Jefferson's Demography of Generations

C ENTRAL to Thomas Jefferson's worldview, historians have argued, is his proposition, earth belongs in usufruct to the living. I The intensity of Jefferson's belief in this concept emerged from his vehement rejection of the claims of the past on the present. Jefferson also advocated placing constraints on the ability of the present to bind the future. In his view, no corporate charter, law, or constitution should be permanently binding. He even toyed with the moral legitimacy of repudiating the public debt. Historians might have exaggerated the importance of this proposition in assessing Jefferson. Advanced in a letter to James Madison from France dated September 6, I789, this statement about what one generation owes another was not published until I829, three years after his death. Jefferson returned to this theme in later correspondence, but he never asserted it publicly. Although opponents raised questions about his private character and unorthodox views, especially on religion, contemporaries primarily engaged him as a public man, a political leader. The historians' Jefferson is a man of lettersperhaps a fitting attribution for someone who spent most of his working day as president writing papers and letters (and retaining copies). Jefferson's reputation, as conceived by recent historians, has plummeted sharply, and his daft proposal, which Madison is generally credited with gently demolishing in response, has certainly not helped to sustain it.2

“How are they at home?” community, state and servicemen's wives in England, 1939-45

The wives of men in the fighting forces in the Second World War were allocated a status of dependency on the state in place of husbands and a function as potential war workers, but also bore the weight of society's fears about sexual laxity and family instability. Rhetoric and a system of financial support helped maintain fidelity and homes but also shepherded many working-class servicemen's wives into the factories. While public opinion and many men in the British Army were alarmed and outraged by stereotypes of weak-willed wives seduced by Home Front opportunities, wives' place in wartime localised urban communities is an alternative lens through which to study their Home Front experiences. Strong gendered ideologies of domestic and work structures survived intact among servicemen's wives and their communities in cities like Birmingham and Coventry, and despite the upheaval of bombing and war production, provided little basis for longer-term post-war changes in wives' statuses and roles.

Science and Civil Society in Japan: Physicists as Public Men and Policymakers

BEGINNING OVER FIFTY years ago, with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japanese physicists struggled to establish a type of civil society. They turned to science as a form of world culture, a way to transcend nationalism and bond with colleagues abroad. Many were to prove influential as men and policymakers. They became engrossed in rebuilding their country, acting as social spokespersons, experts, technocrats, and international men of science. Foremost in their thoughts were the desire for professional autonomy, the commitment to democratic representation, and the notion that science would solve the nation's ills. But others, notably politicians, bureaucrats, and business leaders, had plans for Japan as well, which often differed from the scientists'. This paper outlines the interrelationship and conflict among physicists and these groups in their attempt to direct science for the public good. Now with the end of the Cold War and increasing globalization, political change is occurring throughout East Asia and objectives of the Japanese physicists are becoming a reality.

Cannibalism in the Cars

I visited St. Louis lately, and on my way west, after changing cars at Terre Haute, Indiana, a mild, benevolent-looking gentleman of about forty-five, or maybe fifty, came in at one of the way-stations and sat down beside me. We talked together pleasantly on various subjects for an hour, perhaps, and I found him exceedingly intelligent and entertaining. When he learned that I was from Washington, he immediately began to ask questions about various public men, and about Congressional affairs; and I saw very shortly that I was conversing with a man who was perfecdy familiar with the ins and outs of political life at the Capital, even to the ways and manners, and customs of procedure of Senators and Representatives in the Chambers of the National Legislature. Presendy two men halted near us for a single moment, and one said to the other:

Wellington: A Personal History

A bestseller in hardback, this is a highly-praised and much-needed biography of the first Duke of Wellington, concentrating on the personal life of the victor of Waterloo, and based on the fruits of modern research. Christopher Hibbert is Britain's leading popular historian. Wellington (1769-1852) achieved fame as a soldier fighting the Mahratta in India. His later brilliant generalship fighting the French in Spain and his defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo earned him a dukedom and the award of Apsley House (No. 1, London) and a large estate in Hampshire. His second career saw him make his mark as a politician with commanding presence. Appointed Commander-in-Chief for life, he became Prime Minister in 1827 and presided over the emancipation of Roman Catholics and the formation of the country's first police force. Privately, he was unhappily married, and had several mistresses (including two of Napoleon's) and many intimate friendships with women. The private side of the public man has never been so richly delineated as in this masterly biography.