The
Forgotten Conservative: Rediscovering Grover Cleveland by John M. Pafford
This one was a bit of a disappointment. When shopping for a
book on the internet, it’s best to never judge a book by its picture on the
cover. When this book arrived in the mail,
I was a bit surprised how puny it was. Part of that is my fault as the
description clearly states that he length is only about 250 pages. When you add the fact that about 100 of those
pages are appendices and notes, you end up with quite a narrow volume.
Narrow in quantity and quality. This book read more like a
college student’s term paper. The author
is a passionate conservative/libertarian who states a few times how FDR’s “New
Deal” eventually ruined the nation. Fortunately, he keeps much of his vitriol
at bay, but it does show a strong bias towards its subject matter when
Cleveland, himself, was a staunch conservative. In fact Cleveland vetoed more
bills than any other president mainly because he felt the government had no
business helping anybody no matter how dire the need was. Such reflections do seem harsh 125 years in the
future, but some would also make the argument that the pendulum has swung too
far in the other direction.
None of this really matters though when evaluating quality.
This book is simply too brief and too thin.
By the time we get to (approx.) page 10, Cleveland is already Governor
of New York. After one brief chapter,
he’s running for President of the United States. So we have almost nothing of
his early days. The book does list his
major achievements as President but is simply devoid of any feeling or emotion.
I don’t know how long it takes, on average, an author to write a strong
biography, but if the average time was about one year, this one felt like it
was completed in a couple of weeks.
We must then remember that biographies of minor presidents
from the 18th and 19th centuries are hard to come by, and
in many cases, a reader’s choices can be rather slim. Such was the case here.
Recently, there was a book series titled ‘The American Presidents Series’ which
devoted a brief narrative of all of the U.S. presidents. I’ve read a few of
those only when there seemed to be nothing else easily available on a
particular president. For the most part,
those books are satisfactory when covering the more obscure leaders. I wish I
read the volume that focused on Cleveland instead of this one by John Pafford. I would recommend that you do the same if
you’d like to learn more about the man and get a somewhat detailed account of
who he was and what he did. This one was too brief a tad too opinionated.
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