Book Description
Based upon extensive use of the Van Buren papers and other basic primary sources of the period, this is a readable, authoitative biography of the 8th President of the United States and a close political ally of Andrew Jackson, and later upholder of the Jacksonian tradition.
Customer Reviews:
Well written and comprehensive biography.......2007-09-04
I am currently reading a biography of every President in order. I realize with Martin Van Buren I am entering a long period of obscure Presidents, but very much looking forward to learning more about the chief executives between Jackson and Lincoln. Based on Amazon reviews, I decided that John Niven's biography was the best and most comprehensive choice.
Thankfully, I have not been disappointed. John Niven has written a readable and extremely well researched biography of our eigth President. I was most impressed with the depth of detail Niven has included and the voluminous research it undoubtedly required. Niven has clearly succeeded in covering the public life of Martin Van Buren comprehensibly and succinctly from his early days in New York politics to his final years as an active participant in the political turmoil leading to the Civil War.
The thoroughness this volume achieves regarding the political side of Van Buren's life comes at a price, however. At times this book is a dull read and seems to provide more detail, especially in the first third of the book dealing with New York machine politics, than most readers are likely to want or need. The book also does not delve very deeply into the personal side of Van Buren's life, although given that Van Buren's entire life revolved around politics (certainly far more than any previous President) this leaves fewer gaps than one might expect.
In summation, this is an excellent biography of Van Buren, though Niven obviously intended it to be a scholarly treatment meant primarily for academic level study. This biography is easy to read and well organized, though not the type of book you that you will likely want to read twice.
Excellent, highly detailed bio of an underrated American.......2005-04-21
I came away from this book with a new appreciation for Martin Van Buren--who was certainly much more than the Jackson coattail rider I thought previously. This is THE definitive biography of Martin Van Buren, but I agree with the other reviewers that some of the many and DETAILED accounts of the political machinations in New York at the time were a bit much. That's really the only complaint I had about the book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and recommend it highly if you really want to know Van Buren.
well written and informative.......2004-11-06
Like others, I've set out to read at least one biography on each American President. This particular biography is extremely well researched. A myriad of detail about Martin Van Buren and his times is presented. It's not the book if you are looking for a brief summary of the highlights of Van Buren's career, but if you are looking for detail it's great. Occasionally I got a little lost, probably due to my relative ignorance of the political figures and movements of those times. You form a definite picture of the little magician with both flaws and strengths brought forward. The one significant historical event that I didn't read about was the interaction of Van Buren with the early Mormons, of which I have read some very interesting things elsewhere.
The Life of the Little Magician.......2003-05-31
It is hard to tell how a man will do as President based on his experience. Some figures with virtually no political experience became good Presidents, such as Washington and Lincoln; others were failures such as Grant or Hoover. On the other hand, political experience is no guarantee of success: John Quincy Adams and James Buchanan had decent resumes going into office and had miserable presidencies. Martin Van Buren, one of the most politically talented of all Presidents, was not an utter failure, but he didn't shine in office either.
In Niven's biography, we follow Van Buren from his impoverished roots through his rise in New York state government. Although not perfect, Van Buren had enough political astuteness and the right sort of temperment to help create and lead a party machine and elevate New York's prominence on a national level. Becoming a trusted advisor to Andrew Jackson and a member of his cabinet eventually led to his Vice Presidency and then the Presidency. With a major financial crash occurring right as he got into office, Van Buren was struggling right off the bat, and wound up serving only a single term; nonetheless, in an era of one-term presidents (from 1837 to 1861, no president was re-elected), Van Buren was hardly thrown into ignonimy after his defeat; instead, he remained a powerful member of the Democratic party for the next two decades.
Niven's biography is generally favorable although he doesn't hide Van Buren's flaws. We learn of a man who was not a great ideologue but was one of the most masterful politicians of his era, holding his own with the often more prominent figures such as Jackson, Calhoun, Clay and Webster. He also wound up being a prominent figure in the anti-slavery movement, even running on the Free-Soil ticket at one point.
At times, however, this biography is a bit ponderous and often focuses so much on the political part of Van Buren's life that the personal part is pushed aside. Thus, although this may be the best Van Buren biography available (it may also be the only one), I cannot give it a full five stars. Nonetheless, this is overall a very good book and worth reading if you are interested in this period of history.
Martin Van Buren.......2002-03-17
This is a very readable and interesting book that deals with the long and highly political life of Martin Van Buren. He comes off very well as a hard-working, fair and moral politician who practically establishes the democratic party as a well-oiled machine for both New York state and the United States. I have now read multiple books about the first eight presidents and he can hold his own with almost all of them so far. Highly recommended.
Book Description
The first president born after America's independence ushers in a new era of no-holds-barred democracy The first "professional politician" to become president, the slick and dandyish Martin Van Buren was to all appearances the opposite of his predecessor, the rugged general and Democratic champion Andrew Jackson. Van Buren, a native Dutch speaker, was America's first ethnic president as well as the first New Yorker to hold the office, at a time when Manhattan was bursting with new arrivals. A sharp and adroit political operator, he established himself as a powerhouse in New York, becoming a U.S. senator, secretary of state, and vice president under Jackson, whose election he managed. His ascendancy to the Oval Office was virtually a foregone conclusion.Once he had the reins of power, however, Van Buren found the road quite a bit rougher. His attempts to find a middle ground on the most pressing issues of his day-such as the growing regional conflict over slavery-eroded his effectiveness. But it was his inability to prevent the great banking panic of 1837, and the ensuing depression, that all but ensured his fall from grace and made him the third president to be denied a second term. His many years of outfoxing his opponents finally caught up with him.Ted Widmer, a veteran of the Clinton White House, vividly brings to life the chaos and contention that plagued Van Buren's presidency-and ultimately offered an early lesson in the power of democracy.
Customer Reviews:
A strong summary.......2007-03-14
Van Buren had a lengthy and complex career, from his rise in New York politics in the early 19th Century to becoming the first ex-President to be seriously considered for a new term in 1844, until his unpopular opposition to annexing Texas led to the upset nomination and victory of James Polk. In a short book of under 200 pages, Widmer can't discuss all of this in detail. He makes a good decision to focus on Van Buren's work as a political organizer and in large part the founder of the Democratic Party, when he brought together the Northern and Southern factions which had supported Andrew Jackson in 1824 to back his successful return in 1828. He obviously covers, but doesn't really emphasize, Van Buren's single term as President, made a failure by an economic collapse that he had nothing to do with.
It is as the founder of the Democratic Party and as Jackson's right hand that Van Buren made his most important contributions to history. Democrats generally prefer to assign this role to the more revered Jefferson, but the parties of his era were such loose and unorganized groupings that they were more factions than real political parties. True national parties, with national conventions and permanent structures date to the era of Jackson, and probably nobody had more to do with creating them than Van Buren.
Also included here are other major events of Jackson's presidency, such as the "war of the Petticoats" and the nullification crisis. It was these controversies that led Jackson to break with John Calhoun, naming Van Buren as his Vice President and natural successor.
Widmer has worked in the White House as a speechwriter for Clinton, and refers to that experience and the Clinton presidency several times. Some reviewers thought that a distraction from the proper subject of the book; I thought it added contemporary interest and showed a continuity of politics across very different eras.
On the whole this book is interesting, readable and informative. It recounts a substantial amount of history in a concise package.
Many Gaps Left in the Story.......2005-11-19
If you want a book about the highlights (and only the highlights) of Martin Van Buren's public service career then buy this book.
This book had alot of gaps in it. It kept saying that he was an up and coming star and that he was a political mastermind, but it never once said why he was a star and what manuevers he made to make him a mastermind.
I agree with the other reviewer about Bill Clinton. This was supposed to be a book about the 8th president not the 42nd. I found the constant refrences to Bill Clinton to be out of place. I guess that the author was drawing on his own experience with a president.
The only reason that I bought this book is that it is a short and concise biography of Van Buren. I am trying to read a biography of each of the presidents and did not want to spend alot of time reading a 500-600+ page book on one of the lesser known presidents. I think that the book could have been longer (say about 300 to 350 pages)in order to further detail the career of Van Buren.
Flippant writing style, flittering approach to subject.......2005-11-12
I've read probably more than my share of presidential biographies and this book is probably the worst (as in "unprofessionally written") bio I have ever come across. Period.
It's not the subject. It's Mr. Widmer's flippant, "terminally hip", straight-out-of-People-Magaine, style of writing.
What do I mean? Well, the first thing that struck me was that though the book is not very long -- which given the fairly obscure subject matter is understandable -- the rambling intro to this work IS long. We're talking someting like twenty+ pages!
I kept reading page after page after page of the intro and found myself wondering "Ok. So where's the actually book??" I mean, was the author getting paid by the word or something?
And the work itself...again, "flippant" is the work that pretty much sums it up. Ex-president Bill Clinton was mentioned more than once, as well as BC and his intern Monica L. were also mention (in a book about Martin Van Buren?), The sainted (to Mr. Widmer) FDR is also mentioned several times, likewise Hollywood's Steven Spielburg and TV-producer Aaron Spelling... yeah, I know. In about about Martin Van Buren?? But then, I just said these folks were mentioned in Mr. Widmer's book. I didn't say that had any thing to DO with the subject of the book.
In addition, there were terrible gaps/unresolved events in VB life that the writer skipped over. For example: The young VB, an up and coming legal eagle, goes to NYC and there hones his legal skills + moves in very lofty circles + became close friends of titans like Aaron Burr, etc., and then, we are told, that after 6 years of this that VB up and left NYC to become a law partner with this step-brother in some little town in upstate NY. The end. Huh??
A young, rising attorney moving strickly "Class A" social circles in NYC, suddenly drops everything and buries himself in the country? And there's no explaination by the writer. Probably b/c he doesn't know either.
Another example, VB's wife suddenly dies (She just dies. No accident, no illness, her time just ran out) and he is left widower with three young sons. What arrangements does he make for those children, esp. as he is now a mover-and-shaker in DC by now. Again, we'll never know. The three boys simply ***PPIFF*** off the radar and we (the readers) don't learn of them again until they are young men. Granted, it's not vital but it is a loose end, and it would go a long way in fleshing out the personal side of VB. Again, maybe the writer himself didn't know.
And so it goes....
The book is littered with things like this: dead ends, loose ends, and washed out bridges. This book isn't writing. It's pop journalism. Strickly "People" magazine school of journalism. I gave it one star b/c, heck, if you can pick it up for a quarter at a yard sale go ahead and get it, read it. Otherwise, save your money.
Great........2005-07-31
The most important part of this book is the discussion about how Martin Van Buren pretty much created the two-party system in the U.S. The idea that an organization and it's policy positions should take precedence over any particular individual was an important change in American politics. Furthermore, it led to an important advance in the spreading of democracy in the U.S. Of course, as with all changes, these changes did not come without costs. But the country is, for the most part, better because of Van Buren's party leadership. As for his presidency, who cares?
An engaging look at a forgotten president.......2005-04-12
Ted Widmer's new biography of Martin Buren sets out to rescue this forgotten president from obscurity and give him much of the credit for creating the modern Democratic party. The book that emerges is a solid, engaging introduction to a president most of us know nothing about. (Were you aware, for example, that he grew up in Kinderhook, NY speaking Dutch before he ever spoke English?)
Widmer sketches Van Buren's rapid rise from poverty to power in New York, his unlikely alliance with Andrew Jackson, and his own one-term presidency cursed by the 19th century version of the Great Depression (The Great Panic of 1837) and the increasingly rancorous national debate over slavery. He paints a compelling picture of Van Buren trying to stake out the middle ground, a hated by both sides as he clings to a center that will not hold.
One thing that seems to stand out 150 years after Van Buren's death is the irrational intensity of the hatred directed against him, seemingly all out of proportion to his deeds or alleged misdeeds. Widmer worked for another centrist president who inspired a good deal of hatred-Bill Clinton-and one senses that the parallels there may be part of the reason he was drawn to Van Buren as a subject.
His thesis that Van Buren almost singlehandly gave birth to the modern political party is intriguing, but perhaps a bit of a stretch. His arguments reminded me of a prosecutor who makes a bold opening statement about the defendant's guilt, but then can't quite back it up with the evidence. He may well be right, but I'm not entirely convinced. Still, it is a thought provoking idea that helps readers get a handle on Van Buren.
Widmer's style incorporates a bit of the speechwriter and a bit of the scholar, and benefits from both. He throws in numerous modern political and pop culture references (from George Bush to Vito Corleone) that are only occasionally annoying, and he keeps the story moving forward at a good pace. (At 208 pages, the book is anything but a heavy tome). There are some amusing anecdotes-my favorite is a wonderful story of Van Buren as a former president stuck in a small town on a national tour and spending a hilarious evening of storytelling in the company of a young politician on the rise named Abraham Lincoln.
Ultimately, Van Buren remains elusive, hard to know. Was he an idealist trying to steer a moderate course, or a politician adept at being all things to all people? (Again, the echoes of Bill Clinton). One thing we know for sure: he is the president who popularized the expression "O.K." in his 1840 re-election bid (one of his many nicknames was "Old Kinderhook") and he deserves to be remembered. This book is a good way to do so.
Book Description
In the early part of the 19th century, America was skeptical of popular politics, distrustful of political parties, and disdainful of political management. However, as prominent historian Joel H. Silbey demonstrates, Martin Van Buren took the lead among his contemporaries in remolding the old political order as he captured the New York state governorship, a seat in the United States Senate, and ultimately the Presidency. Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics takes a fresh look at the life and political career of one of America's most often overlooked, yet most influential, public figures.
Customer Reviews:
Poorly written........2007-10-14
To be fair, if all you care to rate a history book by is the extent to which it is well-researched and informative, I suppose I would have to grant this book four stars; my only real complaints on that score are, first, that it pays too little attention to the private life of Van Buren; his marriage is hardly mentioned at all, and his relationships with his sons are almost always relegated to his professional relationships with them as grown men; and, second, the fact that it's a touch more complimentary than I feel he deserves. But the latter problem is simply a matter of opinion, and the author is entitled to have a better opinion of the founder of the political machine than I do, and the former is simply a matter of my preference; I prefer full-life biographies to professional biographies.
But as someone who identifies with the Roman guard in "Monty Python's Life Of Brian", (the one who forces Brian to correct the grammar of his anti-Roman graffiti), more than I do with Brian himself, I am appalled that someone who is as poor a writer as this author can get a scholarly book published. Reading portions of this book, I am reminded of the "Peanuts" cartoon in which Charlie Brown is writing his pen pal and writes, "Today, we, learned, how, to use, commas." Granted, Silbey is never THAT bad, but he's bad enough. If it were just the frequent insertion of unnecessary commas that I would prefer to see excised, it wouldn't be so bad; I'd notice it, wince, and mostly ignore it. But he goes beyond that to frequent use of commas where they are simply WRONG ("Nevertheless, Van Buren supported his fellow New Yorker as a mark of his solidarity with his state's Republicans and, undoubtedly, because, to do otherwise, would seriously affect his standing (and future prospects) among New York's Republican leaders."; "But Clinton's promarket, economic expansionary, ideas clashed with Van Buren's quite different vision of Republicanism, which stressed commitment to those who were less commercially minded: small landholders, village artisans, and urban workers, who did not need, nor benefit from, the expansionary goverment projects that an aggressive market orientation demanded.": These two quotes come from a single page, and there are many more like them throughout the book, as well as far too many other typos and sloppy mistakes in language and punctuation for me to consider the book professional) and this isn't simply a matter of stylistic differences between me and the author; this is a matter of the author being a poor enough writer that he has no business earning money by writing. If his grasp of his subject matter and his ability to convey it were not as solid as they are, I'd have felt no qualms about rating this as a one-star effort on the basis of the writing. Competence in his field earned him a second star; I won't grant higher than that to something that was frequently painful to read.
Broad Brush Analysis of Van Buren.......2005-02-17
This book focuses on Van Buren's role in the development of modern political parties in America, but Silbey also ably narrates the life of Van Buren. This is a broad brush biography--Silbey does paint the whole canvas, and he paints it well, but you won't find the exquisite (and sometimes excruciating) detail that most biographers give.
Silbey is very good at relating Van Buren's life to the times he lived in. By far the strong point of the book is the cogent analysis of Van Buren's life, why he took certain actions, and fitting it all into his life purpose of party formation.
One question I had about the biography was whether Van Buren really did do nothing as president (which would have fit his political philosophy) or whether Silbey just narrated the events that had to do with party formation during his administration and that there just weren't many of them. I suspect the former.
The book is well-written, although there aren't many of those memorable turns of phrases; but it certainly won't put you to sleep either. A bit pricey, especially for the length. Overall, a good book.
A Tragic Genius and the American Tragedy.......2004-01-01
Martin van Buren invented the American Democratic Party.
More broadly, he was responsible as much as any other single man for the overall political party structure which exists in the United States to this day.
Yet, to most of his latter-day countrymen, he is merely one of those forgettable nobodies who inhabited the White House between Andy Jackson and Honest Abe.
Joel Silbey's readable and engaging book tries to correct that historical neglect.
Silbey ably tells the story of van Buren's rise from modest beginnings to dominance of the New York political scene, van Buren's movement to the national stage and his restructuring of the national political party system, his ascendance to the Presidency, and his ultimate failure to attain his long-term political goals.
As fascinating as is the story of van Buren's successes, it is his failures which hold the greatest lessons for posterity.
As a young, loyal Jeffersonain, van Buren early in his career supported "Mr. Madison's War" (the War of 1812). But the increase in federal power and enhancement of federal legitimacy which came from that war led the country in the direction of expanded federal activity and authority relative to the states.
This offended van Buren's laissez-faire/states-rights Jeffersonian sensibilities. To combat what he denounced as resurgent Federalism, van Buren created a new political structure around a new political party based on states rights, limited government, and laissez-faire economic policy.
That party was the Jacksonian Democratic Party and, until the end of the nineteenth century, the Democratic Party largely adhered to the principles which van Buren imprinted upon it at its birth.
(It may seem strange to hear that the Democratic Party was, through most of its history, the limited-government/states-rights party in the United States. Yet, as late as 1928, Frank Kent, in his lengthy "The Democratic Party: A History" defined states rights as the central unifying principle of the Democratic Party. It was only in the depression of the 1930s that party positions were reversed and the Democrats abandoned the founding principles upon which van Buren had built the party.)
Although the Democrats did generally adhere to van Burenite principles through the nineteenth century, in the course of the nineteenth century the Democratic Party slowly lost its ability to control the nation's destiny. By the middle of the twentieth century, the party had abandoned all of its founding principles: van Buren would have been appalled by the militarism, welfare-statism, corporate favoritism, and outright imperialism which now characterize the Republic he so loved.
What went wrong?
Van Buren himself was brought low by two intractable problems of nineteenth-century America: imperial expansion and slavery. As Silbey narrates in detail, van Buren lost the Democratic nomination in 1844 due to his refusal to countenance imperial expansion (the annexation of Texas, which led, ultimately, to the U.S. seizure of half of Mexico). Van Buren vacillated wildly in his attitudes toward the slave states: as President he was an outspoken enemy of the abolitionists and ally of the slave power, but in 1848 he became the Presidential candidate of the anti-slavery Free Soil Party.
In his final years, van Buren endorsed Abraham Lincoln's military crusade against the slave states, a crusade that decisively destroyed the states-rights position which had been the guiding star of van Buren's political life.
But perhaps the ultimate problem, which van Buren failed to perceive, was the inner logic of the Constitutional structure established in 1787. The Constitution, unlike the preceding Articles of Confederation, created a strong federal Executive and granted the power of taxation to the central government: the Constitutional system was, in its intrinsic logic, despite the Founders' intentions, not a confederation of sovereign states but a centralized, national government.
Of course, neither the actual text of the Constitution nor the intentions of its authors mandated the huge, interventionist, imperialist federal government which we possess today. But to believe, as the Framers and van Buren did believe, that the Constitutional government could be prevented from turning into an all-encompassing leviathan was politically naive.
So great was van Buren's political genius (he was known in his time as the "Little Magician") that he almost succeeded in his grand historical aims. For over three decades, until the catastrophe of the War Between the States, the poltical structures created by van Buren succeeded in defying the logic of history and keeping America as a decentralized federation rather than a centralized nation-state.
But van Buren's grand design for a strictly limited federal government was ultimately wrecked by the War Between the States and by the economic and geopolitical disasters of the twentieth century.
In our own day, both American citizens and all the nations of the world must confront the results of van Buren's historically tragic failure. Can the federal government of the United States of America somehow be restrained in either its domestic powers or its international adventurism? Silbey's brief but fascinating book is a cautionary warning to all who now grapple with this central problem facing the human race.
Average customer rating:
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Martin Van Buren: The American Presidents Series
Ted Widmer
Manufacturer: Thorndike Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0786276126 |
Book Description
The slick and dandyish professional politician Martin Van Buren was to all appearances the opposite of his predecessor, the rugged general and Democratic champion Andrew Jackson. Yet he too had an iron temperament, and he would build a lasting legacy as the architect of the modern Democratic Party. Ted Widmer, a veteran of the Clinton White House, vividly brings to life the chaos and contention that plagued Van Buren's presidency.
Book Description
Taking our understanding of political antislavery into largely unexplored terrain, Jonathan H. Earle counters conventional wisdom and standard historical interpretations that view the ascendance of free-soil ideas within the antislavery movement as an explicit retreat from the goals of emancipation or even as an essentially proslavery ideology. These claims, he notes, fail to explain free soil's real contributions to the antislavery cause: its incorporation of Jacksonian ideas about property and political equality and its transformation of a struggling crusade into a mass political movement.
Democratic free soilers' views on race occupied a wide spectrum, but they were able to fashion new and vital arguments against slavery and its expansion based on the party's long-standing commitment to egalitarianism and hostility to centralized power. Linking their antislavery stance to a land-reform agenda that pressed for free land for poor settlers in addition to land free of slavery, Free Soil Democrats forced major political realignments in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Ohio. Democratic politicians such as David Wilmot, Marcus Morton, John Parker Hale, and even former president Martin Van Buren were transformed into antislavery leaders. As Earle shows, these political changes at the local, state, and national levels greatly intensified the looming sectional crisis and paved the way for the Civil War.
Customer Reviews:
A Rarity in Academic Writing: Past U.S. Politics are actually interesting, who knew? .......2006-08-09
In the contemporary professional world of academic writing current history professors have unfortunately succumbed to falling back on the traditional stereotypical role of pretentious writing, utilization of uncommon vocabulary, complicated imagery relating to their historical subject, and hard to understand primary evidence that the general public can not relate to in their own lives and era.
However, Jonathan Earle effectively demonstrates in his book with superlative ease how past U.S. politics, its parties, and the era in which they were at it's apex, can indeed be interesting to the general public again. Jonathan Earle counter poses the traditional stereotypical role by using interesting primary evidence through out his book, in which he makes you feel like you were actually participating in the events and conversations that took place almost 182 years ago.
Earle uses fascinating historical imagery that not only correlates to what he writes about, but makes you want to explore the images away from the fascinating and important emergence of the Free Soil Party, which defied the traditional system of U.S. politics up to that point in our brief history as a nation. With just a brief emergence of a new century this book shows that our young nation was already facing dire dilemmas that would eventually divide a nation into half for four bloody years. With more men, women, and children who were murdered on both the Union and Confederate sides, then both World Wars and contemporary wars that the U.S. has been involved in to this day.
This is an outstanding read that will take your imagination on a wild adventure back to a time period and political party that is too often negated in U.S. history. In my view Jonathan Earle's book and his writing has triumphantly pounced the traditional stereotypical role. That historical subjects and academic writing can not only appeal to the general public again, but more importantly Earle's book shows just how significant past key historical events and U.S. politics have shaped our lives to this very day.
Erica Hare
Not your typical take on U.S. history.......2006-05-09
Jonathan Earle's deftly written, lively account of the Free Soil Democrats' role in the antislavery effort challenges traditional interpretations of the movement, showing these politicians played a critical role in this country's push toward equality. But more than that, Earle makes you feel like you were at the dinner table with these folks as they debated the central issue of the day, and that's worth the price of the book alone.
A misnomer, but what a book!.......2004-11-24
I picked up this pounder in hopes of gardening on the cheap, but little did I know what pleasure I would find delving into this well-written account of a fertile time in our nation's history that doesn't get much play in the schools. And, so informative for any one interested in history, and history of the US. Even the garderner in me was gratified: I never knew that hickory needed a split to thrive. What's the sequel?
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