| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Lewis L. Gould. The Modern American Presidency. Foreword by Richard Norton Smith. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. Pp. xv, 301. $29.95.
Do not judge Lewis L. Gould's book by its cover. The jacket illustration by artist Chris Hiers portrays eleven twentieth-century presidents, all but one of whom (a sulking Richard M. Nixon) are laughing. One would never suspect that Gould regards the modern presidency as an institution that "has outlived its usefulness and has become a liability to the person who holds the post and to the nation that the president of the United States is supposed to serve" (p. 238).	1
As Gould reminds us in the preface, he argued in The Presidency of William McKinley (1980) that the Ohio Republican was the first modern president. In this new book, Gould links McKinley with his near-term successors—Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson—to advance the thesis that "the rise of the modern presidency should be traced to the period between 1897 and 1921" (p. xi). By the end of Wilson's second term, he argues, the main elements of the modern presidency were in place, including a substantial White House staff, an expanded understanding of the president's powers as commander in chief, and, most important, "continuous campaigning" by the president through political travel and extensive efforts to generate favorable media coverage. Two of the book's ten chapters deal with this formative quarter-century. The remaining eight trace the elaboration of the modern presidency since 1921, mostly in chapters that group the twentieth-century presidents in contiguous clusters of two or three, such as Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover (chapter three) and Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower (chapter five). Only Franklin D. Roosevelt, Nixon, and Bill Clinton merit chapters of their own.	. . .

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