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Book Review
| Spencer Weber Waller, Thurman Arnold: A Biography, New York: New York University Press, 2005. Pp. 273. $ 40.00 (ISBN 0-814-79392-4).
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| I suspect that disenchantment is one of the costs one must pay for becoming an academic historian. Teaching, writing, and researching history have their rewards, but as semester blends into semester I find it hard to remember what it was—love of stories, delight in the material differences of the past, or fascination with the processes and patterns that historical inquiry reveals—that brought me into the profession in the first place. Even worse, I find myself wondering on occasion whether it is even possible to perceive the past as past: so many studies do such an excellent job of revealing the pieces of the present in the past that I find it increasingly difficult to recall the real changes (good and bad) that have taken place in my lifetime, or the past fifty years, or the previous century. |
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That is why I enjoyed Waller's biography of Thurman Arnold as much as I did. It is not, and has no desire to be, a complicated history of the man or his times. Students interested in learning something new about the New Deal, or trying to dig beneath Arnold's actions to understand why he did the things he did, will find little to satisfy their interests in the period or help them understand the ideologies that shaped Thurman Arnold's career. Those who prefer their portraits warts and all will doubtless be disappointed by the fact that Waller admires Arnold and wrote a book that reflects that sentiment. |
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But for those of us who worry that we must insist our students specialize, and always do brilliantly, rather than explore a variety of interests and possibly fail at some, lest we condemn them to be marginalized as failures or dismissed as dilettantes, Arnold's passage from less than stellar student, small town lawyer, professor, antitrust theorist, federal judge, to defender of civil liberties and founder of one of D.C.'s ultimate insider law firms, is a refreshing reminder that once it was possible to follow meandering career paths. And for those of us in search of materials to assign beside the decisions of the New Deal or Warren Courts, Waller's crisp discussion of Arnold's major books and law review articles is a useful prompt to re-read or read those works. |
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I can also see a value to this book as a classroom tool. It would be a handy addition to an undergraduate legal or constitutional history course, since it lays out a foundation for a more complicated discussion of law and economic thought between 1940 and 1970. Read in combination with Parker's recent John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (2005), the book might even be suitable background reading for a graduate or law school legal history course that covered that same period. In either case, the book, straightforward as it is, can only help complicate students' understanding of the economic history of the twentieth century. And given the tendency of my students to see that century as a battle between free market capitalism and a state-controlled system based on five year plans (which one student constructively characterized as "Maoism" in one class discussion), any study that helps provide some nuance strikes me as an excellent addition to the field. |
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When I chaired a recent job search I was asked by the committee's external member if historians thought biography was scholarly history. It was clear she was scandalized by the possibility that I might answer yes. So, in the spirit of trying neither to offend a committee member nor shrink the pool of acceptable candidates prematurely, I temporized. I conceded that there were problems with studies that focused on a single person, but I argued that there was much to be said for a biography that used its subject as a way into a larger question or problem, in the manner of a microhistory. |
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Waller's study makes it clear that I was too glib. Sometimes it is enough to just write a study of a single person, because that focus can evoke the issues of the past in a way a more complicated study will not. |
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| Elizabeth Dale
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| University of Florida |
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