| Book Review | The Michigan Historical Review, 33.1

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| Book Review | The Michigan Historical Review, 33.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Thomas J. Noer. Soapy: A Biography of G. Mennen Williams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. 419. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $35.00.
G. Mennen "Soapy" Williams was the Democratic governor of Michigan from 1948 to 1960, head of the State Department's African Bureau from 1961 to 1966, ambassador to the Philippines in 1968, and a justice on the Michigan Supreme Court from 1970 to 1986. Despite such an impressive résumé, Thomas Noer's Soapy is the first full-length biography of a man who was one of the lions of twentieth-century Michigan political history.	1
Soapy Williams was a complicated figure. He was an unabashed liberal who openly espoused Christian principles. He was an outspoken champion of racial equality when such a position was far from the norm. His down-to-earth campaign style, complete with his trademark green-and-white bow tie and folksy demeanor, masked an aggressive political infighter with a sometimes inflated sense of his own correctness. As Noer puts it, Soapy "claimed he could say 'hello' in seventeen languages. He had a hard time saying, 'I'm wrong' in any" (p. 9).	. . .

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