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Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana: Law and Public AfFairs, from TR to FDR J. LEONARD BATES (Foreword by RICHARD Low=), 1999 Urbana: University of Illinois Press pp. xiv +- 410, $39.95
This is a political biography in the traditional style, comprehensive, firmly anchored in archival sources, and clearly admiring of its principal. Thomas Walsh of Montana was a major figure in the progressive era Democratic Party, a senator from 1913 to 1933, and chair of the Democratic National Committee in 1924 and 1932. He declined his party's vice-presidential nomination in 1924 but resigned his Senate seat to accept an appointment as Franklin Roosevelt's attorney general in 1933. He died before he could be sworn in.
Despite the limits of the genre, solid biographies like this one provide a wealth of detailed information for historians and political scientists interested in larger questions. Particularly useful, in the reviewer's opinion, is the example of the power of ethnic origins in political careers (Sen. Walsh might have fit comfortably into the progressive wing of Montana's dominant Republican Party, but his Irish Catholic heritage planted him firmly in the Democracy), and the pressures confronted and appeased by a western politician of progressive inclinations in a state dominated by powerful mining corporations.
Despite the strong conservative streak in his temperament (signaled, perhaps, by the perpetual scowl on his face in photographs), there is no doubt that...