Word: josephson
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...POLITICOS - Matthew Josephson -Harcourt, Brace ($4.50). Left-wing study of post-Civil War spoilsmen...
...tycoon was once a hero of romantic fiction. Of late he has figured more often as the villain in more realistic pieces: such works as Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons, Oscar Lewis' The Big Four, Ferdinand Lundberg's America's 60 Families. Last week a novel with good prospects of popularity-Agnes Sligh Turnbull's Remember the End (Macmillan, $2.50)-might well make readers wonder whether even popular romancers have begun to look asquint at success stories...
Readers of recent muckraking histories like Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons are likely to feel they have heard all they want to about early U. S. railroad builders. In monotonous procession the great figures of the post-Civil War period follow each other-all up to their ears in political intrigues, angling for Federal land grants, corrupting legislatures, double-crossing the public, their stockholders and each other so consistently that it seems remarkable the railroads ever got built...
More successful in the second half of this job, Author Josephson has dusted off dozens of half-forgotten heroes: fast-thinking James G. Elaine of Maine; sardonic Roscoe Conkling; crippled Oliver Morton of Indiana, who ran his organization "as the country schoolmaster ran his school"; portly Zachariah Chandler of Detroit, who wanted to "raise a wall of fire" between the U. S. and Great Britain, and who advised Republican wives not to sleep with Democratic husbands...
...left-wing study of early U. S. capitalists, The Robber Barons (1934), Josephson wrote of men who "spoke little and did much"-Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Collis Huntington, Morgan, Rockefeller. In The Politicos he writes of men who did as little as possible and spoke all too much. For the period after the Civil War saw the flowering of the spellbinders, the men who, when trapped in some snide deal, escaped by waving the bloody shirt, denouncing Jeff Davis, pulling out all the stops in tearful eulogies to the Union dead...