Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson

by Elting E. Morison

In Turmoil and Tradition Elting Morison has written a wise and subtle exploration of American life and society. Just as Lord David Cecil laid open an era in his Melbourne, just as Henry Adams in The Education exposed the mainsprings of his country and his age so Mr. Morison illuminates the history of a stirring half century in the biography of a man who was concerned in most of its key events.

When Henry Lewis Stimson was born, Andrew Johnson was President of the United States; when he died, Harry S. Truman had been in the White House for five years.

During those eighty-three years, America, broken loose from its past by the violence of the Civil War,changed spectacularly and chaotically. In this turbulent era Stimson, devoted as he was to principle and firm standards, was able both to resist the vulgarity and to accept the danger of his times. From his apprenticeship in the law under Elihu Root, Stimson was associated with great events and great men. He served the state under seven of the eight Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Harry S. Truman. He was Secretary of War, Secretary of State, Governor General of he Philippines, close contender for the governorship of New York, world statesman -- more than once, as Dwight D. Eisenhower has said of him, "an inspiration at a moment when all of the world seemed black."

Elting Morison here not only tells the story of a great public servant; he explores the sources of Stimson's power in his traditions and training and he places him amongst the brilliant and varied men with whom his career was led: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Felix Frankfurter, Leonard Wood, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George C. Marshall, Ernest J. King, Cordell Hull -- these and many more great men engage in historic events in these pages.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, World War II, Military Fiction

686 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Elting Elmore Morison was an author of non-fiction books, an essayist, a United States historian of technology, a military biographer, an MIT professor emeritus, the conceiver and founder of MIT's program in Science, Technology and Society (STS).

Morison earned his BA (1932) and MA (1937) at Harvard University, where he served for two years as assistant dean. In 1946 he took a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor of humanities in the Sloan School of Industrial Management. Apart from a six-year stint at Yale University as master of Timothy Dwight College, Morison taught at MIT until his retirement as the Killian Chair of the Humanities.

He was the grand-nephew of George Shattuck Morison.

Reviews

[Aaron Million · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are very few people who have served as a Cabinet secretary for multiple Presidents. Henry Stimson is one of those people, having served as Secretary of War (this was prior to the combining of the Secretaries of Army and Navy into Defense) for William Howard Taft, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman; he was also Secretary of State for Herbert Hoover. To add in a bit more, he was Governor General of the Philippines, as chosen by Calvin Coolidge. He also had a close association with Theodore Roosevelt. So, this is a man who was used to being around circles of power, being part of the Eastern elite establishment, and not having to worry very much about money.

Published in 1961, Elting Morison provides a thorough review of Stimson's public life. During the first half of the book, his private life also takes center stage. The difficult relationship with his father, Lewis, is highlighted, with Morison aptly showing how this greatly contributed to Stimson's own rather rigid formality and aloofness in dealing with people throughout his life. Even his relationship with his wife, Mabel, seemed somewhat formal, but with that, honestly nobody would really know except those two. At first, I was pleasantly surprised that Morison chose to show the personal side of Stimson to such a degree. Oftentimes, it seems that biographies of political figures written around the mid 20th century tend to focus heavily on the public or professional aspects of the subject's life, while leaving a void concerning what the person was actually like day to day and with close family members and friends. Unfortunately, after Stimson becomes Secretary of State in 1929, Morison moves in that direction, and Mabel basically disappears from the text.

Interestingly enough, the narrative actually gets more interesting due to Stimson's activities at this time. I found this to be the strongest part of the book, as Morison delves into the difficulties that Stimson faced while occupying that important position. Of particular interest is Stimson's difficult relationship with Hoover. The two men respected each other, but their individual personalities were not a match, nor their sense of the responsibilities that the federal government has. Hoover comes across not looking real good here; he is unimaginative, inflexible, and hesitant to take action in foreign affairs, partly due to the growing depression at home. Morison spends several chapters on this time period, and by the end of it, I had to wonder why Hoover appointed Stimson to begin with, even with the acknowledgment that several other people had turned him down before. Clearly the two men were out of step with each other. Morison has a nice, small chapter at the end analyzing Stimson's record as Secretary of State. It is a mixed bag, with Stimson focusing his energies on things that weren't really going to yield any results, such as the disarmament conference.

As the situation around the globe deteriorated, Stimson was unexpectedly called back into service by FDR in 1940 to take up the same post that he occupied under Taft almost thirty years before. This section of the book is alternately interesting and a slog to get through. Sometimes Morison gets bogged down in detailed administrative battles over how to operate the U.S. Army. At other times, he focuses on Stimson's relationship with FDR – which was probably equally exasperating to Stimson as was his dealings with Hoover. What is missing here is that there is no discussion of what Stimson thought of the other Cabinet Secretaries with whom he had to work with; this is also true of his time in Hoover's Cabinet. I was disappointed not to find more about his interactions with figures such as Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins. That also leads me into a critique that I have of Morison's writing style: he assumes that the reader understands certain references to people and places. Perhaps the reader of 1961 did, but even then I am not sure that was a good practice to get into. As an example, on page 477 he makes reference to the “Old Curmudgeon” without stating the person's name. Now, I happen to know who that was (Ickes), and I suppose it could be surmised that the majority of the people reading this book when it was published would probably also know it, but I wouldn't make that assumption. Unless you were familiar with FDR and his Administration, you probably would not know that. And I know there were other references in this book that went completely past me.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment I have with Morison, and certainly with Stimson, concerns the forced internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast in 1942. That was an appalling breach of the fundamental constitutional rights of those citizens, based solely on their race. It was wrong then and it is wrong now. Stimson, while not promoting this mess, went along with it and did nothing to try to stop it – and he was one of the very few people who had enough authority that he could have stopped it. Stimson was troubled by the action, but more so in a legal sense (he was a lawyer by training and he knew that these innocent peoples' rights were being violated) instead of in a moral sense. What a startling lack of judgment on the part of a well-educated and urbane man. You just want to go back in time for a moment and ask him “What the hell were you thinking here?” My issue with Morison is that, on such a momentous issue that caused major pain to thousands of people whose only “fault” was their heritage, he only spends two pages talking about this. Come on. And just because he wrote this in the early 60s does not give him a pass. Wrong is wrong; it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure that one out. He neither castigates nor applauds Stimson for the actions that he took regarding this, he simply points out Stimson's decisions and and thoughts that he had put down on paper. That's just not good enough.

Morison spends a great deal of time discussing Stimson's involvement in the development of the atomic bomb. While I found it interesting, I could easily see where someone might tire of reading about the interminable discussions and meetings that Stimson had on the subject. Mixed in here is one single line mentioning the passing of FDR. No comment about what Stimson's thoughts or feelings were on this. That is disappointing. Even more disappointing is that this is one of those biographies where the subject dies on the final page, and the exact cause of death is not even given. Rather, it is “he died.”That tells us a lot. No review of his funeral, what people who had worked with him thought or said about him following his death, what happened to his wife, or anything of the like. And, in such an accomplished life, no review of all of the critical positions that he held and momentous decisions he was involved in over the years.

What I ultimately came away with is that Stimson was an uninteresting man who led an extremely interesting life. Widely traveled and cultured, he was in and around high level government service for roughly forty years. He was a man who was used to getting his way, with the major exception being a delayed marriage of several years due to the obstinacy of his father, himself a cold and distant man. He had a deep sense of morality that failed him at a critical time during WWII, and that also seemed not to apply in his personal dealings with subordinates. On the plus side of the ledger, this was a man whose devotion to his country topped that of any loyalty to one party. He was a liberal Republican (it is hard to believe, today, that such a political viewpoint once existed) but was open to working with FDR on issues before he came into his Cabinet.

This is a far from perfect book. Much of it now seems dated, but despite its age I still find certain elements lacking in it. Saying that though, overall I found it worthwhile to read so as to get an understanding of a person who saw and helped to make so much history. This book would appeal only to a narrow audience, but it does contain some worthy passages and it was well-researched.

Grade: C+

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Henry Lewis Stimson ranks among the few people in American history who were at the center of American power for as long and as pivotal an era. The son of a surgeon and the grandson of a attorney, Stimson enjoyed the benefits of an elite education at Phillips Academy and Yale University. Though drawn to a career at the pulpit, he chose instead the law, and after he graduated from Harvard Law School he worked as a Wall Street law. Stimson's appointment in 1906 as a United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York inaugurated a public career that led to periods as Secretary of War, governor-general of the Philippines, and Secretary of State. Yet all of this proved prelude to Stimson's return as Secretary of War in 1940, in which office he played a vital role in America's victory in the Second World War.

Such a lengthy and distinguished career requires a biographer capable of navigating the decades of American history which Stimson influenced. Here Elting Morison successfully takes up the challenge. As an experienced biographer and the editor of Theodore Roosevelt's published letters, Morison employs the documentary sources well to provide both an account of Stimson's public activities and a glimpse into his contented private life. Yet the author often gets in the way of his account with a writing style that is far too mannered. At times his narrative comes across more like something out of a Booth Tarkington novel than a biography of a statesman who served in a half-dozen presidential administrations, which can prove distracting. Anyone seeking an account of Stimson's life will find themselves reading around many of its florid passages, which too often get in the way of a fascinating account of a man who helped to shape the world we know today.

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

How tastes have changed since 1961. Morison’s biography of Henry L. Stimson (1867-1950) is a thoroughly researched, nicely crafted, award-winning study that I think most 21st-century readers would find fairly difficult to read straight through. Stimson himself is part of the problem, a moralistic and unusually reticent patrician of the sort whom it is hard to like despite his unquestioned virtue, decency, and dedication to public service. Modern readers will more likely mine this volume for its “times” rather than find themselves stirred by the “life” because it is men and issues that swirl around Stimson, rather than the man himself, that are the real points of interest.

Elting Morison (1909-1995) was a fine historian, a historian of technology at MIT; and this book won the 1961 Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians for its literary distinction. Literary distinction it has, but not the sort that would probably excite many modern publishers or, for that matter, judges of the Parkman Prize. (The book awarded the 2015 Parkman Prize is a bit less than half as long as Morison’s.) As Stimson was a buttoned-down government servant, so Morison is a buttoned down historical writer. His refined sentences sometimes read as if they had been written closer to the beginning of the 20th century than its end. Here, for instance, is Morison describing the interest New Haven residents took in Yale: “Frequenting the collegiate precincts for reasons of diversion, enlightenment or personal devotion, they maintained a lively and proprietary interest in the condition of the academic groves.” (35)

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

The quintessential picture of the eastern establishment Republican, Henry L. Stimson ended his career
where he served in some capacity every president but one from Teddy Roosevelt to Harry Truman.

Elting Morrison is an admirer of Stimson and writes pretty uncritically of him. Stimson has gotten
more severe treatment from more recent studies. Still this one will do because it is rich in detail and
personalities.

Stimson was born in 1867 in New York City to a society doctor and his bride and didn't go into his
father's profession. But with a Yale undergraduate degree and a Harvard law degree the world was
open to him. He was in private practice for years until Theodore Roosevelt made him US Attorney
for New York's Southern District in 1906. He pleased both Roosevelt and his successor William Howard Taft with a number of successful anti-trust prosecutions.

The only time Stimson ran for office he was the losing candidate for Governor of New York in 1910
losing to Democrat John Dix. After that he served as Secretary of War from 1911-1913 in the last
two years of the Taft administration. He managed to stay on good terms with TR as well no mean
feat at that time. The main issue he dealt with was the chain of command, was the newly created
Chief of Staff to be in charge or would the various War Department bureaus retain independence.
The Chief of Staff was Leonard Wood at the time and Stimson came down strongly for Wood. The
Chiefs of Staff have been in charge since.

In the Woodrow Wilson administration Stimson felt like TR we would be going to war soon enough
and was part of the preparedness movement. At the age of 50 he was commissioned an officer in
the Artillery and served in France.

In the Harding administration Stimson was a Wall Street lawyer and made a lot of money at it. Calvin Coolidge called him back to public service as Governor General of the Phillipines. Herbert
Hoover made him Secretary of State and he served 4 years there.

Not entirely in tandem with Hoover. They mainly quarreled over what some consider the real out
break of the Pacific War, the Japanese takeover of Manchuria. Stimson made an aggressive statement opposing said invasion, but Hoover was against military force. Besides being a Quaker,
a war might have been a real hard sell to the American people during the Depression for Hoover.

It was back to private practice after Hoover's defeat in 1932. But another Roosevelt brings him back
to service when in 1940 he appoints Republicans Henry L. Stimson and Frank Knox as Secretaries of
War and the Navy. It was FDR's intention to run the war as non-partisanly as possible. Can you
imagine George Bush conducting the war on terror on that basis?

As War Secretary again, but now during a war Stimson was an administrator and not involved in
military strategy per se. He administered the civilian aspects including the Manhattan Project. It
was Stimson who briefed new president Harry Truman about the atomic bomb in 1945.

Stimson though the book gave short shrift to it administered the displacement of Japanese-Americans on the Pacific coast. He was skeptical about it, but did it just the same. He also opposed
the Morgenthau plan to pastoralize post war Germany.

By 1945 Stimson was ready to retire and after Potsdam didn't need any big urging from Truman.
He was inactive for the last few years of life departing this earth in 1950.

Stimson is your basic establishment player the kind we don't see much of now. He had a useful
career and the book is a tribute to him.

[JerryDeanHalleck · Rating 2 out of 5]

Best book on Henry stimson that I've read so far. The liberal point of view, and the areas of emphasis are the same as the others. But its much better written with much more detail.