Journal of the Southwest

David C. Broderick: A Political Portrait by David A. WilliamsReview by: Benjamin F. GilbertArizona and the West, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring, 1971), pp. 96-97Published by: Journal of the SouthwestStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40167961 .

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DAVID C. BRODERICK: A Political Portrait By David A. Williams. San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1969. 274 pp. $7.50.

96 ARIZONA and the WEST

This book is a significant study for two principal reasons. First, it is a revisionist version of the life of David C. Broderick that is more accurate than earlier biographies. Secondly, it is a generally precise account of California

politics in the 1850s. The author corrects many errors that appeared in James O'Meara's Broderick and Gwin, originally published in 1881, and that appeared in Jeremiah Lynch's A Senator of the Fifties, published in 191 1. He convincingly proves that Broderick, while active in New York City politics, was not a member of Tammany Hall. The biography also has valuable details about the California Democratic party. These supplement Peyton Hurt's 1930 account of the Cali- fornia Know Nothing party.

The author ascertained that the major manuscript sources relating to Broderick were those of his political foes, such as the James W. Mandeville and David S. Terry collections deposited in the Huntington Library. This fact

handicapped his research, as did the lack of an ample collection of Broderick

papers. However, he compensated for the biased accounts and the shortage of Broderick's papers by consulting numerous diaries, letters, legislative journals, newspapers, and other sources that demonstrated that Broderick dominated the California political scene in the fifties.

The book details Broderick's different roles as a stonemason, saloonkeeper, ward politician, volunteer fireman, city charter framer, customs clerk, and Con-

gressional candidate in New York; and as a miner, State Senator, land specula- tor, and United States Senator in California. The author explodes the myth that Broderick was a political opportunist, portraying him as an egalitarian democrat who espoused free labor and who fought nativism and bigotry. As a State Senator

representing San Francisco in the first California Legislature, which convened at San Jose, Broderick appeared as an adept parliamentarian. He fought the

foreign miners' license, opposed the bill to stop entry of Free Negroes into California, and supported a San Francisco charter that gave the city a truly democratic government.

Broderick was a complex and studious man who lived an ascetic life. His rise from obscurity to become a United States Senator was achieved by his strong will, self-education, and personal courage. The familiar stories of Broderick's battles with Senator William M. Gwin and the California chivalry, and of his difficulties with President James Buchanan, are well told. This excellent biography also includes lesser known facts about Broderick, such as his tutoring by Townsend Harris and George Wilkes, his opposition to the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1851, his political alliance with Governor John Bigler, and his earlier duel in 1852 with Caleb C. Smith.

The book was thoroughly researched, and its scholarship is generally sound. However, the author has made a few factual errors. He erroneously calls California's sixth governor, Milton S. Latham, a Harvard graduate and "a long- time resident of Alabama" (p. 213). Actually Latham graduated from Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, and he only resided in Alabama for two

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REVIEWS 97

years, from 1848 until 1850. The middle initial of John G. Downey, Latham's

running mate in the gubernatorial campaign of 1859, *s erroneously given in both the narrative and index. A similar error occurs in both the narrative and index when the author refers to Judge Henry Perrin Coon as H. B. Coon. Coon was the San Francisco Police Judge who failed to use his authority to prevent the Broderick-Terry duel. In this instance both author and publisher are at fault, since a previous Huntington Library publication, A. Russell Buchanan's David S. Terry of California, had the name as H. P. Coon in its index. Unfortunately, the book lacks a separate bibliography, and one must cumbersomely consult the footnotes to find the author's sources.

Benjamin F. Gilbert

A Professor of History at San Jose State College, the reviewer has published numerous articles on California history.

HISTORY AS HIGH ADVENTURE. By Walter Prescott Webb. Austin: Pemberton Press, 1969. 206 pp. $6.95.

This collection of Walter Webb's essays is pure unrestrained Webb. There runs through this assortment of papers and speeches, most of them written at different times, in different stages of his career, and for widely varying audiences, a distinct thread of intellectual independence. In some respects it would not be too broad a generalization to call Webb one of the last of the rural-agrarian historians, who saw the general course of American history outlined by individual heel tracks upon the land, rather than as abstract experiences of an urban or effete society.

Walter Webb would be horrified today if he could read the programs of the two larger national historical associations of which he was President. Modern scholars writing in the post-World War II decades have made an almost 900 turn in their approaches and interpretations, yet he and the modern scholars would have something in common - both have placed faith in the "think"

process of writing and assessing the meaning of the past, and both have seen a human relevance in their discipline. Webb's sense of historical values was conditioned by folk relationships, and he worked the folk theme. Man, no matter what position he occupied in the social and economic scales, played a role in the

unfolding drama of history. Equally true was the place of the land in the lives of the people. There was always in Webb's writing a passionate devotion to the latter theme. Nowhere did he more clearly state this than in a paragraph in The Great Frontier: An Interpretation. Discovery of the New World dropped into the mixture of human affairs a new and potent ingredient. People had a place to

go and room enough to turn around in when they got there. In his writings, lecturing, and teaching Walter Webb served several causes

with passionate zeal. He took seriously the notion that the historian is also an artist and author, or should be, and that he is as much challenged by the art of

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