My Joyous As Always Reactions to the 2025 Critics Choices TV Nominations

 

 

There are times the longer I do this that I have reasons to doubt the profession I specialize in. With so many of my fellow professional critics taking an increasingly elitist approach to film and television – really everything – it can often become difficult for me to maintain my objectivity. So many times with each passing year I find it harder not to give in to the narrative of criticism being out of touch and everything else they are called.

And then when we get closer to the end of the year and groups like the Critics Choice Awards meet and give their annual nominations my faith in their judgment and my choice of profession are restored and I regain the enthusiasm and energy that is usually flagging by the end of the year.

I have made no secret that I truly believe that since they began giving awards for television in 2010 the Critics Choice Awards have been the gold standard when it comes to both nominated and giving awards to the best television the industry has to offer.  As much as the Golden Globes the Critics Choice Awards have been the guiding hand they I use to decide which TV shows to follow going in an always crowded field and it is rare that they have ever steered me wrong. What's more historically they tend to recognize those series and actors that can be overlooked and underappreciated by the Emmys, though in recent years the Emmys has managed to catch up and even occasionally surpass them.

They gave The Americans Best Drama three times and Better Call Saul the grand prize in its final season. They gave nominations to such masterpieces as Reservation Dogs and Somebody Somewhere every season they were on the air before the Emmys caught up in the final seasons of each. They have led me in the right direction when it comes to such limited series masterpieces as Black Bird and Lessons in Chemistry. And they will often nominate dramas and comedies the Emmys never will such as The Leftovers, Rectify and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Sometimes their shows are overshadowed  by the time the Emmy nominations come out months later – as was the case for Day of the Jackal – but I've never regretted seeing any of their selections the way I occasionally have with the Emmys or Golden Globes over the years.

To be sure they have their foibles and quirks: there are some series like Slow Horses that never truly register on their radar. And they are far from perfect both in what shows and actors they include as well as exclude. But over the years I've come to view that is a virtue rather than a sin. So I was waiting with eager anticipation for the nominations to come out this afternoon. And as always they didn't let me down.

Officially Emmy Watch 2026 began earlier this week with both the Indie Spirits nominations and a couple of other groups. I will get to them in due time but for now let's just soak in what the Critics have wrought.  Let us begin with Drama.

 

BEST DRAMA

Here we see four of the major contenders from 2024-2025: Andor, Paradise, Severance and The Pitt. The Diplomat was nominated for Best Drama but this is for Season 3.

Two of the newcomers are not a shock: Pluribus and Task. The third one is Alien: Earth. This is an outlier because it received no other nominations.

I should mention that The White Lotus was shutout but that's not that surprising because its never done that well with the Critics Choice Awards no matter what category its in. The Last oi Us exclusion is a little surprising but it is recognized below.

 

BEST ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES

Here we see three of the contenders from last year – Sterling K. Brown for Paradise, Adam Scott for Severance and Noah Wyle for The Pitt. Diego Luna, who many thought was overlooked for Ander by the Emmys, is present here.

Mark Ruffalo leaps into contention with his expected nomination for Task. I'm surprised to see Billy Bob Thornton here for Landsman rather than Gary Oldman or Ethan Hawke for The Lowdown but honestly this is a good group.

 

BEST ACTRESS IN A DRAMA SERIES

They nominated Carrie Coon! For the right series. Here she is for The Gilded Age. Also overjoyed to see Rhea Seehorn up for her work in Pluribus. The other four were all present at the Emmy nominations this fall: Kathy Bates, Britt Lower, Bella Ramsey and Keri Russell. No notes.

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES

Here I do have some notes but they may be more due to not having seen all the nominees. First good to see Tom Pelphrey in the hunt for Task. Tramell Tillman won the Emmy and Billy Crudup has always done well in this category for The Morning Show. (He's previously won twice, each time presaging an Emmy win.) Patrick Ball, in all fairness, should have been nominated for his work in The Pitt.

Ato Essandoh's work on The Diplomat has always been solid and I'm fine with Wood Harris getting nominated. I just find it odd to see no one from The White Lotus here, particularly because Walton Goggins has always gotten a lot of recognition from the Critics Choice Awards.

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A DRAMA SERIES

They nominated another actress from The Gilded Age. I mean I would have preferred Christine Baranski but Denee Benton is fabulous. Katherine LaNasa more than earned and I'm thrilled to see Skye P. Marshall recognized again (are you listening Emmy judges) and I'm thrilled to see Allison Janney back for The Diplomat (ditto)

I will never understand the fascination these people have for The Morning Show. I guess Nicole Beharie and Greta Lee are great in it (they're great in everything I've seen them in) but it's odd to see them recognized and not Reese Witherspoon or Jennifer Aniston. Oh well.

 

Now let's move on to Comedy. And a big note the Broadcast Critics are done with The Bear. Whether it’s a comedy or a drama they have no patience for it. However…well, you'll see.

 

BEST COMEDY SERIES

Some of last year's faces are here again: Abbott Elementary, Hacks, Only Murders in the Building, The Studio and the new favorite of the Critics Season 2 of Nobody Wants This. (I will be reviewing it for my blog soon, thank you critics.) Ghosts has always been a critics favorite.

Elsbeth decided to take a swing and is apparently trying to be nominated as a comedy.  Honestly if you've watched this show for the last two years I think we can argue it has a much better definition then The Bear ever did. I approve. And in keeping with their recognition of series that are overlooked in their final season the Critics Choice chose to honor The Righteous Gemstones. The big surprise is that it's taken them this long considering how big a fan they were of Vice Principals, a previous David Gordon Green=Danny McBride joint.  No notes and I hope the Emmys follow along.

 

BEST ACTOR IN A COMEDY

Seth Rogen and Adam Brody totally deserve to be here as do Ted Danson for Man on the Inside, David Alan Grier for St. Denis Medical and probably Danny McBride for Righteous Gemstones. But seriously? Alexander Skarsgard for Murderbot over Steve Martin and Martin Short for Only Murders?  Oh well.

 

BEST ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES

Kristin Bell and Jean Smart are here as they should be. And even though Poker Face is cancelled the Critics chose to do what the Emmys wouldn't and nominated Natasha Lyonne. I don't think anyone should pretend Carrie Preston doesn't belong in the Comedy category for Elsbeth.

Rose McIver has been coming her for Ghosts for a while and I'm glad to see Edi Patterson recognized for Righteous Gemstones. I would have loved to see Selena Gomez or Quinta Brunson here but the latter has gotten her share of recognition already.

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A COMEDY

Thank you Sal Saperstein! Ike Barinholtz may get the prize he didn't get at the Emmys.  Chris Perfetti and Paul W. Downs, both overlooked at the Emmys for acting last year, are in the fight. Timothy Simons deserves to get nominated for his work in Nobody Wants This.

I suppose I could hem and haw about Walton Goggins being ignored for playing Baby Billy in Righteous Gemstones but considering how many nominees for Supporting Actor are ineligible for these awards I'm find with Oscar Nunez for The Paper and Asher Grodman for Ghosts..

 

OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A COMEDY

Okay I'm fine with Hannah Einbinder and Janelle James, overjoyed with Justine Lupe here for Nobody Wants This and I can make some accord for Ego Nwodim (we have to have an SNL nominee). But nothing for Catherine O'Hara or Kathryn Hahn for The Studio?  Rebecca Wisocky I'm fine with for Ghosts but Danielle Brooks for Peacemaker? Oh well. Better them than Liza Colon-Zayas.

 

BEST LIMTIED SERIES

As you'd expect Adolescence and Dying for Sex are here. But there are some new nominees, some of which may play into the Emmys for what's to come.

The major contenders among them are Netflix's Death By Lightning and All Her Fault both of which have been highly praised and which I will review in the days and weeks to come. Chief Of War may see him nominations and its hard to know what they'll do with Devil in Disguise or The Girlfriend. Dope Thief is from last year and I'm somewhat shocked to see it ahead of Sirens  though I'm glad its hear ahead of Ed Gein.  (Though as you'll see both were recognize to an extent.)

I should also mention Outstanding TV movie nominated Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy and Mountainhead because they play into what's below.

 

BEST ACTOR IN A LIMITED SERIES OR TV MOVIE

Stephen Graham and Bryan Tyree Henry, both of whom were nominated last year are present. The other four faces may contend in the following months.

We see Charlie Hunnam for playing the title role in The Ed Gein Story and Michael Chernus for playing the title role in Devil IN Disguise. Michael Shannon is in the hunt for playing James Garfield in Death By Lightning and Matthew Rhys is up for Netflix's The Beast in Me.  Since the majority are for limited series I have yet to see I'll withhold comment until I do.

 

BEST ACTRESS IN A LIMITED SERIES OR TV MOVIE

Two of last year's contenders in the Emmys are present: Michelle Williams for Dying For Sex and Meghann Fahy for Sirens. Renee Zellweger, who many though would be nominated for Bridget Jones is here.

Sarah Snook is her for All Her Fault while Robin Wright is nominated for The Girlfriend. Jessica Biel is up for The Better Sister, which was eligible for last year's Emmys. I approve of the first three and I'll withhold judgment on the latter.

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A LIMITED SERIES OR TV MOVIE

As you'd expect Owen Cooper and Ashley Walters are here for Adolescence. Less expected, but welcome, two nominees are from projects of last year: Wagner Moura is present for Dope Thief and Ramy Youseff for Mountainhead. Michael Pena is up for All Her Fault and Nick Offerman for his work as Chester Arthur in Death By Lightning.

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A LIMITED SERIES OR TV MOVIE

Again Erin Doherty and Christine Tremarco are here for Adolescence. I'm thrilled to see Julianne Moore nominated for her work in Sirens.  I'm always glad to see Betty Gilpin nominated for anything (this is her fourth consecutive nomination from the Critics Choice Awards) and she's here for Death by Lightning.

I'll withhold my judgment on Sophia Lillis's work in All Her Fault and Marin Ireland's in Devil In Disguise.  My only disappointment – if you could call it that – is that neither Jenny Slate nor Rob Delaney were nominated for Dying For Sex. Otherwise I'm basically fine.

 

The remainder of the categories in play I don't have enough knowledge to comment or if I do I'm going to remain silent. I will say I am thrilled to see Brett Goldstein nominated for Best Comedy Special.

 

That's all for now. I'll be back with the second part of Phase One of Emmy Watch 2026 on Monday when the Golden Globe nominations are announced. The Critics Choice Awards are scheduled for January 4^th and I'll have my predictions (and hopes) on January 2^nd.

Revisionist History Series: The 1619 Project - A Revisionist History That Makes All Revisionist Histories Look Bad (No Mean Trick)

 

 

In recent years The 1619 Project has become the flashpoint for both sides on the history war. It is defined as a 'journalistic revisionist work that takes a critical view of traditionally revered figures and events in American history focusing on subjects of slavery and the founding of the United States.'

Credit where its due: it used to be a bad thing for most people to call themselves revisionist historians. Of course all progressives, of which Nikole Hannah-Jones proudly is, have always written revisionist histories that essentially do exactly what Hannah-Jones does. There's nothing it that is any different from the writings of Howard Zinn or Lies My Teacher Taught Me or anything that would be unfamiliar to someone who has a passing familiarity with the work of W.E.B Dubois, Malcolm X or James Baldwin. I mention this because I really wonder, having done all the research she claims to have done, whether Hannah-Jones read any of these source materials before she was 'inspired' to write her famous work. And that's before you get to the fact that by the standard of other historians Hannah-Jones essentially violated the rule that might cause Gore Vidal to start spinning in his grave: at least get your facts right before you start revising them to fit your agenda.

Because say what you will (and trust me I will)about her predecessors: at least they were sure to cherry pick data that was actually in the historical record before they spun it to fit their agenda. What's clear is that every step of the way Hannah-Jones was painting a false narrative, was informed so while the process was going on and chose to ignore it, and after the flaws were openly pointing out almost from the start of its publication to the present day has not only stood by her words but done the progressive trick of accusing her adversaries of the usual boogeymen of racism and white supremacy. It's a gift that POTUS himself would be proud of if he weren't making it a campaign issue – and as is always the way with conservatives, actually using it to greater effect on the battlefields that matter than the left  ever does. (I'll get to that.)

 Even the title is of dubious distinction considering that the first enslaved Africans were brought to North America in 1526 and the enslavement of indigenous people can be dated back to Columbus.  And it was attacked by multiple qualified historians, among them James McPherson one of the most well-know Civil War historians who disputed the claim "made by Hannah-Jones in her introductory essay "that the primary reasons the colonists wanted to declare their independence was to preserve slavery." Slavery was still active both in Britain and the British Empire well past the time of the Treaty of Paris.

Multiple people have claimed that the image was false but one historian consulted saying that the project was a 'much needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories.' To be clear we stopped having blindly celebratory histories a long time ago and the only way you can find them is if you actively seek them out. Multiple historians from the right and the left have pointed out that previous historians like Zora Neale Hurston searched for 'historical understanding' by prominent African-Americans." Yet despite all of these numerous flaws Hannah-Jones was still awarded the Pulitzer prize and named one of the ten greatest works in the last decade. I guess liberal guilt as well as reactionary behavior to conservativism counts for  more than historical accuracy these days.

It's impossible not to look at Hannah-Jones as anything but another version of an extreme progressive. And its worth noting that in 2008 she went to Cuba to study universal health care and the educational system under Raul Castro. When she became a staff writer for the Times, she says she writes to 'discover and expose the systemic and institutional racism that she says are perpetuated by official acts and laws."

Now I'm not going to say that racism doesn't exist in America, that the divides in our country are systemic and possibly unsolvable and that slavery plays a huge role in everything that has  happened in our society since well before the official founding of the republic. What troubles me is that Hannah-Jones seems to write all of these things like every single leftist I've had the misfortune of reading: as if  each discovery was something that is a blinding revelation to her and therefore excluded from society. Since she has studied African-American history she has to have studied every single one of her predecessors that every single thing she was writing about as part of the 1619 Project had been written about before multiple times with little change even with the outrage. Even her idea of how the world should  be viewed is derivative of Baldwin who famously said America's real independence day came with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.  

So there are only two conclusions one can draw. The first is that she read all of this material when doing her studies multiple times and decided: I want to get in on this action. She knew that no one ever lost money by playing on the liberal guilt of  America and that there was a way to work with it.

The second alternative is that somehow she managed to live her entire life, both before she went to college and after, somehow thinking that America – not just white America but all America – had no idea of just how much slavery infected society. This is a commonality held by progressives who live in their own bubble and truly think the reason our systemic problems have not been solved by society is their lack of awareness on the subject.  When it comes to the subject of slavery, as I have written multiple times and will again, this attitude has been taken as far back as the abolitionists such as Garrison and Frederic Douglass and has been at the center of the men I mentioned and even more.  And it's not like it hasn't been reiterated in movies, TV shows or hell, rap songs. (I can't believe Hannah-Jones never heard 'Fight The Power' growing up.)

I'm relatively sure by this point in history every educated American knows how horrible slavery was even if we don't know the details. I grant you that white America has always handled discussion of it poorly but honestly, what could we possibly say that would do it justice? I seriously doubt Hallmark makes a card that says: "I'm sorry that my ancestors held your ancestors in bondage for 400 years."  Setting aside that half of white America (at least) doesn't think they have to apologize for anything, I'm not convinced that a majority of African-Americans would accept it if it was offered by every white American. Nor should they, honestly.

I will admit that Hannah-Jones has put forth a solution of sorts, though it comes after hundreds of pages of regurgitating old leftist standards and making some new ones up. Like everything else it's cribbed from a combination of progressive and racial talking points: reparations for descendants of slaves, national health care and other social welfare for all American. Of course there are no details, no such things as cost analysis and no assessment of the political climate. None of that is surprising either: the left has never been about solutions to problems and pragmatism is not part of their vocabulary.  And I suspect that the only reason Hannah-Jones actually put even these token suggestions in her conclusion was so that she didn't sound like another 'angry black woman' to the New York Times.

As always with progressives my problem is less with the reason of their moral outrage but their execution of what they do. So much of the journalism Hannah-Jones has been doing is closer to the level of activism then reporting. The two can and have overlapped in the 20^th century but in this one their has been a failure in the mission statement. As Hannah-Jones knows having studied history activism only works when it is a means to an end. Works like The 1619 Project are the means and the end. As activism it will accomplish nothing long term. As a historian it is a betrayal of the term.

So to reiterate: there is nothing in Nicole Jones's project that hasn’t been said hundreds of times before. What is said is little more than 'junk history'.  She was warned by multiple historians during the Project that what Jones was saying was inaccurate and was ignored. There are no solutions offered in the subject that would count. My question is simple: At any point didn't someone in Times editorial process say anything to someone about what they were putting into print?

For all my issues with the New York Times none of them are with their actual reporting. I've read enough of it over the decades to know that they are basically thorough, objective and even handed when it comes to nearly every subject whether it be foreign or domestic affairs, dives into cultural trends and when they choose to do it, sports. I also know that they will take Democrats to task and in just as harsh terms as they do Republicans. (The difference is, ever since Nixon, the right has been more, shall we sensitive to criticism.)

So the Times's failure to not only let the 1619 Project go into print but also when asked by numerous historians to offer corrections to stand by Hannah Jones even in the face of the multiple criticisms from so many sources is a betrayal of their usually impeccable standards. To be sure they offered a 'clarification' but never offered an accompanying editorial note. They've since done a podcast series, a book and a documentary series, which have made it more than clear that they are fine with everything this project this says. When critics have attacked the project the Times stood by Hannah-Jones

The only criticism Hannah-Jones has ever responded to, of course, is the one that comes from conservatives, and has only responded on Twitter. "Those who've wanted to act as if tweets/discussions about the project hold more weight than the actual words of the project cannot be taken in good faith" and "Those who point to edits of digital blurbs but ignore the unchanged text of the actual project cannot be taken in good faith'. In a sense she said that all the criticism of her project were fake news.

Its telling that while high profile conservatives criticized the project, the only prominent Democrat to defend it at the time was Kamala Harris and former President Obama.  I suspect the only reason Democrats lined up behind it was a combination of liberal guilt and the reactionary behavior that has multiplied exponentially since Trump took office. I seriously wonder if anyone actually read the project by the time Biden took office and if they did they no doubt thought: "Well we're committed to it now. We have to stand by it." That they kept doing so even after one such historian wrote a detailed essay in Jacobin – Jacobin! – which said that it "botched the history of the slave economy, misconstrued the origins of Northern economic development, erased the history of anti-slavery and rendered emancipation irrelevant' – is a sad sign as to how polarized so much of our American discourse has become. Even the World Socialist Web Site has criticized the falsification of history saying it wrongly centers on racial rather than class conflict.

Had the GOP chosen to take the approach that many prominent historians did and quoted numerous liberal journals criticisms they would have had that rarest of things: their assertions would have been backed up by facts and records. Instead by the GOP choosing to make it part of the culture wars and threatening to withhold funding for teaching it, as well as using the same terminology of 'left-wing propaganda', which is their go-to response for everything from politics to hip-hop to the Green M & M, they put it under the same ridiculous banner and gave cover for the left to defend it without quarter or likely even reading it.  And it has no doubt given cover for The Times as well: given that the Republicans will as a given, attack them about everything that they do correctly (the majority of them) they have been insulated from having to back away from a horrible error in judgment.

Compared to everything the GOP and conservative media have done as I speak, the obsession over The 1619 Project has long since faded into the background. The problem is by this point it has essentially become part of the education curriculum and leftist dogma in multiple sources, including this site. It's now essentially the historical record even though its junk history. And for any true historian that's appalling.

The 1619 Project was no doubt celebrated in large part because it completed one of the goals of progressives: 'raising awareness'. This has always struck me as the mirror image as when right-wing journalists and politicians say "we're just asking questions'. And as with so many things the left's version is far more nebulous and harder to measure if it is successful then the right's version. From my perspective this approach has been just as effective at changing the conversation and winning hearts and minds as Hollywood's role in 'The Resistance' has been when it comes to issues like income equality and DEI.

To be clear the reasons for my anger at Hannah-Jones and The 1619 Project go beyond my usual issues with the left overall. It is yet another example of them fighting battles that don't matter while the right continues to fight – and win – the battles that do. It's another example of the left's ridiculous focus on trying to point out the cause of societal problems as a solution rather than try to deal with actual solutions and then try to put them into effect. It's another example of every pattern I see with the left in so many places: write nebulous theories to deal with problems, double down on them when you are called out, and never apologize. And like everything else the left does it exists for two reasons: to play to your base and provoke outrage from 'the establishment'.  It's usually conservatives but as is always the case with the left, they will view against anyone who pushes back against them as their mortal enemy.

All of these are bad enough from an activist and while I would have issues with Hannah-Jones if she were only one of those I could at least comprehend it. But Hannah-Jones fancies herself a historian. 1619 demonstrates she doesn't pass muster as one of those but let's engage in the kind of magical thinking she does and say she actually has spent her life reading so many histories of African Americans. Considering she's a journalist I assume she is familiar with the idea of doing research on a project before you do it is well.

It's clear when she was doing whatever work she did she has to have read the documents about the efforts at emancipation and the abolitionist movement. She also has to have done her work on the various battles for civil rights from the end of the war and to the present day. So by that standard she has to know what helps a cause succeed and what leads it to fail.  Abolitionism and every cause of reform is full of example of the division within them of the activist and the politician and even if that no longer exists in so many progressive causes today at the very least she has to have read about them.

So in other words Nikole Hannah-Jones was provided countless examples of what brings about the kinds of deep societal change in America and around the world – and chose to devote her time and energy to a method that has never worked historically and shows no signs of working in the present day.

That leads me to the question I ask over and over when I read works like 1619 and the overwhelming majority of these left-wing revisionist histories: what are you trying to accomplish? You know, besides getting rich off the guilt of liberals and receiving fame and infamy in a certain segment of society. I guess that in itself is its own reward (though it goes against so much of the morality that the left uses to judge the rest of society by) but in the short and long term how do you change anything?

Works like this are, unfortunately, another reason that the right has a built-in advantage in the war of revisionist history. As I'll illustrate in later articles the right approaches history much like it approaches politics: there is a clear story with heroes and villains. The 'Great Man' version they create is the hero and it tells the reader that yes, America is a good place to live in and you should be proud of it.  Lie or not, it offers an optimistic view of the world.

Hannah-Jones, by contrast, creates a world where America itself is the villain from the time of its founding to the present day. There are no good people in her America and the entire system is rigged against them from the day you were born. The country you live in is corrupt, immoral and fundamentally broken. It is less about education or enlightenment then hitting you over the head with the fact that your world is hopelessly broken and the powers that be will do nothing to solve it even if they wanted to.

To be very clear Hannah-Jones' work is not the least bit original when it comes to this tone even among previous leftist revisionists. And like everything else by the so called progressive it will sell very little beyond the converted.  It's bad enough when they make this argument about the present and talk the same way about the future. When they do the exact same thing to the past then the world is even more miserable then it's ever been.

And that brings me to the final question, the one I never truly get an answer too: If America is such a shitty and unforgiving place to everybody who has ever lived here then why do people like Hannah-Jones still voluntarily live here? Despite the fact she didn't write about it the 13^th Amendment has been signed into law since 1865. What's chaining her and her colleagues to a nation that holds them in a state of such oppression?  Did that question ever occur to her writing this work? Or did she just do what she did to the historical record and choose to ignore the part that wasn't flattering?

I welcome whatever vitriol will come my way.

 

The History of Hollywood and Politics, Part 1: Henry Wallace's 1948 Third Party Run as Entertainment Gets in at The Ground Floor of Politics

 

There are very few 'great men' in history who fall under the left's definitions. And those who are usually involve the greatest of contortions. One of them is Henry Wallace, FDR's second Vice President.

According to  some revisionist historians narrative and propagated through Oliver Stone's 'documentary series' The Untold History of America' Henry Wallace was 'cheated' out of the Vice Presidency in 1944 because his favorable opinion of the Soviet Union was counter to what the political establishment wanted. They were aware of FDR's failing health and they didn't want Wallace to become President because he was going to follow up with FDR's policy of treating the Soviets with respect and courtesy as Stalin took over Eastern Europe after World War II.  (That part's ignored of course in those contortions.) So they forced the choice of Harry Truman on the party and 'cheated' Henry Wallace from the Presidency, therefore starting the Cold War which was, of course,  just an excuse for American empire.

As with every version of what passes for history by these revisionists it involves ignoring most of the facts, not the least of which is when FDR wanted Wallace to run with him in 1940 the convention was planning to revolt and only a last minute visit by Eleanor Roosevelt managed to get Wallace on the ticket the first time. There's also the very really fact that so much of the idealization of Henry Wallace basically involves ignoring what he was:  which was possibly the most naïve political figure in FDR's entire cabinet and one of the most deluded figures in the 20^th century. He conducted seances, privately thought eugenics might not be the worst idea, was frequently silly on the campaign trail when he talked about and wrote letters to a figure known as The Guru an exiled Russian mystic which he signed the letters to as 'Galahad'. He did all of this, I should be clear,  before FDR nominated him for Vice President the first time.

And that's before you consider that by the time of the 1944 election he was sent on a 'goodwill trip to Siberia' where he described the Soviet gulags as 'a combination of the TVA and Hudson's Bay company and admired the embroidery at a women's concentration camp. Eventually members of the Secret Police would infiltrate Wallace's inner circle without his knowledge. Honestly they probably could have shown him their ID and he would have asked if they knew certain people from his trips to the east before promoting them to higher positions.

After he was kicked to the curb in FDR offered mercy by naming him Secretary of Commerce. His new Vice President Harry Truman was not happy about this, as he later wrote he had to cast two tie-breaking votes in the Senate just to do so. He kept Wallace on as a holdover from FDR's cabinet when he ascended to the Presidency and he did listen to his advice for a time. But the liberals loved Wallace and hated Truman. Wallace should have known better than to stay in the administration afterwards but he stayed in as much for spite then anything else. And he was the only Commerce Secretary with his own foreign policy which was completely at odds with the one Truman was finding was not attainable with Stalin.

After Wallace was forced to resign he was increasingly at odds with the rest of the country. In an October 1947 poll with the Truman Doctrine already in effect, 62 percent of Americans thought Truman was 'too soft on Communism'. Only six percent thought it was too hard. Wallace was part of that six percent and even though that might be a factor in the election it was a fringe that was increasingly becoming Communist. By early 1948 American members of the Communist Party had a big influence in the 'Wallace movement'  which caused almost all of the members of the non-communist left – almost all of them the political ones – to almost completely jump ship by late April.

To be clear by the time Wallace announced his campaign under the Progressive Party platform there was never any chance of a victory. Wallace himself had never had anything resembling a strategy even as a spoiler. It was clear early on he had one goal and one goal only: to deny the Presidency to a man who held a job Wallace was convinced should have been his and that he clearly thought he was more qualified for.

Wallace was running a poorly managed campaign, made statements that were out of touch with reality (when Jan Masaryk was pushed out a winder he parroted the Daily Worker line: "Maybe he had cancer" ) talked only to people who told him what he wanted to hear and delivered policies that were completely out of touch with America. It may be a bit glib to say that it makes perfect sense that his biggest supporters were from the entertainment industry as a result but the fact remains the major draw of his campaign, from his major followers to campaign events to the Progressive Party Convention, came from either Broadway or Hollywood.

At one point the Progressive Citizens of America involved such luminous stars as Edward G. Robinson, Katherine Hepburn, Jose Ferre, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly and Gregory Peck, it also had such CPUSA (US communist party members) as John Garfield and Lee J. Cobb. However eventually it became too far left even for these hard core celebrity and aside from Cobb, the only ones who went the distance were Zero Mostel, Paul Robeson and a young Pete Seeger.

Lillian Hellman, known for her Communist affiliations and proud of them, enlisted early. However her former lover and close friend Dashiell Hammett never agreed. "I love him as much as you do, but you simply can't make a politician of him," he warned her in early 1946,

Even some members of the Party and Hollywood tried to warn him. Budd Schulberg, a former communist, told Wallace at a fundraiser he was in the hands of the party. He was sloughed off. "He was naïve and trusting and didn't want to believe a word of it," Schulberg concluded. The man he chose as Vice President Glen Taylor had himself been  a low-level stage performer and entertainer before being elected to the Senate in Idaho in 1944.

Announcing his run for Vice President he uttered the words: "I have not left the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me. Wall street and the military have taken over."

By the time of the Progressive Party Convention in Philadelphia (held their so it could be televised like those of the Republican and Democratic one) Wallace's campaign was essentially in ruins before the convention was gaveled to order.  Hollywood screenwriters and actors have sympathy for it, but because HUAC was in session and weary of being blacklisted, they steered clear. Several people in the arts did not, among them such writers as Dorothy Parker, Donald Odgen Stewart and Broadway's Sam Wannamaker.

One attendee Howard Fast, a novelist who one day write Spartacus met with his idol H.L. Mencken. Mencken warned him of being with these people. "You don't put politics aside, you taste it, listen to it and write it. You don't join it. If you do, these clowns will destroy you as surely as the sun rises and sets." It was good advice. Fast didn't want to hear it.

It's worth noting that when Mencken wrote about the convention while he didn't see many Kremlin maneuver he noted neither "were there many dark faces spotted in the crowd…Jewish faces were scarce…I saw no Indians, Chinese, Malays or Eskimos." Critically Mencken was pointed out for all the arguments for civil rights, this party was just as lily-white as the Dixiecrats.

So naturally when they heard this the Progressives demanded Mencken be thrown out of the convention. It was only stopped when it was clear they didn't want Mencken to become a martyr. (That was to be reserved for Wallace and Taylor. Critically Wallace and Taylor spent the entire convention dealing primarily with foreign policy and not the domestic issues that Truman was making the clarion call of his campaign.

Paul Robeson was a critical part of the convention both as entertainment and designing the platform. So were Fast and the artist Rockwell Kent. This would probably rank as the highpoint of entertainment role in designing a political platform at any convention. They would have been better served sticking to their profession. (Kent for instance advocated for a cabinet-level Department of Culture.)

During the campaign the most prominent supporters remained entertainers. They included future Oscar winners Walter Huston and Judy Holliday, playwrights Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets and composers Marc Blitztein, Aaron Copland and young Leonard Bernstein. Many of these men and women had sympathies to the Communist: Copland had even campaigned for the Communist candidate for President in 1936. Hellman publicly was fine with all this saying: "There is no difference between the two parties and Wallace is the greatest political progressive in the field." Hammett was as much a Communist as Hellman was, told her to 'stop playing around with that Iowa yogi and his fringe imperials."

Eventually Hellman and Wallace met for lunch. After leaving his usual nickel tip -distressing Hellman and everyone there – Wallace asked Hellman if his party's core was Communist. When she laughingly told him it was, she said he thought he must have known this and "I don't think they mean any harm, they're stubborn men."

Eventually Hellman tried to convince both Wallace and the CPUSA to build more of a grass roots level. She would eventually complain to members of the Communist Party that they were barking up the wrong tree. "You have a party of your own. Why do you want to interfere with another political party? It's plain willful meddling and it should stop." Hellman's either was unaware that this was how Communists worked across the globe in so many other places or she actually thought that if the Communists stayed out Wallace and the Progressive Party had a future in America. Either way, she was more of a useful idiot then she thought.

Eventually Hellman left the campaign in October to go to the Balkans to attend the premiere of the Belgrade debut of The Little Foxes and to interview Stalin's latest nemesis Yugoslavia's Marshall Tito. He wanted to ask her about Henry Wallace.

By the time of the final months the campaign was known for its musical endeavors which were writing campaign songs by the boatload. In addition to Robson and Seeger, they included Yip Harburg and Woody Guthrie. In the final campaign rally held in Madison Square Garden of New York City Pete Seeger sang and Norman Mailer proudly said he was joining the Communist Party tomorrow.

When the ballots came in November 4^th Henry Wallace carried 1,156,103 votes, just 2.38 percent of the total.  8 percent of the vote came from New York State; 4.73 percent came from California. Those were the only states he carried more than 4 percent of the vote.

Pete Seeger's sister-in-law told him: "I know Wallace is a wonderful man but I didn't want to see Dewey become President, so I voted for Truman." This was a trend throughout the country. In the final ten days of the campaign a full third of Wallace's supporters shifted to Truman.

It's worth noting the major way this would affect Hollywood in the next decade. Harry Truman, resistant to the idea of being labeled soft on Communism, had counterattacked with loyalty-security programs, attorney general lists and the reopening of HUACA as a political weapon. The McCarthy era was about to erupt and for those entertainers who would support the Wallace campaign, while ignoring the clear Communist influence within it, they must be held at least partially to blame for what happened in the decade to come.

In the next article in this series I will deal with how the Red Scare affected Hollywood and helped lead to the first major California junior senator's ascension to power – though Hollywood will deny that they played any part in that as well.

How Did The Winningest Pitchers in Baseball History Do in The Postseason, Introduction and Part 1

 

As someone who is both a baseball fan and has lived in New York his entire adult life there's an argument that you'll always here whenever a great player is discussed: "Sure he might have had great statistics but how did he do in the postseason?"

Aside from the obvious entitlement factor it actually posed a question that I can answer: how have the winningest pitchers in baseball history done in the World Series or given how baseball has changed over the last half century, the expanded postseason? And this is a question we can answer.

So in this article I'm going to look at how every pitcher who won 300 games or more did in the postseason during their long careers. To be fair I've divided the group into four eras even though they don't always fit:

Deadball Era: In This Case 1900-1920

Pre Expansion Era In this case, 1920-1961

Divisional  Era: 1969-1995

Modern Era: 1995-present

Six of the pitchers who have won 300 games or more pitched the entirety of their career before 1900 and don't qualify. Two more Phil Niekro and Gaylord Perry never managed to reach the World Series and while they did have some postseason appearances for the purposes of this article I'm not included them. Nolan Ryan is a borderline case but because he did pitch in one, he's listed her for completion sake.

So let's get started.

 

Deadball Era Pitchers

Cy Young

Boston Red Sox 1903 World Series 2-1 1.59 ERA

In one of those cases of symmetry that baseball is so great at the winningest pitcher in baseball history pitched in the very first World Series as a member of the Boston Pilgrims (they didn't change their name to the Red Sox until a few years later.) Young had jumped to the American League when it was founded and in 1903 led the League with 28 wins, seven shutouts, 341 innings pitched and 34 complete games. He was about to turn 36 so he was clearly slowing down a bit.

The inaugural World Series was a best of nine games affair and Young started three games and relieved in a fourth. He won two of his starts to go 2-1 with a 1.59 ERA. However his battery mate Bill Dineen was the hero of the series going 3-1 and pitching a shutout in the eighth game to give Boston the first ever World Series.

The following year the Red Sox repeated as American League Pennant winner with Young winning 26 games and throwing 10 shutouts. However John McGraw the pugnacious manager of the New York Giants made it clear his team would not play the American League winners. There was no World Series in 1904. Fortunately McGraw changed his mind the next year setting the stage for...

 

Christy Mathewson

1905, 1911-1913 New York Giants

World Series Record: 5-5

 

Any student of baseball history knows that in the 1905 World Series Mathewson pitched three complete game shutouts and gave up just 14 hits in three complete games, a record that will no doubt stand forever. What is less known is that for the rest of Matty's career in the World Series, it was downhill from there.

In the opening game of the 1911 World Series against the Philadelphia A's (we'll hear about them in the next entry) and they must have considered a moral victory to finally score a run against them after he shut them out three times.  In Game 3 however Frank Baker hit a home run off Mathewson in the ninth to tie the game leading to the A's beating him in the eleventh. After a week of rain delayed the series McGraw sent Mathewson to the mound again and they humiliated him 6-2 as the A's ending up winning the World Series for the second year in a row.

The next year they played the Red Sox and Mathewson was humiliated. He pitched three complete games but ended up with an 0-2 record including the climatic final game which gave the Red Sox the World Championship. And when the Giants faced off against the A's in the 1913 World Series Mathewson managed to win the only Giants victory in a five game loss but he also lost the climatic game.

Mathewson did not pitch poorly by any means: his lifetime ERA of 1.15 is still in the top ten of World Series records and his ten complete games and four shutouts have never been approached by any modern pitcher. It doesn't change the fact that having won his first four World Series starts he went 1-5 the rest of the way. And that brings us to…

 

Eddie Plank

1905, 1910-1911, 1913-1914 Philadelphia A's
World Series Record 2-5

Gettysburg Eddie Plank is likely the only player in this group – maybe of the entire roster  - that will draw blank expression. That's remarkable considering that by any measure he was as great as the other five names on this list. A little explanation is due.

Eddie Plank won 326 games in his seventeen year career which is thirteenth on the list all times. His lifetime ERA is 2.34 and he threw 69 shutouts, fifth all time and the four men ahead of him are in this group. Yet I'm not sure even at the time he was appreciated in the American League or on the A's. For one thing he never managed to win 30 games once in a season even though he managed to win 20 or more eight times. For another he was never as flashy as some of his fellow pitchers on Mack's staff such as Rube Waddell, who was a great strikeout artist or Chief Bender who pitched far better in big games that Plank did.

This record I should mention is not his fault. His lifetime ERA in the World Series is 1.32 also in the top ten and he also threw six games. The problem was in all four of the World Series he pitched he always seemed to get into tough matches. He lost the opening game of the 1905 World Series to Mathewson and lost Game 4 1-0 to Joe McGinnity. Connie Mack chose not to pitch him in the 1910 World Series against the Chicago Cubs and considering they won in five games you can't blame him. In the 1911 World Series he went  1-1 beating Rube Marquard in Game 2 but losing Game 5 in relief. In 1913 he lost to Mathewson in another shutout. And in 1914 when the Miracle Braves swept Mack's A in four games he lost Game 2 1-0.

After that he jumped to the Federal League and two years later his career was over. But by that time Philadelphia's eyes were on another great pitcher…

 

Grover Cleveland Alexander

1915 Phillies, 1926,1928 St Louis Cardinals 3-2 one save.

Again any baseball fan knows of the save on that record when a drunk Alexander came in after pitching a complete game win to fan Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded in the seventh, preserving the game and the World Series for St. Louis. He'd actually won the second and sixth game as well and that wasn't his first World Series appearance.

In 1915 he'd helped the Phillies win their first ever National League Pennant with the first of three consecutive 30 win seasons. He managed to win the opening game of the 1915 World Series against the Red Sox 3-1, in what would be the first – and last World Series game they would win until 1980. (We'll get to that.)

In 1928 Alexander still had some stuff winning 20 games to help the Cardinals win their second National league pennant in three years. But this time the Yankees ran over the Cardinals and Alex could do nothing to stop it. In Game 2 Lou Gehrig hit a three-run homer in the first and Alex was gone in the third. They brought him in to pitch relief in Game 4 to try and hold off the Yankees from the sweep. Ironically Lazzeri was waiting for him but this time greeted him with a hit. The humiliation continued and the Yankees won 7-3.

 

Walter Johnson

Washington Senators 1924-1925 3-3

Johnson lost both his starts in the 1924 World Series but famously came in relief in the deciding game as the Senators held on to win the World Series in the 12^th. They returned to the World Series the following year and Johnson did better this time, winning both his starts including a shutout in Game 4.

Unfortunately manager Bucky Harris stuck with even as things went horribly wrong in Game 7 in which the Pirates battered him for fifteen hits and nine runs in the final game. Adding insult to injury the Pirates would become the first team in baseball history to come back from being down three games to one to win a World Series. As we shall see another one of the pitchers on this list would endure a similar humiliation.

 

Next time I'll deal with the pitchers from the lively ball era until the era of expansion.

December Begins And Harrison Whitaker's Jeopardy Streak Ends: His Final Ranking Among the Jeopardy Elite

 

 

Harrison Whitaker spent much of November – and the entire period of eligibility for the 2027 Tournament Champions from this point – in one of the greatest runs of a Jeopardy player in history. Perhaps when Ken Jennings mentioned this on December 1^st he was inadvertently foreshadowing what was to come by the time the game was over.

The more ominous portent came when Harrison found the Daily Double on the very first clue of the Jeopardy round and got it incorrect. For the first time in his entire run he was starting the game in the red. As is his want he got out of the hole very quickly and established a lead that he never relinquished for the Jeopardy round. However his opponents Brendan Thomas and Libby Jones were doing well.

Early in Double Jeopardy Libby made her presence known taking the lead after four consecutive correct responses. She and Harrison went back and forth for the lead and she got to the last Daily Double ahead of him. Unlike both Harrison and Brendan she responded correctly and took the lead back. Harrison took back on the very next clue and built from there but he could not shake Libby the way he had in the last six consecutive games. By the end of Double Jeopardy he was still ahead with $21,000 but Libby was right behind him with $17,200 and Brendan loomed as a potential spoiler with $3600.

It came down to Final Jeopardy. The category was POSTAGE STAMPS. "A 1959 4-cent stamp depicts an eagle and a maple leaf beneath the name of this project."

Brendan's response was revealed first. "What is the St. Lawrence Seaway?" He was correct. (I had no idea that the U.S./Canada collaboration was completed by 1959; architecture and geography have never been my strong suits. He nearly doubled his score to $7199. Libby was next. She also wrote down St Lawrence Seaway. She wadded $7601 to her total giving her $24,801.

It came down to Harrison who has always had a good poker face. He wrote down: "What is the Ambassador Bridge?" As Ken pointed out  its in Detroit not that far from the Canadian border. His wager of $13,499 was essentially irrelevant as Libby Jones brought an end to the magnificent run of Harrison Whitaker after 14 wins and $373,999.

As I predicted in Tuesday's article I was skeptical that Harrison could reach the top ten in total victories by a Jeopardy player. This turned out to be accurate. As Ken pointed out 12 other players had managed to win 15 or more games and Harrison was unable to become one of them finishing 13^th on the all-time list trailing Adriana Harmeyer (who Harrison seems to have a relationship with according to Ken.) So by that standard let's see where Harrison finished compared to the 12 other players that are ahead of him on that leaderboard on their fourteenth game (again eliminated James Holzhauer for the sake of mercy)

 

Ken Jennings: $471,759

David Madden: $333,301

Julia Collins: $284,100

Jason Zuffranieri: $399,543

Matt Amodio: $440,600

Amy Schneider: $571,200

Mattea Roach: $320,081

Ryan Long: $260,100

Cris Panullo: $487,923

Adriana Harmeyer: $326,000

Scott Riccardi: $390,902

Harrison Whitaker: $373,999

 

He's clearly superior then Adriana and Ryan (he won more then both of them in their runs though they each won more games than him). As I mentioned before he was clearly a better player in his run that Mattea and Julia Collins both of  whom, while excellent players in their own right were not nearly as dominant in their wins as Harrison was in his.  And he's basically even with such greats as Scott Riccardi and David Madden. That he's not nearly at the level of the five biggest money winners in Jeopardy history is hardly surprising considering how incredible those five were.

However its worth comparing him to the three players immediately behind him in games won when it comes to money earned:

 

Ray Lalonde: (13 wins) $386,400

Matt Jackson: (13 wins): $411,612

Austin Rogers (12 wins) $411,000

Harrison Whitaker (14 wins) $373,999

 

It's hardly surprising Harrison ranks behind Austin and Matt: in his entire 14 game run Harrison only topped the $40,000 mark twice. Matt by contrast won $50,000 or more 4 times in his run and Austin won $65,000 or more in consecutive wins.

Make no mistake when Harrison was good, he was very, very good. In what was his final win he managed 26 correct responses with no incorrect ones and he gave 30 correct responses in 13^th victory. But it was clear after his most dominant win on November 21^st when he won $50,000 that his momentum was starting to flag. He started responding incorrectly on Daily Doubles at a more frequent rate and when he did he lost a lot of money. And while he managed six consecutive runaways after narrowly winning his eighth game (which even he expected to lose) last week his margins began to grow increasingly on the narrow sign.

Because it was preempted in many locations for college football last Friday few saw how close he came to defeat in his fourteenth win. His challenger Wilder Seitz got to all three Daily Doubles ahead of him and both times in Double Jeopardy then went against him.  The former where he was trailing Harrison by $8000 was the most critical to date. The category was CLOTHES IN BOOKS:

"Completes the Wilkie Collins description of a woman's attire: "Bonnet, shawl and gown all of…" Clearly Wilder had never read Collins' novel The Woman in White (I had) and he guessed: "What is black?" (the natural alternative). Had that response gone correctly he would have been ahead of Harrison at the end of Double Jeopardy and because both he and Harrison knew the correct response he likely would have won.

It is almost always Final Jeopardy that does in even the best Jeopardy champion. These exact circumstances have played out to almost every single super-champion since Ken Jennings famously lost to Nancy Zerg with few exceptions. In most occasions they will be in the lead when their nearest challenger comes from behind to take them down.  On rare occasions such as with James Holzhauer or David Madden (to take the most successful cases) they will be trailing in Final Jeopardy and despite responding correctly their opponent does as well leading to their defeat. Harrison was no different in that regard and in that sense has nothing to be ashamed of. Not that his track record as a Jeopardy super-champion leaves him with much to be embarrassed by.

It says a lot about where we are at this point in Jeopardy history that the long-time viewer like myself can now pick out the type of super-champion is at this point.  While I might be prone to overgeneralizing I now see three basic archetypes:

1. Those who completely dominate a game from beginning to end and leave both their opponents in the dust by the time the Jeopardy round is over. Amy Schneider, Matt Amodio and Cris Panullo are the clearest examples of that since the post-Trebek era began.

2. Those who while they play well frequently do not runaway with their matches and need to get Final Jeopardy correct in order to win. Ray Lalonde and Adriana Harmeyer are the most recent examples.

3. Those who runaway with most of their games but not by incredible margins. Mattea Roach and Ryan Long fit this model.

Harrison fits most comfortably into the final group particularly in the second half of his run. And it is likely for that reason that he was so gracious in everyone of his victories, always going out of way to applaud every contestant he defeated with each successive victory. Harrison does have a charming and self-effacing nature in his play (most Jeopardy champions do, honestly) but in his case in what was his last full week he knew how close he was skating to the edge. Harrison knew how much luck was involved in his run. Anyone who remembers what turned out to be his eighth victory he couldn't come up with a correct Final Jeopardy response and wrote down "Well its been fun." He was fortunate it wasn't a triple stumper on that day.

Harrison will be waiting a long time to return for the Tournament of Champions: it's not just that he'll have to wait until the winter of 2027 but considering that he won 14 games he will almost certainly get a bye into the semi-finals just as Scott Riccardi has for the 2026 Tournament of Champions and Adriana Harmeyer did for last year.  I'll be both looking forward to his return and pulling for him just as I will be Scott Riccardi in this year's Tournament of Champions.

Barring another player manages to qualify for next year's Tournament of Champions my next piece on Jeopardy will be in two weeks' time when I begin my play-by-play of the 2025-2026 Jeopardy postseason. I'll be back with the results for Week 1 of the Second Chance Tournament.

Historical Book Club December 2025: Ascent to Power by David L. Roll

 

Reading David L. Roll's Ascent to Power: How Truman Emerged from Roosevelt's Shadow and Remade the World, I kept thinking to myself: what would Harry Truman think if he were to read this book? I suspect at a certain point in this work he'd rant that it's 'another one of those pieces by an ivory tower egghead who thinks he can substitute his judgment for the President." And there's a decent chance by the end (no doubt fortified by the bourbon he might need to get through it) he would be penning an obscene note to the author calling him the worst names possible in the foulest language possible.

Now in the hypothetical scenario a wiser head (I suspect Bess or Margaret) would convince him not to send it. After he cooled down (as he usually did after a bit) he would acknowledge that the author was far more fair to him then so many of his fellow academics, particularly in comparison to 'That Man'  who chose him as Vice President and left him very much with a mess he didn't have nearly the qualifications he handle. He would strut a little at the favorable comparisons when it came to his plain speaking and how genuine he was with staff, how difficult many of the decisions he made and how well they were borne out by history and how groundbreaking he was in many ways. But in his heart he would no doubt think and say quite frequently: "It's good for a guy who never ran for office in his life but still thinks he could have made better decisions with the same perfect hindsight we all have."

Am I reading too much into this? Perhaps. But Roll is like every other good biographer when it comes to getting a critical aspect of Harry Truman correctly: the man never suffered fools gladly. And there are far too many times in what is otherwise a superior piece compared to so many academic studies of these two Presidents – one of whom is revered as a saint in most academic circles while the latter is just as frequently vilified – where you can see the moralizing of the modern left-leaning aspects of the academic overshadowing what should be the objective lens of the historian.

I need to give credit where it is due and try to alleviate some of my problems. Roll has written three biographies of men who were critical to different degrees to the presidencies of both FDR and Truman: George Marshall, Harry Hopkins and Louis Johnson. And when he deals with foreign policy he is on very firm ground and more importantly, balanced.

He makes it clear about the flaws when it came to Roosevelt's misjudgment of Stalin in the first chapter of the book more than prior historians. He makes it clear Truman was nowhere near prepared for the job and that while he made some mistakes going forward he tried for far longer than possible to maintain the vision of his deceased predecessor. He keeps the moralizing about his decision to drop the atomic bomb to a minimum compared to so many of his predecessors, gives him credit for his work in getting the Marshall Plan into effect and how vital it was for the rebuilding of West Germany and much of Western Europe. He credits him for helping rebuild Japan into an economic force after World War II (something I was basically unaware of as to the extent) and while there is some moralizing about the Middle East he gives Truman credit for at least trying to dip his foot into the waters of Israel and that there were things he did that deserve a light to be shined on.

The problem, however, is that this is the first work Roll has ever done on the Presidency and how it relates to both domestic policy as well as how politics works in general. And it is in these sections overwhelmingly that the progressive bias of the author is far too visible as well as a critical difference between both that bias and conservative historians overall.

Looking at so many conservative histories of this era and much of those that involve Democrats during the 20^th century their clearest belief is an underlying cynicism that whatever policy any Democrat makes has nothing to do with social justice, economic or foreign policy is done solely as something to convince the average voter to blindly vote Democrat without thinking. This is a completely amoral and pessimistic way to look the world and I would reject it – were it not for the fact that at its core and particularly with FDR and Truman, there is a fair amount of truth in it.

The policies that FDR argued for the New Deal were so revolutionary  - he was accused of being a radical and a socialist during his 1932 campaign – that the main reason much of it got passed was due to the Great Depression and his overwhelming electoral majorities, particularly in the conservative South.  He ran so far ahead of the Southern Democrats in many of their states – in 1936 he got over 90 percent of the popular vote in some Southern states – along with an increased amount of power in the Northern and Western states that even though Southern Democrats opposed him they were behind the voters. What FDR misjudged was that even in his landslide election of 1936 was that the voters had not wanted him to go any further to the left. As Elmo Roper pointed out in an election in October 1936 only 35 percent of the public thought that FDR's first reelection was essential to the good of the country. The remaining 65 percent were either indifferent or negative too him.  And even among that 35 percent, "people in general did not expect him to lead the country very much further to the left, nor did they want him too." Indeed 17 percent thought that if his policies were to change they would become more conservative.

Its understandable that this part is not in Roll's book: he's focused on the 1940s. What is notable that while there is an extensive bibliography in Ascent to Power he doesn't use as a resource David Pietrusza's 1948 which goes into great detail abut Harry Truman's campaign for the Presidency and basically covers much of the same material on Truman in this book. Considering how much of Roll's book deals with the majority of contemporary sources and those written decades after the fact this is a tell of the worst kind. Among its many virtues Pietruza basically deals with objective reporting never letting his own bias or his personal views illustrate his opinion of the figures involved, even though he clearly has the same respect for Truman that Roll does. The critical difference is that Pietruza focuses primarily on political histories and politics is the last thing on Roll's mind when he wants to talk about the 1948 election.

  I would find this forgivable were it not for the fact there are many places where he acknowledges the difference between the 1940s and the present day and yet still seems to feel it necessary to come down on Truman for not doing the 'right thing' even though there was no political gain to be made (and as Roll acknowledged often came at a huge cost)and even though it was out of touch with where the rest of America was at the time.  In Roll's mind feelings will always be more important than facts in some cases and its off-putting in what should be a history.

Perhaps the most glaring example of this comes with the talk of civil rights. Throughout the book Roll goes to great pains to illustrate how far ahead of most politicians at the time and certainly Southern Democrats Harry Truman was when it came to that issue.  He acknowledges how just speaking about race relations   - a position that 80 percent of Americans polled in 1947 were opposed to – was harmful to his political cause. He acknowledges that much of Truman's civil rights agenda died in Congress due to opposition from Southern Democrats and Republicans in Congress. He acknowledges that Truman's position, however timid it was by the standards of even twenty years later,  caused the 'Solid South' to break from the Democratic Party in the Dixiecrat revolt in 1948 and that it would eventually completely erode by today.  

And yet despite that he seems determined to make the argument that Truman should nevertheless have used the power of the executive order to desegregate the federal government. In this he takes on the position of so many modern progressives who truly believe that the President can just press a button and do things, something that is at odds with almost every other part of his research. The very real possibility that this might have led to mass resignations within his own government as well as even more backlash from Congress as a result that would have worked against it – something that he accurately reports happened multiple times during his first term and happened just as frequently in his second on other parts of his policy – is set aside with the simple binary moral calculus that it was the morally right thing to do. The fact that Truman did not hold views on race that Roll respects also doesn't factor into the decision that he should have done it regardless.

We see an even greater example of this kind of political naivete in the otherwise superb recounting of Harry Truman's famous 'non-political' tour of the west that officially launched his 1948 campaign. The twelve pages are superb, showing how Truman built momentum as he went, how Senator Taft denounced it as a 'whistlestop tour' that quickly backfired on him and helped Truman, how he spoke directly to the farmers with a plain style of speaking, how he made superb speeches about foreign policy and labor and how while Washington newspapers through cold water on it, some reporters began to believe in Truman.

So why does Roll add that 'Truman failed to mention civil rights at any time on his tour?" even though he says that his audience was nearly "100 percent white?"  Truman no doubt knew that there was nothing to be gained making these speeches in territory that was heavily Republican in places and certainly not the main issue for many of the people he was speaking to.  Furthermore, he had to be politically savvy enough to know just how bad things were in regard to southern support already and if he said anything too difficult on the subject it would hurt his chances for the nomination which as Roll reports completely accurately were far from guaranteed.  Why doesn't he mention it? Because he thinks his judgment his superior to Truman's in this regard.

We see the most critical difference in a long section where he writes four pages about three prominent African-Americans who he considers essential to helping Truman carry California due to minority outreach. He argues passionate that these three people never made it into any previous book about Harry Truman and while this is true and it may very well have turned the corner, I find just as telling that he chooses to deal with something far more important: the Dixiecrats.

Roll essentially argues that Thurmond's States Rights Party was something that Truman and the Democrats wrote off in the fall campaign. This is a blatant falsehood. Truman was determined to hold as much of the South as possible, particularly Texas. Texas at the time had 23 electoral votes (only 2 fewer than California) and if the Dixiecrats carried it or took enough votes away from Truman that the Republicans carried it they could very much throw the election into the House of Representatives. Governor Beauford Jester  notably chose not to attend the Dixiecrat convention on July 2^nd and used his considerable influence to make sure that Thurmond was not ranked as the Democratic nominee for President or to keep Truman off the ballot altogether (as would be the case for states like Alabama and Mississippi. Jester is mentioned in Roll's book but only in a September 26^th speech which he attends with Sam Rayburn and John Nance Garner, two notable Texas politicians. Even then it is done to point out the anti-civil rights position of the men on the podium with him and how Henry Wallace chose to recount it for the high ground.

By and large the South was solidly behind Truman mainly because states like North Carolina and Georgia believed in party unity and thought Dewey's liberal policies on civil rights (Roll leaves out how Dewey put more civil rights policies into action as Governor of New York then Truman did as President) caused them to pick Truman. He also glosses over that many thought Alben Barkley's selection as Vice President would help strengthen Truman's position in states such as Kentucky and Tennessee which they did.

In his autopsy of the election Roll finds it 'curious' that Truman chose to give more credit to labor and the farm vote for his election rather than African-American votes. He tries to gloss it over that he did this because 'he believed labor and farmers would be more useful allies than African-Americans in the coming four years."

That Roll chooses to dismiss the power of both labor and the farm movement as a moral bad as opposed to African-American votes belies his own writing. He states that there were only two African American representatives in Congress in 1948 Adam Clayton Powell and William Levi Dawson. By contrast labor and farm had immense influence on politicians in both parties and across the country. Truman was doing was most politicians must do: consider the present rather than the future.

And this brings us to one of the strangest facts of Rise to Power. This is a book about two of the greatest Presidents in history and that a large part of their success was due to the way they understood politics at every level. Yet throughout 446 pages aside from FDR and Truman he doesn't mention a lot of the representatives and senators at the time and the few critical ones he does are in odd ways.

Sam Rayburn and Joe Martin, both Speakers of the House and invaluable to getting much of the legislation passed for Truman are mentioned only eleven times, only in terms of leadership conferences. Alben Barkley, senate majority leader for both FDR and Truman is only mention six times with most of them coming when Truman named Vice President. JFK is mentioned only in his decision to affirm the veto of Taft-Hartley while LBJ is only mentioned to uphold it.

The only Senators of note mentioned are Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Taft. Vandenberg is mentioned as an ally to Truman during his foreign policy and Taft is mention in regard to being his primary force of opposition in the Senate. He gives a favorable impression to the former, no doubt because without his approval Truman would have gotten nowhere, but never how Vandenberg helped get so much of his policy through Congress over the opposition of Republicans like Taft. I have little regard for Robert Taft as a senator, to be sure, but in Roll's book he comes across as the villain of the piece.

But he also has little use for the liberals of the time. He famously mentions Hubert Humphrey's speech at the 1948 Democratic convention but in large party it has to be because he 'admonished his own party…for advocating for a mild civil rights platform." That he argues its passage let to the South defecting goes against the actual electoral results in which the South overall held. 100 of Truman's 303 electoral votes came from the South but critically this doesn't appear in the electoral results.

And its worth noting one of the few political battles he talks about is the battle for the Displaced Persons Act of 1949 . He excoriates Chapman Revercomb, an anti-Semite and anti-immigration Republican Senator for West Virginia for being the primary obstacle for that acts passage. By extension he argues that Robert Taft was an anti-Semite and conspiracy theorist as well though he doesn't state so directly. When it reaches the Senate in 1949 it comes under the heading of Pat McCarran who he thinks was even worse even though he was a Democrat.

McCarran was so conservative that he was once asks why he didn't defect to being a Republican. He answered: "I can do more good by staying in the Democratic Party and watching the lunatic fringe – the Roosevelt crowd."  McCarran was one of the worst men to ever serve in the Senate during the 21^st century but like most conservatives he had a better understand of politics then the left does.  In a sense it is the reverse of LBJ's famous dictum: "he could do more harm pissing inside the tent that pissing outside it".

And its worth noting there's one more thing that Roll looks at Truman's stump speeches in which he called Republicans "gluttons of privilege, a return of Wall Street economic dictatorship," and how they had stuck a pitchfork in the farmer's back. Roll acknowledges that 'in 1948 it would have been fair to label his farm speech and some of his others and fiery oratory emanating from a demagogue' – a statement that is preceded by "Today his extreme rhetoric and unsupported assertions would probably pass for normal campaign talk." Three guesses as to who he's referring too. And the fact that Truman is using the same kind of phrasing that criticizes Wall Street Republicans makes it clear just how harsh this was."

Pietruza doesn't modify it one bit. He quotes Richard Norton Smith:

"Truman talked about Republican bloodsuckers on Wall Street who are going to stick a pitchfork in the back of every farmer. At one point he cleverly likened Dewey with his little mustache to Hitler and the forces of fascism."

There's all the fact it was a strategy born out of weakness as another historian says: "This was a strategy borne out of weakness…because he felt he had very little left to lose. Losers break the rules. There's no point in obeying them because if you obey the unwritten rules of civility, you're going to lose anyway. So why not just do what you can?"

The problem was this did have consequences and many of them were of Truman's own making. Ignored in Roll's book is how as part of Truman's reopening Congress for 'Turnip Da' HUAC reopened hearings that would lead to Whitaker Chambers testifying before Congress about Alger Hiss  which would lead to the prominence of first term Congressman Richard Nixon. As a result of Truman's harsh demagoguery during the 1948 campaign while the Democrats did gain control of Congress those Republicans who were left now had a real axe to grind. As a result minority leader Bob Taft would be more than fine with the demagoguery of freshman Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and the soon to be freshman Senator Nixon.

It’s worth noting that Roll ends his book just after Truman is sworn in for the second time and refers to his second term with the euphemism: "It was destined to be a troubled four years." Perhaps he doesn't want to point out how much of the problems Truman brought about on his own head as a result of his behavior – or indeed that so much of the campaign demagoguery that was to follow would become part of the Republican playbook starting with Richard Nixon and continuing to this day. Truman despised Richard Nixon for many reasons – all of them justifiable – but perhaps that was a part of him who knew that Nixon was just as much a politician as he was, that he knew just how to rouse a crowd with the same rhetoric and that hie played an indirect but critical role in his rise to power.

Looking at how Roll interprets political events I can't help but be reminded that his style reminds one of Dewey who famously ran his entire campaign as if politics were beneath him, barely worth talking about while campaigning for President. Harry Truman was a great president, for all his flaws, because he understood politics the way the best Presidents and all elected officials must by necessity to have long and successful careers. Truman understood that power comes from the people and that politics is about building coalitions and without the vote you are powerless.  For all his appreciation and admiration for Harry Truman, it's telling that Roll is either unwilling or unable to grasp that simple fact in Ascent to Power – something that the Man From Missouri would not hesitate to give Roll hell for.