The United States, for all its virtues, has had a history troubled by dark episodes. There certainly wasn't much glory to be spread around during the massacre of the Indians native to the continent. And for all its fetishizing, the Civil War was a conflict between the interests of powerful elites who cared about money far more than they cared about justice. But for all that there are periods in which all countries wish that they had been better, there are times when corruption is so systemic, when those with whom one does business are so universally dirty, that a dark outcome is inevitable. James K. Polk, the president who essentially delivered unto the United States the whole of the Southwest, was a product of this corrupted environment. Mr. Merry, a historian, encapsulates the Polk presidency, its wars, its policies and its times. And in doing so, he captures a man who did more to shape modern America than many who have followed him.
From a gruesome operation he endured as a child, to the awesome challenges he faced as President, life never seemed to come easy to James Polk. Born into the slaveholding South to relatively prosperous parents, a sharp mind and his keen ambition carried him to the White House in 1844, only three administrations prior to Abraham Lincoln's. Mr. Merry's steady hand paints a portrait of a pragmatic president who, charged by a belief in the uniqueness of America, was eager to secure his nation's prosperity both economically and militarily. Though Mr. Merry touches on some of his fiscal policies, much of this work is dominated by Polk's maneuverings which provoked a war with Mexico, a war that, at a cost of considerable lives, proved to be decisive for America. After all the bloodshed, the northern victors annexed from Mexico and Spain territory from Texas to California, more or less defining the modern boundaries of the country. But as much as we learn about Polk's machinations to establish his vision of an American future, we also learn a great deal about the man himself. For he was an accidental president, a clever politician who capitalized on the slim window of his opportunity to imprint upon his nation his dream for the future. In this way, though we can find his maneuverings contemptable by today's standards, he was admirably driven to succeed in a world that never paid him the heed he probably deserved.
Though Mr. Merry's work here is on the dry side of the historical divide between factual and entertaining, there's no shortage of earth-shaking events to cover. He does spend the majority of his time chronicling Polk, but frequent detours into the minds of Polk's contemporary Mexican adversaries are sobering and edifying. For while one may be quick to criticize Polk for his expantionist policies, Mexico of the 1840s was hardly stable or virtuous. And it is in this way that we come to understand the extent to which this most dogged of American presidents was the right man for a dark moment. We may lament the dangerous precedent he set in putting the aims of his nation above the rights and freedoms of his enemies, but there's no question that he did a great deal to set the United States on a course for wealth and destiny. Mr. Merry tells it well. (3/5 Stars)
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