{"id":766,"date":"2012-09-21T06:57:12","date_gmt":"2012-09-21T06:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/?p=766"},"modified":"2014-01-04T07:08:39","modified_gmt":"2014-01-04T07:08:39","slug":"book-review-politician-extraordinaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/2012\/09\/21\/book-review-politician-extraordinaire\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Politician Extraordinaire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Politician Extraordinaire: The Tempestuous Life and Times of Martin L. Davey.\u00a0<\/em>By Frank P. Vazzano. (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2008. xiv, 322 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 978-0-87338-920-4.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Nearly all Ohioans are at least somewhat familiar with the Davey Tree Expert Company and its ubiquitous green trucks.\u00a0 But few are aware that Martin L. Davey, the son of the company\u2019s founder, served in a number of political offices, most notably the Ohio governorship from 1935 to 1939.\u00a0 Seeking to rectify this gap in the collective knowledge, historian Frank P. Vazzano, who calls Davey \u201cthe most interesting man I\u2019ve never met,\u201d has produced a masterfully-written biography of the state\u2019s fifty-third governor.\u00a0\u00a0 He draws upon a voluminous collection of primary sources, including contemporary news accounts, Davey Company records, and government documents from the local, state, and national levels to paint a colorful portrait of a controversial man.\u00a0 Unfortunately, as well-written and thoroughly-researched as this book is, readers may disagree that Martin L. Davey was in any way extraordinary.\u00a0 On the contrary, what emerges from the pages is a stereotypical portrait of a cynical politician: an ambitious job-seeker climbing the political ladder \u2013 vain, hypocritical, self-aggrandizing, and not above employing \u201cmean\u201d campaign tactics, to use the author\u2019s term.<\/p>\n

The Martin L. Davey portrayed in the early chapters of Vazzano\u2019s book is actually quite admirable.\u00a0 Born in 1884 in Kent, Ohio, Davey grew up in poverty, as his father, John, \u201cfar more a dreamer than a realist\u201d (4), struggled to transform the craft of tree surgery into a respectable profession and profitable business.\u00a0 The family moved from house to house, and Davey suffered the taunts of schoolmates who considered the elder Davey little more than an eccentric.\u00a0 This hard upbringing fostered in Davey a spirit of independence and self-reliance.\u00a0 He worked to help the family survive, most notably by going door-to-door selling his father\u2019s book,\u00a0The Tree Doctor<\/em>.\u00a0 During his late teens Davey sold typewriters in Cleveland, and Vazzano makes it clear that the skills at salesmanship and \u201csizing up\u201d prospective customers which he honed at this time would later serve him effectively during his campaigns for public office.\u00a0 Forced to drop out of Oberlin College to help manage the fast-growing Davey Company, Martin Davey also developed a fascination with politics; his admiration for William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson drew him to the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n

Davey\u2019s first political victory came in 1913 when, at age 29, he won election as mayor of Kent.\u00a0 One questions whether Davey was really a \u201cBoy Wonder,\u201d as Vazzano dubs him.\u00a0 The improvements he oversaw, such as the construction of a modern sewage plant, were typical of dozens of Ohio cities during the Progressive Era, and Davey actually fulfilled few of his promises and quickly tired of the low-paying, mundane position.\u00a0 After an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1914, Davey won election to the House of Representatives in 1918.\u00a0 His term was distinguished by his Red-baiting and support for the excesses of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer during the post-war crackdown on radicals.\u00a0 Davey joined the fray by introducing a draconian anti-leftist sedition bill which went nowhere in Congress.\u00a0 He also supported immigration restrictions, despite being the son of an immigrant himself.\u00a0 In his unsuccessful reelection bid in 1920, Davey ran newspaper ads boasting that he was \u201cvirile\u201d and \u201c100% American,\u201d even though he had dodged the World War I draft.<\/p>\n

Davey again won election to the House in 1922, serving Ohio\u2019s Fourteenth Congressional District for six more years.\u00a0 Despite his conviction that \u201cthe gutter appeal of anti-Catholicism\u201d was \u201cwicked and detestable\u201d (70), Davey balked at the opportunity to denounce Ohio\u2019s powerful Ku Klux Klan during his 1924 reelection bid because, as Vazzano tells it, \u201cdoing so might jeopardize his chances for reelection\u201d (125). \u00a0Davey did little of substance during his second tenure in the House, save for a widely-ridiculed government reorganization bill he introduced in 1925.\u00a0 What most distinguished Martin Davey\u2019s congressional career was his appalling attendance record, as his continued oversight of the Davey Tree Expert Company necessitated constant travel between Washington and Kent.\u00a0 \u201cIn seven years,\u201d Vazzano notes, Davey \u201chad missed more than five hundred roll calls out of a thousand\u201d (272).\u00a0 Little wonder, then, that Davey remained \u201cbetter known as a tree man than as a congressman\u201d (128).\u00a0 He left Congress in 1929 after an unsuccessful bid for Ohio\u2019s governorship, during which he once again resisted pleas from party officials to denounce the KKK.<\/p>\n

After struggling to keep the family business financially viable during the early years of the Great Depression, Martin Davey won the governorship in 1934 and 1936, victories made possible in large part by the coattails of Franklin Roosevelt, a man whose domestic policies he detested.\u00a0 What ensued were four brutish years marked by Davey\u2019s juvenile temper, vindictiveness, and general lack of tact.\u00a0 He carried on a public feud with New Deal officials over the disbursement of relief funds, and squabbled with just about everyone else on a regular basis.\u00a0 Davey\u2019s clumsy mishandling of the 1937 Little Steel Strike alienated organized labor, one of the Democratic Party\u2019s most loyal constituencies.\u00a0 He fought off charges \u2013 well founded charges \u2013 of graft and corruption in his administration, even as he exacted revenge on old political foes and became abusive of subordinates.\u00a0 Vazzano observes that \u201cnothing energized Martin more than the prospect of a mean, drag-out fight\u201d (240), and therein lays the problem: Davey was a volatile politician, but never a statesman.\u00a0 Fittingly, his own party rejected him in the 1938 primary.\u00a0 Nominated again in 1940, Davey suffered an overwhelming defeat to incumbent governor John W. Bricker.\u00a0 He spent the remaining six years of his life overseeing the Davey Company and sending mean-spirited letters to Bricker.<\/strong><\/p>\n

To his credit Vazzano, despite his fascination with Davey, presents a very balanced account of his life, leveling criticism when warranted.\u00a0 The book is meticulously researched, and Vazzano\u2019s writing is nothing short of first-rate.\u00a0 He does a superb job of placing Davey\u2019s political experiences in perspective with thorough explanations and analyses of state and national politics in the 1920s and 1930s.\u00a0 On a negative note, Vazzano, who confesses to being an \u201cunabashed storyteller,\u201d occasionally includes too much superfluous detail, such as his three-page-long account of the 1924 Democratic Convention.\u00a0 There are other examples of this needless wordiness throughout the narrative; this book could have been condensed a great deal and still have been every bit as effective, perhaps more so.\u00a0 Another minor criticism concerns Vazzano\u2019s secondary sources, which are terribly dated, no doubt the products of his original research conducted over four decades ago.\u00a0 These include a forty-plus-year-old biography of J. Edgar Hoover, Calvin Coolidge\u2019s 1928 autobiography, and even a 1970 survey-level history textbook.\u00a0 There are newer, much better sources available, and it would have taken minimal effort to do some updating.<\/p>\n

In the end, although Vazzano is right to call Davey a \u201cvery, very interesting man\u201d(x), it is questionable just how significant a political figure he really was.\u00a0 Although he lived through some of the most critical and tumultuous times in American history, Davey did very little to shape them; Ohio and the nation at large were little affected by Martin L. Davey.\u00a0 Where he did leave his mark, it was a negative, even ugly one.\u00a0 Vazzano\u2019s narrative provides very little to like about Davey, but plenty to dislike.\u00a0 Still, this is a very important book, as it fills a void in the history of Ohio politics, and is the only book-length scholarly study of Martin L. Davey.\u00a0 It is a welcome addition to the literature on Ohio politics in the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

Arthur E. DeMatteo<\/strong><\/em>
\nGlenville State College<\/strong><\/em><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Politician Extraordinaire: The Tempestuous Life and Times of Martin L. Davey.\u00a0By Frank P. Vazzano. (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2008. xiv, 322 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 978-0-87338-920-4.) Nearly all Ohioans are at least somewhat familiar with the Davey Tree Expert Company and its ubiquitous green trucks.\u00a0 But few are aware that Martin L. … Continue reading Book Review: Politician Extraordinaire<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1622,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39894],"tags":[41837,41894,41902,41898,18770],"class_list":["post-766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-volume-7-issue-1-fall-2012","tag-7-1","tag-arthur-dematteo","tag-davey-tree-expert-company","tag-martin-l-davey","tag-review"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1622"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=766"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":782,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions\/782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}