The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 74, July 1970 - April, 1971 Page: 578

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

secret service, and the Army to justify his original mistake in dismiss-
ing the men from the service without a trial. His behavior went far
beyond the limits of propriety and the constitutional prerogatives of
his office. The biased, dictatorial, petty Roosevelt that emerges from
the narrative is an unpleasant corrective to the usual picture of the
man. One suspects that the author may have come closer to the truth.
At the same time Weaver rehabilitates in convincing fashion the
soldiers' most ardent defender, Senator Joseph B. Foraker of Ohio.
Normally no friend of reform, the senator may well have been too
close to some large corporations, but he also retained some vestiges
of the commitment of the Civil War generation in the North to the
idea of human equality. This prompted him to champion the cause
of the Negro soldiers. Like Foraker, Weaver was not satisfied with
society's judgment on Brownsville and his sobering book should, at
long last, enable history to bring in an honest verdict.
University of Texas, Austin LEWIs L. GOULD
Talks on Texas Books. By Walter Prescott Webb. Edited by Llerena
Friend. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1970. Pp. 94.
$6.00.)
The old truism that a biographer usually reveals less about his
subject than about himself is doubly true in the case of the book
reviewer. Over the years the reviewer bares his ideals about ethics,
scholarship, literary quality, the proper purpose of writing, philosophy
of history-even his evaluation of his own role in society. All become
public knowledge. In this collection of book reviews written by Walter
Prescott Webb in the early stage of his scholarly development, Llerena
Friend has provided a finely ground and polished lens, enabling us
to penetrate the secret hopes, dreams, and ideals of the great historian
and teacher. Miss Friend's bibliographic essay, in spite of her dis-
claimer, presents a sensitive and succinct biography of Webb's intel-
lectual development to the 193o's. Indeed, the book supplies strong
supporting evidence for Webb's own belief regarding the expansion
of his intellect, as he put it, "from a hard-packed West Texas door-
yard to the outer limits of the Western World." The book is best read
in conjunction with Webb's Presidential Address to the American His-
torical Association, in American Historical Review, XLIV (January,
1959), 265-281.

578