About the Author

Jean Harvey Baker is the author of many books on nineteenth-century American history. She is a professor of history at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.

Reviews

"A valuable study of one of the most frustratingly elusive figures of mid-century American politics, rich in political anecdote but rigorously analytical." -- Michael Kenney - Boston Globe "A vivid portrait... It is a great American story." -- Baltimore Sun "Scrupulous and perceptive." -- Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post Book World

Baker (history, Goucher Coll.) skillfully combines traditional, individual-based biography with social history to tell the story of the Stevensons, the first family of moderate American liberalism. Focusing on the family's most famous member, Adlai E. Stevenson II, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956, the author also gives much attention to Adlai E. Stevenson I, his grandfather and Grover Cleveland's vice president in 1892, and to Letitia, the first Stevenson's wife and an early feminist and advocate of education for women. Adlai Stevenson II appears as a two-dimensional person, but this has less to do with Baker's fine writing than with Stevenson himself, who was a man "for the people, not of them." Stevenson's appeal as Democratic standard-bearer was due to his loyalty, wit, anti-McCarthyism, and negotiating skills-certainly not to his gradualism and lukewarm stand on civil rights. As ambassador to the United Nations, he was an outsider during the Kennedy-Johnson era. Politically, Stevenson was derided by the powerful advocates of the muscular liberalism that pervaded the Cold War era. This fascinating tale is strongly recommended for large collections and merits consideration for smaller collections.-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, Pa.