Fortune's Fool

[L Verge]

I have read about 130 pages of Fortune's Fool and have one thing to say: If Terry had only written this book forty years ago, he could have saved me hundreds of dollars buying so many books to get all the information that he has covered in just the first 3-4 chapters.

He has taken one-liners or two paragraphs that you find in the standard telling of the story and added so much more information -- and so many more primary sources. And he shows the good side of the man, even when Lincoln wins in 1860. This is really a character development study of a man who was shaped by his times and his acquaintances, and his love for his country. We'll see what the post-assassination chapters portray him as...

One chapter really impressed me, and it dealt with massive details about Booth's service during the John Brown situation. He didn't go along for entertainment, he actually worked, mainly in helping the quartermaster get supplies and food for the men and beasts of the Richmond Grays. I don't remember any Booth author giving so much time and attention to the details.

Terry writes with an easy, flowing style in chronological order. No skipping back and forth from one topic to the other to prove a point, which has driven me crazy with some authors. You'll even love the creativity of his chapter titles.

No wonder it took about 25 years for Terry to finish this book. I used to get very frustrated with him for taking so long and for not sharing anything juicy with me! I now understand why.

I know that he has another subject in mind for a book. He better get started and work a little faster this time 'cause I don't have 25 years left in me!!

[LincolnToddFan]

One thing I have learned from others who have read "Fortune's Fool" is that as a child, Booth like to torture and kill the neighborhood cats.

For fun.

[L Verge]

That story has been around for awhile, and Fortune's Fool verifies it. I didn't like that trait either, but I'm not sure that it was for fun. He also killed a farmer's stray sow that wandered onto the farm and a dog that was disturbing his farm. Overall, however, most people remarked that he was an animal lover. Terry includes at least one story of Booth finding a mother cat and kittens caught outside in bad weather and taking them to his landlady at the time for shelter until good homes could be found. Shades of Mr. Lincoln.

[Susan Higginbotham]

I finished my copy last night. I too found the part about Booth at John Brown's hanging to be fascinating--previous books I had read suggested he was there at best as a hanger-on and at worst as a nuisance.

[RJNorton]

Here is an excellent article by Jennifer Schuessler in the New York Times. Many familiar names are mentioned.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/books/....html?_r=1

[Eva Elisabeth]

Thanks, Roger.
Sorry for lacking linguistic style, but it nails it - that's just cool, cool, cool!!!!
"That research included nearly 25 years in libraries and archives, but also something more unusual: ...immersion in the world of the Boothies."
WONDERFUL the forum, Laurie, and Dave are honored in the NYT - such a big international newspaper!!!!!

[DKEast]

Mentioning this forum and quoting Dave and Ms Verge. Well done! Also catch the op-ed piece in todays Times too by Martha Hodes.

[LincolnToddFan]

As far as newspapers go, it doesn't get more prestigious than the NYT. Wonderful shout out!

[L Verge]

(04-14-2015 07:00 AM)DKEast Wrote:  Mentioning this forum and quoting Dave and Ms Verge. Well done! Also catch the op-ed piece in todays Times too by Martha Hodes.

Martha Hodes is one that I wish I had known about when lining up our speakers for this past conference in March. It seemed like all of a sudden her name and book's title popped onto radar out of nowhere.

[Rsmyth]

I have been reading FF a little each night before bed and I have to say the author is not just a great historian/research, he is a writer! Great job!

[Wild Bill]

At last! After 150 years, the first full-fledged biography of John Wilkes Booth, the notorious assassin of America’s greatest and best loved president, Abraham Lincoln, has appeared to sate and even titillate the inquiring minds of historian and history buff alike. We now have a more thorough understanding of Booth that fills much of what was lacking heretofore in the Lincoln Assassination story. Or so claims Booth’s erstwhile modern biographer, historian Terry Alford.

Nearly twenty-five years in the making, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth (Oxford University Press, 2015), is a prodigious study that fills the gaps in the famous actor’s existence that confirms him as a prime character in American infamy for all time. Lacking a comprehensive collection of papers, the few of which are sadly and seldom revealing to the scholar and reader alike, author Alford was forced to rely on the recollections of those who knew Booth during his lifetime. But, in the end, the meticulous search for Booth materials has proved tremendously rewarding, as Alford separates fact from rumor and legend to reveal what Leopold von Ranke, one of the originators of the original German Ph.D. program of the late nineteenth century, proclaimed as “Geschichte . . . wie es eigenlich gewesen ist” --history as it really was.

Professor Alford traces Booth from birth as the illegitimate ninth child of the actor, Junius Booth, Sr., who was the best-acclaimed Shakespearian of the pre-Civil War period, to his own interpretation known as the 'blood and thunder' version. An eccentric like his father in private life, John Wilkes Booth was reputed to be the handsomest man in America, with a girl (both married and unmarried) in every theater town, with a vicious temper, which often revealed him actually to be a man of very sensitive nature; a man who disliked Abraham Lincoln from his election onward and condemned him as a monarch and tyrant worse than King George III of American Revolution notoriety; a cooperator in 1860, gradually transforming his politics to secession by 1864 and a wish to join the Confederacy in the last ditch, leading to tyrannicide less than a year later, Booth is revealed in all his complexities as a citizen, spy, and political man.
Alford presents Booth as less intelligent than Michael W. Kauffman, who in his American Brutus, sees him as versed enough in conspiracy law to entrap all of his co-conspirators and make their testimony hearsay under law as it was read then, or this reviewer, who in Sic Semper Tyrannis, sees him as familiar with pre-war Southern political philosophy so as to embody it in his undelivered Philadelphia speech of 1860. On the other hand, Professor Alford agrees with Kauffman in that Booth operated more as a lone wolf, rather than an active spy funded and backed by Confederate secret service operatives working out of the massive Rebel program in Canada, as posited by William A. Tidwell, James O. Hall, and David W. Gaddy in their opus, Come Retribution, and dramatized by this reviewer in The Last Confederate Heroes.

Yet for all the excellence that historian Alford has produced in this magisterial volume of the complete or quintessential Booth, something is missing. What is absent is Booth as a completely sane nineteenth century romantic, imbued with commonplace Southern political philosophies and ideas of the agrarian Founding Fathers of the United States before Lincoln changed all that to the new industrialism of the postwar eras. Alford’s Booth is a twenty-first century characterization created by an historian who tries to live up to v. Ranke’s ideal, but just misses the mark.
In reality, Fortune’s Fool is John Wilkes Booth portrayed as a modern politically correct fan of Abraham Lincoln sees him. It used to be said that so much is missing from the Booth life as to really require he be written up as a piece of historical fiction. Many, as revealed by historians Constance Head (“John Wilkes Booth in American Fiction,” Lincoln Herald, 82 [Winter 1980], 455-62) and Steven G. Miller (“John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Assassination in Recent Fiction,” Surratt Courier, 29 [June 2004), 4-9) have done so. As popular historian, Jill Lepore (“Just the Facts, Ma’am: Fake Memoirs, Factual Fictions, and the History of History,” The New Yorker, [March 24, 2008], 79-83) “History matters, but the best novels boast a kind of truth that even the best history books can never claim.”

Alford’s research has filled those gaps in our knowledge. Now we have all the facts we need, but presented in the wrong framework. It is black historian and critic of Lincoln as president, Lerone Bennett, Jr., who provides the reality of current Lincoln scholarship. He points out that there is a veritable modern Lincoln Historical Machine--he calls its advocates Lincolnites or Lincolnologists--that warps most of the historical interpretation of our sixteenth president into an acute case of Lincolnitis, or apotheosis through the Cult of Saint Lincoln.

Bennett and his ideas are too casually dismissed by Lincolnites as “a historical hobby-horse.” (Michael Burkhimer quoting Gabor Boritt in “The Lincoln Assassination as a Rebuttal to the Bennett Thesis,” Surratt Courier, 26 [October 2001], 4-9). But already Fortune’s Fool is praised as being “so deeply researched and persuasively argued that it should stand as the standard portrait for years.” (Harold Holtzer, Wall Street Journal, Bookshelf, March 27, 2015). All deserved praise aside, as Jennifer Schuessler points out in the New York Times (April 14, 2015, p. C1), Alford’s book really does not end the various arguments about Booth’s character, “let alone the larger one over the meaning of Booth’s act.”

That is because, in the end, Alford is essentially writing about Abraham Lincoln, not John Wilkes Booth. As one contemporary put it, “None of you who judged [Booth] knew him.” Unfortunately, in spite of Alford’s admirable study, we still don’t.

[Gene C]

I take it, you didn't care for the book? (I haven't read it)

This question, not just for Bill to answer.
How do you think it compares to "My Thoughts Be Bloody" by Nora Titone? (I did read and enjoyed this one)

l

[Thomas Thorne]

I found Wild Bill's review of Alford's book most interesting but I believe his attempts to make Booth a deep political thinker do not fit the man. I have yet to encounter an acquaintance or friend of JWB who was struck by the profundity of his political thought.

Booth would have been delighted at today's campus idiocy of seeking to suppress speech that upsets listeners of certain political points of view as he sought to do in his "Allow Me" speech draft in which he equated the advocacy of abolition to an actual John Brown type insurrection.

It is true that Terry Alford has not solved the mystery of John Wilkes Booth but he has provided much useful information that will permits his readers to draw their own conclusions and will stimulate further studies of the man.

For me the question was why did not John Wilkes Booth with the opinions he shared with hundreds of thousands of Americans in 1861 join the Confederate armed forces? If he had, he might have died of disease or been killed in battle. He might have been survived-crippled or not- and gone home to family and friends with the magnificent prose of Robert E Lee's farewell to the Army of Northern Virginia:

"You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed, and I earnestly pray that a merciful God will extend to you his blessing and protection.

With an unceasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your Country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous consideration for myself, I bid you an affectionate farewell."
R.E.LEE

Booth's justification for not enlisting in the Confederate Army-he did not want to break his mother's heart -does not ring true. Mary Ann's Booth's sentiments were shared by the majority of American mothers whose sons believed that it was their patriotic duty to serve their country.

We are told that in 1911 a pacifist Kansas woman broke down and sobbed when her son joined the army. Fortunately, Dwight D Eisenhower was made of sterner stuff than John Wilkes Booth.

Tom

[L Verge]

"It is true that Terry Alford has not solved the mystery of John Wilkes Booth but he has provided much useful information that will permits his readers to draw their own conclusions and will stimulate further studies of the man."

Excellent point, Tom, and who will ever solve the mystery of John Wilkes Booth (without the ability to talk with the man directly)? If research and published works like Mad Booths, American Gothic, American Brutus, Fool's Fortune, Blood on the Moon, and My Thoughts Be Bloody don't give you excellent insights into Booth, you haven't been paying attention, imo.

As far as Ike's mother - My father was career military; he never wanted a son. This was in the day of the draft and few women in the military. He did not want to send any son into war.

[LincolnToddFan]

[
Bennett and his ideas are too casually dismissed by Lincolnites as “a historical hobby-horse.” (Michael Burkhimer quoting Gabor Boritt in “The Lincoln Assassination as a Rebuttal to the Bennett Thesis,” Surratt Courier, 26 [October 2001], 4-9). But already Fortune’s Fool is praised as being “so deeply researched and persuasively argued that it should stand as the standard portrait for years.” (Harold Holtzer, Wall Street Journal, Bookshelf, March 27, 2015). All deserved praise aside, as Jennifer Schuessler points out in the New York Times (April 14, 2015, p. C1), Alford’s book really does not end the various arguments about Booth’s character, “let alone the larger one over the meaning of Booth’s act.”

That is because, in the end, Alford is essentially writing about Abraham Lincoln, not John Wilkes Booth. As one contemporary put it, “None of you who judged [Booth] knew him.” Unfortunately, in spite of Alford’s admirable study, we still don’t.]// quote

But we can say the same thing about any controversial, much studied figure of history, can we not?

I grew up reading Lerone Bennett's essays in EBONY and JET magazine. I agree that his conclusions about Lincoln's "race problem" have been too easily dismissed by Lincoln scholars and many in the so-called "Cult of Lincoln".

My problem with Mr. Bennett is his "baby with the bathwater" dismissal of the idea of any type of complexity, growth, or nuance in President Lincoln's attitudes toward race and slavery from his beginnings in the Indiana/Kentucky backwoods to his tenure as president. The man was an enigma and a puzzle to many, including me. It's what drives a lot of the fascination toward him. Because he attended minstrel shows and used the "n word" does not make his sincere and profound belief that slavery is wrong moot. It does not mean that because he was not convinced that Blacks were his social and intellectual equals renders meaningless his belief that they did deserve to live as free men in a country that had been founded on democratic principles.

Bennett is offended, stridently so, because he felt that Lincoln talked the talk but did not walk the walk. But what about his treatment of another man that I admire, Martin Luther King Jr.? Bennett's 1969 hagiography of Dr. King ("What Manner of Man?") was published long before some rather jolting revelations about King's personal life entered the public domain. But when they did become public, Bennett evinced no offense or disappointment toward this idolized, iconographic figure, like he did when his bubble was burst about Lincoln(a man he had formerly admired). In fact, when African Americans like the late Ralph Abernathy and recently Professor Michael Eric Dyson wrote books that went into painful detail about REVEREND King's prodigious extra-marital activities and some of his unflattering comments about Black women, I don't remember so much as a peep from Bennett.

It's an example of the type of selective hagiography that I can't understand.

Neither King nor Lincoln were perfect men, worthy of worship. I can be inspired by the courage and eloquence and greatness of these two men while accepting dichotomy, sometimes quite troubling, in the characters of both.

As for Booth? I admit that I have not gotten around to the Alford book yet. But I have read a lot about him, including Michael Kauffman's classic "American Brutus". He was charismatic, manipulative, charming, beautiful to look at. But if there was any depth to him besides his violent racism and his conviction that Southern culture was superior to that of the North I haven't been made aware of it yet.