Walter Stahr's Stanton

[Tom Bogar]

As I slogged through the 543 pages of text (743 pp. overall) in Walter Stahr’s Stanton, I kept thinking of David McCullough’s words, “No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.” Because what surprised me most was how many times during my reading I put it down and did not look forward to picking it up again, despite its events occurring in an era of great personal interest. It felt at times like a homework assignment. On the plus side, Stahr has no axe to grind, and applies a lawyer’s objectivity (a two-edged sword, also yielding dullness) to assess evidence—every piece and word of every letter, telegram, and news item. Stanton is an even-handed book, neither a hagiography nor a vilification, and Stahr walks the careful line of impartiality. His cogent, yet verbose legal briefs of each event and situation were certainly thorough, but left me asking, where is the sense of the man? Chronology alone (he did x, then he did y, then he did z) does not generate interest for, or understanding of, or empathy for, the inner man, his psyche, his motivations, his feelings, his conflicts, his quiet torment. While Stahr justly refrains from the taboo of putting words and thoughts into Stanton’s mouth and head (as far too many “historians” have done, blithely violating the canon), it would be more compelling if he drew a few inferences now and then (it would be okay to say, “By doing x, Stanton was displaying his y, or negating his earlier, compulsive z”). As the page totals might suggest, many paragraphs simply go on too long. I found myself skimming one out of every two or three paragraphs and still following events (I almost wrote “the narrative,” but a narrative implies something more absorbing). In many a paragraph, the final sentence, instead of summarizing or providing meaning or insight, adds an additional, tedious (and not necessarily relevant) new detail. In olden days of publishing, an editor’s swift sword would have held sway. Just because an author’s research assistants (and there were apparently quite a few, from the acknowledgments) dug out copious facts, doesn’t mean every one of them has to be included. I found myself saying over and over, “Synthesize, man, synthesize! Paraphrase instead of quoting at length.” And yet, I must admit, if Stahr’s purpose was to provide the definitive Stanton biography, this may well be it, and it may be my own bias against too-dry, overly-long academic works that kept me from enjoying it as much as I wanted to (I really did).