Henry Clay: The Essential American by DAVID S. HEIDLER; JEANNE T. HEIDLERReview by: WALTER RUSSELL MEADForeign Affairs, Vol. 89, No. 5 (September/October 2010), p. 159Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20788670 .

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Recent Books

sunny uplands of the academy to the meat grinder of history. Meanwhile, this document provides helpful insight into the mindset of the Obama administration in its early days. Although it contains

what many will feel is an unseemly num

ber of disparaging references to the last

administration, in its transformational

and Wilsonian ambitions (on issues such as nonproliferation), it is a document the Bush team can admire. Judging from the evidence here, the current adminis

tration shares the neoconservative belief

that the world is ready to be fundamen

tally reshaped under U.S. leadership; the Obamans disagree violently with the Bushies on the nature of the reshaping and the tactics required to get there, but there is little sign here that the admin istration plans to draw in the United States' horns.

Henry Clay: The Essential American, by david s. heidler and jeanne t.

heidler. Random House, 2010,

624 pp. $30.00.

Henry Clay is not only an also-ran in

nineteenth-century presidential politics; today, he is an also-ran in American

political memory. One of the triumvirate

of statesmen (along with his colleagues and rivals John Calhoun and Daniel

Webster) who competed with Andrew

Jackson and one another to dominate

the political stage between the War of 1812 and the Compromise of 1850, Clay (like Calhoun and Webster) never be came president but seemed greater and

more consequential than many of the rel

ative nonentities who occupied the White House in those years. Clay was a polariz

ing figure; revered by some and loathed

by others, he was the chief spirit of the

Whig Party and a great advocate of what he called the American system of high tariffs, designed to build a world-class industrial economy in the United States.

Historians have a hard time making him a compelling figure, and although the Heidlers have written a useful and

clarifying account that is a pleasure to

read, they have not created the kind of

electrifying biography of Clay that could

explain his appeal and importance to the twenty-first century. Until that book is written, this one will serve readers as a sound introduction to a major

American figure.

Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction, by

Walter nugent. Oxford University Press, 2009,160 pp. $11.95.

Nugent s book accomplishes three im

portant things in very few pages. First, it provides an irreproachable and clear

summary of the conventional view of

the American Progressive movement and

its historical importance. Second, it shows that a serious scholar can produce a short book that is well written and makes its points effectively and com

pletely. The world needs more books like this one, and Oxford University Press

should be commended for producing this series of "very short introductions."

Finally, Progressivism shows the limits of the conventional approach to the

Progressive movement. Nugent is too

close to the Progressives to see them

whole; like most treatments of the move

ment, his book is written in part to pass the torch on to new generations. Although there is much to honor in Progressive history, upper-middle-class white pro

gressivism (in both its northern and southern wings) had a much more complex

FOREIGN AFFAIRS ? September/October2010 [159]

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