Vol. 145: Biographer’s beef

My problem with Ron Chernow

To paraphrase a line from The Sound of Music, how do you solve a problem like Ron Chernow?

For 35 years, this prolific author has churned out a seemingly endless series of hefty popular biographies of famous men, none of which, as far as I can tell, plows any new ground, but all of which have been snapped up by his loyal following and anointed by mainstream awards committees while more authoritative academic works are overlooked.

Chernow’s The House of Morgan (1990) won the National Book Award for non-fiction. His Washington: A Life (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His biographies of John D. Rockefeller (1998) and Ulysses S. Grant (2017) were listed by the New York Times among the ten best books of their respective years. And of course, his Alexander Hamilton (2004), was adapted by Lin-Manuel Miranda into a Tony award-winning hip-hop musical, Hamilton, which opened on Broadway in 2015.

Just this month, the National Constitution Center conferred its Liberty Medal (and with it a $100,000 prize) upon Hamilton— the book and the show together— which the Center’s president, Jeffrey Rosen, pronounced one of the “most influential works of American history.” Rosen explained that “the most exciting thing is seeing young kids who have got the fire of learning about history because of the musical– you see it in their eyes… When people come to Signers’ Hall, which is our most inspiring space, with life-size statues of the framers, everyone walks up to Hamilton first.”

A ‘thigh man’

Sigh. The challenge of kindling the interest of young Americans (not to mention many grownups) in America’s colonial history is nothing to be sneered at. But for serious adults, many of Chernow’s works seem superficial at best.

Toward the end of Alexander Hamilton, Chernow calls his protagonist “a fervent abolitionist.” But as Eric Foner, a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, has observed, anti-slavery “was low down on Hamilton’s list of priorities compared to other things,” including “uniting this nation, which required compromise on slavery.”

In You Never Forget Your First, a recent feminist biography of George Washington, Alexis Coe singles Chernow out as the leader of what she calls “The Thigh Men of Dad History,” that is, male historians who write history about men for men. To Coe, their reflexive focus on Washington’s stereotypical masculinity means that they neglect other things that are more important, like his shortcomings, his contradictions, and the texture of 18th-Century life. She provides a devastating sampling of Chernow’s descriptions of Washington’s mother Mary, which include: “self-centered,” “querulous,” “crude,” “coarse,” “hypocritical,” “slovenly,” “strangely indifferent,” “crusty” and “complainer.”

As for Chernow’s latest work, Mark Twain (2025), Dwight Garner in the New York Times suggests that Chernow “misses the man William Faulkner called ‘the father of American literature’ almost entirely. He demonstrates little feeling for the deeper and least domesticated regions of Twain’s art, or for the literary context of his era. His book is an endurance test, one that skimps on the things that formed Twain and made him the most lucid, profound, unpredictable, and irascibly witty American of his time. Hardy will be the souls who tour this air-conditioned edifice all the way through and glimpse the exit sign.”

The wrong Drexel

I confess, as you may have guessed already, that I have a dog in this fight. My biography of the 19^th-Century banker Anthony J. Drexel, The Man Who Made Wall Street, was published in 2001 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Drexel is perhaps best remembered as the Philadelphia banker who in 1871 summoned the young J. Pierpont Morgan to his Philadelphia home and persuaded that confused and depressed young New Yorker to enter a partnership with the Drexels.

Thus began a legendary banking powerhouse that reorganized corporate America, financed the great railroads of the East— the Pennsylvania and the New York Central— and bailed out the U.S. government during the Panic of 1895 and the New York Stock Exchange during the Panic of 1907. Anthony Drexel remained J.P. Morgan’s mentor and senior partner right up until Drexel’s death in 1893. At that time, Morgan wrote to Drexel’s daughter, “He was the best friend I have ever had in every way.”

But this was not at all the story Chernow told in The House of Morgan (1990). He did not explore the critical question of why J.P. Morgan went into business with Drexel rather than with his own father. To the extent that Chernow’s book mentions my man Drexel at all, he provides this flat assertion: “From a personal standpoint, the Drexel-Morgan match wasn’t smooth.” Chernow appears to have based this erroneous conclusion on a single piece of evidence: the banker Joseph Seligman’s description of Pierpont Morgan as “a rough, uncouth fellow, continually quarreling with Drexel in the office.” Apparently Chernow was unaware that the Drexel to whom Seligman referred was not Anthony (whom Morgan revered) but Anthony’s younger brother Joseph (whom Morgan despised.)

Who wins awards?

It’s that kind of book, a seemingly endless litany of loans, deals, crises, and scandals, all trees and no forest, that are never compellingly linked, except by the fact that they concern people or companies whose names are Morgan. It’s like reading a book that devotes equal space to Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and his son Robert’s law firm. But it won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction.

As I observed in my own memoir, The Education of a Journalist (2022), more than 1 million books are now published in the U.S. every year. Given the diversity of human tastes and the limitations of time, how could members of any award committee presume to read some 300 nominated works, many of them large and complex, much less reach some consensus as to which is best? In most cases, I concluded, awards go to those candidates with the strongest marketing support.

Three years before Chernow’s House of Morgan appeared, Harvard University Press published The Morgans: Private International Bankers, 1854 to 1913, by Vincent Carosso, a professor of financial history at New York University. This magnificent and very serious book comes across throughout its 890 pages as the work of an author clearly in command of his subject. Chernow’s 812-page House of Morgan, conversely, is full of men and deals but no real context. You may guess which book won prizes and which one was ignored except in academic circles.

Crumbling correspondence

Only one of Chernow’s books can be said to have broken new ground. His second book, The Warburgs (1993), is the only book-length exploration of that famous German Jewish banking dynasty. As such, it continues to occupy a place on my bookshelf. All Chernow’s other books concern famous Americans who’ve been covered by many other writers. In this century alone, I count three other Grant biographies, two of Washington, two of Hamilton, and one each of Morgan and Rockefeller. Whence springs Chernow’s compulsion to write about people who’ve already been written about endlessly?

During the 24 years, off and on, that I devoted to researching my Drexel biography, I spent three weeks at the Morgan Library in New York, reviewing the correspondence between Anthony Drexel and J.P. Morgan from 1870 to 1893. This was no easy task. Before the invention of typewriters and carbon paper, copies were made on dampened onionskin sheets that were then bound into ledgers whose pages were so fragile that any false move by a reader could reduce the dried pages to corn flakes. And of course I examined just a small fraction of J.P. Morgan’s correspondence during that period. Nevertheless, during my third painstaking week at the Morgan Library, one of the librarians remarked, “You know, you’ve spent more time here than Chernow did.” Why am I not surprised?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com