Claude Bowers

Claude Bowers in 1932

Claude Gernade Bowers (November 20, 1878 in Westfield, Indiana – January 21, 1958 in New York City) was an American historian, Democratic Party politician, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ambassador to Spain (1933-1939) and Chile (1939-1953).[1] His histories of the Democratic Party in its formative years from the 1790s to the 1830s helped shape the party's self-image as a powerful force against monopoly and privilege. As ambassador he worked to keep the United States out of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.

Biography

Bowers began his career as a journalist with a newspaper in Terre Haute, Indiana and, while residing there, became the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives at the request of powerful Democratic leader John Edward Lamb. Though he lost, the experience polished his abundant speaking skills. Bowers' enormously popular books Party Battles of the Jackson Period (1922) and Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America (1925) were political manifestos that denounced the Federalist Party, the Whig Party, and the Republican Party as bastions of aristocracy, and hailed the Democrats as true heroes. He was an editorial writer for the New York World from 1923 to 1931, and a political columnist for the New York Journal from 1931 to 1933.[2]

In his very popular histories Bowers promoted the idea that Thomas Jefferson had founded the Democratic Party. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, an avid reader of Bowers was impressed enough to build the Jefferson Memorial and appoint him the U.S. ambassador to Spain in 1933. Bowers' The Tragic Era (1929) attracted wide attention for its attack on the Republican Party, which Bowers believed humiliated the South and corrupted the North during Reconstruction. His work popularized the Dunning School that "provided an intellectual foundation for the system of segregation and black disenfranchisement that followed Reconstruction".[3] He was the temporary chairman of the 1928 Democratic National Convention where he gave a keynote speech.[4] Roosevelt appointed him ambassador to Spain and later Chile.

Although disillusioned when the New Deal veered away from pristine low-budget Jeffersonian principles, Bowers held his tongue and never criticized his patron. His biography of Senator Albert J. Beveridge, Beveridge and the Progressive Era (1932) was non-polemical and of high quality. He continued writing late into his life, completing My Mission to Spain in 1954, which chronicled his time in Spain as ambassador, covering both his travels throughout the country, and the hectic politics that foreshadowed the Spanish Civil War. Bowers was highly critical of what he saw as fascist agitation and strongly defended the regime of the Spanish Second Republic.[5]

He died of leukemia in 1958 and is buried at Highland Lawn Cemetery in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ digitalcommons.unl.edu
  2. ↑ Thomas T. Spencer, "'Old' Democrats and New Deal Politics: Claude G. Bowers, James A. Farley, and the Changing Democratic Party, 1933-1940" Indiana Magazine of History (1996) 92#1 pp: 26-45. in JSTOR
  3. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/opinion/sunday/why-reconstruction-matters.html?_r=0
  4. ↑ Text in New York Times June 27, 1928. p. 8
  5. ↑ Spencer, "'Old' Democrats and New Deal Politics: Claude G. Bowers, James A. Farley, and the Changing Democratic Party, 1933-1940"

Books by Bowers

Scholarly studies

External links

Diplomatic posts
Preceded by
Irwin B. Laughlin		 U.S. Ambassador to Spain
1933–1939 		Succeeded by
Alexander W. Weddell
Preceded by
Norman Armour		 U.S. Ambassador to Chile
1939–1953 		Succeeded by
Willard L. Beaulac
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