Reviews for The Wolf Files

The average rating for The Wolf Files based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-04-05 00:00:00 Dawn Brown Certainly a good man for his time, someone like James M. Cox would never be considered for the presidency by the Democratic party today. In 1920 he was as good a Democrat as you would find and in that year we had the Democratic Governor of Ohio opposing the Republican Senator from Ohio Warren Harding. And both were in the newspaper business. This is an updated version, a republished version of Cox's memoirs which were done in 1946. Cox died in 1957. He was born in 1871 in Dayton, Ohio and developed the two interests of journalism and politics. He was a reporter who was hired to be a Congressional secretary for Representative Richard Sorg and did so from 1893 to 1897. Contacts made at that office including Sorg himself allowed Cox to get the financial backing to purchase a newspaper in Dayton, renamed the Dayton Daily News. He bought a couple of other papers in Ohio as well. In 1908 he was elected to the House of Representatives for two terms. In Congress and later as governor Cox had a pretty good record on bread and butter issues. No political scandal attached itself to him. He was however the first divorced man a major party nominated for president. He was a high stepper and the divorce might have cost him the election for a second term as governor in 1914. Cox rebounded in 1916 and in 1918. As governor he was in step with Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom initiatives he was also in step with support for the war which included some of the more superpatriotic efforts. He backed fully an effort to get the German language being taught out of the schools. He was all in favor of rounding up suspected aliens and deporting same as radicals and terrorists. One more thing he took the view of the Civil War that Reconstruction was an unbearable and corrupt yoke the south had to bare. When Birth Of A Nation was banned Cox took up its defense and had the author of the The Clansman Thomas Dixon as a guest. He felt teaching about the corrupt carpetbag regimes should be mandatory in schools. That neared and endeared him to Woodrow Wilson when he ran to succeed him in the White House. Also he and running mate Franklin D. Roosevelt's defense of the League of Nations. Among the few people he didn't like in his memoirs were the GOP Senators who wouldn't ratify the Versailles Treaty. Not Warren Harding though. Cox regarded him as a nice man, but a lightweight. Many saw Harding that way. He really didn't like Harry Daugherty, Harding's Attorney General and the black prince of that administration. Cox gives some colorful anecdotes about what a rogue and an operator Daugherty was. Nothing surprised Cox about the Harding scandals. Cox stayed in tune with politics but after his losing race to Harding he concentrated on business and building media empire. He acquired newspapers and resettled in Florida. No interest at all in running for office again. When his former running mate Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president, Cox generally supported him and his policies foreign and domestic. One thing he did criticize was how these northern liberals establishing Fair Employment Practices Committees could not take into account southern racial sensibilities. Living in Miami in retirement from politics he was a thoroughgoing southerner now. The book concludes with a postscript about how the Cox conglomerate was now owning not just print media, but radio and TV stations and even was into the internet. His children and grandchildren have done well with his legacy. Cox was a man of his time, but not of our's.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-09-17 00:00:00 Fermin Caraig Both scholarly and accessible, this is a must-read for anyone interested in California history. The research is thorough, the subject matter is fascinating, and the feminist angle provides a much-needed counterpoint to the academic machismo of old-school scholars like Bancroft, who would just as soon interview a dog than a woman.