Claude Gernade Bowers (November 20, 1878 – January 21, 1958) was a newspaper columnist and editor, author of best-selling books on American history, Democratic Party politician, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ambassador to Spain (1933–1939) and Chile (1939–1953). 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. Bowers was a sharp critic of Republicans and their Reconstruction era policies for African American voting rights and civil rights.
Bowers was ambassador to Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). At first he recommended the United States join other nations in a Non-intervention Agreement. When it soon became clear that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, in violation of the Agreement, were openly helping the Nationalist rebels, he unsuccessfully pressed Washington to aid the government of the Spanish Republic. He left Spain when it became clear, in early 1939, that the rebels, led by the dictator Francisco Franco, had won the war. Later that year, he became U.S. Ambassador to Chile, which had a leftist government more to his liking.
In domestic affairs he considered himself a staunch Jeffersonian, and was increasingly dismayed at the New Deal interventions into the economy, but kept quiet about it.
Three of Bower's books were genuine best-sellers, "but he is little remembered today except by political historians".
Early life and education
Bowers was born in Westfield, Indiana, on November 20, 1878, the son of a small-time Indiana shopkeeper, Lewis Bowers, who died when he was 12. His mother, Juliet Tipton Bowers, moved to Indianapolis, and Bowers graduated from Shortridge High School there in 1898. He was a voracious reader: "Irish oratory, English poetry, and history of all kinds were his favorite study." He demonstrated "intellectual excitement". He was a champion debater, "when debate was more important than basketball", and won the Indiana State High School Oratorical Contest with a speech on "Hamilton the Constructionist."
Finances made college impossible; even high school (not dropping out of school to work) had been a financial challenge. Beyond high school, Bowers was self-taught.
He began his career at age 21 as a journalist writing editorials for the Indianapolis Sentinel, filling in for the vacationing editorial writer, Jacob Piatt Dunn. Bowers worked as reporter and editorial writer for a variety of Indiana newspapers.
In 1903 Bowers left Indianapolis to work for the Terre Haute Gazette, and then moved to the Terre Haute Star as editorial writer. It was there that he became friends with Eugene V. Debs, head of the Socialist Party of America and repeated candidate for president and other offices on its "ticket".
At the urging of Terre Haute Representative and then Attorney General of Indiana John Edward Lamb, Bowers was chosen in 1904 as Democratic candidate for Congress for the district that includes Terre Haute. He campaigned hard but lost in a Republican landslide. He was renominated unanimously in 1904, but lost again. The political activity led to a "political position": he accepted an appointment to the Terre Haute Board of Public Improvements, serving unhappily from 1906 to 1911. Much later, Bowers published a biography of the man Kern defeated in 1910, Albert Beveridge.
Described as "an ardent Democrat", he was chairman of the Platform Committee of the Democratic Party in 1918. He declined the party's 1918 offer of the post of Indiana Secretary of State. He was a speechwriter for and advisor to 1928 presidential candidate Al Smith. He became a close friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt; "As a result of Roosevelt's lobbying",
Ambassador
Bowers played a major role in Roosevelt's 1932 campaign for president; Roosevelt's overwhelming victory "virtually guaranteed Bowers some type of position in the new administration". While in Spain, where he was enormously popular as U.S. ambassador, and "established a reputation as 'a careful, painstaking executive,'" Roosevelt told Bowers in 1939 that he had been right and that the US should not have remained neutral.
One of Bowers's main concerns was the safe evacuation of Americans caught in Spain by the war. In his memoir, My Mission to Spain (1954), he was highly critical of fascist agitation and strongly defended the Republic.
The 1939 victory of the Nationalists, led by Francisco Franco, made Bowers's position untenable, and he was recalled from Spain.
Without a college education, he did not write innovative scholarship, and he shows no knowledge of the scholarly journals containing historical research. But he read widely, including when appropriate old newspapers and archival material, and gives references in footnotes.
History was for Bowers the story of personalities, and men were either heroes or villains. This was politics. "He early interpreted American history as a contest between privilege and democracy". Lynch predicted that Bowers's "harmful" histories would not be enduring works:
<blockquote>"[T]he volumes of Mr. Bowers would be much sounder, live longer and do less harm, had he understood that it is not so much the business of the historian to blame and praise, as to explain political leaders. Neither is it the chief business of the historian to drive his own interpretations into the minds of his readers with the most forceful English that he can command, but instead to present the truth clearly leaving his readers free to form their own conclusions in the presence of the evidence impartially stated. Within these limits, an engaging style should not be despised but welcomed. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt reviewed Jefferson and Hamilton as a favor to Bowers — the only book review Roosevelt ever wrote
Ex-Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge wrote a very long review of Jefferson and Hamilton, calling it "captivating". He wrote that Bowers "is master of the picturesque, which, in history and biography, is largely the human ... Mr. Bowers is frank and above board as a partisan of Jefferson, albeit an honest partisan. Moreover he tries to be fair, and he succeeds better than most special pleaders. So notwithstanding his partiality, Mr. Bowers' book is the best story of the origins of Jeffersonian Democracy that has been published."
Seven years later, Bowers published a biography of Beveridge, Beveridge and the Progressive Era (1932). Non-polemical and of high quality, President Franklin Roosevelt, an avid reader of Bowers and for whom Bowers's book was "a revelation", Additionally, the United States Supreme Court often cited the book during the early 20th century, entrenching Bowers' unfavorable view of the Reconstruction Amendments in the precedent of American law.
The Tragic Era was a regular selection of the Literary Guild book club, went through 13 printings before being reissued in paperback, and has never gone out of print. The book is also remembered for Bowers' defense of President Andrew Johnson, which historians believe was meant to revive support for the Democratic Party after Republican Herbert Hoover's landslide victory over Al Smith in the 1928 United States presidential election. This partisan endorsement reinforced Roosevelt's already favorable view of Bowers.