For those interested in the life of George B. McClellan Jr., Harold Syrett's edited volume of McClellan's flawed autobiography, The Gentleman and the Tiger (New York, 1956), has been the only major source on the former congressman (1895–1903) and New York City mayor (1904–1909). Unfortunately, after M. Barbara Mulrine's hagiographic account, The Price of Honor, the son of the Civil War general and presidential nominee still awaits a definitive treatment.

McClellan's early life was empty of major accomplishment, although Mulrine is quick to describe his efforts in Horatio Alger language. At the Brooklyn Bridge Commission, “he managed to steer just the right course and earned the respect of most of his colleagues” (41). When he arrived in Congress, “he hoped to make his own contributions to American history and he had full confidence in his ability to do so” (60). Mulrine's thesis is that as mayor, McClellan placed the good of the city over the tawdry politics of Tammany Hall and that the price he paid for his independence and political heroism was that he was denied higher office, including president. This argument, however, ignores his own role in playing hardball politics when necessary, even if it meant working with Tammany and people like Big Tim Sullivan in order to combat perceived enemies such as Charlie Murphy. Mulrine describes the latter as having “attended Catholic schools and had the opportunity to have more instruction in faith and morals, and should have known better” (121). McClellan apparently had enough morals for everyone, even though the methods by which he defeated William Randolph Hearst in 1905 took over two years for the courts to investigate. After the election recount was finally dropped, Mulrine concludes unhelpfully, “Max felt like a big weight had been lifted from his shoulders” (237).

McClellan's post-mayoralty years were as mediocre as his political career. He was made a full professor of economics at Princeton, although he held only a master's degree and had not published a word in the field. Despite a comfortable twenty-year career at Princeton, Mulrine concludes that academia was “a narrow and petty world” (277) for McClellan. The Ivy League was evidently similar to Tammany Hall in not appreciating “Max.” The only occasion where Mulrine offers a critical eye to her subject comes when McClellan writes too many pro-German accounts of the World War I. However, even here she explains it away as a case where McClellan “helped balance out the lurid stories the British press offered as news” (287).

Mulrine bemoans that the nation was denied the leadership of a modern Cincinnatus, whose “sense of politics was patriotic and relatively pure,” and she even compares the ultra-conservative McClellan to President Barack Obama (312). Mulrine asserts McClellan was a “viable candidate for President of the United States, a destiny he felt called to fulfill as a legacy from his father” (18), although she never discusses whether the younger McClellan, born in Germany during a family trip after the Civil War, would have been legally eligible for the nation's highest office.

McClellan's career could provide a window into observing the difficulties that sons of famous fathers often undergo in making their own way, as well as some of the intricate complexities of Gilded Age politics at the local and state level. In The Price of Honor, these opportunities are squandered. In a sea of blind Tammany corruption, Mulrine's McClellan is a lone vessel of moral courage, never fully appreciated by his contemporaries or historians. The ultimate loser was an ungrateful country. Such grandiose conclusions, it seems, were ultimately shared by both McClellans, but Mulrine falls far short of making a compelling case to support that view.