George P. McLean (1857–1932) was an ambitious Connecticut Yankee of Puritan descent, yet born into modest circumstances. After several career moves, he settled into the legal profession and developed a lucrative practice. He later entered politics and served in several positions, including state legislator, U.S. district attorney, governor, and U.S. senator. Along the way, he inherited substantial wealth through a childless aunt. This is a very sympathetic biography written by one of McLean’s great-great grandnephews.
As an introvert and somewhat of a loner, McLean’s choice of a political career seems like an odd choice. The emotional and social demands of the governor’s office triggered a debilitating depression that required the lieutenant governor to take over for the last four months of his term in 1902. This episode might have ended McLean’s career, but he rebounded after a decade and secured election by the state assembly to the United States Senate just months prior to the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment. What accounts for this turnaround? According to Greeley, it was a mixture of ambition, a powerful service ethic, a longing for the partisan fight, and a need to redeem his reputation. The persistent McLean was no quitter. These keys to his personality run throughout his life.
Greeley attributes McLean’s consistent electoral successes to his consciously positioning himself as a moderate, though partisan, Republican standing between extremes. Like many others of the period, his stances on issues defy his easy categorization as either a conservative or a progressive. He favored protective tariffs and supported the popular election of U.S. senators. He opposed most of Wilson’s domestic program, women’s suffrage, prohibition, and the immigration restriction law of 1924. During the war, McLean agreed with the Alien and Sedition Acts, supported arms manufacturing (which was a major industry in Connecticut), and voted with reservationists on the Treaty of Versailles.
McLean’s signature legislation was the Weeks-McLean Migratory Bird Protection Act of 1913. It is the only issue that warrants its own chapter and shows McLean pushing past the labels of moderate and partisan. In 1911, McLean, an avid sportsman, introduced a bill to protect migratory game birds, but responding to appeals from wildlife preservationists, he expanded it to include all birds, game and nongame. This proposal was very forward-thinking and even radical. Many people doubted the constitutionality of this revised legislation. McLean also adopted a very progressive-sounding argument that the birds protected the nation’s food supply by consuming noxious insects. Finally, he played a critical role in getting the controversial measure tucked deep into an appropriations bill where it was unseen by President William Howard Taft, who unwittingly signed it in the closing minutes of his administration, even though he had previously vowed to veto it. McLean defended his bill on the floor as state’s rights advocates, such as Senator James Reed, an acid-tongued conservative Democrat from Missouri, attempted to repeal or at least defund it. McLean also backed other important bird protection measures during these years. He supported the plumage ban in the tariff of 1913 and vigorously advocated a treaty that expanded protection to Canada in 1916, as well as its subsequent enabling legislation two years later.
McLean deserves praise for this substantial achievement – one of the most important conservation measures of the early twentieth century. Greeley is not speaking hyperbolically when he claims that the legislation saved the lives of millions of birds over the century following its passage. However, there is no follow-through on the issue in the text. The migratory bird discussion did not end in 1918 with the treaty. Throughout the 1920s, there was a bitter debate among conservationists over migratory bird regulations and funding for refuges, including three separate bills introduced into Congress. One wonders where McLean was during that debate and what position he took in the aftermath of his signature legislative contribution.
A lack of context is a limitation of this book. For example, Greeley notes that McLean was an avid sportsman, duck hunter, investor in a sportsmen’s club, and someone who viewed his estate as a wildlife refuge, but there is little discussion on how these pursuits fit into the vast historiography of sportsmen in the progressive conservation movement. This scanty context might not be much of a hindrance for scholars of the period, who can fill in the blanks themselves, but nonspecialists might miss some important ways that McLean’s story connects to the larger forces of the period.
There are no McLean papers from which to draw; Greeley does not know what happened to them or if they even existed in the first place. He offers the tantalizing thought that a nephew had arranged for Lewis Mumford to write a biography of the childless McLean, but the senator’s widow quashed that project out of respect for her husband’s privacy. Might she have destroyed his papers out of the same concern? With no personal papers, the main primary sources for this book include newspapers and other items available on the Internet. While several scholarly monographs are cited, a much larger number of secondary source footnotes refer to articles.
A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington makes sense of an influential senator in the Progressive Era. It shows how the Senate itself changed during this important period and how senators reacted to key concerns of the day. It is a corrective to the notion that presidents, even such strong ones as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, dominate domestic policy. A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington merits the attention of anyone interested in the high politics of this period.
