The People's Choice
by Herbert Agar
Summary
Herbert Agar's The People's Choice examines the American presidency from George Washington through Warren Harding, treating each administration less as a sequence of individual biographies than as a running argument about what popular democracy actually does to executive leadership. Agar, trained as a historian at Princeton before he moved into journalism, brings a working editor's clear judgment to the question of how presidents have succeeded or failed at translating the people's will into governance, rather than writing a chronological survey for its own sake.
The book weighs which presidents genuinely understood and led public opinion against those who either resisted it stubbornly or simply drifted with it, building toward an argument about the health of American democracy itself as much as about any single president's record. Agar wrote from a critical distance, willing to judge celebrated presidents harshly and rehabilitate neglected ones where the evidence supported it, a stance that grew out of his own developing skepticism about unchecked industrial and financial power, the same concern that led him toward the Southern Agrarian movement in the years just after this book appeared.
Reading the book means following an argument rather than a series of separate portraits, a critic's case for what popular leadership should look like tested against more than a century of American presidents who mostly fell short of it. It suits a reader interested in the presidency as an ongoing democratic problem rather than a gallery of individual character studies, argued by a writer who would spend the rest of his career returning to the same question of how power and the popular will actually meet.
Historical Context & Significance
The People's Choice won the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for History the year after its 1933 publication, becoming Agar's best known book. Agar wrote it while building a career that soon moved from historical scholarship into journalism, and he went on to edit the Louisville Courier Journal and to co edit the 1936 essay collection Who Owns America? with Allen Tate, aligning himself with the Southern Agrarian writers skeptical of industrial capitalism's effect on American life.
Agar's later book The Price of Union, published in 1950, became a particular favorite of John F. Kennedy, who kept it on his desk and later credited a passage on John Quincy Adams with helping inspire his own book Profiles in Courage. Agar spent much of his later life in Sussex, England, continuing to write history, including a 1952 life of Lincoln and a 1972 account of Britain's first year alone against Germany, until his death there in 1980.