Jeffrey Boutwell — Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy - with Sidney Blumenthal

During his seven-decade career in public life, George Sewall Boutwell, the son of a Massachusetts farming family of modest means, was a key figure in the politics of racial and economic equity and the principled use of American power abroad. From 1840 to 1905, Boutwell was at the center of efforts to abolish slavery, establish the Republican Party, facilitate President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and frame the civil rights-focused Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. He helped lay the foundations of the modern American economy with President Grant, investigated white terrorism in Mississippi in the 1870s, and opposed American imperialism following the Spanish-American War alongside Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and Booker T. Washington.The first major biography of an important public figure who has long been hiding in plain sight, Boutwell is as much a history of nineteenth-century century US politics as it is a critique of the failures of governance during a turbulent and formative period in American history.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324074267?ic_referral=DTZT6yV-LeYfsnmZCygYzTsdWpGmd_xZJSZo0sAzN1owMzRlyiyfqh1mGgw3ZDDkPDBlf6JtrplMXPTz8_rqZmY-TjD5wz8PgGt2iRl76Jmjh2jvYv3AS6Cq9XNmsW5zsGdwKAJeffrey Boutwell is a writer, historian, and policy specialist whose forty-year career spanned journalism, government, and international scientific cooperation.  His writings cover nuclear weapons arms control, European politics, Middle East security issues, and environmental degradation and civil conflict.  Born in Boston and now living in Columbia, Maryland, Jeffrey and George share a common ancestor, the indentured servant James Boutwell, who emigrated from England in 1632 and settled in Salem, Massachusetts.Boutwell is in conversation with Sidney Blumenthal. Blumenthal, a columnist for The Guardian, is the acclaimed author of All the Powers of the Earth, A Self-Made Man and Wrestling with His Angel, the first three volumes in his five-volume biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton. He has been a national staff reporter for The Washington Post and Washington editor and writer for The New Yorker. His books include the bestselling The Clinton Wars, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, and The Permanent Campaign. Born and raised in Illinois, he lives in Washington, DC.*recorded 1/27/2025