Poor James Knox Polk. The 11th president can't seem to catch a break. Consider his accomplishments: He cut tariff rates, created the Independent Treasury System (a forerunner to the Federal Reserve) and brought to the country more than 500,000 square miles of territory stretching to the Pacific. In polls of historians, he ranks high—11th in an aggregate ranking of 12 academic polls since 1948.
But the controversies and animosities that dogged him in office still gnaw at his reputation: He is demonized as a territorial zealot who lied to the American people in invading a weak and innocent Mexico so he could grab lands as plunder. Where the contemporary critics of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and the two Roosevelts exercise little lingering influence on those presidents' historical reputations, Polk's standing seems trapped in the passions of his time.
In "A Wicked War," Amy S. Greenberg of Pennsylvania State University takes the anti-Polk fervor to a new level. Not content to portray the president as simply misguided or even morally obtuse, she depicts him as a national villain with no redeeming qualities save his relentlessness in pursuing despicable goals and a solicitousness toward his wife. This loathing for Polk undermines her scholarship and renders her vulnerable to the suspicion that she cares more about convincing readers of Polk's perfidy than of her own historical accuracy.
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