Discerning the Lack of a Call

A few weeks ago I wrote a post where I said that a casual lunch time conversation at the 19th Century Baseball conference in Cooperstown convinced me that I had a call to write a book about early baseball in New Jersey. With the past few days, it has also become clear to me that I don't have a call regarding another possible book topic - Andrew Jackson and his war against the Second Bank of the United States.

I have written before about how this is a topic that I have been interested in since high school, primarily for two reasons, nothing that I have read has ever explained how the bank operated and there seemed to be so many arguments that the bank was a good idea. Over the past six months, I read Robert Remini's "Andrew Jackson and the Bank War, as well as Jon Meacham's Pulitzer Prize wining biography - "American Lion." (Sometime I may write about my reaction to the latter book winning that award). In both cases, the author's did not explain how the BUS (pictured above left) worked nor did they give (in my opinion) any good explanation of why the bank was a bad idea. The merits of the bank just get dismissed by saying the issues were really political.

I decided to keep reading about this to see if there was, in fact, a call to try to write a book about the topic. My next book was Thomas Govan's "Nicholas Biddle: Nationalist and Public Banker," basically a biography of Biddle as a banker. Govan's book had been criticized by Remini (the dean of Jackson scholars) as being prejudiced, a complaint that I sometimes think can be made against Remini. Reading the book gave me a little more sense of how banking worked in the 1820's and 1830's, but it still seems a very complicated topic. More importantly was the portrayal of Biddle, for more than half the book, it certainly seemed as if he was far from the evil figure portrayed by Jackson and then subsequent biographers and historians.

However as I read on it seemed like Biddle was indeed guilty of some of the things he had been accused of, some of which Govan admits and some of which he seems to excuse. For some reason, as I read the second half of this book, I lost a lot of my interest in the topic. As noted I think it is a very complicated one and it also appears that a lot of the original source material, especially the records of the bank, do not survive. More than these things though is that my interest, almost passion, for the subject took a big hit. It may come back, but it doesn't feel like it now.

In any event recognizing the lack of a call is a sort of negative clarity which isn't such a bad thing, but it helps simply things. It also isn't like I have a lack of potential writing projects, I am very hopeful about the Ebbets Field book, still have to finish editing the Lloyd letters and have a clear sense of a call on the New Jersey baseball book. There are some smaller projects in the offing as well including a chapter in a book about New Jersey and the Civil War plus the possibility of contributing something to a book about the greatest baseball games of the 19th century. Beyond or behind all of this is another possibility for a book on a much larger scale - a book about Charles Ebbets, Brooklyn and the Dodgers. In a lot of ways the Ebbets Field book would be a way to pursue that further so here is hoping that works out and I continue to get more clarity about what I should and shouldn't be doing.