Scott Martelle

Detroit was established as a French settlement three-quarters of a century before the founding of this nation. A remote outpost built to protect trapping interests, it grew as agriculture expanded on the new frontier. Its industry leapt forward with the completion of the Erie Canal, which opened up the Great Lakes to the East Coast. Surrounded by untapped natural resources, Detroit turned iron into stoves and railcars, and eventually cars by the millions. This vibrant commercial hub attracted businessmen and labor organizers, European immigrants and African Americans from the rural South. At its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, one in six American jobs were connected to the auto industry and Detroit. And then the bottom fell out. Detroit: A Biography takes a long, unflinching look at the evolution of one of America’s great cities, and one of the nation’s greatest urban failures. It seeks to explain how the city grew to become the heart of American industry and how its utter collapse resulted from a confluence of public policies, private industry decisions, and deep, thick seams of racism. This updated paperback edition includes recent developments under Michigan’s Emergency Manager law. And it raises the question: when we look at modern-day Detroit, are we looking at the ghost of America’s industrial past or its future? Scott Martelle is the author of The Fear Within and Blood Passion and is a professional journalist who has written for the Detroit News, the Los Angeles Times, the Rochester Times-Union, and more.

A Biography

Detroit

In the decade before the onset of the Civil War, groups of Americans engaged in a series of longshot--and illegal--forays into Mexico, Central America, Cuba, and other countries, in hopes of taking them over. Known as military filibusters, the goal was to seize territory to create new independent fiefdoms, which would ultimately be annexed by the still-growing United States. Most failed miserably. William Walker was the outlier. Short, slender, and soft-spoken with no military background--he trained as a doctor before becoming a lawyer and then a newspaper editor--Walker was an unlikely leader of rough-hewn men and adventurers. But in 1856 he managed to install himself as president of Nicaragua. Neighboring governments saw Walker as a risk to the region and worked together to drive him out--efforts aided, incongruously, by the United States' original tycoon, Cornelius Vanderbilt. William Walker's Wars is a story of greedy dreams and ambitions, the fate of nations and personal fortunes, and the dark side of Manifest Destiny--for among Walker's many ambitions was to run his own empire based on slavery. This little-remembered story from US history is a cautionary tale of all who dream of empire.

How One Man's Private American Army Tried to Conquer Mexico, Nicaragua, and Honduras

William Walker's Wars

As thoroughly examined as the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth have been, virtually no attention has been paid to the life of the Union cavalryman who killed Booth, an odd character named Boston Corbett. The killing of Booth made Corbett an instant celebrity who became the object of fascination and of derision. Corbett was an English immigrant, a hatter by trade, who was likely poisoned by mercury. A devout Christian, he castrated himself so that his sexual urges would not distract him from serving God, which he did as a street evangelist and preacher. He was one of the first volunteers to join the US Army in the first days of the Civil War, a path that would in time land him in the notorious Andersonville prison camp. Eventually released in a prisoner exchange, he would end up in the squadron that cornered Booth in Virginia. The Madman and the Assassin is the first full-length biography of Boston Corbett, a man who was something of a prototypical modern American, thrust into the spotlight during a national news event. His story also encompasses tragedy—his wife died when he was young, and he struggled with poverty and his own mental health—as it weaves through some of the biggest events in nineteenth century America. Scott Martelle is a professional journalist and the author of The Admiral and the Ambassador, and Detroit: A Biography, and is an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times.

The Strange Life of Boston Corbett, the Man Who Killed John Wilkes Booth

The Madman and the Assassin

On July 20, 1792, the body of Admiral John Paul Jones, Father of the American Navy, was buried in the Saint LouisCemetery on the outskirts of Paris. As the French Revolution was gathering steam, the unmarked location of Jones's grave was nobody's primary concern. And though the admiral was not forgotten to history, in time he was certainly lost beneath the soil in the City of Light. Luckily, Jones had been sealed in a lead-lined coffin filled with alcohol to preserve the body. In theory, if somebody could locate that coffin, Jones could be returned to the United States for a proper burial. That somebody was Horace Porter, Civil War hero, aide to General (and later President) Ulysses S. Grant, Republican Party fundraiser, and US ambassador to France from 1897 to 1905. Porter had been a driving force in the creation of Grant's Tomb, and he developed a similar sense of duty regarding the final interment of John Paul Jones. The Admiral and the Ambassador details Porter's long, relentless search for the lead-lined coffin, first through scraps of archive material and written recollections of funeral attendees, and then beneath the rickety buildings that had been constructed over what Porter believed to be the graveyard. Part history, part biography, and part detective story, The Admiral and the Ambassador is a fascinating look into the compelling real-life characters who populated the first century of the United States of America.

One Man's Obsessive Search for the Body of John Paul Jones

The Admiral and the Ambassador

Sixty years ago political divisions in the United States ran even deeper than today's name-calling showdowns between the left and right. Back then, to call someone a communist was to threaten that person's career, family, freedom, and, sometimes, life itself. Hysteria about the "red menace" mushroomed as the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, Mao Zedong rose to power in China, and the atomic arms race accelerated. Spy scandals fanned the flames, and headlines warned of sleeper cells in the nation's midst--just as it does today with the "War on Terror." In his new book, The Fear Within, Scott Martelle takes dramatic aim at one pivotal moment of that era. On the afternoon of July 20, 1948, FBI agents began rounding up twelve men in New York City, Chicago, and Detroit whom the U.S. government believed posed a grave threat to the nation--the leadership of the Communist Party-USA. After a series of delays, eleven of the twelve "top Reds" went on trial in Manhattan's Foley Square in January 1949. The proceedings captivated the nation, but the trial quickly dissolved into farce. The eleven defendants were charged under the 1940 Smith Act with conspiring to teach the necessity of overthrowing the U.S. government based on their roles as party leaders and their distribution of books and pamphlets. In essence, they were on trial for their libraries and political beliefs, not for overt acts threatening national security. Despite the clear conflict with the First Amendment, the men were convicted and their appeals denied by the U.S. Supreme Court in a decision that gave the green light to federal persecution of Communist Party leaders--a decision the court effectively reversed six years later. But by then, the damage was done. So rancorous was the trial the presiding judge sentenced the defense attorneys to prison terms, too, chilling future defendants' access to qualified counsel. Martelle's story is a compelling look at how American society, both general and political, reacts to stress and, incongruously, clamps down in times of crisis on the very beliefs it holds dear: the freedoms of speech and political belief. At different points in our history, the executive branch, Congress, and the courts have subtly or more drastically eroded a pillar of American society for the politics of the moment. It is not surprising, then, that The Fear Within takes on added resonance in today's environment of suspicion and the decline of civil rights under the U.S. Patriot Act.

Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial

The Fear Within

Offers an in-depth account of the violent strike that plagued Colorado's southern coal district, which in April 1914 culminated in a full-scale battle between armed strikers and the Colorado National Guard, the burning of the strikers' tent colony in Ludlow, and the deaths of two women and eleven children, and launched calls for vicious guerrilla warfare on the part of union supporters.

Scott Martelle

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