“First Franco: Albert Beliveau in Law, Politics, and Love” 

“At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump” by Amy Fried and Douglas B. Harris; Columbia University Press, New York, 2021; 320 pages, paperback, $30.

In Stephen King’s novel “Bag of Bones,” a New York City lawyer hears that the name of a Maine attorney he’s going to be collaborating with is Romeo. “Is that his real name?” he asks the main character. “What town is he from?” “Lewiston,” says the NYC lawyer. “That’s a real name,” says the main character.

This is a wry joke you get if you have an outsider’s familiarity with how deep the roots of Maine’s Franco community go. And my colleague Douglas Rooks’s new book, “First Franco: Albert Beliveau in Law, Politics, and Love,” is a beautiful testament to that heritage.

Beliveau was one of Maine’s distinguished legal and political figures of the 20th century. Born in 1887, he grew up in Lewiston, worked in the family’s bakery in Jay, and then moved to Rumford where he worked in factories and volunteered in law offices. He attended the early version of the University of Maine School of Law in Bangor, graduating at the top of his class. He served in World War I, and afterward distinguished himself as a lawyer, became county attorney for Oxford County, and ran unsuccessfully for Maine’s 2nd District congressional seat in 1928 and 1930. He was appointed a Superior Court judge in the 1930s, and then in the 1950s a Maine Supreme Judicial Court justice.

Rooks provides not only copious detail about Beliveau’s life from letters and other documents, but also fascinating historical context, including the history of the Franco-American community in Maine, who gathered in two general areas, Acadians in the Saint John River Valley and Quebecois in the western Maine mill towns, particularly Lewiston and Rumford. Beliveau’s losses in his congressional campaigns were due in part to anti-immigration fears of the time that were being stoked, much as they are now, by heavy doses of racial and ethnic prejudice – which Francos have suffered through much of their history in Maine. Beliveau actively insisted his community take pride in its heritage, we learn in the book, and that unifying disposition is still influential today.

“First Franco” is a gold mine of a book, not only for the Franco community, but for anyone interested in Maine political and social history of the 20th century.

Among Douglas Rooks’s other books are “Rise, Decline and Renewal: The Democratic Party in Maine” and “Statesman: George Mitchell and the Art of the Possible.” “First Franco” is available through UMaine Press as well as local and online book sellers.

• • • • •

“At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump”

In the category of “this is pretty much what I thought was happening,” UMaine political science professor Amy Fried’s new book, “At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump,” co-authored with Douglas B. Harris, of Loyola University, shows how American distrust of government, going back to the 19th century, has been utilized as part of a carefully planned political strategy since the 1960s.

The authors detail how Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964 as in a way the first major-party “conservative,” inflaming fears that big government was on the brink of creating a communist welfare state that would do away with American freedoms. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and the GOP successfully used fears of big government for political purposes by focusing on alleged stifling effects of government regulation. In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich led an explicit emphasis on the evils of “big government.” Then following George W. Bush’s foreign policy debacles and spending expansions, and the election of a Black man as president, the stage was set for the tea party, which Republicans fostered by pretending it was a grass roots movement (it by and large was not) against government.

They show how Donald Trump’s efforts to provoke impulses to “punch government in the face” were a direct outcome of the decades-long strategy, escaping control of the party itself into efforts to undermine, through lies and fabrications, confidence not only in bureaucracy but in elections themselves. Not to mention, as we now know, efforts to violently overthrow the government.

Fried and Harris are not making this up, to use a phrase from a journalistic master of irony. “At War with Government” makes its case through well-vetted studies in political science and factual, historical information available to everyone. Anyone interested in this particular political thread among the many leading to the mess we’re in right now, should read this book, if only to get their facts straight. It’s available through local and online book sellers.

Off Radar takes note of poetry and books with Maine connections the first and third Fridays of each month. Dana Wilde is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Contact him at universe@dwildepress.net.

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