Book signing with author Marc C. Johnson

Political Hell-Raiser. The Life and Times of Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana

Apr 17

April 17, 2019

Montana State University

Please join us for a lecture and book signing with author and long time board member of the Wheeler Center, Marc C. Johnson.

Book signing with author Marc C. Johnson

Event Details

Marc C. Johnson has worked as a broadcast journalist, a top aide to Cecil D. Andrus, Idaho’s longest serving governor, and a public affairs and crisis communications consultant. Marc spent nearly 25 years in various capacities with Gallatin Public Affairs, including serving as the firm’s president and the long-time managing partner of the Idaho office. A student of political history, Marc writes and speaks regularly on political history with particular focus on the New Deal era, U.S. Senate history and the America presidency. He lives on the north coast of Oregon.

We will be hosting a lecture by Marc at 5 PM in the Procrastinator Theater located in the Student Union Building on the campus of Montana State University before the book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

Click here to see the book on Amazon

Burton K. Wheeler (1882-1975) may have been the most powerful politician Montana ever produced, and he was one of the most influential—and controversial—members of the United States Senate during three of the most eventful decades in American history. A New Deal Democrat and lifelong opponent of concentrated power—whether economic, military, or executive—he consistently acted with a righteous personal and political independence that has all but disappeared from the public sphere. Political Hell-Raiser is the first book to tell the full story of Wheeler, a genuine maverick whose successes and failures were woven into the political fabric of twentieth-century America.

Wheeler came of political age amid antiwar and labor unrest in Butte, Montana, during World War I. As a crusading United States attorney, he battled Montana’s powerful economic interests, championed farmers and miners, and won election to the U.S. Senate in 1922. There he made his name as one of the “Montana scandalmongers,” uncovering corruption in the Harding and Coolidge administrations. Drawing on extensive research and new archival sources, Marc C. Johnson follows Wheeler from his early backing of Franklin D. Roosevelt and ardent support of the New Deal to his forceful opposition to Roosevelt’s plan to expand the Supreme Court and, in a move widely viewed as political suicide, his emergence as the most prominent spokesman against U.S. involvement in World War II right up to three days before Pearl Harbor.

Johnson provides the most thorough telling of Wheeler’s entire career, including all its accomplishments and contradictions, as well as the political storms that the senator both encouraged and endured. The book convincingly establishes the place and importance of this principled hell-raiser in American political history.

Location Details

Montana State University
751 W. Grant Street Bozeman, MT 59715
Bozeman, MT 59715

Event Sponsors

Schedule

Wednesday, April 17

5:00pm - 6:00pmLectureProcrastinator TheaterMarc C. Johnson