Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics.

• Author: Sloan, Eliot

In the mid-1930'S, rumors spread around America like a forest fire, whispering that Franklin Roosevelt was mentally deranged. Some claimed to have heard shrieks and laughter emanating from the windows of the White House, and others solemnly explained that the bars on the president's windows were there to keep him from throwing himself out onto the lawn in a maniacal fit. Tongues began wagging faster as the gossip caught on: His polio had spread to his brain, he was discovered cutting out paper dolls instead of working, he had been seen breaking into fits of uncontrollable laughter during press conferences, and now he was babbling all sorts of entertaining nonsense during meetings.

When a journalist finally got up the nerve to inquire directly about the president's mental status, FDR, holding his cigarette holder and leaning back in his chair, began to laugh a loud, healthy laugh. Newsweek reported: "Back to the roomful of correspondents he tossed the question. How did they think he looked? `Okay from here.'"

These rumors about the president, New York Times editorial writer Gail Collins tells us in her lively new book, flourished so successfully because they contained a thread of truth: a genuine public fear about the president's health. While most Americans at the time knew that FDR suffered from polio, very few had actually seen him, and many could not bear to imagine their president, a paragon of strength and leadership, as an invalid. Since FDR made special efforts to conceal his disability, and since reporters rarely depicted the president in his wheelchair, much of the public remained in the dark as to his real condition. Gossiping about his health was a way to release pent-up concerns about the president, under the umbrella of dramatized, embellished entertainment.

Gossip, Collins argues, "provides an insight into what's bothering Americans -- maybe not as precisely as a random cross-sample poll of the voting public, but with a little more flavor." From Civil War rumors that President Lincoln had "Negro blood" and was nicknamed "Abraham Africanus the First," to stories of Prohibitionist Americans angrily pointing fingers at Teddy Roosevelt's drinking habits, Collins' book traces the history of American gossip through the eyes of the public. She gives us all the sordid details and all the delicious rumors from the safe seat of the talker instead of the talked-about. With humor and insight, Collins offers every view of the truth, the...