value (to their substantial benefit and the substantial loss of the original holders of the debts), and to establish a national bank on the same basis. After their humiliating defeat in the 1924 elections Democrats "began to pray for 'another Thomas Jefferson' to put Humpty Dumpty together again.... [In Bowers' book they found] the myth of the Democratic party masterfully recreated, ...an ideology with which they might make sense of the too often senseless conflicts of the present." When Franklin Delano Roosevelt reviewed Jefferson and Hamilton as a favor to Bowers — the only book review Roosevelt ever wrote — he began with the words: "I felt like saying 'At last' as I read Mr. Claude G. Bowers’ thrilling Jefferson and Hamilton." Ex-Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge wrote a very long review of Jefferson and Hamilton, calling it "captivating". He wrote that Bowers "is master of the picturesque, which, in history and biography, is largely the human.... Mr. Bowers is frank and above board as a partisan of Jefferson, albeit an honest partisan. Moreover he tries to be fair, and he succeeds better than most special pleaders. So notwithstanding his partiality, Mr. Bowers' book is the best story of the origins of Jeffersonian Democracy that has been published." Seven years later, Bowers published a biography of Beveridge, Beveridge and the Progressive Era (1932). Non-polemical and of high quality, many considered it to be Bowers’ finest work. In his very popular histories, he promoted the idea that Thomas Jefferson had founded the Democratic Party. (Later historians would focus on the roles of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren instead.) President Franklin Roosevelt, an avid reader of Bowers and for whom Bowers' book was "a revelation", was impressed enough to build the Jefferson Memorial and appoint him the US ambassador to Spain in 1933. The tragic era: Reconstruction Bowers is "best known for his hyperbolic and racist popular history of Reconstruction, The Tragic Era. The Revolution after Lincoln (1929)." No subsequent work of his matched or even approached its impact. That book "helped mold a generation's racist view of Reconstruction". (See Dunning School.) He "expressed pride when southern segregationists used the book to oppose civil rights legislation a quarter century later. Praised by historians when it appeared, more recently it has been reviled by professional historians. The Tragic Era is still recommended reading on neo-Confederate Internet sites." As he put it: They