Over at the New Criterion, Glenn Ellmers has written a review of Matthew Continetti’s book The Right, which seems mainly a review of Continetti and the book’s introduction and an argument that someone with Continetti’s background is not the right person to have written the book. I was puzzled by this critique of Continetti’s treatment of the 1920s, where he begins his narrative: “Several major conservative statesmen and writers from that era are either passed over quickly (William Howard Taft) or ignored entirely (Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root).” Taft, however, left office in 1912, and his political career was very much a part of the Progressive Era; he spent the 1920s on the Supreme Court, happily leaving politics behind. Root, Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state, left public office in 1915, and was 75 years old in 1920; while he remained an eminence grise involved alongside Lodge in various peace initiatives, it is difficult to rank him among the leading statesmen of 1920s America. Lodge died in 1924. All three men were central figures of the previous decade, with Root and Lodge being critical to the resistance to Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations–centered vision of foreign policy, but Ellmers seems to be grasping at straws in placing them as central players in the post-Wilson world of “normalcy.” One wonders why he could find no examples further into the book than the first chapter.