"Father Tom"

GENERAL SKERMAN'S SON (276 pp.)--Joseph T. Durkin, SJ.--Farrar, Sfraus & Cudahy ($4.50).

To the speaker's stand at the great Exposition Hall at Omaha strode a spare, erect man with snapping blue eyes and firm jaw, his quick step springing to the band's blare of Marching Through Georgia. The date was June 1893. The speaker, in the double identity that was the theme of his life, was 1) Thomas Ewing Sherman, eldest surviving son of General William Tecumseh Sherman, who had died but two years befofe; 2) the Rev. Thomas Ewing Sherman, a militant Jesuit, known to the lecture circuit as "Father Tom." The Jesuit began to speak in bullet sentences. "It was a Roman Catholic who planted the stars and stripes on the parapets at Vicksburg ... It was a Roman Catholic who led the most dashing charge ..."

"People in Love." How the son of General Sherman, a nondenominational Protestant who believed in "truth," came to be a Jesuit spellbinder is told in this fascinating biography by Joseph T. Durkin, himself a Jesuit and professor of American history at Georgetown University. Tom Sherman, born in 1856, was brought up in St. Louis and Washington amid his father's legend, but his Catholic mother, Ellen Ewing Sherman, probably had the greater influence. Tom went to Yale, studied law at St. Louis' Washington University, then abruptly informed his father that he was about to enter the Jesuit novitiate. "He was the keystone of my Arch," General Sherman mourned bitterly, "and his going away lets down the whole structure with a crash." Tom explained to the family: "People in love do strange things. Having a vocation is like being in love only more so, as there is no love so absorbing, so deep and so lasting as that of the creature for the Creator."

As Tom moved toward his ordination as a priest, he began to sound more and more like the general's son. "National spirit will always be associated with the national arms," he proclaimed. "I should like to see all schools flying the national colors." He also said: "Order is heaven's first law and man's last and to restore it in a few spots of earth takes greater exercise of divine power than to create a million worlds."

"I Will Obey." After his father's death in 1891, he seemed to rededicate himself, in a sense, to the Sherman tradition. He attended Army of the Tennessee reunions, took such tough stands on national issues --"Socialism asks us to vote for the dishonor of our mothers"; "The man who shoots an anarchist on sight is a public benefactor"--that his Jesuit superiors pulled him off speaking tours. In 1898 he volunteered for duty as an Army chaplain, served in Puerto Rico.

But Father Tom, not yet 50, was wearing down fast, suffering nervous breakdowns, getting entangled in exhausting quarrels with his superiors about minutiae. In 1911 he collapsed, was put into one sanitarium after another, was treated as insane. "Repeated confessions but no peace," he wrote in 1913. "No hope whatever of eternal salvation. Still my vows press on me and I will continue to obey blindly."

Seventeen years later, incapacitated in hermitlike seclusion in Santa Barbara, four years before his death, he had just enough of the Sherman combativeness to fight and win a last battle for a $50-a-month Army pension that was his due for service in the War of 1898. Father Tom's entry on his pension application blank for nearest relative to be notified in case of death: his dead father, General William Tecumseh Sherman.

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