Book Reviews
With Shield and Sword: American
Military Affairs, Colonial Times to the Pres-
ent. By Warren W. Hassler, Jr. (Ames: Iowa State University
Press, 1982. x
+462 p.; maps, notes, selected
bibliography, index. $29.50.)
This book is the first comprehensive
history of the American military past
since Walter Millis's Arms and Men: A
Study in American Mlitary History
(1955). T. Harry Williams's The
History of American Wars: From 1745 to 1918
(1981) might have claimed that position
had not its author's untimely death
cut the account short at the close of
the First World War. Thus With Shield
and Sword fills a need for an up-to-date survey, and those
seeking out the de-
tails of battles and campaigns and of
the evolution of military institutions will
leave copies of it well-thumbed.
Battles and campaigns must be mentioned
first among its contents, howev-
er, because the book is very much unlike
Millis's and seems paradoxically
old-fashioned when compared with that
work of nearly a generation ago.
Hassler offers little to compare with
Millis's stimulating interpretative judg-
ments or his sweeping synthesizing of
detail into a larger whole. Rather, the
strongest sections of Hassler's book are
its combat narratives in the most tra-
ditional style of military history.
While Hassler does not overlook institution-
al history in peace as well as in war,
so that he touches all the appropriate
bases as far as supplying essential
information is concerned, his heart clearly
belongs to his tales of battle, and
there is an almost perfunctory quality about
the passages of institutional history.
A further difficulty is Hassler's
penchant, particularly evident when he de-
parts from combat, for citing the
opinions of other historians or military crit-
ics whom he considers
"authorities," as though the mere word of an "au-
thority" can settle controversial
issues. His authorities on debatable matters
of institutional development, such as
the appropriate shape of military organi-
zation or the historically vexed
question of citizen soldiers versus a profes-
sional army, tend to be those of the
Emory Upton, professional army school.
The trouble with this method is not that the present
reviewer happens to
disagree with many of the authorities,
but that it falsely suggests the closing
of many debates that ought to remain
open.
An instance bringing to mind an Ohio
historian illustrates the problem.
Hassler says of the War of 1812:
"So far as naval strategy and the building of
warships were concerned, some men at the
time as well as such later authori-
ties as Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore
Roosevelt thought that a greater
number of larger vessels,
ships-of-the-line and frigates, should have been
constructed" (p. 80). But what of
the cogent arguments of another authority,
Professor Harry L. Coles of Ohio State University? In
his book The War of
1812 (1965), Coles suggests that it would have been better
to take the oppo-
site course and have the navy build
still more smaller vessels, on the lines of
the privateers, while trying to bring some coordination
to a commerce raiding
that was hurting the British more than anything else of
which the United
States was capable at sea, but which was
limited by the helter-skelter nature
Book Reviews
157
of privateering. At the very least,
Hassler's citing of his favored authorities is
not enough to dismiss Coles's argument
out of hand.
The Uptonian bias naturally extends
beyond the selection of authorities. It
blends into a larger tendency for
Hassler to abdicate his critical faculties
when he is dealing with any topic that
might conceivably cast the military in
an unfavorable light. The account of
President Harry S. Truman's dismissal
of General Douglas MacArthur, for
example, glides over MacArthur's contin-
uing "to air his views that were
obviously at variance with those limited-war
ones of the administration" (p.
365) without mentioning the patience of the
administration with the general's
persistent defiance of categorical orders to
clear his public statements, until at
last patience could go no further. Instead,
the vague wording of the account implies
a certain petulance on Truman's part
-but then Hassler goes on to let
MacArthur justify himself by devoting al-
most an entire page to lengthy quotation
from the "old soldiers never die"
speech.
Thus the old-fashioned quality of the
book reaches from its preference for
battle stories over the "new,"
socially and politically oriented military histo-
ry into its interpretations of strategy
and policy. The reader may well find
himself longing for the wisdom and
sophistication of a Walter Millis; old as it
is, Millis's Arms and Men remains
for now the best comprehensive military
history of the United States. Yet it
also remains true that Hassler's With
Shield and Sword ought to find extensive use. It is a treasure-trove of
factual
detail. To savor its merits at their
best, a reader should leap ahead to the
chapter on the post-1865 Indian wars,
perhaps the best succinct account ever
written of the final campaigns on the
High Plains and in the southwestern
deserts. Several others of Hassler's war
narratives are not far below the
standard set by that chapter.
Temple University Russell F.
Weigley
The Glorious Cause: The American
Resolution, 1763-1789. By Robert
Middle-
kauff. Vol. II of The Oxford History
of the United States. Edited by C.
Vann Woodward. 11 vols. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982. xvi
+ 696p.; illustrations, notes,
bibliographical note, index. $25.00.)
The first volume published in the new Oxford
History of the United States,
Robert Middlekauffs history of the
American Revolutionary period is a dis-
appointment. It has strengths-graceful
prose, care in detail, and a thorough
knowledge of English politics-but its
weaknesses are too many and seriously
reduce its utility as a synthesis
reflecting the present state of knowledge.
Most unfortunately, Middlekauff pays but
scant attention to the research
of the social historians of the past
fifteen years. When discussing the causes
of the Revolution, he dips here and
there into a few of the most well-known
pieces of social history but by and
large he simply ignores this vast literature
which reshaped our appreciation of the
social milieu in which the Revolu-
tion was set. His brief discussions of
class relationships, economics, and pop-
ulation give little indication of the
advances recenty made in understanding
these subjects. His discussion of such
an important, controversial, and com-
plex subject as wealth distribution is
based on one article. Social history
158 OHIO HISTORY
fares even less well in the section of
the consequences of the Revolution and
almost none of the quantitative
measurements of change wrought by the Rev-
olution inform the analysis.
In interpretation, The Glorious Cause
is also strangely old-fashioned. Mid-
dlekauff does not explicitly address
historiographical questions, but implicit-
ly his book is a standard Whig tract
that dismisses by omission any sugges-
tion that class conflict played a
serious role in the Revolution. Middlekauff's
choice of language does indeed make the
colonists' cause sound glorious.
For example, the English "did not
know the people they were dealing with
- did not know them well, that is, and
had little notion of their stiffnecked
quality or of their capacity for
principled action" (pg. 49). One wonders if
merchants and artisans were equally
stiffnecked and if they were stiffnecked
in their attitudes towards each other.
One also wonders if stiffneckedness
ever derived from changes in the
economy. Further on, Middlekauff writes
that "as rhetorically extravagant
as the colonists' responses may appear, they
were not contrived; they were not what
we call propaganda" (pg. 128). This
conclusion is based on Bernard Bailyn's
analysis of Revolutionary pamphlets
and, as magnificent and important as
Bailyn's work is, it is not uncritically ac-
cepted by the profession and is the
center of a lively debate. Middlekauff
should either acknowledge the debate or
furnish some evidence of his own
to sustain his unqualified position.
And finally, Middlekauff's relative
weighting of topics is unbalanced. Al-
most half of the book deals with the
military years of the Revolution; little is
written about the aftermath and
immediate or long-range consequences. Less
than five pages, for example, are
devoted to the negotiations leading to the
treaty that ended the war, while most of
the major battles are treated in mi-
nute detail. The decade of the 1780s and
the process of creating and ratifying
the Constitution receive far too brief
an analysis relative to their importance.
And, within the period 1775 to 1782,
military events dominate Middlekauff's
account to the near exclusion of everything else: there
is almost no discussion
of the governmental processes at work.
One has no sense of what the Conti-
nental Congress, the various states, and
the local communities were doing. A
regional imbalance in Middlekauff's
narrative of the events prior to 1775 is
very misleading. While Massachusetts is
unquestionably the center of much
of the pre-Revolutionary agitation,
Middlekauff emphasizes its importance
far too much and slights the activities
of radicals in other colonies. Ironically
in doing this, he makes the same mistake
the English ministries made in the
1760s and early 1770s.
Curiously, The Glorious Cause reads
in the main as if it were published
about 1965. The new social historians
were just beginning to make them-
selves heard but were not a major force;
the neo-Whig view held sway and
had not been sharply challenged by the
neo-progressives of the New Left;
the consequences of the Revolution had
not been quantified in any signifi-
cant way; and few detailed and anaytical
studies of states and communities
had appeared. As a one-volume summary of
existing scholarship, The Glori-
ous Cause would have been appropriate and useful in 1965: in 1982
it is not.
Bruce C. Daniels University of
Winnipeg
Book Reviews
159
Olive Branch and Sword: The
Compromise of 1833. By Merrill D.
Peterson.
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1982. xi + 132p.; notes, in-
dex. $15.00.)
Merrill Peterson's latest book is based
both on his 1980 Walter Lynwood
Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State
University and a larger project on Web-
ster, Clay, and Calhoun. The title
refers to the two-pronged Congressional
approach to sectional crisis in 1833:
the Compromise Tariff (olive branch) and
the Force Bill (sword). Peterson's
purpose is to present the passage of both
bills as case studies in the politics of
compromise - indeed, as examples of
the "perils and perplexities"
(124) of compromise. He first examines the polit-
ical setting of the crisis, particularly
the history of tariff legislation; second,
the making of the Compromise itself
(actually there were several), with em-
phasis on the interested sectional and
economic parties and the bill's
statesmen-architects; and concludes with
the consequences and effects of
the Compromise.
This is not easy history to write, and
most legislative histories make for
tedious and dull reading. Happily, this
book is different. In Peterson's capa-
ble hands the emphasis throughout is on
the texture-the smell and feel-of
the legislative process, and most
especially on its accompanying political the-
atrics. What lifts it above others of
its genre is Peterson's insistence on keep-
ing his actors on center stage despite
complex narrative and analysis. The
centerpiece is the eternal candidate,
Henry Clay, who, like a seaman in the
capitol's corridors and chambers, was
forever calculating political tides, cur-
rents, and winds. Only slightly less
prominent are the complex and princi-
pled Daniel Webster; John Calhoun, the
psuedo-logician; and the ignored
prophet of his generation, John Quincy
Adams.
While Peterson attaches considerable
significance to the debates and ma-
neuvering over the Compromise, he is
reluctant to allow these activities in
1833 to presage coming events; he does
not believe that the Compromise of
1833 caused either the Panic of 1837 or
the Civil War. Compromise, he re-
minds us, is too equivocal in nature and
outcome to give such assurance, and
the Compromise of 1833 had limited
effects: it ended the immediate nullifi-
cation crisis and settled tariff policy
for only a decade. It did not, he argues,
solve either problem or alter the fate
of the nation. Here, however, Peterson
may too easily dismiss the psychological
effect of the crisis, especially the
likelihood that after 1833 the South
viewed nullification and the threat of se-
cession as precedents to be employed in
the future to alter the course of na-
tional policy. One suspects that John Quincy
Adams understood this result
of the Compromise better than any of his
contemporaries when he predicted
that "that awful day" of
reckoning between North and South had been
brought nearer by the "fatal
precedent" (p. 87). Peterson, however, sees
more reason to study the Compromise as a
complex process dominated by
strong personalities than as a crystal
ball. He concludes by reminding us that
compromise is not "winning."
Rather it is the struggle to find a temporary so-
lution, not a permanent one; it is the
price Americans pay for peace under
their Constitution.
Altogether this is an important little
book. It is a thorough, thought-
provoking dissection of an overlooked
episode in American sectional history
-one that has fallen through the cracks in an age of
compromise. It throws
160 OHIO HISTORY
new light on an old subject and is one
of the very best examples of this kind
of historical literature. Readers who
believe in the role of historical actors in
shaping events, and who want lively
writing, sharp analysis, and sound judg-
ment from their historians will profit
immensely from this book.
Humboldt State University Stephen C. Fox
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Volume 9: July 17-December 31, 1863. Edited
by John Y. Simon. (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1982.
xxiv + 700p.; maps and illustrations,
notes, chronology, calendar, index.
$40.00)
"If Vicksburg made Grant a public
hero, his conversion of defeat into vic-
tory at Chattanooga proclaimed his
military greatness." These words of
William McFeely (Grant: A Biography. W.W.
Norton, New York, 1981, p. 139)
set the basic theme of volume nine of
this important series. Volume eight
highlighted Grant's growth under
pressure. He moves on to military great-
ness in the Chattanooga campaign. The
brilliance already being attributed to
him by his President and some of the
North's leading military authorities
reaches fruition in this new challenge
of leadership.
Following his glorious triumph at
Vicksburg, Grant turned his attention
eastward, to the besieged Chattanooga on
the Tennessee-Georgia line,
where General William S. Rosecrans
seemed frozen before an enemy well-
defensed in the rugged terrain south of
the city. Grant's entrance into this
theater was the final step on the
proving grounds leading to supreme com-
mand of the Federal Army, and he passed
new tests here with his usual
craftsmanlike efficiency.
Through Grant's writings, this volume
recounts the continuing growth of
the general as military expert and his
increasing capacity to direct the ad-
vance of a large army in the field. His
letters are strikingly brief, even in the
darkest moments, but they are also
crisp, straight to the point and specific in
terms of plans, personnel, and logistics
for opening up the Tennessee River.
Grant's favorite subordinates continue
to serve him well, both as inspira-
tion for new moves as well as victors on
the field of battle. Sherman and
McPherson continue as favorites, but
Generals George H. Thomas and W.F.
Smith also receive commendations. But as
he rewards those who succeed,
Grant also speaks harshly to those who
displease him. Sharp personal notes
precede quick disciplinary action toward
Generals Orlando Willcox and
James H. Wilson and Colonel Clark B.
Lagow because of their ineptness in
the field. He seems forever impatient
with poor leadership, enough so that
he curtly dismisses Wilson and Lagow
from his personal staff.
Grant's letters also reveal that his
days are hardly free during the late sum-
mer and early autumn of 1863. If the war
is running down, as some seemed to
feel after Gettysburg and Vicksburg, it
is not evident from the general's cor-
respondence. He filled his days not only
with plans for an extensive and
complex campaign, he divested Rosecrans
of his command, he assumed the
administrative burdens of exchange and
parole, of formation of a regiment of
Black troops, of feeding a large army
within enemy lines and of promoting
and rewarding the deserving. Beyond the
field, he worried about his
Book Reviews
161
child's health, he missed his wife, he
kept listening to the rantings of his fa-
ther, he addressed himself to the plea
of a friend to write a supporting letter
for a young man's entrance into the
Naval Academy, his personal debts
mounted in a period of shortage of
funds. There is again the hint of at least
one episode with the bottle. Meanwhile
the reader wades with growing im-
patience through the small print and the
military language, always expecting
the big move on the Tennessee.
And then finally: ". . . our attack
will be made in the morning .. ." words
from Grant to General Willcox, words
that announce the beginning of the fa-
mous battle "in the clouds".
Five days of battle, charges and
countercharges, a growing anxiety within
Confederate ranks, then breakthrough . .
. a great victory for a brilliant gen-
eral, then victory recounted in a long
and tedious but knowledgeable report.
Grant is at last the general for whom
his President was searching. But for the
ever restless general, even in victory
there is a note of expectancy. To his be-
loved Julia he confesses his dream: "I shall not
probably remain in Chatta-
nooga many weeks longer, where I expect
to go would not be proper for me to
state, but I have no expectation of
spending a winter in idleness." Victory
over General Braxton Bragg was great
medicine for the ambitious command-
er, but his active mind was already
searching out new arenas of conquest.
For a time it was Mobile. There was
something in that Gulf port, and Grant
watched the city for several months. But first he chose
"to make the line of
the Tennessee secure and harry the enemy
through the winter months."
This meant movement toward Knoxville.
Though Mobile remained a
recurring dream, possibilities in the
Heartland were more encouraging. This
volume ends as Grant arrives at
Knoxville on the last day of 1863, ready to tie
up the Tennessee package and begin another phase of his
illustrous career.
This volume continues the excellent
quality of research and recounting
seen in previous volumes. Grant emerges
more and more as a complex man
and general. His prejudices remain, he
seems to hold deep feelings for Blacks
but seems never to understand the race.
He is still wary of Jewish sutlers and
of incompetents. But mostly these are
pages of preparation for a great battle.
Wittenberg University Robert Hartje
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Volume 10: January 1-May 31, 1864. Edited
by John Y. Simon. (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1982.
xxv + 618p.; maps and illustrations,
notes, chronology, calendar, index.
$40.00.)
In this volume of papers, the general
finally arrives to the height of com-
mand and to the awesome responsibility
of directing the Union army against
the fading but still fierce Southern
forces on several fronts. In March 1864
the Senate confirmed Ulysses S. Grant as
the army's first lieutenant general
since George Washington and President
Lincoln directed his return to
Washington to assume this new command.
This volume is a study of that
transition, from command in the West to
the Eastern Theater of operations,
to face directly the fabled leadership
of Confederate Robert E. Lee.
In this correspondnece there appears a
new firmness in the general's man-
162 OHIO HISTORY
ner, with his officers and even with his
father who is still chronically at-
tempting to exert his influence upon his
son.
Grant leaves the West with an
unprecedented command record, successes
against all odds. But before departing,
he assigns two of his favorite generals
to continue the harassment of the
"Heartland," William T. Sherman and
James B. McPherson, and to invade strategic
locations to break the waning
intensity of Confederate resistence.
After some delay, Grant himself joins
General George G. Meade's army for its
push against the Army of Northern
Virginia in a new spring offensive.
In this volume the papers reveal a man
with a will, a man confident in what
he was doing, generally unpressured by
the politics of command that went
with the new high rank. Compared to
Sherman's reports, his are tantalizing-
ly short but crisp and to the point.
There is no equivocation in his letter to
General H.H. Halleck, his former
commander, to improve the army mail serv-
ice. There is the same crispness in his
assumption of command in March; in
his decision to halt prisoner exchange
because he believed it benefited the
South more than it did the North; in his
effective new command relationship
with his former chief, General Halleck;
in his curt dismissal of one of the po-
litical generals, N.P. Banks, in late
April for laxness in command; in his suc-
cinct reporting to the President,
Secretary of War Stanton and General Hal-
leck, and in his field orders,
especially to Generals Meade and Burnside. If
there was a serious drinking problem in
the nature of the man, there is no evi-
dence of it in these packed days of
leadership responsibility in the first five
months of 1864.
But the human traits are also there. We
feel his pride in the "very elegant
horse" presented to him by the
citizens of several Illinois counties before his
departure for Washington, his concerns
over the dangerous illness of his son
in February, in his chagrin at
Confederate Longstreet for continued pressure
against Knoxville when Grant wanted to
move on to greater things, in his con-
stant concerns over his wife, and in the
friendly rejection of his father's ad-
vice to reinstate a dismissed West Point
cadet.
The last part of this volume is the
story of the Wilderness in Virginia in late
Spring, 1864. Lee with his
"lieutenants" disappearing daily in the smoke of
battle was still able to celebrate
another "finest hour" against the best that
the North could offer. But this time the
wily Virginian faced a new match-up;
instead of folding tents and returning
to Washington as other generals de-
feated by Lee had done, Grant turned his
army east and renewed the as-
sault against the Army of Northern
Virginia on a line hardly expected even
by Lee. A crisp new order to Meade on
May 7 and the army moved to
Spotsylvania Court House, where he began
a furious series of assaults best
identified by his willingness to
sacrifice large numbers of his troops in hopes
of cutting into Confederate totals. Always with his eye
on Sherman, hoping
for the end of hostilities, Grant moves through the old
battlefields of 1862,
his losses horrendous in such
engagements as Spotsylvania Court House and
North Anna River. Grant begins to feel success from the
increased tempo but
Lee falls back but holds on.
Grant is in the highest command position
possible in early 1864, but the
frills are still missing. He discounts
conclusively, at least for the time, the ru-
mors that would send him against Lincoln
for the Presidency; he disdains
medals and frilly uniforms; he smokes
the ever-present cigar; he worries
Book Reviews
163
about his wife who he continues to love
as a young lover. But beyond the im-
age is the complex man, and these
letters help to bring to light the life and
times of this unique man in some of his
most severe testing-against Robert E.
Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia.
Wittenberg University Robert
Hartje
Ulysses S. Grant: Essays and
Documents. Edited by David L. Wilson
and
John Y. Simon. (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1981.
145p.; maps and illustrations, notes,
index. $13.95.)
It may be new revival time, refighting
the old war we probably never can
forget. It may be just a reaction to the
recent critical accounts of Robert E.
Lee from the pens of Thomas Connolly,
Archer Jones, Grady McWhiney and
others. It may even be because of the
concerns about another global war
that stalk our dreams. It could be
another reaction to recent years of frustra-
tion in White House leadership. Or it
just might be, that with new insights
and computerized perspectives,
historians are becoming more sensitive to re-
ality than to the romantic. Whatever the
case, Ulysses S. Grant is receiving a
better press, and this book is an
example. And this despite the recent survey
of Presidential leadership by American
historians which gave the general
his usual rating as one of our worst
Presidents.
This little book is a series of four
essays and two documents on varied as-
pects of Grant's life: as general, as
diplomat, as symbol or myth, as a young
officer on the frontier in the early
1850s. There is no real order in this book,
no central theme unless it is the
complexity and variety in this important life.
It is, as its editors state, a fill-in
replacement for the now defunct Ulysses S.
Grant Newsletter, which was a
rich source of miscellany.
Richard Current's essay is probably the
most significant one. This recog-
nized Grant scholar reclaims the general
from the stockpile of Presidential
failures by showing him as being as much
of a war leader as was Lincoln.
The Reconstruction period demanded a man
of Grant's character and was
fortunate to have him, a man of courage
and strength and of peace as well as a
man who could admit his own
shortcomings.
E.B. Long dispels some of the cruel
mythology that surrounds the man
and recounts more positively his
leadership, especially in the big years 1864-
65. One great general defeats another,
Grant and Lincoln work well as a team;
Grant's military objects were well
selected, his strategy of high quality, his
control of subordinates often exemplary.
Though he did appear as "butch-
er" for a spell, he effectively
made the transition to a more restrained offen-
sive mood and cut back on losses. Long's
Grant emerges in new myth as a
"bourgeois man," "to be;
to do; . . . to suffer."
Charles G. Ellington and Horatio E.
Wirtz bring us more adventuresome
phases of Grant's life: the first the
story of Grant's involvement in an Isthmus
of Panama crossing in 1852 with all its
hardships and thrills, while the sec-
ond moves to his post-Presidential years
with an account of the general's
unofficial diplomacy with Japan in 1879.
Both articles size up his leadership
as unusual but effective.
The last two sections are rewrites of
documents that relate directly to Grant
164 OHIO HISTORY
as general in war. They are General
Meigs's "Journal of the Battle of Chatta-
nooga," and Samuel Beckworth's
account of his service as telegraph opera-
tor under Grant. The latter account is
especially rich in detail and personal
memorabilia.
This little volume will read well to
those interested in either Grant or the
Civil War. It is not of the caliber of
William McFeely's splendid Grant, A Bi-
ography, but it also defends a maligned historical figure. As
with McFeely,
Grant emerges as more human, more
understandable in his actions, and as
real as the cigar that seemed
ever-present with the general or the President.
Wittenberg University Robert Hartje
Custer Victorious: The Civil War
Battles of General George Armstrong Custer.
By Gregory J.W. Urwin (East Brunswick,
New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1983. 308p.;
illustrations, notes, appendix, bibliography,
index. $29.50.)
On the memorable 9th of April, 1865, at
Appomattox Court House, Philip
Sheridan bought from Wilmer McLean the
table on which General Grant
had written out the terms of surrender
of General Lee's army. The next day
Sheridan gave the table as a gift for
his wife to the commander of the 3d Di-
vision of his Cavalry Corps, Major
General George Armstrong Custer, not yet
26 years old, lowest-ranking graduate of
the West Point Class of 1861. With
the table went a note to Mrs. Custer.
"Permit me to say, Madam," Sheridan
wrote, "that there is scarcely an
individual in our service who has contrib-
uted more to bring about . . . [the
surrender] than your gallant husband."
Eleven years later, on June 25, 1876, on
the Little Big Horn in Montana, Custer
and 264 men of his 7th United States
Cavalry were wiped out by the Sioux.
Mr. Urwin's point of departure, stated
both in the "Preface: Why Another
Custer Book?" and a summing-up
chapter, "George A. Custer as a Military
Commander," is his conviction that
historians have given Custer a bad
press; that, in fact, "A glib yet
monstrous fabrication has been fixed in the
place of a complex human being,"
and that this "howling injustice" de-
mands redress. Mr. Urwin wishes firstly
to testify against "this cynical and
jaded century, where slander and mudslinging are
confused with historical
objectivity"; and secondly, to
"strike a blow against all those recent flawed
and illiberal histories that have been
foisted on the reading public." Mr.
Urwin admits to being a liberal Democrat
who "does not idolize military
men"; nonetheless, he holds that
Custer has been a victim of injustice, and
is entitled, to restore the balance, to
be presented as the Custer of the Civil
War, "The Custer America
Forgot." And lest the book be dismissed as "an
exercise in hero-worship by a
romantically-inclined Custerphile," Mr. Urwin
assures us that "The opinions
expressed herein were not formulated until af-
ter the author had waded through his research, which alone
distinguishes
it from most other Custer books ..
."
Mr. Urwin's presentation invites
appraisal of his book first of all as one ad-
dressed to "Custerphiles," the
general reader, and Civil War buffs. As
such, it is top notch. Custer's deeds
first at the head of the "Michigan Bri-
gade" and then of the 3d Cavalry
Division, at Gettysburg, Yellow Tavern,
Book Reviews
165
Trevilian Station, The Opequon, Tom's
Brook, Cedar Creek, Waynesbor-
ough, Dinwiddie, Five Forks, Sayler's
Creek, and Appomattox Station, are
the stuff of legend, deserving of being
told and retold. Mr. Urwin does the
telling with admirable narrative skill,
verve, clarity, and obvious (and infec-
tious) relish. Custer Victorious (a
felicitous title!) is a thoroughly good
"read." Nevertheless, this
reviewer would be happier if, in a commendable
effort to avoid the Scylla of academic
prose, Mr. Urwin had not run afoul of
the Charybdis of "measly
lieutenant," "grabbed a bit of breakfast," "met
up with," "lit out so
fast," "cockeyed optimist," "get some shuteye,"
"foot-
sore ground-pounders," and alas, of
many more like them; or such gems of
Creative Writing I as "Mother
Nature was marshaling her awesome might to
chastise the mere mortals who had dared
to shake the cosmos for three
days with their orgy of mass
murder." (July 4, 1863, Gettysburg.) And in
what way, a despondent reviewer asks, is
"Old 'Bob' Lee" preferable to
Robert E. Lee, "Old Beauty" to
J.E.B. (or "Jeb") Stuart, and "Old Curly,"
"Boy General,"
"long-haired hell-raiser," "[Sheridan's ] long-haired dar-
ling," to just plain Custer? One
cannot help wondering what Mr. Urwin
would call Napoleon, if he should decide
to write his biography.
The scholarly format and apparatus of Custer
Victorious make it obvious
that Mr. Urwin also wishes the book to
be judged as a serious work of histo-
ry. At the risk of being thought "a
historian . . . [of the ] dour, solitary, plod-
ding sort," your reviewer must take
issue with Mr. Urwin's major premise,
namely that Custer's role in the Civil
War has been the victim of a conspiracy
of silence, that "Even informed
students of . . . [the Civil War] are acquaint-
ed only with scattered highlights of his
services." A cursory check of the
serious literature on the war
(including, if such a reference be thought not im-
proper, this reviewer's The Union
Cavalry in the Civil War) will show that
Custer has had his fair share of
attention. After all, he never held army or
even corps command; and more
importantly, he belonged to what was essen-
tially an auxiliary arm of the service,
and one, moreover, that in the East did
not play a significant role until the
spring of 1864. But even if the author were
entirely correct, the injustice to
Custer would not be redressed by crediting
him, as the author does, directly or
impliedly, with winning single-handed
the battles of Yellow Tavern, The
Opequon, Cedar Creek, Brandy Station,
and Aldie. Custer's real accomplishments were
creditable and spectacular
enough; it adds nothing to his stature
to be turned into a military Paul
Bunyan.
Unfortunately, Mr. Urwin's desire to
focus attention so exclusively on Cus-
ter detracts from the effect of his
admirable battle pieces. They would be
more striking if they told more of what
the rest of the cavalry, the infantry
and artillery, and particularly the
enemy, were doing. The need to do this
fairly and accurately would save Mr.
Urwin from implying (for example) that
Custer and two regiments of his division
were alone in pursuing Early's beat-
en army after Cedar Creek, or from
writing that the V Army Corps "waddled
lazily" to Five Forks.
Lastly, while Mr. Urwin's expressed
objective is to present Custer's "Civil
War Battles," his
portraiture would be less one-dimensional, more human, if
he had gone beyond Custer's leadership
of his men in battle. How did he
perform between battles? How did
he measure up in the discharge of the
humdrum but vitally important
administrative duties of brigade and divi-
sional command? Did he concern himself
with the welfare, health, morale,
166 OHIO HISTORY
comfort, or discipline of his men? What
were the degree and effectiveness of
his concern for the most vexatious and
most critical of a cavalry commander's
problems, namely the condition and
numbers of his horses? And what were
his relations with his commissioned
subordinates-did he attract their de-
votion (during, not decades after, the
war) as effectively as he attracted the
devotion of his troopers? It is a
tribute to the author that one would like to
be told more about someone whom,
notwithstanding his own status as a lib-
eral Democrat, he obviously admires.
Cambridge, Vermont Stephen Z.
Starr
The Papers of George Washington. The
Journal of the Proceedings of the Pres-
ident, 1793-1797. Edited by Dorothy Twohig. (Charlottesville: The Uni-
versity Press of Virginia, 1981. xvii +
393p.; illustration, bibliography,
notes, index. $25.00.)
The first volume in the first series in
the massive Papers of George Wash-
ington project is not going to excite any but the most devoted
student of the
administrative history of Washington's
second administration. In fact, since
275 of the 352 pages of text deal with
1793, this tome adds little to our com-
prehension of most of that second term.
And yet, Dorothy Twohig's detailed
edition of the presidential daybook
offers many insights into that critical
year with its growing animosity between
Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson
and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander
Hamilton, rising European tensions
which threatened to draw the United
States into the Anglo-French war, and
continuing Indian troubles on the Old
Northwest and Old Southwest fron-
tiers.
Beneath the laconic record kept by
secretaries Tobias Lear and Bartholo-
mew Dandridge one finds only hints of
the Jefferson-Hamilton rift. The ex-
cellent notes provide amplification of
the estrangement, especially in the cab-
inet meeting of August 20, 1793. What is
interesting is Washington's positive
leanings toward revolutionary France in
the midst of the attempted American
neutrality and despite the obtuse
machinations of Citizen Edmond Genet,
the French ambassador. It is during the
international crisis that Washing-
ton's journal breaks its normal neutral,
factual tone to describe one of Genet's
letters as "insulting" (p.
210). It is amusing to note Jefferson's objections to a
military academy on the grounds of its
unconstitutionality when one recog-
nizes he established West Point a decade
later. Throughout 1793 most presi-
dential concerns revolved around
diplomatic and military affairs-very few
matters of substance directly involved
the Secretary of the Treasury who
busied himself with consultations within
the preserve of other department
heads. The important roles of Secretary
of War Henry Knox and Attorney
General Edmund Randolph are more obvious
in these memoranda than
most readers taught to emphasize the
Hamilton-Jefferson clash would nor-
mally expect.
Ohioans will be particularly interested
in the Indian troubles which in-
volved General Anthony Wayne's actions
leading toward the Battle of Fallen
Timbers and the Treaty of Greeneville. Unfortunately,
the journal's detail
slips considerably as these events near
their climax and there is little mention
Book Reviews
167
of the events of 1794-95. In one
notation the quotation cited refers to "Miami
Bay" (p. 237) and river, probably
an allusion to the Maumee (the "Miami of
the Lakes") which is correctly
referenced earlier (p. 221). Equally interesting
is the restraint Washington imposed on
Wayne-prohibiting him from an ex-
panded expedition in 1793 in order to
allow negotiation with the Maumee val-
ley tribes. Since the President
committed virtually the whole of the U.S.
Army with Wayne, but had additional
troubles with the Iroquois, Creeks,
and Cherokees, he did everything
possible to restrain the governors of
Pennsylvania, Kentucky, North Carolina,
and especially Georgia from pro-
voking the Native Americans. The
Georgians proved most trying as they en-
croached on Creek lands and attacked
Indian villages.
Much of this Journal of the
Proceedings concerns the routine rather than
the significant. The mundane detail with
which the President coped is
startling-signing passports and
commissions for minor officials and revising
the letters of his cabinet officials
were everyday duties. Because Washington
did not maintain a diary during these
years, this journal represents the best
available record of his daily
transactions.
This volume constitutes the first of
dozens to follow in The Papers of
George Washington of which W.W. Abbot is the general editor. Although it
represents an addition to the canon of
published Washingtonia, it is not par-
ticularly useful. One can easily
question the necessity of its publication. Pro-
fessor Twohig's editorial commentaries
expand the secretaries' notations and
in conjunction with the presidential
letters of the period should augment our
comprehension of Washington's
leadership. One critical indicator of the
president's role appears relative to
French difficulties, but it reflects the
whole tenor of his administration:
"I thought we ought to consider very de-
liberately on all these measures before we
acted-for it was impossible to
determine with precision what would be
the final issue of the contest-
consequently this Government ought not
to go faster than it was obliged; but
to walk on cautious ground" (p.
148). Herein lies the key to Washington's suc-
cessful presidency-he considered every
issue deliberately and always
walked on cautious ground.
Bowling Green State University David Curtis Skaggs
Letters of Delegates to Congress,
1774-1789. Volume 6: January
1-April 30,
1777. Edited by Paul H. Smith. (Washington, D.C.: Library of
Congress,
1980. xxviii + 760p.; illustrations,
chronology of congress, list of delegates,
notes, index. $19.00.)
Letters of Delegates to Congress,
1774-1789. Volume 7: May
1-September 18,
1777. Edited by Paul H. Smith. (Washington, D.C.: Library of
Congress,
1981. xxvi + 749p.; illustrations,
chronology of congress, list of delegates,
notes, index. $15.00.)
Letters of Delegates to Congress,
1774-1789. Volume 8: September 19,
1777-
January 31, 1778. Edited by Paul H. Smith. (Washington, D.C.: Library of
Congress, 1981. xxxi + 745p.;
illustrations, chronology of congress, list of
delegates, notes, index. $17.00.)
168 OHIO HISTORY
The men and women who lived through the
American Revolution were
well aware of its worldwide significance
and the importance of writing its his-
tory. But John Adams wondered whether the history of
the great events he
witnessed could ever be written since
the materials for doing so had not
been collected. In the nineteenth
century, Peter Force, Jared Sparks and
other outstanding editors began the arduous
work of collecting and printing
both the public record and some of the personal papers
of the revolutionary
period. Between 1900 and 1940, their
work was greatly expanded, and more
reliable editions of revolutionary
sources were issued by a number of editor-
scholars including J.C. Fitzpatrick,
W.C. Ford, P.L. Ford, and Edmund C.
Burnett. Though some of the series
issued ran to ten or twenty volumes, they
were selective rather than complete
collections of the papers of George
Washington, the letters of delegates who
served in the Continental Congress,
and other figures.
In 1950, a new age of historical
publication was initiated with the issuance
of the first volume of Julian Boyd's
edition of Thomas Jefferson's papers.
Since then, several dozen similar
projects have been begun, with the aim of
printing comprehensive collections of
the papers of Franklin, Hamilton, Mad-
ison, the Adams family, and nineteenth
and twentieth century historical fig-
ures as well. In contrast to earlier
editions, some of these modern ones are
projected to run fifty to one hundred
volumes. It is common for individual
volumes to cost $30.00 or more, and it
now seems highly unlikely that all of
them can be financed to their
completion. This may be unfortunate, in view
of the vast sums that our society spends
on less worthwhile projects, but one
might also question the editorial wisdom
of attempting comprehensiveness in
these editions.
The volumes under review total 2255
pages of records on the period Janu-
ary 1, 1777-January 31, 1778. Burnett's
earlier edition of the delegates' letters
required only 470 pages on this period
and without question was inadequate.
But as one reads the new edition and
encounters endless repetitions of, for
example, General Howe's supposed losses
at Germantown, one longs for some
happy compromise.
To be sure, the months covered by these
volumes were important ones,
both militarily and politically. On the
battlefront, Fort Ticonderoga was
abandoned as John Burgoyne's force
descended from Canada, Washington
was out-generaled by Howe at Brandywine,
and the favorable American
prospects at Germantown disintegrated in
fog and confusion. In this same
year, however, Benedict Arnold relieved
Fort Schuyler, thus preventing a
British force from joining Burgoyne, and
Arnold and Gates forced the sur-
render of Burgoyne's entire army at
Saratoga. The letters printed here simply
give us information on what Congress
heard of the battles and how various
delegates reacted to the news; other
sources must be used to study what ac-
tually happened. And so it is with other
subjects. We learn the delegates'
feelings but not the actual facts on the
difficulties at Valley Forge, the mili-
tary genius of Washington and Gates, the
French and other volunteer offi-
cers who came to America, and the
so-called Conway Cabal.
In the political arena, Congress was
trying to reform administration by mov-
ing to a Board of War composed of
members who were not delegates, a mod-
el later used for Treasury and other
affairs. But immediate problems fre-
quently distracted attention-the
disastrous condition of the commissary
and quartermaster corps, inability to
raise troops, scandalous conditions in
Book Reviews
169
the hospital department, and the rapid
depreciation of the currency. John
Adams got so sick of the quarrels of
officers that he said they scrambled
"for Rank and Pay like Apes for
Nutts." Twice the Congress fled its seat at
Philadelphia, once to Baltimore and
again to York, Pennsylvania. While han-
dling all the petty quarrels and routine
business that came to hand, they de-
bated the grave issues of how the states
would be taxed and represented in
the Confederation, the constitution of
which was approved by Congress in
1777. The delegates often critized the
idleness, corruption, and lack of patri-
otism of soldiers and officers, but
there were few members of Congress who
exhibited a greater devotion to public
duty. Eighty-two delegates were elect-
ed for the period May 1-September 18,
1777, but thirty of them did not at-
tend at all and only fourteen were there
during the whole period.
Indeed, these volumes add weight to the
view of recent historians that
the average citizen, who allegedly left
his plow to take up arms, was not read-
ily available when recruiters beat their
drums. One delegate said that some
men would turn out for a month, but
having satisfied their curiosity or col-
lected a good story to tell at home,
they returned to their fields and families.
Another characterized the army as an
arena of dissipation, debauchery,
gaming and profaneness. As in some later
American wars, it was often the
poor, the alienated, the men without
hope in civilian life who entered the
army.
One of the repeated themes in these
volumes is the extraordinary back-
biting and political infighting in
Congress and army. If space permitted, one
could list a baker's dozen of stunning
illustrations. Privately, some delegates
suspected that Charles Lee deliberately
"threw himself in the way of being
taken prisoner." Not hiding his
sentiments, Thomas Burke wrote a remarka-
ble letter to John Sullivan pledging to
do all he could to remove him from
command. He accused him of incompetence,
"evil conduct," and a lack of
judgment that was constantly "productive of
misfortunes to the army." Gen-
erals Greene, Knox, and Sullivan
threatened to resign if a French officer was
appointed to head the artillery; during
the same months, partisans of Gates
and Schuyler engaged in vicious warfare
over which would command the
Northern Department. Some of the most
interesting comments concern the
character of John Hancock, a man of
great wealth, limited talents, and un-
bounded vanity. Sam Adams criticized his
self-importance in giving a fare-
well address to Congress when he retired
from the presidency, and the
Massachusetts delegation voted against a
resolve to thank Hancock for his
service. His successor as president,
Henry Laurens of South Carolina, wrote
of him, "His fawning mild address
& obsequiousness procured him tolera-
tion .... His idleness, duplicities
& criminal partialities in a certain Circle
laid the foundation of our present
deplorable State."
This series began as a bicentennial
project in 1976, and its much greater
comprehensiveness, as compared to the
Burnett edition, is certainly wel-
comed by scholars. Hopefully, funding
will continue and editor Paul H.
Smith will be able to stay the course
and see to completion the many future
volumes covering the period to 1789.
From such works, historians can try to
fulfill John Adams's dream that the
whole history of the Revolution be writ-
ten.
Cleveland State University John H. Cary
170 OHIO HISTORY
The Presidencies of James A. Garfield
and Chester A. Arthur. By Justus D.
Doenecke. (Lawrence: The Regents Press
of Kansas, 1981. xiii + 229p.;
notes, bibliographic essay, index.
$15.00.)
Historical revision of American
presidents-especially Republican ones-
has become almost an academic industry
these days. Eisenhower, Hoover,
Harding, McKinley-all have received more
favorable critiques from recent
historians than was the case previously.
This book continues that trend.
Author Doenecke, a professor at the
University of South Florida, does not,
however, try to make Presidents Garfield
and Arthur something they were
not. He sees their limitations, both
personal and environmental. Garfield, for
example, is portrayed as an inadequate
man who nonetheless believed him-
self a child of destiny. But the tall,
handsome, bearded Ohioan had little
time to shape his own and his country's
future, as Guiteau's bullet ended a
life and a presidency. Successor Chester
A. Arthur came to office with some
public sympathy and much private
skepticism. A protege of New York boss-
es, he had been identified with
factional politics much of his life. Reformers
feared him. Yet the personal Arthur
differed from his initial, grimy public
image. He had refined tastes, renovated
the White House, and drew men
and women to him with good conversation
and charming manners. Washing-
ton liked his style. Yet, says Doenecke,
Arthur was a man "haunted by hid-
den tragedies" (p. 78). A son died
when the New Yorker was thirty-four; his
married life was difficult; he remained
at heart a loner. Moreover, in 1882 Ar-
thur learned he had Bright's disease, a
malady that would end his life only
twenty months after he left Washington.
Although a very sick man, the presi-
dent kept the news from the nation, did
not play on its sympathies, and en-
dured quietly.
The public career of Chester A. Arthur
may have been shaped in part by
the effect of his disease. He showed
apathy, for example, when it came to
administration. (One clerk commented
that the president "never did today
what he could put off until
tomorrow.") Yet the author finds more to praise
in that presidency than have others before
him. The development of the
navy, civil service reform, some
superior appointments, significant vetoes-all
made Arthur "one of the nation's
great political surprises" (p. 183). But,
again, balance prevails, for Doenecke
concludes also that the president,
bound by his ideology, initiated limited
legislation, accomplished little in
foreign affairs, and performed
vindictively in some cases. The final summa-
tion is that if Garfield's record was
"ambivalent," Arthur's was "most ade-
quate" (p. 183). Even in revisionism,
one can only do so much with the mate-
rial.
Professor Doenecke has written a good
book: readable, well grounded in
secondary sources, and properly
interpretive and judgmental. Congress he
calls "plainly incompetent"
(p. 12); Secretary of State James G. Blaine per-
formed in an "irresponsible"
manner (p. 62); and foreign policy resulted
chiefly from party politics and
parochial interests. Such conclusions-often
correctly-can bring an author criticism;
they also can make his work firm
and decisive. In an era of minute
monographic historical writing, such over-
views are badly needed.
In a book as brief and selective as
this, a reviewer can always wish the au-
thor had done some things differently.
In this case, for example, Professor
Book Reviews
171
Doenecke might have devoted less time to
diplomacy and more to domestic
affairs, or more to the West and a bit
less to the South. But, on the whole, he
has done well. Unlike Arthur's
"most adequate" rating, this book deserves
a much more positive adjective.
Professor Doenecke, in fact, may have
served his presidents better than they
did their country.
Kentucky Historical Society James C. Klotter
The Presidential Game: The Origin of
American Presidential Politics. By
Richard P. McCormick. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1982. 279p.;
notes, index. $19.95
The system by which Americans have
elected their Presidents has been
irregular, improvised, and subject to
criticism throughout its history. A con-
cern with its imperfections and
ambiguities prompted Richard P. McCor-
mick, an eminent historian of early
American partisan development, to write
this synopsis of how the "presidential
game" took shape. He stresses that al-
though the framers of the Constitution
intended a system that would resist
party factiousness and intrigue, within
the first fifty years a much different
process unfolded; by the election of
1844, a two-party system had fully de-
veloped, in a form which would last
essentially for over a century thereafter.
McCormick divides this development into
four stages: the "hazardous"
period, lasting from the Constitution's
implementation in 1788 to the ratifica-
tion of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804;
the "Virginia game" of the next
twenty years, by which Thomas Jefferson
and his followers dominated nom-
inations through Congressional caucuses;
the "game of faction," which
characterized the early Jacksonian
period; and the "party game," which
took shape between 1832 and 1844,
featuring national parties and "theatri-
cal" conventions and campaigns.
After recounting the framers' uneasy road
to agreement on an election system that
reflected their ideals, McCormick
shows how that very system, once
implemented, soon led to partisanship.
Devoting a chapter to each of the four
eras, he concludes that in the system
which prevailed by 1844, voters elected
a party and its principles as well as a
President-an expansion not at all
prescribed by the Constitution. Yet this
change was not brought on by renegade
politicians but the leading states-
men of each era; while McCormick seems
to lament that the founders' ideals
were forsaken, we can recognize that it
was the founders themselves, espe-
cially Alexander Hamilton and James
Madison, who stimulated party forma-
tion after the Constitution went into
effect.
McCormick deals authoritatively with the
period from 1787 to 1844. He
adds insights to familiar events, the
roles of prominent participants, and the
mechanics and details of elections. He
skilfully depicts the factions and
ideologies which characterized the
various eras. His notes provide a useful
guide to sources on specific elections and events.
Following this extended treatment of the
earlier years, the lengthier period
from 1844 to the present is explored in
an epilogue. Although constitutional
amendments revised the election process
during this time, McCormick be-
lieves that the two-party structure of 1844 basically
continued until 1968, after
which radical changes occurred. These
changes, which signify to him the
172 OHIO HISTORY
arrival of a new political era, include
reforms in nomination procedures, the
decline of party loyalties, the
influence of media coverage, and the nomina-
tion by major parties of
"nontraditional" candidates such as George McGov-
ern, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. In
treating the modern period, he
skips back and forth in time, presenting
his examples topically rather than
chronologically. One feels that chronological
treatment, as employed in he
earlier chapters, would more clearly
have portrayed the course of later
events.
McCormick's approach also seems to
juggle examples in support of his
thesis that a relatively uniform party
system existed from 1844 to 1968. Some
readers may differ with this, finding as
many exceptions to established rules
before 1968 as afterwards. Some might
question whether America has now
really entered a new political era; some
might disrelish the labelling of their
favorite recent candidates as
"radical" or "nontraditional." Historians of
modern America might dislike the cursory
treatment given to recent times af-
ter the author's scrutiny of the earlier
periods. Still the book is a valuable
synthesis of American political history
which will enhance the perspectives
of persons interested in the subject.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Sylvan H. Kesilman
The Modern American Vice Presidency:
The Transformation of a Political In-
stitution. By Joel K. Goldstein. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press,
1982. xii + 409p.; tables, appendix,
notes, selected bibliography, index.
$20.00 cloth; $7.95 paper.)
It was all but inevitable that as the
federal government grew and America
abandoned isolationism the office of the
vice president would gain in impor-
tance. Beginning with Henry Wallace,
vice presidents have taken on new re-
sponsibilities as diplomatic emissaries
and administration helpers. They are
no longer unoccupied men, Alexander
Throttlebottoms in Of Thee I Sing,
feeding pigeons in Lafayette Park.
Modern vice presidents have played a far
more significant role than their often
deservedly obscure nineteenth century
predecessors.
In The Modern American Vice
Presidency, Joel K. Goldstein describes the
vice president's enlarged political and
administrative role. Goldstein argues
that the centralization of power and
news media coverage in Washington
boosted the office. Gallup Polls are
skillfully cited to demonstrate the popu-
larity of the vice presidents; as late
as April 1973 Spiro Agnew was the most
popular prospect for the 1976 Republican
presidential nomination. And in
perhaps the most interesting section of
the volume, Goldstein reviews the de-
bates over reforming the parties'
selection of vice presidential nominees and
Congress' filling of a vacancy in the
office.
Yet like a hastily and ill-chosen
running-mate, this book has several weak-
nesses. The Modern Vice Presidency lacks
anything approaching a thesis. De-
scription substitutes for contemplation.
Although the author visited several
presidential libraries and interviewed
aides to several who had been vice
president or considered for the office,
he tells us nothing new about those
who held or contested for the office in
recent decades.
Book Reviews
173
The work also suffers from the author's
apparently paper-thin sense of his-
torical evidence and scholarship. This
may in part be explained by Gold-
stein's training in political science,
rather than history. Archival materials are
at times awkwardly used; he cites, for
example, florid testimonials to vice
presidents without questioning their
authors' sincerity. His discussion of
American history suggests a lack of
familiarity with recent work. The 1920s
were not quite the years of laissez
faire that Goldstein describes, citing histo-
ries some twenty or more years old.
Still, what is most absent in The
Modern American Vice Presidency is a crit-
ical probing of the office's recent
history. The question that should have en-
gaged Goldstein, but is only a portion of this
political cookbook, is why the
office has not assumed greater authority
in recent years. Most moden presi-
dents have been overworked; they have needed someone to
help with the
day-to-day management of the Federal
leviathan. Yet because the Constitu-
tion only empowered the vice president to preside over
the Senate and in-
quire of the president's health, a veep's activities
have been subject to the
whim of his president. For various
reasons, most recent presidents could
have made even better use of their
second-in-commands. Instead, modern
vice presidents, with the exception of
Walter Mondale, chaired meaningless
commissions, contributed little to
policy formulation, and traveled abroad
only to have their reports ignored. This
failure to utilize the office and the of-
ten skilled leaders who held it should have been the
focus of Goldstein's
work, not everything connected to the office short of
the furnishing of the
Admiral's House.
University of Wisconsin-Madison James L. Baughman
Constitutional Fate: Theory of the
Constitution. By Philip Bobbitt. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1982. x +
285p.; notes, index. $22.95.)
This important book, which is long on
legal theory and short on history,
deals with one of the thorniest problems
of contemporary constitutional-
ism: How can non-elected judges be
justified in striking down laws enacted
through the democratic process? The
author, a professor of law at the Uni-
versity of Texas, undertakes in this
ambitious, if sometimes obscure, book to
dispose of the question once and for
all. In this task he joins Raoul Berger,
John Hart Ely, and Richard Neeley, who,
among others, have tried in recent
years to provide a similarly conclusive
analysis of the validity of judicial re-
view.
Bobbitt divides his analysis into three
sections. The first of these, "Con-
stitutional Arguments as
Conventions," consists of six typologies of constitu-
tional argument: historical, textual,
doctrinal, prudential (arguments based
on the political and economic
circumstances surrounding a case), and ethical
(that is, arguments based on the ethos
of the Constitution). Bobbitt dis-
misses these arguments as mere
conventions that do not satisfactorily justify
the use of judicial review because each
presupposes the validity of the prac-
tice.
Typical of this approach is Bobbitt's
analysis of historical argument. These
arguments in constitutional debate
depend on a determination of the original
174 OHIO HISTORY
understanding of a constitutional
provision. What, for example, did the fram-
ers mean when they used the words
"full faith and credit" or "due process
of law"? The notion behind the use
of historical argumentation, Bobbitt ob-
serves, is that constancy of
interpertation will promote constancy in the appli-
cation of constitutional rules through
judicial review. The difficulty with this
view, Bobbitt reveals, is that the
skimpy records left by the framers of the
Constitution hardly provide judges with
conclusive sources of authority.
Bobbitt demonstrates the limits of
historical argument by examining the
work of William Crosskey, a former
University of Chicago Law Professor.
Crosskey's two-volume Politics and
the Constitution, published in 1953, used
historical argument to show that
judicial review was not part of the original
Constitution. Bobbitt, however, disposes
of Crosskey's assertions by
demonstrating that the Chicago law
professor often pursued the limited and
problematical records of the
Philadelphia Convention to reach conclusions
far weightier than the evidence would
support. Crosskey, Bobbitt con-
cludes, merely used history to pursue a
specific, preordained conclusion-
the Supreme Court had no legitimate
claim to the power of judicial review un-
der the Constitution.
Bobbitt also disposes of the five other
arguments. He skillfully explains
that all of these arguments are legal
arguments, and that using them to justify
judicial review therefore presupposes that legal
arguments are appropriate in
deciding constitutional issues. Legal
arguments may satisfy lawywers, Bob-
bitt concludes, but they fall short of
making judicial review publicly accepta-
ble.
The two remaining divisions of the book,
"Constitutional Ethics" and
"Constitutional
Expressionism," argue positively in favor of a scheme of judi-
cial review rooted in a
"participatory Constitution." Although the book is
somewhat vague throughout, these latter
divisions are virtually impenetra-
ble. Apparently, a participatory
Constitution involves an interchange between
the courts and the persons affected by
their decisions. Yet Bobbitt also ar-
gues that constitutional theory is a
closed system and that legal decision
making should be free from any outside
standard. Quite what constitutes in
actual practice a participatory
Constitution remains obscure.
This is not a book for the average
reader interested in the historical rudi-
ments of judicial review. Historians
will find it both thought provoking and
disturbing, especially in its assertion
that participatory constitutionalism must
be rooted in the view that "the
present must to some extent control the past"
(p. 239). What the history of American
constitutionalism teaches, and what
Bobbit largely ignores, is that the
forms of argument he identifies and then
dismisses have themselves been essential
parts of American culture. The past
has invariably helped to write the
future. The justification for judicial review
historically has sprung from the context
of events and not from the words
used to sustain or refute it. As Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., once ob-
served, in doing constitutional
analysis, "We must think things, not words."
Constitutional Fate is so attentive to words that the practical world of
things
-past and present-is largely lost.
University of Florida Kermit L.
Hall
Book Reviews
175
The New Deal Lawyers. By Peter H. Irons. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1982. xiv + 351p.; notes,
bibliography, index. $19.50.)
This splendid book reminds us how an
able historian with a fresh per-
spective and a capacity to focus on
unexamined evidence can substantially
enrich and reorient our views of a
subject with which we thought we were
familiar. No aspect of the New Deal has
attracted more attention than the
legislative-administrative-judicial
expansion of the limits of federal power to
regulate the economy. Many excellent
scholars have traced the evolution of
business, agricultural, and labor
legislation. Others have analyzed the judi-
cial philosophy and politics of crucial
Supreme Court decisions overturning
the National Industrial Recovery Act and
the Agricultural Adjustment Act,
Franklin Roosevelt's subsequent attack
on the "nine old men" he saw de-
stroying his administration's programs,
and the Court's dramatic shift to
uphold the National Labor Relations Act.
Biographers have probed practi-
cally every individual involved. Not
until now, however, has there been a
detailed examination of the manner in
which government lawyers defended
the New Deal. The conflict of legal
philosophies within the administration,
the variety of legal strategies, the
choice of test cases, and the presentation of
particular arguments contributed to the
setbacks as well as the eventual vic-
tory. Peter H. Irons, who combines the
training and insights of a political his-
torian with those of a lawyer, has
examined voluminous litigation files in the
National Archives and interviewed many
of the attorneys involved to put
together a thorough and lucid analysis of the legal
maneuvers from 1933
through 1937 which secured the high
court confirmation of essential New
Deal principles.
Having considered the litigation
strategies of the young, liberal lawyers
who staffed the New Deal agencies and
closely examined their preparation of
each significant case, Irons perceives
three distinctive litigation approaches,
each with different consequences.
Lawyers for the NIRA, most notably gen-
eral counsel Donald Richberg, were "legal
politicians" who preferred to liti-
gate small, easily-winnable cases in order to pressure
major Blue Eagle code
violators into negotiated out-of-court
settlements. This cautious, publicity-
seeking strategy did not produce cases
well chosen to test constitutional
questions before the Supreme Court. It
led instead to the badly-timed,
poorly-focused "hot oil" and
"sick chicken" cases where the Court found
unconstitutional delegation of
legislative power to the executive and improper
use of the commerce clause. The AAA legal staff
gathered by Jerome Frank
tended to be "legal reformers" dedicated to
using the law to achieve a maxi-
mum of social reform. Saddled with a
hastily-drawn, defective statute, lack-
ing an understanding of the agriculture
industry, and at odds with Justice
Department attorneys with whom they needed to
collaborate, the AAA law-
yers also failed before the Supreme
Court. Subscribing to Felix Frankfurter's
adage that litigation should only be
accepted as a last resort if the regulator's
preferred tactic of obtaining compliance through
compromise and concilia-
tion failed, neither NIRA nor AAA lawyers left
themselves in the strongest
position when they did reach the
courtroom.
Attorneys for the National Labor
Relations Board were, in contrast, what
Irons terms "legal craftsmen," meticulous
lawyers narrowly focused on win-
ning their immediate case. General counsel Charles Fahy
eschewed politics
176 OHIO HISTORY
and reformist impulses for a
singleminded defense of the Wagner act. Hind-
sight as to the mistakes of NIRA and AAA
defenders provided NLRB law-
yers an advantage. It also helped that
they, rather than politicians and lob-
byists, drafted the statute they were to
defend. Carefully selected test cases
gave them a prompt and precisely-focused
hearing before the Supreme
Court. In the aftermath of the 1936
election, the Court was already shifting,
as the due process Washington state
minimum wage case, West Coast Hotel v.
Parrish, decided in December but not announced until March,
would re-
veal. Effective arguments in the Wagner
act cases allowed politically well-
attuned justices to accept the New Deal
reinterpretation of the commerce
clause. Well-crafted litigation, rather
than the furor over FDR's court-packing
proposal, won the battle.
Peter Irons makes a convincing argument
that litigation failures and suc-
cesses fundamentally shaped the form of
the New Deal. Along the way he
suggests a good deal about the
personalities, the professional structure, and
the internal politics of the federal
legal service. This rare and valuable con-
sideration of the legal process was
rendered possible by the accessibility of
the government's litigation files.
Unfortunately the unavailability of compara-
ble records prevented an equivalent
examination of the opposition. Histori-
ans would be wise to investigate further
the influence of litigation upon public
policy, especially since, as Irons
points out, the number of attorneys in the na-
tion's largest law firm, the U.S.
government, has increased tenfold since the
beginning of the New Deal.
University of Akron David E.
Kyvig
Shifting Involvements: Private
Interest and Public Action. By Albert
O.
Hirschman. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982. x + 138p.; illus-
tration, notes, index. $14.50 cloth;
$5.95 paper.)
Professor in Social Science at the
Institute for Advanced Study and author
of numerous books covering a wide range
of economic and political issues,
Albert O. Hirschman has written a little
study filled with big ideas that have
considerable importance to us all.
Drawing on a number of disciplines,
Hirschman's thesis is simple and yet as
it is developed, complex. Responding
to the abrupt shift in a society during
the 1950s concerned primarily with
pursuit of its private economic and
personal needs to one that embarked in
the 1960s on a decade of social,
political, and economic activism only to re-
turn once more to privatism in the 1970s
and 1980s, the author endeavors to
understand this cycle of public and
private engagement by focussing on the
origins and implications of personal
disappointment. Disappointment is de-
scribed as the experience of people
being disillusioned with, losing interest
in, or no longer coveting something
which they have originally sought and
believed would bring them a certain
satisfaction. By analyzing private con-
sumption patterns, Hirschman explores
the various ways contemporary citi-
zens become dissatisfied with consumer
goods and services. Unrealistic or
outdated expectations as to the value of goods as well
as the changed nature
of consumer products and services often
determine this unhappiness. But it
is not just the vagaries of contemporary consumption
that create less than ful-
Book Reviews
177
filled human beings. Hirschman indicates
that a fundamental ambivalence
about material consumption constituting
the basis for human satisfaction has
had a long history that extends even to
the father of capitalistic consump-
tion, Adam Smith.
It is from private consumption
disappointments, dissatisfactions with the
quality of goods or their flawed
results, that direct some citizens to public ac-
tivity. Why certain disaffected
consumers become political activists while
others remain passive observers is given
considerable attention. But what
clearly brings special satisfaction to
those who do engage in public affairs is
the equal pleasure that comes in the
striving for change and its final attain-
ment. Building from a variety of
historical and contemporary examples,
Hirschman shows that the main
distinction between private and public satis-
faction is that pleasure in public
involvement derives as much from the strug-
gle itself as it does in achieving a
desired goal. To enjoy the pleasures of pub-
lic activity "society does not have
to be actually changed right away; it is
quite enough to act in a variety of ways
as though it were possible to promote
change."
Thus, unlike purely private pursuits,
public involvement produces an inte-
gration of means and ends and a
satisfaction that personal struggle serves the
larger interests of society. Yet it is
often out of this merger of public and pri-
vate selves and interests that
frustration and disappointment develop in pub-
lic activity. The failure to imagine
either the depth or the extent of the in-
volvement demanded by public activism
leads to an "overcommitment" of
time and a loss of perspective as to what
are realizable public goals. Political
involvement often forces a total
absorption of an individual's time and ener-
gies, producing exhaustion and,
ultimately, disillusionment. Yet the alterna-
tive to this type of public activism in
democratic societies is simply electoral
politics, and in a long, sometimes
tedious chapter, Hirschman shows that
democratic suffrage provides individuals
with limited opportunity to affect
political change. "In short,"
he notes, "the trouble with political life is that
it is either too absorbing or too
tame." The result is that people often return
to a world of private interests where
time commitments are more structured
and potential pleasures more routine.
And as often noted, capitalism has
traditionally maintained that in
pursuing private consumption needs the citi-
zen serves the highest interests of the
nation, economic growth. That the re-
verse philosophy appears not to have
much value in western consumer socie-
ties tells us much about the political
history of America and other nations.
Much of this has been said before by
historians, sociologists, political
theorists, and even an occasional
economist. The value of Hirschman's study
is its integration of various
interpretations and theories around the theme of
consumer disappointment and pleasure.
And the moral of this interesting,
frequently thought provoking analysis is
the understanding it provides as to
how America and other western,
industrialized nations have produced a
fundamental division in private and
public pursuits that has led to a fragmen-
tation of work, play, politics, and
love. As Hirschman shows, modern capital-
ism separates work from almost
everything other than earning an income;
"work is thus conceived purely as a
cost incurred for the purpose of a wholly
separated benefit." As our lives
have become even more consumer oriented,
public and private, work and play, love
and sex have assumed distinct char-
acteristics. These divisions in modern
human activity leads to what Hirsch-
178 OHIO HISTORY
man calls the "pathological"
behavior of wide swings from "utter privitiza-
tion to total absorption in public
causes and back."
Although not the final word on the
subject, Shifting Involvements never-
theless offers us a perceptive
interpretation as to why such pathology is a fun-
damental feature of our contemporary
culture.
Denison University John B.
Kirby
Reshaping America: Society and
Institutions, 1945-1960. Edited by
Robert
H. Bremner and Gary W. Reichard.
(Columbus: The Ohio State Universi-
ty Press, 1982. xii + 403p.; tables,
notes, notes on contributors, index.
$22.50.)
This volume is the first in a new
series, U.S.A. 20/21 Studies in Recent
American History, successor to the distinguished Ohio State Modern
Ameri-
ca series now terminated. It marks a worthy beginning. The individual es-
says are all of high merit.
The only reservation I have is that
1945-1960 is not a natural time period.
The essays, while all well-researched
and well-written, and good as far as
they go, are left dangling in 1960, as
in Eugene Watt's "Cops and Crooks: The
War at Home." Watts, after producing
an informative contribution, is forced
to end lamely with "... most
knowledgeable observers agreed that law-
enforcement agencies had progressed a
long way since World War II, and a
few wistful souls felt they would one
day win the war on crime." Gary
Reichard in his "The Presidency
Triumphant" tries to end on a more deci-
sive note by jumping ahead twenty years,
and forecasting what would hap-
pen during the sixties and seventies.
The problem of artificial periodization
appears again in Robert Bremner's
"Families, Children, and the
State," and Leila Rupp's "The Survival of
American Feminism: the Women's Movement
in the Postwar Period." They
both stop without resolving their
subject.
Ronald Lora's "Education: Schools
as Crucibles in Cold War America"
gives a good account of the communist
witch-hunt in the schools. Progres-
sive education also came under attack
during these years, the Soviet launch
of Sputnik in 1957 providing more ammunition.
Lora shows how the Russian
achievement galvanized the nation into
insisting on better teaching of mathe-
matics and science. Unfortunately, an
equivalent improvement in the social
sciences and humanities was not
forthcoming. Those individual educators
who disagreed that the first priority of
education should be intellectual
training and curricular reform, rather
than the enhancement of national secu-
rity, received short shrift.
Bernard Sternsher in the concluding
"Reflections on Politics, Policy, and
Ideology" offers some cogent
comments on those years, along with some
speculation on what might have been had
Dewey been elected in 1948.
All in all, this volume marks an
auspicious beginning of the new series that
succeeding volumes will be hard put to
equal.
Kent State University Harold Schwartz
Book Reviews
179
Kent State/May 4: Echoes Through A
Decade. Edited by Scott L. Bills.
(Kent: The Kent State University Press,
1982. xvi + 302p.; illustrations, an-
notated bibliography, index. $16.50.)
At 12:25 p.m. on May 4, 1970, National
Guardsmen assigned to deal with
anti-war demonstrators at Kent State
University fired 61 rounds of ammuni-
tion into a crowd of students 100 to 400
yards distant from them, killing four
and wounding nine. The two dozen essays
and interviews in this volume,
representing former students,
townspeople, attorneys, faculty, administrators,
and a guardsman, attempt to assess the
significance and long-run impact of
this lethal 13-second encounter. They
demonstrate that no consensus on the
issues has emerged.
Peter Davies and John Logue view the
shootings as part of a governmental
behavior pattern designed to reduce
critics of Nixon's foreign policy to "qui-
escence." Davies and former
archivist Charles Thomas offer persuasive evi-
dence of a Watergate-style coverup of
federal complicity in provoking vio-
lence among demonstrators and
sanctioning violence against them. Logue's
analogies between the Kent State
shootings and official repression of labor
struggles during the period 1870-1930
are enlightening; but when he tries to
argue in Brechtian terms that shooting
dissidents was a way to "elect" a new
people when the existing people refused
legitimacy to government policies,
he falls afoul of the evidence. Not only
most people in Kent, but most Gallup-
polled Americans thought shooting
students a reasonable response to the
trashing of banks, the burning of the
ROTC building, and the tossing of
bricks at the Guard.
None of the radical denunciations of repression
in this volume confronts
the issue of whether burning a
building-with or without the aid of agents-
provocateurs-should be included among the forms of dissent the First
Amendment protects. Nor, interestingly,
do they explore the published
claim of two National Guardsmen that the
army refused the Guard the non-
lethal weaponry they requested for
dealing with dissident students. (See an-
notated bibliography, p. 287.)
Although the lethally hostile
"majority" opinion is not represented in its
starkest form among the essays and
interviews in the present collection, an in-
terview with local Republican
businessman Lucius Lyman dramatizes the
terror, as well as the hostility, that
student demonstrators evoked among
their neighbors. Guard officer Robert
Gabriel offers the opinion that "If
someone breaks the law, especially in
front of you, and is allowed to get away
with it, then you have created a
privileged class . . . The Guard was there to
stabilize the situation. Those that
refused to allow it to be stabilized, what
did they expect?" (pp. 120-121.)
Yet Gabriel is critical of the Guard's com-
mand strategy, which excluded Viet Nam
veterans from ground operations:
"I think we would have been more
cool under pressure." (p. 120.)
Though some faculty-and former
faculty-write bitterly of the failure of
the University to respond creatively to
student dissent and its legacy, most of
the faculty and administration spokesmen
are concerned to place the "trage-
dy" in a broader, positive context
of the University's development. Not sur-
prisingly, the essayists reflect
disagreement over the appropriate measures
the University might take to
"commemorate" May 4.
Among the more thoughtful-and
acerbic-essayists is John Belaga, a
180 OHIO HISTORY
Kent State undergraduate in 1970, who
has served on the City Council and
in the Ohio State Legislature. Belaga
appreciates the University's efforts after
May 4 to sponsor political internships
and opportunities to study non-violent
methods of social change. The
University's Center for Peaceful Change pro-
vided mediators during the 1977
demonstrations protesting the trustees' de-
cision to build a gymn on the site of
the 1970 confrontation. Although the
gymn was built, the conflict was
resolved without serious injury to either
demonstrators or lawmen. Belaga worked
to negotiate an alternative site for
the structure; yet he remarks of the
controversy: "In Ohio, with all its urban
poverty, 'country justice,' low benefits
levels for the poor, low subsidies for
education at all levels, and gross
apathy on all these problems, the great liber-
al cause was stopping a gymn." (p.
132.) He concludes, "The sad and mor-
bid thing is that something like Kent
State University, May 4, 1970, will hap-
pen again and again in America. There is
so much to be learned from it on
which we have collectively closed the
book. In 1980, I read in an article her-
alding the improved enrollment picture
at Kent State University something to
the effect that the administration was
'getting tough with demonstrators.' As
Albert Camus wrote of the plague, the
May 4 disease will linger dormant only
to break out again. Somewhere." (p.
136.)
University of Rochester Mary Young
Fire in America: A Cultural History
of Wildland and Rural Fire. By Stephen
J.
Pyne. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1982. xvi + 654p.; illustra-
tions, notes, bibliographical essay,
index. $35.00)
Wildfire is a natural and cultural
phenomena. As such, the origin, behav-
ior, and effects of fire can be
understood only within the context of the envi-
ronment and culture in which it occurs.
Because of the symbiotic relation-
ship between fire, culture and the
environment, the matters of fire use,
prevention, and control have generated
intense and prolonged political de-
bate and philosophical analysis in the
United States. The primary concern of
this book is the development of the fire
policy which evolved from that de-
bate and analysis.
Stephen J. Pyne, assistant professor of
history at the University of Iowa,
has written a major study of the
cultural history of fire. He has not merely
chronicled the history of the most
disasterous fires on the North American
Continent, although he has done that as
well. Rather, he has crafted a com-
prehensive, intellectural history of
fire in which he carefully discusses the
cultural and physical influences that
have affected the formulation of wild-
land and rural fire policy. He
evaluates, for example, the behavior and ecolo-
gy of fire, the influence of the
American Indians, the use and effects of fire in
the South, North, Midwest, Far West, and
Great Plains, the development of
private and public fire protection, and
the technological resources and organ-
izational structures that have been used
for fire control. The unifying feature
of this topical study is the
relationship of wildland and rural fire to American
culture.
For Pyne, fire is neither good nor evil.
Instead, it is an event which may be
either beneficial or detrimental,
depending upon the cultural environment in
Book Reviews
181
which it occurs. Brush fires in heavily
populated areas such as southern
California, for example, forced
government officials to develop a fire policy
which was much different from that
formulated for the southern pine for-
ests. In the first instance, the public
believed that wildland and rural fire
had to be prevented or controlled to
save homes. In the second case, anoth-
er public saw fire as a beneficial tool
for clearing brush to aid the cattle and
naval stores industries. Thus, economic
and social concerns in addition to
political and philosophical matters have
always played an important role in
the formulation of wildland and rural
fire policy.
This study will be of value to
environmental, agricultural, and forestry his-
torians as well as to policy-makers in
the Forest Service and Bureau of Land
Management who are concerned with fire
management on wild and rural
lands. While Pyne necessarily has dealt
with a large body of technical infor-
mation concerning fire prevention,
suppression, and control practices, his text
is noticeably free of jargon. Still,
this study is not light reading, because of
the encyclopedic nature of the work and
because of a somewhat ponderous
style. Moreover, the overuse of the word
holocaust, when describing major
fires, tends to trivialize a word which has such
portentous meaning in anoth-
er more appropriate context. Nevertheless, this study,
based on exhaustive
research and documentation, is an
important contribution to environmental
history.
Ohio Historical Society R. Douglas Hurt
Suburb: Neighborhood and Community in
Forest Park, Ohio, 1935-1976. By
Zane L. Miller. (Knoxville: The
University of Tennessee Press, 1981. xxxi
+ 263p.; illustrations, notes, appendix,
bibliographical essay, index.
$18.50.)
Despite its growing importance in
twentieth-century America, most urban
historians have avoided the topic of
suburbanization, preferring more color-
ful subjects such as ethnic communities,
the black ghetto, and boss politics.
The rare scholar like Kenneth Jackson
who has seriously researched the
history of suburbia has tended to focus
on the early, pre-1930 period. In
producing a history of a more recent
suburb, then, Zane Miller has made a
unique contribution to both the
literature of urbanization as well as to the
history of the middle class generally.
In the late 1930s the town of
Greenhills, a northern suburb of Cincinnati,
was incorporated as a part of the New
Deal's "greenbelt" program of planned
communities. In the 1950s, a previously
undeveloped part of the town was
developed (this time under private
auspices) and renamed Forest Park. For-
mally opened in 1956 (ceremonies
featured Miss America and an Ohio Su-
preme Court justice), Forest Park grew
rapidly and by 1960 had a population
of 4800. At this early stage there was
little conflict between developers and
residents. Both viewed the movement of a
Cincinnati-based life insurance
firm to Forest Park in 1959 as a
significant coup for the community. Distrust of
the developers grew apace, however, when
they failed to attract a shopping
center to the area or to find a way of
meeting the tremendous need for new
182 OHIO HISTORY
schools to accommodate the "baby
boom" generation. Pressures for greater
control over community growth led to
incorporation as a village in 1961.
Although there was no apparent overt
hostility to blacks in Forest Park, in
the 1960s white residents were clearly
worried about the proximity of a
nearby black suburb. The placement of
new streets effectively isolated the
most "vulnerable" part of
Forest Park from this threat. The village's 1963
Master Plan, like its 1956 predecessor,
envisioned a community that mobile
middle-class residents "could move
into and out of with a minimum of social
and psychological disruption and a
maximum of material comfort" (p. 94).
Miller finds a basic consensus in this
community in the early 1960s, a consen-
sus that was shared by many other
Americans at that time. Forest Park resi-
dents loved change, but they hated
unstable property values, and disputes
over planning mostly revolved around
that issue. Such political disputes as
arose in the 1960s concerned revenue
issues, not the goals of community de-
velopment: they were arguments over
means, not ends.
Forest Park steadily gained in status in
relation to other Cincinnati sub-
urbs, emerging by 1970 as sixteenth in
median income out of eighty-three
suburban census tracts. By 1970 total
population had reached 15,174, and
the village had become a city. A small
(2.8 percent) but noticeable black pop-
ulation managed to gain a foothold in
the community. They were as middle-
class as white Forest Parkers, but black
family income was still considerably
below that of white residents.
Increasingly, "organization men" from major
corporations found Forest Park
especially hospitable to their needs. Women
dominated the myriad voluntary
associations that sprang up in the 1960s,
and nary a voice of women's liberation
was heard.
Growing problems of city services and
taxation ended this placid consen-
sus in the early 1970s, however.
Competition for scarce resources led to a
"turning inward to psychological
concerns and to economically motivated
anxieties about Forest Park's
'deterioration' " (p. 176). Problems of an inade-
quate tax base became serious, as did
the potential for conflict generated by
a modest influx of poorer blacks and
whites into the community.
Unlike many historians who study
specific localities, Miller does not arro-
gantly suppose that his subject is
representative of every other city or com-
munity. Nevertheless, his model should
provide much food for thought not
only for urban historians, but for
students of recent American history gener-
ally. He sees three stages in the
development of Forest Park, corresponding
to changing attitudes toward community:
the 1920s to 1950 (a "metropolitan
mode of thought"); the early 1950s
to mid-1960s (the "community of limited
liability"); and since the
mid-1960s (the "community of advocacy"). Miller
finds the recent excessive individualism
of American life reflected at the lo-
cal level in an almost total lack of
"civic commitment to territorial community"
(p. 229). Yet by showing us that this
decline of communal sensibility is part of
an historical cycle, he offers us hope
that a renewed sense of community re-
sponsibility can emerge again. The
Forest Parks of America are still in pro-
cess.
Temple University Kenneth L.
Kusmer
The East Liverpool, Ohio, Pottery
District: Identification and Marks. by
Will-
Book Reviews
183
iam C. Gates, Jr. and Dana E. Ormerod.
(Ann Arbor, Michigan: The Socie-
ty for Historical Archaeology, 1982.
358p.; illustrations, references, appen-
dices, index. $20.00 paper.)
While the primary purpose of this
impressive compendium is simply to pro-
vide data necessary for the
identification of archaeologically recovered ce-
ramics, the book will also prove
invaluable to collectors of East Liverpool
pottery and to historians.
Limitations of the work are clearly
circumscribed in the introduction: Pot-
teries of nearby locations such as
Steubenville, East Palestine, and Beaver
Falls are not included, although some
firms that began in the East Liverpool
area and later moved away-notably the
Sebring potteries-are included.
No claim is made for the definitiveness
of either the text or the pottery marks
included, though the obvious
thoroughness with which the authors have
combed primary sources suggests that few
unrecorded marks will turn up.
(An appendix listing 82 firms that
either did not use marks or for which
marks are not known indicates seven
additional marks discovered too late for
inclusion in the present publication.)
Nearly 100 pottery marks are clearly
illustrated, usually by photographs,
and their period of use is dated as
precisely as possible, utilizing the wealth
of historical information available at
the East Liverpool Museum of Ceramics
and elsewhere. Access to the data included
in the book is enhanced by an
index, a separate index of motifs or
design in the marks, and an appendix list-
ing building designations which were
distinct from the company names, a
source of past confusion. An indication
of the author's accuracy and thor-
oughness is the inclusion in another
appendix of several "spurious" pottery
marks that have erroneously been
recognized by such authorities as John
Ramsay, John Spargo, the Kovels, and
Lois Lehner.
Not intended as a history of the East
Liverpool ceramic industry, the pres-
ent volume does contain histories of
some eighty-five individual firms active
in the area during the period 1890-1940,
when the "whiteware" industry
was at its height. These sketches,
together with a brief introductory essay
on the industry, provide the most
detailed and comprehensive treatment of
the subject available to date.
The only regrettable feature about this
outstanding reference tool is that it
had to appear in the guise of a 358 page
"journal article" when it is clearly a
full-fledged monograph. While the
Society for Historical Archaeology is cer-
tainly to be commended for making this
valuable work available, it is remark-
able that such an important study on
Ohio ceramics was not published un-
der the aegis of a state or local
historical society.
The Ohio State University Libraries James L. Murphy
American Ceramics Before 1930: A
Bibliography. Compiled by Ruth Irwin
Weidner. (Westport: Greenwood Press,
1982. xx + 279p.; appendix, au-
thor index, subject index. $35.00.
An ambitious attempt to develop
"the first comprehensive bibliography of
184 OHIO HISTORY
the history of American [read
"U.S."] ceramics," this bibliography is less
thorough than it might be.
The work is divided into separate
sections on "Books and Pamphlets,"
"Conference Proceedings/Book
Chapters," "Catalogs of Exhibitions, Col-
lections, and Sales," "Theses
and Dissertations," "Federal, State, and Mu-
nicipal Publications," "Trade
Publications," and "Periodical Articles." The
bulk of these items (2326) are periodical
articles; conversely, only 25 theses
and dissertations are listed. Entries
are accessed by separate author and
subject indexes, with an appendix
listing publication data on selected clay-
working ceramics, china painting, and
crockery journals before 1930. Biblio-
graphic descriptions and accuracy of the
indexes are excellent.
Unfortunately, while certainly a useful
tool for the historian, Weidner's
compilation remains comprehensive more
in intent than in execution. In some
respects, the scope of the bibliography
probably should have been more
limited. For example, a few purely
geological publications on clay sources,
such as Stout's "The Lawrence Clay
of Lawrence County," are included.
These were better omitted, or else
several hundred similar and equally rele-
vant publications should have been
included.
On the other hand, although a few
articles on the clay tobacco pipe indus-
try are listed, Sudbury's important
"Historic Clay Tobacco Pipemakers in
the United States of America"
monograph (B.A.R. International Series no.
60, 1979) is omitted, as well as a
substantial number of shorter articles by
Sudbury, Ian C. Walker, and others.
Refractory ware may have been delib-
erately excluded, though this is not so
stated, and MacCloskey's 1952 histo-
ry of the Harbison-Walker company seems
a serious omission, Carlyle's "His-
tory of the Pioneer Men and Plants in
Southern Ohio, Kentucky and Oak Hill
Fire Brick Districts" perhaps less
so.
Judging from the acknowledgements,
Weidner did not consult any Ohio
libraries. Collections at the American
Ceramic Society, the Ohio Historical
Society, and East Liverpool Ceramic
Museum would have produced numer-
ous additional titles. Striking Ohio
omissions that might have been noted are
Edward Orton, Jr.'s, 1884 "The
Clays of Ohio and the Industries of Ohio,"
Lisa Taft's 1979 Ph.D. dissertation on
Herman Carl Mueller, and Delores Si-
mon's 1977 "Shawnee Pottery in
Color."
The section on trade catalogs,
admittedly and understandably incom-
plete, is one of the most valuable parts
of Weidner's bibliography, but it easi-
ly could have been greatly expanded.
Citing repositories for those catalogs
included (most of which are no doubt
known only from unique coopies)
would have greatly enhanced the value of
this section.
Overall, this bibliography will be a
useful aid to historians of U.S. ceram-
ics (both the art and the industry),
despite the unevenness and the incom-
pleteness of its coverage.
The Ohio State University Libraries James L. Murphy
Material Culture Studies in America. Compiled and edited with introduction
and bibliographies by Thomas J.
Schlereth. (Nashville: The American
Association for State and Local History,
1982. xvi + 419p.; tables, biblio-
graphical essay, notes, index. $13.95.)
Book Reviews
185
There is no question that this anthology
is intended as a primer for stu-
dents seeking to become familiar with
the theoretical concepts, methodolog-
ical issues, and classic practical
applications which have shaped American
material culture studies. It is
unquestionably a textbook.
Schlereth tells us in his preface that,
"This book, like many other Ameri-
can artifacts, came into existence out
of necessity." However, an essay includ-
ed in the anthology states that,
"Economy is the mother of inventions, not
necessity . . . A requirement for
convenience is simply a diluted requirement
for ease and economy." Ease and
economy are perhaps true rationale for the
assembly of this anthology. The essays
collected in this publication were
drawn together from many esoteric and
consequently hard to acquire schol-
arly and professional publications. This
book has made it convenient to use
these very valuable, but previously
dispersed, materials.
The exhaustive search for content was
worthwhile. The essays are unde-
niably well selected. They are a
representative survey of the best recent
scholarship in the field. The classic
statements of theory by Kouwenhoven,
Hesseltine, Washburn, and others have
been included to address the ques-
tion, "Is there any worth in
examining artifacts as historical data?" There are
five statements of method which seek to
explain, "How does one read mate-
rial culture?" E. McClung Fleming's
proposed model and Craig Gilborn's
Coke bottle study are, of course,
included in this section. The following
twelve selections are recent practical
applications of the theory and method
models. These answer the question,
"What can be learned from material cul-
ture study?" They have been
carefully selected and arranged to show a vari-
ety of approaches and sophisticated
combinations of approaches toward
using artifacts as evidence for
understanding American culture. In this cate-
gory the essays of Deetz and
Dethlefsend, Ames, Kniffen and Glassie, and
Cohen and Rathje are notable classics in
the field. Each of the essays in the
anthology is thoughtfully and thoroughly
annotated. This helps greatly in
recognizing the essential variety of
statements. (However, the lazy or over-
burdened student may find it unnecessary
to read the text after having read
such complete notes.)
The real treasure in this book is
Schlereth's introductory essay, "Material
Culture Studies in America,
1876-1976." It is the first authoritative attempt at
a historiogaphy and a history of
scholarship and public interest in American
material culture. Schlereth first
discusses the definition and evolution of
"material culture" and related
terms. He then offers a chronological over-
view of the discipline. Three periods
are identified: Age of Collecting (1876-
1948), Age of Description (1948-1965),
and Age of Analysis (1965- ). The char-
acteristics of each are discussed and
practitioners are named for each
school. In the section on recent
scholarship, the Age of Analysis, Schlereth
abstracts nine conceptual positions
which he suggests are guiding frame-
works for contemporary work. These
schools of thought are art history, sym-
bolist, cultural history,
environmentalist, functionalist, structuralist, behav-
ioralistic, national character, and
social history. He carefully details the
emphasis and strategies of each
approach. Reading this section is laborious,
especially if the reader is not familiar
with the frequently cited names and ti-
tles. It undoubtedly will require
rereading to comprehend and compare the
many abstract distinctions.
Nevertheless, it is well worth the effort. This is a
brilliant analysis of the intellectual
considerations which influence the advo-
cates and practitioners of American
material culture studies.
186 OHIO HISTORY
The book also offers a very adequate
bibliographic essay and complete in-
dex.
Ohio Historical Society Martha Hayes
The Dreadful Month. By Carlton Jackson. (Bowling Green: Bowling Green
State University Popular Press, 1982.
161p.; illustrations, sources, index.
$16.95 cloth; $7.95 paper.)
The "Dreadful Month" referred
to in the title was December, 1907. By
"official" count (which, as
Jackson demonstrates, under-estimated the actu-
al number) 702 coal miners were killed
that month in five coal mine disasters.
One of them, at Monongah, West Virginia,
took 361 lives. Jackson writes in
some detail of what happened at Monongah
and in its aftermath and, less
completely, of events at the other
December explosion sites: Yolande, Ala-
bama; Jacob's Creek and Naomi,
Pennsylvania; and Carthage, in New Mexi-
co territory. Three additional chapters
sketch the history of mine disasters,
and of the political response to them,
from 1910 through 1980.
Scholars of industrial safety, the
Progressive Era, business and labor, and
reform will by and large be
disappointed. Although Jackson has apparently
drawn on some interesting primary
materials, especially accounts in local
newspapers, the lists of sources that
follow each chapter are no substitute for
footnotes. Nor has Jackson consulted the
relevant secondary literature, in-
cluding this reviewer's timeless
classic, Coal-Mining Safety in the Progressive
Period: The Political Economy of
Reform (1976), which covers much of
the
same ground. Whether for this or some
other reason, there is little here in
the way of consistent or penetrating
analysis. The most original chapter in the
book, on the relief efforts coincident
to the Monongah disaster, nicely docu-
ments the nativism, localism,
inefficiency, and class bias of private charity;
but it is also the least germane.
Nonetheless, there is a compelling
quality to much of the narrative. Writing
about the events that followed each
disaster, Jackson has an eye for the ritu-
alistic. He notes that operators
habitually underestimated the number of
men killed; that the crowds that
gathered to observe rescue efforts were in-
variably seen as potentially dangerous
"mobs"; that explosions always took
place in "safe" mines with the
"latest" in safety equipment; that coroners' ju-
ries could be depended upon to establish
the cause of the disaster as "un-
known," to find the miners at fault
and the company free from blame, and to
suggest a national Bureau of Mines as
the only sensible remedy; that the tes-
timony of "experts" was
over-valued, and that of miners under-valued; that
disasters were always replete with
powerful ironies and ghastly stories of
what a mine blast could do to the human
body.
Jackson might have had something had he
maintained some distance
from the newspaper accounts that enabled
him to capture the ritual quality of
the post-disaster scene. Instead,
Jackson becomes just another "morbidly
curious" onlooker, telling us story
after ironic story: of a single human heart
found by Monongah miners as they
returned to work; of foreign miners who
escaped the Darr tragedy because, unlike
the Americans, they celebrated
Book Reviews
187
St. Nicholas on December 17th and 18th;
of a foot found sticking to the roof
of a passageway; of a small child
writing a letter to her dead father.
When Robert Kennedy was killed, the
newspapers were full of photo-
graphs of the grieving family; Americans
wanted to see how the wife and
kids "handled" the tragedy. At
the root of Jackson's work, unacknowl-
edged, unexplored, and, therefore,
somehow illegitimate, is a similar curiosi-
ty. Its subject may be mining, but
whatever strength the book has lies in the
author's fascination with a gamut of
emotions triggered by disasters. The
Dreadful Month is historical melodrama.
State University of New York/Fredonia William Graebner
The Divided Mind of Protestant
America, 1880-1930. By Ferenc Morton
Szasz.
(University, Alabama: The University of
Alabama Press, 1982. xiii +
196p.; notes, bibliography, index.
$19.95.)
The thesis of this work is that the half
century from 1880 to 1930 consti-
tutes a distinct period in American
Protestant history because in it occurred
the division between conservative and
liberal points of view which continues
to this day to transcend traditional
denominational demarcations. Though
not the only factor, this division
contributed to the loss of evangelical he-
gemony over much of American life and
thought.
Szasz traces the beginnings of a
conservative-liberal bifurcation to the
same three intellectual forces
delineated by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., in a
classic essay in 1930: evolution, the
comparative study of religions, and the
higher criticism of the Bible. The last
of these, Szasz argues persuasively,
proved most troublesome until the 1920s,
when evolution displaced it at the
center of controversy. Two concise and
lucid chapters, perhaps the best
short treatments now in print on the
subject, reconstruct the transmission to
the United States of the higher
criticism of the Old and then, after 1900,
New Testaments and its reception here.
Two parties existed by 1900, but a
common "moral-evangelical approach to
society" provided a superficial
unity under the metaphor of the Kingdom of
God around which Protestants rallied in
the heady years of the Progressive
Era. The role of Protestant liberals in
reform is well established, but conser-
vatives too participated. Though sharper
contrasts between liberal and con-
servative assumptions and approaches
would be helpful, Szasz' point is well
taken. A shared optimism and commitment
to social betterment obscured
differences in conceptions of the
Kingdom, blunted conservatives' resistance
to liberalism, and forestalled an open
breach.
The breach occurred in the 1920s because
of the failure of the hopes
raised by the First World War, a rising
militant premillennialism, increasingly
assertive conservative leadership, and
the revival of the issue of evolution by
William Jennings Bryan. Again, Szasz
succinctly and intelligibly recounts the
Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy in
the denominations. But his reinte-
gration of the anti-evolution crusade
into the larger story is especially note-
worthy. Bryan's decision, stimulated by
the war, to transform a previously
moderate opposition to evolution into
the final crusade of his life shifted the
focus of the conservatives from the
higher criticism to evolution. A symbol
188 OHIO HISTORY
with many meanings, evolution "came
to be seen as central to all elements of
religious conservatism" (p. 107),
but this occurred only late in the story. And
for Szasz, it seems, this was an
unfortunate deflection from issues of biblical
scholarship.
Szasz joins Ernest R. Sandeen (The
Roots of Fundamentalism, 1970) and
George F. Marsden (Fundamentalism and
American Culture, 1980) in rescuing
conservative evangelicalism from the
dustbin of history to which some ear-
lier writers had consigned it. All three
authors view theological conserva-
tives without caricature and give
primacy to the clash of ideas. Marsden's
and Szasz' interpretations are
especially close. Szasz, however, is more inter-
ested in how the arguments of thinkers
on both sides reached the Protestant
rank-and-file and gives more emphasis to
the work of popularizers and to
popular perceptions and responses. For
this reason, and because of superb
organization and sinewy style, his book
should be more accessible to non-
specialists.
He concludes that the Fundamentalist
movement was a popular social
movement based partly on reaction
against the claims of experts in science
and biblical scholarship-claims that
were troubling in a democracy. Many
thought that liberalism discounted their competence to
use a deeply cher-
ished Bible and to determine what would
be taught in the public schools.
In this aspect of his interpretation,
Szasz stands out most distinctly from
earlier authors.
Readers of Ohio History should be
interested to know that the author is a
native of Ohio and graduate of Ohio
Wesleyan University and that the many
manuscript collections he utilized
included the Washington Gladden papers
at the Ohio Historical Society.
Wright State University Jacob H. Dorn
Freedom and Grace: The Life of Asa
Mahan. By Edward H. Madden and
James E. Hamilton. (Metuchen, New
Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.,
1982. xii + 273p.; notes, index.
$17.50.)
Modern evangelical thought will find
wide common ground with the views
of Asa Mahan and his nineteenth century
"holiness" (otherwise known as
New Light or Christian Perfection)
approach to Christianity. Mahan be-
lieved that "salvation is obtained
only through the grace of God and is nev-
er a matter of man's achievement."
This is pretty standard Christian doctrine
but Mahan went on to maintain that
holiness "which is simply loving God
and man unreservedly can be attained in
the same manner that salvation is
attained. Holiness is obtained by freely
asking for and accepting the gracious
gift . .. of the indwelling Spirit of
Christ, a presence that ensured triumph
over sin." This presence, sometimes
called the second blessing, however,
does not guarantee against backsliding
according to Mahan for "the sancti-
fied believer must be ever alert on
his own not to become complacent and for-
get to seek that continuous presence
necessary for triumph over sin" (pp.
184-186). Thus Mahan endorses the idea
of the freedom of man to make his
own decision to accept God's proferred
salvation and the indwelling Spirit of
Christ. Freedom and grace, Mahan's
biographers say, are the cornerstones
Book Reviews
189
of Asa Mahan's theology and the
foundations upon which he lived his life as
well.
This is the philosophy that Edward H.
Madden and James E. Hamilton
see as the station from which their book
Freedom and Grace: The Life of Asa
Mahan departs. The volume is Number 3 in a series of Studies
in Evangelical-
ism edited by Kenneth E. Rowe and Donald W. Dayton and
published by
the Scarecrow Press. It is a serious and
thoughtful examination of these
views as taught and lived in the life of
Asa Mahan.
And who was Asa Mahan? One who has
pursued American intellectual
history will recognize him as not only a
philosopher and theologian of note
but as one who was an abolitionist
practicing as a trustee of Lane Theological
Seminary in Cincinnati and first
president of Oberlin College in the 1830s and
1840s. In those places his life crossed
the paths of men such as Lyman
Beecher, Charles G. Finney, Theodore
Weld and others. He contributed in
a meaningful way to the admission of
blacks and women to Oberlin College
and had educational ideas later
implemented by Charles Eliot at Harvard.
In 1859 he helped to found Adrian
College, was a would-be advisor on mili-
tary strategy in the Civil War, and
dabbled in politics as an unsuccessful can-
didate for Congress as a Liberal
Republican in 1872. Shortly thereafter he
moved to England where he wrote and
preached until his death in 1889.
Mahan lived according to his philosophical
lights. He held deontological
views of morality which required that
justice must be done "though the
heavens fall" (p. 81). This kept
him in hot water as President of Oberlin and
of Adrian as well and gave him a
reputation of being abrasive on occasion.
His views of agency and freedom to the
effect that man "causes things to
happen and is not a patient whose action
is molded and determined by ex-
ternal causes" (p. xi) would
challenge some of today's softer ideas about
man's lack of responsibility for his own
actions. But he had a gentler side,
too, which was exemplified by his family
life and his concern for the welfare
of his students.
Madden and Hamilton have done thorough
research, resulting in over for-
ty pages of footnotes. They have given
us a sharp picture of Asa Mahan and
his life. They have expounded well his
motives and his philosophical and
theological views. This is a book that
will delight those who enjoy intellectu-
al history; it will be a little hard for
the casual reader.
Ohio Northern University Boyd M. Sobers
The Righteous Remnant: The House of
David. By Robert S. Fogarty. (Kent:
The Kent State University Press, 1981.
xiii + 195p.; illustrations, append-
ices, notes, bibliography, index.
$17.50.)
This is the first scholarly book-length
study of the millennialist colony at
Benton Harbor, Michigan, that believed
itself the center of the ingathering
of an elect 144,000 children of Israel.
Established in 1902 and still surviving
with a handful of aging members, the House of David was
better known to
many Americans for its Hasidic-looking,
barn-storming baseball teams or for
the harem-like sexual arrangements enjoyed by its
leader, Benjamin Purnell,
sensationally reported by the press,
than for its eschatology.
190 OHIO HISTORY
Fogarty treats the baseball and sex but
keeps them in proper perspective.
He deftly traces the Anglo-Israelite
tradition that originated in seventeenth-
century England through a succession of
"messengers" to Purnell, who
claimed to be the seventh and final
prophet in God's plan for restoring the
scattered Jewish tribes to a millennial
kingdom. He examines the colony's
creation, recruitment of members, expansion,
economic enterprises, and liv-
ing arrangements. And he probes the
charismatic but erratic leadership that
caused defections, lawsuits,
governmental investigations, and in 1927 a court
order requiring Benjamin and Mary
Purnell to leave the colony and placing it
in receivership.
Given the humorous and often bizarre
claims and occurrences that char-
acterized this group, it would be hard
to write a dull book about it. Though
Fogarty insists that we must go beyond
viewing such movements as aberra-
tions on the course of history, and men
like Purnell as "religious imposters"
or mere charlatans, his narrative is
sprightly and he properly notes the rever-
sals, inconsistencies, and ironies that
abound. "By combining equal parts of
greed, guile, and audacity," he
writes, Purnell "stayed one step ahead of the
law and one prophecy ahead of the
membership" (p. 145).
In this "limited case study of
community survival and the dynamics of a
prophet's interplay with his
disciples" (p. xii), Fogarty's central concern is
the "social impact" that
claimed most members' loyalty through thick and
thin. Though many did not know about his
messianic claim to sexual prerog-
atives (despite the "virgin
law" that prescribed abstinence to purify the
blood from the pollution of Adam's sin),
enough did to make one wonder
why they signed affidavits protesting
his innocence of the charges levelled
by "scorpions." What did
members receive to make them relinquish their
property upon entrance, submit to
continuous surveillance, accept Purnell's
reinterpretations of the Israelite
theology when he dictated group marriages
and changed prophetic dates, put up with
food and clothing inferior to his
and Mary's, and engage in deception to
protect him and the community?
Because Fogarty was unable to utilize
colony records and had to rely on in-
vestigative reports and trial records
that reflect the hostility of defectors and
persecutors, his interpretation of the
"social compact" is suggestive, as he
admits. Drawing upon the mechanisms of
commitment in durable communi-
ties delineated by Rosabeth Kanter in Commitment
and Community (1972),
and comparing the House of David to the
Oneida, Koreshan Unity, and
Children of God movements, he concludes
that, despite differences, such
communities exhibit a "dynamic
social compact that holds together the
prophet, the members, and the theology
within a developing framework of
historical circumstances" (p. 142).
Among other things, the House of David
elicited commitment because its recruits
came from a tradition that prepared
them to accept Purnell's claims, engaged
in acts of renunciation of the world
when they joined, believed that their
sacrifices, rationalizations, and de-
fenses were contributions to the coming
of the millennium, and developed
further a sense of isolation and self-protectiveness in
the face of enemies both
within and without. One might wish for
more information from within the
colony, but Fogarty has done much to
enrich his readers' understanding of
the forces that create true believers in
such cults.
Wright State University Jacob H. Dorn
Book Reviews
191
Religion and Sexuality: Three
American Communal Experiments of the Nine-
teenth Century. By Lawrence Foster. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1981. xi + 363p.; appendix, notes, essay
on sources, index. $19.95.)
Religion and Sexuality focuses on the socio-religious thought and activities
of three premier utopian groups of the
nineteenth century: Shakers, Perfec-
tionists, and Mormons. While the urge to
create a model society has always
found enthusiasts, periods of rapid
change, confusion, and economic dislo-
cations have ignited excessive religious
and utopian fervor. In all three case
studies, this theme does much to explain
the rise of these admittedly di-
verse sectarian sects. For the followers
of Mother Ann Lee, founder of the
Shakers, the key to unlocking a better
tomorrow rested with the regulation of
sexual behavior; indeed, if it were
properly controlled, all other social prob-
lems might be solved. Celibacy was the
answer. The much smaller band
who supported the colorful charismatic
perfectionist, John Humphrey
Noyes, adamantly believed that if the
character of marriage were altered,
the quality of life would be enhanced
significantly. These folks embraced
the theory of "complex
marriage." Ideally this notion would end selfishness
by forcing members to replace individual
sexual loyalties for group ones.
Finally, the Mormons, who at various
points in their complicated history
toyed with communitarianism,
experimented with still another form of radi-
cal relationship between the sexes,
polygamy. The concern about sexual
"sins" and the evils of family
disconnectedness spawned this doctrine. In
the estimation of Joseph Smith, Jr., who
established the church, and some
subsequent officials, plural marriages
would strengthen kinship relations and
social solidarity. In each of the three
movements sex served as a means to an
end and not merely as an end in itself.
"Instead the aim was to internalize
values of sexual self-control so that
individual impulses could be sublimated
to the goals of the larger community,
however those larger goals might be de-
fined."
Lawrence Foster has penned an extremely
thoughtful and valuable study.
From this reviewer's perspective, he has
sustained fully his principal thesis
that "Individuals with a sense of
religious and social collapse sought to
establish some basis for order as the
first necessity." Whether celibacy,
complex marriage or polygamy, these men
and women of good hope valiantly
attempted path-breaking, yet permanent
change. Foster is at his best
in analyzing the Mormons: his treatment
is balanced, valid and well-
researched. A superb "Essay on
Sources" complements nicely the 247-pages
of text. Religion and Sexuality should
be required reading for those interest-
ed not only in American utopianism but
in social and intellectual history as
well.
University of Akron H. Roger Grant
Out to Work: A History of
Wage-Earning Women in the United States. By
Alice Kessler-Harris. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1982. xvi +
400p.; illustrations, notes, index.
$19.95.)
192 OHIO HISTORY
Alice Kessler-Harris, professor of
history at Hofstra University, has pro-
duced an important book. Out to Work surveys
the history of wage-earning
women in the United States through a
synthesis of labor, women's, cultural,
immigrant, and to a lesser extent urban
and legal history. The work covers
the colonial period through the present.
The treatment of women and work
from colonial times to the Civil War is
succinct. The book is at its best in de-
veloping the history of wage-earning
women from the end of the Civil War
through World War Two.
Tracing the shifts in the nature of both
work and women workers, the au-
thor develops a sound, precise discussion
of the transition period from co-
lonial times to the Civil War. The
illumination of the woman factory
wage-earner is neatly integrated into
the cultural assumptions of domesticity
prevalent in Jacksonian times. And the
discussion of the transition from
housework to manufacturing work takes
into account in a sensitive fashion
both Anglo-American and late
nineteenth-century immigrant workers.
Kessler-Harris's discussion of the
post-Civil War period develops important
themes on class and gender, and the
author is especially insightful in por-
traying the differences between middle
and working class women in the late-
nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries. The tensions between domestic
and wage-earning roles are examined and
are perceptively placed within a
framework of Progressive Era cultural
assumptions.
A detailed examination of the interplay
between efficiency and technology
in chapter six, entitled
"Technology, Efficiency and Resistance," develops
themes of regimented order,
modernization and gender and is most thought-
provoking. The author capably relates
the spirit of the twenties and thirties
to women and the workplace, develops an
eminently readable chapter for
the forties on "Making History Work
for Women," but all too briefly treats
the 1950s to the present in nineteen
pages. In all, this book has broken pio-
neer ground in labor and social history.
Kessler-Harris's work is commenda-
ble and exciting. It is a finely crafted
work which will serve as a landmark
and deserves a wide audience.
Kenyon College Roy Wortman
Women of the West. By Cathy Luchetti in collaboration with Carol Olwell.
(St. George, Utah: Antelope Island
Press, 1982. 240p.; illustrations, appen-
dix, notes, bibliography, photographic
sources. $25.00.)
Dedicated "To those women of the
West whose stories will never be
told," Luchetti and Olwell's Women
of the West offers that rare blend of his-
torical excellence and personal
excitement in a totally absorbing personal
memoir/photographic format. While the
author, Luchetti, states that the
volume is not intended to be academic
history, but rather a document of per-
sonal experience about those women who
have not had a place in academic
history, the book succeeds nonetheless
on both counts. It furthers both our
understanding of the entire Westward
movement and the tremendous diver-
sity of women's experience within that
movement.
Book Reviews
193
The volume consciously avoids the
omissions of earlier scholarship and
strives to embrace not only the Anglo
woman's experience, but the situations
of Black, Indian, Chinese, Japanese and
Jewish women as well. Further, the
wearisome dichotomized stereotype of the
frontier woman being either . . .
"staunch bonneted women . . . or
frolicsome harlots . . ." is abandoned to
make way for a complex, at times
distressingly painful or exuberantly hope-
ful, collection of readings that portray
the multiplicity of the frontier experi-
ence.
The anthology relies upon the letters,
diaries, journals and account books
of eleven individual women. The
circumstances surrounding their settlement
in the West, class, race and marital
status, type of work and personal tempera-
ment are recurring themes that emerge
throughout their narratives. The text
is complemented, no-heightened and
imbued with life-by one of the
finest historical photographic essays
assembled. Tapping the resources of
public as well as private holdings,
Olwell has collected a stunning array of
pictorial statements. The photographs
range from the once-popular family
portrait posed in front of sod house
with carriage, dog and quilts prominently
displayed, to the less formal and more
revealing pictures of a harlot in her
Alaska bedroom, a family at the grave
site of their nineteen-month-old son,
to women at work in factories, on farms,
and in their homes. The photo-
graphs in this anthology play as central
a role as the text. The two combine to
recreate the hope and despair that
coexisted so forcefully.
The eleven women studied in detail
include Mary Richardson Walker
(1811-1897) whose missionary zeal
spirited her from Maine to Oregon where
she established a mission with her
husband. Her casual notation of child-
bearing, weather, chores, trials with
Indians and the production of house-
hold goods tends to minimize the overwhelming
work load and frequent pe-
riods of self-chastisement she endured.
Like Walker, Sister Mary Catherine
Cabareaux (1813-1903) and Priscilla
Merriman Evans (1835-1914) sojourned
West to answer religious callings, the
former as a Mission nun who settled in
Oregon, the latter as a hand-cart
Mormon whose destination was Utah. Both
left European origins (France
and England respectively), and despite
numerous trials the spiritual nature of
their quests enabled them "to thank
the Lord for a contented mind, a home
and something to eat."
The journals of Miriam Davis Colt
(1817-unknown) and Anna Harder Og-
den (1867-1960) reveal more recalcitrant
participation on the frontier. Colt,
escaping from a poor childhood in a
large New York City family, earned a
teaching certificate; while teaching she
met her husband. His commitment
to vegetarianism led them on an
ill-fated sojourn to Kansas to become settlers
in an experimental vegetarian community.
Poor planning, lack of skills and
provisions, inadequate shelter, malaria
and poor relations with the indige-
nous Indians caused the end of the
experiment after only three months time.
Haunted by psychological foreboding much
of the time, Colt epitomized the
Western woman ill-equipped to meet the
challenges of the frontier, both ma-
terially and spiritually. Ogden,
similarly, was embittered by constant indebt-
edness. This was compounded by a
self-deprecating nature and much bad
fortune in her struggle to survive as a self-supporting
laundress/
chambermaid/baby tender and domestic in
Berkeley, California.
The narratives of the two minority
women, Sarah Winnemucca, a Paiute In-
194 OHIO HISTORY
dian of Nevada (1844-1891), and Pauline
Lyons Williamson, a middle-class
Black woman from New York City (dates
unknown) trying to support herself
and her son in Oakland, California, are,
perhaps, among the most fascinating
and demanding entries in the anthology.
Winnemucca's experience of geno-
cide and oppression, inseparable as it
was from her personal memoirs, casts a
haunting shadow over the descriptive
detail she offers of the gentleness and
communality of the Paiute way of life.
The personal becomes the political as
white influence increasingly controls
the moves, food supply and spirits of
her people. Her pen easily and
eloquently portrays Indian resistance, anger,
frustration, heartbreak and family love.
Williamson, also forced to respond to
racial oppression, struggled against
great economic difficulties while she sup-
ported herself working for invalids in
their homes.
For the remaining individual women
examined in the anthology, the quest
for self-betterment was a common, if not
primary, motivation for their frontier
life. Keturah Penton Belknap's
(1820-1913) entire life seems to have been
ruled by unusually frequent movings and
resettlements. She lived, alternate-
ly, in Ohio, Iowa, Oregon and
Washington. Her family's labors ceaselessly fo-
cused on the accumulation of money to
buy land which, once acquired, was
soon sold. Her economic woes found a
depressing companionship in the bur-
ial of six of her children, events which
she notes cryptically and mournfully.
Helen Wiser Stewart (1854-1926), on the
other hand, inherited her hus-
band's Nevada ranch. Under her competent
guiding hand the value of the
land and of the livestock multiplied
greatly. These profits provided the best
of educations for her children and her
eventual move to a more populated
area.
The narratives of Bethenia Owens-Adair
(1840-1926), a Missouri native
who later became a regularly educated
physician, world traveler, and activ-
ist in social reforms and Elinore Pruitt
Stewart (1876-1933), an Arkansas native
turned Wyoming homesteader and fiction
writer, complete the portfolio of
personal accounts.
The sole weak spot in the book lies in
the section on "Minority Women."
Only here is the overview-nature of the
introductory section lacking in
breadth. Although the author qualifies
her narrative by noting the paucity
of surviving sources for minority women
in the West, in trying to address sev-
eral different racial/ethnic experiences
she employs broad-based generaliza-
tions that include the prostitution,
exploitation and chattel-like status of
Chinese women and the home, middle-class
orientation of Jewish women.
While these elements were operative for
a good many Chinese and Jewish
women, they were not all-encompassing
and it is here that the narrative does
not reflect fully enough the total
diversity of these women's experiences.
This criticism notwithstanding, the
author, Luchetti, and photo editor,
Olwell, have succeeded in amassing and
assimilating a stunning array of ma-
terial. It is a valuable and enriching
contribution to both women's history
and the history of the West. Perhaps the
force of this anthology can best be
appreciated in an excerpt from the
letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart, the Wy-
oming homesteading rancher, who wrote:
... I realize that temperament has much
to do with success in any undertaking,
and persons afraid of coyotes and work
and loneliness had better let ranching
alone. At the same time, any woman who can stand her
own company, can see the
Book Reviews
195
beauty of the sunset, loves growing
things, and is willing to put as much time at
careful labor as she does over the
washtub, will certainly succeed; will have
independence, plenty to eat all the
time, and a home of her own in the end.
Brown University Susan E.
Cayleff
Women's America: Refocusing the Past.
Edited by Linda K. Kerber and
Jane DeHart Mathews. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1982. xi +
478p.; notes, documents, further
reading, index. $21.95.)
Anthologies of essays are often a
disappointment, a grab bag of uneven
quality, style and substance. This
particular collection, however, is remarka-
bly satisfying in both writing and
content. Edited from a clearly feminist per-
spective, these pieces are balanced in
tone and richly informative, covering
American history from the Colonial
period to the present. One of the real de-
lights of this book is that so much of
the content is fresh; this is no rehash of
other collections from the past decade.
Indeed, I had read very few of these
pieces prior to this. And a number of
the essays provide provocative reinter-
pretation of established data. The discussion
of "Smothered Slave Infants:
Were Slave Mothers at Fault?," for
example, completely and soundly pre-
sents a revision of the myth, based on
the high incidence of death among
black babies, that slave mothers
deliberately smothered their children
rather than allow them to grow up in the
cruelty of slavery. Arguing cogently
from the evidence, Michael P. Johnson
suggests that Sudden Infant Death
Syndrome was the true cause, exacerbated
by the low birth weights and
poor postnatal care of the babies. Such
a premise may cause the reader to
rethink also aspects of the myth about
the black family in America, both be-
fore and after slavery. Used in a
classroom setting, an essay such as this
should provoke a challenging dialogue.
Many other pieces in this anthology give
rise to a similar sense of intellectu-
al excitement as new information
unfolds. Anne Firor Scott's "Self-Portraits"
contrasts the life of a famous
historical figure, Benjamin Franklin, with that of
his beloved sister, Jane. By
concentrating on creating a portrait of Jane drawn
from the details of her daily life
depicted in her multitude of extant letters
(many of them written to her brother),
Ms. Scott shows the stark contrast
between the roles and societal
expectations of male and female. Both siblings
were given the same education at home,
both were intelligent and insightful;
nevertheless, the paths of their lives
were destined to be widely divergent
(Jane bore twelve children and endured a
life of penury)-a divergence that
had little to do with talent or ability,
but a great deal to do with gender. The
presentation of such historical facts
allows us to analyze history from a
broader, more accurate viewpoint. At the
same time, as we contrast a piece
such as this one with traditional
written history, we must expand our under-
standing not only of American history
but of human potential-and the mis-
use of human talent (female) over the
centuries. We likewise become more
vividly aware of the fact that history
is not legitimately comprised of only he-
roes and great events; it must also be
the chronicle of common daily lives, of
the role of housework in the economy, of
midwifery, and of everything else
196 OHIO HISTORY
that belonged to "women's
sphere"-the events and concerns that are the
backbone of any country's history.
In encouraging us to reconsider our
history and the role of women in it, the
editors have eschewed the traditional
periodizations of history. Instead
they have established their framework
for this anthology around four major
and interrelated categories: biology,
economics, politics and idealogy. In an
enlightening introductory essay which
discusses this approach, they also
underscore the need to investigate and
legitimize women's history; all other
points aside, such investigation meets
modern woman's need "to better un-
derstand our collective selves."
In addition to a solid selection of
essays, this anthology contains a section
on "Essential Documents" (such
as examples of marriage, divorce and dower
papers from the seventeenth century) and
narrative suggestions for further
reading. The informative footnotes at
the end of the pieces are also a joy in
themselves. Overall, the quality of the
collection is excellent; the editors
have chosen their materials judiciously
and with a sense of scholarship. The
book would be a fine text for women's
studies or a needed supplement and
remedy for courses taught with the
traditional historical approach. Or-best
of all-it can be read purely for the
enrichment and stimulation of one's own
intellect.
University of Maine at Farmington Judith A. Sturnick
Read This Only to Yourself: The
Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 1880-
1910. By Elizabeth Hampsten. (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press,
1982. xiii + 242p.; notes. $22.50.)
Anyone who has ever rummaged through
collections of old letters spirited
from dusty attics should find Elizabeth
Hampsten's book interesting and
worthwhile. The author has studied
several collections of letters and diaries
written by working women who lived much
of their lives in a rural setting,
many of them in North Dakota during the
period from 1880 to 1920. Hamp-
sten has analyzed these writings and
offers several conclusions which vary in
significance and convincibility. That
women have been neglected in the writ-
ings of men seems true enough since much
of the writing, especially on the
frontier, was done by men and about men.
Even when men were accompan-
ied by women, as they frequently were in
their relentless search for greener
pastures, they often had little to say
about women. Thus Hampsten's volume
helps fill a void in this important
respect.
Women who wrote these letters and
diaries tended to relate concrete and
practical matters of local circumstance:
what they were doing to survive the
weather, family or friends they had
recently visited, their health and ap-
pearance, and the ever-present reality
of death which frequently touched
friends and loved ones in tragic and
unexpected ways. According to the au-
thor, there was no distinguishing
regionalism evident in this body of writing.
These women were not tied to the land in
the sense that they are fit subjects
for a unifying myth based on time and
place. Nor did these women speculate
much on politics. Compared to the
writings of men, these women wrote, ob-
Book Reviews
197
serves the author, in a smaller
circumference than men did and tended to be
less direct in language and in style.
The best parts of this book, however,
are those which get away from the
almost ponderous anlaysis of the style
and grammar of these women and fea-
ture instead the content of the material
itself. For example, what women had
to say in their personal letters about
sex, birth control, and about personal
health and welfare, helps one to
appreciate the tenuousness of life and be-
havior of nineteenth century Americans.
Since men and women seemed to
have had little communication with each
other about such matters, Hamp-
sten's study documents again in the
pattern that at the personal level, Ameri-
can society was distinctly divided into
masculine and feminine spheres. The
sections on Viola Pierce who came to the
Dakota Territory in 1879 and Julia
Gage Carpenter are especially revealing
in that both offer examples of how in-
dividual women confronted frontier
settlement life. Carpenter, overcome by a
"franatical lonliness,"
describes desolate winters, dirt, mosquitoes, and the
death of her baby in her arms. She coped
by spending periods of time back
east with her family, only to return to
the west and endure another horrible
time of personal despair. Pierce's
husband corresponded with a close male
friend; the correspondence, which is
included in this study (in spite of the
book's subtitle), suggests that men too
had personal friendships and that
when they wrote to each other about
women they often did so with a certain
bewilderment and even fear of the
opposite sex. In summary, Hampsten's en-
deavor to illuminate the lives of these
women through their private corre-
spondence makes a solid contribution
even if at times the author's analysis
seems a bit labored.
Muskingum College Joe L.
Dubbert
G. I. Jive: An Army Bandsman in World
War II. By Frank F. Mathias. (Lexing-
ton: The University Press of Kentucky,
1982. xii + 227p.; illustrations,
maps, notes, index. $17.50.)
G. I. Jive is a well-written memoir of a World War II army
enlisted man who
was willingly drafted from a small
Kentucky town, received infantry basic
training, was cut from the Army
Specialized Training Program and became
army band saxophone musician almost by
accident. After a year of stateside
duty Frank Mathias was shipped to the
south Pacific as a rifleman replace-
ment where he was sent to the veteran
37th "Buckeye" Ohio National Guard
division. There his musical experience
was rediscovered and he was as-
signed to the division band. In six
months of combat on Luzon, he was,
briefly, an antitank gun cannoneer and,
mostly, a light machine gunner. He
escaped injury but contracted malaria as
the result of lying in a slit trench
unprotected by netting when Japanese
artillery found the range of his head-
quarters. After thirty months of active
service, he was honorably discharged
as a sergeant (T-4) in February 1946.
The title of the book is a bit
misleading, for it is not an account of army mu-
sic and musicians as such. To be sure,
since Mathias was an able "reed man"
and most of his service was in one band
or another, his memoir includes in-
teresting insights into the music of the
time and the life of an army bands-
198 OHIO HISTORY
man. But the book's enduring value will
be as a piece of social history. Excel-
lent accounts of the ordinary soldier's
experiences are essential to the full
understanding of any war, and Mathias's
slender volume gives us an intelli-
gent, sometime humorous, often serious
narrative of a curious, observant
draftee. Somehow, even as a
happy-go-lucky high school graduate whose
life revolved around making music, Mathias
had a keen sense of the histori-
cal importance of his World War II
experience. He had his parents preserve
all his letters to them, and he saved
all those he received. This personal
archive provides the foundation for his
wartime autobiography, but histori-
an that he is, he has studied the
campaigns he was in and supplements his
boyish viewpoint with useful historical
additions. The result is a record of a
wide variety of personal experiences and
emotions which can only be sam-
pled in a brief review.
At the beginning we meet an honest,
pleasant youngster who knew little
about the world beyond his
depression-struck Carlisle, Kentucky. In his
first months of service he learned not
only the fundamentals of army life but
also much about other humans and
cultures he had never before encoun-
tered. Overseas he experienced genuine
fear on his first patrol and a mixture
of fear and curiosity when his convoy
enroute to Lingayen Gulf was machine
gunned by Japanese fighters. He did some
serious soul searching when
faced with his first campaign and then
adapted his training and habits to
the realities of combat. He developed a
hatred of the enemy when he en-
countered the bodies of hundreds of
Filipino civilians murdered by the re-
treating Japanese. He experienced
anguish when buddies were killed and
expressed satisfaction over the dropping
of the A-bombs, especially since
the quick end of the war spared him and
his comrades from any more dan-
gerous campaigns. When he returned to San
Francisco bay, he was no longer
a boy, of course, but he was still
fundamentally the delightful, decent person
he had been before the war.
Mathias writes his narrative with
remarkable candor, reporting the inci-
dents and idioms of army life faithfully
and including episodes which could
cause him personal embarassment. Such an
approach certifies the authentic-
ity of his account. The book will be a
nostalgia trip for Army World War II
veterans and a source of understanding
for those who have never had such
an experience. The book is a true gem
among works of its kind and belongs in
every serious World War II collection.
Ohio University George
Lobdell
The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection:
The Secret Political Activities of Two
Supreme Court Justices. By Bruce Allen Murphy. (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1982. x + 473p.;
appendix, notes, selected bibliography, in-
dex. $18.95.)
The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection is an important history of the off-the-
bench political activities of two of the
nation's most esteemed Supreme Court
justices. Scholars of the Court have previously probed
aspects of the compli-
cated personal relationship between
Louis D. Brandeis and Felix Frankfurt-
Book Reviews
199
er, but Bruce Allen Murphy, a political
scientist, offers the first book-length
analysis of the nature, depth, and
impact of their connection.
Murphy's most spectacular revelation
concerns the payments made by the
well-to-do Brandeis to Frankfurter after
the former's appointment to the
Court in 1916. Brandeis sent the Harvard
Law School professor a yearly re-
tainer to promote Progressive reform measures
that the justice could not eth-
ically advance on his own. Frankfurter
lobbied with important public offi-
cials; he wrote essays for liberal
journals; and he used his Harvard Law
School classroom as a training ground
for legal minds steeped in Brandeis's
liberal reforms and destined for service
in the national government. This re-
lationship apparently persisted until
Brandeis's retirement in 1939 when
Frankfurter himself went on the bench.
Brandeis and Frankfurter, according to
Murphy, covertly influenced poli-
cies whose constitutionality the Court
subsequently adjudicated. Brandeis
played an important role in formulating
the Lever Food Control Act, the Pub-
lic Utilities Holding Company bill, the
National Industrial Recovery Act, and
the Agricultural Adjustment Act.
Murphy's most serious allegations involve
Brandeis's role during the mid-1930s in
shaping the transition from the so-
called first New Deal to the second.
Brandeis, Murphy asserts, bullied the
Roosevelt administration by threatening
to attack the constitutionality of
New Deal programs that departed from his
ideas.
Brandeis and Frankfurter differed in
their approach to off-the-bench
activities. Brandeis had the redeeming
virtue of self-restraint; Frankfurter
meddled incessantly. Brandeis went to
great lengths to make it appear that
Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt had
solicited his advise. Frankfurter, on
the other hand, was usually more direct.
Although the Supreme Court had
almost since its inception refused to
issue advisory opinions, Frankfurter, ac-
cording to Murphy, "showed no
hesitation in offering his opinion" to Presi-
dent Roosevelt in 1940 on the
constitutionality of the proposed Lend-Lease
program. Frankfurter's extensive
political activities clashed with his well-
known posturing on the Court in behalf
of judicial restraint. The justice, Mur-
phy concludes, regularly engaged in
"overt displays of hypocracy" that "left
him vulnerable to attack for duplicity
and a willingness to adapt his princi-
ples to his needs" (p. 259).
The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection is impressively researched, clearly
written and provocatively argued,
perhaps too provocatively argued. An at-
mosphere of scandal-mongering pervades
the book, and so too does the
present-minded ethical concerns of the
post-Watergate era. The book's vir-
tue is that it provides an unvarnished
description of the actions of powerful
persons caught on the edge of ethical
propriety. Yet Murphy fails to explain
why many public officials outside the
Court condoned these seeming impro-
prieties, what role this extra-judicial
activism served in defining the nature of
American constitutionalism, and why some
justices felt compelled to act in
this way while others, such as Harlan
Fiske Stone who served with both
Brandeis and Frankfurter, did not.
Moreover, Murphy does not provide a
single example of either Brandeis or
Frankfurter purposefully using his judi-
cial power to promote on the bench goals
he could not attain off the bench.
Even if Brandeis did threaten (and the
evidence is problematic at best that
he did) to use his position on the Court
to kill the AAA, he in fact voted for
it!
200 OHIO HISTORY
The history of the Supreme Court teaches
that its justices labor under a
powerful irony: they must be in the
world of politics without becoming part
of it. That two influential justices
perhaps stretched the bounds of propriety
reinforces the conclusion, surprisingly
lost in this book's ethical concerns,
that the Court, while a legal
institution, resonates to political reality.
University of Florida Kermit L. Hall
Carl Schurz: A Biography. By Hans L. Trefousse. (Knoxville: The University
of Tennessee Press, 1982. xiii + 386p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography, in-
dex. $29.50.)
James G. Blaine, who did not like Carl Schurz,
said of the prominent
German-American politician in 1884, that
his public life had been "consistent
only in the frequency and ability of its
changes." Schurz reciprocated
Blaine's enmity and preferred to see his
career as the consistent working out
of a fidelity to lasting principle. In
this new biography of Schurz, Hans
Trefousse largely succeeds in presenting
a credible portrait of the man that
avoids the partisan extremes of Schurz
and his detractors.
The main theme that Trefousse pursues is
Schurz as a German-American,
with equal emphasis on both sides of the
hyphen. He sought "to lead the
German-Americans to a realization of
their role in a new country while yet re-
taining their old identity" (p.
300). Schurz carried out this responsibility in
many public and private capacities. He
entered politics as a Republican in the
late 1850s, was a controversial Civil
War general, and then a senator from
Missouri in the 1870s. Later, he served
as Secretary of the Interior un-
der Rutherford B. Hayes and at the end
of his life was a vigorous champion
of anti-imperialism. Trefousse provides
a reliable, informed overview of
Schurz's turbulent career that becomes
the best one-volume account of the
man.
In Schurz's life, however, there were
problems that merit more attention
than Trefousse gives them. Financial
worries plagued Schurz from the 1850s
onward, and there are indications that
his political actions and monetary exi-
gencies often intersected. What would
Gilded Age historians say of James G.
Blaine, Mark Hanna, or Matthew S. Quay
if they acted as "American repre-
sentative" (p. 269) of a German
steamship company at $18,000 a year, a huge
sum in a deflationary era? Schurz did so
for four years in what was a lob-
bying capacity. Yet little is offered
about the specifics of such activities. The
treatment of Schurz's debts arising from
speculations in Wisconsin real estate
also merits more development.
Like many other political biographers of
male statesman, Trefousse han-
dles gingerly Schurz's private,
emotional life. Schurz's marriage to Margar-
ethe Meyer was a difficult and stormy
relationship. Prolonged separations,
wifely jealously, and financial
dependence marked his years as a husband.
His wife was not, Trefousse concludes,
"a dependable helpmate" (p. 209). It
is equally plausible that Schurz was an
insensitive spouse. Self-centered and
domineering, he seems to have regarded
Mrs. Schurz as an appendage. She
died in 1876, in her early forties, of
complications arising from the birth of a
son. Trefousse does not inquire into the
circumstances that impelled Schurz
Book Reviews
201
to have another child by a wife whose
eldest daughter was already twenty-
three. Schurz's relationship with Fanny
Chapman, begun after his wife's
death, also provokes questions.
Apparently he did not marry Fanny because
his daughter Agathe disapproved or
because of "fate" (p. 273). Fanny's
opinion of how well Schurz enjoyed
"lasting intimacy" (p. 273) without re-
sponsibility does not seem to have been
preserved, but it is reasonable to ex-
pect that a biographer should be
sensitive to the impact of a subject's per-
sonal dealings with the opposite sex.
Trefousse has explored well the rich
array of primary sources on Schurz
that remain from his long involvement in
American politics. While recogniz-
ing the strengths of this biography,
there are still conclusions about which
disagreement is possible. There is
appropriate criticism of Schurz's falling
away from enlightenment on the race
issue in the 1870s and 1880s, but his
persistent anti-Black attitudes seem
more deeply rooted than simply his polit-
ical ambitions in Missouri in the late
1860s. On other issues, William McKin-
ley's civil service record was better
than Schurz and Trefousse allow, and
the United States did not
"cruelly" (p. 285) betray Emilio Aguinaldo in the
sense of repudiating a promise of
Philippine independence.
Students of Gilded Age politics will be
glad to have a comprehensive relia-
ble narrative of Schurz's participation
in this important period of American
history, and they will be indebted to
Hans Trefousse for the care and thor-
oughness with which he has traced the impact of one of
the most cele-
brated examples of an immigrant in
politics.
University of Texas at Austin Lewis L. Gould
John A. Logan: Stalwart Republican
from Illinois. By James Pickett Jones.
(Tallahassee: University Presses of
Florida, 1982. xii + 291p.; illustrations,
notes, bibliography, index. $20.00.)
John A. Logan: Stalwart Republican
from Illinois is a sequel to Professor
Jones's earlier volume, Black Jack:
John A. Logan and Southern Illinois in the
Civil War Era. Jones has written the first scholarly biography of the
most
conspicuous volunteer general of the
Civil War. Before Jones wrote his two-
volume study, only the biased and
inaccurate partisan campaign biography
written by George F. Dawson, edited by
Logan, and Mary Logan's Reminis-
cences of A Soldier's Wife were available to trace Logan's proper place in his-
tory. Most historians characterized
Logan as a corrupt politican and associa-
ted him with the "Whiskey
Ring" and the "Salary Grab." The historian
Dixon Wecter called Logan "an
exceedingly crooked politician." Historian
Robert Wiebe (The Search for Order, 1967)
noted that the "'best men' of
American politics scorned him [Logan] as
an example of American political
life at its worst." Although Jones
admits that Logan was not "zealous in
routing out wrongdoers" in the
"Whiskey Ring" fraud, he points out that
the General was never indicted in the
fraud (p. 88). Concerning the "Salary
Grab," he reasoned that Logan
supported it "because poor men would be
unable to serve in Congress so long as
its members were woefully under-
paid." Jones concludes that there
was "no evidence that funds from dis-
honest transactions made their way into
his pockets" (p. x).
202 OHIO HISTORY
In the war between patronage politics
and civil service reform, Logan was
one of the chief foes of the merit
system. The author explains Logan's oppo-
sition to civil service reform as simply
that "he needed patronage to keep his
Illinois organization alive" (p.
xi). While Jones defends Logan against self-
serving and corruption, he nevertheless
characterizes him as one of the last
patronage bosses. By viewing Logan in
the context of the era in which he
lived, Jones has produced a balanced
treatment of his subject.
Logan was often charged with not being
concerned with principle, and
with using the Negro and Reconstruction
as an issue to maintain himself in
office. But Jones says "there was
no political profit to be made for his advo-
cacy of black rights" (p. xi), and
he insists that "no historical evidence
supports the theory that Logan's efforts
for black Americans were disingen-
uous" (p. 226). William Gillette (The
Right To Vote, 1965) was one of the histo-
rians that questioned Logan's sincerity
concerning the blacks' rights. He
charged that Logan's opposition to Negro
office-holding at the time the Fif-
teenth Amendment was adopted harmonized
with his anti-Negro constitu-
ency of Southern Illinois. Jones
challenges Gillette's conclusion by pointing
out that since Logan was elected at
large, the entire state was his constituen-
cy (p. 35, note 8). Jones also calls
attention to Logan's support of Federal aid
to education and the fact that each time
it came before Congress he insisted
that guarantees be written into the law
assuring the blacks of their fair share
of funds. Jones agrees with historian
Daniel Crofts that there was need for
Logan's precautions (p. 217, note 15).
The high point of Jones's book is the
dramatic account of the Illinois elec-
tion of Logan as United States senator
in 1885, requiring 171 days and 120
ballots. On the other hand, some will
question Jones' characterization of
James G. Blaine as a "Halfbreed" (Reformer),
(p. 196).
Jones's research is flawless and
presents a skillful balance of newspaper
sources, manuscript collections and
definitive studies by other scholars.
Jones's biography will be useful to the
specialists of the Reconstruction peri-
od and the Gilded Age as well as for the
general reader.
Morehead State University Victor B. Howard
Crisis of the House Divided: An
Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-
Douglas Debates. By Harry V. Jaffa. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982. 451p.; notes, appendices,
index. $9.95 paper.)
This is the third printing of a book
which first appeared in 1959. If Abra-
ham Lincoln had sought a public
relations expert to secure in history the va-
lidity of his political ideas, he could
not have done better than to choose
Harry Jaffa, whose writing establishes
Lincoln as a master of morality and
political wisdom. The book is an answer
to those Civil War revisonists who
insisted there was no substantive
difference concerning slavery between Lin-
coln and Douglas as expressed in their
1858 debates.
According to Jaffa, their views were
basically different. Douglas empha-
sized popular sovereignty as a way to
save the Union, with or without slavery
in the territories. Lincoln, on the
other hand, considered slavery morally
Book Reviews
203
wrong and its introduction into any new
territory totally incompatible with re-
publican government and the ideals of
the Declaration of Independence. In
this essay of more than 400 pages, Jaffa
explores the background and devel-
opment of each antagonist's thinking.
The conclusion is a ringing endorse-
ment of Lincoln as the living embodiment
of the ideals of the Declaration,
when those ideals are correctly
understood.
The first half of the book deals with
the ideas of Douglas. He is depicted
as indifferent to slavery, anti-Black,
and concerned primarily with national
expansion, an expansion which could
inevitably produce a nineteenth centu-
ry American version of the Roman Empire.
Each concept is examined in a
lengthy analysis. For example, the
repeal of the Missouri Compromise is dis-
cussed in four different chapters. If
Douglas was the Little Giant to his politi-
cal followers, he is reduced to a moral
pygmy in Jaffa's book.
The second half of the work pictures
Lincoln as the correct interpreter of
basic American ideals. Lincoln believed
that all men were created equal,
even though he would not grant Blacks
the status of full citizenship. To him,
equality meant freedom from slavery, a
promise rather than a reality. To Lin-
coln there was no way to justify
slavery, especially within a government
based on representation.
The entire argument tends to become an
exercise in abstract thinking. If
morality was the issue, a better case
could be made for the Garrisonian abo-
litionists than one can possibly make
for Lincoln. If slavery was wrong, why
not condemn it everywhere and refuse to
compromise with it under any cir-
cumstances? Lincoln supported a fugitive
slave bill when he was in Congress,
and he was willing to accept a 13th
amendment allowing slavery to remain in
the states where it was already
entrenched. Jaffa's arguments do not come to
terms with these facts.
On the contrary, Lincoln is pictured in
almost a messianic light. According
to Jaffa, he fulfilled a prophetic role
in the Old Testament sense, standing
alone against a force which might have
introduced slavery into the free
states. How else can one interpret:
"It didn't happen because Lincoln was re-
solved that it shouldn't happen.
And nothing but his implacable resolve
made it impossible."
Far too much emphasis is placed on the
unique contributions of Lincoln in
defining the major political questions
of the day. In his early years Lincoln
viewed slavery and other issues in
pretty much the same way as Henry Clay
and other anti-slavery Whigs. His
unqualified opposition to slave extension
was shared by all free soilers and abolitionists.
But the major shortcoming of
this work is its failure to deal with
the combination of free soil views and rac-
ism which characterized Lincoln's public
statements.
If Lincoln ever realized that slavery
itself could be abolished, yet the ide-
als of the Declaration remain
unfulfilled, it is not clear in this work. To abol-
ish slavery was a giant step toward
freedom, but only a step. Without politi-
cal and economic power, Blacks were
again denied their basic human rights.
Lincoln's vision of the future stopped
short of granting all the promise of
equal treatment that is embodied in the Declaration.
This book has all the strengths and
weaknesses of a study in political
theory. Words in political speeches are
taken at face value and too much is
read into what Douglas and Lincoln implied in their
speeches. Finally, while
no one can deny Lincoln's significance, it is difficult
to imagine a flesh and
204 OHIO HISTORY
blood version of the Great Man which the
book presents. Certainly few, if
any, of his contemporaries saw him in
that light.
Wilmington College Larry
Gara
The Politics of Race in New York: The
Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil
War Era. By Phyllis F. Field. (New York: Cornell University
Press, 1982.
264p.; notes, maps, tables, appendices,
bibliography, index. $19.50.)
Phyllis Field has written an important
book regarding the struggle of
blacks to secure the right to vote in
New York during the Civil War era. She
suggests that a study of the politics of
race in New York is particularly signifi-
cant. Throughout the Civil War era, New
York was the nation's most popu-
lous and wealthiest state. Its political
leaders often went on to become the na-
tion's leaders. Finally, party politics
in New York was played at a highly
sophisticated level, and politicians
elsewhere paid attention to what went on
in the state.
In the years preceding the Civil War,
there were major shifts and realign-
ments among political and economic
forces as the critical issues associated
with the impending war created
polarization between the North and South,
and within the North itself. It was in
this environment of change and political
realignment that Afro-Americans
increased their efforts to secure the right to
vote in New York. The symbiotic relation
between suffrage and other rights
made voting a prized possession in 19th
Century America. It symbolized
one's acceptance as a responsible
citizen of the community, with an interest in
its future and a right to shape it.
Indeed, since the vote strengthened peo-
ple's ability to defend and promote
their own interest, many whites saw
black disenfranchisement as a key
mechanism for maintaining the status quo.
The Democrats in particular believed
that the suffrage issue could be used
to separate working class and poor
whites from blacks and to secure support
for the slave powers.
The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment
ultimately resolved the struggle
for equal suffrage in New York. By 1870
adult male blacks could vote in all
elections by federal, not state, action.
But the political battles in New York
that culminated in full black suffrage,
Field argues, have even greater signifi-
cance than the extension of the
franchise to blacks, important as that was.
They are crucial for understanding the
political and social divisions on race
in New York and, by extension, in the
North; the role of the 19th century
political party in social change; and
the nature of reconstruction in the
North. Most critical, the struggle for
black suffrage in New York illuminates
and gives insight into the whole problem
of social change in racist, class-
stratified America.
To guide her inquiry into the struggle
for black suffrage, Field poses two
basic questions: "If rights for
blacks were always unpopular, why did the
Republican Party pursue policies that
were potentially self-destructive?"
"What social and political factors
determined if racial policies in New York
were pushed ahead or shelved?" To
answer these complex questions, Field
effectively merges the techniques of
quantitative analysis with those of narra-
tive history to examine the New York
State referendums on black suffrage at
Book Reviews
205
three key points in New York and
American history. The first referendum
(1846) took place during the early
political agitation over slavery but before
the formation of the Republican Party.
During this period the opposition to
equal suffrage was overwhelming, and the
only support for black voting
occurred along "cultural
lines." That is, from Yankee idealists who believed
in the need for "each man to develop
unhindered his own talents and vir-
tues." Neither the Democrats nor
the Whigs were united on the suffrage
question. The Whigs did generally
support suffrage as a means of gaining po-
litical support among Yankee idealists,
while the Democrats used opposition
to black voting as a means of
strengthening their influence among immigrants,
the Irish and Germans. To explain the
action of the Whig and Democratic
leaders, Field suggests that they acted
as pragmatic politicians who simply
put politics first. In other words,
neither political party had any real interest
or concern over black suffrage, and the
social and economic problems faced
by the Afro-Americans. Rather, they were
primarily interested in party
building and winning political
elections. To the Whigs, this meant making
overtures to those who had genuine concerns over the
plight of blacks, and
for the Democrats it meant strengthening their
influence among workers and
poor whites, the center of anti-suffrage
sentiment. Suffrage, for both parties,
represented a tool which could be used
to achieve other more basic, politi-
cal objectives.
According to Field, the emergence of the
Republican Party as a major force
in New York politics, coupled with the
growing antagonisms between the
North and South, won new support for
equal suffrage. Consequently, when
the second referendum was held in 1860,
sentiment for black suffrage had
reached a transitional stage. It had
become more of a partisan issue among
the voters. In order to build the
Republican Party, Republicans sought
force, it was necessary to unite all of
the diverse elements who were opposed
to the Slavocracy, including those who
advocated abolition and black suf-
frage. To accomplish this task, they
argued that an aggressive slave power,
supported by "masses of alien
Catholics herded to the polls on election day
by their Democratic overlords, was
threatening America with a reign of tyr-
anny and corruption and attempting to
debase and degrade democratic val-
ues." However, despite the
rhetoric, there were still many conservatives
within the party who saw no connection
between the slave power and New
York property qualifications.
Consequently, the party remained divided on
equal suffrage.
Democrats, on the other hand, remained
almost universal in their opposi-
tion to equal suffrage. Threatened with
the loss of their traditional partisan
edge both in New York and in the nation,
the Democrats perfected their use
of racial fears as a campaign technique.
They were determined to maintain in-
fluence among the Germans, Irish and
immigrants. In the end they were suc-
cessful and the referendum for equal
suffrage was again defeated in 1860.
Field points out that the 1860 election
tended to be even more partisan than
the 1846 one, and this was reflective of
the growing polarization in the coun-
try. However, in spite of the rise of
the Republican Party and its liberal fol-
lowing, the question of suffrage
remained a political tool, rather than a social
question. Further, working class whites
remained in the Democratic camp
and continued to be the most hostile
antisuffrage force in the state. Native
white voters were the only new
supporters of suffrage in the 1860 election, ar-
gues Field.
206 OHIO HISTORY
Field posits that the Civil War and its
aftermath were fundamental in
bringing black suffrage as an issue to
the fore, and shaping the suffrage strug-
gle in its final stage. The Civil War
intensified partisan divisions on racial is-
sues such as emancipation and the use of
black troops. Moreover, Recon-
struction focused attention on the black
man and the role he played in
politics. Political events in the South
meant that the Republicans as a party
had to accept the validity of black
voting in the South, and this forced them
to also make suffrage a partisan issue
in the North. But instead of presenting
equal suffrage as an important social
issue, the Republicans linked it with the
war effort. "It (the adoption of
equal suffrage) will put the constitution in har-
mony with Reconstruction in the South
and the well-being of the Republican
Party." By arguing for suffrage in
this manner, Field suggests, the Republic-
ans undermined the building of a solid
foundation upon which racial equali-
ty could be built. Indeed, to maintain
party unity, the Republicans stressed
the expediency of their reforms, and
argued they contemplated no drastic
change in race relations. Field adds
that for political purposes the strategy
tended to be somewhat effective.
Although the Republicans never won on
the suffrage question between 1846 and
1869, they did succeed in making it a
partisan issue, with almost complete
Republican support.
In spite of its strengths, The
Politics of Race in New York is not without
shortcomings. The most serious is
Field's failure to make a socioeconomic
analysis of the Republican and
Democratic leaders and their respective fol-
lowers. The debates and issues that
ultimately led to the Civil War were eco-
nomic ones that related to the
contradictions between industrial and planta-
tion capitalism. And almost all of the
issues of the day were directly or
indirectly related to it. Therefore, to
fully understand the connection be-
tween popular attitudes and partisan
politics in New York, we need to know
more about the social and class
background of political leaders and the key
members of their constituency. For
example, what is the socioeconomic
background of the Republican and
Democratic leadership? What sector of
the economy were they related to:
banking, finance, insurance, manufactur-
ing, railroads, shipping? Were they
primarily related to Northern or South-
ern economic realities? What is the
class background of the men who sup-
ported the Republicans and Democrats?
Field does not satisfactorily answer
these questions. Implicit, however, in
her analysis is the notion that the Re-
publicans drew most of their support
from the upper and middle classes,
while the Democrats were most solidly
entrenched among the German, Irish
and immigrant workers. Interestingly,
the Democratic supporters, especially
the Irish, were the people most likely
to compete with blacks for jobs and
housing. Paradoxically, because of the
similarities in their living and working
conditions, these ethnics were also the
natural allies of the Afro-Americans.
In essence, during the Civil War era,
perhaps more than at any other time in
American history, economics, class
conflict and race interacted, smoldered
and threatened to explode into
uncontrolled violence. In this turbulent peri-
od, the Irish, foreign-born,
working-class Germans and Afro-Americans were
natural allies. Yet, the Democrats and
Republicans kept them divided. Why
and how they managed to accomplish this
hat trick was accomplished, as
well as the social significance of the
divisions between Afro-Americans and
working class whites, is the important
story behind the politics of race in
New York. It is at this critical nexus
that one finds the real significance of the
Book Reviews
207
political battles that led to full
suffrage in New York. Field has made a begin-
ning in explicating the complex process
of social change in racist, class-
stratified America. However, much work
remains before our understanding
of the sociopolitical forces that keep
blacks separated from their natural
white allies is fully understood.
The Ohio State University Henry Taylor
Gregarious Saints: Self and Community
in American Abolitionism 1830-1870.
By Lawrence J. Friedman. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,
1982. xi + 344p.; notes, bibliographical
note, index. $37.50 cloth; $12.50
paper.)
Readers familiar with Lawrence J. Friedman's
articles and reviews where-
in he develops dissenting views of the
abolitionists' place in history will not
be surprised by this book, but others
are likely to find its perspectives odd.
Here, as in essays published in
professional journals and in papers before ac-
ademic conferences, Mr. Friedman, who
teaches at Bowling Green State Uni-
versity, argues that the abolitionists
bore little responsibility for the sectional
controversy that wracked antebellum
America, that if they were "a dis-
senting minority," they certainly
were not an expanding one whose growth
deserves charting and explaining. If I
have read his work correctly, one of
Mr. Friedman's chief messages is to the
effect that the abolitionists were of
little practical historical consequence.
Given this dismissive verdict, here
justified at impressive length, one cannot but ponder
the rationale that led to
the cover endorsement from a lauded
historian: "It will revive an inert field
of inquiry." To what end? It is not
even certain that the abolitionists' princi-
pal motivation was a desire to end
slavery. Altruism was far from predomi-
nant among them. They "craved pious
self-images as well as convivial social
experiences (p. 222)," Mr. Friedman
explains, and sometimes allowed such
cravings to shape strategy and policy.
The author describes the abolitionists
as "evangelical missionaries who
contributed quite inadvertently and
secondarily to sectional tensions and the
Civil War (p. 5)." Like Ronald
Walters in The Antislavery Appeal: American
Abolitionism after 1830, he argues that most abolitionists were not thorough-
going radicals but shared in widely held
middle-class values. They did be-
long, however, to the evangelical
missionary community. That community in
the 1820s and 1830s supported the
American Colonization Society's program
to send free blacks to Africa, thereby,
its advocates hoped, ameliorating ra-
cial tensions and encouraging
manumissions. Judging that program utopian as
well as morally flawed, some earnest
reformers broke with the consensus.
They rejected colonization and called
instead for the immediate end of slav-
ery without repatriation of the blacks.
The reformers who thus became
abolitionists did not remain isolated indi-
viduals. Instead, Mr. Friedman finds-and
it is the key to his book-they
formed several associative networks,
here called "clusters," loosely grouped
around persuasive, even charismatic
figures: the Boston Clique, whose
Unitarian-Quaker types recognized
Garrison as their center; the New York
City-Oberlin evangelicals (mostly
Presbyterian and Congregational) who
208 OHIO HISTORY
looked to Lewis Tappan for leadership;
and a smaller group in upstate New
York, likewise earnestly religious, who
gathered around Gerrit Smith.
To this point, Mr. Friedman's account
differs little from that found in the
"dull and plodding" (p. xi)
histories he seeks to supplant, but after this fair-
ly traditional beginning, the treatment
follows new and unexpected lines. An
analysis of interpersonal relationships
within the three "clusters" mentioned
above provides the book's organization
and central theme. Not much is to
be learned here about what the members
of these groups did to promote
the end of slavery. Their activities on
the public stage, even the books and
pamphlets they wrote, do not engage the
author. Rather his concern lies
with their inner life and sensibilities,
and, especially, with their changing re-
lationships with other members of their
network and with society beyond it,
including the emerging Republican party.
Many readers will find highly re-
vealing his treatment of the
abolitionists' gender attitudes and ties ("homo-
social" is a term not found in
every vocabulary), their racial attitudes, and
their changing views on violence.
This is a highly original and
imaginative work; it is thoughtful and well or-
ganized, and is derived from extensive
research, some of it in hitherto not
adequately examined materials. Its
argument must be pondered by everyone
interested in 19th century United States
History.
The Ohio State University Merton Dillon
Army Generals and Reconstruction:
Louisiana, 1862-1877. By Joseph G.
Daw-
son, III. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1982. 294p.; illus-
trations, notes, appendices,
bibliography, index. $25.00.)
Would-be readers of this book should
note carefully its subtitle, which
severely limits the broad promise of the
main title. Moreover, the book does
not deal with all generals involved in
the reconstruction of Louisiana. The fo-
cus is almost wholly on department
commanders, paying little or no attention
to several subordinate generals during
the wartime period whose actions af-
fected Reconstruction. Nor do all
department commanders receive adequate
treatment. There is no reference to the
serious charges of corruption against
General Stephen A. Hurlbut, which helped
to discredit the military govern-
ment. According to his announced
intention, the author gives little attention
to enlisted men.
His book does treat in some detail the
involvement of high Union officers
in the affairs of the state which was
under Reconstruction longer than any
other. Wisely it includes wartime
Reconstruction which set important prece-
dents. The major stress, however, is on
the traditional postwar Reconstruc-
tion era. The earlier years through 1869
were, according to Dawson, the most
influential ones for the army. With
civil government secondary and such
Radical-minded generals as Philip H.
Sheridan in command, the military
was able to compel some change in
Louisiana's political and social systems
and provide a degree of protection for
black and white Republicans. From
1870 to 1877, the generals and their
shrunken forces played a frequently futile
part in attempting to defend Republican
state administrations from Demo-
crats' often physical attacks.
Book Reviews
209
A minor weakness of the book is the
index which has omissions. A minor
strength is the handsome portraits of
most of the generals. A major strength
is the very extensive array of source
material on which the narrative rests.
Especially rich is the evidence drawn
from the army's archival records. Yet
Dawson's work also depends heavily on
standard secondary studies, espe-
cially James Sefton's The United
States Army and Reconstruction, 1865-1877
(1967) and Joe Gray Taylor's Louisiana
Reconstructed, 1863-1877 (1974).
While the author continually refers to
the reactions of the generals, too much
of the principal action of his book is
simply a more detailed version of a famil-
iar story.
Army Generals might have made a new breakthrough by exploring deeply
the motivations of its subjects. Its
unwillingness to do so is disappointing.
Like most other histories of
Reconstruction, this book portrays the con-
servatism on political and racial
matters of most Regular Army officers. Even
William H. Emory, who is pictured as
attempting to be neutral between Re-
publicans and Democrats, evidently took
a dim view of black voters and dis-
played a remarkable ignorance of the
organization and intention of the White
League. Why were he and others thus?
Even more striking, in an age of hos-
tility between Irishmen and Negroes why
did Phil Sheridan consistently ad-
vocate vigorous support of Republican
regimes? To say that such generals
were Democrats or Radicals is not very
instructive. Would that the author
had penetrated the surface of official
correspondence and addressed the
question of why these men behaved as
they did. From such an in-
quiry might have come answers applicable
to the performance of the army
throughout Reconstruction.
Nonetheless, the present book sheds
light on several aspects of the peri-
od. Perhaps unique to Louisiana was the
role of disease. The deaths of two
commanders and the removal of many of
the troops during yellow fever sea-
sons suggest that medical conditions had
an impact on Reconstruction in the
state. Also illuminating are the
statistics, especially in the appendix, demon-
strating how few federal troops were
present during much of this fabled age
of army rule. Obviously the military
could not be everywhere; less obvious-
ly, they could do little good even where
they were. Well-organized oppo-
nents simply maneuvered around them.
Dawson's description of a handful of
soldiers going through the motions of
guarding the polls at Monroe while
armed Democrats controlled access to the
entire town is a graphic example of
how Reconstruction was overthrown. As
this book makes clear, the lack of
committed commanders and numerous
followers dulled the great experi-
ment's cutting edge.
Kent State University Frank L. Byrne
The Rise of Literacy and the Common
School in the United States: A Socioec-
onomic Analysis to 1870. By Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens. (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1982.
xii + 247p.; illustrations, tables,
notes, bibliography, index. $20.00.)
This brief monograph of two hundred
pages of text by two individuals at
Ohio University, one an economist and
the other a professor of education,
210 OHIO HISTORY
has as its ambitious purpose a full
discussion of the growth of literacy in the
United States from the colonial period
to 1870. Its thesis is that the advo-
cates of literacy developed their own
ideology linking literacy to virtue, mo-
rality, republicanism, economic success,
and protestant religion. The rate of
literacy was positively affected by
population density and to a lesser extent
by ethnicity, occupation, wealth, as
well as by the region of the country in
which one lived. To be specific, a
native-born, early American who lived in a
northern city, and who possessed wealth,
usually had a higher rate of litera-
cy.
The authors emphasize the role of educational
reformers, particularly their
advocacy of the common school in the
mid-nineteenth century as the chief
institution to reduce illiteracy. Those
expecting, however, a full elucidation of
the role of the common school will be
disappointed, for less than one-third
of the volume focuses on it. In fact,
the family continued throughout most of
the period to exert primary influence on
literacy, ably abetted by newspaper
editors, book peddlers, and others in
the print media.
The major strengths of the book are that
it is the "first full-scale national
level-study of literacy through the
Civil War" and it is well researched,
utilizing primarily federal census
manuscripts, and local school attendance
records from Ohio and New York. Although
quantitative techniques are util-
ized, conventional historians will be
pleased that approximately half of these
appear in copious endnotes. These
techniques, however, are particularly use-
ful in emphasizing the relative weight
of the variables affecting literacy, such
as wealth, residence, school attendance,
and occupation.
Its strengths are also the sources of
its weaknesses. Its broad chronological
scope lends itself to a cursory
treatment, while its social science approach has
reduced much of the rich historical
context which makes the quantitative
data more meaningful. More damaging to
this reviewer is the repetition of
topics in discrete chronological
periods, even though the data had changed
only slightly. Not only does this
organization contribute to repetition, but in
some cases to lack of historical
precision, such as when the claim is made
that "reformers were highly
successful in their efforts to enroll children of
ages five to nine in school" during
the 1800-1840 period, when what is meant
is the period 1840-1870 (p. 148). The
impression of repetition is reinforced by
the lengthy introduction and the chapter
conclusions, not to mention a con-
cluding chapter. This arrangement makes
the book chiefly valuable as a ref-
erence work rather than a richly
rewarding work of history.
The authors would have been well served
had they revised the work
once more, eliminating the long awkward
sentences which frequently compel
the reader to puzzle over them. Finally
historians will be amused that U.S.
Grant's father's love for books and his
desire to educate his children are
used as examples of how individual
attitudes were important in determining
school attendance, and by implication in
instilling love for books and a more
literate way of life (pp. 92-93).
University of Cincinnati Gene D. Lewis
Reading, 'Riting, and Reconstruction:
The Education of Freedmen in the
South 1861-1870. By Robert C. Morris. (Chicago: The University of Chica-
Book Reviews
211
go Press, 1982. xv + 341p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
$25.00.)
Black and white relationships in the
South during the years after the Civil
War continue, fortunately, to attract
scholarly attention. Although the "Sec-
ond Reconstruction" (the 1960s) has
ended, these studies can make impor-
tant contributions to understanding
contemporary issues and problems.
This is particularly true of race and
education. Mr. Morris' objective, there-
fore, is of more than passing interest.
He undertook to "survey the school
experiment from its beginnings during
the early part of the Civil War through
1870 .. .;" (p. ix) that is, until
the demise of the Freedmen's Bureau. The re-
sult is an important, if uneven, survey
of black education from an elitist/
administrative perspective in the Deep
South states.
Initially, the author tells the
well-known story of religious and benevolent
aid societies and their efforts (and
squabbles) to educate the freedmen from
1862 to 1865 in Virginia, the Carolinas,
and Louisiana. In addition, the new
Bureau's activities, from General
Superintendent John W. Alford's vantage, is
outlined from 1865 to 1867. Three
chapters deal with teachers. "Yankee
School-marm" (although ca. 15-30
per cent were male) concentrates on the
backgrounds of selected females,
staffing problems, and prejudices, particu-
larly anti-Irish attitudes. "The Black
Teacher" emphasizes the backgrounds
of selected South Carolina and Louisiana
teachers as prototypical. Recruiting
problems and lists of educated blacks
and their political success are deline-
ated: ". . . free blacks ...,"
he noted, "were the dominant force. [They]
. . . tended to share the values of
their white counterparts" (p. 130). It was,
of course, extremely difficult to enlist
"Southern White Teachers" in the ed-
ucation of the freedmen.
Accommodationism was the norm.
In "Educational Objectives and
Philosophy," Morris concludes that "Ad-
vanced academic training took a back
seat as school officials concentrated on
raising the level of 'civilization' of
the masses through instruction in the three
R's and 'practical' or industrial
education" (p. 173). The most important and
illuminating chapter is "The
Content of Instruction" in which Morris lists ex-
amples of texts, the curricula, and
excellent (and interesting) examples of
each. "Nonetheless," he
suggests, "the educators' emphasis on order, mo-
rality, middle-class values, and
forgiveness obviously played a part in main-
taining social stability . ." (p.
211). In the final chapter, "Political and Social
Issues" were "black
codes," confiscated lands, "mixed schools," intermar-
riage, corporal punishment, successful
black (educated) politicians, and the
denouement of the Bureau. With the end
of its activities, "The era of Booker
T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois was
about to begin" (p. 249).
The bibliography, endnotes, and index
are needed updates of postwar
education in the South. Also a ten-page
group of photographs of schools and
illustrations of primers is a valuable
addition. Although the specialist will
need to look at this work, its real
contribution is to the non-specialist. Read-
ing, 'Riting and Reconstruction . . . should be required in every institution's
teacher-training curriculum as an important educational
and bibliographical
source.
California University of
Pennsylvania John Kent
Folmar
212 OHIO HISTORY
Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior
in the Old South. By Bertram Wyatt-
Brown. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1982. xxi +579 p.; notes, in-
dex. $29.95.)
Mark Twain once suggested that Sir
Walter Scott caused the American Civ-
il War. He meant, of course, that
Scott's tales of chivalrous derring-do which
so enthralled readers south of the
Mason-Dixon line fed Southern notions of
honor and gallantry to the point where
they felt compelled to act them out in
real life. Twain was half joking but
Bertram Wyatt-Brown of Case Western Re-
serve University makes a serious and
convincing case that "honor" in all its
mythic, racial and sexual manifestations
was the distinguishing feature
which set the South apart from the rest
of the nation.
What separated North from South,
Wyatt-Brown contends, was not eco-
nomics or even geography but ethics:
"As much as the regions shared a
common legacy, they yet parted to some
degree on perceptions of right and
wrong." In the South, he argues,
shame, rather than conscience, regulated
conduct so that a man's perception of
his inner worth depended, to a larger
degree than at the North, on the
approbation of his peers. To seem was more
important than to be.
Wyatt-Brown has undertaken one of the
most difficult tasks a historian can
assume-to climb inside the minds of
generations long dead and recreate the
unspoken assumptions which governed
their lives. Operating at that point
where history, literature and sociology
intersect, he has fashioned an argu-
ment supported by a richness of detail
that defies summary and illustrated
by dozens of anecdotes and stories
containing enough juicy rapes, murders
and mutilations to fill a John Irving or
(more appropriately) a William Faulkner
novel.
They are, by and large, wonderful
stories, many unearthed for the first
time from Southern court records and
archives. They illuminate the darker
side of honor: the duels, the wife
beatings, the public shamings (which an-
ticipated the Ku Klux Klan) and the
theatrical posturing which made grand
gestures like secession seem so natural.
The very vividness of these narratives,
however, tends to obscure Wyatt-
Brown's argument. One gathers that
because the South was a pre-modern
society it was still under the thrall of
traditional values and folkways which
the modernizing regions influenced by
New England had put aside. This
seems reasonable and yet one wonders
whether those traits which Wyatt-
Brown singles out were peculiar to the
antebellum South or whether it is pos-
sible that equally diligent research in
other pre-modern regions (such as the
frontier northwest, the urban immigrant
ghettoes or the southern portions of
the midwestern states) might not reveal
similar characteristics. Has Wyatt-
Brown, in short, made a necessary
connection between the South and the
ideal of personal honor? Similarly, his
suggestion that white supremacy was a
function of honor rather than the other
way around is an intriguing inversion
of the currently fashionable approach
but one would like to see it nailed
down more firmly.
The quest for the essence of Southern
distinctiveness is a hardy perennial
of American historiography. Wyatt-Brown
has added a valuable new dimen-
sion to that continuing controversy.
Because of its subject matter, this book
Book Reviews
213
automatically invites comparison with
W.J. Cash's classic study of The Mind
of the South. Despite quibbles one could make over its excessive
length and
repetitive organization, Southern
Honor is not out of its class in that fast com-
pany.
Cleveland State University Allan Peskin
Book Reviews
With Shield and Sword: American
Military Affairs, Colonial Times to the Pres-
ent. By Warren W. Hassler, Jr. (Ames: Iowa State University
Press, 1982. x
+462 p.; maps, notes, selected
bibliography, index. $29.50.)
This book is the first comprehensive
history of the American military past
since Walter Millis's Arms and Men: A
Study in American Mlitary History
(1955). T. Harry Williams's The
History of American Wars: From 1745 to 1918
(1981) might have claimed that position
had not its author's untimely death
cut the account short at the close of
the First World War. Thus With Shield
and Sword fills a need for an up-to-date survey, and those
seeking out the de-
tails of battles and campaigns and of
the evolution of military institutions will
leave copies of it well-thumbed.
Battles and campaigns must be mentioned
first among its contents, howev-
er, because the book is very much unlike
Millis's and seems paradoxically
old-fashioned when compared with that
work of nearly a generation ago.
Hassler offers little to compare with
Millis's stimulating interpretative judg-
ments or his sweeping synthesizing of
detail into a larger whole. Rather, the
strongest sections of Hassler's book are
its combat narratives in the most tra-
ditional style of military history.
While Hassler does not overlook institution-
al history in peace as well as in war,
so that he touches all the appropriate
bases as far as supplying essential
information is concerned, his heart clearly
belongs to his tales of battle, and
there is an almost perfunctory quality about
the passages of institutional history.
A further difficulty is Hassler's
penchant, particularly evident when he de-
parts from combat, for citing the
opinions of other historians or military crit-
ics whom he considers
"authorities," as though the mere word of an "au-
thority" can settle controversial
issues. His authorities on debatable matters
of institutional development, such as
the appropriate shape of military organi-
zation or the historically vexed
question of citizen soldiers versus a profes-
sional army, tend to be those of the
Emory Upton, professional army school.
The trouble with this method is not that the present
reviewer happens to
disagree with many of the authorities,
but that it falsely suggests the closing
of many debates that ought to remain
open.
An instance bringing to mind an Ohio
historian illustrates the problem.
Hassler says of the War of 1812:
"So far as naval strategy and the building of
warships were concerned, some men at the
time as well as such later authori-
ties as Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore
Roosevelt thought that a greater
number of larger vessels,
ships-of-the-line and frigates, should have been
constructed" (p. 80). But what of
the cogent arguments of another authority,
Professor Harry L. Coles of Ohio State University? In
his book The War of
1812 (1965), Coles suggests that it would have been better
to take the oppo-
site course and have the navy build
still more smaller vessels, on the lines of
the privateers, while trying to bring some coordination
to a commerce raiding
that was hurting the British more than anything else of
which the United
States was capable at sea, but which was
limited by the helter-skelter nature