Book Reviews
First Lady: The Life of Lucy Webb
Hayes. By Emily Apt Geer. (Kent: The
Kent State University Press, 1984. ix +
330p.; illustrations, notes, sources
cited, index. $19.95.)
The goal which Emily Apt Geer has set
for herself in this book is to evalu-
ate the true character of Lucy Webb
Hayes. Was she the intolerant "Lemon-
ade Lucy" that her husband's
political opponents labeled her, or was she
the saint-like creature her friends
believed her to be? The conclusion rests
somewhere between these two extremes.
In clear and straightforward prose, Geer
takes the reader through the
events of Lucy Webb Hayes's life,
beginning with her childhood in Chilli-
cothe, where her father was a successful
physician and her mother helped
in caring for his patients. Lucy
attended Cincinnati Wesleyan Female College,
and was the first president's wife to
have a college education. In 1852 she
married future president Rutherford B.
Hayes and spent the rest of her life
being a very supportive wife for his
political career. Shortly after they were
married, Hayes became governor of Ohio.
With her husband, Lucy Hayes
visited prisons and hospitals for the
mentally ill. She helped to found an or-
phanage for war orphans and exerted
pressure on her legislative friends to
have it made a state institution. She
bore children and kept the home fires
while her husband served in the Civil
War. When he was hospitalized she
came to his side and also visited other
wounded soldiers. As a helpmate to
her husband, she entertained graciously
at the White House and is remem-
bered for her temperance policy in not
serving wine. She was a tactful and
charming hostess and eased the way for
the president in politics, although
her interest was more often in the
people than the issues involved. She was a
capable cheerful and prodigious
homemaker and the first president's wife to
be referred to as "First
Lady."
Aside from her devotion to her husband
and family, her commitments
were not very deep. Most surprising, as
Geer tells us, the White House tem-
perance policy was not her decision, but
that of her husband who believed
alcohol erodes the dignity and efficiency
of government officials. Neverthe-
less, the WCTU credited her with the
policy, bestowed great honors on her
and begged her to be active in its
organization, but she never did much for
the WCTU. She was ambivalent about woman
suffrage and did nothing to
support it. She was noncommital about
reforms of any kind that had political
implications. She was extremely kind to
individuals in need, and active in
church work in her later years. For
several years she was president of the
Woman's Home Missionary Society. She
regularly tried to resign that posi-
tion, but her husband always persuaded
her to continue.
Geer leaves us with the thought that the
title "First Lady" was deserved,
and that Lucy Hayes's contributions to
the welfare of others and her interest
in politics enhanced the role of women
in our society. Quite true. Beyond
that, Geer has missed an intriguing
opportunity to place Lucy Webb Hayes in
women's history. Students of women's
history delineate the development of
separate but complementary spheres for
men and women in the mid- and
Book Reviews
61
late-19th century. Politics, business,
law, sports and the tavern were in the
sphere of men, while women lived with
the home and children, were pure
and untouched by immoralities. Lucy
Hayes is a nearly perfect model of a
woman who lived in the women's sphere,
entrenched in the cult of true
womanhood. Even the term "First
Lady" fits the model, for she was cer-
tainly the lady of the house and no
breath of scandal ever touched her. In
the context of separate spheres, women
were expected to be active in reform
movements and many were. Lucy Hayes
fails on this count, but may be ex-
cused since she was a supportive wife
and her husband was himself ambiva-
lent on reform issues. The
interpretation gives strength and consistency to the
character of Lucy Hayes and enhances the
validity of the idea of women's
sphere.
It is interesting that Lucy Hayes and
Queen Victoria were contemporaries.
They had much in common. Both graced the
late-19th century in ways
unique to that era.
Cleveland State University Jeanette Tuve
Hudson's Heritage: A Chronicle of the
Founding and the Flowering of the Vil-
lage of Hudson, Ohio. By Grace Goulder Izant. (Kent: The Kent State Uni-
versity Press, 1985. x + 278 pp.; 156
illustrations, map, epilogue, notes, in-
dex. $27.50.)
Thirty-two years ago I had the pleasure
of reviewing Grace Goulder Izant's
first book, This is Ohio, for
what was then called the Ohio Archaeological
and Historical Quarterly. Now, for the same journal, though under new for-
mat and title, I have the privilege of
reviewing her fourth and last, Hudson's
Heritage, a handsome volume of substantial quality for which the
Kent State
University Press should take justifiable
pride.
Grace Goulder Izant is a name familiar
to generations of northern Ohioans.
For twenty-five years her stories of
Ohio's people and places occupied an im-
portant part of the Cleveland Plain
Dealer's Sunday magazine. For sixty
years, from 1924 until her death in
1984, she made her home in the very
heart and showplace of the Connecticut
Western Reserve, the village of
Hudson. Given her near life-long
penchant for the history of Hudson and the
Reserve, it seems only fitting that her
final book center on that which she
knew and loved best.
Hudson's Heritage is not the usual microcosmic history of an American
small town. Rather, it consists of a
series of delightfully written biographical
vignettes: of Roger Sherman, the
"Shoemaker Senator" of Connecticut, "the
father (in 1786) of the Western
Reserve"; of David Hudson, the central figure
in the 1799 founding and subsequent
development of the village that would
bear his name; of the Nortons of Goshen,
Connecticut-Anna, wife of David
Hudson, and her cousins Birdsey and
Nathaniel; of the Browns of Torring-
ton, Connecticut-Owen and Ruth and their
six children, including eldest
son John, he of subsequent Harper's
Ferry fame; and of another Connecticut
family named Ellsworth, linked to Chief
Justice Oliver and numbering such
Hudson luminaries as Elisha, Birge, the
village's millionaire benefactor
James, and the polar explorer Lincoln.
Included is the story of David Ba-
62 OHIO HISTORY
con, a preacher among the Indians who
served the Hudson Congregational
Church before founding the steepled
landmark church on the Tallmadge
Circle. And included as well are the
stories of Benjamin and Heman Oviatt,
of Theodore and Kezia Hudson Parmele,
and of the Baldwins-Stephen
and Anner Maria Hudson and Harvey.
For those of us in academe, the account
of the founding in 1826, largely
through the efforts of David Hudson, of
the Western Reserve College, and
subsequent glimpses of its impact on the
life of the community, hold unusual
interest. Like Miami University, Western
Reserve aspired to become the
"Yale of the West." Like
Miami, Reserve established in the 1830s one of the
nation's first astronomical
observatories. Like Miami, the predominant ar-
chitectural mode of the Western Reserve
campus (thanks largely to master
builders Lemuel and Simeon Porter) was
red-brick Georgian Colonial. Like
Miami's campus in Oxford, collegiate
instruction on the Western Reserve
campus in Hudson came to a halt in
late-nineteenth century. Like Miami,
when instruction resumed on the Reserve
campus it was preparatory rather
than collegiate, the Western Reserve
University removing to a new campus in
Cleveland in the 1880s and the old
campus in Hudson subsequently serving
the Western Reserve Academy. Unlike
Miami, collegiate instruction has nev-
er returned to the campus in Hudson, the
Academy persisting to this day.
This reviewer found particularly
interesting the account of the schism
among the Western Reserve College
trustees, faculty and students in the
1830s over the slavery question, leading
to the emergence of opposing coloni-
zationist and emancipationist factions.
When sermons preached in the col-
lege chapel by Beriah Green, professor
of Sacred Literature and a fiery aboli-
tionist, were subsequently published in
William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator,
"Western Reserve College [p. 159]
gained national attention." Soon "the vil-
lage was in an uproar. Tempers flared.
Now and then fists flew as heated ar-
guments took place on street corners, in
homes, and in neighborhood gather-
ings ... At this point, to the
consternation of Hudson, Owen Brown resigned
from the board of Western Reserve
College and, affronting village citizens
still further, sent his daughter
Florilla (John's half-sister) to [the newly
opened] Oberlin."
Memorable as well are the roles of early
Western Reserve College presi-
dents Caleb Pitkin, Charles Storrs, and
three hundred-pound George E.
Pierce, who "set up a medical
department in Cleveland out of which a world
renowned school of medicine
developed." Also memorable was chemistry
professor Edward W. Morley, who with
physics professor Albert Michelson
of Case gained international acclaim for
the study of ether drift in the atmos-
phere and the atomic weight of oxygen.
It was Mrs. Izant's intent to finish her
book with the death in 1925 of
James W. Ellsworth, the "rich,
powerful, aloof, perhaps lonely, man" (p.
225) who revitalized both the academy
and the village in early-twentieth
century. It was he who provided an
endowment sufficient to enable the
academy to reopen its doors in 1916 and
funds to equip the village with mod-
ern electric light, water, and sewage
plants. The village in turn voted out sa-
loons, placed its electric wires
underground, and planted thousands of trees.
With her own life in Hudson having
spanned the years since the death of
Ellsworth, it seemed fitting to the
publishers to include as epilogue an ad-
dress Mrs. Izant had delivered in 1975
as a memoir, filling in "the years be-
tween the end of her history and the
present age." It was a happy choice,
Book Reviews
63
providing capstone to a delightful
volume and farewell to a charming lady
whose "scenes and citizens" of
Hudson, the Western Reserve, and Ohio will
long be remembered.
Miami University Phillip R.
Shriver
The Vietnam War: A Study in the
Making of American Policy. By Michael
P.
Sullivan. (Lexington: The University
Press of Kentucky, 1985. 198p.;
charts, references, index. $20.00.)
Michael P. Sullivan writes a challenging
and compelling account of the
American experience in Vietnam that
should be required reading for those
seeking to fit the war into the broader
pattern of American foreign policy and
international relations in recent times.
For far too long American involvement
in Vietnam has either been ignored,
treated as an aberration, or viewed in a
narrow, and thus unrevealing, light.
Neither American leaders nor the Amer-
ican public have been willing to
investigate objectively the reasons why we
lost the war. We have refused to
"confront the war as a massive failure" and
instead have treated it as an
"aberration" brought about by poor presiden-
tial leadership, or by the containment
policy with its "anti-Communist ma-
nia." Others have chosen to ignore
the Vietnam experience altogether.
The author widens the field of view by
presenting the war as a case study
to test several foreign policy theories
of social scientists. He presents several
perspectives on the war: the individual
perspectives of Kennedy, Johnson
and Nixon, the factors involved in
decision making, long-term trends relating
to the Cold War and the containment of
Communism, and the even longer-
term trends involving cyclical patterns
in international violence.
Using the Naisbitt-popularized method of
content analysis, Sullivan scans
The Papers of the President,
Britannica Book of the Year, The Pentagon Pa-
pers, and others, to test theories linking the symbolic rhetoric
of the presi-
dents with the escalation of the war.
The author also evaluates two dissimilar
explanations, or models, of the decision
making process used during the war.
The first, the "rational policy
model," offers historical evidence suggesting
that our policy in Vietnam was based on
a long-term, solid commitment
dating back to at least Truman's support
for the French in Indo-China. The
second explanation, the
"quagmire-quicksand-incremental model," argues
that our policy makers were geared to short-term,
band-aid solutions, such
as preventing the immediate collapse of
the South Vietnamese government,
rather than dealing with long-term
goals. Arthur Schlesinger once described
this policy as "one more step"
which "lured the United States deeper and
deeper into the morass." Sullivan's
purpose is not to lay blame but to assess
the decision makers' judgements.
Citing Frank Klingberg's study of
alternating moods in American foreign
policy from introversion to
extroversion, Sullivan shows that American policy
in Vietnam went through a radical change
at the same time that public opin-
ion shifted toward an introverted, or a
"very low intensity and limited," for-
eign policy. At the same time, Sullivan
argues that the war did not adversely
affect our relations with the Soviet
Union, especially the policy of detente.
Finally, Sullivan deals with the lessons
and myths of the Vietnam experi-
64 OHIO HISTORY
ence. Admitting that mistakes were made,
he nevertheless argues that the
war should not be viewed in the light of
"either evil or incorrect decisions."
Such a narrow interpretation limits
"the lessons to be drawn from a massive
tragedy, and perpetuates the myth that
if we had only tried harder, or if cer-
tain decision makers had not been
involved, things would have turned out
differently." Current and future
foreign policy cannot be constructed proper-
ly if the war is either ignored or
treated as a mistake; rather, the war is part of
the dynamic of American foreign policy.
While historians may question the
author's modish social science style of
internal noting, as well as his
occasional lapses into needless jargon, this does
not detract from a scholarly,
intelligent and impartial discussion which con-
cludes with vindication for the
historical method. Thucydides suggested
that "an exact knowledge of the past"
may aid in "the interpretation of the
future." Professor Sullivan calls
upon policymakers to discover the historical
perspectives of the Vietnam War, for
"foreign policies cannot be created on
an ad hoc basis, in a tabula rasa fashion."
They should read his book!
Youngstown State University Charles W. Darling
Workers On the Edge: Work, Leisure,
and Politics in Industrializing Cincinna-
ti, 1788-1890. By Steven J. Ross. (New York: Columbia University
Press,
1985. xx + 406p.; illustrations, tables,
notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.)
Segmentation, worker culture and
Republican ideology are major themes
often covered in recent labor histories.
Stephen J. Ross has drawn on each
of them in an effort to explain why
Cincinnati's workers did not unite against
the conditions imposed on them by
industrialization. Ross' book is an im-
portant local study of nineteenth-century working
conditions that compares
favorably with Alan Dawley's work on Lynn and Bruce
Laurie's study of
Philadelphia. Based upon newspapers and
assorted labor records, as well as
a wide variety of theses and
dissertations, Workers On The Edge is a well-
written example of the latest theories
and methods employed by labor histo-
rians.
In following the advice of David
Montgomery to create "a periodization,
which effectively identifies the
distinguishing aspects of the relations of pro-
duction at different moments in the
evolution of American capitalism," Ross
has divided Cincinnati's history into
three major eras: the Age of the Artisan
(1788-43), the Age of Manufacturing
(1843-73) and the Age of Modern Indus-
try (1873-90). Without offering much
explanation for specific dates, Ross
traces the transformation of the
workforce from independent and skilled
craftsmanship to subservience in the
factory.
In the first era Ross sketches a picture
of Republican harmony in which
the worker's role as citizen and as an
accepted member of the producing clas-
ses created a stable city devoid of
class frictions. But Cincinnati's location on
the Ohio River, augmented in the 1830s
by the construction of Ohio's canals,
attracted trade that generated
mercantile wealth, investment in small manu-
facturing concerns, and a diminishing
share of the pot for workers. Although
workers protested by striking and even
formed a Workingman's Party, the
merchant capitalists effectively blunted
their efforts by suggesting that class
actions violated Republican principles.
Book Reviews
65
The second era witnessed the
transformation of Cincinnati into the third
largest industrial center in the nation.
In this stage rapidly increasing levels of
production resulted from reorganization
of the still highly skilled work force
rather than from utilizing machinery or
building large factories. This piece-
meal process produced separation of the
workforce into small shop artisans,
factory artisans, factory laborers and
outworkers. Although unions were
formed in the 1850s to seek a larger
share of the pie, workplace segmentation
and the fact that the workforce was
composed of more and more immigrants
whose social and political associations
revolved around ethnic and religious
loyalties rather than class
considerations reduced their effectiveness. Politics
reflected this division, as native-born
workers emphasized the dangers to
America posed by immigrants who drank
too much and violated the Lord's
Day.
In the final stage the rapid growth of
large-scale manufacturing finally
broke down some of the barriers between
workers as higher percentages
flooded into factories. The economic
strain produced by the depression pro-
voked workers into joining organizations
such as the socialist Workingmen's
Party, craft unions and the Knights of
Labor. Strikes increased, and culmi-
nated in a citywide strike for the
eight-hour day on May 1, 1886. Ross attrib-
utes the unity among the strikers and
their ultimate success to a commonly
shared Republican value of law and
order. In the strikers' minds, the em-
ployers were illegally avoiding
implementation of the recently passed Haley
Law establishing an eight-hour day.
Rejecting the exceptions clause which
permitted individual contracts, workers
demanded an eight-hour day with
the same pay, and rigorously protested
the mayor's calling in of the National
Guard as a failure to maintain
government neutrality. If anything, the mayor's
responsibility was to enforce the
eight-hour law, not to interfere with legiti-
mate and peaceful protests. Such worker
unity, however, was temporary.
Newly formed class bonds continued to
founder, Ross concludes, on the
rocks of competing social, ethnocultural
and political loyalties.
Ross has written a fascinating account
of the Cincinnati working class. But
there are flaws. The final section is
inexplicably limited to a period of 17
years, and rather sparse in coverage of
ethnocultural splits. As is characteris-
tic of such works, it overlooks the
accumulation of investment capital and a
generally increasing standard of living
as factors affecting worker discontent
and unity. Overall, though, Ross' effort
is a fine example of the recent efforts
to explain the lack of unity in the
working class.
Youngstown State University William D. Jenkins
Brigham Young: American Moses. By Leonard J. Arrington. (New York: Al-
fred A. Knopf, 1985. xvii + 522p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
$24.95.)
Brigham Young, the "American
Moses" as Leonard J. Arrington has aptly
described him, was many things to many
people during the 19th Century. To
the New York editor and reformer Horace
Greeley who interviewed him in
1859, Young was "A portly, frank, good-natured"
individual (p. 4). His uncle,
John Haven, whom Brigham Young the
missionary sought to convert during
the mid-1830s, saw him as a courageous
defender of the Mormon faith (p.
66 OHIO HISTORY
55). And Samuel Bowles, a newspaper man
from Springfield, Massachusetts,
who heard Young preach at Salt Lake City
in 1865, found the untrained reli-
gious exhorter to be brash and
provincial (p. 343). Jedediah M. Grant, a fel-
low churchman, described his associate
as "the article that sells out West"
-an honest, hard-working man without the pretensions
which Grant felt
many Easterners had adopted (p. 409).
Grant's assessment reflects the Brigham
Young which Leonard Arrington
has so skillfully written about in this
biography. Utilizing the vast materials
of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints Archives, which he had
complete access to during his tenure as
Church Historian, the author has
rendered the most thorough accounting of
Young's life to date. And, most
significantly, he has done it in an
unprejudicial manner. Prior biographies of
this most well-known Mormon have
generally tended to be antagonistic or
apologetic. While Arrington has the
innate bias of a true believer, he still
manages to be first and foremost an
uncompromising historian and an excel-
lent scholar.
Following a slow and methodical
consideration of the Book of Mormon,
Brigham Young accepted the upstart
religion as true and was baptized into
the fold in April 1832. Once his mind
had been made up Young was a
committed disciple of Mormonism and
follower of the Prophet Joseph
Smith. In 1835, after he had proved his
mettle time and again, Brigham
Young was called as an apostle. This new
charge placed him among the lead-
ing men of the church and gave him new
responsibilities to shoulder. By the
time of Joseph Smith's murder in 1844
Young had risen to the position of sen-
ior member of the Quorum of Twelve
Apostles. Consequently, when the
church presidency was reorganized
following the Mormon's expulsion from
Illinois in 1846, Brigham Young became
the successor to Smith as prophet. It
devolved upon him to lead the Latter-day
Saints in their exodus to the Great
Basin.
During the next thirty years of his
life, Young would serve not only as
church leader but also several years as
governor of Utah, superintendant of
Indian Affairs for the Utah Territory,
and gain his more well-known title of
"colonizer" as he dispatched
Mormon pioneers to all corners of the Inter-
mountain West in an attempt to solidify
a Mormon kingdom which others
could not penetrate. Arrington's discussions
of Brigham Young as a family
man, as a counselor to his followers,
and as a protector of the kingdom offer
fascinating insight regarding his role
in the settlement of the West and the
growth of the Mormon Church.
While some may criticize aspects of the
book which they feel could use
more detail, whether it be Brigham
Young's religious life or his attitudes
concerning women or minorities, it must
be recognized that Brigham Young:
American Moses is a masterful study. Those interested in Mormon history,
the American West, or just lovers of
biography will find this work enjoyable
and enlightening.
Los Angeles County Museum M. Guy Bishop
Herbert Croly of The New Republic:
The Life and Thought of an American Pro-
gressive. By David W. Levy. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1985.
xvii + 335p.; illustrations, notes,
selected bibliography, index. $32.50.)
Book Reviews
67
Herbert Croly, journalist and
philosopher, was one of the seminal twenti-
eth century American social thinkers and
intellectuals. A shy and reclusive
man whose personality was hardly
exciting perhaps made his contributions
even more surprising. While the
influence of his The Promise of American
Life (1909) has been overrated, it still remains one of the
great, original works
on American political philosophy.
Croly's editorship of the New
Republic beginning in 1914 was one of the
distinguished episodes in American
journalism and his columns provide a
primer of American liberal thought,
embracing such issues as birth control,
women's and black's rights, and academic
freedom. The New Republic, with
the brilliant journalists he gathered
around him thanks to the financial and
moral support of Willard and Dorothy
Straight, made this journal truly unu-
sual. In addition to such professionals
as Walter Lippmann, Croly convinced
thinkers like Charles A. Beard, Van Wyck
Brooks, Morris R. Cohen, Theo-
dore Dreiser, Ford Maddox Ford, George
Santayana, Rebecca West, and H.
G. Wells to use his pages to develop
their ideas.
Croly's defense of a Hamiltonian-like
strong central government but with
Jeffersonian people-oriented goals was
predicated on his conviction that big-
ness in America was not necessarily
badness, and it was this feature of the
Croly ethic that Theodore Roosevelt
found most appealing. The corporation
was here to stay and his vision was of
the here and now, not to lament the
passing of a less complex past. Big
business, Croly reasoned, would be con-
trolled by labor unions and regulation
provided by a powerful federal gov-
ernment.
For Professor Levy, Progressivism was a
precursor to other liberal-type
programs such as the New and Fair Deals
and the New Frontier, and that
Croly was the quintessential expositor
of the liberal life of the mind. There is
another point of view, more complicated
than that linking progressivism with
liberalism. For example, even Croly was
skeptical of such progressive tenets
as electing judges, the initiative,
referendum, and recall, increasing govern-
mental power, and anti-trust reform.
Also, his attraction for mystics Georges
I. Gurdjieff and A. R. Orage entitles
one to ponder the extent of Croly's liber-
alism. Such considerations as these
deserve more attention.
One of the most engaging parts of this
monograph deals with Croly's par-
ents. His mother, writing under the name
"Jenny June," was a productive
journalist, probably the first to be syndicated, and a
pioneer advocate of
women's liberation. Father David Croly,
also a newsman, was editor of the
New York World, and was even more important for his Real Estate
Record and
Builder's Guide. The correspondence between son and father, especially
when the younger Croly was at Harvard,
are instructive and delightful exam-
ples of a respectful relationship and a
predictor of what was to come from his
pen.
Croly died in 1930 at the age of 60,
leaving one to ponder the tantalizing
question of whether he would have felt
the New Deal would bring a restored
promise to American life. Certainly the
Harding-Coolidge-Hoover era, replete
with such insults to the liberal mind as
the Red Scare and the Sacco-
Vanzetti case, brought him severe
disillusionment.
Our debt to Levy is a great one because
he has provided us with the first
full-length scholarly biography of a
real intellectual giant. Croly's contribu-
tion to the scholarly ferment of his
time is interestingly described in a clear,
lively, sympathetic, but objective way.
Levy affords excellent insights into
68 OHIO HISTORY
Croly's development as a thinker and how
that was reflected in a unique jour-
nal of thought.
State University of New York at
Buffalo Milton Plesur
The Architecture of Migration: Log
Construction in the Ohio Country, 1750-
1850. By Donald A. Hutslar. (Athens: Ohio University Press,
1986. 558p.;
illustrations, notes, appendices,
bibliography, indexes. $50.00.)
In this book on log construction Donald
Hutslar has accomplished two
things for which anyone interested in
folk architecture must be grateful. He
has brought together a substantial
number of documents dealing with early
log cabins, and he has presented an
amazing number of photographs of ex-
tant log buildings, nearly 250 in all.
This book is actually Hutslar's second
treatment of his subject, for earlier
he wrote with his wife, Jean, The Log
Architecture of Ohio published in Ohio
History in 1971 (volume 80, numbers 3 & 4). Hutslar begins
his book with a
brief summary of the prevailing theories
on the origins of log construction in
America. He devotes considerable space
to discussing the earliest log build-
ings in Ohio but deals with later
historic periods in more summary fashion.
In addition to dwellings, Hutslar also
describes public buildings, barns, and
outbuildings. A noteworthy feature is a
continual emphasis on methods of
construction, including a chapter on
"Tools and Methods" and another on
"Construction Practices." The
work closes with a chapter on "The Restora-
tion of Log Structures."
In his discussions of log buildings,
Hutslar relies heavily on early written
accounts of various kinds. The early log
cabins and the extant log houses
mostly shown in photographs do not have
all that much to do with one an-
other, actually. Outside of the fact
that they both used horizontal timbers
notched together at the corners, the
round-log cabin built hastily for tempo-
rary shelter and the hewn-log house
intended as a permanent habitation do
not resemble one another to any great
extent. Indeed, when the exterior
walls of hewn-log houses were covered
with siding, as they normally were (p.
5 and p. 12, note 1), such houses
resembled frame houses of the same period
far more than they did round-log cabins.
Hutslar's book, therefore, repre-
sents in the abstract something of an
anomaly: the text treats mainly one sub-
ject while the illustrations represent another.
Fortunately, the text does give
some information on hewn-log buildings
while the annotations to the illustra-
tions give somewhat more.
In the last few years there have been
three books published on log build-
ings, attesting to the general interest
in log construction and its importance for
the study of folk architecture. Each of
the books represents a different ap-
proach to the study of folk
architecture. Terry Jordan is a cultural geogra-
pher. His book, American Log
Buildings: an Old World Heritage (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1985), emphasizes the diffusion and
distribution of many of the traits of
log construction. It is based largely on ex-
tensive travel and observation in
Europe. My own book, Log Buildings of
Southern Indiana (Bloomington, Indiana: Trickster Press, 1984), ignores
early
written sources on pioneer log cabins
and, instead, presents a typology of and
Book Reviews
69
a functional description of over 400
extant log buildings, most of which were
built in the nineteenth century. I
consider my approach that of the folklife re-
searcher. Hutslar, a historian,
concentrates, as previously noted, on the early
written documents describing pioneer log
cabins. Extant log buildings from
the nineteenth century seem, to him, to
be almost an afterthought since they
are rarely mentioned in his text and
appear mainly in the photographs.
All those who enjoyed and benefitted
from the Hutslars' earlier work on
log buildings in Ohio will find even
more material, especially excellent draw-
ings and photographs, to attract them in
this new volume. The author and
the publisher must both be thanked for
this addition to our knowledge of
the folk architecture of the Midwest.
Indiana University Warren E.
Roberts
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Volume 11: June 1-August 15, 1864. Edited
by John Y. Simon. (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1984.
xxvi + 497p.; maps and
illustrations, notes, chronology, calendar, index.
$45.00.)
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Volume 12: August 16-November 15, 1864.
Edited by John Y. Simon. (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University
Press, 1984. xxvi + 520p.; maps and
illustrations, notes, chronology, calen-
dar, index. $45.00.)
When Ulysses S. Grant became Abraham
Lincoln's choice to lead the
Northern armies against the Confederacy,
the general left no stone unturned
to win the war. If one expects heroes to
be models of chivalry and honor,
Grant is disappointing as a hero as the
war moved into its most deadly cock-
pit. He dispatched General Sheridan into
the Shenandoah Valley deliber-
ately to devastate that rich breadbasket of the South.
He gave his blessing
to General Sherman for the march to the
sea, aware of a new kind of suffer-
ing. He approved the destruction of
Georgia cotton to prevent its use by ene-
my agents to improve Confederate
economic strength. He discontinued
prisoner-of-war exchanges even as the
prisons on both sides deteriorated in
the face of overwhelming numbers. And
among his own generals, heads
rolled at his command as he shaped up an
army more and more to his own
personal considerations.
These are some of Grant's actions during
the last six months of 1864, the
period covered in volumes eleven and
twelve of this monumental series on
General Grant. The war was running down,
but not its violence or its hatreds.
Those days were the "killing time," and
spangles that decorated the shoul-
ders of generals tarnished as the glut
of destruction piled ever higher. Gener-
al Lee staggered a bit but held on desperately
at Petersburg, still the awe-
some figure to the enemy he had been
before. But he seemed to have met
his match?
This is Ulysses S. Grant, the figure of
mystery who sits in his command
post at City Point, Virginia, but
directs a war across a vast continent. Dark be-
hind beard and dressed in his blue
uniform, he increases the anxiety of the
enemy as he promotes the unorthodox as
his daily fare. Grant gives up the
personal glory of the battlefield to
Sherman, Sheridan and Thomas, while
70 OHIO HISTORY
he holds onto his besieging army at
Petersburg, but the results move on to-
ward success. He prevents Lee from
joining the action against Sherman; he
holds the line for Sheridan to do his
worst in western Virginia while Lee
holds his large force to their trenches.
He listens to a giant bomb explode
underneath the Confederate army with
disasterous results for the Union,
but he recovers quickly and holds on.
These two volumes cover some of the most
critical days of the Civil War.
Grant seizes his new role as army
commander and moves into the greatness
that history has accorded him. Sherman
separates his army from Grant, but
ever loyal to his "very good friend,"
he gains his own fame with a modified
version of the Anaconda play that
General Winfield Scott had advocated
early in the war. And General Sheridan
rises from obscurity to demonstrate
some of the most aggressive leadership
seen in the war as he neutralizes Gen-
eral Jubal Early's cavalry and frees
Washington, D.C. from the Confederate
threat.
In these volumes Grant appears as a
series of contrasting personalities. In
his family correspondence he is always
the father, admonishing his children
to a better life, especially by studying
harder. He seems to show excitement
over the new acclaim that results in
material gifts for his wife, including new
homes in Philadelphia and Chicago. But
his orders to generals on the very
same day direct slashing moves to
disable the enemy, and those generals
who do not follow his "game
plan" read his wrath in his correspondence.
Although he appears so certain of his
field decisions, one still sees the shy
and lonely man of earlier years.
Grant's war plans were basically simple.
Use the vast resources and man-
power of the North to subdue the South.
It was not a "nice" operation.
Guerrillas, deserters, sutlers and camp
followers were of no use to his opera-
tions and they must go. Again the Jewish
question arises, but for a moment
only. But against guerrillas from the
South and deserters from his own army
he is always unrelenting.
Much of the action in these volumes
favors the newly successful Federal
cavalry. These are times of cutting
lines of communications and supplies, rid-
ing behind lines for special information
on enemy affairs. These are times to
get behind the enemy, to take advantage
of his deteriorating man and horse
power. These are times to clean up
important pockets of resistance, and Grant
directs his cavalry in all arenas of
action toward these goals.
This is a volume in which the general
and a President reach the under-
standing that the late T. Harry Williams
pointed up so strongly in his Lincoln
and His Generals. These were violent times for a loving father, a friend,
and
to those who knew him well. He waited
impatiently at times, but patient un-
der challenging circumstances as his
troops cut enemy lines, destroyed their
rolling stock, and strengthened their
siege lines.
These years of the Civil War have never
been covered as well as we see
them in these volumes. Editor John Y.
Simon seems to have tightened up his
work, associating materials better, thus
giving the reader a better in-depth
view of the complex happenings along
several fronts. I still find the small
print irritating at times, but the work
continues to stand as a first-rate editorial
job and should lead to new research and interpretation
of an historical figure
still much shrouded in mystery.
Wittenberg University Robert
Hartje
Book Reviews
71
Letters of Delegates to Congress
1774-1789, Volume 11: October 1,
1778-
January 31, 1779. Edited by Paul H. Smith, Gerard W. Gawalt, Ronald M.
Gephart, and Eugene R. Sheridan.
(Washington, D.C.: Library of Con-
gress, 1985. xxxi + 587p.; editorial
method and apparatus, acknowledg-
ments, chronology of Congress, list of
delegates to Congress, illustrations,
notes, index. $18.00.)
For students of Congress as an
institution, for biographers of individual
members, and for other highly
specialized researchers, this well-edited
volume will be very serviceable for
many, many years to come, as will the en-
tire series of which it is a part.
Indeed, this series, published under the aus-
pices of the Library of Congress
American Revolution Bicentennial Program,
constitutes one of the most useful and
durable of those innumerable and
seemingly interminable
"commemorations" to have been spawned by this
so-called "Bicentennial Era"
of ours.
But, in the very nature of things, this
is not the sort of book that very many
people - either professional historians
or history buffs - will choose to sit
down with and peruse from cover to
cover. This is all perfectly understanda-
ble at one level, and yet what becomes
immediately apparent to the reviewer
assigned the task of going through the
volume far more thoroughly than
most people will is that there are
decided advantages to reading all of these
documents in their proper chronological
order and in a systematic way. One
is reimpressed, to begin with, with the
sheer disorder of lives while they are
actually being lived as compared to that
artificial orderliness that is so often
imposed on such lives by historians operating
with 20/20 hindsight. In these
pages rumor is rampant and speculation
is boundless; but most information is
slow in arriving and is of dubious
veracity besides, so that precious little is
known for sure.
And, as always, the future of the
country is an open question. The dele-
gates look endlessly for the causes of
the country's problems. Richard Henry
Lee of Virginia and Henry Marchant of
Rhode Island rail out at "an infamous
set of Engrossers" who are
artificially driving up the price of flour and other
commodities essential to the war effort.
"Extortioners, & monopolizers must
have a twisted Bitt put into their
rapacious Mouths," Marchant declares (pp.
24-25). For his part, Samuel Adams frets
about the luxury and extravagance
being reported in Boston, fearing that
this symbolizes that the American
people have arrived at "such a
Pitch of Levity & Dissipation" as would "ex-
tinguish every Spark of publick
Virtue" and undo the infant nation (p. 31).
Cyrus Griffin of Virginia, on the other
hand, sees Congress itself as the major
problem. In fact, Griffin tells Thomas
Jefferson that Congress may have to be
dissolved shortly because it is so rife
with party spirit and with members
prostituting their votes in anticipation
of future support for some pet project or
another. "Congress exhibit not more
than two or three Members actuated
by Patriotism," Griffin laments (p.
32). In short, judging from these docu-
ments, this Congress of 1778 and 1779
seems to have been a veritable babel
of voices and the fledgling country it
represented only a step or two removed
from chaos.
A systematic reading of these documents
also reminds us that the personal
and the political parts of our history
are not to be so neatly separated as most
secondary accounts would seem to
suggest. Here is Josiah Bartlett of New
72 OHIO HISTORY
Hampshire suffering from headaches but
determined nonetheless to carry
on. Here is gouty Cornelius Harnett of
North Carolina explaining to the gov-
ernor of his state that "I am too
old to be sent here. .... I am now not many
years from 60" (p. 252). Here there
are, that is to say, flesh-and-blood hu-
man beings often feeling pain and
anxiety and self-doubt and frustration.
Here are men who did not like to be away
from home, missing their wives
and children. Here are delegates
actually resigning or thinking often of doing
so. Here are men concerned about their
reputations. Here are politicians try-
ing to convince each other - and
themselves - of the complete worthiness
of their motives. Here are humans trying
hard to make the best of things in
what many regarded as some of the worst
of times.
Thus, while the volume under review is
destined to be used primarily as a
reference work by those concerned with
the political, military, and economic
aspects of our past, a closer reading of
it reveals not a little to illustrate the
more human side of American history.
Marquette University Robert P. Hay
The Star-Spangled Screen: The
American World War II Film. By Bernard
F.
Dick. (Lexington: The University of
Kentucky Press, 1985, ix + 294p.; illus-
trations, notes, appendix,
bibliographical essay, indexes. $26.00.)
The recent past has witnessed a spate of
books about World War II films,
some designed primarily for the layman
and movie buff, others for a more in-
tellectual audience. Fairleigh Dickinson
professor Bernard F. Dick's Star-
Spangled Screen offers the best of both worlds: on the one hand, an
affec-
tionate reminiscence for those who, like
Dick, can recall watching these films
in a theater in which "shoes picked
up an adhesive popcorn-studded gum,
and nostrils contracted from the odor of
disinfectant in the lavatory" (p. 1);
on the other, a scholarly, extensively
researched, insightful survey of Ameri-
ca's cinematic assault on the aggresor
nations of World War II - Germany,
Japan, and Italy.
To some extent, Hollywood in the late
1930s was quicker to oppose what
would become the Axis, an earlier
"evil empire" (Walter Lippmann did in
fact once describe Nazism as
"ice-cold evil"), than the American govern-
ment. But even Hollywood moved
cautiously, waging until our actual entry
into the war in 1941 a crusade in
three-quarter time. For although Hollywood
was not subject to the geopolitical
constraints confronting the Roosevelt ad-
ministration, its actions were
circumscribed by the demands of the box of-
fice - will it play in Peoria? - and the
sensitivities of the foreign market. Ac-
cordingly, filmmakers felt that overtly
political themes were to be avoided
and thus adopted Augustus's motto
"to make haste slowly" (p. 144) in their
war on Fascism, especially in dealing
with the Spanish Civil War. This policy
was not always strictly adhered to - how
could it when the studios employ-
ed such prominent leftist writers as
Clifford Odets, John Howard Lawson,
and Lillian Hellman? - and some viewers
were predictably antagonized. For
example, although efforts were made not
to offend the Roman Catholic
Church, largely supportive of Franco's
forces, Blockade (1938) incurred the
wrath of the Knights of Columbus and was
banned in twelve countries de-
Book Reviews
73
spite the appeal of the film's star,
Henry Fonda; one of Fonda's emotional
perorations was denounced by the Ohio
Knights of Columbus as "Marxist
propaganda, historically false and
intellectually dishonest" (p. 20). Indica-
tive of the filmmaker's dilemma, Blockade
was in turn endorsed by the Cali-
fornia Council of Federated Churchwomen
and the National Council of Jew-
ish Women.
Fighting Fascism while abjuring the
political or dealing in particulars re-
sulted in some truly unique films,
particularly those westerns produced by
Republic Studios, maker of profitable
horse operas geared to the aesthetic
preferences of the callow, the
unsophisticated, and sundry other matinee
marauders. To further satisfy the tastes
of its audience, Republic produced a
new western genre - fascism on the
range. Villains had always been clad in
black. Now, in Range Defenders (1937),
added to the black were white light-
ning flashes, resulting in dress
suggestive of that worn by Himmler's SS. In
Pals of the Saddle (1938), featuring John Wayne (always an early enlistee
in
wars on the celluloid front), alert
cowpokes thwart foreign agents. In 1939 Re-
public offered In Old Monterey, a
plea for military preparedness starring
America's "Singing Cowboy,"
Gene Autry. The film's high point, the "piece
de resistance," according to Dick,
was "crotchety George 'Gabby' Hayes,
Autry's sidekick, singing 'Columbia, Gem
of the Ocean'" (p. 49).
Dick is most perceptive when analyzing
those films made after the United
States officially entered the war. He
notes the distinction between how the
Germans and Japanese were pictured:
Germans came off relatively clean,
their behavior portrayed as lying
somewhere between the pathological and
inhuman (this before the horrific full
disclosure of the death camps), while
the Japanese, conversely, were seen as
flatly subhuman. An occasional good
German, or even a half-decent Nazi,
cropped up, but the Japanese were nev-
er even treated as individuals. Films
such as Flying Tigers, Air Force, Bataan
(one's childhood memory still retains
the image of those shadowy, ghost-
like forms charging relentlessly toward
Robert Taylor's last stand), The Pur-
ple Heart, God is my Co-Pilot, and Objective Burma depicted or suggested an
unthinking lower form of life committing
heinous atrocities. These films suc-
cessfully mobilized hatred of the
Japanese, probably an emotional impera-
tive following Pearl Harbor and other
American disasters of the first six
months of the war in the Pacific, but in
retrospect are embarrassingly racist
and best left to television's midnight
time-slot.
Those films whose goal was to portray
Russian and Stalin in a favorable
light after Russia, by necessity,
entered the lists against Hitler also receive
thorough coverage. Playing a prominent
role in producing this type of film
were a number of left-wing, pro-Soviet,
and in some cases genuine Communist
party screenwriters, some of whom would
later during the Cold War years at-
tain fame, or notoriety, depending upon
ones political predilections, as the
Hollywood Ten. They were encouraged and
aided by a government tempo-
rarily suffering from an illusion that
would in time permanently govern Ameri-
can perceptions of foreign countries:
any country, Stalin's Soviet Union in this
instance, however unsavory its political
past or present, is automatically re-
deemed (and blithely declared
democratic) upon making common cause
with the United States. Writers such as
Lillian Hellman, Paul Jarrico, Alvah
Bessie, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson,
Adrain Scott, and Dalton Trum-
bo were involved with the making of such
films as: Sahara, Action in the
North Atlantic, and the "unashamedly Stalinist" Song of
Russia (p. 212);
74 OHIO HISTORY
Tender Comrade, Mission to Moscow - made at the request of FDR, its pur-
pose was "to convert Americans from
Russophobia to temporary Russophil-
ia" (p. 158) - and The North
Star, retitled "Oklahomaski" by one cynic be-
cause of its depiction of the idyllic
life on a collective farm in the Ukraine,
ruined only by ruthless invading Nazis.
All of these writers to some degree
or the other sought to palliate Stalin's
Soviet Union and its political system.
That the Soviet Union, whatever its
political system, did in fact bear the
brunt of fighting the Germans, and that
whatever messages the films con-
tained were either harmless or so
obscure as to be discernible only to the al-
ready converted, mattered little to
later Cold Warriors, most notably mem-
bers of the House Committee on
Un-American Activities who would see to it
that these writers paid a price for
their political indiscretions.
Star-Spangled Screen is so thorough, so well researched, and so eminently
readable that no brief review can do it
justice. Dick's sources, conveniently
listed for the reader, include most of
the published works pertaining to his
topic and, more importantly, studio
archival collections. This writer found
particularly fascinating his detailed
accounts of the evolution of a number of
screenplays and scripts into their final
form. Casablanca, "fiction elevated to
fable, then translated into myth"
(p. 167), is of course a familiar story. (One
still shudders at the film's fate had it
starred, as originally planned, Ronald
Reagan and Ann Sheridan.) But Dick also
provides accounts of numerous all
but forgotten movies, including the
first, to this writer's knowledge, of the
path taken by Warner Brothers in
converting Sigmund Romberg's operetta,
The Desert Song, into a war film in which Nazis replaced French
colonialists
as the villains of the piece. Such
meticulous research has resulted in a book
of which the author can be proud. It is
also that type of quality publication
one has grown accustomed to expect from
The University Press of Kentucky.
Ohio Historical Society Robert L. Daugherty
Coxey's Army: An American Odyssey. By Carlos A. Schwantes. (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1985. xii
+ 321p.; notes, illustrations, index.
$22.95.)
On March 25, 1894, 122 unemployed
marchers and 44 journalists tramped
out of Massillon, Ohio, bound for
Washington, D.C. Calling themselves the
Commonweal of Christ, they were better
known as Coxey's Army. Five
weeks later, on May 1st, Washington
police prevented Coxey from delivering
an address from the capitol steps and,
in what is best described as a police
riot, arrested Coxey and two associates
for carrying signs on the capitol
grounds and walking on the grass.
Convicted, they served twenty days in
jail. Numerous other armies formed in
the west, intending to rendezvous in
Washington and join in petitioning
Congress for public works employment in
the face of severe depression. Given
massive press coverage, the marches
very much lived up to Schwantes'
characterization as "an unemployment ad-
venture story" (p. 46).
Good copy in 1894, Coxey is still good
copy today. Schwantes sets out to
reconstruct the various marches and
place them in the context of the 1893
depression. It is a colorful tale,
involving over 50 locomotive thefts, several
Book Reviews
75
train chases, clashes between marchers
and deputy federal marshals, mass
arrests and mass imprisonments. Stronger
on description than analysis,
Coxey's Army is a vivid portrayal of this mid-1890s phenomenon.
Schwantes calls the late-nineteenth
century "the golden age of the crank"
(p. 47), a category to which he assigns
Jacob Coxey. A prosperous Massillon
quarry owner, Coxey was also a currency
reformer and an advocate of better
country roads. After the onset of the
1893 depression, he developed a
scheme whereby the federal government
would make what were in effect
interest-free loans to local governments
to be used for public improvements,
thereby relieving unemployment. At an
1893 Bimetallic League convention in
Chicago he met California promoter Carl
Browne, an outlandish figure who,
clad in Buffalo Bill garb, gave
street-corner lectures on currency and econom-
ics. Wintering with Coxey in Massillon,
Browne not only conceived of the
march of the unemployed to publicize
Coxey's public works schemes, but,
for good measure, converted Coxey to his
beliefs in reincarnation as well.
With the idiosyncratic Browne
orchestrating what today would be called
a media event, Coxey's ideas received
national dissemination and caught the
imagination of countless thousands. The
appeal, however, was distinctly sec-
tional: armies formed in the midwest and
far west; the south and northeast
were largely unaffected. In the west
Coxeyites added federal irrigation proj-
ects to the list of demanded public
works.
Schwantes tells us more about the
marches than the marchers; we learn
little more than that they were
unemployed and represented a wide range of
occupations. On the road they distanced
themselves from tramps and ho-
boes, sang patriotic songs, conducted
religious services, and would not scab
on local labor. "Marching"
from the west coast to Washington involved al-
most insuperable hurdles; Coxeyites and
transcontinental railroads engaged
in continuous running battles of wits
and wills, with the federal courts coming
down squarely on the side of the
railroads. Most likely to supply traveling
armies with food and shelter were
communities in which organized labor or
the Populist party were
disproportionately strong.
In a larger sense, Schwantes interprets
Coxeyism as a first attempt at defin-
ing unemployment as a national problem
requiring federal intervention. An
unconvincing solution in the 1890s,
large-scale public works, if not interest-
free bonds, became a mainstay of
economic policy in the 1930s. And Coxey,
in a fitting sequel, became a
depression-era mayor of Massillon. Schwantes
has given us a solid and vivid depiction
of a significant episode in American
history, an early milestone on the long
road to a greater federal domestic
presence. The research is thorough, the
writing excellent. Schwantes cap-
tures the drama inherent in the story.
Here is a book that can be read for
pleasure as well as profit.
The University of Akron Douglas V. Shaw
Outposts of the War for Empire. The
French and English in Western Pennsyl-
vania: Their Armies, Their Forts,
Their People, 1749-1764. By Charles M.
Stotz. (Pittsburgh: Historical Society
of Western Pennsylvania and Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh Press, 1985. xii +
203p.; illustrations, bibliography,
notes, index. $34.95).
76 OHIO HISTORY
The late Charles M. Stotz of Pittsburgh
was an architect, museum design-
er, author, trustee and officer of the
Historical Society of Western Pennsylva-
nia, and one of the leading authorities
on 18th century fortifications in the
United States. His career as an
architect stretched from 1922 to 1971 and in-
cluded the design of facilities ranging
from houses to research labs. For this
work he was recognized as a Fellow of
the American Institute of Architects.
Notoriety as a restoration architect
came from work on some forty buildings,
including the historic village at Old
Economy in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.
For our story, however, his greatest
accomplishments were the design of the
reconstruction of Fort Ligonier at
Ligonier, Pennsylvania, and the partial re-
building of Fort Pitt at Pittsburgh.
Stotz became thoroughly involved in the
study of frontier fortifications in
the mid-1940s when he was commissioned to
prepare plans and specifica-
tions for the reconstruction of Fort
Ligonier. Thereafter it became a lifetime
ambition to research the physical
location, construction, and appearance of
French and Indian War forts in eastern
North America through local, nation-
al and international archives. As an
architect, Stotz strove to produce studies
comprehensive enough to actually make it
possible to physically recreate a
frontier fort. Where historic drawings
or documents lacked adequate detail,
he filled in with information gained
from a careful study of manuals written in
the 17th and 18th century as a guide to
neophyte military officers. For archi-
tectural minutiae he relied on his
knowledge of log buildings erected during
the late-18th and early-19th centuries
in western Pennsylvania.
Outposts of the War for Empire represents the culmination of Stotz's almost
40 years of study of frontier fortifications. It is in
essence an architectural his-
tory of the 24 forts built in western
Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania
between 1749 and 1764. This time frame
begins with the Celeron expedition
and follows the English, French, and
Indian struggles through Bouquet's
campaign into the Ohio country. The
volume is divided into three parts.
First is a narrative of the events which
surrounded the erection of the forts.
Almost half the volume is a review of
the structural history and appearance of
the forts themselves. Finally Stotz
included a detailed chronicle of the re-
construction of Fort Ligonier complete
with his construction drawings and
photos of the work in progress. The
latter is an adaptation of material pub-
lished in 1974 in the Bulletin of the
Association for Preservation Technology.
The first question to ask is how Stotz
chose this particular group of forts for
his study. No clear answer is found in
the text except the obvious interest of
a life-long Pittsburgh resident and the
Historical Society of Western Pennsyl-
vania in that geographical area. While
there are certainly many other frontier
forts of the French and Indian War outside this area
that are worthy of
study, Stotz and his publisher should
probably be forgiven their provincial-
ism, if for no other reason than in
recognition of the great labor inherent in
the author's approach to each
fortification. Stotz gathered not only original
plats and drawings of these forts, but for nineteen of
what he considered
"the most important
installations," he prepared meticulously detailed
"bird's-eye" perspectives from
a 45-degree aerial angle. The assemblage of
these historic and modern reconstructive
drawings, which are handsomely
reproduced in an oversize format, are clearly
the major contribution of the
volume. But the limited scope led,
unfortunately, to several erroneous state-
ments. The claim that the siege of
Niagara in 1759 was the only example of
the use of European siege tactics in
North America was caught by the editors
Book Reviews
77
and corrected in the caption for an
illustration, but remained in the main text.
This ignores, of course, any number of
occurrences elsewhere, not the least
of which was the British siege of
Louisbourg in 1758. The assertion that a
porch was rare on frontier forts could
only result from a lack of familiarity
with the numbers of military quarters
with porches built at frontier forts on
both sides of the Appalachians from the
Revolution through the War of
1812.
A more serious organizational flaw came
from the separation of the histori-
cal narrative from the physical history
of each fort. This necessitates flipping
back and forth between two sections to
get the whole story on any one struc-
ture. Separate as it is, the historical
narrative is merely a brief rehash of
ground historiographically already well
trod and better covered. If it had
been put with the appropriate text on each fort, it
would have measurably
expanded the understanding of the
architecture that was Stotz's real focus.
My prime disappointment as a historian
is Stotz's missed opportunity to
compare and contrast the architecture he
so intimately described. Even
though the forts were arranged according
to the French, Maryland and Vir-
ginian, Pennsylvanian or English origin
of their builders, the author never
presented any analysis of what he spent
40 years gathering. His personal
viewpoint as an architect could have,
for example, been used for a discussion
of the design characteristics common
among or unique to each nationality.
While a section is provided on "the
builders of the forts," it is little more
than a series of biographical sketches
with little reference to the actual types
of structures they created.
Outposts shows the careful attention to detail which has become
the
hallmark of the editing of the
Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania,
and the quality of the production and
design is exemplary. In addition, the
overall quality of Stotz's drawings are
first-rate. In fact his perspective draw-
ings of "the parts of a fort"
and "typical walls of the frontier fort" are the
most descriptive and clearest of any
that I have seen. Furthermore, the crea-
tion of "birds-eye" views of
nineteen "outposts" provides information and a
perspective which have been lost ever
since the mid-18th century. Many of
these places did indeed figure large in
the frontier history of the Ohio Val-
ley. A mental image of their appearance
was previously possible only after
laboring over any number of
contemporary descriptions found scattered
throughout the literature and archives.
Stotz has made it possible to exam-
ine these places in detail with uncommon
ease from our 20th century vantage
point. Together the author and publisher
created a remarkable research tool
for those interested in military
architecture and engineering in particular, as
well as those intrigued with the 18th
century Ohio Valley frontier in general.
My main regret is that the author, who
died in the spring of 1985, did not re-
ally finish the job he started.
Ohio Historical Society David A. Simmons
America Enters the World: A People's
History of the Progressive Era. Volume
Seven. By Page Smith. (New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1985. xiii
+ 1089p.; index. $29.95.)
78 OHIO HISTORY
In the 19th century, patrician amateurs
dominated the craft of historical
writing and produced pietistic
narratives for the educated public. These ex-
tensive narratives focused on the formal
institutions of political life, elections,
legislation, and, of course, war. The
first professional historians shared this
emphasis on political history, narrowly
defined. "History is past Politics and
Politics present History," read the
slogan above the seminar room at Johns
Hopkins University, an important center
of the new profession in the late-19th
century. At the turn of the century,
however, a group of talented and imagina-
tive young historians challenged the
profession's narrow emphasis. The pro-
gressive historians, especially Turner
and Beard, dramatically enlarged the
scope and methods of historical research
to include demography, statistics,
economics, and sociology. Not content
with a superficial examination of polit-
ical institutions, the progressives
searched for social and economic determi-
nants of political behavior.
The progressives shaped the modern
historical profession and are respon-
sible for much of its strength. But they
also bequeathed to the profession
two difficult and related problems.
Despite their own talent for narrative and
synthesis, the progressives' emphasis on
underlying factors and the scientif-
ic methods of uncovering them led the
profession towards the ever more ob-
scure and technically complex monograph.
The decline of narrative and syn-
thesis has isolated the profession from
the broader educated public and,
moreover, has made it difficult even for
specialists within the profession to
find common ground for debate. Page
Smith has attempted to resolve at least
the first of these problems. Since the
1970s when he distanced himself from
the profession and the university, Smith
has endeavored to return American
history to the American people. In America
Enters the World, the seventh
volume of his People's History of the
United States, Smith has brought the
narrative skill of the 19th-century
historians to the enlarged scope of modern
historical writing.
As a narrative Smith's volume succeeds
very well in a difficult task. Smith
forswears a narrow perspective, treating
such varied topics as the founding of
the IWW, the Greenwich Village literary
renaissance, and the influence of
Freudian psychology on American
intellectuals; yet his narrative holds to-
gether. The dominating personalities of
Roosevelt and Wilson shape the
work, but not to the exclusion of all
else. Smith's impressive gift for storytell-
ing works equally well in rendering TR's
penchant for testing foreign diplo-
mats with strenuous feats of endurance
and Big Bill Haywood's strange so-
journ in Mabel Dodge's salon. More successfully than in
earlier volumes,
Smith has integrated the history of
workers, blacks, and women into his nar-
rative (though he would have benefited
from a closer examination of some
important monographs in these fields).
Abandoning the professional's quix-
otic quest for objectivity, Smith brings
a judicious moral sensibility to his
task. Thus he can acknowledge the
sincere, if shallow, moral vision of Wil-
son's Fourteen Points, while also
detailing the hypocritically illiberal sup-
pression of wartime dissent. A work at
once serious and entertaining, Smith's
narrative deserves and will satisfy a
wide and educated audience.
As a synthesis, however, Smith's book is
less successful. Perhaps it is un-
fair to say that his book disappoints
the professional historian, since Smith is
not writing for the professional. But we
need works of synthesis, especially on
the much studied but ill-understood
Progressive Era, and Smith is capable
of such a work. The problem is not that
he avoids central themes; the war
Book Reviews
79
between capital and labor, the emergence
of America as a world power, the
expansion of governmental power, and the
development of an intelligentsia
are central themes in his work. What
Smith fails to do is to explore the re-
lationships between his themes. Was
America's increasing involvement in
world affairs partly an attempt to
resolve or limit the conflict between capital
and labor? How great a role did the
intelligentsia play in the growth of feder-
al power and progressive reform? Such
questions are central to professional
debates, but they are also questions
which the reading public should be
asked to consider. Smith has combined a
traditional political narrative with
an entertaining and informative catalog
of economic, social, and cultural top-
ics. What remains to be done is to
explore the relationship of one to the oth-
er.
Xavier University John D.
Fairfield
The First Suburbs: Residential
Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-
1860. By Henry C. Binford (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985.
xiv + 304p.; illustrations, appendix,
notes, bibliography, index. $25.00.)
The 1980 census figures indicate that
the United States is no longer pre-
dominately a rural or an urban
nation; more of the country's population now
lives in suburban areas than in central
cities or the countryside. Surprisingly,
historians have paid relatively little
attention to the origins of this phenome-
non. Sam Bass Warner's classic Streetcar
Suburbs is now over twenty years
old and, while there have been some
important journal articles in the inter-
vening years, there have been few
book-length studies. The drought seems
to have ended, however, with the
publication in 1985 of two important
works: Kenneth T. Jackson's Crabgrass
Frontier: The Suburbanization of the
United States and, the subject of this review, Henry C. Binford's The
First
Suburbs.
While Binford's focus (on the Boston
suburbs of Cambridge and Somer-
ville during the antebellum decades) is
narrower than Jackson's national
overview, his monograph nevertheless is
an important addition to the litera-
ture of American urban/suburban history.
Indeed, his conscious decision to
probe deeply into the local history of
these two communities has enabled
him to identify, and to describe more
fully than anyone to date, the exis-
tence of a complex stage "between
preindustrial village and residential dor-
mitory" (p. 5). He argues convincingly that such an
investigation demon-
strates the inadequacy of viewing
suburban history as "a linear, accelerating
process beginning about 1850 and leading
to Levittown" (p. 3).
A common conception is that the suburbs
resulted principally from urban
expansion, the "take-off' coming in
the late-nineteenth century with the ex-
tension of street railway service. For
some cities this may be an accurate de-
scription. Binford shows, however, that
a "fringe" population and economy
flourished on the Boston periphery
during the first third of the century. Per-
forming services for the urban
market-services best performed outside the
city-the region exhibited a "city
oriented but not citified way of life" (p.
19). Between 1845 and 1860 this
"fringe" gradually developed into some-
thing recognizably "suburban,"
a transformation the author analyzes in
80 OHIO HISTORY
great detail. His discussion of the
growth of commuting is especially valua-
ble, since changes in the nature and use
of public transportation were, in-
deed, crucial to the process. But it is
among Binford's contributions to show
that the "old" suburban
residents, not just newly out-migrating Bostonians,
played a crucial role in beginning the
commuting process and led the way in
promoting the local transportation
revolution.
These "first suburbs,"
therefore, were "not just artifacts of city expansion
but products of a community-building
process .. ." (p. 2). And it was as a re-
sult of this on-going "process of
social and political redefinition" (p. 154) that
a majority of those living on the
periphery came to define their communities
in residential, rather than commercial
or industrial, terms. This victory of the
domestic ideal over the entrepreneurial
vitality of the "fringe" created the
modern suburb.
This thoroughly researched, engagingly
written, and well-produced vol-
ume suggests several new lines of
inquiry. It also whets the appetite for
comparative work in other communities in
order to answer the inevitable
question: How representative is this original
case study? But Binford's ac-
complishment in this book is
substantial, and students of the American city
will need to be familiar with his
findings and interpretation.
Indiana Historical Bureau Robert G. Barrows
Law, Alcohol, and Order: Perspectives
on National Prohibition. Edited by
David E. Kyvig. (Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Press, 1985. xiii +
218p.; notes, index. $35.00.)
The Eleutherian Mills Historical Society
in Wilmington, Delaware, hosted
a conference in April, 1983, to
contemplate the implications of Prohibition's
repeal fifty years earlier. This volume
contains eleven essays delivered at, or
written as a consequence of, that
conference.
There is a nice balance among the essays
between the general and the spe-
cific. David Kyvig's keynote address
presents a concise summary of alcohol's
role in American history, together with
"Myths and Realities" about the
Prohibition experience that recent
scholarship has uncovered. Mark Keller's
"Alcohol Problems and Policies in
Historical Perspective" traces cultural atti-
tudes toward alcohol back to ancient
times, and summarizes scientific inter-
est in the subject since repeal. Other
essays are more narrowly focused. One
examines pre-Prohibition medical
attitudes toward alcohol's therapeutic
value. Another investigates Prohibition
decisions rendered by one of the
federal government's ten appellate
circuits.
Given the diversity of participant
backgrounds-history, political science,
law-the papers at times complement each
other surprisingly well. Clement
Vose places in broader perspective
Kyvig's summary of state ratification con-
ventions leading to repeal. Attorney
Rayman Solomon's examination of the
Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals'
Prohibition decisions reveals, in part, judi-
cial concern about the proper behavior
of federal prohibition officers. This
dovetails nicely with Paul Murphy's
finding that the Supreme Court's deci-
sions involving alcohol showed
increasing concern for federal protection of
individual rights.
Book Reviews
81
Scholars have a penchant for finding
legacies in commemorative occasions.
Humbert Nelli and Mark Haller agree that
repeal was key to the post-World
War II development of Las Vegas
gambling. Nelli, however, sees bootleggers
as a continuation of criminal syndicate
activity that dotted American cities
since Reconstruction. By contrast,
Haller stresses the individual and en-
trepreneurial roots of Las Vegas
gambling lords, who learned business,
investment, and management techniques as
bootleggers. Kyvig fears that
Prohibition and repeal have made
Americans more reluctant to change the
Constitution. Murphy dates the
beginnings of an organized concern for civil
liberties in the prohibition era. To
Mark Lender, repeal cleared the way for
nontemperance solutions to problem
drinkers, represented by private and
later public institutional support.
Incidentally, Keller's essay, based upon a
half-century of involvement in alcohol
studies, outlines the process by which
that focus ultimately turned to a
narrower concern for alcoholism.
Nuala Drescher advances the most
original legacy of Prohibition. She ar-
gues that, in severely weakening the
United Brewery Workers' union, nation-
al Prohibition stifled the most powerful
liberal voice within the American
Federation of Labor. Without
Prohibition, the UBW's size and passionate
devotion to socialism and to race and
gender equality might have advanced
a sense of class consciousness within
organized labor.
Unfortunately, some scholars could not
resist the temptation to find les-
sons in history. Prohibition, we are
told, shows that human nature resists
change by fiat. The Constitution is no
place to legitimize change based upon
shifting scientific judgments. As a
constitutional experiment, Prohibition was
a "gaudy failure." (Most of
these "lessons," contradicted by recent scholar-
ship, have alleged contemporary
ramifications in such issues as abortion,
drug regulation, and mandatory prayers
in schools.) For those seeking a
quick fix for liquor problems Keller
offers the most sobering lesson of all:
"The people who succeeded in
substantially reducing their alcohol prob-
lems did so through a cultural agency-specifically,
religion" (pp. 170-71).
This volume has a little something for
everyone. The Kyvig and Keller es-
says present a nice overview for novices
to the topic. There is some grist for
those interested in the political and
constitutional process. Specialists in alco-
hol history will welcome Lender's
impressive agenda for further research on
post-repeal issues. Whether all of
the essays will appeal to all of these groups
remains problematic.
University of Kansas Lloyd
Sponholtz
President Washington's Indian War:
The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790-
1795. By Wiley Sword. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1985. xvi
+ 400p.; maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography,
index. $24.95.)
The United States' conquest of the
native Americans and British allies in
the Old Northwest has long been great
interest to midwesterners because of
its critical import to the development
of their region. Wiley Sword treats this
familiar tale in a reasonably well-researched and
competently written de-
scriptive history of the encounter
between white and red men that makes few
additions to the literature of the age.
82 OHIO HISTORY
Essentially the Sword version is flawed
in three ways. First, while he has
explored most of the primary sources
relating to the age, he has hardly
tapped any of the vast array of recent
secondary materials that would have
given his account the depth of analysis we should
expect. For anyone to
write of this period without consulting
such essential works as Richard
Kohn's Eagle and Sword: The Federalists
and the Creation of the Military Es-
tablishment in America (1975), Charles Royster's A Revolutionary People at
War: The Continental Army and
American Character, 1775-1783 (1980),
and
James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward
Lender's A Respectable Army: The
Military Origins of the Republic,
1763-1789 (1982) means that some of
the most
critical insights about the relationship
of the army to the citizenry of the re-
public are ignored. While one cannot
have expected him to have consulted
Paul David Nelson's recent biography of
Anthony Wayne, surely several of
Nelson's articles on this topic should
have been utilized. The net effect of
these omissions is that Sword's study
was outdated at the time of its publi-
cation. In particular, his
interpretation of the militia's combat effectiveness is
woefully behind current scholarship as
is his analysis of the Militia Act of
1792.
Second, despite the careful analysis of
many primary sources, the writing
and the logic behind many arguments,
descriptions, and conclusions are
questionable. For instance, General
Josiah Harmar is criticized for training
his troops in a regular manner, while
General Wayne is praised for doing the
same thing. His descriptions of St.
Clair's Defeat on November 4, 1791 (it
should truly be called Little Turtle's
Victory, but one cannot expect the tra-
ditional title to be modified any more
than one can expect the same to occur
regarding what we call Custer's Last
Stand), do not conform to the actions
illustrated on the accompanying map and
are confusing. Much the same can
be said about the analysis of the Battle
of Fallen Timbers. Moreover, the fail-
ure to delineate the provisions of the
Fort Harmar Treaty of 1789 means that
the reader never sees their importance
to the Greeneville Treaty of 1795.
Finally, the whole book is too narrowly
focused. Despite its title, it is not
about President Washington's conduct of
the war (something we truly need);
it is rather another account of Generals
Harmar, St. Clair, and Wayne in oppo-
sition to Little Turtle, Blue Jacket,
Joseph Brant, Simon Girty, and Alexander
McKee. As such it is reasonably
satisfactory. However, Sword fails to com-
prehend Washington's role in directing
the overall Indian policy of the Unit-
ed States, the influence of the Indian
troubles on the southwestern frontier
upon that policy, the limits that the
Whiskey Rebellion imposed upon Feder-
al action, and the options other than
war that confronted the native Ameri-
cans.
For those wanting an introduction to the
first campaigns in the Old North-
west this is a solid place to begin.
However, I would suggest one also read
Paul David Nelson's Anthony Wayne:
Soldier of the Early Republic (1985) for
a more thorough and imaginative account.
Bowling Green State University David Curtis Skaggs
Nashville The Occupied City: The
First Seventeen Months-February 16,
1862, to June 30, 1863. By Walter T. Durham. (Nashville: Tennessee Histor-
ical Society, 1985. xv + 307p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
$18.95.)
Book Reviews
83
The first of a projected two-volume
study of Nashville under Union rule,
this book is a modest addition to the
small body of Civil War literature that
deals with occupied portions of
Confederate territory. The months covered
here were traumatic for Nashville's
citizens, who were overwhelmingly pro-
southern. The fall of Fort Donelson,
Joseph E. Johnston's decision to retreat
without even trying to defend the city,
and the approach of Yankee troops ig-
nited a panic among Nashvillians.
Rioting occurred and many prominent se-
cessionists fled for their lives. The
arrival of Federal forces and (several
weeks later) of Military Governor Andrew
Johnson placed the Tennessee cap-
ital under a "dual siege." One
siege was political, as Johnson tried to consoli-
date his grip on Nashville and build
loyalist support. Hampering his efforts
was the other siege, a military one
conducted by Confederate cavalrymen
John H. Morgan and Nathan B. Forrest, by
organized partisans and ad hoc
guerrillas, and by the Army of
Tennessee's lingering threat.
The author of seven other historical
works about Tennessee, a past presi-
dent of both the Tennessee Historical
Society and the Tennessee Heritage
Alliance, and a former chairperson of
the Tennessee Historical Commission,
Durham has unearthed an abundance of
factual data about both sieges. Re-
garding the internal siege, he presents
a vast amount of information about the
administration of loyalty oaths, the
military arrest of civilians, spying and
smuggling, the city's distressed
economy, the influx of refugees, the use of
private property for Union hospitals and
headquarters, Yankee troops be-
havior that ranged from attending the
theater to consorting with prostitutes,
the effort to maintain municipal
services-in short, about virtually every as-
pect of the war's effect on an occupied
city. And, concerning the Confederate
military siege, he duly discusses every
threat to Nashville, whether real or
only rumored.
Unfortunately, the book lacks the
organization and broad, integrating
themes that would tie all of this detail
together. Many topics, such as loyalty
oaths and spies and smugglers, discussed
in one part of the narrative pop up
again-and again and again. The chapter
structure conveys some sense of
this disorganization. For instance,
Chapters XIV ("Living With The Yan-
kees"), XV ("Smugglers, Spies,
and The Loyalty Oaths"), and XVI ("Garri-
son Town") all deal with the first
half of 1863. Moreover, the author has
made little effort to show how events in
Nashville had a larger importance for
the nation as it wrestled with wartime
Reconstruction problems in occupied
southern territory. The book's rambling
style and narrow focus detract sub-
stantially from its potential
significance.
In trying to reconstruct events in
occupied Nashville, the author made ex-
cellent use of the Official Records, wartime
newspapers, and the collections
of the Tennessee State Library and
Archives. His research in collections in
other state repositories and in the
National Archives is less thorough and,
especially surprising, the author is
apparently unaware of relevant disserta-
tions, such as Edwin T. Hardison's on
Johnson's tenure as military governor,
John Cimprich's on slavery in Tennessee
during the Civil War, Stephen V.
Ash's on blacks in Middle Tennessee
between 1860-1870, and May Alice
Ridley's on the black community of
Nashville between 1860-1870.
Since historians should always indicate
any possible source of bias, read-
ers of this review should know that in
1978 I published a book on wartime
Nashville. However, even if Durham's
book had dealt with a different occu-
84 OHIO HISTORY
pied city, I believe that I would have
come to the same conclusions about it:
extremely detailed; solid, though not
exhaustive, research; deficient in or-
ganization and analysis.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Pete Maslowski
Men of Patriotism, Courage, &
Enterprise! Fort Meigs In The War of 1812. By
Larry L. Nelson. (Canton, Ohio: Daring
Books, 1985. xiv + 156p.; illustra-
tions, notes, appendix, bibliography,
index. $5.95 paper; $15.95 cloth.)
Larry Nelson, in his preface to this
story of Fort Meigs, made perhaps the
most perceptive statement in his book
when he said regarding victory and
defeat in the War of 1812, "the
tribes of the Indian nation were . . . the ulti-
mate losers in the conflict. For enemy
and ally alike, the dream of Indian au-
tonomy was swept aside by the rush of
westward expansion at the war's con-
clusion." The Indiana frontier was
populous enough to become a state in
1816; Illinois was added in 1818. As for
the British and Americans who
fought, this reviewer remembers the
Canadian historian who appeared at
Ohio Northern University some years ago
who proved conclusively (at least
to his own satisfaction) that Canada had
won the War of 1812. There is
something to be said for his viewpoint,
and certainly there were men of patri-
otism, courage and enterprise on his
side as well as among the Americans at
Fort Meigs-and for the same reasons.
Nevertheless, when the war was over
the boundaries of the United States and
Canada were precisely where they
were when the war began and, as Nelson
observes, the substantive issues
which had led to the war were ignored.
It is difficult to find much victory in
a situation of that kind for British
(Canadians) or Americans. But the Indians
had clearly lost.
Nelson has done well with the primary
sources which he so often quotes
to establish the patriotism, courage and
enterprise of the men of Fort Meigs.
He also shows how those sterling
qualities can be thrust into the back-
ground, as happened during the regime of
General Leftwich in March of
1813. Patriotism, courage and enterprise
can turn into selfishness, complaints
and near disaster when leadership deteriorates.
While Nelson considers the
emotional side of military service his
overriding interest, he has very effect-
ively told us the broad story of
military events as well, going beyond Fort
Meigs itself and treating the whole
Western campaign-Fort Stephenson,
Perry and Lake Erie, and the Thames.
This puts Fort Meigs in true perspec-
tive as the base from which military
things happened in the West from the
American point of view. We even get
glimpses at times of the problems that
Proctor and the British were facing, and
they were fully as troublesome as
those faced by General Harrison, the
American commander.
One can legitimately ask whether the
patriotism, courage, and enterprise
displayed at Fort Meigs and in the West
in the War of 1812 were superior to
that demonstrated by servicemen
elsewhere or at other times. Nelson does
not claim that they were. Then why the
emphasis upon these traits in this
volume? Nelson in his final sentences
concludes that "Emotional involve-
ment was denied, repressed and
abandoned, replaced with a stoic resigna-
tion and numbness." Certainly that
statement could describe the reaction to
the scenes of war of other servicemen in
other places and at other times. It is
Book Reviews
85
not, however, a universal reaction. The
existence of the Veterans of Foreign
Wars and the American Legion testify
that many veterans look back upon
their service with satisfaction, and
some of them glory in their patriotism,
courage and enterprise. Nelson does not say that his
book is a condemnation
of all war, but in view of his
concluding statement one could reach such a
conclusion. Then why the title of the
book? Would it not have been better to
have reversed the title and subtitle?
Mr. Nelson has produced a readable
account of the Western campaign in
the War of 1812. He has used his sources
well. Where military events are
concerned there is clarity without too
much depth for the casual reader and
he treats the men involved with
sympathy. With the emotionalism of his title
he is, in this reviewers mind,
ambiguous. Many people are, where war is con-
cerned.
Ohio Northern University Boyd M. Sobers
Sympathy & Science: Women
Physicians in American Medicine. By
Regina
Markell Morantz-Sanchez. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985. xii
+ 464p.; notes, bibliography, appendix,
index. $24.95.)
Sympathy & Science examines the role of women physicians in the United
States in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, documenting their profes-
sional and personal lives, as well as
the institutional and academic milieus in
which they studied and worked. Drawing
on new interpretations in social
history, the history of medicine, and
women's history, Morantz-Sanchez
makes a significant contribution to our
understanding of professional and
public attitudes toward women's
involvement in this field and the mecha-
nisms that women professionals developed
to cope with such problems as
systematic discrimination on the part of
medical schools and hospitals.
In the decades preceding the Civil War,
public concern, particularly
among the reform community, led to the
increased interest and involvement
of women in medical practice. Viewing
health care as a corollary to their tra-
ditional domestic functions enabled
these pioneers to justify their entrance
into the formal profession.
Morantz-Sanchez argues, however, that this line
of reasoning, while probably helping
women physicians in the nineteenth
century, was to work to their detriment
in the twentieth century, as they
found themselves tracked into
specialities, such as public health work and
preventive medicine, which bore an
obvious relationship to women's tradi-
tional nurturing role.
A comparatively open environment for
education and clinical experience
existed in the nineteenth century with
the establishment of such institutions
as the Woman's Medical College of New
York Infirmary, New England Hos-
pital for Women and Children, and the
Woman's Medical College of Penn-
sylvania. By the early twentieth
century, however, several factors led to a
decline in the number of women medical
students and practitioners. As edu-
cational standards tightened and were
tied to the presence of clinical and re-
search facilities, many of the women's
schools closed; yet traditionally male
schools were reluctant to admit more
than a token number of women. Women
professors were not hired, leading to an
absence of role models for women
86 OHIO HISTORY
students, while the positive, supportive
aspects of single-sex institutions were
lost in the transformation to the
contemporary pattern of medical education in
teaching hospitals. The increasing shift
of medicine from being a healing art
to being an exact science may also have
led to a lessening of women's interest
in the profession. As Morantz-Sanchez
notes, "The vigorous, detached, al-
most godlike figure of the
twentieth-century physician-a product of the tri-
umph of scientific medicine-kept all but
the most determined of [women
physicians] from challenging cultural
barriers."
In the 1920s the decline of old-line
feminism and the rise of companionate
marriage, with its implications for
balancing family and career, dealt further
blows to women wishing to play an active
role in the profession. Only since
the advent of the contemporary feminist
movement have women once more
begun to play a significant role in the medical
profession. Indeed, twenty-
five percent of today's medical students
are women. The full impact of this
change, however, cannot be assessed
until these students have had a
chance to vigorously test their skills
in the professional arena.
Morantz-Sanchez presents her material
with the ease that comes only after
years of immersion in a subject and its
sources, and her bibliography dem-
onstrates how thorough her research has
been. Especially strong is her abil-
ity to draw analogies between the
individual and the general, as in her chap-
ter on Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary
Putnam Jacobi's divergent attitudes
toward "scientific" and
"moral" medicine. Statistical analysis is balanced
with anecdotes about individuals, and
throughout the book the author suc-
ceeds in presenting a balanced,
nonpolemical, yet appropriately revisionist,
view of the subject. Ohio readers will
find references to such institutions as
Oberlin College and the Western Reserve
Medical School of interest, al-
though the scope of the book is truly
national. This is perhaps the best his-
torical study to yet appear on the topic
of women and medicine. Morantz-
Sanchez sets a high standard that is
worthy of emulation by all historians.
National Historical Publications and
Records Commission Nancy Sahli
Slavery in the Courtroom: An
Annotated Bibliography of American Cases. By
Paul Finkelman. (Washington, D.C.:
Library of Congress, 1985. xxviii +
312p.; notes, illustrations, appendix,
selected bibliography, index. $12.00.)
In this book Paul Finkelman has
furnished scholars with an invaluable an-
notated bibliography of materials
focused upon American courtroom cases
relating to slavery. The publications
summarized in the collection are drawn
from the holdings of the Library of
Congress, from the extensive Trials Col-
lection of the Law Library as well as
from other divisions of our great national
depository. The period covered ranges
from the colonial era to the years of
the Civil War. The author has provided a
guide to the resources of a particu-
lar library but has also offered a most
useful account of American law as it re-
sponded to the challenge of slavery.
Finkelman's approach is developmental,
showing the impact of trial decisions
upon future cases and revealing how the
courtroom position of blacks was altered
by changes in the place of slavery
within American society. The legal
history we have here tells us much about
the provisions of statutes, but we also
learn about the social context within
which statutes were interpreted.
Book Reviews
87
Slavery In The Courtroom gives a sense of the human drama that charac-
terized the struggle over slavery. As
the cases are outlined there appear the
conflicts that gave rise to them, the
will of blacks to attain freedom and the
hard determination of slaveholders to
cling to their property. Along with the
confrontation of legal issues there is
also the test of will and intellect between
the legal advocates of slavery and those
who would use the law as a vehicle
for freedom.
The volume presents many, if not all, of
the cases that were turning points
in the legal history of slavery.
Beginning with the British case of Somerset v.
Stewart, the book includes such important cases as Commonwealth
v. Aves,
Dred Scott v. Sandford, Prigg v.
Pennsylvania, In re Thomas Sims, United
States v. Hanway, In re Anthony
Burns, Commonwealth v. Brown and United
States v. The Amistad. Court proceedings touched on a number of the key as-
pects of slavery, the status of the
system in a free jurisdiction, the legal posi-
tion of fugitive slaves, the role of
abolitionists, slave revolts, and the African
slave trade, and these questions are
amply reflected in the author's annota-
tions.
Several themes emerge quite clearly from
the book. 1. The struggle over
slavery encompassed every section of the
nation, reaching into courts North
and South, as bondage could not exist
without the support of legal institu-
tions. 2. The courtroom history of
slavery reveals no inclination on the part of
slaveholders as a class to voluntarily
abolish the institution. The plantation
owners were zealous and uncompromising
in their insistence upon property
right in persons. 3. Prior to the Civil
War the Federal Government was most
often a basic component of the machinery
enforcing slavery, as perhaps most
clearly shown in the government's
protection of slavery in the District of Co-
lumbia. 4. The law was an essential
element of the ideological conflict be-
tween defenders and opponents of
slavery, and the records of courtroom
cases made effective anti-slavery
propaganda in the hands of abolitionists.
Generally, the legal critics of slavery
had the better of the argument. The
courtroom history of slavery aids in
understanding why the slaveholders in
the end lost all patience with electoral
and legal debate and resorted to the
brute force of secession. The evidence
supports the view that law reflects the
relationship between the contending
classes of society and that those seek-
ing to change the social order must
redefine the law.
This is a piece of scholarship that has
been done with careful attention to
detail and an eye for broader
implications. The author does not intrude upon
the evidence but rather simply and
clearly outlines the background of events
and what happened in the legal cases.
Serious students of American slavery
and of the history of American law will
find this a book of enduring worth.
University of Cincinnati Herbert Shapiro
The Black Heart's Truth: The Early
Career of W. D. Howells. By John W.
Crowley. (Chapel Hill: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1985. xv +
192p.; notes, index. $19.95.)
John Crowley, a professor of English at
Syracuse University, titles his book
after something William Dean Howells wrote to Mark
Twain, his old crony, in
1904. "I'd like immensely to read
your autobiography," said Howells. "You
88 OHIO HISTORY
always rather bewildered me by your
veracity, and I fancy you may tell the
truth about yourself. But all of it?.... Even
you won't tell the black heart's-
truth."
Professor Crowley's psychoanalytical
biography and literary criticism of
Howells discerns some buried truths
unrecognized by Howells himself. The
Black Heart's Truth reveals no lurid villanies in the decent and
high-minded
Ohioan, but finds him to have been
victim of more than his share of Oedipal
and other complexes.
Crowley is not the first scholar to find
neurotic obsession in young Will
Howells and his earlier books. He has
been preceded, in one way or anoth-
er, by Edwin Cady, Kermit Vanderbilt,
Kenneth Lynn, George C. Carring-
ton, and Elizabeth Stevens Prioleau.
Profiting from their insights, Crowley
has pushed on to more detailed and
precise analyses than theirs. Unlike Ms.
Prioleau's recent The Circle of Eros:
Sexuality in the Work of William Dean
Howells (Duke, 1983), Crowley denies himself clinical jargon
and sensational
exaggeration, and he is more persuasive
than she.
The general reader of Howells, if any
remain nowadays outside the univer-
sities, may well be puzzled to learn
that Howells' seemingly bland, "unevent-
ful" novels have proved to be
catnip to the Freudians. What kinks or psy-
chic tensions could be found beneath
these smooth, cool, serene fictions?
Plenty. Crowley's analyses are detailed
and technical, but we may sample
the main features of his principal
exhibit, A Modern Instance (1882), Howells'
first major novel and possibly his best.
Anyone who can read is aware that A
Modern Instance is a sexually intense
story, and it is well known that Howells
suffered a breakdown-physical,
psychological, and literary-in his
struggle to map out the ending of the nov-
el. His breakdown was apparently the
result of havoc caused in his psyche
by identifying with his novel's
characters.
There was, first, what Freudians term
the incestuous implications for How-
ells in his heroine's over-close
attachment to her father-and what this
meant in the secret soul of Howells,
himself the father of a troubled daugh-
ter. There was also his ambivalence
toward his tragic antihero, Bartley Hub-
bard, a young journalist based in part
on Howells himself at the same age. In
Howells' sympathy, yet hostility, toward
Bartley Hubbard, Professor Crow-
ley sees Howells subconsciously
defending, yet also punishing, the "criminal
element" in himself. Crowley also
sees Howells confused by the tangle of free
will and psychological determinism in
his hero and heroine-that is, in their
degree of responsibility for themselves,
morally and ethically, as adults.
Howells was probably unaware that in
writing his tedious and puritanical
last chapters of A Modern Instance he
was reversing, or unwriting, what he
had built up in the strong main part of
the novel. He stands convicted in this
case of violating his own critical
dictum: "The novel ends well that ends
faithfully."
The present reviewer has been skeptical
of Freudian readings of Howells
heretofore, but Professor Crowley
explains young Howells' psychological
problems better than previous critics.
General readers will find The Black
Heart's Truth technical and specialist, but any sound and sensitive
under-
standing of Howells from now on must
study Crowley's admirable case histo-
ry.
University of Illinois at Chicago James B. Stronks
Book Reviews
89
A Good Southerner: The Life of Henry
A. Wise of Virginia. By Craig M.
Simpson. (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1985. xviii +
450p.; illustrations, maps, notes,
bibliography, index. $29.95.)
We know Henry A. Wise chiefly as
Governor of Virginia during the 1859
trial and execution of John Brown. Now
appears Craig Simpson's examination
of the life of his Virginia congressman,
governor and Civil War general. In the
preface, Simpson announces his intention
to meet the "traditional tests of bi-
ographical relevance-representativeness
and significance." Simpson's biog-
raphy meets the former test more
successfully than the latter. For, as repre-
sentative of Southern moderates who
tried to dislodge the South from its
dangerous obsession with slavery during
the troubled pre-Civil War dec-
ades, Wise certainly warrants the
thorough, scholarly treatment he receives
at the hands of Simpson. Regarding
Wise's significance, Simpson claims that
his subject "made a
difference." However, it is difficult to see what real ef-
fect Wise had in energizing Virginia's
potential, in restraining Southern hot-
heads in the 1850s, and in producing a
solution to the problem of slavery.
Three themes dominate Simpson's study:
Wise's political ambition, his in-
consistent policy toward slavery, and
his devotion to Virginia. Maintaining an
appropriate distance from his subject,
Simpson studies Wise's vacillations
throughout his tortuous political career
(not unusual behavior for Americans
in the mid-nineteenth century). Elected
in 1833 as a pro-Jackson Democratic
Congressman, Wise joined the Whigs in
1837, and while still in Congress
served as informal advisor to President
John Tyler. After three years as Min-
ister to Brazil, Wise returned to the
Democratic Party in 1847 and was elected
Democratic Governor of Virginia in 1856.
Finally, in the 1870s Wise leaned to-
ward Grant and the Republicans. Immersed
in these policy shifts and con-
tradictions, the reader looks for more
narrative. For example, regarding John
Brown's trial, Simpson plunges into a
discussion of both Brown and Wise.
Granted, all readers are familiar with
this fateful event, but before the ex-
tended analysis of the two men, one
would like to know Wise's immediate re-
action to Brown's raid and why he
decided to have Brown tried in a Virgin-
ia, not federal, court. Similarly, after
describing Wise's election, Simpson first
evaluates the Governor's national impact
before going on, in the next chapter,
to specify exactly how Wise governed
Virginia. A more extensive portrayal of
Wise's personal life, his attitude
toward his three wives and his seven surviv-
ing children, could also have shed
further light on Wise the human being.
Only in the last two chapters, dealing
with the Civil War and Reconstruction,
do we come to understand Wise as the
failed and frustrated brigadier gener-
al and later the unreconstructed
Southerner.
How was Wise "a good
Southerner"? Simpson states that he calls him
good "because he would have wanted it that way"
(p. xi). By Southern
standards Wise could be classified as
"good." He was a humane slavehold-
er who saw slavery as a doomed
institution, one that in turn doomd his be-
loved Virginia. Wise manifested deep
loyalty to Virginia, seeking to improve
her economically, to make her once more
lead the United States. Yet, at the
same time, Simpson undercuts Wise's
ethical conduct with thorough scruti-
ny of Wise's lifelong motive:
maintaining power. After describing Wise as
slaveholder, Simpson concludes,
"Once having projected the persona of a
good slaveholder, Wise increasingly
fitted his pretentions to reality" (p. 223).
90 OHIO HISTORY
Although Simpson is not explicit, his
emphasis on motive suggests that the
adjective good applies to Wise
only ironically. And irony is appropriate.
Besides meeting the tests of
representativeness and significance, a biogra-
pher should blend narrative with
interpretation. As a biography, Simpson's
study could narrate a clearer
chronological story of Wise the husband, the
father, the man. As historical
interpretation, A Good Southerner offers valua-
ble analysis of Virginia politics and
the plight of those Southerners who
wanted Southern policy to become more
than a defense of slavery.
Pomona College Beverly Wilson Palmer
The Mood/Interest Theory of American
Foreign Policy. By Jack E. Holmes.
(Lexington: The University Press of
Kentucky, 1985. xiii + 238p.; figures,
tables, notes, bibliographical essay,
index. $24.00.)
Jack Holmes introduces his work with the
charge that Frank L. Kling-
berg's 1952 article on American foreign
policy mood has received insufficient
attention. He promises to redress past academic neglect
and reemphasize the
important role mood plays in the foreign
policy process with publication of
The Mood/Interest Theory of American
Foreign Policy.
The mood/interest theory is based on six
sequential propositions: 1) public
mood is a dominant force in American
foreign policy and limits governmental
action; 2) American foreign policy moods
are expressed and channeled by
American liberalism and fluctuate
between extreme introversion and extro-
version with intervening periods of
moderation; 3) the United States has gen-
erally definable foreign policy interests,
although there are clear regional var-
iations; 4) there is a fundamental
conflict between the moods manifested in
the liberal American ideology and the
dictates of U.S. politico-military inter-
ests; 5) application of the theory
suggests that the Executive plays a strong
role in periods of extroversion, while
Congress takes the lead during periods
of introversion; and 6) the possibility
of a return to extreme introversion is
more likely than commonly recognized.
The author presents an interesting
analysis of American Lockean liberal-
ism, allowing him to divide the public
into reform and business liberals.
However, many of his assertions about
liberalism, mood and interest conflict
are unconvincing. For example, Holmes
asserts that the American liberal ori-
entation "includes an aversion to
power, and, therefore, an aversion to the
notion of pursuing politico-military
interests." These politico-military con-
cerns define the national interest-
economic and humanitarian elements are
secondary and their pursuit is not
subject to fluctuating mood. Having limit-
ed the American national interest to the
politico-military arena, Holmes states
that national/global interests have been
reflected in two ways: "attempting to
maintain freedom of the seas, and, since
1945, preventing a nuclear, chemical,
or biological exchange." Despite
this extremely limited definition of national
interest, the mood/interest theory is
built around the proposition that Presi-
dents elected during introvert periods,
reacting to public mood, have con-
sistently failed to do enough to protect
the national interest, and, in an at-
tempt to redress the balance,
"extrovert" Presidents have done too much.
These evaluations are offered with
little or no examination of the international
context.
Book Reviews
91
A second, more fundamental problem stems
from the failure to clearly ex-
plain what constitutes "mood."
Holmes builds his theory on Klingberg's
contention that mood has vacillated
between twenty-one year periods of in-
troversion and twenty-seven year periods
of extroversion. Despite the propo-
sition that mood is a dominant and
limiting force in the creation of policy,
there is no clear definition of liberal
mood, no convincing or consistent expla-
nation of what forces lead to the
cyclical change, and no discussion of how
the public makes its mood manifest to
foreign policy makers. (Public opin-
ion is merely short-term fluctuation and
frequently does not reflect overall
mood.) Holmes merely accepts Klingberg's
21-27 year paradigm, asserts that
mood determines policy, and then counts
the number of incidents when
policy-makers concluded treaties, used
force, or annexed territory to prove
that an introverted or extroverted
public mood existed.
The mood/interst theory is an ambitious
attempt to create a macroanalysis,
free from the "overly sensititve
attention to detail" that plagues contempo-
rary studies. However, by ignoring the
economic, humanitarian, and ideolog-
ical components of U.S. foreign policy,
it delivers rather less than more.
SUNY, Fredonia Lynne K. Dunn
George Washington and the American
Military Tradition. By Don Higginboth-
am. (Athens: The University of Georgia
Press, 1985. xii + 170p.; illustra-
tion, notes, index. $16.50.)
Readers who have come to expect work of
high quality from Don Higgin-
botham will not be disappointed by this
slender volume. Based on his La-
mar Lectures at Mercer University in
October 1983 and his Harmon Memorial
Lecture at the U.S. Air Force Academy in
March 1984, the book is obviously
a product of many years of research,
teaching, and contemplation. Academic
experts and Washington buffs will find
little new in the work, but they can
still admire Higginbotham's thoughtful
synthesis of primary and secondary
material.
Higginbotham skillfully uses Washington
and a comparison of Washington
with George Marshall to identify a
number of important elements in the
American military tradition. Perhaps the
most significant has been the fusion
of civilian values with those of the
professional military. Although the syn-
thesis has been only partial at times,
Washington and Marshall represent the
highest achievement of the ideal.
Higginbotham concluded that no officers
were their equal "in effectively
bridging the gap between the civilian and the
military." They "understood"
as well as accepted civil control, and "their
occasional dissent from governmental
decisions was a part of the American
military tradition worth preserving. To
be loyal is not always to be silent."
Nor is being professional the same as
being isolated. Washington, Marshall,
and other officers have benefitted from
"a healthy diversity of experiences
with the civilian sector of American
life." The combination of European prac-
tice and American experience added
another important element to the Amer-
ican military tradition, pragmatism.
The challenges facing Washington clearly
represent negative aspects of the
American military tradition. The
Revolution was not the only war in which
92 OHIO HISTORY
Americans would fail to unite, nor would
it be the only conflict in which
"historic militia attitudes"
would make discipline and organization difficult.
Higginbotham's book reminds us that a
military tradition is not all positive,
and the American way of war contains
many problems as well as virtues.
The book also reminds us that good
leadership is essential in military af-
fairs, and Higginbotham's Washington was
a superb leader. He was accessi-
ble to subordinates, exhibited a flair
for the dramatic, and had a host of
additional qualities that "brought
out the best in others." Washington's
greatest contribution as a leader,
however, may have been his demonstration
"that a professional army was not
incompatible with civil liberty."
Higginbotham's portrait of Washington is
a sophisticated one, although
some readers will find it insufficiently
critical. Arguing that "too much has
been made of Washington's military
limitations," Higginbotham portrays
him as a man who "had taken his
military education seriously." Although
he could also be petty and self-serving,
particularly as a young man seeking a
British commission, he matured with age,
and the Washington selected
as commander of the Continental army was
a more controlled individual.
"Tough, tenacious, brave, perhaps
even inspirational," he was a perfect
choice. Higginbotham admits, however,
that Congress supported Washing-
ton "because its members knew and
trusted him as a legislator, not as a sol-
dier."
George Washington and the American
Military Tradition should provide
enjoyable reading for anyone interested
in either subject. The book provides
a concise overview of Washington's many
attributes as a military leader as
well as a number of insightful comments
on the subject of military profession-
alism in America.
The College of Wooster John M. Gates
Book Reviews
First Lady: The Life of Lucy Webb
Hayes. By Emily Apt Geer. (Kent: The
Kent State University Press, 1984. ix +
330p.; illustrations, notes, sources
cited, index. $19.95.)
The goal which Emily Apt Geer has set
for herself in this book is to evalu-
ate the true character of Lucy Webb
Hayes. Was she the intolerant "Lemon-
ade Lucy" that her husband's
political opponents labeled her, or was she
the saint-like creature her friends
believed her to be? The conclusion rests
somewhere between these two extremes.
In clear and straightforward prose, Geer
takes the reader through the
events of Lucy Webb Hayes's life,
beginning with her childhood in Chilli-
cothe, where her father was a successful
physician and her mother helped
in caring for his patients. Lucy
attended Cincinnati Wesleyan Female College,
and was the first president's wife to
have a college education. In 1852 she
married future president Rutherford B.
Hayes and spent the rest of her life
being a very supportive wife for his
political career. Shortly after they were
married, Hayes became governor of Ohio.
With her husband, Lucy Hayes
visited prisons and hospitals for the
mentally ill. She helped to found an or-
phanage for war orphans and exerted
pressure on her legislative friends to
have it made a state institution. She
bore children and kept the home fires
while her husband served in the Civil
War. When he was hospitalized she
came to his side and also visited other
wounded soldiers. As a helpmate to
her husband, she entertained graciously
at the White House and is remem-
bered for her temperance policy in not
serving wine. She was a tactful and
charming hostess and eased the way for
the president in politics, although
her interest was more often in the
people than the issues involved. She was a
capable cheerful and prodigious
homemaker and the first president's wife to
be referred to as "First
Lady."
Aside from her devotion to her husband
and family, her commitments
were not very deep. Most surprising, as
Geer tells us, the White House tem-
perance policy was not her decision, but
that of her husband who believed
alcohol erodes the dignity and efficiency
of government officials. Neverthe-
less, the WCTU credited her with the
policy, bestowed great honors on her
and begged her to be active in its
organization, but she never did much for
the WCTU. She was ambivalent about woman
suffrage and did nothing to
support it. She was noncommital about
reforms of any kind that had political
implications. She was extremely kind to
individuals in need, and active in
church work in her later years. For
several years she was president of the
Woman's Home Missionary Society. She
regularly tried to resign that posi-
tion, but her husband always persuaded
her to continue.
Geer leaves us with the thought that the
title "First Lady" was deserved,
and that Lucy Hayes's contributions to
the welfare of others and her interest
in politics enhanced the role of women
in our society. Quite true. Beyond
that, Geer has missed an intriguing
opportunity to place Lucy Webb Hayes in
women's history. Students of women's
history delineate the development of
separate but complementary spheres for
men and women in the mid- and