Ohio History Journal

Book Reviews

 

Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy. By George

McJimsey. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. xiv + 474p.;

illustrations, notes, index. $25.00.)

Perhaps it was the common bond of a Grinnell College education that lured

George McJimsey to Harry Hopkins as a biographical subject. Certainly few

men other than heads of state and a handful of generals were more important

than Hopkins during World War II, and no one, including Franklin D.

Roosevelt himself, was more pervasive as the New Deal swept across the

nation. Yet, like other presidential factotums, Hopkins has been largely

forgotten by all but historians and a diminishing generation of older Americans.

McJimsey begins his account with a description of Hopkins' early years and

family life in Sioux City and Grinnell, Iowa. The son of a harness maker,

Hopkins enjoyed a happy turn-of-the-century existence. He delivered papers,

easily made friends in school and had a steady girl. He was also a good athlete,

particularly in basketball. Even in the idyllic small-town environment of

Grinnell, though, Hopkins was already developing the healthy cynicism that

later deflated so many of the New Deal's critics.

After high school, Hopkins matriculated at Grinnell College. There, influ-

enced by professors who believed Grinnell graduates should improve the world

through social commitment, the young Hopkins began to refine the attitudes he

carried into public life. His Grinnell education led him to social work in New

York City, and later to positions with the American Red Cross, the Association

for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP) and finally to the executive

directorship of the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA),

where he attracted Roosevelt's attention in 1932.

The ensuing phases of Hopkins' life are better known. He directed with skill

and compassion a number of New Deal relief programs, all the while never

deviating from a simple conviction: "Hunger is not debatable." So humane a

philosophy naturally endeared him to America's poor. In his unwavering

devotion to that humble constituency Hopkins truly exemplified the highest

sense of the term "public servant."

World War II, of course, altered America's and Hopkins' destiny. At

Roosevelt's beckoning, Hopkins made an effective transition from relief

minister par excellence to diplomat extraordinaire. Before and after the United

States' entry into the war Hopkins advanced America's cause. He was

virtually everywhere-Placentia Bay, Casablanca, Tehran, Yalta and else-

where, even though serious digestive problems frequently debilitated him.

McJimsey devotes about two-thirds of his book to Hopkins' career during

the war years. It is here that the author is most artful, describing in patient

detail the Gordian snarl of Lend-Lease and other wartime policies. Hopkins

seemed to sense instinctively how idiosyncrasy and personal pique often shape

diplomacy, steering a delicate course, for instance, between Winston Churchill

and Josef Stalin, although he tended to placate the Soviet leader.

McJimsey used a wide variety of printed and manuscript sources, including

Grinnell College records, Red Cross and other social service agency papers,

the correspondence of several prominent New Dealers and wartime figures and

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180                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

the rich Hopkins and Roosevelt collections in Hyde Park. Indeed, it is through

his extensive use of these varied materials that McJimsey's biography surpass-

es the more anecdotal (and consequently more readable) Harry Hopkins: A

Biography, by Henry H. Adams. Too, McJimsey's book is more analytical

than Robert Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History, which,

though dated, remains indispensable because of its detail and description.

One wishes that McJimsey would have cast his Hopkins more vividly against

the backdrop of the thirties and forties. The book provides little of the flavor

of the Roosevelt court and almost none of World War II. For example,

McJimsey mentions neither VE nor VJ Day. Furthermore, McJimsey's Hopkins

would have been livelier had he been juxtaposed, inter alia, against the London

Blitz, the siege of Leningrad and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki. And this book lacks colorful vignettes of Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt,

Chiang Kai-shek, Charles de Gaulle and others. Considering that these men

were the titans of their age, they deserved a better descriptive fate.

 

Walsh College                                     Frank P. Vazzano

 

 

Dictionary of American Conservatism: The First Complete Guide to Issues,

People, Events, Organizations. By Louis Filler. (New York: Philosophical

Library, Inc., 1987. 380p.; $29.95.)

Louis Filler, now retired from teaching, but continuing a prolific publishing

career that reaches back half a century, has written the first dictionary of

American conservatism. It covers people, organizations, events, and issues of

conservatism past and present. The entries are not only informative, as one

would expect, but interesting, largely because of the author's wide range of

scholarship and distinctive point of view. Many items, handled somewhat

differently, also appear in his Dictionary of American Social Change.

Professor Filler takes care to say that a dictionary is not an encyclopedia, yet

the volume under review often emits the variant hues of an eclectic encyclo-

pedia. Words such as racism and even conservatism are more discussed than

defined. The same may be said of war, liberalism (transformed after the Great

Depression into quasi-socialism), and slavery (too closely linked with the

indentured servitude of whites).

Many years ago Filler grew sympathetic to conservative causes, while

maintaining a compassionate attitude toward the poor and the less-privileged.

He is not anti-labor or even anti-government, and looks always for humane

action. This sensibility pervades his entries, many of which are short essays of

enlightenment. The seven-hundred-word essay on World War I is excellent, as

are the tightly written pieces on Henry James, Herbert Hoover, and H. L.

Mencken. This reviewer is struck by Filler's ability to find conservative themes

in movements and personalities commonly deemed reformist or liberal. Thus

readers will find discussions of populism, progressivism, abolitionism, Jane

Addams, and Lewis Tappan. Filler excels in book reviews; see, for example,

The Unraveling of America (1984), in length comparable to reviews found in

scholarly journals. Many essays conclude with suggestions for additional

reading.

Although Filler protects himself by acknowledging that he has not prepared

a Who's Who of conservatives, hoping only to cover "representative figures,

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Book Reviews                                                  181

 

visible personalities, and symbolic slogans and ideas," users of this reference

book will find cause to second-guess his principles of selection. Jane Addams

and Abbie Hoffman are included, but not Edith Wharton or Nicholas Murray

Butler. Anita Bryant makes the list; Walter Lippmann, William Gilmore

Simms, Donald Davidson, and George Stigler do not. Why the muckraking

journalist and novelist David Graham Phillips and Claude Pepper, the Demo-

cratic politician from Florida, are included is not made clear. Readers will find

entries on tipping and quality control, but none on such venerable conservative

themes as duty, work, custom, prudence, authority, virtue, inequality, and

legitimacy. Fuzziness in description occasionally sets in. A case in point is the

New History, misleading on both James Harvey Robinson and the more radical

approaches that emerged in the 1960s.

The Dictionary of American Conservatism would have benefited from more

careful editing. Common names such as Randolph Bourne, John Kenneth

Galbraith, Pare Lorentz, and Nikita Khrushchev are misspelled; The Scarlet

Letter is dated 1950, and so on. Bibliographical selections are not always the

preferred ones. To list Fawn Brodie's Jefferson as one of only two books on

the revolutionary thinker is surprising, given the numerous better studies

available.

Some of the deficiencies in the volume are attributable to the fact that it is the

first such effort to appear in print. When all is said and done, there is something

about the texture of this Dictionary that is subtly engaging. The varied entries

and sources, the sensibility of a learned student of American history, leavened

with a taste for realism and common sense, carry the reader along. Moreover,

Filler's work is graced with an admirable Preface by Russell Kirk, who in

several paragraphs provides a concise statement on the nature of the conser-

vative mentality. What emerges is not a bland dictionary or an epic of

conservatism, but rather a living portrait of issues that matter to conservatives.

This Dictionary is a success because it proves that such an ambitious

undertaking is possible, even though revisions will doubtless be necessary.

 

The University of Toledo                              Ronald Lora

 

 

Crusade Against Slavery: Friends, Foes, and Reforms, 1820-1860. By Louis

Filler. (Algonac, Michigan: Reference Publications, Inc., 1986. 389p.; illus-

trations, maps, notes, bibliographic overview, index. $24.95 cloth; $12.95

paper.)

When first published in 1960, Louis Filler's The Crusade Against Slavery,

1830-1860 received positive reviews. Prominent historians including Kenneth

Stampp, Gilman Ostrander, Larry Gara, and Avery Craven recognized it as an

important achievement, especially in its elevation of William Lloyd Garrison to

central leadership of the abolition movement. Filler's rejection of the Gilbert

Barnes thesis which had promoted Theodore Weld and other westerners as the

most important leaders of the movement has stood the test of close to thirty

years of abolition study. Thus one might expect that the publication of a new

edition of Filler's pathbreaking study would be a welcome addition to

antislavery literature. Yet a closer look leaves one who is familiar with the

original monograph wondering why another edition is in order.

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182                                                  OHIO HISTORY

 

In a new introduction Filler tells us that he has made several hundred

changes in the text along with significant emendations of footnotes. Such

textual changes are very difficult to locate. Indeed, all but a few are of minor

consequence and hardly merit a new edition. Filler has also added a subtitle

and altered the beginning date from 1830 to 1820 without changing the text. Nor

are the footnotes significantly amended. All but a few are left as they were, the

only changes being infrequent additions. In light of the vast abolition literature

published since 1960, one is surprised to discover how few significant writings

are mentioned in the new edition. One is also disappointed to find that the new

Bibliographic Overview is extremely selective and in no sense gives the reader

the total picture of recent antislavery historiography. For example, no mention

is made of James B. Stewart's model political biography of Joshua Giddings in

either footnotes or bibliography. Filler makes no effort to hide his personal

bias, taking verbal swipes at such prominent historians as Larry Gara,

Lawrence Friedman, and Merton Dillon, as well as Stewart who is berated for

his interpretation of the movement in his highly useful Holy Warriors.

Despite the promise of significant changes from the 1960 study, Filler

disappoints the reader in his basically unaltered study. His introduction does

not really discuss recent trends as much as it allows the author to vent his

feelings at several of his favorite targets. Especially and perhaps deservedly

attacked are those historians who persist in psychological interpretations of the

abolitionists, usually concluding that less than admirable factors motivated

their interest in the plight of the slave. Filler purports to see an erosion of

appreciation of the abolitionists and their movement among today's histori-

ans-a trend which many in the field would not agree exists.

Filler's original monography remains useful to students of the antebellum

period. He provides an important, largely appreciative overview of abolition-

ism and is especially effective in showing the close relationship of abolitionism

and other reform movements and in describing the years before the antislavery

movement became politically oriented. His defense of the abolitionists as a

whole and the Garrisonians in particular, all the time pointing out their

inconsistencies and faults, is as viable today as it was in 1960. Less useful is

Filler's recounting of the 1850s where the reader is led through familiar

territory without significant additional information or interpretation. In places,

the study is somewhat disjointed in organization and choppy in style. The book

is clearly not for the beginning college student who would be left confused with

the lack of an overview or smooth transition from one topic to the next. To

those versed in the period, Filler's view remains as significant an account and

interpretation in the eighties as it was in the sixties. The original edition will

continue to meet the needs of most readers.

 

Youngstown State University                         Frederick J. Blue

 

 

Agricultural Distress in the Midwest Past & Present. Edited by Lawrence E.

Gelfand and Robert J. Neymery. (Iowa City: Center for the Study of the

Recent History of the United States, 1986. ix + 111p.; tables, figures, notes.

$9.95 paper.)

Agricultural distress is not new to farmers in the Midwest. From the granger

period of the 1870s through the cooperative movement of the early twentieth

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Book Reviews                                                  183

 

century, economic change has troubled the agricultural community. With acute

economic distress continuing to plague Midwestern agriculture during the late

twentieth century, the Center for the Study of the Recent History of the United

States at the University of Iowa hosted a symposium at which scholars

attempted to place Midwestern agricultural problems in perspective. The

papers presented at that symposium, published here, trace the development of

those problems and the policies designed to alleviate them over the past

century.

The first paper presented by Walter T. K. Nugent, Tackes Professor of

History at the University of Notre Dame, provides an excellent introduction to

the state of American agriculture between 1880 and 1920. Nugent notes that

improved technology and transportation helped make farmers one-crop spe-

cialists within the market economy of the industrialized world. Commercial

agriculture, however, meant a loss of freedom and a dependence upon bankers,

commission men and markets far beyond the control of farmers. Increasingly,

Midwesterners attempted to resolve economic problems by political means.

Governmental intervention in agriculture in the form of tariffs, direct purchas-

ing and price fixing became daily topics of discussion in the farm community.

Nugent correctly notes that as long as farmers exist within an industrial,

market economy, their economic situation or plight will change little. Nugent

implies, although he does not state, that the solution to the economic problems

of many small-scale farmers is for them to leave the land.

Next, David E. Hamilton, Assistant Professor of History at the University of

Kentucky, furnishes a detailed look at American farm policy between World

War I and World War II. Hamilton rejects the traditional belief that the 1920s

were years of economic depression for farmers caused merely by low prices

and inadequate federal policy. Instead, he suggests that the interwar years

marked a time when policy makers attempted to "rationalize" agriculture by

giving it an institutional order. Hamilton contends that federal policy makers,

led by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, tried to fit agriculture into the

context of mainstream industrial society. As technocrats addressed the prob-

lems of agriculture, however, their solution favored narrow interest groups not

the marginal farmer.

Stanley R. Johnson, Director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural

Development at Iowa State University, explains the purpose of the Food and

Agriculture Act of 1985 that will shape governmental agricultural policy into

the early 1990s. He is not optimistic that the economic condition of agriculture

will change for the better during the immediate future, because of foreign

production, demand and protectionism. Finally, Norman Borlaug, Distin-

guished Professor of International Agriculture at Texas A & M University and

past Director of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center at

Londres, Mexico, and father of the "Green Revolution," looks at the Center's

activities and world agricultural needs. Borlaug's common sense approach to

agricultural improvement and incisive reflection upon human nature provides

an enjoyable reflection on the past.

Overall, this collection of symposium papers furnishes a useful, brief and

highly selective look at Midwestern agricultural problems. Agricultural histo-

rians will find the contributions of Nugent and Hamilton particularly useful for

synthesizing their knowledge of agricultural problems and policy since the late

nineteenth century. Only Nugent and Johnson, however, deal specifically with

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184                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

the Midwest. Hamilton's policy study necessarily applies to the nation as a

whole, while Borlaug's address is a pleasant diversion.

 

State Historical Society of Missouri               R. Douglas Hurt

 

 

Frances Willard: A Biography. By Ruth Bordin. (Chapel Hill: The North

Carolina Press, 1986. xv + 294p.; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.

$25.00.)

In Frances Willard: A Biography, Ruth Bordin masterfully portrays the life

of the charismatic leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union who

was widely regarded during the latter decades of the nineteenth century as both

the temperance queen of the United States and the St. Francis of American

womanhood. Using the previously unavailable sources, including all of

Willard's diaries and the private papers of her close friend and associate,

Hannah Whitnall Smith, Bordin convincingly illustrates that Willard's success

came from her ability to merge within her personality the conflicting goals

advocated by a radical social vision, and those demanded by the cult of

domesticity.

As the daughter of a Free-Soil Democrat who served in the Wisconsin

legislature, Willard, born in 1839, was raised in that era of altruistic reform

culminating in the abolitionist crusade to end involuntary servitude. Beginning

in the early 1870s as Willard grew into her majority, she increasingly became

drawn to women's issues. As these issues became central to her life, they led

her to become first the president of the Northwestern Ladies College (later, the

Women's College, Northwestern University), and ultimately, in 1879, the

president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, a position she held

until her death in 1898. From this position, Willard attempted to make the

WCTU a multi-issue organization, focusing first on protecting women and the

home, then on temperance and other radical causes such as woman's suffrage,

equal rights, prison reform and Christian Socialism. By advocating what was

then regarded as radical reform to protect women, the home and the cult of

domesticity, Willard, by not threatening traditional values, gained a wide

popular following throughout the nation.

Frances Willard is not limited to biography; it also is excellent social history

illustrating one woman's tenuous existence in an overwhelming male environ-

ment. Bordin, drawing on Carrol Smith-Rosenberg's notion of homosocial

relationships, illustrates that Willard's intimate relationships with women was

the supportive human characteristic allowing her to continue her crusade in the

face of an obstinant male world. Willard, while eschewing marriage, developed

homosocial relationships with her mother, her personal secretary, Ruth

Gordon, and with many other women who shared her views, goals and

burdens. While constantly rebuffed by the male establishment, especially in

the Methodist church, Willard did not falter because of the close, personal

support she received from women with whom she shared her deepest and most

intimate feelings.

While portraying Willard as a strong link between altruistic reformers of the

nineteenth century and their more realistic counterparts in the twentieth

century, Bordin failed to adequately explain why the woman who at her death

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Book Reviews                                                  185

 

was regarded as the most famous American of her sex is hardly remembered

today. To conclude, as Bordin does, that Willard became too closely identified

with the failed reform of temperance is not fully explanatory. Willard's passing

popularity also appears as a reaction to her thorough devotion to the rejected

conception of women as defined by the cult of domesticity. Purity, piety,

domesticity and submissiveness were alien to the thrust of the woman's

movement throughout most of the twentieth century, even if in recent years

temperance again has raised its sober head.

This criticism should not detract from the significant contribution made by

this book. Bordin has thoroughly researched her subject, and her presentation

is so becoming that the reader is left with the impression that he has known

Willard for most of her life. This is biography at its best, and Bordin is to be

highly complimented. Frances Willard: A Biography is required reading for

students of women's and social history.

 

Youngstown State University                         Fred W. Viehe

 

 

Rebel Raider: The Life of General John Hunt Morgan. By James A. Ramage.

(Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986. xi + 306p.; illustra-

tions, maps, notes, bibliographic notes, index. $25.00.)

Ramage planned to describe the life and career of John Hunt Morgan, as well

as evaluate his role in the Civil War. Born in 1825 of a family well up in the

social aristocracy of Kentucky, and the eldest of eleven children, Morgan

attended Transylvania University. Undistinguished as a student, he left the

university after a duel with a classmate. He served in the Mexican War with the

Kentucky militia, fighting at Buena Vista. Attracted by military life, Morgan

tried to obtain a commission in the army after the war, to no avail. He went into

business, including that of renting slaves to others, and became a captain in the

Kentucky militia. Ramage observed that "he thoroughly identified with the

Southern way of life .... When Southern civilization was threatened,

Morgan's own adjustment was endangered" (p. 39).

After Kentucky's abortive attempt at neutrality as the Civil War opened,

Morgan led the Lexington Rifles and other volunteers of occupied Lexington,

and on his own initiative embarked on a guerrilla war, aimed, Ramage claimed,

to protect Southern sympathizers in Kentucky. At about the same time his first

wife, Rebecca, died after an extended illness. The story of Morgan's activities

as a partisan leader are well-known, as he disrupted Union communications,

especially railroads, in Kentucky and Tennessee. Though he accomplished

"nothing of great military significance" (p. 63), he became something of a

popular military hero throughout the Confederacy.

A guerilla leader, Morgan received little support and sympathy from the

regular Confederate military, and deservedly so as he was "not a team player"

(p. 228), but he remained a hero of considerable proportions to Southerners.

Morgan appeared to be successful even when the fortunes of war failed to favor

the Confederate cause. His career divided into roughly two parts: that prior to

his second marriage, on which his reputation was established, and that after,

when he proved less successful. He married Martha Ready, of Murfreesboro,

Tennessee, in December, 1862. Morgan "put gambling and high risks behind

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186                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

him," and "the source of his creativity and motivation as a guerrilla warrior

was lost" (p. 147).

Ohioans know Morgan best for his raid into Indiana and Ohio, where

careless, he was captured and imprisoned in the Ohio State Penitentiary at

Columbus. Ramage gives General Ambrose E. Burnside the credit for this, as

Burnside's cavalry, Commander Leroy Fitch's gunboats, along with Indiana

and Ohio militia brought Morgan to bay. The raid succeeded in refurbishing

Morgan's reputation, but failed to hurt Northern morale.

After four months in prison, Morgan and some of his men escaped, and he

returned to lead another raid into Kentucky in 1864. He had virtually no regular

Confederate support, as that army was stretched too thin to provide either the

men or material for him. Supposedly relieved of command because of an

investigation into a bank robbery by his forces, he instead moved his small

command into eastern Tennessee, where, at Greeneville, he chose to flee

rather than surrender, and was killed, September 4, 1864.

Ramage combed many manuscript collections, with countless letters and

dozens of newspaper accounts. There is no bibliography, only a brief biblio-

graphical note, and we may well lament this. The end notes, however, appear

quite complete and fill some of the void. We learn more of Morgan than we

perhaps need to know, but that is a tribute to Ramage's thorough investigation.

Along with other, previously published, accounts of Morgan, it appears no one

will have to tackle this job again for a long time.

 

The University of Akron                            Robert H. Jones

 

 

The History of Wisconsin. Volume III: Urbanization & Industrialization,

1873-1893. By Robert C. Nesbit. (Madison: The State Historical Society of

Wisconsin, 1985. xiv + 693p.; maps, illustrations, notes, appendix, notes on

sources, index. $30.00.)

 

Robert C. Nesbit argues that the period 1873-1893 was one of "sweeping

changes" in the lives of Wisconsin's citizens. A "major transformation" of the

state's economy brought about, in turn, a series of "far-reaching adjustments"

in its social and political structures (pp. v-vi).

Nesbit, a retired professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-

Madison, has mined an extensive collection of published and unpublished

materials in order to produce a remarkably thorough work of scholarship.

There are lengthy notes at the foot of the page, numerous maps and graphs,

seventy-three fascinating photographs, a twenty-four page essay on sources,

and a marvelous index. Nesbit has thus contributed a most impressive addition

to the six-volume History of Wisconsin sponsored by the State Historical

Society of Wisconsin.

In keeping with his thesis, Nesbit devotes the first section of five chapters to

economic developments. He recounts the shift from wheat farming to dairying

as the focus of Wisconsin agriculture. Most interesting here is the suggestion

that the emergence of dairy farming was by no means inevitable but, in fact,

required considerable prosyletizing, experimentation, technological innova-

tion, and tax revenues. Nesbit then discusses lumbering, the state's dominant

industry, the expansion of the rail network along with other forms of transpor-

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Book Reviews                                                  187

 

tation, and the crucial role played by entrepreneurs in the region's flour mills,

paper factories, and, of course, Milwaukee's famous breweries. In the final

chapter of the section Nesbit portrays Wisconsin as a "workshop," a supplier

of machinery, goods, and services, located between the rising commercial

centers of Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul (p. 205).

According to Nesbit, Wisconsinites practiced an "old-time politics," by

which he means that they were passionately partisan, intensely concerned with

state and local (but seldom national) issues, and usually voted along lines of

ethnic and cultural affiliation. The Republican Party, controlled by old-stock

Yankees, held fast to the governor's seat and the legislature for most of the era.

The Democrats, representing the huge Catholic immigrant population, might

have posed a greater challenge but were unable to capture consistently

Wisconsin's German Lutheran electorate. Nesbit contends that this Yankee-

dominated government responded quite well to rapid social and economic

changes and satisfactorily pursued the interests of the majority.

Wisconsin's social landscape is the subject of five chapters collectively

entitled "Communities." Nesbit begins with a fine demographic portrait of the

state and also includes an interesting look at the conditions of Indians, blacks,

and women. As for the remaining chapters, however, minor objections are in

order. "Labor" is devoted to the plight of industrial unionism and would be

more effective as part of the first section on the economy. Since "Communi-

ties: Geographic and Corporate" is largely an examination of how ethnic and

cultural identities were expressed in the political arena, it rightly belongs in the

section on politics and government. And finally, "Life and Times" gathers

brief accounts of topics such as education, religion, and the arts that deserve

to be treated in greater detail.

Nevertheless, Urbanization and Industrialization is an admirable work. Not

the least of its several virtues is its evenhanded judgement of Wisconsin's past.

For example, Nesbit is quite critical of the high social cost exacted by the new

industrial order and yet convincingly shows that, contrary to contemporary

opinion, the government "responded with salutary changes, a considerable

expansion of services and resources, and actual leadership" (p. 630).

Like the author, who admits that once he began his project he was pleasantly

surprised to discover how dramatic the subject was, this reviewer found that a

seven-hundred page book on two decades of Wisconsin history was far more

absorbing than he had imagined it would be.

 

 

Bethany College                                    Bruce R. Kahler

 

 

Pershing: General of the Armies. By Donald Smythe. (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1986. xii + 399p.; illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography,

index. $27.50.)

"Black Jack" Pershing was fifty-seven years old, in good health and ripe for

command when Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917. His

previous experience in the Philippines, and more recently as head of the

so-called Punitive Expedition in Mexico, made him a likely candidate to

organize and lead the new American Expeditionary Force to France. Admin-

istration officials likewise appreciated his reputation for loyalty and apparent

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188                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

lack of political ambition. So when Secretary of War Newton D. Baker put

forth Pershing's name in the place of others (including generals Leonard Wood

and Hugh L. Scott) President Wilson approved without hesitation. Looking

back it seems he made the right choice. John J. Pershing ultimately personified

the AEF. He also faced head-on the complicated issues of modern coalition

warfare, and successfully guided American efforts to help turn the tide of

events in the Great War.

This book is the second and concluding volume in a two-part biography. (The

first volume entitled Guerrilla Warrior: The Early Life of John J. Pershing was

published in 1973.) Author Donald Smythe has spent more than a quarter

century researching his subject-examined scores of archival collections here

and abroad, and interviewed or corresponded with literally hundreds of people

who knew the general personally. The result is an illuminating portrait which

will not be superseded anytime soon.

There are thirty-six chapters, each relatively short and arranged in a straight

forward chronological fashion, e.g. "The Voyage Overseas (May-June 1917),"

"First Days in France (June 1917)," "Getting Organized (July-August 1917),"

"Chaumont (September 1917)," and so on. Roughly two-thirds of the book

focuses on Pershing's handling of wartime issues and events, with only a few

remaining chapters devoted to his postwar life and career.

Throughout the war Pershing drove his staff hard, demanded results, and

when he failed to get them, sacked those whom he considered responsible-

including on one occasion a whole slew of division commanders. But he was

never as cold, humorless, and devoid of emotion as some perceived. Rather he

was "two decidedly different men: remote and austere in his official life, warm

and human in his personality" (p. 238). It takes a keen observer to find and

piece together all the subtle indicators of a man's character and personality.

Professor Smythe more than meets this challenge by calling up a wide

assortment of good quotes, anecdotes, and other comments reflective of the

general's many-sided nature. Included too are many brief yet insightful

characterizations of the key figures surrounding Pershing.

Not all of the fighting in the Great War took place on the battlefield.

Bloodletting of another sort, in the form of strained relations over major policy

and strategic issues, frequently occurred among Allied leaders at the highest

level. There were, for example, good arguments on both sides of the so-called

"amalgamation issue." Yet Pershing seemed willing to risk everything in order

to keep American units separate. "He was," notes Smythe, "like a man

playing Russian roulette. He lived through it, but he was lucky he didn't blow

his head off" (p. 234-35).

Pershing also guessed correctly in assuming that the Allies would not need so

many priority shipments of American infantry and machine gun units. How-

ever, Smythe seriously doubts that more intensive rifle training or the use of

"open warfare" tactics, both of which Pershing called for repeatedly, would

have altered the war's outcome. "In truth," the author concludes, "it might be

argued that the war was eventually won, not by the introduction of any tactic

like open warfare, but simply by attrition, by the fact that one side ran out of

men and equipment before the other-in other words, by exhaustion" (p. 236).

Smythe gives a balanced assessment overall, both of America's and Pershing's

contribution toward victory in the war.

In addition, most readers will profit from Smythe's tactical and operational

analysis of the 1917-18 campaigns. His coverage of events at Cantigny, Belleau

• 10
 

Book Reviews                                                    189

 

Wood, St. Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne includes thoughtful discussion on

logistics, plans, training, and organization, as well as good commentary on

Allied leadership capabilities. His narrative also evinces a feeling description of

the "face of battle"-the muck, mud, stench, darkness and confusion, the

sheer terror, and of course the heroism commonly associated with fighting on

the Western Front. For Pershing, clearly, it appeared darkest just before the

dawn. Worn out, sad and depressed by ever mounting problems in early

October 1918, he confided in his secret lover, Mademoiselle Resco: "I feel like

I am carrying the whole world on my shoulders" (p. 208). Yet for the benefit

of those around him, he never wavered in his optimism regarding eventual

triumph.

In sum, this is a thoroughly researched, scholarly, and well-written study of

Pershing's life and career. It is obvious that Smythe understands America's

one and only "General of the Armies" better than any previous writer.

 

 

US Army Quartermaster School                       Steven E. Anders

Fort Lee, Virginia

 

 

American Workers, American Unions, 1920-1985. By Robert H. Zieger.

(Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. xii +

²33p.; bibliographical essay, index. $25.00 cloth; $9.95 paper.)

University of Florida historian Zieger has previously written three well-

received monographs on labor unions in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. His

newest book is a survey, based mainly on secondary sources and intended for

general readers and for students in history courses. It joins James R. Green's

The World of the Worker (1980) as general overviews of twentieth century

American labor. As we shall see, Zieger differs from Green in important

respects.

As a brief synthesis, Zieger's work traverses territory familiar to specialists

in the field. He describes organized labor's expansion after 1933, New Deal

labor legislation, the founding of the CIO, and its early victories in autos and

steel. During World War II, armed with the government's maintenance of

membership policy, union membership climbed 50 percent and organized labor

gained security in many industries. But the war's heritage was mixed.

Governmental restrictions on unions increased during and after the war, both

limiting labor's independence and creating intra-union tensions. Second, major

strike waves both during and just after the war alienated public opinion.

Finally, organized labor became closely tied to the Democratic Party. The Cold

War and the 1948 Wallace campaign led to the CIO's purge of member unions

which dissented from the Democratic Party on these matters. Thereafter,

American unions became even more troubled. In the fifties, "affluent work-

ers" enjoyed higher wages and expanded fringe benefits; the AFL and CIO

merged; and public employee unionism grew. But unions and labor-management

relations grew increasingly bureaucratized, and alienation from work, wide-

spread poverty, and racial bias still marred working-class society. The 1960s

found organized labor even more on the defensive. Issues such as Vietnam, the

environment, civil rights, and black militancy, plus the collapse of liberal

Democratic dominance late in the decade, eroded unions' prestige and

weakened their influence in national politics.

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190                                                  OHIO HISTORY

 

As the author's preface reveals, the scope of this book is narrower than its

title suggests. Unlike Green, whose more broadly defined "world of the

worker" encompassed culture, ethnicity, and gender, Zieger's subject is

American unions more than American workers. Chronologically, too, Zieger's

canvass is smaller than either his title promises or than Green's, which spans

the entire twentieth century. Zieger's main concern is the 1930s through the

1960s. The formative 1930s and 1940s alone account for more than five-eighths

of the book. By contrast, readers will find little here on the 1920s and 1980s and

almost nothing on the 1970s. Zieger's chapters are clearly structured, which is

not always the case with Green's writing. In addition, readers finding Green's

new left outlook uncongenial may feel more comfortable with Zieger's main-

stream liberalism. Whereas Green's heroes are militant radicals, Zieger's

sympathies lie with mainstream union leaders. While not uncritical of their

policies, he casts them as unaccepted "realists" steering between right-wing

employers and politicians on one side and "self-assured radicals" on the other.

Although both Zieger and Green acknowledge the left's presence, Zieger is

much less willing to see the relevance of radicalism. His treatment of the CIO's

communist purge of 1948-50 condemns violence and denounces persecution of

non-CP leftists but does not question the assumptions or motives behind the

expulsion (or note its consequences for organized labor). Zieger hits CP

unionists for subservience to the USSR on foreign policy, but he does not

explain why so many workers elected CP-linked officers or whether their

unions functioned differently from those supporting the Democrats and the

Cold War. As these comments suggest, readers seeking a dissenting perspec-

tive or a labor history wider than the story of unions may be disappointed in

Zieger's offering. However, it will likely satisfy those wanting a well-written

narrative of national events that emphasizes and empathizes with organized

labor.

 

Eastern Michigan University                       Michael W. Homel

 

The Northwest Ordinance, 1787: A Bicentennial Handbook. Edited by Robert

M. Taylor, Jr. (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1987. xxiii + 136p.;

chronology, maps, illustrations, notes, appendix, selected bibliography,

index, separate wall map, and facsimile of the Northwest Ordinance. $6.50

paper.)

With the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution,

the Northwest Ordinance has been called one of the three great charters in the

formation of our nation. It has also been called the plan on which the United

States was built. Providing for the organization and governance of the new

nation's first colony, the area north and west of the River Ohio, it established

the most magnanimous colonial policy the world had ever seen. At its heart

was the assurance that as many as five states could emerge from the Northwest

Territory, each "on an equal footing with the original states in all respects

whatever." Under its principles thirty-one of the present fifty American states

have entered the Union. Even the territories of the Northern Marianas and

Western Samoan Islands are organized today under those principles.

Of the three charters, it is the Ordinance which has the least name

recognition, is the least understood. Consequently, the bicentennial handbook

• 12
 

Book Reviews                                                  191

 

published by the Indiana Historical Society serves the important function of

providing teachers, students, and the general public with an in-depth under-

standing of the content and significance of the Ordinance in determining what

kind of country this was going to be.

The handbook is presented in three parts. The first features an essay by

Andrew R. L. Cayton on "The Northwest Ordinance from the Perspective of

the Frontier," and considers the Ordinance from the points of view of three

disparate groups living on the frontier at the time of its passage-the Native

Americans, the Anglo-Americans (primarily squatters), and the French inhab-

itants of the area in and about Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes. It also

includes an essay by its editor, Robert M. Taylor, concerning the relatively

unknown eighteen men in the Confederation Congress at the time of the

consideration and ultimate passage of the Ordinance, his argument being that

they were not intellectually and politically inferior to those sitting in the

Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as has frequently been asserted.

The second part of the handbook consists of an annotated text of the

Ordinance, by section and article, addressing the obscure legalese in which

much of the document was written and making it intelligible for the great

majority of us who are not lawyers by training and profession. Involving the

contributions of nearly a score of Indiana's finest historians, editors, and

lawyers, the annotations (in this reviewer's opinion) constitute the single

greatest service rendered by the handbook. As explained in the Introduction

(p. xii), "Young readers are forewarned that, in places, the Ordinance is

difficult for all but trained lawyers to understand. (That is one reason why the

Society decided upon this format for the book)."

In the third part of the handbook, Patrick J. Furlong considers how a paper

plan was transformed into functioning territorial and then state governments in

his essay "Putting the Ordinance to Work in the Northwest." In it he details

the experiences of the people of the original Northwest Territory under

Governor Arthur St. Clair, then those of the subsequent territories which

emerged as the ultimate states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin,

and Minnesota. Furlong notes that while at first there had been "serious doubt

that the westerners would be competent to govern themselves without firm

direction from their betters in the long-settled states along the Atlantic

seaboard," by the time the Wisconsin Territory was formed "there were no

longer any legal or political arguments about the meaning of the Northwest

Ordinance, . . . The patterns of territorial government were well settled, the

necessary legal precedents were firmly established, and personal and local

political issues dominated the attention of voters and legislators alike. The

Northwest Ordinance had become a matter of historical interest rather than

political debate."

Among the not unexpected spate of books commemorating the bicentennials

of both the Northwest Ordinance and the Constitution, this is clearly one of the

better, more useful ones, particularly for classroom teachers and their stu-

dents. Favored with well-selected maps, including the reproduction of a

handsome four-color wall map first issued at the time of the Ordinance's

sesquicentennial anniversary, which has been inserted in its own pocket

attached to the inside rear cover, it also contains helpful end-notes and an

up-to-date bibliography.

A few errors and omissions managed to escape the editor's pencil. For

examples, on page 4 the reader may be surprised to learn that the Miamis as

• 13
 

192                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

well as the Delaware and Shawnee "had migrated west from eastern

Pennsylvania in the middle of the eighteenth century." And in the lengthy

annotation on pages 62-65 concerning the third article of the Articles of

Compact, one is perplexed to find no consideration of the highly significant

sentence dealing with the encouragement of education.

Yet the merits of this handbook far transcend occasional flaws. Intended

primarily for the people of Indiana, its merits a wide readership across the Old

Northwest and the nation.

 

Miami University                                  Phillip R. Shriver

 

 

Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance. By Peter S.

Onuf. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. xxi + 197p.; maps,

notes, index. $27.50.)

With two books and a series of distinguished articles, Peter S. Onuf of

Southern Methodist University has emerged as the nation's foremost authority

on the evolution of the doctrines of territorialism and statehood that dominated

the westward expansion of the United States. Readers of Ohio History will

remember his stimulating "From Constitution to Higher Law: The Reinterpre-

tation of the Northwest Ordinance" which appeared in the Winter-Spring 1985

issue. Scholars were particularly impressed with his The Origins of the Federal

Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775-1787 (1983)

which examined the history of the American state system during the Confed-

erate era. Onuf has capped his studies with Statehood and Union, an

intellectual history of the adoption of the Ordinance of 1787 and its implemen-

tation in the era of northwestern state making.

For those interested in the early history of Ohio, Statehood and Union is

indispensable reading. But it is not the place to begin one's study of the region.

It requires its readers have a basic understanding of the political history of the

early Northwest Territory, 1787-1837. With such a background, readers will

find Statehood and Union is the place to broaden one's informed comprehen-

sion of what the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote the document and

how their fragmentary, ambiguous, and contradictory provisions achieved

substance and form in the Old Northwest. Onuf seeks to determine the

author's original intent and the interpretation and application of the text in the

Northwest Territory, with particular attention focused on Ohio. He concludes

with discussion of the apotheosis of the Ordinance and of its elevation into one

of the great documents of America's founding, rivaling the Declaration and the

Constitution.

According to Onuf, four basic premises of westward policy emerged in the

1780s-prior survey, controlled development, compact settlement, and the

introduction of industrious, market-oriented settlers. Congress sought to

achieve the first three through the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the last through

the guarantee of property rights and eventual statehood status pledged in the

Ordinance of 1784 and implemented in the 1787 Ordinance. Once enacted, the

key question that emerged was just how much the Ordinance was a "compact"

with constitutional validity that could not be changed by Congress and just how

much latitude Congress or the territories had to modify its provisions under

changing circumstances. Onuf's central chapters concentrate on three critical

• 14
 

Book Reviews                                                  193

 

"compact" provisions of the Ordinance-the transition from territory to state;

state boundary questions; and the prohibition of slavery. While the latter

question was never significant in Ohio politics, the first two were given a

degree of permanency in the course of Ohio's emergence as the first state

carved from the Northwest Territory.

Onufs arguments dovetail nicely with those of Andrew Cayton in The

Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country (1986). Both

books examine popular ideology. Both add new dimensions to our comprehen-

sion of how the nation took the ideals of republicanism and territorialism and

transformed them into transcendental truths central to the American experi-

ence. Because both concentrate on the intellectual aspects of their subject

areas, they avoid the clash of personalities, regions, and interests that make

politics so popular to most readers of history. Even so, both are worth reading.

 

Bowling Green State University                  David Curtis Skaggs

 

 

Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South. By Grady McWhiney with a

prologue by Forrest McDonald. (University, Alabama: University of

Alabama Press, 1988. xliii + 290p.; illustrations, notes, appendix, index.

$25.95.)

Everyone knows that Southerners differ from Yankees, and in Cracker

Culture Grady McWhiney explains why. In fact, he suggests that the differ-

ences between Northerners and Southerners not only predate the settlement of

America, but arose before the conquest of Britain (the Roman, not the Norman

one). His thesis is that the dominant culture of the antebellum South, like most

of its people, came from the "Celtic fringe" of the British Isles (Ireland,

Scotland, Wales, and the highland areas of England), while Northerners came

predominantly from the English lowlands. Using a variety of 17th-through-19th

century sources, mostly accounts of travelers in the South and in the Celtic

regions of Britain, the author details the similarities of culture in the two, then

compares them to their English and Yankee counterparts. The material is

fascinating, even if neccesarily anecdotal.

"Cracker" was a 17th-century Scottish name for a braggart. The word today

is synonymous with "poor white," but the term originally carried no class

distinction, and cracker attitudes pervaded all levels of Southern society. Celts

and Southerners attached great value to independence, leisure, hospitality,

eloquence, and valor. They scorned hard work, formal education, and the

institutions of government. Conversely, Northerners and the English valued

civil order, dependability, hard work, and material success. They looked down

on Southerners as lazy, lawless, improvident, boastful, and violent, Southerners

saw Yankees as rude, bloodless, compulsive, materialistic, and money-

grubbing. In many ways, each culture prized just those traits that the other

deplored.

The contention that the South's racial stock was predominantly Celtic rests

on an analysis of surnames in the 1790 federal census, a method McWhiney

concedes to be "both complex and inexact." The methodology, not explained

in the book, was developed by his colleagues Forrest McDonald and Ellen

Shapiro McDonald ("The Ethnic Origins of the American People, 1790,"

• 15
 

194                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

William and Mary Quarterly 37 [1980], 179-99). Family histories support but

cannot corroborate his thesis; the proportion of families so studied is still far

too small.

This work has major implications for cultural and family historians. The

Southern distrust of institutions, the preference for oral rather than written

transmission of culture, and the lower rates of literacy together explain why

public and private records of Southern families are harder to find than they are

in the North. The nature of Southern agriculture, based on the herding of

livestock on open range rather than the mixed tillage of the North; the

preference for sparsely-settled country rather than villages and close-set farms;

and the legendary senses of daring and independence likewise account for the

footloose pattern of westward migration shown by many Southern families.

The author notes that the antebellum lower Midwest or Ohio Valley was

ethnically and culturally closer to the South than to the North.

McWhiney does not discuss the contribution of Celtic immigrants to the

spoken Southern dialect in terms of accent and vocabulary. The effects of

climate and the practice of slavery on Southern culture are dealt with only

briefly. He uses 1860 as his cut-off date, limiting consideration of Southern

influence on the culture of the American West. There is little about the role and

experience of women. Classical descriptions of the ancient Celts of Europe

bear many similarities to accounts of the early-modern insular Celts, but there

is no mention of the descendants of continental Celts-as in Brittany and

Spanish Galicia-whose images do not conform to the ancestral stereotypes.

Antebellum Southerners had little future-consciousness; they lived in-and

enjoyed-their present, while their Northern contemporaries constantly strove

for future security. Doubtless time itself was perceived differently by the two

communities: observers of traditional and agrarian societies often note their

timeless quality. This is not the same as being ahistorical: if anything, Celts and

Southerners appear more conscious of their history than English and Yankees.

But for the former the past has not passed, as it has for the latter. For

Northerners, with a rigid sense of the directionality of time, the future is most

important, the present is its handmaiden, and the past is found in museums.

For Southerners time seems less linear, and historical events-such as the Civil

War-have a presence and immediacy which baffle Northerners. In the same

way, Irishmen deal every day with repercussions of the Battle of the Boyne

(1690).

Tied to the different conceptions of time were differing views of the Deity.

New Englanders labored under the judgmental gaze of a God who participated

in history, who weighed and measured men's actions and rewarded them

accordingly. Southerners appeared more confident of divine grace and less

worried about the day of judgment, and McWhiney's sources point out that

they were more relaxed about religious observance and less given to denomi-

nation strife.

This is a provocative book, and the contrast between Anglo-Saxon and

Celtic values and attitudes is sharply drawn. In their purest forms, the cultures

McWhiney describes bear an uncanny resemblance to Aesop's ant and

grasshopper, or Nietzsche's Apollonian/Dionysian polarity. The persistence of

cracker values in modern American society raises monumental challenges to

public policy, and McWhiney's explication of their origin is both cogent and

enlightening. He has previously written about the influence of Celtic cultural

values on Confederate military tactics in the Civil War (Grady McWhiney and

• 16
 

Book Reviews                                                  195

 

Perry D. Jamieson, Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the

Southern Heritage (University, Alabama, 1980). I look forward with great

interest to his further work on this topic.

 

Oberlin, Ohio                                  William B. Saxbe, Jr.

 

 

The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856. By William E. Gienapp. (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1987. xi + 564p.; notes, figures, tables,

appendix, bibliography, index. $35.00.)

William E. Gienapp has produced a study of the rise of Republicanism that

most antebellum political historians would be proud to have written, provided

one had the stamina to perform the same impressive research. In this first

volume of a projected two volume work, Gienapp carefully traces the growth

of the Republican party from the Whig debacle of 1852 through the new party's

first presidential campaign with flawed hero John C. Fremont atop the ticket.

Much of this volume concentrates on how the Republicans successfully

struggled with the Know Nothings to replace the Whigs as the Democrats'

chief rival for national political power.

Gienapp's contributions do not really come in the area of creativity or

originality. His real achievement is to document with amazing clarity the

essential elements of what new political historians have been saying for years.

Nevertheless he does spring some surprises; for example, he questions the

common assumption that evangelicals voted primarily anti-Democratic.

Still, the broad outlines of the new political approach are clearly visible.

Gienapp shows that the disruption of the Whig party and the new alignment of

the 1850s began well before the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. At the

same time he clarifies that this was but the first of a two step process that ended

with the Republican party dominating Northern politics. Throughout 1855

ethnocultural tensions, particularly temperance and anti-Catholic issues, con-

tributed to the rapid growth of the Know Nothing movement while hindering

the efforts of antislavery strategists to build a Northern majority against

slavery's expansion.

Once and for all, Gienapp establishes that the breakup of the Whig party was

due as much to cultural and religious concerns as to slavery-related issues.

Though Whiggery limped on past 1854, "nativism had sealed the party's fate"

(p. 161). Gienapp does differ from Michael Holt by arguing that the crisis of the

1850s grew not from old issues no longer being relevant, but that old politicians

could not control the new ethnocultural pressures within the old political

system. (Indeed, Gienapp suggests that temperance was the truly explosive

issue that most politicians sought to avoid.) The Republican party did not

benefit immediately from this situation, however; fusion first failed in most free

states. Opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act alone proved insufficient to

build a new party.

By 1856, however, the march of events weakened the nativist impulse and

played into Republican hands. A vital first step was the disruption of the Know

Nothing national organization, a development Republicans purposively en-

couraged. Besides exploiting the blood split over Kansas, particularly that of

Charles Sumner, Republicans used a strong dose of anti-Catholicism to lure

• 17
 

196                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

American party voters. Salmon P. Chase's critical victory in the 1855 Ohio

gubernatorial race pointed the way to the successful strategy. The "Ohio Plan"

envisioned a party that was half Republican, half Know Nothing.

While admitting that the prime source of Republican strength was Northern

fear of a "slave power conspiracy," Gienapp thus insists that the Republicans

co-opted the nativists' political appeal by similarly stressing the threat of papal

power. His analysis seems convincing on this point, but some still may doubt

the implication that nativism proved the "most powerful impulse" of this

critical period (p. 164). At times Gienapp may indeed oversell his product; for

example, he occasionally exaggerates the "commanding power" of the Know

Nothings (p. 271) and claims that Republican candidate Fremont "sympathized

strongly" with the nativists (p. 318).

Although well-written and incisive, this work probably will be engrossing

only to the specialist. It is definitely not for the weak of will (although the

statistical tables wisely have been relegated to an appendix). However, for

those willing to wade through the voting analysis and follow the accounts of

party infighting from state to state, it will deliver remarkable amounts of insight

and information. Most impressive is Gienapp's skill in sketching political

developments within individual states while providing a compelling picture of

the impact local and state disputes carried on national politics.

With the publication of this work, Gienapp joins Michael Holt, Joel Silbey,

and several other scholars as leading interpreters of the causes of the political

turmoil in the 1850s. One can only hope and expect that the proposed second

volume will maintain the high quality exhibited in the first.

 

Kearney State College                              Vernon L. Volpe

 

 

Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media. By James L.

Baughman. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987. x + 264p.; illustrations,

chronology, notes and references, bibliographic essay, index. $24.95.)

With the possible exception of William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce is the

most significant figure in the history of American journalism. Time, Inc.,

continues to be the colossus of the periodical trade, even though, well before

Luce's death in 1967, television, soaring production costs, and successful

imitative competitors had undermined Luce's preeminence as a journalistic

"communicator." The empire that Luce built endures in the form of Time,

Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Time-Life Books, the post-Luce People, and a

variety of other enterprises. But it is most unlikely that any single person will

ever equal the stature Luce had attained by the 1940s-1950s.

Yet for all his fame and power, Luce, as Baughman interprets his career,

"promoted rather than initiated policies" (p. 158). Despite his conviction that

his magazines, especially Time, directly expressed American values and

aspirations, and despite his famous call in 1941 for an American Century, Luce

was generally content in trying to influence his countrymen toward tendencies

already at work, not bold new departures. And while he enjoyed a reputation

as a journalistic pioneer, Luce, Baughman shows, has less to do with shaping

Time's distinctive character than his Yale classmate and initial collaborator

Briton Hadden. He also took little interest in the highly successful "March of

• 18
 

Book Reviews                                                    197

 

Time" radio programs and newsreels, and resisted launching a popular picture

magazine (Life) until second wife Clare Boothe Luce and other associates

finally overcame his skepticism in the mid-1930s. Fortune was the only one of

Luce's magazines that originated as his own idea.

Limited by the format of Twayne's Twentieth-Century American Biography

series to writing a short, interpretive account, Baughman concerns himself

almost entirely with Luce's public life, from the founding of Time in 1923 until

his effective retirement around 1960. One would like a longer book that gives

more attention to such matters as Luce's experiences as a student at Oxford

University and as a reporter in Chicago and Baltimore after the First World

War; his divorce from Lila Hotz Luce and marriage quickly thereafter to the

actress Clare Boothe Brokaw in 1935; his relationship to his two sons by his

first marriage; and his and Clare's experiments with LSD in the 1960s. But if

Baughman leaves the reader wanting more, that is also because what he gives

us is so good. Meticulously researched and perceptively written, Baughman's

book sets a high standard for the Twayne biography series. It is an excellent

account of the China-born Presbyterian missionary's son whose "mastery of

informing the middle class" (p. 61) once was virtually unquestioned.

 

Ohio University                                 Charles C. Alexander

 

 

The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Volume 13: November 16, 1864-February 20,

1865. Edited by John Y. Simon. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University

Press, 1985. xxvi + 599p.; maps, illustrations, chronology, calendar, index.

$45.00.)

The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Volume 14: February 21-April 30, 1865.

Edited by John Y. Simon. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,

1985. xxvi + 548p.; maps, illustrations, chronology, calendar, index.

$45.00.)

To those Americans, Blue or Gray, suffering in the lines before besieged

Petersburg or in their homes far from the battlefield, it must have seemed like

an endless war in late 1864 as troops on both sides slogged on to continuing

indecisiveness. The romance of the war, if ever there was such, disappeared in

the inhumaness of hunger, illness, loneliness, rain-drenched bodies, and cruel

death. Two intangibles stand out as consistent in those trying times: the

South's indomitable spirit and General U.S. Grant's tenaciousness. Grant

finally prevails and the North wins the victory. To Robert E. Lee, this was no

pretty ending, this triumph on war's chessboard by an old Mexican War

colleague.

These two volumes trace the trails of these two remarkable generals to an old

Virginia courthouse, one general grown old and broken as was his army, the

other upbeat and at the height of his power in those fateful days before

Appomattox, his "finest hour," writes biographer, William McFeely, Grant

anticipated the outcome and made ready to end hostilities with a look toward

a more peaceful future. As the end approaches, some of the mystery of Grant

the general and Grant the man begins to lift. His correspondence shows the

general, putting his trust in Generals Sherman in Georgia and the Carolinas,

and Sheridan in Virginia, breaking the enemy with tactics that reveal his genius

• 19
 

198                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

in the field. The man, usually writing his wife, is deeply involved with family,

as with son Fred who joins his father on the front lines outside Petersburg. He

is the friend, who in the midst of decision making on the front, served as agent

for a project to construct a home for General Sherman. He is the manager who

directs in laconic notes to his generals his calculated moves to crush the

enemy.

Basically, these volumes are an accounting of Grant's activities and his

growth during those closing four and a half months of the long war, a close look

at a military man being tested by war as he faced the routines, the challenges

and the interruptions of command. As Grant attempted to end the war against

a gallant enemy, he also faced daily the irritating prisoner of war problems, the

bickering among his officers for promotions and assignments, and the pres-

sures of a people and a Government intent upon ending the war. Too often it

was his task to make important command decisions for frail men too soon

thrust into command, seeking at the last the glory they had missed by their late

arrivals to the field. Grant's correspondence is the meticulous accountings of

the activities of a general holding loosely to many strands of a developing

modern army, a general with a sense of the present and of the future, planning

strategy for the victory, selecting those commanders he felt were best to

perform the strategy of attrition he designed for the failing enemy. This is the

story of the officers and men of the Army of the Potomac, as they lower the

curtain on the drama through the smoke and the dust of battle.

These closing days of conflict are also the story of three generals and a

President, all intent upon a victory and national restoration, finally becoming

that efficient team of command that made things happen against a faltering

Confederacy short of men and material if not of spirit. Slowly but surely,

Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, supported by a cooperative President, effec-

tively press the might of the North's military machine against a fading South.

But the end did not come handily. Rain mudding up the roads stalled a great

army in the shadow of victory. Reporters from the Northern Press, seeking

new headlines, daily streamed through the ranks. To the general commanding,

there were always the questions of what to do with the former slaves,

confiscated cotton, prisoners of war demanding exchange. But persistent

generals pushed on. Sherman finished off Georgia and South Carolina and

entered North Carolina. Sheridan cleared the Shenandoah Valley of Confed-

erate units, and Grant like a talented puppeteer moved the larger piece across

the chessboard, besting the talented Lee move for move. While Sherman and

Sheridan burned the land, Grant appeased the anxious President, coordinated

with the Navy, supervised prisoner of war policies and prepared for the end.

Telegrams to Grant on April 5, from field officers pursuing Lee's disinte-

grating army, spoke of Rebel deserters, prisoners of war, casualty lists,

starvation and desperation among the defeated enemy. Grant's tactics remain

unchanged. To Sherman he wrote: "If you can possibly do so push on ...

to help "finish the job." Early in April, 1865, the telegrams finally came:

"... Davis and his Cabinet and Lee with most his army retreating ...

Our prisoners number from twelve thousand . . . to fifteen thousand."

The reader anticipates the scene at Appomattox Court House and is hardly

disappointed to read of that staging of national victory. No new light appears

in correspondence relating to Lincoln's assassination, but one seems to sense

a change in the General as his war comes to a close. Grant, as McFeely

suggests, must now find his way in a world in which to conquer becomes even

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Book Reviews                                                  199

 

a greater challenge. In a letter to Julia on April 16, there is a harbinger of life

beyond the sounds of battle. He writes that he is under close security but that

all threats seem past. He hopes Julia is in their Philadelphia home, partly

because of the convenience of travel for himself.

These two volumes continue the excellence of their predecessors as they

follow the correspondence of army officers and government agents, a recording

of democracy meeting its greatest challenge. In particular these two volumes

are a story of the fall of Petersburg and the meeting at Appomattox. But more

than this, they elaborate, through his own writings, Grant, the great man. We

savor this greatness in the drive to Appomattox, knowing that his brilliance will

fade in the political world ahead. Forthcoming volumes of these papers may

prove even more important to historians attempting a true assessment of the

man.

 

Saluda, North Carolina                               Robert Hartje

 

 

Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits & Propaganda Shaped World

War II Movies. By Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black. (New York:

The Free Press, 1987. x + 374p.; illustrations, notes, bibliographical essay,

index. $22.50.)

Mrs. Miniver, Since You Went Away, and Casablanca: these are among the

best known of the hundreds of patriotic feature films made during World War

II. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black commend that these morale

building movies were not merely a reflection of that industry's devotion to the

war effort. Not only were the major studios still guided by the profit motive,

but they also had to comply with regulations instituted by the Office of War

Information (OWI), the federal govenment's wartime propaganda agency. The

OWT's mandate over Hollywood was strengthened by its close working

relationship with the Office of Censorship, which issued export licenses for

films to foreign countries. "Since foreign exhibition often made the difference

between profit and loss for a picture, studio executives found it quite expedient

to follow OWI's advice" (p. viii).

Protective of their foreign markets, studio chiefs shied away from serious

dramas that tackled contemporary political and social issues. At times they

went to extraordinary lengths not to antagonize the fascist powers in Europe.

For example, MGM's well intentioned production of Robert Sherwood's

Pulitzer Prize winning play Idiot's Delight, a biting antiwar, antifascist

statement extremely critical of Mussolini, was submitted to officials of the

Italian government for changes. The film that was finally released in 1939 bore

little resemblance to the play aside from its title.

Hollywood crossed an important threshold in the early 1940s, with the

release of pictures like Charlie Chaplin's classic The Great Dictator (1940) and

Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940), and assumed an openly

interventionist posture. The creation of the OWI served to encourage these

patriotic efforts by filmmakers and developed even stronger themes of wartime

propaganda. OWI officials evaluated feature films with one primary criterion in

mind: "will this picture help win the war?"

While OWI regulations acknowledged that home front society was less than

perfect, films were, nevertheless, encouraged to depict the civilian war effort

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200                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

as a united endeavor. The OWI deplored comedies like Palm Beach Story

(1942) and Princess O'Rourke (1942) that trivialized the importance of volun-

tary contributions to the war effort. The authors note that "even such a

cinematic staple as screeching tires was toned down in Preston Sturges' The

Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) to avoid a reprimand from OWI about

wasting rubber" (p. 143). Conversely, the OWI applauded films like David O.

Selznick's Since You Went Away (1944), "a virtual compendium of OWI-

approved vignettes of American life as changed by the war" (p. 156). The

Hollywood image of a united home front appealed to wartime audiences, the

authors contend, but it did little to prepare the American public for the postwar

realities that faced them.

Equally important was OWI's concern for how the United States' allies and

enemies were depicted on film. However strained the connection might have

been, for propaganda purposes, all of the United States' allies were placed

under the rubric of "democracy." The OWI encouraged the production of

films that emphasized the commonality of those nations. In Mrs. Miniver

(1942) no mention was made of the British Empire, a point of contention

between Churchill and Roosevelt; instead, viewers were assured that all social

classes in Britain were making sacrifices for the war effort. Likewise, MGM's

Dragon Seed (1942) and Mission to Moscow (1943) represented Hollywood's

efforts to portray China and Russia as democratic societies. By the early 1950s,

the wartime image of the noble Russian had become an embarassing anachro-

nism.

Koppes and Black note that filmmakers applied different standards in the

depiction of Germans compared to the Japanese. OWI codes insisted that

filmmakers distinguish between "good" Germans and "evil" Nazis. This led

to sympathetic portraits of Germans, even soldiers, as in The Moon is Down

(1943). The wartime image of the Japanese, on the other hand, was unambig-

uously racist.

Hollywood Goes To War succeeds on two levels-it is both informative and

entertaining. It offers a clear account of the uneasy partnership that emerged

between the federal government and filmmakers that deeply influenced public

perceptions about the war.

 

University of Cincinnati                       Robert Earnest Miller

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