Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's
Movement, 1830-1860. By Bonnie S. Anderson.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xii + 288p.; illustrations, notes,
bibliography, index. $30.00.)
Anyone interested in history, especially of the nineteenth century, will
be energized by the complex revelations and new material in Joyous
Greetings. Bonnie Anderson succeeds in demonstrating, without question,
the boundary-breaking international nature of "the woman question" in
the nineteenth century. Interweaving gender with the political and social
context since the French Revolution, she has told an exciting story. A
wealth of detail from years of archival research brings to life German,
French, English, and American leaders of the early women's movement.
Utilizing a structure that is both thematic in terms of women's life
cycles and roughly chronological, Anderson explores the situation of middle-class
Victorian women. She clarifies how the separate spheres concept arose
with the Industrial Revolution as production moved outside the home. "Separate
spheres" implies an equality, but the areas allotted each sex "became
increasingly unequal" as women's work within the household was less visible.
Thus, a sign of status was a wife not working (for wages). Clothing changes
for both sexes in the nineteenth century also showed how gender differences
came to be more important than class differences. Men of both the aristocracy
and the middle class came to accept the simpler coat and trousers with
white shirt of the bourgeoisie, eschewing the aristocratic knee breeches,
corsets, high heels, wigs and make-up of earlier times. But tight lacing,
high heels, ankle-length skirts and petticoats, and exotic hairstyles
were still demanded of both middle-class and aristocratic women. Dress
reform was a hotly contested issue throughout the period, as shown by
the ill-fated attempt to introduce the bloomer costume of loose pants
under a calf-length skirt.
After exploring how the twenty exceptional women in her core group managed
to "become rebels," Anderson describes how they began to connect with
each other via reform organizations (like the abolitionist movement to
end slavery), early socialism, immigration and travel, political exile,
and the proliferation of women's newspapers and books about women's situations
in other lands, such as the Swedish Fredrika Bremer's Homes of the
New World (1853) and the English Harriet Martineau's Society in
America (1837). Anderson employs the geologic metaphor of volcanic
eruption, often used in the 1840s to signify political unrest, to elucidate
the growth of women's demands. French revolutionary women in 1 848 called
themselves Les Vésuviennes, after the volcano in Italy,
and Fredrika Bremer named the period a "social volcano."
The conclusion describes the crushing of the radical women's movement
after the failed continental revolutions of 1848-49, citing the repressive
legislation in France and Germany, and, especially after the beginning
of the Civil War, the retreat in the U.S. and England from all-encompassing
demands for women to campaigns focused only on women's suffrage. I would
argue, however, that stalwarts like Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the U.S.,
Fredrika Bremer in Sweden, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon in England, and
Jenny d'Héricourt in the U.S. and France did continue the larger
fight, while newer organizers like Frances Power Cobbe in England, Dora
Book Reviews, page194
d'Istria in eastern Europe, Selma Borg in the U.S. and Finland, and Matilda
Joslyn Gage in the U.S., built on the ideas and inspiration of the earlier
pioneers, continuing women's demands in education, the law, religion,
violence against women, and work.
On every page there are exhilarating, apt quotations as we come to know
the work of these women from five nations. Still, the author's practice
of using the English names of journals and newspapers rather than their
French or German titles is frustrating for anyone trying to find a source.
Voice of Women is used, not La Voix des femmes, and Women's
Newspaper instead of Frauen-Zeitung.
Joyous Greetings joins other works recently published on international
feminisms: Leila Rupp's Worlds of Women: The Making of an International
Women's Movement (1997), Margaret McFadden's Golden Cables of Sympathy:
The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (1999), and
Karen Offen's European Feminisms, 1700-1950 (2001). Nineteenth-century
historiography undoubtedly will be significantly affected by this wealth
of source material and the movement's rescue from oblivion.
Margaret McFadden, Appalachian State University
Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees. By
John Sugden. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. xvi + 350p.;
maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)
John Sugden admits to being viewed as something of an eccentric by his
British colleagues. Born in Hull, England, trained in three English universities,
and the former director of studies at Hereward College, he has spent the
last thirty years studying American Indians, in particular the Shawnees
in the Ohio Valley. Sugden has already written two books on Tecumseh for
respected American presses and a monograph on eighteenth-century Shawnee
culture published by a German ethnological association. Blue Jacket
is his fourth effort relating to the Shawnee and, in many respects, is
his best yet.
If Sugden is singular in his academic interests, neither is he afraid
of controversy. His introduction immediately attacks the long-held belief
that Blue Jacket was not an Indian but a captured white man, remembered
as Marmaduke van Swearingen. Recognizing the myth's durability, Sugden
carefully deconstructs it, revealing its original source as an Ohio journalist
writing in 1877 and greatest reinforcement through Allen Eckert's Ohio
frontier novels and the modern summer drama performed near Xenia. Sugden
is certainly not the first professional historian to demonstrate the myth's
inability to stand up to historical scrutiny but is likely the most thorough.
He points out that it was believable, even by Blue Jacket's own descendants,
because the chief married a white woman and fathered children recognized
as "half-bloods."
More important than restoring the chief's ethnicity is Sugden's goal
of reestablishing the prominence of Blue Jacket and the Shawnee in the
military and political history of the eighteenth-century Ohio frontier.
This is done, admittedly, not so much to denigrate the role of Little
Turtle and his Miami Indian brethren as to restore the Shawnee chieftain
and his people to the rightful position they occupied among their contemporaries.
Like the controversy over Blue Jacket's personal history, Sugden examines
and evaluates the origin of Little Turtle's claim to
Book Reviews, page195
ascendancy and reveals that the Miami chieftain himself or his son-in-law,
William Wells, provided the information. No less a figure than Major General
Anthony Wayne recognized the rivalry and competing claims of the two leaders.
While crediting Blue Jacket with the Indian leadership at St. Clair's
Defeat, the author admits that a host of factorsamong them individualistic
Indian fighting techniques, shortages of manpower and firearms, and lack
of suppliesworked against any one Indian truly having overall control
(p. 109). And Sugden concedes that even the "independent witnesses with
no apparent axe to grind" who named the Shawnee as leader still constitute,
as with many components of his biography, "thin evidence" (p. 118).
While historians may debate battle leadership, there should be no doubt
about Blue Jacket's importance in the negotiations that preceded the Treaty
of Greene Ville. In fact, as Sugden points out, it was Blue Jacket who
pulled together a peace party of Indians. At the risk of his own prestige,
he was the first to approach General Wayne to discuss peace terms, and
the general, who understood the chief's importance to the process, went
out of his way to accommodate him. Blue Jacket's personal intervention
was, according to the son of Alexander McKee, "the cause of the Indians
coming in" (p. 195). With Wayne's concurrence, the Shawnee war chief offered
safe places for villages, food, and trade goods and was responsible for
transferring the Indians, including substantial segments of the Wyandots,
Delawares, Ottawas, and Miamis, from British to American influence. Ironically,
the Shawnee chief was unable to deliver four-fifths of his own people
to Greene Ville.
In reinstating the Shawnee to their proper position, Sugden has not fallen
into the trap of oversimplification. Blue Jacket was a powerful war chief,
but he did not operate within a vacuum of Shawnee leadership. Authority
was shared with individuals such as his orator half-brother Red Pole,
whose death early in 1796 was a serious blow to Blue Jacket and the Shawnee
nation. Nor does the author see the Shawnee as monolithic. He recognizes
the diversity of opinions that could exist amongst a people living in
widely dispersed villages under the influence of strongwilled, individualistic
leaders. Captain Johnny, for a time the nation's principle civil chief,
and his Shawnee band remained under British influence into the first decade
of the nineteenth century. The main split in the Shawnee came in the wake
of the treaty when a large body in Auglaize and Logan Counties guided
by the acculturationist Black Hoof were at odds with nativist elements
under the Prophet and Tecumseh. Despite his striking success as an entrepreneur
in the frontier white economy, Blue Jacket eventually formed an alliance
with the nativists.
Sugden sheds light on the influential role played by the Lasselle family
during the period. Antoine and Jacques "Coco" Lasselle were French-Canadian
traders in the Detroit area during the third quarter of the eighteenth
century and the early nineteenth century. The latter brother became Blue
Jacket's son-in-law by marrying his daughter Mary in the 1790s, and, Sugden
speculates, became an especially close confidant. These Francophiles were
quick to remind the Shawnees and others of French successes whenever warfare
erupted in Europe. In fact, accusations by English traders and military
officers that the two brothers were undermining the British-supported
Indian confederacy (p. 148) forced them into the Indian line of battle
at Fallen Timbers in order to prove their fidelity (p. 173).
Sugden's research comes full circle in his claim that Tecumseh's confederacy
had its origin in the Blue Jacket-led confederacy of the 1790s (pp. 227-228).
Having begun his Shawnee historical odyssey with Tecumseh, he ends it
by tying up his research on Blue Jacket there. Because Blue Jacket spent
his later years in the
Book Reviews, page196
company of the younger Shawnee leader, Sugden envisions a mentoring relationship
between the two (p. 258). "Plans of intertribal unity" (p. 313) were not
new but old and the end of a strategy begun by other Shawnees half a century
before.
Many snares lie in wait for the Indian biographer. Not the least is the
sparsity, and at times questionable, veracity of resources. These force
historians who, like Sugden, are interested in explaining their subject's
behavior, into areas of supposition and speculation. Sugden faithfully
indicates where he does this and when he is expressing opinions, although
casual readers may sometimes miss his cautionary words like "presumably"
and "probably."
In sum, this British scholar provides Blue Jacket and the other Indians
who surrounded him on the Ohio frontier with human dimensions. The Indians
on these pages have feelings but also suffer hard-heartedness; they meet
with both successes and failures, and equally display aspirations and
indifference. They are, just like their white counterparts, imperfect
human beings. But because of this historian's honest portrayals, the reader
comes closer to understanding an Indian point of view than in most previous
treatments of the period. Sometimes the author's evidence is fragmentary,
but he always reveals his exhaustive research and explains his reasoning
process. Eccentric or not, Sugden has done historians of the Ohio frontier
a great service.
David A. Simmons, Ohio Historical Society
Inside Hitler's High Command. By Geoffrey
P. Megargee. (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2000. xxi + 327p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.)
Geoffrey Megargee, who received his Ph.D. in History from Ohio State
University in 1998, has provided a badly needed organizational history
of the German High Command during World War II. Based primarily on German
archival and published sources, Inside Hitler's High Command explodes
numerous myths regarding the efficiency of German military decision making
and regarding the sole responsibility of Adolf Hitler for Germany's military
disasters.
The author begins by reminding the reader of German general staff traditions
which emphasized an officer's character rather than his intellectual acumen
and which held that operational planing alone, if properly worked out,
could surpass any obstacle. Such tendencies remained regardless of Hitler,
but also despite changes in warfare foreshadowed in the interwar period
such as the need to plan joint operations and garner superior intelligence.
The deficiencies were masked by Germany's early victories, but they became
frighteningly clear during the Eastern Campaign. The USSR was judgedby
staff officers as well as by Hitleron notions of its supposedly
inferior national character. An understaffed and under-trained army intelligence
office committed horrendous errors regarding enemy capabilities, while
logistical problems were never worked out sufficiently in the expectation
of victory in a single grand offensive.
Megargee is at his best in demonstrating how Germany's military suffered
from a chaotic institutional structure, and a review cannot do justice
to his meticulous work describing the conflicting maze of authority within
the command chain. An understaffed Supreme Command (0KW) lacked the personnel
and authority to fulfill its theoretical function of unifying the three
service branches, thus leaving
Book Reviews, page 197
Hitler with the final authority to arbitrate between constantly bickering
officers after long periods of confusion and wasted staff work. Each operational
theater, meanwhile, had its own chain of command, from Poland, which was
left to the Army High Command (OKH), to Norway, which was under direct
0KW supervision, to Crete, which was a Luftwaffe theater, to North Africa,
which was technically under Italian command. The simple transfer of increasingly
scarce troops and supplies from one theater to another could not occur
without days of argument. And as the war progressed, Hitler and his top
officers housed in Hitler's East Prussian headquarters became increasingly
isolated from their own staffs and divisional commands. Distrust and resultant
exaggerated reporting up and down the chain(s) of command complete the
dismal picture of a military command at odds with itself.
Finally, Megargee wrecks the picture, carefully cultivated in the postwar
testimony of Hitler's generals, of competent officers led by an incompetent
Führer. True, Hitler's micromanaging, amateurishness, and tendency
to interrupt briefings with lengthy monologues did not help German staff
work. But numerous senior officers shared Hitler's attitudes, aims, and
operational decisions. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt approved of the
halt before Dunkirk. Army Chief of Staff Franz Halder (1938-1942) agreed
with Hitler that the USSR would fall in a single offensive despite Germany's
limited resources, and he was taken by complete surprise by the Soviet
winter offensive in 1941. His successor Kurt Zeitzler (1942-1944) insisted
on speedier staff work with smaller staffs, while demonstrating full devotion
to Hitler. And the list goes on to include such luminaries as General
Heinz Guderian, whose self-serving memoirs still sell well in Germany
today. Overall, Megargee has provided an essential history from a new
perspective that should be on the shelf of every scholar of the Second
World War.
Norman J. W. Goda, Ohio University
John D. Clifford's Indian Antiquities; Related
Material by C.S. Rafinesque. Edited by
Charles Boewe. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2000. xxxi
+ l'75p.; illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, index. $30.00.)
If you are interested in the first flowerings of American archaeology,
especially in the early Midwest, you likely have a reprint of Caleb Atwater's
1820 "Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio
and Other Western States," the first volume of the American Antiquarian
Society's "Archaeologia Americana." The Circleville, Ohio, resident's
weighty tome is a well-placed keyhole for letting us look into that lost
world of the very early nineteenth century, where "antiquarians"
were slowly becoming "archaeologists" in the shadow of Romanticism.
Instead of museums, "Cabinets of Curiosities" were maintained
in public places like Independence Hall in Philadelphia as a way of experiencing
"the Sublime" without traveling to Mont Blanc, by viewing horrors,
mysteries, and wonders from far away or long ago, and academic departments
of natural history, classics, and language were very slowly starting to
weave the fabric of a new discipline to study the artifacts of the past
that appeared in those curio cabinets.
On the heels of Atwater's work was the contentious figure of Constantine
Rafinesque, remembered for his distinctive name if not for many other
achievements in early American archaeology. This Transylvania University
professor of botany and natural history became an indefatigable identifier
and lister of prehistoric sites
Book Reviews, page198
particularly in Kentucky. More infamously, he claimed to have discovered
late in his life a collection of Indian pictographs called the "Walam
Olam," generally regarded today as a fake likely created by its discoverer
to advance certain linguistic theories about Indian migration.
But it was a Lexington, Kentucky, businessman and early archaeological
enthusiast, John D. Clifford (1779-1820), who brought Rafinesque into
the limelight, wrote archaeological theory that saw print before Atwater,
and influenced his "Description of Antiquites" with the range and force
of his conclusions, which largely paralleled Atwater's own. Rafinesque's
attempt to claim pride of place for his now-deceased friend and benefactor
after Clifford's death and Atwater's publication began an enmity that
would cast a shadow over not only Rafinesque's stature in early archaeological
developments, but would help to completely obscure Clifford's work behind
them both.
Adding to the difficulty in appreciating the influence of Clifford's
work on Atwater is that his writings appeared in a short-lived, poorly-circulated
publication, the Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine. Very
few libraries today have copies of this early literary and scientific
endeavor. This is the great gift that Charles Boewe has provided in assembling
Clifford's published letters and articles from the Western Review,
along with a number of pertinent letters and reviews by Rafinesque that
closely follow Clifford's death, including those that began the feud with
Atwater. In fact, sometimes Boewe seems to be more motivated to restore
Rafinesque's reputation than he is to remind us of Clifford's place in
archaeology's early days beyond the Alleghenies. This mixed agenda leads
to the occasional cryptic remark, such as on page xxx where we are informed
of a trove of material at the American Antiquarian Society that may have
the potential to let Rafinesque be taken more seriouslybut never
tells us what those manuscripts are about. Clifford's works, on the other
hand, are clearly presented in all their tragic brevity, and those who
have Atwater's "Antiquities" on their shelves will certainly welcome the
opportunity to place this collection next to that work, where it deserves
its pride of place, so long obscured.
Clearly, the early history of archaeology in America is a rich and still
largely untapped vein of ore, well worth further digging and delving.
For those interested in exploring some of these as yet unexplored passages,
Boewe offers a bright if flickering torch to carry the search deeper.
Jeff Gill, Hebron, Ohio
Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles. By Chad
Berry. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. xiii + 236p.; bibliography,
index. $44.95 cloth; $21.95 paper.)
In the course of teaching American history, I often raise the issue of
ethnicity, asking my students about their own ethnic origins. Many are
very conscious and knowledgeable about their roots, while others profess
to have little idea. Reflecting the ethnic diversity typical to the United
States, their responses regularly cover a broad range of national or cultural
backgrounds, spanning the areas and peoples of Africa, Europe, Asia, and
Central America. Frequently, however, and to my initial surprise, many
of my Ohio students self-define their ethnicity as either "Hillbilly,"
"Hilligan," or possibly, Appalachian. These common responses led me to
the question, "Why are there so many people of Appalachian descent in
north-central
Book Reviews, page199
Ohio?" The answer to this remained fuzzy until I came upon Chad Berry's
engaging Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles, which provides a wonderful
analysis of life in the prewar South, the white migration to the North,
and the slow and awkward process of assimilation.
Actually, this migration is already well known to many. Millions either
read or watch Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker each year, which
portrays the northern journey of white southerners seeking work in wartime
industry. Focusing on the hardships of the Nevels family, Arnow illustrates
the difficulties they experienced in adapting to both Detroit culture
and to work inside the auto plants. Though quite popular as fiction, historians
have largely overlooked this fascinating saga, more attentive to the larger
and longer transition of African Americans from farm to factory. In
Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles, Berry finally turns a scholarly
eye to the experience of these white migrants, presenting a very comprehensive
overview of their transition from rural to urban, industrial life.
Berry tells the complete story of this migration and cultural transition.
This wide breadth is the greatest strength of his work, first providing
the reader with a full understanding of why these people chose to leave
their homes, the process of their move, and how they acclimated to their
new environment. Not stopping with the migration itself, Berry follows
the lives of several families up until recent years, examining how they
either successfully adapted to urban culture, or possibly, how they ultimately
decided to return to the South. More than just a story of demographic
shift, Berry demonstrates how these migrants introduced their own style
of evangelical worship and other aspects of their indigenous culture to
their new urban neighbors. Berry shows how these white southerners not
only filled critical wartime labor needs, but also enriched the diversity
of urban life. In return, they faced endless discrimination, enduring
negative stereotypes, inferior employment, and cruel insults for decades.
In addition to providing a well-structured and readable overview of this
white migration, Berry also revises the accepted timeline for when this
exodus occurred. Earlier studies look almost exclusively at the phenomena
of wartime migration to fill labor voids in northern industry. Such work
concentrates on the "pull" of the factories, depicting impoverished workers
lured north with the promise of generous wages. This premise assumes the
only "push" northward to be the dire poverty of the southern hill regions,
disregarding other potential factors that might prompt emigration. Berry
probes beyond these simplifications, documenting that large-scale white
migration began decades before World War II, and continued for decades
afterward. In fact, he asserts that the largest migration took place between
1945 and 1960, and continued steadily through the 1960s. Acknowledging
the economic pull of wartime employment, Berry's analysis goes much further,
examining the influences of extended family, mid-century cultural change,
and the complex allure of city life.
Above and beyond his fine scholarship, Berry also shatters the simplifications
and stereotypes that plague those of Appalachian descent. Berry's migrants
are not a monolith of poverty and despair. Just as with most other immigrant
"ethnic groups," the lives of his southern migrants varied greatly, with
some achieving wealth, some remaining poor, and the majority finding reasonable
prosperity and comfort. Most largely assimilated to their adopted environment,
while others purposely retained much of their cultural heritage. Southern
Migrants, Northern Exiles opened my eyes to the importance of this
interesting, yet seldom-told story. Though not as dramatic as Arnow's
fiction, Berry's narrative and analysis are brilliant and captivating,
Book Reviews, page 200
shedding light on an unheralded transition in twentieth-century America.
His work will appeal to scholars, students of American history, and most
of all, to readers curious about the history of Appalachian culture.
David Gerard Hogan, Heidelberg College
C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical
Writings. Edited by Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2000. xxvii + 378p.; illustrations, notes, chronology,
index. $34.95.)
This volume of letters and unpublished autobiographical writings of renegade
sociologist C. Wright Mills, edited by his daughters, covers Mills's entire
life, from his upbringing in Waco, Texas, through his college and graduate
school days, to his years as a professor at the University of Maryland
(1941-45) and Columbia (1945-62), where he established himself as one
the America's most prominentand controversialintellectuals.
This collection reinforces the widely shared view that Mills's death
in 1962, at age forty-five, cut short a career of great promise. Mills
was a man of enormous energy and outsize ambitions. He wrote or coauthored
six books, edited several others, and turned out literally dozens of scholarly
articles. He was far from being a typical academic, however. Mills rode
to work on a motorcycle, built his own house, and, most importantly, provided
a badly needed critical perspective on American society during a period
when all too many intellectuals retreated into the cocoon of bland functionalist
analysis and sterile "consensus" history.
Mills's rebellion began early. In 1935, as a freshman at Texas A&M,
he audaciously wrote letters to the editor of the student paper attacking
the "sham, hypocrisy and feudalistic customs" of college life there. Mills
soon transferred to the University of Texas, where he completed his undergraduate
work, and went on to graduate school at the even more liberal University
of Wisconsin. The letters in this volume enable the reader to observe
the intersection of Mills's personal and professional lives as he built
an extraordinary network of like-minded friends who provided him with
moral support and, often, practical advice for his multifarious writing
projects.
An important turning point in this personal oddysey was the publication
of White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951). More letters
are devoted to Mills's grappling with this project than any other. This
correspondence makes clear that much of Mills's caustic assessment of
the "new" white-collar world of the postwar era was rooted in his personal
experience with it in academia. One letter suggests that the chapter in
White Collar comparing professors to business managers was based
upon the year he spent as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago,
whose once legendary sociology department by then was in sharp decline.
Publication of The Power Elite in 1956 further solidified Mills's
reputation and expanded his influence beyond the United States. Much of
the correspondence of his last six years was with scholars and activists
in Europe and Latin America. While planning for other scholarly projects,
Mills now devoted his immediate attention to more pressing issues. Two
short volumes sharply critical of U.S. Cold War policies, The Causes
of World War III (1958) and Listen, Yankee (1960), a sympathetic
view of the Cuban revolution, led to surveillance of Mills by the F.B.I.
At the time of his death, he was at work on a book about intellectuals
in the U.S., Europe, and the
Book Reviews, page 201
Soviet Union to be entitled The Cultural Apparatus, but never
completed it.
Mills is best described as an independent leftist, a kind of populist
with brains. "You see," he told one friend, "I've set my stuff always
against various forms of liberalism because those are dominant. But it
could just as wellin fact easier for mebe set against Marxism
. . . . way down deep and systematically I'm a goddamned anarchist." He
referred to himself as a "spiritual Wobbly," "the opposite of a bureaucrat,"
someone who "doesn't like bossescapitalistic or communisticthey
are all the same to [me]" (pp. 217-18, 252). In a revealing comment, he
subscribed the causes of his intellectual independence not to the radical
ideologies of the thirties but to "a very sensitive mother who imparted
to me, thank God, many 'feminine' sensitivities in the middle of Texas,
which insulated me, made me repelled by the rural and military crudities"
he found around him there (p. 250). Also important was the model of racial
tolerance that his mother set in her dealings with the Mexicans who lived
near Mills's family.
Beginning in 1956-57, when he was a Fulbright Professor at the University
of Copenhagen, Mills travelled extensively in Europe. The experience further
alienated him from the mainstream of American life, which he found provincial
and uninspiring. His interaction with other cultures provided opportunities
for selfreflection, and he began a diary in the form of an ongoing correspondence
with a fictional Russian named Tovarich. "In Europe, it has been said,
an American discovers America," Mills wrote in one such letter. "But to
do so that he must first discover himself. It may be an old self long
buried, or a new self in the making, but if he is trying to be honest,
the first question he must ask is not What Are You but What Am I?" (p.
298).
For a prominent writer, Mills had a rare humility. He continuously tried
to learn from critics of his books and was perpetually dissatisfied with
the quality of his intellectual efforts. By any objective standard, Mills
produced a great deal of valuable scholarly work, but he was never content
with traditional academic writing. The popularity of his later works attested
to his growing mastery of a style that could entertain as well as enlighten
readers. Had Mills lived only a few years longer, he undoubtedly would
have left academia altogether, becoming what he really always wanted to
be: a freelance writer and social critic. Ironically, this was exactly
the kind of intellectual that Mills, in White Collar, had said
was rapidly going out of existence in mid-twentieth century America.
Mills urged his friend, novelist Harvey Swados, to accept an academic
appointment, because teaching was "the only half-free way of life in the
US because despite everything, it allows you freedom and a physical chance
as it were, to write as you like" (p. 213). By the late 1950s, however,
Mills himself was increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of that
life, especially its bureaucratic aspects. "I just can't take these people
seriously," he complained of his colleagues at the University of Chicago.
"They have their own problems . . . not those of research people or writers
or people trying to find out how to live. I'm afraid my attitude shows
thru and so I've ceased to behave. I just yawn when I want to and attack
whoever talks foolishness" (p. 132). The threat of McCarthyism, he believed,
was less dangerous than the self-imposed censorship of most academics.
Too many professors "intimidate themselves; they coordinate themselves
instead of acting and speaking as they really think and as they would
like to do" (p. 198).
Mills provides a valuable case study of an engage intellectual's attempt
to combine work and life in a satisfactory way. While working on White
Collar, Mills wrote that "flamboyance" was the "only way to live:
the only personal answer to
Book Reviews, page 202
bureaucratic precision and form which, part of the managerial demiurge,
would stultify everything we do and are." Elsewhere, he favorably quoted
W. H. Auden: "To grow up does not mean to outgrow either childhood or
adolescence but to make use of them in an adult way . . ." (pp. 115, 248).
The prefatory essays by Mills's daughters illustrate the ways in which
he tried to apply this axiom to his own family relationships. Their remembrances,
and the excellent Introduction by former student Dan Wakefield, provide
valuable context for the documents reproduced in this excellent collection.
Kenneth L. Kusmer, Università di Genova
Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. By Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns.
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. xi + 240p.; illustrations, selected
bibliography, index. $35.00.)
The gambit, "Haven't read the book, waiting for the film" does not work
in the case of Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Simultaneously in 1999 the book was
issued as the companion volume to the PBS documentary film. Faced with
a choice of the order in which to experience the two works, I decided
to watch the film first since I am a documentary filmmaker and a women's
history scholar. The book followed; in both instances, I was thoroughly
engaged.
In the Preface of the book, award-winning documentary filmmaker Ken Burns,
director and producer of Not For Ourselves Alone, noted that Elizabeth
Cady Stanton was "a name I only vaguely recognized." His editor, Paul
Barnes, whose "infectious enthusiasm for Elisabeth Griffith's biography"
convinced Burns to place Stanton on the list of future film projects,
introduced him to her.
Paul Barnes had never heard of Stanton until he read a review in the
New York Times Book Review of In Her Own Right, Griffith's
life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. He mentioned it to his friend Geoff Ward,
historian and screenwriter, who had the book and loaned it to Barnes.
Geoffrey C. Ward would eventually be the writer for both the documentary
Not For Ourselves Alone and the text upon which it is based. In
part, herein lies the success of the book and the film. The complement
rests in the outstanding illustrations using primary source materials
including archival photographs and footage, manuscripts, and contemporary
photos of the environs that lend the nineteenth-century ambience of time
and place.
For those of us immersed in women's history, the trail of discovery on
the part of these men does not elude us; we are simply grateful! The outcome
in the form of the book and the film is impressive. Both employ a chronological
narrative to trace the lives of two extraordinary women, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton (1815-1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906). They first met in
1851 at Seneca Falls, New York, forged a friendship that spanned fifty-two
years, and with missionary zeal led a crusade to secure the most basic
civil rights for women. Not realized in their lifetimes, the struggle
continued for decades until with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment,
on November 2, 1920, American women for the first time went to the polls
in every precinct in America and voted.
The comfortably paced film appears quiet and introspective enhanced by
the musical score drawn from the time period but lacks the drama that
the story demands. Actress Sally Kellerman is the narrator while Ronnie
Gilbert gives voice
Book Reviews, page 203
to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Julie Harris to Susan B. Anthony. Interspersed
are "talking heads" who are notable women historian essayists and biographers
of Stanton and Anthony. In a film, it must be recognized the message is
transmitted primarily through the visual and supported by the audio offered
by the script. To editor Sarah Hill goes the accolade for the quality
of this production.
The book is more compelling in its portrayal of the highly dramatic events
that punctuated the life and times within which these indefatigable women
devoted themselves to the cause of women's rights. The text is exceedingly
well designed with illustrations ideally situated to complement the text
where more information is provided than is possible in a film script.
Beyond this the book offers the opportunity to set one's own pace, to
hit "pause," "rewind," "fast forward," "stop," and to reflect.
Foremost in the text are superb interpretive essays by women's history
scholars: "Women Without Rights" by Martha Saxton, "Taking Possession
of the Country" by Ann D. Gordon, "A Friendship Through History" by Ellen
Carol DuBois. Two essays by the principals, "Homes of Single Women" by
Susan B. Anthony and "The Solitude of Self" by Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
are particularly moving. Curiously, here may be found an explanation for
the manner of address exchanged in by these two nineteenth-century heroines.
Despite their bold challenges to the roles of women in the public domain,
were they after all captives of their time and station? Was it in deference
to an age difference of five years and marital status that one was called
"Mrs. Stanton" and the other "Susan"?
Gladys Haddad, Case Western Reserve University
The Politics of Long Division: The Birth of the
Second Party System in Ohio, 1818-1828. By Donald J. Ratcliffe. (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 2000. xvii + 455p.; illustrations, tables,
notes, bibliography, index. $65.00.)
A distant but no less interested observer of Ohio's early and formative
politics, Donald Ratcliffe of England's University of Durham should soon
become even more familiar to historians of America's antebellum politics.
Ratcliffe has already written extensively on the early stage of Ohio politics
and typically he provides an engaging, even idiosyncratic view of traditional
historiographic questions. His recent and quite impressive reexamination
of the origins of the Jacksonian party system in Ohio should only extend
this well-earned reputation for both thorough and provocative research.
Perhaps due to his observer's perch from far across the Atlantic, Ratcliffe
relishes the opportunity to challenge conventional thinking, often pointing
out flawed arguments or lapses in research. His work is marked by a careful
attention to detail and a critical eye for hyperbole or overstatement.
He especially enjoys tossing out tantalizing tidbits of information, in
one case reviving the none-too-heroic reputation of Ohio's favorite son,
William Henry Harrison. American historians seldom treat Old Tippecanoe
as a serious political figure, no doubt a strategy inherited from Harrison's
political rivals. Yet not only does Ratcliffe argue that Harrison enjoyed
a powerful political presence in Ohio, but he adds that the Old General
likewise boasted a legendary reputation for his amorous conquests!
On a more serious note, Ratcliffe worries that historians of the Jacksonian
Age have relegated the 1820s to a "mere prologue to a more interesting
tale" (p. xi). Instead, he seeks to demonstrate how the political controversies
of the 1820s (and
Book Reviews, page 204
even memories of the Jeffersonian period) shaped the more famous Jacksonian
battles to come.
Ratcliffe thus endeavors to show how the Second Party System emerged
in Ohio much earlier than usually thought, and due to factors different
from those often assumed. The famous disputed presidential election of
1824 not only laid the foundation for the subsequent political orientation,
but it too had been shaped by somewhat earlier crises over banking policies
in 1818-1819 and the 1819-1821 conflict over slavery in Missouri. Ratcliffe
stresses how such circumstances forced Ohio to choose between its status
as a northern and a western state, and how most Ohioans agreed that Henry
Clay's "American System" (though perhaps not Clay himself) offered the
most likely path to prosperity. In doing so Ratcliffe illustrates in a
refreshing way how much impact the slavery issue could have at this relatively
early date, although he also shows how this concern lost favor among many
Ohio voters by the 1830s (partly due to renewed concerns about a black
influx into the state).
Ratcliffe might actually quibble with the notion that all politics are
local, but he does constantly demonstrate how essentially national issues
could shape local loyalties and alignments. At times his approach does
betray a contrary nature. That is, we should regard 1820s politics as
more important than those of the 1830s, but only in terms of shaping that
later debate. And, one must completely follow and understand local politics
and leaders, but mainly to appreciate how these reacted to truly important
national political issues. Yet, there can be no doubt about the value
of the Ratcliffe approach.
He commonly rejects simple explanations for more complex, multi-leveled
arguments, and he employs statistic analysis that takes multiple variables
into account. At the same time, scholars familiar with decades of research
on Ohio politics will find names, events, and theories revived and extended
in interesting new ways.
Ratcliffe is especially adept at explaining how Andrew Jackson emerged
as a major figure in Ohio politics despite questions about his status
as a military chieftain, slaveholder, and inconsistent (at best) supporter
of economic development. Besides possessing an ethnocultural appeal to
certain Ohioans (chiefly Scotch-Irish and German voters), Jackson particularly
benefited from a surge of new voters in 1828, primarily younger ones touched
by memories of Jackson's heroics in the War of 1812. While thus implying
that Ohio's Jacksonian supporters allowed such emotion to triumph over
a rational calculation of the state's interests, Ratcliffe's analysis
serves to both identify and account for this somewhat paradoxical voting
behavior.
Primarily an intensive reexamination of Ohio politics in the 1820s, this
work deserves serious attention from all students of antebellum American
politics and society. Ratcliffe puts to the test various and popular theories
involving class conflict, democratic politics, ethnocultural analysis,
and the emergence of a market economy. No single approach emerges triumphant
or unscathed, yet each in its own way receives its just due. Ratcliffe
possesses a unique capability to recognize and even pay homage to the
work of others in the field while simultaneously identifying the limitations
of such research. In the end, the patient and diligent reader receives
a most valuable primer on the formative age of Ohio's politics.
Vernon L. Volpe, University of Nebraska at Kearney
Book Reviews, page 205
Sowing the American Dream: How Consumer Culture
Took Root in the Rural Midwest. By David Blanke. (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2000. xiii + 282p; notes, appendixes, index. $59.95 cloth; $21.95
paper.)
David Blanke's thesis that Midwestern farm families in the later part
of the nineteenth century utilized their shared heritage to create consumer
strategies to combat economic problems is certainly thought provoking.
He is to be commended as a historian for attempting to integrate disciplines
as diverse as consumer economics, rural sociology, and agricultural economics
in analyzing and defending this thesis, but the breadth of the task creates
an elusive goal.
Challenging Henry Thoreau's view of farmers as capitalistic victims and
Hamlin Garland's perception of farm families as bereft of community and
blind to social realities, Blanke contends that rural Midwesterners were
among the first Americans to create consumer strategies to challenge manufacturers
and retailers.
Blanke describes in detail the factors that led to the formation of the
National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry in 1868, and recognizes that
the Panic of 1873 led to the organization's rapid growth, but he fails
to provide readers a framework for evaluating its peak membership of more
than 858,000 in 1875. Although the Grange was strongest in the Midwest
and varied from county to county, it represented a minority of the nearly
four million farms enumerated nationwide in the 1880 census. Without this
perspective Blanke's analysis of its economic power in creating cooperative
purchasing units lacks context. He describes Grange members as "middle-rank"
farmers, supporting this categorization by a quantitative analysis of
a Delaware County, Indiana, sample that includes 162 Grange members and
110 nonmembers from four townships and compares average real estate and
personal property holdings from the 1870 census for each group (Appendix
I). Inexplicably, he fails to utilize agricultural census data from the
same year that would show the value of farm equipment and livestock owned,
and the value of farm products sold or consumed within the year. Such
data, of course, would reveal far more accurately how typical Grange members
were of the "commercial farmers" of whom Blanke speaks (p.154).
Although historians generally cite the granary-rate regulations negotiated
with Midwestern railroads as one of the Grange's major successes, the
organization's rapid membership declineto approximately 124,000
by 1880is inadequately explained by Blanke's economic focus. The
political and social agendas of the Grange cannot be dismissed as "social
digressions" (p.167). Although Blanke chose to confine his analysis to
the nineteenth century, it is difficult to place the Grange's cooperative
marketing and purchasing goals into perspective without considering the
later but more lasting Farm Bureau Cooperatives and the twentieth-century
rural electrification cooperatives that so successfully brought power
to farm homes and specialized agricultural operations such as dairies.
Blanke presents a statistical analysis of advertisements from sixty-one
randomly selected issues of the Chicago Tribune, Indianapolis
Journal, Milwaukee Daily News, Oshkosh City Times, and
Ripon Free Press from 1863 to 1878 (Appendix II). Although he categorizes
these by type of advertiser and type of product, readers do not gain a
perspective on the variety of products available to the majority of farm
families who traded primarily in county-seat towns or small villages.
He gives no voice to the numerous farm wives who consistently traded their
butter and eggs at the local general store and were as bound by its prices
and products as industrial workers forced to purchase household supplies
at a "company store."
Book Reviews, page 206
One of Blanke's most interesting chapters describes the rise of the mail-order
catalog business in the Midwestbeginning with Montgomery Ward &
Co. in 1872 and the later but competitive
Sears, Roebuck & Co. The simultaneous development of the Montgomery
Ward catalog and the Grange movement demonstrated the urban retailer's
superior ability to integrate the rural consumer into the modern massconsumer
society. Blanke appropriately attributes this success to the central business
management experience and capitalization of the retailerfactors
that were sadly lacking among Grange members.
Historians will be able to mine flecks of gold from Blanke's data, but
a narrower focus might have produced two valuable studiesone relating
rural Midwestern consumer culture to- the evolution of marketing and purchasing
cooperatives and the other its influence on the emergence of mail-order
catalog retailing to serve rural consumers.
Virginia E. McCormick, Worthington, Ohio
Rosie the Rubber Worker: Women Workers in Akron's
Rubber Factories During World War II. By Kathleen L. Endres. (Kent
State University Press, 2000. l76p.; illustrations, bibliography, index.
$45.00.)
As the title suggests, Professor Endres presents a history of women workers
in Akron's rubber factories during World War II. Endres utilizes manuscript
material from B.F. Goodrich, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, and Goodyear
Tire and Rubber Company along with oral interviews, photographs, and primary
source documents to give us a local picture of the female experience in
rubber factories. The book is designed for the general reader and laid
out in six chapters heavily annotated with archival photographs. A brief
bibliography follows the text.
Endres bases her story on the World War II image of "Rosie the Riveter"
and how that image compares to the female workers in Akron's rubber factories.
Rosie became the generic term for all women war workers in the United
States. With some sixteen million men in the military, employment opportunities
for women expanded at unparalleled rates. Women became the national heroines
as welders, riveters, solderers, and drill press operators for the war
effort. Endres attempts to distinguish Akron's Rosies from the popular
image of Rosies nationwide, but actually the two images are very similar.
One of the main premises of Endres' study is that the Akron rubber workers
differed from the popular Rosie image. Endres uses the former model of
Rosie as a young woman who is working for the first time in the workforce
"only for the duration" and looks forward to returning home as a housewife
and mother. By 1970, Sherna Gluck, Alice Kessler-Harris, Ruth Milkman,
and Susan Hartmann found that the original image of Rosie was incorrect.
Rosies were older and married and fully three-quarters of them had worked
before the war. And 75 percent of the 13,000 women war workers who were
polled by the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor wanted to remain
in the workforce in the postwar period.
Endres' Rosies fit this revision and the Akron women rubber workers'
experience parallels that of women in factory work across the country.
For example, a majority of women in Akron's rubber factories during World
War II were not new to factory work. Beginning in 1 850 women represented
60.7 percent of all workers in the rubber and elastic goods industries.
Women's manual dexterity relegated them to the lighter, gender-specific
jobs producing sundries, toys, boots, and shoes that
Book Reviews, page 207
compensated in low pay and low status. By 1920, the production of automobile
tires skyrocketed which meant creating more jobs for men and decreasing
women's share of the rubber industry workforce to 21.8 percent.
Similarly, Akron's factories mirrored the national experience of wartime
production in other ways: Akron experienced critical labor shortages;
previously working women advanced to the factories for higher pay; European
Americans resisted working with African American employees; a two-tiered,
gender-based work model usually prevailed with the men holding the supervisory
positions; women experienced sexual harassment by men; unions (dominated
by men) reluctantly pursued females' claims of pay discrimination; older
women and younger women worked separately; female absenteeism was twice
as high as male; and the factories dealt superficially with female absenteeism
(i.e., "presenteeism" campaigns rather than programs to help women ease
their home responsibilities with Victory Shifts, day care centers, and
other possible opportunites). In summary, continuity of women's roles
rather than change faced the Akron rubber workers in the postwar period.
European American women and African American men and women were overwhelmingly
fired to make jobs for the returning Veterans. Women returned to traditional
female employment.
By giving names and faces to Akron's Rosies, Endres enriches our understanding
of the period and personalizes the national image of Rosies by looking
at individual women's experiences in Akron's rubber factories from 1870
to 1946.
Julieanne Phillips, University of Dayton
The Hunting Pioneers, 1720-1840: Ultimate Backwoodsmen
on the Early American Frontier. By Robert John Holden with Donna Jean
Holden. (Bowie, Maryland: Heritage Books, Inc., 2000. xii + 232p.; map,
notes, bibliography, index. $21.00 paper.)
EuroAmerican settlers venturing beyond inhabited areas faced numerous
problems. Not only were such bold people marginalized socially and economically,
they also faced many physical dangers inherent in living in isolated areas.
Moreover, by encroaching on Native American lands, the potential for bloody
conflict became a significant risk.
Since Frederick Jackson Turner forged a framework for looking at western
settlement with his frontier thesis in the late nineteenth century, historians
have been fascinated with articulating the "frontier experience." Such
is the task Robert John Holden and Donna Jean Holden set out to accomplish
in The Hunting Pioneers. Drawing on travel accounts written by
Americans and visiting foreigners, Holden and Holden glean descriptions
of these menand occasionally their familieswho "reveled in
their freedom and independence" (p. vii). In so doing, they distinguish
between hunting pioneers and farming pioneers. The former "depended primarily
on hunting for food, raised small patch crops only as a supplement to
their diet, and let any livestock they possessed run loose in the woods."
Meanwhile, farming pioneers "depended primarily on crops and domestic
animals for food, hunted game only as a supplement to their diet, and
closely tended or fenced in their livestock" (p. 6). Because of the information
provided within their sources, this story is virtually all one about frontiersmen,
not women.
As a descriptive history, Holden and Holden seek to provide their readers
with a
Book Reviews, page 208
correct portrayal of the "lifestyle" of frontiersmen. Beginning with
an introduction that accurately lays out what will be discussed in each
chapter, they offer the reader an overview of the hunting pioneer experience
and concomitant "ethos" (p. 2). The relative isolation of these pioneers
held particular importance, especially when considering the "wilds" of
nature and the "freedom" of living apart from society. After quickly finding
the cultural origins of the hunting pioneers in both a Swede-Finn emigration
to the new world in the mid 1600s and a Scotch-Irish immigration in the
early 1700s, Holden and Holden argue these hunting pioneers continually
struggled to free themselves from encroaching settlements of farming pioneers,
imperial struggles, and Native American violence. In a lengthy chapter
on "Wilderness Warfare," the authors implicitly relate frontier battles
with hunting pioneer wilderness experiences. Holden and Holden follow
this discussion with detailed descriptions of hunting pioneers in the
Ohio River valley and the Illinois Country, as well as the movement of
hunting pioneers toward the southern interior and across the Mississippi
River. Through these chapters, the authors continue to elaborate on themes
of violence, settlers encroaching on the independence of hunting pioneers,
relations with Native Americans, and the lifestyle of this type of pioneer.
Although well constructed, this book suffers from a couple of problems.
Although Holden and Holden go through great pains to show the "independence"
of hunting pioneers from society, these frontiersman always seem to be
tied to the developing economy, engaged in imperial struggles and generally
interacting with "society." Perhaps for this reason, the authors constantly
preoccupy themselves attempting to prove hunting pioneers' rejection of
society for frontier life. In part, problems arise because Holden and
Holden do not illustrate why hunting pioneers made the decisions they
did other than linking it to ambiguous notions of "freedom" and "independence."
For example, why did some hunting pioneers side with the Patriots in the
Revolutionary War, while others chose to fight with Loyalists? Why did
some "hunting pioneer families" plant roots and become "farming pioneer
families," while others chose to move on? Although The Hunting Pioneers
is an entertaining book, readers should ask why some of these questions
are left unanswered.
William H. Bergmann, University of Cincinnati
Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and
David Duke's Louisiana. By Lawrence N. Powell. (Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press, 2000. 616p.; illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography,
index. $34.95.)
Most of Powell's Troubled Memory, which draws heavily from contemporary
accounts and memoirs, provides the reader with a compelling narrative
of the experiences of a Jewish family in Nazi-occupied Poland. Students
of German history will benefit from the detailed accounts of German occupation
and of the horrific conditions to which Polish Jews were subjected (e.g.,
the daily struggle to find food, work, and housing in the ghettoes, profound
psychological disorientation, problems of dissimulation and escape).
Unlike other accounts, Powell's subject is not the isolated individual
but rather a family unit. The very presence of children, the reader learns,
had a profound effect on the problems and options facing the parents,
especially when the family fled the Warsaw ghetto and lived among non-Jews.
Where should the children stay while the
Book Reviews, page 209
parents were at work? Would the children remain silent during Nazi raids?
How were the children to be educated? Would the children inadvertently
reveal their family's identity? By recounting the decisions and actions
taken by the Skorecki's, Powell adds to our understanding of the complexity
of the circumstances of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Other than some instances of unneeded and distracting detail (unpronounceable
Polish street names) and occasional inane remarks about someone's "boyish
handsome [ness]"(p. 243) or "wavy hair and movie star good looks" (p.
181), Powell generally avoids the pitfalls typical of biographical accounts:
in many cases, he uses the particular experiences of the family's ordeal
to illuminate larger historical issues. The reader is, for example, particularly
alerted to the dynamics of the Jewish community under siege. Differences
in age, social standing, gender, ideological persuasions, and religious
observance are among the factors which shaped Jewish social relations.
It was not, in short, a monolithic community whose experiences of and
responses to persecution were uniform. Indeed, Powell's account includes
the multiplicity of tensions, which fragmented the community (e.g., over
jobs, charges of collaboration). Powell is also quite effective in showing
the chaotic nature of the Nazi regime and the confusion among the Nazis
over the resolution of the "Jewish question."
Neither does Powell fall victim to a Goidhagenesque caricature of non-Jewish
Germans and Poles. The survival of the Skoreckis was, in part, due to
the support of Polish employers and citizens, the occasional German soldier,
and even a high-ranking member of the 55.
The first and final two chapters emphasize Ruth's survivor-daughter,
Anne, and her confrontation with David Duke in 1990. Given the recent
literature on Holocaust memory and politics, it is curious that Powell
does not address the confusion and near-pathological obsession of survivors
with the Holocaust. Duke did not, for example, represent a threat of Nazi
revolution. Duke's senatorial campaign represented a threat primarily
to African Americans, not Jews. Powell does not expose Anne's misperceptions,
leaving the reader with a very problematic understanding of Nazi Germany
and contemporary America.
The final chapter, moreover, mirrors other efforts to popularize and
instrumentalize the Holocaust. As at Yad Vashem, Powell's narrative emphasizes
Jewish heroism and resistance (albeit resistance to the American radical
right rather than to the Nazis). Like Spielberg's Schindler's List,
so, too, does Troubled Memory have a happy end: Jewish victory
over evil. Moreover, just as in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,
D.C., the Holocaust and Anne's battle with Duke serve to affirm proverbial
American values, such as tolerance, the rule of law, and the defense "of
historical truth." As a whole, Powell's narrative is redemptive: Anne's
victory over Duke is the culmination of her parents' victory over Nazism.
The final chapter, "Redemption," mythologizes the Holocaust by bringing
closure and thereby meaning to the irrational destruction of human life
and the fortuitous survival of its victims.
Robert Sumser, Wright State University
Book Reviews, page 210
Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic
Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism. By Margaret H. McFadden. (Lexington:
The University Press of Kentucky, 1999. xiv + 270p.; illustrations, notes,
appendixes, works cited, index. $29.95.)
In this wide-ranging and engaging work, Margaret H. McFadden explores
the growing network of communication among women in Europe and North America
between the 1820s and 1880s that gave rise to the international women's
movement. Populated by such diverse figures as Lucretia Mott, George Sand,
and Frances Power Cobbe, the study traces the "complex lines of international
contact, association, friendship, argument, and correspondence" that led,
by century's end, to "a fully mature international women's consciousness
and organizational articulation" (p.l'72). Indeed, the 1888 founding of
the International Council of Womenthe first international women's
organizationrepresented the culmination of a much older tradition
of transatlantic female connection and support hitherto obscured by history.
Borrowing concepts from social network analysis, McFadden describes that
tradition as a "matrix" from which first a feminist consciousness, and
later an autonomous women's movement, would develop. Fostered by rapid
improvements in communications technology, increased travel opportunities,
and higher literacy rates, women's international contacts and relationships
multiplied in the decades after Lucretia Mott's famous trip to the 1 840
World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London. McFadden has painstakingly
followed these linkages back and forth across the Atlantic, revealing
an intricate web that connected women across the boundaries of language
and culture. Stretching from North America to the British Isles, across
continental Europe to Russia, Scandinavia, and Finland, the matrix was
generated by a heterogeneous assortment of female adventurers, evangelicals,
social reformers and utopians, political activists, and literary celebrities.
To be sure, not allor even mostof the women encountered here
espoused explicitly feminist views. Some, like the Methodist evangelist
Phoebe Palmer, took thoroughly conservative positions on the question
of women's proper role, while others, like famed novelist Harriet Beecher
Stowe, devoted themselves to other causes. Nor were such women necessarily
interested in fostering ties with other women, let alone uniting to advance
women's rights. But by flouting convention in their own lives, and more
importantly, by assuming a public voice through speaking and writing,
they helped other women to imagine a world of expanded opportunitya
small but vital step in the creation of feminist consciousness. And through
their personal connections with other socially prominent women in different
countries, they contributed something more concrete to the future women's
movement: an "old girls' network" that would facilitate more formal organizing.
Of course, some women were acutely aware of their circumscribed sphere,
and clearly hoped to enlarge it by forging international bonds with other
women. Lucretia Mott, Anna Doyle Wheeler, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fredrika
Bremer, and Frances Power Cobbe are five such "mothers of the matrix"
singled out by McFadden for particular attention. Unlike many of the other
women profiled, they were committed feminists (though their views often
differed) who actively cultivated internationality and served as role
models to younger followers.
McFadden has recreated a nineteenth-century world of female association,
and this is her book's primary virtue. That the women who inhabited it
shared correspondence, friendship, and ideas despite differences of language,
culture, and
Book Reviews, page 211
less often, class, seems beyond dispute: judging from the meticulously
reconstructed lines of acquaintance among them, that world appears to
have been small indeed. Harder to assess, however, is the precise nature
of the relationship between transatlantic women's networks and the emergence
of the organized women's movement. It is puzzling that McFadden devotes
a mere two pages to the founding of the International Council of Women,
a subject that demands greater attention. A more probing investigation
of that relationship will have to await future treatments, though McFadden
has ably prepared the way.
Charlotte Weber, Ohio State University
Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign,
Corinth, and Stones River. By Earl J. Hess. (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2000. xiv + 252p.; illustrations, maps, notes, bibliographical
essay, index. $32.00.)
The University of Nebraska Great Campaigns of the Civil War series, edited
by Anne J. Bailey and Brooks D. Simpson, has already produced a number
of good books on the battlefield history of the Civil War. Earl J. Hess,
a well-respected historian from Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate,
Tennessee, has now added a monograph on an aspect of the war in the West.
In 1862, Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith led Confederate forces
into Kentucky, a border state torn in its allegiance between the Union
and the Confederacy. During that same period, Sterling Price and Earl
Van Dorn led other Confederate soldiers against Union-held Corinth, Mississippi.
At the end of the year, Braxton Bragg's army fought Union forces under
William S. Rosecrans to a bloody standstill at Stone's River/Murfreesboro
in Tennessee. Union forces, after a promising start in 1862, were on their
heels at the end of the year. Here, says author Hess, was a great opportunity
for the Confederacy, but it failed. "Ultimately," he concludes, "the Confederate
failure to take the strategic initiative [in 1862] from their enemy and
control the course of the war in the West doomed the entire Confederacy"
(p. 234). Hess makes a good argument, the crux of it supporting the position
of many other historians that the Civil War was won (or lost) in the western
theater. His book is straightforward, detailed, and presents the basic
information clearly. This is good tactical history presented within an
overview of the strategic framework. Anyone interested in a succinct account
of the war in Kentucky, upper Mississippi, and Tennessee in 1 862 will
find this book helpful.
Still, this monograph is not what it is advertised to be. The editors,
as they have in earlier books in the series, state in their introduction
to this book that what follows is incorporation of traditional battlefield
history with the findings of new broader scholarship. Scholars today have
moved beyond simply describing the movement of troops on the battlefield
to discuss the impact of the battlefield on white civilians (men, women,
and children), slaves and free blacks, and the common soldiers themselves.
The new military history now places battles into broader frameworks, discussing
them, not in battlefield isolation, but in the context of political, social,
economic, gender, racial, and a host of other contexts.
Unfortunately, Banners to the Breeze does not fulfill this promise.
It is good oldfashioned battlefield history. Every once in a while, the
author mentions political leaders and international reaction, but he does
so only incidentally. Notably missing from the book is any real incorporation
of the military's impact on white civilians,
Book Reviews, page 212
blacks, and any number of other matters.
Some readers, of course, may want only a battlefield history of the period
under consideration, and they will find this book satisfying. Others expecting
the new approach promised in the introduction will have to look elsewhere.
John F. Marszalek, Mississippi State University
A Fragile Capital: Identity and the Early Years
of Columbus, Ohio. By Charles C. Cole,
Jr. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001. xi + 292p.; illustrations,
notes, index. $45.00.)
Columbus, Ohio: A Personal Geography. By
Henry L. Hunker. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. ix + 22Op.;
illustrations, notes, tour guide. $35.00.)
Ohio's capital city, Columbus, is overdue attention from scholars. For
decades the city's image has widely been one of Cowtown, USA, a place
not to be taken too seriously by academic writers, and, on autumn Saturdays,
a certain institution "up North." To Cole and Hunker go the honor of giving
untilled yet fertile Columbus two examinations it much deserves. The nearly
simultaneous release of both workspublished by Ohio State University
Pressillustrates a sustained interest in "nearby" history, as well
as, perhaps, the commitment of the publisher to regional studies. For
those unfamiliar with a city boasting no "basic set of amenity resources"
(Hunker, p. 27) the authors have brought readers two welcome, companion
works devoted to opposite yet not dissimilar bookends of the past two
centuries. A Fragile Capital, compiled by Charles Cole, Jr., director
emeritus of the Ohio Arts Council, chronicles the first four decades of
Ohio's largest city. Here is a meticulously documented volume teeming
with primary sources arranged topically yet without the choppiness that
may have resulted were this work a collection of essays. Going beyond
the hagiographical accounts of white male leaders profiled in earlier
anecdotal histories, Fragile Capital traces the lives of ordinary
citizens. To paraphrase the urban historian Carl Abbott, Cole treats his
subjects not as "atomized individuals but as members of a complexly structured
society." Emphasizing the shift from a product to service economy, Henry
Hunker's Columbus Ohio: A Personal Geography examines with engaging
and authoritative passion the past half-century of the city's growth and
civic culture from an urbanistic perspective. It is the most recent work
published under the banner of OSU Press's Urban Life and Landscape series,
edited by the indefatigable and esteemed historian Zane L. Miller. What
emerges are highly readable portrayals of a city that transformed itself
from an agrarian frontier culture into what some observers have broadly
described as the "urban sweepstakes" of American civic life.
Bridging both works are several important historic themes. Rejecting
the notion of a static society, the dynamic issues facing early Columbus
are part of the dialogue that challenges the city todayland annexation,
migration, segregation, land speculation, state support for education,
and perhaps most intriguing, self-image. More documentary than quantitative,
Cole delineates social tension and migration as core urban growth issues
while Hunker, professor emeritus Ohio State, describes the city from an
organic perspective through the geographer's lens of demographics, critical
mass, and land development. Growth, the mantra of past and present urban
boosters, had by the close of the twentieth century evolved into a tangled
web of
Book Reviews, page 213
congestion, sprawl, and geographic isolation. While in Cole's hands Fragile
Capital is less analytical in its portrayal of the city's early trends,
Hunker seldom holds back his enthusiastic observations about Columbus,
critically marshalling his thoughts in describing the process of what
determines a "developer's city"-how it developed, who were the key players,
and how the projects were located and financed. In so doing Hunker complements
and expands Patricia Burgess's earlier study Planning for the Public
Interest (1995), placing communication and technology at the crosshairs
of the city's growth. Ultimately, both authors support the convention
that demographics is destiny, and to truly be recognized by contemporaries
as a "real city," a critical mass of population and cultural identity
is needed.
A capital before it was a town, Columbus emerged by 2000 as Ohio's largest
and only expanding major city. Beginning in 1880, when the city began
overtaking civil townships, Columbus leveraged the provision of water
and sewerage in annexing middle class neighborhoods, particularly those
developing "upstream," or northward, from the urban core (Hunker, p. 97).
From 1950-2000, borrowing a script more reminiscent of American Sunbelt
cities, Columbus grew from forty square miles to over 200, becoming the
nation's fifteenth largest city and sixth-rated metropolitan area for
generating a favorable business climate. Such insatiable growth, cautions
Hunker, has not come without a civic price. In nearly creating a community
without an identity, Columbus has demolished many of its most recognizable
historic landmarks, notably Union Station, the Neil House, and the Kelley
Mansion (Hunker, p. 123). In their wake the city has created 66,000 parking
spaces in its central business district. Is it any wonder, mulls the reader,
why residents have so little awareness of the city's past?
If Hunker sardonically profiles the city's late twentieth-century obsession
toward major-league status, Cole contends much of Columbus's early existence
was defined by its worthiness to be Ohio's third capital. Between 1812
and 1816 several contenders lobbied for the coveted status of capital
city, a designation that was not officially resolved until 1846. In charting
the city's first half-century, seventeen chapters guide the reader through
Columbus's social, political and economic adolescence. Cole's pen is sharpest
when chronicling the everyday lives of women, blacks, and the understudied
shadow aspects of Columbus's labor force, public hangings, and the cholera
epidemics. Amidst such major milestones as completion of the National
Road and the city's first cost overrun, mundane glimpses of daily life,
including Anson Buttles's bathing in the Scioto River, offer amusing yet
telling insights. It is the personal element, seen through the stories
of the author Margaret Coxe, activist Jane Jones, and the unheralded Kelton
family that bring human faces to this compelling story. Cole's sober account
of the Ohio Pen, modeled on the Auburn system of silence and contract
labor, along with its harsh approach to corporal punishment, also reveals
a great deal about Ohioans' antebellum attitudes toward incarceration.
Despite appalling conditions inside the Ohio Pen, and persistent problems
smoldering outside the prison walls with racism, evidenced by the disturbingly
slow repeal of the state's Black Laws and exclusion of blacks from many
city institutions, coupled with the continued segregation of the city's
poor through the twentieth century, many nonetheless felt life in Columbus
was generally good. "A Family Costs Very Little Here," wrote one immigrant
in 1841 (Cole, p. 208), while a century later Beth Hunker, the author's
spouse, contemplating life in post World War II Columbus, described the
city as an "easy" place to live (Hunker, p. 65). Of course such comments
are relative. The reality remained only one in five males owned real
Book Reviews, page 214
estate in 1850 (Cole, p. 91), while residential isolation and urban abandonment
became troubling consequences of a growing city. Power and influence,
both conspicuous and sublime, gravitated toward a select few at Broad
and High Streets where for much of the twentieth century a commercial
elite of the Wolfe, Lazarus, and Galbreath families governed the city
de facto. The proud self-image of a folksy, simple cowtown with its home-grown
leaders and unpretentious Midwest values had by century's end been transformed.
In surpassing old rivals Cincinnati and Cleveland as the state's largest
city, once provincial Columbus had arguably achieved by 2000 major-league
status, a sort of post-modern coming of age. Its sophisticated, well-educated
and youthful work force, energizing the city's emerging civic and cultural
institutions, in particular a new professional hockey franchise, fostered
the "big city" image sought by the builders of this once fragile capital.
Perhaps, someday soon, the appendage "Ohio" can be dropped by publishers
from such book titles, and Columbus, for better or for worse, will have
shed its bovine imagery and finally "arrived."
Stephen C. Gordon, Ohio Historical Society
Remembering the Boys: A Collection of Letters,
A Gathering of Memories. Edited by Lynna Piekutowski. (Kent, Ohio:
The Kent State University Press, 2000. xxvi + 299p.; illustrations, appendixes,
index. $45.00.)
This book offers yet another contribution to the recent spate of print
and media productions recalling the effects of World War II upon Americans.
Within her comprehensive coverage, Lynna Piekutowski focuses her work
on the diverse ramifications that these far-reaching hostilities brought
to administrators, students, and former pupils of Western Reserve Academy,
a small but prestigious secondary boarding school in Hudson, Ohio. Piekutowski,
a retired academy faculty member, employs a variety of documentsthe
school's records, its newspaper, and its alumni magazine. However, her
concentration is on 850 letters which represent illuminating interchanges
between former students then serving their country and their old school
mentors, particularly their beloved headmaster, Dr. Joel B. Hayden. Accordingly,
after a brief introduction to the venerable institution and its final
peacetime academic year (1940-41), Piekutowski chronologically reproduces
this wartime correspondence. Simultaneously, she cites the effects that
hostilities had upon the academy: rationing; curtailment of social functions
and interscholastic activities; a stress on physical fitness; curriculum
adjustments; staff shortages combined with increased school enrollment
and faculty departures; and the direct contribution to the war effort
of student-produced tools in the school's converted machine shop. But
it is the letters from the former "boys" that form the crux of this volume,
together with several poignant condolence messages to families of forty-six
"boys" who died during the conflict. Their names were affixed to a school
memorial, and are listed in the book's appendixes along with academy students
who died in military service since 1945.
Western Reserve Academy, when World War II commenced, was an all-male,
almost all-white, politically conservative institution catering to upper-middle-class
familiesadmittedly not representative of those American secondary
schools that furnished most of the men to our armed forces. Still, regardless
of social or intellectual backgrounds, the combatants in this mammoth
conflict experienced a commonality of sentiments such as loneliness, boredom,
apprehension, and uncertainty. This fact clearly emerges within the correspondence
of such previously
Book Reviews, page 215
indulged young men. In addition, their communications from far-flung
theaters of action may have prompted Dr. Hayden understandably to comment,
"we no longer live in a big world." Similarly, the notations that several
former students had encountered each other in faraway lands possibly influenced
the headmaster to reflect that while the war had scattered the "Reserve
family" across the world, ironically it had also "brought them closer
together." This closeness and genuine affection for their alma mater is
repeatedly evident in numerous letters sent back to Hudson, reaffirming
a special gratitude to the academy and the administrators who had nurtured
them. The messages also proclaimed confidence in victory and the justness
of the Allied cause in which one alumnus idealistically declared (1944)
that the war, "must be followed by a peace which at least aims at liberty
and justice for all."
This seemingly narrowly focused volume is a welcome addition to the personal
side of the World War II era which has been featured in books such as
Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation and The Greatest Generation Speaks.
Ms. Piekutowski has assembled and composed a very commendable work, and
my reservations are admittedly minor. For example, she is mistaken when
she declares (p. 282) that "Japan declared war on China in July 1941."
In fact, there was no declaration of war, and the Japanese continually
referred to the conflict as "the China Incident." Also, I believe that
annotations to several servicemen's letters could have been enhanced by
employing available primary source army and navy documents, and secondary
sources such as Samuel E. Morison's multi-volume, History of United
States Naval Operations in World War II. This reviewer, an alumnus
of Western Reserve Academy (1949), was undeniably affected in reading
this work that related to his own distant youth. My closing remarks, consequently,
should include my own gratitude to Western Reserve Academy; its respected
former wartime faculty, now all deceased; all of its "boys" who participated
in this great war; and particularly the forty-six academy "family members"
who perished during the monumental struggle. They died, as Abraham Lincoln
declared during an earlier struggle, "that this nation might live." And
for all these roughly 900 worthy individuals discussed, a concluding line
from Oliver Wendell Holmes would perhaps be most appropriate: "Dear Father,
take care of thy children, THE BOYS!"
Sheldon S. Cohen, Loyola University Chicago
Encyclopedia of Marks on American, English, and
European Earthenware, Ironstone, and Stoneware: 1780-1980; Makers, Marks,
and Patterns in Blue and White, Historic Blue, Flow Blue, Mulberry, Romantic
Transferware, Tea Leaf and White Ironstone. By Arnold A. and Dorothy
E. Kowalsky. (Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 1999. f188p.;
illustrations, glossary, bibliography, indexes. $69.95.)
At first glance the big fat book of pottery marks that every historical
archaeologist dreams of, this is actually a somewhat idiosyncratic albeit
highly useful work. The subtitle is telling and more accurate than the
title proper: "Makers, Marks, and Patterns in Blue and White, Historic
Blue, Flow Blue, Mulberry, Romantic Transferware, Tea Leaf, and White
Ironstone." The presence of the word "Stoneware" in the title especially
seems a bit unfortunate, however, since the book certainly does not cover
materials generally thought of as stoneware in North America.
In effect, the Kowalskys have created an enormous compendium of British
and American marks found on pottery that interests them. It would not
be my first choice
Book Reviews, page 216
for the purpose of identifying an unknown pottery backstamp; but, to
be fair, that is not the intent of the book. As Geoffrey Godden, to whom
the book is dedicated, aptly puts it in his studied foreword: "The end
result may be rather uneven, due to personal taste, situation or pure
chance but the benefit is undoubted." Although Godden is writing about
specialist books and papers on different types of collectable ceramics
in general, his words apply to the Kowalsky's compendium as well.
Virtually a third of the book224 pagesis indexes and tables
that are potentially quite useful in certain circumstances. If, say, one
has a ceramic sherd bearing only the word "Best," Appendix B7 handily
identifies this as made probably by either Mayer & Elliott or Livesley,
Powell & Co. There are also tables of selected pottery chronologies,
lists by name and by initials, a listing of patterns arranged by pottery,
as well as a table of categories of ware produced by each pottery, various
chronological listings of British potteries by Registry dates, and so
forth. There is even a brief section on European potters, patterns, and
marks.
To cut to the chase, the book includes marks of 106 American (U.S.) potteries
and 680 British potteries. Godden, the dean of British ceramic historians,
gracefully acknowledges that while the Kowalskys have not engaged in first-hand
research in European archives, they have painstakingly combed the published
literature and resolved many discrepancies, even correcting some of his
original views and erroneous dates.
Reviewing only the U.S. section, and restricting comments to the pottery
types of interest to the authors, there are a number of omissions. Pope-Gosser
China, for example, definitely produced Flow Blue; the Steubenville Pottery
produced Flow Blue with their Porc-granite and Canton China backstamps,
which are not included. Morley & Co.
is included because of its ironstone manufacture, but there
is only one mark, whereas DeBolt (1994) illustrates no fewer than five
Morley marks that include the word "Ironstone" or "Stone China." The Vance
Faience Co. of Tiltonsville, Ohio, did not produce any ironstone, and
it is extremely unlikely that any of the white earthenware produced by
its successor, the Avon Faience Co., qualifies as ironstone. In any case,
the "F. M. & Co." mark included under this company is unquestionably
that of the Faience Manufacturing Co. of Greenpoint, New York, and not
that of the Vance Faience Co. The well-known gold Laughlin Art China backstamp
is not present although that line included some very impressive examples
of Flow Blue.
There are also some surprising inclusions. The American Beleek Co., of
Fredericksburg, Ohio, in business for a scant six months, is listed although
no examples of its wares are known. The ambiguous "ACC" coat-of-arms mark
is included for the American China Co. of Toronto, Ohio, but no mention
is made of the Akron China Co., of Akron, Ohio, which contemporary expert
William Barber recorded as using the same mark and which very likely made
flow blue ware; this backstamp, incidentally, has been found at the Akron
pottery site. Based upon the similarity to an undisputed Brunt Pottery
backstamp, a coat-of-arms backstamp is attributed to the Brunt Pottery
by DeBolt; but the Kowaiskys attribute the same mark to Knowles, Taylor
& Knowles. It appears that in order to represent their early "K. T.
& K." mark, the Kowaiskys used the Brunt mark, with the notation that
it occurs with K. T. & K. Unfortunately, they do not actually depict
the mark they describe; nor do they include an undoubted but quite dissimilar
K. T. & K. coat-of-arms backstamp illustrated by both DeBolt and Gates
and Ormerod. The cautious researcher needs more than their remark that
this backstamp occurs with the letters K. T. & K.
Book Reviews, page 217
For purposes of identification and dating, Debolt's 1994 Dictionary
of American Pottery Marks, Whiteware & Porcelain remains the most
complete and accurate study. Lehner's 1988 Lehner's Encyclopedia of
U.S. Marks on Pottery, Porcelain & Clay is the most ambitious
and the most comprehensive in scope but is sadly deficient in terms of
accuracy. Gates' and Ormerod's 1982 The East Liverpool, Ohio, Pottery
District: Identification of Manufacturers and Marks is the only monographic
work to include photographs of marks and is rigorous in its standards
of historic accuracy though deliberately limited in geographic scope.
The Kowaiskys' compendium offers some useful approaches to identification,
particularly if one is dealing with a partial mark or a particular style
of pottery, such as flow blue, transferware, or tealeaf, but probably
is not a necessary purchase for most historical archaeologists. It may
be of limited appeal to collectors of flow blue, mulberry, tea leaf, etc.,
but much of the data included is available in other publications on these
specific types of ceramics or other books on ceramic marks.
James L. Murphy, Ohio State University Libraries
|