Ohio History Journal

Copyright © 2002 by the Ohio Historical Society. All rights reserved.

Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941
By Jonathan Scott Holloway
Reviewed by Abel A. Bartley

Swallowed by Globalism: John M. Vorys and American Foreign Policy
By Jeffrey C. Livingston
Reviewed by John T. McNay

Murder, Culture, and Injustice: Four Senstaional Cases in American History
By Walter L. Hixson
Reviewed by Kenneth J. Bindas

The Story of Joshua D. Breyfogle, Private, 4th Ohio Infantry (10th Ohio Cavalry) and the Civil War
Edited by George E. Carter
Reviewed by Robert Patrick Bender.

By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans
By Greg Robinson
Reviewed by Allan W. Austin.

Headquarters in the Brush: Blazer’s Independent Union Scouts
By Darl L. Stephenson
Reviewed by Damon R. Eubank.

Down and Out, On the Road: The Homeless in American History
By Kenneth L. Kusmer
Reviewed by Robert H. Bremner

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The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History. Edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001. vii + 251p.; map, notes, index. $35.00.)

What does it mean to be a Midwesterner? Is regional identity merely a state of mind or also a way of affirming something culturally more significant and more complex? How can the expansive and diverse places of the Midwest form a coherent geographical region? What do the residents of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois have in common with Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas? These questions and many others receive large amounts of learned discussion in The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray. Andrew R. L. Cayton is Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of numerous books and articles dealing with the history of the Midwest, most notably Frontier Indiana, 1996, The Midwest and the Nation, 1990, co-authored with Peter S. Onuf, and The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825, 1986. Susan E. Gray, associate professor of history at Arizona State University, is the author of Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier,1996, and numerous articles relating to Midwestern history. Kathleen Neils Conzen, Nicole Etcheson, Eric Hinderacker, Jon Gjerde, R. Douglas Hurt, John Lauritz Larson, Mary Neth, and Kenneth Winkle each contribute essays in addition to those of the editors.

The origin of this volume dates to a conference held at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in October of 1998. The questions that arose over the course of that conference led the editors to invite historians who had published in the history of the Midwest to reflect on what it meant to write “Midwestern history,” or if they even accepted that such a genre really existed. The ten essays in this collection are the fruits of those inquiries. They stand as “counter-narratives” that show the wide range of agreement and disagreement about what it means and has meant to be a Midwesterner. The authors of the respective chapters introduce diverse and often dissenting voices that stand as a counterfoil to the triumphant nineteenth-century narrative of progress and development. They are concerned with explicating the complex and subtle relationships between the construction of regional identities and historical narratives, the intricacies of regional cultures, the place of race and gender in Midwestern history, the historical position of the American Midwest as an “anti-region,” and what may be said to be truly distinctive about the Midwestern experience and what it more broadly shares in common with other regions of the nation. Taken together they provide a conversation about regional identity and regional history.

Cayton and Gray observe that historians writing about the Midwest carry a historiographical burden loaded with irony: “rather than argue for the distinctiveness of the Midwest, they must demonstrate the national, even universal, significance of what is generally considered both the most American and the most amorphous of regions” (p. 1). That tendency has been in place in the historiography of the region since the early nineteenth century. Nationalism and regionalism in the Midwest have been parallel and mutually sustaining traditions. “Ironically, the very strength of nationality made the emergence of regionality possible. Indeed, nationality created regionality; the latter would never have mattered without the existence of the former” (p. 8). Regional stories began to emerge in the Midwest between 1820 and 1860. Cultural leaders in the region attempted to create an indigenous literature and to declare their cultural independence from the northeastern United States. They were in search of native grounds and frequently found them within their state histories. Regionalism in the Midwest as expressed in its literature, history, and politics was often a localized expression of nationalism: “Regional conversations mirrored the processes of nationalism of which they were a part . . .” (p. 9).

A distinct Midwestern identity gradually emerged from an earlier regional consciousness. Before there was a Midwest there was the Old Northwest. Residents of the Old Northwest, a historical designation for the states created from the Northwest Territory under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, initially identified themselves as Westerners. The common political origins of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin under the Northwest Ordinance served as the basis of a common regional identity at least until the American Civil War. As new American states were created west of the Mississippi in the decades following that conflict, the Old Northwest as a historical and geographical construction gradually gave way to the larger and more unwieldy conception of the American Midwest. Residents reconstructed new regional identities in light of the urban and industrial imperatives of the day. The old narrative of progress and development bequest by earlier generations of Midwesterners no longer provided a useable past.

Specialists in certain subjects of Midwestern history will no doubt take issue with certain assumptions, statements, and treatments. Eric Hinderaker’s discussion of narrative and identity in Midwestern histories (Chapter 2) offers significant insights, but his treatment of historical societies is superficial and sometimes inaccurate. State historical societies significantly shaped regional identity and historical consciousness in the Midwest from the 1820s onward (even those that did not survive the antebellum period). They deserve more than passing mention. The first Ohio Historical Society, that established by the Ohio General Assembly in 1822, was a stillborn entity with no connection to the present day Ohio Historical Society as is incorrectly stated in a somewhat jumbled footnote (p. 215n34). Historical societies in the region did not “take shape” in the last decade of the nineteenth century (p. 63) so much as they evolved from earlier beginnings. A group of prominent Indianans founded the Indiana Historical Society in 1830 and the following year witnessed the chartering of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio at Columbus, which later became the Cincinnati Historical Society. The State Historical Society of Wisconsin appeared in 1846, two years before statehood, and the Minnesota Historical Society in 1849, nine years before statehood. The changes that were afoot among those organizations in the last decade of the nineteenth century built upon the earlier and not insignificant efforts of their founders.

Perceptions of regionalism, or regionality as the editors prefer to call it, are complex constructions. They are problematic in many ways but still have a coherence that justifies their existence as categories of historical and cultural analysis. Historical geographers and cultural historians greatly value the perspectives of regional history as a means of explicating the countervailing traditions of localism and nationalism that are writ large in the American past. The contributors of these essays ably explain how those traditions have become intertwined in the Midwest, and that the question of identity (the process of being or becoming Midwestern) is fluid, contested, and continually renegotiated across generations and within them. Students of regional identity, collective memory, historiography, and Midwestern history and culture generally will find this volume an important and welcome addition to the literature.

Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate. By Neil Baldwin. (New York, N.Y.: Public Affairs, 2001. xii + 416p.; illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. $27.50.)

In Henry Ford and the Jews, Neil Baldwin seeks to track the automaker’s involvement with anti-Semitic ideas and his promotion of popular anti-Semitism between the wars. Baldwin suggests that Ford, before he was twenty, had probably never met a Jew, and he notes the inclusion of Jews along with other immigrants in Ford’s energetic pre–World War I program of compulsory Americanization for workers. Ford declared himself opposed to war in 1915, and with a probable nudge from the pronouncements of Stanford president David Starr Jordan, Ford migrated quickly toward conjoining pacifism and prejudice by identifying warmongering bankers with Jews. The disarray and ridicule surrounding Ford’s “Peace Ship” venture late in 1915 may have encouraged his resentments. After half-hearted ventures into senatorial and presidential politics, Ford turned toward newspaper publication as a method of spreading his ideas. A postwar climate that included anti-bolshevism, a controversial peace treaty, labor agitation, and economic uncertainties enhanced the allure of scapegoating explanations. Beginning with a long piece on “The International Jew” on May 22, 1920, Ford’s Dearborn Independent published ninety-one articles of anti-Semitic accusation, and in June 1920 the newspaper began serializing the infamous Russian forgery “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.” Collections of the articles published in book form as The International Jew were translated into sixteen languages and did much to make the Protocols famous. Legal and economic pressures led Ford to repudiate the articles in 1927 but probably without changing his views. He would still be struggling with public opinion and a reputation for anti-Semitism at the dawn of World War II.

There are multiple challenges in tackling the questions Baldwin confronts. Most of the files associated with the Dearborn Independent were destroyed. Staff members and editors surrounding Ford wrote nearly all of the materials that appeared in his name, played out their own preoccupations under his banner, and guarded access to their employer. Ford himself had limited education and a weak comprehension of history or social thought. He resisted conversation, argument, and information that might challenge any settled conviction, and his declarations appeared contradictory and impulsive. Thus, Baldwin has little purchase to explore Ford’s ideas (if paucity of substance can bear such a label) and often only indirect evidence to trace his actions. The narrative is left to explore ventures supported with Ford’s money, prejudices abetted by his reputation, and responses generated by his newspaper’s campaign, with forays into the larger social and historical dynamics that gave context to anti-Semitism between the wars.

Baldwin notes that the “exercise of writing this book forced me to make the transition from being a biographer . . . to becoming an historian” (p. 325). The transition must be judged incomplete. Ford cannot stand consistently as a spine for the narrative as he might in a biography. To write successfully as a historian, Baldwin needed to find another source of cohesion. This he fails to do. Admittedly entering into unfamiliar territory in studying anti-Semitism, Baldwin follows scattered trails in his reading and attempts to bring a captive from every hunt back into his manuscript. The result at times seems haphazard. Without a sense of purpose to provide narrative direction and a principle for inclusion, the text becomes an assemblage of pieces stitched loosely together rather than a cohesive whole. Standards of argument are unclear. Baldwin does not hesitate to suggest that Ford may have provided secret funding for Hitler in the 1920s even as he acknowledges that no supporting evidence exists and that it is “impossible to be certain” (p. 189). Yet Baldwin holds back some of his most systematic comments on Ford’s anti-Semitism until an “Afterword,” claiming “The historian in me abhors speculation” (p. 326). Humbug. Readers drawn by the topic may wish to dip into Henry Ford and the Jews, but they should not expect to find an integrated work.

Terry A. Cooney, University of Puget Sound

The Goodyear Story: An Inventor’s Obsession and the Struggle for a Rubber Monopoly. By Richard Korman. (San Francisco, Calif.: Encounter Books, 2002. 300p.; illustrations, notes, index. $25.95.)

Richard Korman’s biography of Charles Goodyear is the first to appear in more than sixty years. Goodyear was an obsessed experimenter and entrepreneur who, in the years before the Civil War, discovered how to make rubber into a useful commercial product. The author, an experienced business and technical journalist, has uncovered a body of little-used sources to write an account that debunks myths and clearly explains the saga that was Charles Goodyear’s life and obsession. Goodyear emerges as a fanatic so obsessed with rubber that he ruined his own health and the well being of his family in the quest to find ways to transform latex from rubber trees into a useful commodity.

There is a myth that prevails around the life of Charles Goodyear: that he accidentally placed some rubber latex on a stove, only to discover that the heat had transformed it. In fact, it was Goodyear’s partner, William Ely, who had the accident. Goodyear took the insight gained to learn how to use heat to change latex into rubber. In rich detail, this biography explains how Goodyear spent years working with rubber both before and after Ely’s discovery. Goodyear was no scientist in the modern sense of the term; his were techniques of trial and error. Somehow he managed to keep going on borrowed funds. Eventually, Goodyear learned to mix sulfur and lead oxide with the latex and heat it, using varying temperatures to produce different properties in the final product. Goodyear called the result “metallic.” He received several patents and hoped to become rich by selling licenses for the use of his techniques.

For much of his life the quest impoverished Goodyear and his family. Goodyear was able to escape a life of poverty as a result of his success with rubber, but not the avarice of competitors here and abroad who sought to deny his patent rights. His principal rival in the United States was Horace Day, who produced rubber goods without paying license royalties. A court case ensued, perhaps the single most important patent case of the nineteenth century, which Goodyear won. (In his pursuit of Goodyear, Day collected much information, information that Korman is the first biographer to exploit fully.) Goodyear, however, was much less successful in Great Britain, where Thomas Hancock, upon seeing some of Goodyear’s rubber samples, was prompted to begin his own experiments with heat and sulfur, successfully transforming latex into rubber. (It was Hancock, not Goodyear, who invented the term “vulcanization” to describe and advertise the process.) Although Hancock was probably in violation of Goodyear’s patents, he was able to convince a British court that he was not, and Goodyear never succeeded in enriching himself with license fees from the British.

When Goodyear died in 1860 at the age of 59 his estate, like the inventor during his lifetime, was not wealthy. Goodyear’s many creditors lined up to redeem their loans, and immediately after his death the family was unable to enjoy the riches Goodyear had expected. Soon, however, shoes, raincoats, and other useful rubber products proliferated; especially important were orders from the Union army during the Civil War. Eventually some of Goodyear’s heirs became wealthy as a result, although their fortune was small compared to the greatest industrial fortunes.

The only weakness of this biography is the author’s sole focus on Goodyear. The modern rubber industry that eventually arose was based on science and industrial research. There is little effort to place Goodyear’s life in this larger context, to understand his efforts as precursor to industrial research in a setting of expanding scientific and engineering knowledge about polymers.

Two profitable companies not connected with the family eventually adopted the Goodyear name. The most successful was the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, founded in Akron, Ohio, in 1898 by Frank Seiberling. This was Charles Goodyear’s only significant Ohio connection.

K. Austin Kerr, The Ohio State University

Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History. By David Goldfield. (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. 354p.; illustrations, notes, index. $34.95.)

The study of “memory,” the ways in which cultures recall, reshape, and mythologize the past, has become a hot topic in American history. This is particularly true of the literature surrounding the Civil War, a cataclysmic event that figures prominently in the nation’s collective memory of itself. David Goldfield’s Still Fighting the Civil War is a wide-ranging tour of the modern South’s memory of that war, which, Goldfield argues, still stalks the region. “The Civil War is like a ghost that has not yet made its peace and roams the land seeking solace, retribution, or vindication,” he writes (p. 1).

The driving argument of Still Fighting the Civil War is that, for the South, the past is still very much the present: that is, Southern culture is so deeply connected with its history—slavery and the Civil War, in particular—that many Southerners have a difficult time distinguishing between past and present. “Southerners may live in the past, as some charge, but it is incontrovertible that the past lives in Southerners,” writes Goldfield (p. 16). This is true alike for black and white Southerners, though of course blacks and whites remember the past in different ways.

To make these points, Goldfield created a wide-ranging narrative that sweeps back and forth from antebellum plantations, to the war, to Reconstruction, to the civil rights movement, and to modern Southern neo-Confederates and fundamentalist evangelism. Goldfield designed this book for a general reading audience, stating plainly that “I am writing for my neighbors, not my colleagues” (p. 14). His narrative provides a good synthesis of current trends in scholarly literature on the South, written in a jargon-free manner that does make difficult concepts like Southern patriarchy and honor digestible for a non-academic audience. His chapter on women in the antebellum South, for example, provides a useful overview of the scholarly insights on the subject by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Drew Gilpin Faust, and others.

Goldfield writes with a lively, acerbic prose that can be an advantage or disadvantage. At times his edgy, critical observations are appropriate and entertaining. For example, in describing the mingling of black and white women at social clubs during the 1920s and 1930s, Goldfield points out that the women talked together but would not eat together. “They mingled standing up,” he writes, “Apparently, vertical integration was acceptable” (p. 150). But there are other occasions when his observations are sarcastic and a bit overwrought, as when he refers to the recent Southern obsession with publicly displaying the Ten Commandments. “Number ten, about coveting, would have a serious impact on New South economic development,” Goldfield writes, “Or number four, keeping the Sabbath holy—what would happen to all those Sunday football games?” (p. 86). The book’s narrative is also so sprawling that it is hard to imagine how the reading audience will be able to get a purchase on it. A reader could pick any chapter by itself and get a good summary of the scholarly writing on that chapter’s subject, but the overall sweep of the book causes its narrative to lose focus and sharpness.

Still Fighting the Civil War will likely suffer from its close proximity in time and subject to two other books: David Blight’s Race and Reunion, 2001, and Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, 1998. Goldfield’s book lacks the sharpness and crystal clear perspective of Blight’s masterpiece, and it does not have the affecting kookiness of Confederates in the Attic. Nevertheless, Goldfield has written a useful book, in the sense that it does provide a broad overview of current trends in Southern cultural and social history.

Brian R. Dirck, Anderson University

Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars. By Robert V. Remini. (New York, N.Y.: Viking Press, 2001. xvi + 317p.; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $26.95.)

Robert Remini’s many books on Andrew Jackson and his contemporaries have won wide acclaim for their solid scholarship and graceful prose. His latest book examines the most painful and controversial aspect of Andrew Jackson’s career: his dealings with Native Americans. He provides a lively, readable account of Andrew Jackson’s interactions with Indians from his early years on the frontier through his service in the White House. An avowed admirer of Old Hickory, Remini recognizes the suffering and injustice occasioned by the removal treaties Jackson negotiated and by the removal program he instituted as president. He acknowledges that Jackson was a racist, but denies that he was an Indian hater. His actions were driven, Remini argues, not by bigotry or greed, but by concern for the security of the United States. He feared Indian collaboration with America’s enemies. But he was also a kindly man who adopted an Indian orphan boy and worried about the fate of the poor and the downtrodden. His removal program was intended to protect Indians from bigoted and cruel whites, and despite the suffering caused by Jackson’s haste to enforce it, removal succeeded in its objectives. Remini concludes this book with the declaration that the Hero “saved the Five Civilized Tribes from probable extinction” (p. 281).

Does Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars meet the high standard of Remini’s earlier works? This reviewer regretfully concludes that it falls short of the mark. The book’s strongest feature is its succinct and lucid survey of Jackson’s career as an Indian fighter. But his characterizations of Native Americans are sometimes problematic. This reviewer was astounded to discover that Remini opens his book with an account of Tecumseh’s speech to the Creeks that culminates in a bloodthirsty exhortation to kill all whites, including women and children, “that the very breed may perish!” (p. 3). That so-called Tecumseh speech was recorded by a white Mississippian many years later, and is generally thought to be spurious. Remini uses it to establish a context for the Jacksonian argument that the Indian presence east of the Mississippi endangered the United States. Remini has made little use of the recent ethnohistorical literature. He provides few insights into the real nature of the Indian nations Jackson sought to remove, or of the various motives and concerns of Indian leaders. Instead, he relies heavily on Andrew Jackson’s observations about backward savages, corrupt chiefs, and nefarious half-breeds. While Remini apparently doesn’t share those views, he offers few correctives. We seldom hear authentic Native American voices. Instead Remini all too often gives credence to Jacksonian reports of their responses in treaty proceedings. To cite one example, in writing of the Chickasaw chiefs whom Jackson bludgeoned into acceptance of removal, Remini strains our credulity by declaring: “Still they loved him. They really did” (p. 146). Remini pays little attention to the white opponents of Jackson’s Indian removal program, but dismisses the critics as an ineffective minority. Thus, we seldom hear from the Whigs either.

Remini is far too willing to accept Andrew Jackson’s public statements at face value. In his assessment of Jackson’s presidency, he denies that the Hero ever intended to force any Indian to leave his homeland. “Unfortunately, the President’s noble desire to give Indians free choice between staying and removing, one free of coercion, was disregarded by land-greedy state and federal officials, who practiced fraud and deception to enrich themselves at the expense of the native tribes” (p. 237). That statement is puzzling. Remini himself quotes Jackson’s frequent warning that Indians who remained behind would not be well treated by their white neighbors or protected by the states, and would face “annihilation” (p. 242). He acknowledges also that Jackson encouraged negotiators to play on Indian fears. Even a cursory inspection of Jackson’s confidential papers reveals his opposition to any continued Indian presence east of the Mississippi. (See for example, Notes on Poinsett’s Instructions, August 5, 1829, Jackson Papers, Library of Congress.) Nor is it difficult to find evidence of extensive opposition in the country at large to Jackson’s refusal to enforce laws and treaties extending federal protection to Indians. Remini’s claim that Jackson intended that removal be voluntary flies in the face of evidence that can be found in Remini’s own books, this one included. Overall, it seems that Jackson’s well-documented determination to carry out thorough ethnic cleansing has somehow eluded his most celebrated biographer.

Alfred A. Cave, The University of Toledo

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. By David W. Blight. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2001. 512p.; illustrations, notes, index. $29.95.)

With the memorable final sentence of his 1975 interpretation of the Civil War, Flawed Victory, historian William L. Barney suggests, “In perhaps the greatest irony of the war, the North won the battles but the South dictated the peace terms.” Where Barney’s provocative book offers only this tantalizing hint of the war’s social and ideological repercussions with regard to the future of free African Americans in the republic, David Blight’s fine book completes his hypothesis, using the vehicle of race with which to assess the war’s lasting impact. Focusing his study on the period between Reconstruction and the First World War, Blight’s complex study rests upon a facile premise: that a national memory of the war, one that reunited the once-divided sections around a mythology of shared white sacrifice and valor, was achieved only through white Americans’ collective erasure from that memory of African American participation in the war and the acceptance of southern-style racial segregation by the nation as a whole. Thus, in a sense, Blight argues that reconciliation itself could not have occurred had not the entire nation jumped Jim Crow.

Make no mistake: however reducible Blight’s argument might be, his book is anything but simple or even reductionist. The author has created a deeply layered and textured book steeped in an exhaustive array of sources and offers nuances as complex as the period and subject tackled. Memory is a difficult subject to assess, a “promiscuous critter” (as the historian Barbara Fields has called the related concept of ideology) which shifts and changes with individual experience, sectional realities, and historical circumstance. Yet Blight has provided ample evidence to bolster his case for a national racialized reunion, assessing rituals of holidays, monuments, modes of popular entertainment, academic treatises, periodicals, speeches, politics, and elections. Moreover, he does not limit his evidence to a treatise of white soldiers’ memory of the war, northern or southern; he offers women’s, civilians,’ and African Americans’ (soldiers and not) memories, the latter of which white Americans did all in their power to obfuscate. For Blight, race and reunion’s symbolic pièces de résistance occurred near or at the Civil War’s fiftieth anniversary, most particularly the 1898–1903 Spanish American War and the 1913 white veterans’ reunion at Gettysburg. The jingoistic former allowed “Southern support for the war and expansion [to become] an overwhelming force by which reunion trumped appeals for racial justice, . . . [and] the growing alliance between white supremacy and imperialism, had profound consequences for race relations and for the nation’s historical memory” (p. 352). The sentimental latter demonstrated that “Racial legacies, conflict itself, the bitter consequences of Reconstruction’s failure to make good on the promises of emancipation, and the war as America’s second revolution in the meaning of liberty and equality had been seared clean from the nation’s master narrative” in favor of a “clean narrative of a Civil War between two foes struggling nobly for equally honorable notions of liberty, of a sentimentalized plantation South . . . [and] of soldiers’ devotion in epic proportions to causes that mattered not” (p. 391).

If any criticism can be offered of Blight’s sweeping and powerful assessment of national culture, his interpretation of national reunion does not account for the shift of regional identity between South and North revealed clearly by the Ohio River as border and by those who lived on either side of it. Kentuckians and Ohioans, despite their shared racist ideology, clearly did not consider themselves of the same ilk after the war. If anything, the Civil War shaped this region in terms of regional identity beyond any that had existed prior. Regardless, this book is a tour de force and is simply required reading by all who have interest in the Civil War or American history in general.

Christopher Phillips, University of Cincinnati

Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle. By Kenneth W. Noe. (Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001. xxiv + 494p.; illustrations, maps, appendixes, notes, works consulted, index. $35.00.)

Within the realm of Civil War operational history, historians and readers have often given short shrift to less well-known battles in the western theater. Events in the eastern theater, where Robert E. Lee and his Confederate legions enjoyed great battlefield success, have frequently taken precedence in popular memory, contradicting the old maxim that victors write the history books. Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle goes a long way toward correcting this imbalance. Professor Kenneth W. Noe of Auburn University has filled a significant gap in the historiography of the Civil War’s western theater. He asserts that the October 1862 battle must rank with the war’s decisive engagements.

October 8, 1862, was indeed the “high water mark” of southern fortunes west of the Appalachian Mountains, as elements of General Braxton Bragg’s Confederate Army of the Mississippi and Major General Don Carlos Buell’s Union Army of the Ohio clashed in the drought-scarred Chaplin Hills of central Kentucky. The fighting was confused and tactically indecisive, but brutal nonetheless, with more than 6,000 casualties between the opposing armies. Perryville’s larger significance lay in the fact that Bragg was forced to break off his invasion of Kentucky, marking the last real attempt to bring that key border state into the Confederacy. After the battle, simultaneous events surrounding the Battle of Antietam, which climaxed Lee’s first invasion of the North, overshadowed Perryville in scale and immediacy and consigned it to relative obscurity, both then and now. Professor Noe has rescued this key engagement from obscurity with this masterful study.

The author’s research is impressive, bringing to bear a wealth of civilian and military primary sources on both sides, the latter from men in the ranks all the way up to the generals commanding on both sides. Throughout the book, he also demonstrates a command of the existing scholarly interpretations of the battle, while drawing his own judicious conclusions along the way. Balancing these various viewpoints without creating confusion is difficult, but Noe does it with ease, creating a seamless, entertaining narrative. This balance allows the book to tell a very human story while maintaining an appropriate level of analysis of operational and tactical decisions. One particular instance bears mentioning: Noe’s contention that a bipolar disorder may have caused Braxton Bragg’s well-known mood swings and difficult personality is sure to provoke debate and discussion.

Noe’s retelling of the battle is also excellent. Here again, he is especially adept at conveying the confusion and destruction of the battlefield, while detailing troop movements and engagements and maintaining a balanced commentary on leader decisions. He clearly finds fault with the generals on both sides, and the actions and sacrifices of the soldiers themselves take center stage as the battle progresses.

Instead of using the book’s concluding chapter to recap the Perryville campaign’s lessons and significance, points that he makes quite clearly throughout the text, Noe uses his conclusion to detail both the place of the battle in the memories of participants and local residents and the ongoing struggles to preserve the battlefield. Human memories of the experience of battle are every bit as important as the battle itself in shaping subsequent events. Noe does a superb job of placing Perryville within the continuing process of understanding and memorializing a defining moment in American history.

Exhaustively researched and engagingly written, this book will appeal to both academic and popular audiences. The author and the University Press of Kentucky are also to be commended for the book’s excellent maps and photographs and attractive presentation. Of particular note is the book’s Order of Battle, a useful resource which lists commanders and casualty figures down to regiment and battery level. Until new primary sources emerge, this book will surely remain the definitive treatment of the Battle of Perryville.

Maj. Charles Bowery, United States Military Academy

The Roots of Appalachian Christianity: The Life & Legacy of Elder Shubal Stearns. By Elder John Sparks. (Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001. xx + 327p.; bibliography, notes, index. $34.95.)

Elder Shubal Stearns (1706–1771) lives in Baptist and southern church history as the “man who baptized the South.” He is credited with planting the first Separatist Baptist churches in the North Carolina Piedmont, establishing the associational system whereby Baptist churches voluntarily cooperate in evangelistic ventures, and as the individual responsible for the spread of fervent evangelicalism into the highlands west of the Piedmont. Stearns’s evangelistic efforts led to the establishment of the Sandy Creek Baptist Church, and the Sandy Creek Association of forty-two Baptist churches in North Carolina and Virginia. After the death of Stearns, his Separatist Baptists traveled further west into the mountains and his legacy survives there today. Baptists in the Piedmont no longer preach in the emotional style of Shubal Stearns, but the Appalachian preachers continue to deliver sermons in such a manner.

The author, Elder John Sparks, a part-time United Baptist preacher in the Old Zion Association in Johnson County, Kentucky, believes that Stearns is responsible for the establishment of more that just Separatist Baptists in the Piedmont and the mountains. He argues that Shubal Stearns does not get the credit he deserves for impacting Appalachian evangelical churches. Elder Sparks may be correct, but his presentation is not convincing, and his work is fraught with problems.

The difficulty is the scarcity of primary source material. Most of the primary source notes are from one collection of manuscripts, and the biographical knowledge of Stearns comes from three encyclopedia articles. Sparks admits that Stearns left posterity without a diary, journal, extensive correspondence, or written sermons. These facts go a long way in explaining why detailed accounts of Stearns do not exist. Another defect in the research is in his failing to acknowledge recent secondary works such as Bill Leonard’s edited collection Christianity in Appalachia: Profiles in Religious Pluralism (1999), H. Leon McBeth’s The Baptist Heritage (1987); and Jesse C. Fletcher’s The Southern Baptist Convention: A Sesquicentennial History (1994).

The book is marred by Sparks’s prejudice against the Southern Baptist Convention. He repeatedly laments as to the Old Landmark heresy, so common in the early years of the Southern Baptist Convention, in which J. R. Graves and J. M. Pendleton argued that Baptist origins could be traced back to John the Baptist and through “the trail of blood” of Christ and the apostles. Southern Baptist scholars and intellectuals have long since abandoned this hagiography, but Sparks will not let it rest. The original works of either Graves or Pendleton do not appear in the bibliography, nor are they cited in the text. Sparks also did not address historiography such as James Edward McGoldrick’s Baptist Successionism: A Crucial Question in Baptist History (1994), and W. Wiley Richards, Winds of Doctrines: The Origin and Development of Southern Baptist Theology (1991).

Sparks’s prose is inflammatory, terse, and often confusing. The digressions are especially annoying. In the book’s final chapter, under the subheading “The Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) and Its Offshoots,” he digresses from his subject for most of the first page to rail against the Southern Baptist “megalith” (p. 279). An example of his writing style is found near the end of the book when Sparks discusses the lack of a Stearns biographer. He writes that “it’s been a matter of continual wonder to me why some enterprising Appalachian scholar—or a Baptist historian with enough guts to challenge the SBC’s view of Baptist history—hadn’t penned his biography already” (p. 291). His choice of words and terminology is often confusing. He refers often to “American” Baptists rather that “colonial” or “colonial era” Baptists. Many novice readers might confuse the term “American” Baptists with the modern denomination of the same name founded in 1950.

The strongest features of the book are the foreword written by Loyal Jones and the final chapter, in which Sparks describes the various religious sects that populate modern Appalachia as a result of Stearns’s efforts. In summation, Sparks attempted to do too much with too little. The books mentioned above are written in a clear and orderly fashion, researched thoroughly, well documented, and readable. The same cannot be said for The Roots of Christianity in Appalachia: The Life and Legacy of Elder Shubal Stearns.

James S. Baugess, Columbus State Community College

The second volume in The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, an eight-volume edition published by Ohio University Press, picks up with Secretary of War Taft mounting his successful 1908 campaign for the presidency. The first volume in the collection, which combined Four Aspects of Civic Duty, the Dodge Lectures delivered in 1906 at Yale University, with Present Day Problems, a collection of addresses delivered between 1895 and 1908, offers scholars and lay readers an excellent introduction to Will Taft’s social, political, and economic thought. The second volume, edited by series general editor David H. Burton, reproduces Political Issues and Outlooks: Speeches Delivered Between August 1908 and February 1909. The speeches are introduced by Burton’s excellent commentary on Taft’s life and career at this momentous turning point in both.

Political Issues and Outlooks presents twenty-three speeches from the 1908 campaign and transition period. The reader will find both vintage Republican political rhetoric and Taft’s personal philosophy in these selections, including the usually heavy dose of his conception of equal justice under the law. As editor Burton observes in his commentary, these speeches demonstrate not only how heavily candidate Taft leaned on his predecessor’s record, but also how honest he was in admitting “some failures to procure justice for the people over the previous twelve years of Republican rule.” Burton rightly notes that the candidate’s admission goes beyond mere political candor to provide “a clue to his deeper, moral side” (p. 2).

Political Issues and Outlooks, like the first volume in this collection, is a significant work for historians to mine. This book provides texts of Taft’s public statements in four very important, and interrelated, categories of political argument at the end of the Theodore Roosevelt administration: the fundamental political principles of the Republican party, the party’s stance on labor relations and the controversy over the use of injunctions in labor disputes, its position on the proper relations between the races and the party’s strategy in the American South, and finally, its defense of America’s new imperial expansion done through a spirited justification of U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines.

Why is this edition a valuable source for historians of Progressive Era Ohio and the nation to consult? The first two volumes of the Collected Works of William Howard Taft provide us with the secretary of war and president-elect’s most important public contributions to the formulation of both the Republican party’s political ideology and the American discourse on civilization during the Progressive Era. Specifically, in the second volume, five speeches (“The Future of the Negro,” “Hopeful Views of Negro Difficulties,” “The Outlook of Negro Education,” “The Uniting of Whites and Negroes,” and “A Cheerful Review of Negro Activities”) reveal much about Taft’s position on race relations and the importance he placed on the notion of “racial uplift,” especially for African Americans in the South. Similarly, “In Defense of the Philippine Policy,” a speech given in Norwood, Ohio, during the early weeks of the presidential campaign, clearly demonstrates the linkage Taft saw between the “civilizing mission” Republican administrations pursued in the nation’s new insular colonies and great power imperial policies in the Far East. “We are pioneers in spreading Western civilization in the East,” candidate Taft declared (p. 66). As in earlier speeches defending American empire, he blasted Bryan Democrats for advocating the abandonment of that imperial mission—the burden of uplifting the uneducated colonial peoples of the new American empire.

Historians interested in the debates over race, empire, and civilization, and historians of party ideology and political argument at the start of the last century will find the first two volumes in this edition extremely useful. David H. Burton, his associate editors, and Ohio University Press have made an important contribution to scholarship in the fields of Progressive Era U.S. and Ohio history.

Clarence E. Wunderlin, Jr., Kent State University

Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941. By Jonathan Scott Holloway. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 320p.; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth; $18.95 paper.)

The 1933 Amenia Conference signaled an intellectual shift in the African American community and indicated the arrival of a new generation of Black intellectuals who offered a different analysis of the racial and social problems facing the United States. These new scholars centered their talents in the relatively comfortable and academically free and financially stable environment of Howard University. In Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, Jonathan Scott Holloway looks at the way the three new generation intellectuals challenged the old guard solutions, strategies, and leadership of the NAACP and forced its leaders to change the organization’s approach to solving the country’s racial problems.

Holloway provides a biographical sketch of these men who distinguished themselves as new generation leaders at the Amenia Conference. The book is divided into well-written, concise biographies of Harris, Frazier, and Bunche sandwiched between an introductory and conclusion chapter summarizing their impact on America. The biographies are interesting looks into the professional and intellectual lives of these men, tracing their paths to Amenia and Howard University. The author does a wonderful job of describing Howard University’s relationship to the African American intellectual community and the role Mordecai Johnson plays in maintaining Howard’s intellectual, financial, and racial integrity. The book is rich with knowledge and anecdotes about the Howard community and the men who taught there.

Holloway shows the varied paths the three men took to national recognition and their relationship and attitude towards America’s racial problems. Each man came to his own personal Rubicon, where he flirted with communism and then joined the mainstream civil rights process. Harris, the economist, centered much of his critiques of the American system in his economic analysis and the importance of developing an economic foundation for African Americans. Even though he rejected Dubois’s separatists model, he understood that economic development is essential to racial progress.

E. Franklin Frazier, a pioneering sociologist, took a sociological look at African Americans, emphasizing the unique nature of their existence. He attempted to divorce the Black experience in America from that of their African past. He engaged in an intellectual contest with Melville Herskovits over the significance of the African past to understanding contemporary African American behavior. Frazier was a fighter who did not mind pushing the envelope, even associating racism with a psychological problem.

Ralph Bunche became the Mr. Everyman for the African American people. His insistence on deemphasizing race led him to look towards cooperative solutions to Black problems. He underestimated the level of racial hatred and as a result lost valuable momentum in his struggle for advancement. Bunche, a pioneering political scientist, launched a series of brutal assaults on African American leaders, castigating their willingness to compromise with racism. Bunche was a diplomat who made a name for himself studying an internationalist model of development. He won a Nobel Peace Prize and served in a number of diplomatic capacities within and without government. Harris, Frazier and Bunche were also trailblazers who expanded the scholastic opportunities for students at Howard. Each man set his own academic tone, leaving behind a traceable record of intellectual or diplomatic achievements.

Confronting the Veilýis a very good look at the new generation intellectuals who provided leadership for the African American community during the depression and postwar era. The book is a wonderful read, which provides answers to some of the pressing problems facing the African American community today. Although there are others who are equally significant as these men, Confronting the Veil looks at three men who offered differing solutions to a confusing and frustrating period of American history. Even though the narrative is excellent, it sometimes gets cumbersome following the storyline and maintaining the book’s focus. Nevertheless this book is a must for anyone interested in African American intellectual history.

Abel A. Bartley, University of Akron

Swallowed by Globalism: John M. Vorys and American Foreign Policy. By Jeffery C. Livingston. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001. x + 193p.; notes, bibliography, index. $24.00.)

At the center of Jeffery C. Livingston’s study of Ohio Rep. John Vorys’ political career is the irony that although Vorys had impeccable conservative Republican credentials, he was a leader in the conservative embrace of globalism in the years after the Second World War.

Swallowed by Globalism: John M. Vorys and American Foreign Policy is a finely crafted study that is intriguing on a number of fronts, not the least of which is the apparent new bipartisanship that has now emerged in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Similar to the early years of the Cold War when Vorys influenced policy, conservative Republicans are again moving toward a recognition that engagement in the world is the best way to avoid the kind of misperceptions and misunderstandings of American policy that have in part led to the current problems. As Democrats and Republicans today strive for a bipartisan approach to the current crisis, Livingston’s book makes for interesting reading of a similar struggle for bipartisan foreign policy some fifty years ago.

“Ironically,” Livingston notes, “Vorys’ advocacy of globalism swallowed his commitment to the conservative ideals of limited government and fiscal restraint.” Vorys clearly reflected his Midwestern conservative background which he absorbed thoroughly while growing up in Columbus. Yet, as a young adult, he had several experiences that broadened his perspective. Leaving Columbus, Vorys went to college at Yale University, a bastion of East Coast internationalism. Vorys’ acceptance into the prestigious secret society, Skull and Bones, helped him forge links with the elite that ran American foreign policy through much of the twentieth century. Vorys’ service in Europe in World War I also had an important impact on his life, Livingston notes, because it caused him to reconsider what role the United States should play in the world. Contemptuous of Woodrow Wilson and distrustful of other nations, Vorys shunned the notion of a League of Nations and emphasized instead American unilateralism, a theme he maintained throughout his political career. Also, while at Yale, he participated in the Yale-in-China program and while there he “absorbed what one prominent historian has labeled the ‘open door ideology,’ an outlook shared by many ‘China Hands.’” After his return to Columbus, he graduated from Ohio State University law school in 1923, having already served as assistant secretary to the U.S. delegation to the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922.

Vorys entered Congress in 1938, riding Republican coattails to edge out Democratic incumbent Arthur Lamneck by just 2,400 votes out of 126,000 cast. The timing of Vorys’ election was crucial because the outbreak of World War II was to be a key factor for him by forcing foreign policy issues to primacy. Given the combination of his international background and his conservatism, Vorys became a leader in the important shift by Republicans toward internationalism. Yet, Vorys and other Republican conservatives like Arthur H. Vandenberg did not entirely give up on prewar unilateralism. They projected it globally instead of toward isolation.

Beginning in World War II, and then becoming more complete during the early years of the Cold War, the movement toward global bipartisanship caused the Ohio Republican to have some good working relationships with members of the Democratic Party. He often had opportunity to work closely with Dean Acheson, for example, although his relationship with Acheson soured after the secretary defended Alger Hiss. Eventually, Vorys helped draft a resolution calling for Acheson’s dismissal.

Sometimes Vorys’ judgment could be flawed, such as when his ardent support of the Chinese nationalists caused him to call them “the most potent anti-Axis force on earth.” Also, and much to his discredit, he eagerly embraced much of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s approach to attacking Democrats as soft on communism. While he privately expressed concern about McCarthy’s tactics, like McCarthy Vorys also “made exaggerated accusations and then failed to deliver supporting evidence.”

Livingston notes that students of American foreign policy have neglected the role of Congress in foreign policymaking, and because of that it has been easy to overlook that John Vorys “was a bellwether for evolving conservative nationalist views on U.S. foreign policy.” Livingston’s study, however, goes a long way to correcting that neglect and suggests the value of examining the careers of individual congressmen to shed light on broadly important foreign policy issues.

John T. McNay, University of Cincinnati

Murder, Culture, and Injustice: Four Sensational Cases in American History. By Walter L. Hixson. (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 2001. v + 274p.; illustrations, bibliography, index. $27.95.)

“Reality and representation,” Walter L. Hixson writes of the O. J. Simpson case, “became so blurred as to blend together in the public eye” (p. 259). Yet in the three cases that preceded O. J.’s story it was exactly society, and by extension the criminal justice system, that proved unable or unwilling to separate the real from the imagined. Murder, Culture, and Injustice examines the cases of Lizzie Borden, Bruno Hauptmann, Sam Sheppard, and O. J. in order to explore how these sensational cases “brought to the surface cultural tensions” (p. 2) which existed in each of the eras they represent. These “perversions of justice” (p. 3) prove interesting reading because of Hixson’s excellent storytelling and his ability to weave historical context into the chilling crime stories. Part history, part popular nonfiction, Hixson’s work proves adept at engaging the reader and critiquing the criminal justice system’s handling of these four murder cases.

Each case was played out in a different era and was driven by unique cultural tensions. Borden’s murder of her father and stepmother was situated within the Victorian framework of feminine frailty. Hauptmann was tried and convicted of kidnapping and murdering Lindbergh’s child under the xenophobic tendencies of his day. Sheppard, accused of murdering his wife, found that wealth was not always the key to judicial success. Simpson’s case revealed the duality that exists in America between race and the criminal justice system, even as it seemed clear that he had indeed murdered two people.

Each of these involved high-profile legal struggles which saw much of their strategy influenced by the media’s analysis. In the Borden case, local and New York papers argued that the brutality of the murders made it impossible for Miss Lizzie to have committed them, as she was a respected member of the Falls River social elite. Whatever the prosecutor tried to do to encourage the jury to convict—even as the evidence against her was clear—their minds were made up. They agreed that no woman could have committed these murders and that the real culprit was still at large. In the Hauptmann case, Hixson’s presentation makes his guilt clear without a doubt, but the trial was marred by poor defense representation, media hype as the “crime of the century,” and a “lynch mob atmosphere” (p. 128). The Sheppard case proved, for this reviewer, the most compelling, as this was the only case where the accused was innocent. Railroaded by a police force, medical examiner, and a slew of local Cleveland newspapers, Dr. Sam waged a decade-long struggle to prove his innocence and tried to regain some semblance of life after the brutal rape and murder of his wife. While exonerated—eventually—the “Roman holiday” of the trial and slandering of his reputation destroyed the man who died without peace. Hixson leads the reader through every turn of this American tragedy, placing blame on the newfound power of the media to create truths where none existed (a carryover from propaganda efforts of World War II and the cold war) and a judicial system that was blinded by its own desires.

Perhaps Hixson purposely used the Sheppard section to show how the system could be manipulated against the innocent as well as the guilty to set up the reader for his best and most biting analysis—the O. J. Simpson case. Hixson shows that perhaps he could and should have been a part of the prosecution team by outlining the myriad of ways in which Clark, Darden, et al., bungled a simple and winnable case. While Simpson’s dream team of lawyers made the trial an issue of race, the facts did not alter the reality that Simpson had come to view the system with contempt as the celebrity of his person “allowed him to violate the law with impunity” (p. 206). The defendant believed he could run, talk, and act his way out of anything, and using his fame, fortune, and race as trump cards helped orchestrate a perversion of the criminal justice system.

Murder, Culture, and Injustice is an informative and entertaining book. Not encumbered with notes or issues of historiography, Hixson sets out to write a readable and exciting overview of four of the most sensational murders and trials of the last one hundred years. There are few revelations here, and while Hixson does argue persuasively the injustices of each case, what sets this book apart from the many others is the confidence and verve of the writing. Each chapter is introduced with a fictionalized account of the murders and from these one gets the sense that what Hixson really wants is to blend the crime-story formula into the historical narrative. In this book, on these topics, he is successful.

Kenneth J. Bindas, Kent State University-Trumbull

The Story of Joshua D. Breyfogle, Private, 4th Ohio Infantry (10th Ohio Cavalry) and the Civil War. Edited by George E. Carter. (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. iii + 381p.; illustrations, appendix, bibliography, index. $129.95.)

In late January 1868, Civil War veteran Joshua D. Breyfogle walked into the woodshed by his home and brought his life to an abrupt and tragic end with a single gunshot. Although details of his motivation are almost nonexistent, it seems apparent that his wartime experiences so severely altered his mental state that he proved incapable of a successful postwar readjustment into civilian life. Unlike his tragic death, however, Breyfogle’s Civil War service is amply chronicled in his letters and journal entries, which are held by the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College.

Several characteristics of Joshua Breyfogle’s personal history make this collection a worthwhile publication. As a fifty-four-year-old father of six children, Breyfogle certainly did not need to enlist; plenty of younger men would help fill the ranks of the Union army. In May 1861, however, Breyfogle joined many of those younger men and enlisted in the 4th Ohio Infantry, a regiment that later gained fame as part of the Gibraltar Brigade of the Army of the Potomac’s hard-fighting Second Corps. Two of Breyfogle’s sons served with him in the 4th Ohio and his writings chronicle their experiences as well as his own in several of the early eastern campaigns. The elder Breyfogle received a discharge in November 1862 and returned home to Delaware, Ohio. His stay, however, proved rather brief. In early 1863 he agreed to serve as a paid substitute and enlisted in the 10th Ohio Cavalry. Breyfogle and his new regiment served in the western theater until the close of the war and saw action at Chickamauga, the Atlanta Campaign, and Sherman’s March to the Sea.

Breyfogle’s letters and journals offer the reader the perspective of a much older soldier who saw active duty in two branches of service, in the war’s two most significant theaters of operation. His letters, written to his wife Mary, and his journals reflect this varied perspective. In addition to the usual soldier’s complaints about food, pay, weather, and officers, Breyfogle offers consistent, honest, and sometimes foreboding commentary on the campaigns in which he participated. The austerity of his almost daily record of activities on the march to Savannah provide a subtle contrast to the devastation of the campaign and bear witness to his pre-march observation that the operation would produce “one mass of ruin and desolation” (p. 301).

George E. Carter provides good, albeit somewhat uneven, editorship of these documents. He does an excellent job of identifying most of the ordinary soldiers and civilians who appear in Breyfogle’s accounts. The time-consuming nature of this task makes it a crucial facet of the editorial process, as anyone who has edited Civil War documents can attest, and he should be commended for this effort. Carter also provides an appendix of names near the end of the text, which serves as a useful reference tool. At times, however, Carter’s efforts seem incomplete and unpolished, such as his heavy reliance on block quotes and unnecessary identification of topical breaks in the introduction, which combine to create several uneven transitions. Grammatical errors also occur too frequently to be dismissed as typographical miscues. Much of Carter’s text would have benefited from at least one additional draft to eliminate such problems. In addition, the rather scant bibliography suggests an over-reliance on published primary sources; military service and pension records, readily available through the National Archives, are not consulted. No maps are included and photographs are limited to only a few images of specific letters.

Joshua Breyfogle was a soldier who did not easily fit into many of the usual historical categories associated with the men who served in the Civil War. It is that degree of uniqueness that makes his premature death such a tragedy and his wartime letters and journals a valuable addition to the wealth of primary material produced by the rank-and-file soldiers.

Robert Patrick Bender, Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell

By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans. By Greg Robinson. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. 322p.; notes on terminology, abbreviations, notes, index. $27.95.)

In By Order of the President, Greg Robinson investigates how the exile and incarceration of Japanese Americans during the Second World War occurred under the watch of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a president closely associated with human rights. In part because of his reputation, Robinson argues, Roosevelt’s role in constructing concentration camps has been too often ignored. Although emphasizing Roosevelt’s role at the center of this story at times might obscure the larger context, especially for readers unfamiliar with the topic, the author manages for the most part to ground Roosevelt’s role effectively in the larger picture. Robinson’s thoroughly researched and well-written monograph presents an even-handed approach to a controversial subject that centers on Roosevelt but does not indict the President alone for the mistreatment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. However, Robinson occasionally overstates the case versus the President. For example, he suggests Roosevelt’s disinterest in helping Japanese American college students resettle from concentration camp to campus by noting his lack of effort to help provide funds, despite a plea from California Governor Culbert Olson. Robinson neglects to point out until later in the text that Roosevelt did respond to Olson with the important promise that “qualified American-born Japanese students” would be able to continue their education. In fact, a program of student resettlement was begun for fall 1942 and eventually helped more than 4,000 students resettle.

Coming of age in an era that saw Japan rising to power, the prominence of scientific racism, and strong anti-Chinese prejudice, Roosevelt shared the conventional wisdom of the day in believing that Japanese were inherently unassimilable and “undeserving of equal citizenship rights” (p. 43). Seeing all Japanese Americans as adjuncts of Japan and potential enemies, Roosevelt was only too ready to assume the worst. Having conflated national security concerns with the belief that all Japanese Americans were foreign and dangerous, Roosevelt moved toward exile and incarceration after Pearl Harbor. Robinson meticulously details the key events, persons, and forces leading to the decision for exile and incarceration, which imposed military rule over civilians absent a declaration of martial law and “was unprecedented in the extent of its racially defined infringement of the basic rights of American citizens” (p. 109). The implementation of exile and incarceration, Robinson argues, revealed “a blend of weak administration and deadly indifference, which was informed by racial hostility but was not synonymous with it” (p. 145). Roosevelt continued to see all Japanese Americans as a potential threat to national security even as his administration retreated from exile and incarceration. Thus, political considerations, not the rights of Japanese Americans, determined the painfully prolonged course of this retreat.

Robinson’s examination of exile and incarceration runs counter to two trends in Asian American historiography today: he ignores Japanese American agency in studying the oppressors instead of the oppressed and he focuses on Japanese American incarceration, a subject that some scholars such as Gary Okihiro consider to be too much studied. He also at times covers ground previously mapped by other historians, most notably Roger Daniels. Still, By Order of the President is a useful addition to the field; in refocusing an oft-told story on a relatively neglected yet important actor, Robinson reminds us that, at a minimum, the old narrative needs some fine-tuning if not a total revision. In placing Roosevelt in a more central role in the story, Robinson makes important contributions toward a more complete understanding of the treatment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War as well as a reassessment of the benefits of Roosevelt’s pragmatic leadership style.

Allan W. Austin, College Misericordia

Headquarters in the Brush: Blazer’s Independent Union Scouts. By Darl L. Stephenson. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2001. xxi + 355p.; illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)

Historical memory is a very selective process as Darl L. Stephenson reminds the reader in Headquarters in the Brush. While John S. Mosby’s exploits have made him a popular hero the similar exploits of Richard Blazer’s Independent Scouts have been ignored by historians for decades. Only one work written by a member of the unit a few years after the end of the war and a few scattered articles have been published. This study will help correct that historical omission.

Colonel Carr B. White, a volunteer officer with experience dealing with irregular troops in the Mexican War, was the driving force behind the development of Blazer’s Independent Scouts. The scouts would counter the Confederate partisan activity in West Virginia and keep Union straggling to a minimum. Only troops of the highest quality could serve as scouts.

Blazer’s unit originally consisted of soldiers chosen from the 9th West Virginia Volunteer Infantry, the 12th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and the 91st Ohio Infantry. In 1864 additional troops were added from units raised primarily in Southeastern Ohio. The original commander of the unit was John White Spencer, but he was followed by Lieutenant [later Captain] Richard Blazer with whom the scouts are most closely associated. Lieutenant Harrison Gray Otis, of Los Angeles Times and Spanish American War fame, rounded out the original officer corps.

The scouts served with distinction in West Virginia dealing with several partisans bands, most notably the Thurmonds, and in the Shenandoah Valley and Loudoun Valley in 1864. Blazer’s men used the Spencer rifle and more than held their own against Confederate forces. Several officers, especially General George Crook, understood the value of the scouts and prized their work highly. Eventually attrition and promotions reduced the number and quality of the force. As a result, at Kabletown in late 1864 the unit was vastly outnumbered and severely defeated by Mosby’s Rangers. Unfortunately, historians have remembered the scouts’ defeat at Kabletown far more than they did their earlier successes.

Stephenson believes that the experiment with Blazer’s Independent Scouts had a profound impact on subsequent American military history. General Crook took his experience with the scouts and used it in the Indian Wars of the next generation. His use of scouts made Crook the most successful of the Indian war commanders. The author also believes that Harrison Gray Otis’s experience with the scouts gave him valuable insight in dealing with Filipino insurgents after the Spanish American War.

Headquarters in the Brush is a well-researched work on a small unit which played a significant role in the Civil War. Because of the nature of their work relatively little has been written about the unit since the end of the Civil War. Moreover, much of what has been written has been from the perspective of Mosby’s Rangers. These works tend to denigrate the quality of service Blazer’s unit provided for the Union cause. In addition, personal egotism played a role in the historical record of the unit. General Phillip Sheridan refused to give the unit due recognition in his reports or memoirs.

The author has done an admirable job of bringing Blazer’s Scouts back to life. He has compiled a roster of members of the unit and provided numerous photographs of the individuals mentioned. Stephenson has also included several good maps for the reader. The author makes a persuasive argument about the quality and impact of the scouts. Criticisms of the work are few and relatively minor. At times quotations on a page are greater than the prose and some quotations could have been paraphrased or condensed to make the reading easier, However, this does not spoil what is essentially a fine study of a small unit. Anyone interested in the partisan war in Virginia or in John S. Mosby should have this volume on their shelves to counteract the prevailing omission of Blazer’s service to the Union cause. It is hoped that other authors will take their cue from Stephenson’s work, and well-researched small-unit studies will follow.

Damon R. Eubank, Campbellsville University

Down and Out, On the Road: The Homeless in American History. By Kenneth L. Kusmer. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2001. ix + 332p.; illustrations, appendix, notes, index. $35.00.)

Down and Out, On the Road impressed me as an informative monograph on the lives of beggars and tramps in the United States, mainly between 1865 and 1935, to which brief introductory and concluding chapters have been added to make the work seem more timely. The author provides no bibliography or list of recommended readings but includes sixty closely packed pages of notes, many with multiple citations. A number of the sources and much of the material discussed will be familiar to historians of poverty and social welfare in America.

Kusmer pays due attention to the presence of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos in the ranks of the homeless. In a chapter on the origins of homelessness in America, the author largely ignores the long European experience with the problem. He does not dwell on the reality or threat of loss of land and livelihood in Great Britain or continental Europe that impelled so many immigrants to seek new lives in America. He notes the early appearance of sturdy beggars and idle vagrants—probably runaway slaves, apprentices or indentured servants—as distinct from the infant, aged, crippled, and sick poor, and calls attention to the problems that former slaves had in finding a place in society. He mentions but shows little interest in the adventurers, loners, social misfits, and nonconformists who flourished in early America.

Chapter 3, “The Emergence of the Tramp,” and the following seven chapters comprise the bulk of the book. They alternate between the experiences of wandering hobos and stay-at-home denizens of urban skid rows. The chapter on demographic characteristics of the homeless, emphasizing native-born white males as the predominant group, is probably the most controversial; “The Changing Image” deals as much with polite literature as popular culture. Except for occasional periods of well-merited apprehension, the general population appears to have been tolerant of tramps and generous enough toward down-and-outers to keep them in business. Even the C.O.S., whose tough-love philosophy and policies Kusmer deplores, did the homeless the honor of taking their condition seriously and trying, according to its lights, to help them regain independence.

The high point of Kusmer’s book comes in Chapter 10, with the organization of the Federal Transient Service (FTS). Kusmer provides a sympathetic account of the development, policies, and leadership of the FTS and a favorable assessment of conditions in its camps. The FTS came to an end in 1935, when the New Deal shifted course from direct relief to public works projects and social security legislation. Efforts to revive FTS failed for lack of general support and because the Roosevelt administration, as Kusmer says, “had turned its attention to other matters.” Among those other matters were the Civilian Conservation Corps, which kept many of the sons of people on relief from going on the road; the Resettlement and Farm Security Administrations, which assisted desperately poor tenant farmers (and left a pictorial record of the lives of the American poor in the 1930s and early 1940s); construction of public housing for low-paid workers and work projects for unemployed people in a variety of socially useful fields; and aid to students. Kusmer is unwilling to acknowledge that such efforts to help the “at risk” population occurred. He has such a proprietary attitude toward the homeless that he tends to reserve his sympathy for approved, politically correct categories of the needy.

Chapter 11, “The Forgotten Men,” contains information on the destruction of skid rows and cheap hotels as a result of urban renewal, but the story Kusmer has to tell has already come to an end with the closing of the Federal Transit Centers in 1935. This is partly because of the author’s self-imposed limits on his investigations, and partly because the journal articles and monographs on which he relies before 1935 are not as abundant for later decades. Nineteen thirty-five was a long time ago. Almost as many years have elapsed between 1935 and 2002 as separate 1865 from 1935.

Readers seeking a summary outline of homelessness after 1975 will find the author’s concluding chapter adequate. I believe it oversimplifies the complexities of the issues involved, underestimates the difficulty of solving the problem, and fails to do justice to the valiant efforts both public agencies and advocacy groups have made to deal with it.