Ohio History Journal

Book Reviews

An Archeological History of the Hocking Valley. By James Murphy. (Athens:

Ohio University Press, 1975. xi + 360p.; illustrations, tables, figures, ap-

pendix, index. $15.00.)

In the past the major portion of the archaeological literature for Ohio has

been derived from work done in the central, southern and southwestern parts

of the state; that situation is currently changing for the better. In An Archeolog-

ical History of the Hocking Valley, James Murphy broadens our knowledge of

prehistoric Ohio Indian cultures by presenting a comprehensive view of an

area extensively inhabited throughout the prehistoric era but poorly recorded

or understood. It is a logical outgrowth of a brief survey by Murphy and

Orrin Shane published in 1967, and incorporates data from Murphy's own in-

vestigations in the Athens area as well as that of other archaeologists.

The book begins with a "note" on nomenclature which quickly develops into

a detailed (14 pages long) disagreement with the way in which Olaf Prufer

and Shane have used various terms in their theoretical constructs. Such a

chapter is more suitable as a separate article in one of the archaeological

journals rather than a book that is expected to have an appeal to a fairly

wide audience. The reader will, however, be frustrated in any attempt to delve

further into the works Murphy is criticizing, since the list of references that

accompanies every other chapter is missing from this section.

The next three chapters introduce the Hocking River valley, its history,

its resources and the previous archaeological work that has been carried on

there. The section on the origin of the name "Hocking" ably demonstrates

the problems of the varying interpretations of Indian words. The Primitive

Environment chapter introduces the geology, pedology, flora, and fauna of the

Hocking valley; the descriptions of the various flint sources in the area are

particularly detailed. The third chapter of this section discusses the small

group of nineteenth and early twentieth century archaeologists working in the

Hocking valley, many of whom described sites that are no longer in existence.

Their work and observations, crude as they sometimes were, are valuable be-

cause they are often the only records we have.

The remainder of the book is devoted to descriptions of the various cultural

traditions whose presence has been documented in the Hocking area-the

Palaeo-Indians, Archaic, Early Woodland (Adena), Middle Woodland (Hope-

well), Late Woodland, Late Prehistoric, and historic Indians. A special chap-

ter addresses the numerous rockshelters that are particularly characteristic

of the Hocking valley. Each section is introduced by a summary of the more

recent literature on the particular tradition, followed by a discussion of the

evidence for that group in the study area. In some instances, Murphy pre-

sents data on sites he has excavated himself while in other cases he merely

describes the work and collections of others. Of particular interest is the re-

port on the Daines mounds in Athens, one of which, Daines #2, provided

fragments of corn cob, suggesting that the Adena were familiar with this cul-

tigen in the third century B.C. The book ends with a short discussion of the

historic period, treating some of the American Indian as well as Euro-Ameri-

can sites such as Fort Gower. The single appendix follows with brief descrip-

88                                                        OHIO HISTORY

tions of sixty-three sites in the Hocking valley; locational information is suit-

ably vague so that its publication would not encourage looters to attempt to

find the sites.

The real worth of Murphy's work lies in the individual site reports, many

of which represent the only tangible evidence of prehistoric habitation in some

localities. Since numerous sites have been destroyed we are grateful for

every bit of information we can get! Also of great importance are the sum-

marizations of the current literature relating to each cultural tradition that

begin each chapter.

The book is not without problems, however. Many of the sites Murphy in-

vestigated, particularly the mounds, had been disturbed by untrained indi-

viduals, making his interpretations difficult and incomplete. More detailed draw-

ings of mound plans and profiles should have been included in the volume.

Of all the sites excavated, only one is illustrated with a photograph-a tiny,

dark, indistinct view of the Daines mound #3; only one excavated feature,

a burial from the McCune site, is shown in situ. The artifacts have been

photographed under varying conditions, some of which may not have been un-

der Murphy's complete control and many are dark and indistinct making it

difficult to use them for comparative purposes. For some reason, apparently

determined by the publisher, two figures are shown on a single page with one

of the captions printed on the opposite, otherwise blank page. This arrange-

ment is not aesthetically pleasing, and, more importantly, has meant that

photographs have been reduced to fit them onto a given page. There are also

errors in references to figures in the text that are annoying.

From the viewpoint of the more general reader the discussions of the site

reports may be difficult to follow, particularly the details of differentiating

among various projectile point types and the theoretical positions. To make

his contribution complete, therefore, Murphy should have finished the book

with an overview, a look at the whole forest rather than the trees, that would

relate the Hocking River valley and its cultural history to the rest of the state.

Perhaps that will be the subject of his next publication.

The Ohio Historical Society                           Martha Potter Otto

The Mapping of Ohio. By Thomas H. Smith. (Kent: The Kent State Univer-

sity Press, 1977. xiii + 252p.; illustrations, maps, appendix, bibliography,

index. $29.00.)

This handsome volume, for the most part well-illustrated with some eighty

uncolored maps and views, provides a concise and well-documented histori-

cal narrative through a discussion of selected early maps and mapmakers of

the area, all within a seemingly strict framework as outlined in the introduc-

tion. The book is arranged into seven chapters with an appendix, a general,

primary and secondary bibliography and an index.

Chapter I traces the history of the Ohio region from the time of the French

pioneers and explorers to the beginning of the British westward movement

across the Allegheny Mountains. Five key maps, made between 1650 and 1778,

representing the works of noteworthy French and English map makers, are de-

scribed and portions reproduced. The second chapter deals at length with the

Book Reviews                                                          89

prehistoric earthworks which are a dominant feature of the landscape. Many

of the well-known maps portraying the mounds are shown including those of

the nineteenth-century American journalist, diplomat and archaeologist

Ephraim G. Squier. Although this is a fascinating subject, both for the

archaeologist and the historian, it is not of itself a study in the history, develop-

ment and chronology of Ohio mapping. It is, rather, a graphic record of these

unusual manmade features.

Chapters III and IV group together maps of towns, battles and fort plans

and describe in detail the survey systems employed by the United States Gov-

ernment to divide the public domain. Interesting and important exploration

maps, fort plans and views are depicted, but only one "battle" map is illus-

trated, that of the defeat of Arthur St. Clair at the hands of the Miami Indians

in 1791. In this section, as also to some extent in other parts of the book,

more careful editing would have eliminated such errors as the caption for

Plate 28, which shows what is left of Fort Miami in 1888, but describes the

fort in 1794 (not illustrated elsewhere) as the "only foreign fort built in Ohio."

The notation apparently refers to earthen and not foreign. Additionally, the

map in Plate 34 should be dated 1863 and not 1965.

A well-illustrated study recounting the growth of state map production to

the beginnings of the Civil War constitutes the fifth chapter. This growth

paralleled the introduction of nineteenth-century printing inventions which

enabled maps and atlases to be produced inexpensively and in great quantity.

This easy availability in turn helped disseminate geographic information and

gave a stimulus to further exploration, rail travel and settlement in the West.

The last two chapters illustrate the close relationship between Ohio's early

urban growth, the development of internal improvements, and map making as

a promotional enterprise. Many of the early urban maps were designed as

virtual advertisements designed to highlight the advantages of each town in

the competition for Eastern immigrants. Though the author includes no map,

to illustrate turnpikes or roads in the state, an interesting map of Columbus,

dated 1818, and annotated in 1831 by Columbus publisher Horton Howard,

shows the economic impact of two different routes through the city. The map

is accompanied by an extract from Horton's long letter to Secretary of War

Lewis Cass insisting upon construction of a route extending the length of the

business district and arguing against a "secret influence" that sought a less

commercially favorable but more direct route.

By peopling its great interior west of the Alleghenies the United States at-

tained maturity in the nineteenth century, and this work affords much docu-

mentation to that great effort. The selected maps, however, do not include

some of the landmark developments in cartography of the time. The detailed

and important nineteenth-century county maps are only mentioned in a foot-

note. Real estate and insurance maps and atlases, panoramic maps of Ohio

cities, geology, mining, and early U.S. Geological Survey topographical maps,

and U.S. Lake Survey navigation charts are not discussed, although all meet

the criteria for inclusion established by the author's introduction.

There is no discussion or illustration of Rufus Putnam's January 1804 map,

popularly known as the first map of Ohio, or of Arthur G. King's article

"The Earliest Map of Cincinnati (1792)," which appeared in the Historical

and Philosophical Society of Ohio Bulletin, 1957.

A list of Ohio state atlases, minus most twentieth-century "plat books,"

appears to be an updating by about a dozen atlases (and two maps?) of

90                                                        OHIO HISTORY

Clara E. LeGear's United States Atlases, and is included without comment as

an appendix. In addition, it would have been useful if a list of illustrations

was included which gave credit information. It is difficult without reading the

text to trace where an original is located.

Although the present decade has seen a marked increase in the literature

of the history of cartography and map librarianship, the latest quoted source

in this work is dated 1970. There seems to be, therefore, a long gap between

the end of the research for the project and its final publication. Despite these

critical observations, the book, taken as a whole, is a welcome addition to the

growing literature on early cartography and a popular guide to the study of the

early mapping and history of Ohio.

Library of Congress,                                Andrew M. Modelski

Geography and Map Division

Golden Door to America: The Jewish Immigrant Experience. Edited by

Abraham J. Karp. (New York: Viking Press, 1976. xiv + 271p.; bibliography,

index. $8.95.)

With the appearance of the Golden Door to America, Abraham J. Karp,

Professor of History and Religious Studies at the University of Rochester,

has provided students of American Jewish and Immigration History with a

well-edited documentary history beginning with Peter Stuyvesant's invective

against the earliest Jewish arrivals (1654) and concluding with attempts to

create a securely Jewish and American life style in the inter-War years.

Part I is a narrative history which carefully weaves poetry, documents,

diaries, reports, letters, descriptions and reminiscences by those who expe-

rienced migration or by those who wrote about those who experienced it. Of

greatest interest are the little-known sources (non-political) for and against

Jewish immigration restriction from the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, the unique sources on East European Jewish immigration trans-

lated by the author from the European Yiddish press, and the care with which

Karp's choices link Europe, the United States, and the ocean between them.

Part II documents the adjustment of Jewish immigrants to the stresses of

family, generational conflict, work and education in America and the Jewish

community's response to these tensions. Here the most compelling sources

are articles from the Yiddish and American press, many of which this re-

viewer has not seen in other collections of immigrant materials.

Part III consists of excerpts from four immigrant memoirs: childhood

memories of an East European Jewish woman and man in Buffalo and Utica,

and the recollections of a poet (Ephraim Lisitzky) and a philosopher (Morris

Raphael Cohen). They serve to amplify several of the previously articulated

themes.

Generally, the documents which comprise this collection, and Karp's brief

narrative introductions, reveal careful selection and attention. The sources

touch repeatedly upon what the poet Elyakum Zunser described: "Tears and

suffering and tales of woe. . . . Poverty, misery, darkness, cold-Everywhere,

in this Land of Gold!" We feel respect and fascination when presented with

Book Reviews                                                          91

the hardships, disillusionment and modest achievement of these men and

women.

The major weakness of the collection is that many of the sources are dull,

although not unimportant. On several occasions lengthy selections from The

Russian Jew in the United States (1905) anesthetize the reader, while the

same holds true for some of the congressional documents in the chapter on

immigration restriction. Thus while some chapters move from topic to topic

with stimulating and diverse sources, other chapters move tediously and slow-

ly. We need to be reminded, however, that most emigrants unfortunately

wrote nothing that can be traced and said nothing that we can hear. Given

the potential sources then, this is a rich and valuable collection.

The Ohio State University                              Marc Lee Raphael

George Rogers Clark and the War in the West. By Lowell H. Harrison. (Lex-

ington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1976. xi + 120p.; map, notes,

bibliographic essay. $3.95.)

This slim volume, written for the general reader, is part of the Kentucky

Bicentennial Bookshelf, sponsored by an impressive group of Kentucky indi-

viduals and business concerns. Within this context, Harrison has produced an

excellent summary of George Rogers Clark's role in the complex military

activities in Kentucky and the Illinois Country during the American War of

Independence.

George Rogers Clark possessed exceptional talent for forest warfare and

diplomacy as his brief moment of glory in the years 1777-1780 demonstrates.

The glory was earned. His story is filled with the endless frustrations that

marked eighteenth-century American military endeavours-lack of manpower,

essential supplies, prompt and accurate communications, and reliable military

intelligence. Perhaps these difficulties were in the nature of eighteenth-century

warfare generally, but in the American wilderness they were exaggerated. It

took men of persistence and character to surmount them. Such men, bold

and assertive by nature, often become the targets of jealous men who try to

humble them, even by lies and slander if necessary. Thus Clark was frus-

trated by those who deliberately misrepresented his intent and his interests.

Harrison presents Clark as a wise leader of courage and foresight who con-

ducted one of the "brilliantly conceived and executed campaigns of the Amer-

ican Revolution" (p.109). A consummate practical psychologist, Clark used

persuasion and the power of suggestion to maneuver the Indians and French

in the Illinois Country. But psychology was no substitute for men and sup-

plies, and these he was unable to get in suitable quantity from a bankrupt

Virginia government. Clark fell short of achieving his major objective in the

West-the seizure of the British stronghold at Detroit from which the bloody

raids against Kentucky were launched. With sound strategic insight, he knew

that his proper objective should be the war-making potential of the enemy.

This aggressive intent was frustrated not only by shortages of men and mate-

rial, but also by colleagues who favored a static defense of the Kentucky set-

tlements, a policy that left initiative and choice to the British and Indians.

Like some other frontier adventurers of this period, Clark's career peaked

92                                                        OHIO HISTORY

at an early age. Frustration, disappointment, and whiskey wore him down, and

physical infirmities finished the erosion of strength and purpose. In his later

years, he became an object of pity.

Harrison tells his story with economy and with fidelity to the records.

He uses sources selectively, and he provides the inquiring reader with notes

and a bibliographical essay. This is a successful venture in popular history.

The University of Akron                               George W. Knepper

Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. By

Barbara Welter. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976. 230p.; notes. $12.00

cloth; $4.50 paper.)

Anyone familiar with the explosion in knowledge and methodology in wom-

en's history over the last decade will find Dimity Convictions an interesting

book to peruse. Six of its essays appeared in scholarly publications between

1966 and 1973. The other three were written for this collection before 1976.

To read these essays in 1978 is to gain an insight into the key issues which

have occupied practitioners of women's history since revived interest in the

topic developed in the mid-1960s.

Barbara Welter, Professor of History at Hunter College, was a pioneer in

the field. She is well-known for her article "The Cult of True Womanhood,

1800-1860" which is key in this collection. Her ability to move beyond the

narrative history of women toward wider, interpretive themes was remarkable

when most historians of women were still experimenting with the factual ap-

proach now known as "remedial" women's history. She was also one of the

first to attempt an interdisciplinary approach by looking at women's history

in relation to other fields, particularly religion and literature.

With this background, it is unfortunate that Welter's Dimity Convictions

is not more innovative. The three new essays are simply "notable women"

history. Here she deals with women who wrote on religious controversy; with

Anna Katharine Green, the first woman writer of detective stories; and with

Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. The pieces thoroughly review the ideas

of these women's works, but hardly touch upon their background or their im-

pact and meaning.

Combined with the other essays, they form a disjointed compilation whose

direction is unclear. This might have been remedied by an introduction tying

together the essays' themes or by a conclusion interpreting their theses. The

time frames are also unclear. The first six chapters deal primarily with the pe-

riod before the Civil War, the next two with the years after the war, and the

last jumps back to the early nineteenth century. If there was intent in this

organization it is never explained and one is left to assume that the nineteenth

century was an entity, rather than a series of developmental stages.

Another problem is that the subtitle, "The American Woman in the Nine-

teenth Century," is misleading because the book is geared to only one seg-

ment of women. Welter deals almost exclusively with middle- and upper-

class women of New England; nothing is said of ethnic, racial, sectional, and

class differentiations. Of course, this criticism reflects recent awareness

levels which Welter could not have been expected to display in her earlier

Book Reviews                                                        93

essays. However, they might have been integrated into the new chapters or

into the missing introduction or conclusion.

Finally, Welter's use of literature as source material is problematic. Much

nineteenth-century literature was prescriptive rather than normative. It ex-

hibited what writers, often male, thought women should do, not what women

did. Even some of the women writers cited, such as Lydia Maria Child and

Lydia Sigourney, prescribed what women were "supposed" to do while fail-

ing to follow their own dictums. So many "shoulds" would not have been

necessary if women were already practicing what was so widely preached.

This is not to say that Dimity Convictions lacks value. Having these essays

in one collection gives a feeling for the complexity of women's history. It

suggests topics, people, and areas needing more research. It is of historio-

graphical significance to those who want to determine what the field was and

where it is going.

University of Northern Iowa                               Glenda Riley

The Kentucky Shakers. By Julia Neal. (Lexington: The University Press of

Kentucky, 1977. 98p.; illustrations, bibliographical note. $4.95.)

The revival of interest in America's most enduring and successful com-

munal sect, the Shakers, has prompted the emergence of numerous books

about the Shakers and their crafts. This book, as the title implies, differs in

that it deals primarily with one geographic area. The Kentucky Shakers in-

volvement in Ohio and Indiana are included, which resulted in a fuller under-

standing of their range and activity. The work concerns itself primarily with

the Kentucky Shakers themselves, their growth, industry, religion, hardship

in the Civil War, and dissolution, rather than the artifacts that they produced.

The extraction of material of Kentucky interest from numerous sources in

conjunction with sometimes congested quotes, dates, and figures, occasionally

results in difficult reading. This may be the result of trying to condense a num-

ber of sources and ideas into a relatively small book.

Surprisingly little background information about the Shakers is included.

In fact, there is only an occasional reference to Ann Lee, the fanatical founder

and Mother of Shakerdom. A previous knowledge of the Shakers is necessary

to place the importance of the two Kentucky colonies into the entire Shaker

picture.

To those unfamiliar with the Shaker communities of Pleasant Hill in Mer-

cer County, and South Union in Logan County, the narrative concerning

the buildings at these sites would be somewhat confusing. The inclusion of a

diagram among the illustrations would have been helpful in the identification

and outlay of their buildings.

The Shakers' beliefs, manners, and religious dances often made them a

subject of controversy among the outside world. The author presented an

impartial outlook of the attitudes towards the Shakers and of the problems

and persecutions they encountered defending their faith. A great deal of

attention was given to the problems the Shakers met during the Civil War.

This was the most devastating period of their existence and the beginning

of their decline.

94                                                        OHIO HISTORY

One problem that seemed somewhat over-rated, however, was the threat

of danger from wild animals and Indians on Shaker messengers traveling to

Ohio and Indiana in 1805. This was ten years after the Greene Ville Treaty

and by this time the Indian threat was very minimal. Wild animals were also

a small danger. Most were wary of human beings and would attack only the

most weak or injured.

The Kentucky Shakers provides a worthwhile condensed account of the

history of the Shakers in Kentucky, and would be recommended not only for

those interested in Shaker history, but in Kentucky history also. The book

would be especially benefiting to anyone who plans to visit the two Shaker

sites in Kentucky. It was published as part of the Kentucky Bicentennial

Bookshelf and reflects a sensible project of publications that will be of endur-

ing value.

The Ohio Historical Society                                 Doug White

Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change.

By Merritt Roe Smith. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. 363p.; il-

lustrations, bibliography, index. $17.50.)

The notion that all nineteenth-century Americans, with the possible excep-

tion of southern plantation owners, were so fully committed to the glories of

industrial progress that no serious popular resistance to technological innova-

tion could have existed on this enlightened side of the Atlantic is one of the

favorite axioms of American historians. Although numerous studies written

by historians of American workers during the last decade and a half have

challenged that facile assumption, none of them has documented the

tenacity of popular opposition to the time-discipline demanded by industrial

capitalism quite as thoroughly and convincingly as Merritt Roe Smith has

done in this impressive volume. Although the author's sentiments clearly

lie with the innovators, he has analyzed all parties involved in more than

half a century of chronic controversy over work methods at the Harpers

Ferry armory with sensitivity and skill.

At least since Andrew Ure published The Philosophy of Manufactures in

1835, it has been well known to all those who cared to know that those

"desultory habits of work," which we have lately come to call "pre-

industrial," were most deeply ingrained and most effectively defended not by

workers of recent agricultural backgrounds, but by artisans. Smith makes

clear to us why this was so, starting with a description of hammering musket

barrels around swedges out of flat wrought iron bars so vivid as to leave the

reader perspiring, and proceeding through a detailed analysis of the sporadic

but often intense efforts of superintendents of the armory and chiefs of the

Ordnance Department to harness science to the breaking of the craftsmen's

"refractory spirit" (to use Ure's apt phrase), to a lucid exposition of the role

of "the very fibers of things" (p.279) in the Harpers Ferry community in

frustrating the utilitarian designs of the armory's reformers.

It is important to note that the artisans never enjoyed the legendary

pleasure of fabricating an entire weapon. Extensive specialization of work was

the rule in Harpers Ferry from at least the time full-scale operations were

Book Reviews                                                        95

first attained in 1802. By the 1820s fifty-five separate detailed tasks (including

twenty-one on the lock alone) had made the armorers living appendages of

specialty files and hammers. They faced incessant pressures to change their

habits of work. In 1809 inside contracting was introduced, one effect of which

was the displacement of formal apprenticeship within the shops by simple

child labor. Piece work payments and accounting became the rule during the

next decade, and, at the insistance of Col. Decius Wadsworth of the Ordnance

Department, inspection gauges, trip hammers, and turning lathes were in-

troduced. From 1819 onward John H. Hall experimented, under special con-

tract with the government, with massive milling machines, jigs, and ingenious

locator studs on castings, all of which enabled inexperienced workers to turn

out interchangeable parts. In 1829 rules against gambling, loitering, and

drinking in the armory's buildings were posted, but they were subsequently

allowed to lapse into neglect. Early in the 1840s the superintendents were

required to be military officers, and time clocks were installed.

Each of these innovations was fiercely opposed, and often frustrated, by

the armorers. As late as 1841 farmers took orders for hogs to be slaughtered,

and other household affairs were regularly conducted in the shops, workers

transferred between jobs at will and continued to exercise such perquisites

as absenting themselves for hunting and farming, handing round the jug on

the job, and selling off armory tools. Long after formal apprenticeship had

disappeared, armorers taught their own sons the mysteries of the craft on

the job. The posting of time clocks provoked the armory's first strike, and

the superintendent who decreed workshop rules in 1829 was shot by a dis-

charged armorer, who became a folk hero. "For the most part," Smith con-

cludes, "hard work prevailed at Harpers Ferry; a systematic work regime

did not" (p.66).

What Smith has provided in this well-written and splendidly illustrated

volume, however, is far more than simply a chronicle of resistance to change.

He has shown, first of all, the decisive role of the state, and in particular of

its military arm, in the evolution of both the machinery and the work disci-

pline of capitalist metal working. Before the 1840s, he argues convincingly,

machine technology was not cheaper than hand methods. Only government

contracts and armories sheltered from the competitive pressures of the market

could encourage its use, before large scale private enterprises emerged in the

1840s. Moreover, the earliest effective champions of "Uniformity, Sim-

plicity, and Solidarity" (p.¹⁰⁶) in production appeared in the army itself.

Although the cause of utilitarian reform of the arsenals was supported by

congressmen beholden to local Maryland timber interests and by Jacksonian

politicians, who wished to substitute party for family patronage, the links

between work discipline and military discipline were always evident.

Second, Smith quite properly does not offer a bucolic image of "pre-

industrial" artisanal life. The armory's workers were entrapped in deprivation,

disease, and petty exploitation. Interwoven with the lax work regime was a

network of managerial perquisites, effectively exploited and preserved by the

extended family of the civilian superintendent and the rest of a coterie of local

landowners. Monopoly prices for food and housing, and even payment in

"shinplasters" by paymasters who pocketed the difference between the de-

preciated value of the banknotes they gave the armorers and the payroll

sent from Washington, were integrated into arsenal life as thoroughly as

were hunting and fishing.

96                                                        OHIO HISTORY

Finally, as these comments suggest, Smith has offered some provocative

insights into the relationship between paternalism and the largely self-

regulated work regime of the artisans. The utilitarian decrees of the Ordnance

Department were defied by all echelons of the community, not just by the

armorers, and the relationship among these various levels of defiance was

symbiotic. On the other hand, the author vacillates between depicting this

symbiosis as especially resillient in a rural southern setting and envisaging

Harpers Ferry as "a microcosmic view of the industrial revolution which is

perhaps more suggestive of America's bittersweet relationship with the

machine than many historians have heretofore recognized" (p.21). Only more

local studies, which strive to match the quality of this book, can clarify

what belonged generically to the experience of technological change in early

industrialization and what was distincively southern in the experience of

Harpers Ferry.

State University of New York at Buffalo               David Montgomery

Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861-1877: The Rise and Fall of Radical Re-

construction. By Peter Camejo. (New York: Monad Press, 1976. 269p.;

illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $12.00 cloth; $3.45 paper.)

Making use of selected secondary accounts, Peter Camejo has written a

Marxist interpretation of the Reconstruction period. He has followed closely

the ideas of Charles and Mary Beard and W. E. B. DuBois and relied heavily

on the economic interpretation of Howard K. Beale and C. Vann Woodward.

The author oversimplifies and overlooks the complexity of this era, yet he

follows a tortured path to establish a thesis that the events leading to the

postwar exploitation of the blacks and dominance of northeastern capitalism

was entirely the result of deliberate planning by an industrial capitalist "ruling

class." According to Camejo, race relations were improving during the Civil

War as a result of the policies of the Radical Republicans. However, the

ruling class broke with the Radicals, because of the corruption of the machine

politicians, and in the interest of stability. Turning against the blacks,

northern capitalists forged an alliance with southern Conservatives that re-

sulted in a sell-out of the freedmen and the subordination of the South to

northern interests. Thus, the second American revolution was betrayed. It

will take a third, writes Camejo, to replace capitalism with socialism and

realize the complete liberation of blacks and other minorities.

The Civil War did result in the triumph of northeastern capitalism over

the agricultural South and West and there can be little doubt of the subse-

quent fate of the black population. However, Camejo overlooks much recent

research, makes questionable unproved assumptions, and in general does little

with non-economic factors. There is no understanding of Lincoln's war-time

policy, of the western attitudes that divided the Republican party, or of the

lack of unanimity among the Radicals. The author underestimates the extent of

racism in both the North and South during the war and afterward. Neither

are the politics of the period sufficiently explained. For example, there were

many reasons why Carl Schurz turned against the Grant Administration,

including the support the latter gave to France in the Franco-Prussian war.

The Half-Breeds were hardly the liberal reformers Camejo portrays them.

Book Reviews                                                         97

Reference to recent studies such as Keith Polakoffs The Politics of Inertia

(1973) would have contributed additional insights.

Because historians hesitate to be definitive where complex issues are in-

volved and because they often fail to pass judgment on the past, Camejo

castigates most in the profession as historical agnostics. The author, however,

is much less restrained, and he forthrightly asserts that "Radical Reconstruc-

tion was the last progressive act of the American ruling class."

But the truth is much more subtle, and must be quite frustrating to Camejo,

who was the Socialist Worker's party presidential candidate in 1976. Unable

to explain how capitalism came to be institutionalized in the last part of the

nineteenth century, Camejo fails to see how public opinion provided a favor-

able climate for unrestrained industrial capitalism. Much history is irrational,

and has so biased American society that we may move toward repressive

tyranny rather than the revolution which Camejo expects.

Kent State University                                    Harris L. Dante

The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830. By Ronald G.

Walters. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. xvii + 196p.;

illustrations, notes, bibliographical note, sources for illustrations, index.

$11.00.)

Professor Walters hopes to "comprehend why abolitionists perceived slavery

as they did after 1830." His method is to "trace the institutional, cultural,

and social parameters of abolitionism" by focusing on its "cultural com-

ponents." Primarily interested in what abolitionists had in common with

each other and, more importantly, with antebellum America, he has written

what he calls a "contextual" history. He wants to divert our attention from

the abolitionists' motives ("causal" history) and factions and to force us to

consider his contention that the abolitionists had "as much or more in common

with those who attacked them as with latter day reformers and radicals."

The book is original, thoughtful, well-written, interesting and important.

Walters shows clearly and specifically how abolitionists built upon and used

feelings, fears, values, hopes, and perceptions which they shared with other

Americans. Ignoring geography and chronology, he uses what important

abolitionists wrote and said after 1830 to reconstruct their most "persistent"

themes and then demonstrates what was "antebellum and American" about

the movement. For instance, he establishes that abolitionists were Protes-

tants for many of whom antislavery was a church, and that they believed

simultaneously in environmentalism and an innate moral sense (and thus

were "relatively optimistic" about human nature) and that mankind had

continuously to struggle against an innate drive to dominate other people.

The abolitionists saw within all people and within American society a

constant tension between freedom and order. They shared this perception with

other Americans because the idea was a product of their common culture.

Most Americans, including the abolitionists, believed that the family was a

rudder that could steer society through impending disorder and that women

were especially able to chart the way; they hoped that the United States

could be redeemed and become the great nation God had intended it to be-

98                                                      OHIO HISTORY

a virtuous, civilized nation of Christian individuals freely competing in com-

mercial capitalism.

None of this especially distinguished abolitionists from other Americans.

What did, Walters argues, was that only the abolitionists perceived slavery

as a major threat to the moral order which most Americans wanted to impose

upon the great social and economic changes of the era. For them, slavery was

"a guidepost, marking the outer limits of disorder and debauchery;" it

became "an archtype" of the threatening forces they saw at work "within

mankind and within American society, North and South."

One can disagree with Walters' contention that the divisions among

abolitionists were relatively insignificant without raising a serious objec-

tion to this book. A more important problem is his candid refusal to ask why

thousands of men and women became and remained abolitionists. He believes

that the "vagaries of personality" make it useless to ask what made individual

abolitionists. But it is very different to ask why an individual became an

abolitionist than to ask why thousands did. Abolitionism was itself evidence

that individual abolitionists did not share some important values and per-

ceptions with other Americans; it was itself a culture, even by Walters' static

definition of the term, and as such it attracted only certain people. To refuse

to ask why not only avoids the question Walters wanted to avoid-that of

individual motivation-it also leaves unanswered the question he does ask:

why did abolitionists as a group perceive slavery as they did after 1830? That

is, after all, a "causal" question.

Stanford University                                 Douglas A. Gamble

Brand Whitlock's The Buckeyes: Politics and Abolitionism in an Ohio Town,

1836-1845. Edited with an Introduction by Paul W. Miller. (Athens: Ohio

University Press, 1977. ²⁷3p.; illustrations, notes, index. $12.00.)

Statesman and man of letters, Brand Whitlock combined both pursuits more

happily than any other leader of the Progressive Movement. That he himself

was not particularly happy merely shows how difficult a path he had taken.

Neither, however, did he fall between two stools: to his credit are an ex-

cellent performance as reform mayor in Toledo, service as ambassador to

Belgium during the "Great War," the best existing biography of Lafayette,

and several finely crafted novels that present-day critics class as very good

if not "great." His fiction includes J. Hardin and Son, similar in theme to

Sinclair Lewis' Main Street and unquestionably a better written book.

At his death in 1934, Whitlock left unfinished The Buckeyes, a historical

novel of pre-Civil War Ohio based rather closely upon the life of his grand-

father Brand and Governor Tom Corwin. Inability to resolve certain aspects

of character and plot, as well as brooding upon a tactless criticism by his

friend Edith Wharton, undermined Whitlock's already weak self-esteem and

prevented completion of the novel.

Now published for the first time, through the courtesy of the Champaign

County Historical Society and the effort of Dr. Paul W. Miller, Whitlock's

last, "lost" novel is found to be an excellent imaginative portrait of early

Ohio. Miller's able introduction and notes indicate the few relatively minor

Book Reviews                                                       99

points in which historical fact has been made subservient to the necessities

of novel writing. The product of Whitlock's strict historicity, his broad

knowledge of politics and human nature, and his love for the Macochee

country around Urbana, Ohio, the novel is a highly readable description of

southwestern Ohio from 1835 to 1845, with particular attention given to Tom

Corwin and the Abolitionist Movement.

In recent years Whitlock's reputation as a writer has steadily increased in

stature, and rightly so; for that matter, in regard to Ohio's contribution to

the twentieth-century novel, if we take away Whitlock, Bromfield, and

Howells, who is left other than the likes of Zane Grey and James Ball Naylor?

Even in its unfinished state, The Buckeyes is a novel of which Whitlock

should have been proud, though he was not, and a novel in which Ohioans

today may well take pride. His "unfinished swan song of Macochee, Ohio,"

serves as a fine monument to a talented and dedicated son of Ohio.

The Ohio Historical Society                          James L. Murphy

The History of Wisconsin. Volume II. The Civil War Era, 1848-1873. By

Richard N. Current. (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin,

1976. xiv + 659p.; illustrations, maps, notes, appendix, essay on sources,

index. $20.00.)

The State Historical Society of Wisconsin is to be commended for em-

barking upon such a laudatory project as to commission a six-volume

professional history of the peoples of Wisconsin. Thus far, volumes I (From

Exploration to Statehood by Alice E. Smith) and II have appeared and

represent an outstanding contribution to local and regional history.

Richard N. Current's volume encompasses the historical development of

antebellum, civil war and reconstruction Wisconsin. Intersperced with ex-

cellent maps, meticulously printed and bound, and generously endowed with

quality photographs and an extensive bibliographical essay, The History of

Wisconsin: The Civil War Era, 1848-1873 traces in a most engaging style the

political crises, the economic ups and downs, and to a lesser degree the social

and cultural composition and fluctuation of a frontier region undergoing

mild industrialization and urbanization. All of this is accomplished in sixteen

chapters of some 600-plus pages.

Of special note and interest are chapters 4 and 16. In an early division

entitled "Living Together and Apart," historian Current describes life in

Wisconsin. Clearly Wisconsin embodies heterogeneity, a differentness that

made for conflict. Numerous European immigrants settle; various racial groups

reside; abundant religious communities converge; and many divergent tribes

maintain or attempt to sustain their cultures in Wisconsin. Also family

functions and male-female relationships are briefly discussed.

Chapter 16, "The Politics of Reconstruction," analyzes the relative turbu-

lence of Wisconsin politics during the post-Civil War decade. The Republican

party, according to Current, did not have an easy time dominating Badger

state government; it had to cultivate the electorate carefully and it did so

around appeals to patriotism and support of veterans in time of peace.

Andrew Johnson, his policies and impeachment, split Republicans, but

100                                                       OHIO HISTORY

they still managed to maintain control until 1873. Generally, Wisconsinites

favored congressional reconstruction, but they were uncomfortable with radi-

cal Republicans. National politics undeniably had a major impact upon state

politics in Wisconsin during Reconstruction.

Only one noticeable deficiency does exist in The Civil War Era. For this

reviewer an insufficient amount of social history is included in this survey,

especially regarding the status and role of women in the life of mid-

nineteenth-century Wisconsin. Still, Volume II of The History of Wisconsin

is a book that every major library, American middle period historian, and

midwest educational institution should house in their collections, and if it is

an indication of the quality of the series, all should be obtained.

Case Western Reserve University                         John R. Wunder

The Transformation of American Foreign Relations: 1865-1900. By Charles S.

Campbell. (New York: Harper & Row, 1976. xviii + 393p.; illustrations,

maps, bibliographical essay, index. $15.00.)

This is the most recent volume in the New American Nation Series edited

by Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris. Unlike other recent

studies which have been monographic in scope or which have emphasized

commercial expansion, Professor Campbell's study presents a classical, "old

school" survey of American diplomatic history for the three and a half

decades following the Civil War. Both in its style and its content, the ap-

proach is reminiscent of Thomas A. Bailey's Diplomatic History of the Ameri-

can People and of Julius W. Pratt's A History of the United States Foreign

Policy. Campbell's treatment of events, however, is much more detailed and

comprehensive than either of these general texts.

Two general themes or problems which run throughout the period are

identified and examined, the first being that of Anglo-United States rela-

tions. Professor Campbell, who has published extensively on this subject,

details the troubled relations between the two principal English speaking

powers from the Alabama Claims and the Washington Conference of 1871

(which he believes "exacerbated" relations) through the Venezuelan Boundary

Dispute of 1893 (which he sees as a turning point preparatory to rapproche-

ment). His familiarity with this aspect of American foreign policy permits

him to build his case upon extensive use of English as well as American

primary sources. Indeed, seven of the eleven cartoons reprinted in the volume

are taken from Punch and all but two photographs of foreign personalities

are English, a balance which betrays his great concern with Anglo-American

relations.

The second theme or problem which is identified as characterizing Ameri-

can diplomacy during the late nineteenth century is the nation's changing

posture on territorial expansion. After the annexation of Alaska, additional

acquisitions were stymied despite the activities and desires of such men as

President U. S. Grant, "an instinctive expansionist." Moreover, taking issue

with the findings of Walter LaFeber and John A. Williams, Campbell finds

little evidence of a diplomatic effort to advance American commercial ex-

pansion prior to the Panic of 1893. Then, partly as the result of the "stagger-

Book Reviews                                                      101

ing increase in American industrial output," both commercial and territorial

expansion become major themes in the transformation of foreign policy.

Those sections of the volume which treat United States relations with

powers other than Britain are based almost exclusively on English language,

secondary sources. The coverage given these problems is usually judicious,

yet on occasion flaws emerge. For example, when dealing with the origins

of American intervention in Cuba, Campbell reports that "About 400,000

reconcentrados, a quarter of the total Cuban population, were commonly

believed to have perished by early 1898" (p.²⁴3). Only in a footnote does he

acknowledge that the figure "may have been nearer 100,000." He uses no

Spanish sources on the state of affairs in Cuba and nowhere does he try to

assess the state of affairs in Cuba. Yet he concludes that the United States

had "ample justification to intervene" (p.²⁷⁷) for Americans could not "en-

dure much longer the horrible slaughter just off their shores" (p.278). The

conclusion in this instance reflects the view of recent American scholarship,

but it is not supported by the evidence provided. Nevertheless, most of the

book must be regarded as an accomplished narrative history of American

diplomatic history and of the personalities who made it.

Bowling Green State University                         David C. Roller

Keep the Last Bullet for Yourself: The True Story of Custer's Last Stand. By

Thomas B. Marquis. (New York: Two Continents Publishing Group, 1976.

²⁰³p.; illustrations, bibliography, index. $8.95.)

Few incidents in our nation's history have created as much controversy as

the Battle of the Little Big Horn. In the one hundred years that have passed

since it took place there have been many things written, painted, filmed, or

said about it. General George Armstrong Custer has been portrayed as every-

thing from a hero to an egotistical and vilainous fool. There has been much

debate and speculation as to whether Custer would have been found guilty of

disobeying orders if he had survived the battle. On the morning of June 25,

1876, General Custer and 213 soldiers and civilian and Indian scouts of the

Seventh U.S. Cavalry rode into the valley of the Little Big Horn. The last

white man to see them alive was Sergeant John Martin, then a trumpeter,

who rode out with orders for Captain Frederick Benteen who was with the

pack train. Two days later the bodies of Custer and all of the men with him

were discovered. What actually happened on that hillside will never be known.

During the 1920s and early 1930s, Dr. Thomas Marquis was a physician

for the Northern Cheyenne and Crow Indian Reservations in Montana near

the site of the Little Big Horn. He had long been interested in the battle and,

after gaining the confidence of the Indians, he spent years interviewing their

old warriors and listening to their stories. According to Marquis, the Indians

themselves were not sure what had happened to Custer and his men. Like

the soldiers, they had been fighting on foot and from behind cover. The smoke

was thick and no one had a clear view of the fighting. The only thing the In-

dians knew for sure was that suddenly the firing from the soldiers stopped

and they were all dead. According to Indian legend the "Everywhere Spirit"

caused an invisible barrier to surround the soldiers and their bullets bounced

102                                                       OHIO HISTORY

hack and killed them. Dr. Marquis' interpretation was that the soldiers had

panicked and committed suicide. His theory was so unpopular when he first

presented it, that no publisher would handle the book. It was not until forty-

one years after the author's death that his account was published.

In spite of the implication of the title, Marquis in no way accuses Custer or

his men of cowardice. He defends Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. He points

out that almost 30 percent of the regiment were recruits and that most had

little experience in Indian fighting. None of them had any real knowledge of

Indian ways and most believed that the Indians would torture captives to

death. Marquis mentions instances when small parties of soldiers fought

larger parties of Indians in similar situations and had survived with minimal

losses. He also debunks the theory that Custer and his men were drunk on

that day. Dr. Marquis' hypothesis was that Custer had too many men with

him and that if he had had fewer but more experienced Indian fighters, they

might have had a better chance to come out of the battle alive. He believed

that mass depression and feelings of hopelessness and doom had set in and

that the panic-stricken men of the Seventh Cavalry killed themselves and

each other rather than risk capture.

Keep the Last Bullet for Yourself is a well-researched and well-documented

work and would be a welcome addition to the library of any student of Custer

and the Indian War.

Fort Meigs State Memorial                              Michael N. Morell

Affairs of State: Public Life in Nineteenth Century America. By Morton

Keller. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977.

ix + 600p.; tables, notes, index. $17.50.)

In this monumental volume Professor Keller dispassionately argues that

"the intense conflict between old values and the pressures generated by

massive change" is the dominant theme of the American polity in the Gilded

Age, demarcated by two generational experiences: the Civil War and its con-

sequences, and, after about 1880, the problems associated with industrialism.

This book revises the traditional view of government in this period as domi-

nated by "lethargy and subservience to vested interests" by developing a dual

theme: the impulses toward a stronger sense of nationhood and government,

and the countervailing traditions of individualism and localism.

Keller is a student of political institutions, widely read in printed sources

and secondary writings, who develops a broad view of polity which should

attract considerable interest among scholars of state and local history. His

discussion of state and local political institutions is substantial, weaving it

with better-known federal developments.

This focus on institutional history, however, tends to delete human con-

tent. Keller argues that the postwar southern experience was close to that of

the north, convincing the reader from an institutional viewpoint, but omitting

analysis of the human tragedies involved-which he mentions parenthetically.

This difficulty appears elsewhere. Throughout-because the subject is polity-

social and economic change is assumed. Keller would have had to write an

even longer book to do otherwise. This leaves future authors with exciting

Book Reviews                                                      103

opportunities to integrate more fully institutional developments with the hu-

man experiences of societal change. Keller has provided state and local his-

torians with an informed basis from which to embark, examining subjects

with both an understanding of responses to industrialism and a comprehen-

sion that industrialism was itself dynamic.

Thus this study should guide us away from parochialism while helping to

raise profitable questions. For instance, Keller examines the widespread state

constitution writing after the Civil War, arguing that it involved a two-staged

pattern. The first was an effort to revise charters to conform to new standards

of government power and citizenship; the second, a reaction to limit govern-

ment power. He bases the generalization on results, but in so doing seems

trapped in inconsistencies which future scholars could resolve through the

social and behavioral analysis of institutional change. Because the Illinois

Constitution was a fifty-page document it may not have been a reaction to

increased government activity, but an effort of new groups to circumvent a

legislative stalemate entrenched in established institutions. The constitution

proposed by Ohioans in the 1870s foundered on the temperance issue; social

analysis of the range of issues involved could well question Keller's generali-

zation that this was simply a rejection of growth in government power and

reveal an intense human grappling with revolutionary new social and economic

conditions.

Readers will profit from this book's broad scope and thorough grounding

in new scholarship. From it scholars can further enrich our understanding of

Americans coping with evolving conditions in society.

The Ohio State University                               K. Austin Kerr

The Railroad and the City: A Technological and Urbanistic History of Cin-

cinnati. By Carl W. Condit. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977.

xii + 335p.; illustrations, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. $15.00.)

More profoundly perhaps than any one else of his generation, Carl Condit

has changed the way we respond to our urban environment by teaching us to

see buildings, bridges, and now railway stations not as inevitable excres-

cences of the social body but as intentional constructions, technical solutions

to technical problems which yield human consequences often undreamed of by

the engineers and architects who bring them into monumental being, and who

thereby provide that unintended legacy, the shape of the city in our time.

Through his books and articles, moreover, Condit has freed us from the domi-

nant anecdotal tradition in architectural history, which sees design as an

aesthetic activity, the product of cultural trends rather than of social and

practical necessity, and he has made possible a new kind of architectural

history which seeks to examine the process of problem solving as a social and

ultimately a political act, and which itself is a social and political act, criti-

cism in the best sense. It is thus to the tasks of the "new" history which his own

work has made possible, that Condit turns his attention in his most recent

book.

The relationship of the railroad and the city, Condit sees, provides an

opportunity to explore the processes by which problems defined in terms of

104                                                         OHIO HISTORY

one system are solved or not solved, and in their solution or nonsolution have

consequences for the future of both systems. The Railroad and the City, that

is, is much more than a history of the "impact" of the railroad on American

life, or on that small slice of it which is the history of Cincinnati, and bears

no relationship to the narrow causal and genetic renderings which largely

constitute that genre. It is rather an attempt to explore the relationship be-

tween systems which are at once fundamentally interdependent and practi-

cally independent, and which, in this case as perhaps in all such cases, are

characterized by competing and contradictory needs, goals, and modes of op-

eration. It is an attempt of appropriately magisterial proportions.

On the whole, it must be said, the book as currently published points the

way. It does not complete the task Condit has set for himself, but consists

very largely of the record of his preliminary investigations into the details of

Cincinnati's complex railroad history-routes, lines, mergers, schedules, rolling

stock, the location of terminals, the impact of design changes on the operation

of the system itself-all discussed however in relationship to the broader pat-

terns of American railroad history and to the structure of the Cincinnati sys-

tem. (In these areas, moreover, Condit knows considerably more than he tells

us in the text or, more important, in the notes, which are both extensive and

curiously diffuse, so that future scholars will be hard put to follow up the hints

he offers or to track down the bases for some of his generalizations.) In his

discussion of two parallel "events" in the transportation history of Cincinnati,

however, Condit begins to focus clearly on the processes which are his ulti-

mate concern.

The first of these "events" is the attempt of the city-as-system to rationalize

"its" transportation network by authorizing in 1912 the design of a subway

system that would not only link suburbs with the central business district, as

in other cities, but would also ease human transit in the metropolis by elimi-

nating grade crossings and by facilitating the transfer of people, freight, and

rolling stock among the several inter-city carriers, the "interurban" lines and

the street railways. The design of the subway system, which was partially

built between 1920 and 1923 but never put into operation, was made with the

needs of the city in mind, and thus stands as the articulation of a problem for

which there was no solution, that is no solution without the cooperation of

the railroads for which the city's problem was no problem. In contrast, the

monumental Union Terminal, with its related system of bridges, overpasses,

feeder roads, approaches, and yards, constructed between 1928 and 1932 on

the extreme periphery of the central business district, represents for Condit a

solution for which there was no problem. Designed with the needs of the inter-

city carriers in mind, for more efficient means of handling rolling stock,

freight, and passengers within a closed system, it not only failed to acknowl-

edge that social, economic, and technological changes had already severely

cut into the market for rail service, but made access to the railroad conceived

as a closed system even more difficult than it had been before, and further

isolated the railroad from the city. Cincinnati's Union Terminal, Condit tells

us, however splendid an achievement as a technical solution to technical prob-

lems, and however splendid an achievement as design for human use, was doomed

from the start, for it stood-and stands-outside of any relationship with the

city, a useless curiosity and a monument whose message must be remembered.

University of Cincinnati                                 Henry D. Shapiro

Book Reviews                                                          105

The Indiana Voter: The Historical Dynamics of Party Allegiance During the

1870s. By Melvyn Hammarberg. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

1977. xi + 251p.; tables, figures, appendices, notes, bibliography, index.

$17.50.)

This is certainly the most methodologically sophisticated book written by a

political historian. Appropriately entitling his book The Indiana Voter, Ham-

marberg has been strongly influenced by the survey researchers at the Uni-

versity of Michigan, whose best known work, The American Voter, provides a

framework on which to place the Indiana political culture of one hundred years

ago. At the same time the book also deals with questions which have in-

terested historians in the last fifteen years, namely the "ethno-cultural" model

of voting behavior, and the important topic of bias caused by data linkage.

Hammarberg's research design-indeed his ability to use the many insights

provided by Campbell and his colleagues-is based on materials which are

unique in the nineteenth century. Only in a few counties in Illinois and In-

diana were "People's Guides" produced. The Guides were reasonably com-

prehensive lists of citizens at the minor civil division level. Unlike the Fed-

eral census they provided two crucial pieces of information: religious and

political affiliation for each person enumerated. Like the modern survey re-

searcher, the author has used this material to study individual rather than just

aggregate voting behavior.

To this reviewer the most useful and worthwhile contribution of the

volume is not the sophisticated analysis, and the extremely elegant presen-

tation, but the fact that Hammarberg is the first historian to acknowledge

and honestly tackle the question of biases caused by data linkage. This is

obviously a problem encountered more often by the social historian than the

political. In his case he attempts to link a census sample of male voters in 1870

to his People's Guides four years later. With a successful linkage rate of 37%,

Hammarberg's problem is to measure the biases caused by this substantial

loss of respondents. Fortunately, when he attempts to draw inferences to his

voting population, he is able to show that in his nine counties there is no ap-

preciable difference between his census sample and his traced sample to the

People's Guides.

While Hammarberg's methodology is admirable, his attempt to re-work the

ethno-cultural model is, however, less successful. For a start his uncritical

use of the information on party and religious affiliation in the Guides is suspect.

It is possible that a certain percentage of respondents refused to give this

personal information, especially in the case of religion where over 20% gave

no response. He claims, quite rightly, that much of the revisionist work in

political history which uses the ethno-cultural model is based on aggregate

data. Therefore, individual level data from counties should in theory provide

a much more solid test for the model. In the People's Guide counties, occupa-

tional status turned out to be a better predictor of party affiliation than did

religion. Which brings us the important point as to whether the Guide coun-

ties, and for that matter Indiana as a whole, are suitable locales for a fair test

of the ethno-cultural model. In comparison to northern Illinois, Wisconsin,

and Iowa, the ethno-religious make-up of Indiana was strongly old stock and

Protestant. In addition, what ethnic concentrations there were in the state

were outside the nine Guide counties. In the only other study which uses

106                                                       OHIO HISTORY

similar materials in Illinois, a much more positive reading is given to the

question of party affiliation and its connection to religion and ethnicity.

This is not to say that Hammarberg's interpretation is unsuited to the In-

diana context-indeed in a state where ethnicity and religion were not espe-

cially important we should see reasonably sharp "cleavages" between occupa-

tional groups and ecological areas. And in a chapter devoted to a comparison

between town and open country-a rare example in the literature where an

author takes the trouble to explore differences between village and farm-

Hammarberg not only highlights the political cultural of rural Indiana, but

also explains the variability of the farm vote and adds to our understanding

of the high levels of voter participation of a hundred years ago.

In sum, this is a work of social science, written in the language and analyzed

with the tools of the political scientist. It is very much a product of the heady

days of the late 1960s when some historians spent their summers at Ann

Arbor learning the "new political history." Hammarberg has written a book

which is a credit to his teachers.

The Newberry Library                                   Mark Friedberger

New Burlington: the Life and Death of an American Village. By John Baskin.

(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976. 260p.; illustrations. $9.95.)

In his brief "Introduction" to this book, John Baskin remarks that "It is

likely the reader will wish to look at New Burlington as a history. When I

think of history, I think of a lady named Abigail Winans who said, 'History

is a drunk in the snow with his feet sticking out.' I think of New Burlington

as a book of stories and voices. ..." It is, in fact, at once a history and a

book of stories, or rather a history continually defining and discovering itself

through the reminiscences, anecdotes, and family sagas-the stories-of the

people of New Burlington, Ohio. It is a history as immediate, as personal and

local, as a treasured packet of family letters or courtship customs or the

village chicken thief. The book is, in this respect, close to what Richard M.

Dorson has defined as "oral traditional history"-an oral history from the

point of view of the folk themselves, deriving from them and their traditions.

As such it has a special importance, for New Burlington as a place is no more.

The village, a farming community situated between Dayton and Cincinnati,

has fallen victim to progress in the form of a dam and at the hands of the U.S.

Army Corps of Engineers. Its inhabitants have been scattered but happily

not before John Baskin recorded their stories. Taken together, they offer

moving testimony that, like other American villages, New Burlington was

a place of loneliness and frustration, peopled with pious preachers and maiden

schoolteachers, country doctors and town drunks. It was a place of blighted

crops and blasted hopes that left scars on the landscape and the soul alike.

But like the inhabitants of those other villages, the people of New Burlington

cultivated a comic sense along with their crops and harvested a richness of

experience that to some degree compensated for material poverty and the

pain of back-breaking labor.

Baskin's narrative captures all of this and more. Or rather Baskin's nar-

ratives do, for New Burlington consists largely of a collection of dramatic

Book Reviews                                                       107

monologues and diary entries, selected and arranged with an unerring eye for

the significant and meaningful and an ear for cadences that lie below the

surface language. The effect upon the reader is strikingly similar to that

conveyed in Faulkner's early great works, in which the work seems and is

infinitely greater than the sum of its several parts. This is possible only be-

cause Baskin is himself a gifted writer and the book is as much a work of art

as it is a historical record. The coarse and rugged humor of the men and

the eccentric ways of the village's local characters are more than balanced

by the delicate, almost startling beauty of the young women who look out

from the book's early pages only to be supplanted by their aging counter-

parts later on. There is understatement throughout and a severe economy of

style and emotion. Best of all, there is a sense of dignity and worth, pre-

served here without condescension or sentimentality.

New Burlington stands as both a chronicle of its people and a moving

tribute to them. As such, it is worthy of a place on any historian's shelf.

The Ohio State University                              Daniel R. Barnes

The Presidency of Warren G. Harding. By Eugene P. Trani and David L.

Wilson. (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977. ix + 232p.; notes,

bibliographical essay, index. $12.00.)

This volume in the American Presidency Series is an attempt to present

historians and the general public with a scholarly assessment of the Harding

years. Eugene P. Trani and David L. Wilson have admirably synthesized

recent scholarship surrounding Warren G. Harding. Utilizing recent revi-

sionist studies, Trani and Wilson question the appropriateness of the "New

Harding" literature. They believe that Harding has been "partially re-

habilitated" (p.190) by scholars such as Randolph C. Downes and Robert K.

Murray. Yet, an aura of pessimism permeates this excellent study. The gen-

eral conclusion is that the Harding Administration was short-sighted and did

little to promote long-term reform in American politics.

The main strength of this study lies in the skillful organization of the

material. In eight beautifully written and cogently argued chapters, Trani

and Wilson weave a highly interpretive synthesis incorporating all significant

material on the Harding years. The result is to produce a volume which

examines the transition in American politics from the Wilson years to the

"normalcy" of the 1920s.

In the first chapter, "The United States in 1920," Trani and Wilson set

the tone for the remainder of the study by examining the problems inherent

in the postwar transition to a peacetime economy. Using a wealth of fasci-

nating statistical information, the authors charge that Americans desired to

return "to the simple life exemplified by Marion, Ohio, rather than face up to

the worldwide contention the nation had been involved in under the leader-

ship of the Democratic party and Wilson" (p.28). The next chapter, "Peopling

the Government," is a brilliant reexamination of President Harding's Cabinet

and the inner circle surrounding Harding. Although the quality of appoint-

ments varied, Trani and Wilson believe that Harding attempted to select

108                                                       OHIO HISTORY

well qualified individuals. It was the weakness of a select number of ap-

pointees that doomed the Harding Administration.

The two chapters examining domestic affairs present a highly skeptical

view of Harding's ability to control national politics. His weak position

with Congress is detailed to suggest that Harding's goals were short-sighted

and impractical. In fact, Trani and Wilson argue that domestic gains "would

have occurred with or without Harding" (p.80). This conclusion indicates that

the moderate, conciliatory, manipulative Harding of recent revisionist literature

does not appeal to Trani and Wilson.

In foreign affairs this volume contain's its strongest material. Drawing

heavily upon Trani's extensive work in American diplomacy, the authors draw

a clear picture of the ties between business and government in foreign affairs.

While business influences upon foreign relations are not startling revela-

tions, nonetheless, Trani and Wilson refrain from the heady moralism of

New Left scholars. The conclusions regarding American foreign policy are

balanced and judicious and reflect extensive research into primary and

secondary sources. Harding's personal interest in foreign affairs is carefully

analyzed, and the authors conclude he was a president who "understood

the complex relationship of the United States . . . to the world" (p.169).

Perhaps the strongest recommendation for this volume is that only seventeen

pages are spent analyzing the Harding scandals. Trani and Wilson deal with

the substantive matters surrounding the early 1920s. In the final analysis

they believe that Harding failed as a president because he did not under-

stand the significance and impact of America's transition from a rural society

to an urban-industrial power. This is the finest synthesis available on the

Harding Presidency and it deserves the attention of serious scholars.

Ohlone College                                        Howard A. DeWitt

Roosevelt's Revolution: The First Year, A Personal Perspective. By Rexford G.

Tugwell. (New York: Macmillan, 1977. xix + 327p.; addendum, index.

$14.95.)

Tugwell was adviser or "Brains Truster" to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932

and "Assistant Secretary and Undersecretary of Agriculture, 1933-1936. In

this account of the hectic first year of the New Deal he does not go so far as

to say the New Dealers did not know what they were doing. He does note

that Roosevelt ran on a platform embracing contradictions, and he views the

New Deal reaction to economic crisis as a conglomeration of specific re-

sponses to the exigencies of the moment rather than the implementation of a

comprehensive, logical plan of attack on the Depression. Out of the legisla-

tive maneuvers of the first hundred days emerged a flood of measures, exe-

cuted by massive organizations. What was done by the big government which

the Depression produced was minimally effective, but decline was arrested

and slow recovery initiated. This story, as Tugwell vividly recalls it, is still ex-

citing, although its basic components are familiar to the historian of the

thirties.

Still, there is much of value here, even for those who have read Tugwell's

major works on Roosevelt and the New Deal: The Battle for Democracy

Book Reviews                                                        109

(1935); The Democratic Roosevelt (1957); The Art of Politics as Practiced by

Three Great Americans (1958); FDR: Architect of an Era (1967); The Brains

Trust (1968); and In Search of Roosevelt (1972). Tugwell's portraits of indi-

viduals, beginning with himself, are impressive. The professor of economics,

telling students and a presidential candidate what the government should do,

soon found himself in Washington, where things did or did not get done. Amid

the scheming of a swarm of arrogant, self-interested "fixers and power brok-

ers who descended on the capital along with the new officials," Tugwell expe-

rienced both dismay and political maturation.

Tugwells characterizations of Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, and Henry

Wallace are entertaining. Unusual for their inclusion as well as their quality

are his depictions of some able, honest, dedicated civil servants who shunned

politics as they pursued the promotion of the public interest. In this gallery,

Walter Campbell of the Food and Drug Administration and Ferdinand Sil-

cox of the Forest Service are striking figures. Above all, Tugwell presents

an outstanding portrait of Roosevelt, contrasting the imaginative idealist, even

dreamer, harboring unbounded hopes for the nation, with the practicing poli-

tician who both manipulated and appeased his formidable opponents. Let us

hope that Tugwell, now in his eighty-seventh year, will carry his insider's

recollections, year by year, down to his resignation at the end of 1936.

Bowling Green State University                         Bernard Sternsher

Madison's Battery Workers, 1934-1952: A History of Federal Labor Union

19587. By Robert H. Zieger. (Ithaca: New York State School of Industrial

and Labor Relations, 1977. xiv + ¹²6p.; notes, bibliographical essay, index.

$6.25 cloth; $4.50 paper.)

Madison's Battery Workers is a useful addition to the literature on the

labor movement of the 1930s, to which about two thirds of the text is devoted,

while the war and postwar years are dealt with rather briefly. The book deals

with a fairly homogeneous small-town work force (with a significant admix-

ture of workers of Norwegian stock) whose organizational involvement did

not go beyond the Federal Labor Union set up by the American Federation

of Labor (AFL) in 1934, although there was significant, but vaguely specified,

support for the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) when the Lewis

group parted company with the AFL. The author provides us with a useful

description of the dependence of the local unionists on outside administrative

aid: the Wisconsin Federation of Labor, the United States Conciliation Ser-

vice, and the National Labor Relations Board. We thus gain some insight into

a segment of the American working class that in many respects was more

conservative than those heroic figures memorialized in song and story, and

the book advances our understanding of the overall conservative character of

the American labor movement. Yet the book raises many more questions

than it answers, and reveals more about the intellectual quandry of much of

labor historiography than it does about the period and processes under discus-

sion.

In what purports to be a local study the specific strategies of historical

analysis that ought to be associated with that genre are completely lacking.

110                                                       OHIO HISTORY

The concrete descriptions of occupational structure, ethnoculture, and institu-

tional relationships that one expects to find in a particular workforce under-

going a process of politicization and organization are absent. Although the

author relies heavily on interviews with former activists, the specific relation-

ship of these activists both to each other and to the broader milieu that

they seek to mobilize is not an object of historical analysis. The author de-

scribes a persistent factional conflict between "moderates" or "conserva-

tives" and "militants," but beyond the fact that he specifies two leaders of

each tendency, and mentions in passing that the "militants" seemed to have

the support of younger workers, we learn very little about what appears to be

a central conflict within the union. It is only when the reader had gotten two

thirds of the way through the text that he learns that the machinists domi-

nated the leadership of the union following a disasterous confrontation with

the company in 1938, and this piece of information is mentioned only in pass-

ing as the author describes the departure of the machinists from the federal

local and their organization into a lodge of the International Association of

Machinists. The reader might well wonder whether these same machinists

were the principle protagonists of the conservative tendency, and, more gen-

erally (since they seemed to function as a coherent group) what role they

played in the development of the local from 1934 onwards.

While acknowledging the strength of this ill-described conservative ten-

dency, the author tends to contradict himself when he uses general terms de-

scribing the "feisty" and spirited character of the workers-terms which evoke

the romantic ideological imagery of a working class poised on the brink of

militant class action. Yet in comparative political terms this was a local on

the right wing of the industrial labor movement of the CIO era; a local which,

had it left the AFL for the United Auto Workers, for example, most likely would

have been in the camp of the anti-Communist anti-CIO Homer Martin fac-

tion of that union in 1939. Certainly we might infer as much from the author's

description of the rise of the machinists to power in that year.

Wayne State University                                  Peter Friedlander

The Imperial Years: The U.S. Since 1939. By Alonzo L. Hamby. (New York:

Weybright and Talley, 1976. xi + 429p.; bibliography, index. $14.95 cloth;

$6.95 paper.)

In his preface to The Imperial Years, Alonzo Hamby reveals the approach

of this survey of America since 1939. He acknowledges that he leans toward

the "liberal-democratic tradition" in American politics. He then proceeds to

criticize "the modish strains of radicalism," particularly challenging those re-

visionists who constitute the New Left. True to his admission, The Imperial

Years-though hardly imbued with original insights-presents a liberal interpre-

tation of American history in a balanced and professional fashion.

Although Hamby never specifically defines the liberal tradition, his meaning

indirectly emerges as the narrative unfolds. He sees much to praise in the

administrations of the more liberal Democratic presidents of this era. The

more conservative Republican presidents do not fare so well since in his opin-

ion they have failed to keep pace with modern society. Concentrating on the

Book Reviews                                                       111

backgrounds and personalities of the presidents and other prominent figures,

he establishes an enlightening correlation between personalities, goals, and

accomplishments which pervades the text. Although liberal presidents had

their shortcomings, their actions are portrayed in a more favorable light than

those of conservative chief executives-as in his evaluations of Dwight Eisen-

hower and John Kennedy: Ike unsuccessfully tried to replace the "traditional

conservatism" of the Republican party with "responsible moderation." He

agrees that this effort had abstract appeal, but failed to evoke the response the

GOP had hoped, a far less adulatory assessment than his treatment of Ken-

nedy. According to Hamby, Kennedy "sought to attune himself to the reali-

ties of power and to exercise constructive, responsible leadership within the

pragmatic limits as he perceived them." Upon his death, the western world

lost an "invaluable asset."

Even if he sees shortcomings in conservative politics, the author shuns

revisionism and has little patience with radical revisionist historians. He laces

his commentary with periodic consideration of New Left interpretations,

consistently exposing their deficiencies. Revisionist theories ranging from the

"back door to war" thesis to the more recent interpretations of the causes of

the Cold War and Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis fall under

Hamby's scrutiny. On most occasions, he advocates a moderate approach

and the traditional judgment. Upon assessing the causes of the Cold War, for

instance, he acknowledges both American and Soviet foreign policy mistakes.

Yet he places the bulk of the responsibility for this tense and volatile period

on the Soviets: "The cold war may have begun to take shape in 1945-46, but

it became the dominant factor of world diplomacy because of communist

pressures and apparent Russian designs on areas beyond the power of Soviet

armies." He argues that America's postwar "empire" emerged naturally from

its position of power in 1945, not from some conscious, sinister imperial

drive (hence the title The Imperial Years). Other revisionist interpretations

are handled in a similar manner.

Throughout this book, Hamby provides an upbeat, yet objectively scrupu-

lous, survey of the emerging American empire. He expounds a convincing

case for the liberal democratic tradition, with proper recognition of its weak-

nesses. Although the work, like any attempt to write recent history, is already

somewhat dated since it was completed in late 1975, it is a worthwhile addi-

tion to the numerous histories of modern America. Hamby's handling of his

liberal outlook is a revealing and convincingly stated picture of American

political and diplomatic history.

St. Louis University                                  T. Michael Ruddy

The Afro-American and the Second World War. By Neil A. Wynn. (New

York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1976. vii + 183p.; appendices, notes,

bibliography, index. $18.50.)

In this book Neil A. Wynn focuses upon alterations in Afro-American life

resulting from World War II. The author recognizes the need to understand

the nature of war and the manner in which it brings about social change.

Wynn proceeds from the work of Arthur Marwick and finds especially rele-

112                                                       OHIO HISTORY

vant the concept that war is the supreme test of a country's institutions and

also the view that war requires the participation of minority groups and so

makes possible social gains. Basically an interpretive essay rather than an

uncovering of new evidence, the monograph is a useful addition to American

social history of the war period. The book, concise and clearly written, draws

extensively upon an assortment of manuscript collections and documents in the

National Archives.

The author deals with a number of facets of the wartime black experience.

Individual chapters are devoted to black participation in the armed forces,

employment patterns, war-induced migration and racial aspects of the cultural

media. Viewing the war years in perspective Wynn perceptively notes that

the basis was then laid for the civil rights advances of the 1950s and 1960s.

Wynn does not seek to cover comprehensively the armed forces situation

but instead outlines key developments and offers some new emphases. Blacks

persistently strove to secure full involvement in the services and Wynn prop-

erly points to the gains made while making clear the limitations of that prog-

ress. Particularly interesting is his discussion of the British response to black

servicemen. Clearly there was some British importation of American racism

but the evidence also shows considerable public sympathy for blacks and

opposition to discriminatory practices. Wynn notes that while many civilians

welcomed blacks, the official British attitude was one of neutrality on the

racial question.

Wynn's history of the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC)

makes clear that while the struggle for fair employment practices was impor-

tant, of more significance to black economic gains was the wartime labor

shortage. Conservative efforts to obstruct FEPC were unrelenting and the net

result of economic changes wrought by the war was that while incomes of

Afro-Americans rose during the conflict many employers resorted to merely

token compliance with Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802. Blacks tended to be

confined to hot and grimy industrial occupations and the discrepancy between

the incomes of blacks and those of whites remained substantial. Added to all

this, as Wynn stresses, was the realistic apprehension that with peace, black

economic gains would be erased.

The story of urban adjustment to wartime black migration was largely one

of failure. A key index of that failure was indifference to the Afro-American's

need for decent housing, with the consequence that the war brought an inten-

sification of discriminatory housing patterns. There is obvious irony in the fact

that the war for democracy reinforced residential segregation in many Amer-

ican cities. As Wynn realizes, in this context the racial violence that struck

Detroit and New York was understandable, especially so when it was apparent

that all progress by blacks met with stubborn resistance. There was little

persuasive evidence that the dominant institutions of American society looked

favorably on black aspirations. Drawing upon Myrdal, Wynn also percep-

tively links housing status with the general conditions of health and welfare

and he concludes that serious inadequacies in health care for blacks persisted

throughout the war years. Viewing together the problems of health, educa-

tion and housing the author offers the pertinent conclusion that blacks played

their part in the war effort and expected their due rewards.

Included also in this work is a brief but thoughtful discussion of the black

role in films, music and literature. Black intellectuals focused upon the war

and in their work themes of protest and expectation were joined. Wynn refers

Book Reviews                                                      113

to the prevailing black mood as "demanding and expectant" and this mood

was influenced by broader portrayals of blacks on stage and screen and the

work of white authors who dealt seriously with racial issues. Although the

war did not eliminate white racism it posed a challenge to that ideology and

aroused hopes that commitment to democracy would be strengthened by the

war experience.

Two shortcomings of the book should be noted. Firstly, there is little at-

tention to the diversity of ideological currents within the black community

with a resulting a lack of perspective on the richness and complexity of Afro-

American culture. Secondly, the Afro-American experience is inadequately

related to the specific character of the war. The war's nature as a struggle

against fascist racism formed the context for Afro-Americans seeking to win

new victories for democracy at home, but Wynn gives this relationship little

attention. This question is central to the subject matter of the book and Wynn's

useful work could have been better if he had considered this problem and more

fully developed his interpretive approach.

University of Cincinnati                               Herbert Shapiro

Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist. By W. A. Swanberg. (New York: Charles

Scribner's Sons, 1976. xii + ⁵²8p.; illustrations, notes, index. $14.95.)

When H. L. Mencken covered a Norman Thomas political rally during the

1948 presidential campaign, he confessed to being captivated by this "really

intelligent and civilized man." While the libertarian Mencken was happy with

Thomas' refusal to espouse much of the usual "Socialist whim-wham" and his

dismissal of "Papa Marx" and "other Socialist archangels," what impressed

him most was Thomas' striking character and mind. Mencken found Thomas'

speech "full of adept and memorable phrases, some of them apparently

almost new. It shined with wit and humor. The speaker poked gentle but

devastating fun at all the clowns in the political circus, by no means forgetting

himself. There was not a trace of rancor in his speech, and not a trace of

Messianic bombast." It is fair to state that Mencken's judgment has come to

be shared by many people. For it was incontrovertible to both Thomas'

admirers and his critics that he was the luminous opposite of all the hollow

men with their fabricated personalities, contrived behavior and grim de-

termination to wield power. Thomas radiated a blend of authenticity and

sympathy so transparent and captivating that he won the respect of men he

could never persuade. It is W. A. Swanberg's ability to portray this dimension

of Thomas which makes his biography a compelling and important book.

While there have been several previous treatments of Thomas' career,

Swanberg's narrative is the only one written from the perspective of an

admiring camp follower with access to many of Thomas' relatives, friends,

associates as well as the more traditional sources. Swanberg's evocation of

the private and inner man provides an important insight into a figure who

has often been obscured in the tedious ideological polemics characterizing

many histories of American Socialism and its principal spokesmen. While

this approach will annoy readers who prefer a rigorous analytical exposition

of political thought and socialist ideology, it should not result in a cavalier

dismissal of the whole work.

114                                                        OHIO HISTORY

Swanberg has written a rather traditional political biography. It is totally

animated by the desire to portray Thomas as an individual and it frequently

falls into the problem of treating him in vacuo or ignoring the milieu in

which he lived and acted. It is impressionistic, summary and often disap-

pointingly awkward in its juxtaposition of major intellectual and political

issues along with references to his wife's raising cocker spaniel puppies and

other domestic revelations. And because it assumes an undeviating chrono-

logical focus, the narrative frequently gives evidence of undigested file cards

assuming a life of their own. In many crucial sections the book simply floats

from one theme to another without any organizing principle other than

sequential linearity. And, if it is true that virtually all of the major themes

in Thomas' political career are included, they are often simply mentioned,

buttressed with a Thomas quote and then dropped. Perhaps the salient

instance demonstrating the inadequacy of this approach is Swanberg's in-

ability to show cogently how much Thomas' actual socialist beliefs under-

went substantial modifications from 1918 to his death in 1968. Swanberg

also manages to say virtually nothing about the many books Thomas wrote

during his life. Norman Thomas was, as Murray Kempton once observed,

always willing to occupy "some lonely unfashionable place where only he

would stand." Swanberg's book will serve as an excellent guide to the

numerous occasions when Norman Thomas affirmed the politics of civility,

hope and conscience.

Eisenhower College                                     Frank Annunziata

The Committee of One Million: "China Lobby" Politics 1953-1971. By Stanley

D. Bachrack. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. xi + 371p.;

notes, bibliography, index. $14.95.)

Stanley D. Bachrack carefully points out that he conceived and researched

his book before the Watergate and CIA scandals of the mid-1970s, but his

work reflects a spirit fostered by those scandals. That spirit is embodied in

his final sentence: "Government officials who distort the difference between

politically embarrassing information and genuine national security secrets

also distort and diminish the democratic process" (p.²⁸⁵). The Committee of

One Million (more accurately, its predecessor), according to Bachrack, de-

veloped in such secrecy, its origins and its ties to an important congres-

sional subcommittee and to Nationalist Chinese officials obscured from public

view. The thesis is well supported by the evidence.

The Committee of One Million is a work of considerable merit. The author's

research-including the extraordinarily rich manuscript collection of Marvin

Liebman, longtime secretary of the Committee, as well as papers from three

presidential administrations and  numerous transcripts of congressional

hearings-is meticulous (though he might have buttressed it with a few

strategically chosen interviews). In its description of the Committee's struc-

ture and operation, the book is a model study of a lobby: Bachrack presents

a detailed account of how such an organization builds support, conducts

mailings, uses "two-tiered" approaches (through friendly third parties formally

unconnected to the group) to reach larger numbers, and sets up "dummy"

Book Reviews                                                       115

operations of at least questionable propriety to raise funds for its own use.

The author also describes a number of interesting episodes in his own re-

search, as pertinent to the subject as they are fascinating to the reader, in

that they provide a realistic glimpse of the difficulties confronting one who

researches recent "national security" topics-even in the age of the Freedom

of Information Act (Bachrack engaged in an unsuccessful lawsuit against the

CIA in connection with his research in 1975-1976). Finally, the book pays

attention to context, including good coverage of international events and

turns in American foreign policy which affected the Committee's decisions

and tactics.

Weaknesses in the book are largely structural; at several points (chapter

three, for example), chapter subsections are arranged in a way that confuses

the reader on chronology and produces redundancy. There are also some lapses

in analysis. For all the strength of its presentation of the central thesis and

its description of Committee operations, the book is weak in examining some

of the important issues it raises-for example, how "bipartisan" the Com-

mittee really was in its methods and objectives, and in what ways it "co-

opted" the Congress. In fact, Bachrack's handling of institutional partisan

politics is probably the least satisfying aspect of the book.

In general, however, this is a useful and informative book, an example of a

dissertation well worth expanding for publication. As one of only a few

monographs which focus on domestic aspects of American foreign policy mak-

ing and an excellent study of interest group lobbying, The Committee of One

Million represents a genuine addition to the body of scholarship on recent

United States history.

The Ohio State University                             Gary W. Reichard

Assassination in America. By James McKinley. (New York: Harper & Row,

1975. xii + 243p.; bibliography, index. $10.95.)

Incomprehensible and yet often commonplace, mysterious and mundane,

suffused with so many ironic "if only's" and still, apparently, so inevitable:

these are the characteristics of assassination in America. A violent country,

compared to almost all of its modern industrialized counterparts, we are

nevertheless a land in which assassination seems tragically out of place.

Assassination in other countries, rooted in class war and tribal conflict,

violates our faith in democratic fair play. Each episode of fatal public assault

thus raises the anguished question: is there some demonic, inherent flaw

in our society that breeds violent attacks upon political leaders? The al-

ternative explanation, hardly more flattering to our national self-image, but

perhaps less ominous for our political future, is psychopathological. Are our

assassins psychopathic loners, adrift in a world too complex and demanding

for their immature superegos to comprehend. For them, assassination would

become a twisted symbolic protest against individual psychic pain.

James McKinley, a professor of English, has provided a lively, vivid anec-

dotal narrative of the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley,

and Kennedy, as well as Anton Cermak, mayor of Chicago, Martin Luther

King, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy. The lives and leading policies of the

116                                                       OHIO HISTORY

victims and assailants, the dramatic events surrounding the fatal attacks, and

the swirling controversies over conspiracies, suppressed evidence, and

bungled investigations are here intelligently and grippingly retold.

McKinley's style is graceful and clear, but marred by occasional hyperbole,

gratuitous hindsight, and entire paragraphs of questions, posed as extended

asides. These devices may be holdovers from the original, popular form of

publication, as a serial in Playboy magazine. They are neither good history

nor good journalism. The absence of footnotes is disturbing, and a cryptic

reference in the preface to an assistant who performed much of the research

invites awkward inquiries. Is it the assistant or the author who is to blame

for the out-of-date analysis of Reconstruction politics? The oversimplified

account of the New Deal? The caricature of American radical ideologies?

One may forgive the eccentric asides, sloppy scholarship and locomotive

speed of parts of the book; the style and scope of the essay compensate

for many of its overt weaknesses. One cannot so excuse the author for miss-

ing a real opportunity to contribute to our understanding of the causes of

assassination. Rhetorical questions and formal bows to deprivation psy-

chology and alienation sociology do not explain anything here. And the author

concedes as much, when he concludes: "But it is precisely because assassins

are so variously motivated that there is no cure for assassination." Granted-

no cure-but how may we begin to comprehend the act itself. Sporadically,

throughout the book, McKinley suggests that assassins like Guiteau, Oswald

and Ray may have been psychologically receptive to violence-that it provided

them with catharsis and relief. A bit more research into psychiatric literature

on murder, for example the work of David Abrahamsen and Stuart Palmer,

might have revealed more about the complex inner turmoils of the potential

assassin. McKinley's essay is spritely and well-meant, but the mysteries and

the terrors of assassination in America remain unexplained.

University of Notre Dame                                  Peter C. Hoffer

Ships of the Great Lakes, A Pictorial History. By Robert E. Lee and David T.

Glick, Paintings by Karl Kuttruff. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,

1976. ⁶⁹p.; illustrations. $25.00.)

A sophisticated "coffee-table" production dealing with Great Lakes ship-

ping never has been attempted until recently. Now, through a grant provided

by the Detroit Historical Society Guild and in conjunction with the Dossin

Great Lakes Museum, a handsome developmental portrayal of the prosaic

lake vessels is available. An introduction by Robert E. Lee, curator of the

Dossin Museum, skims the surface of this development and historically places

the illustrated vessels in their proper perspective. David T. Glick, of the Henry

Ford Museum and a devotee of lake shipping history, has done an excellent

job of providing relevant data for each vessel without becoming encyclopedic.

However, Karl Kuttruff, through his thirty-one line drawings of the ships,

totally steals the scene. The book is designed to do this, and through Kutruffs

artistic talent and skill for capturing the painstaking details of each of the

vessels, is worthy of its assigned task.

The selection of ships to be highlighted in such a volume must be arbitrary.

Book Reviews                                                          117

Certainly some vessels must be included because of their historic role. In

this connection, the Griffin, Lawrence, Walk-in-the- Water, Vandalia, and

Wyandotte appear. Each is well recognized as a "first-of-a-kind" or appear in

schoolboy texts. Others were selected as being representative of a general

class or for having been identified with a specific trade. Here, one finds the

carferry Pere Marquette 18, the lumber steamer Sidney 0. Neff, and the

modern bulk freighter Paul Thayer. The lake buff will be pleased to discover

the famous Detroit River tug Champion, but will look in vain for a repre-

sentative harbor tug. In the modern era there are included a tanker, a

thousand-foot "bulker," and a diesel-powered ore carrier. But there are no

traditional coal-fired ore carriers, powered by triple expansion engines, be-

fitting the period 1900-1925.

If this most difficult and never all-satisfying selection of vessels to be

portrayed is a flaw, it is an admirable and relatively minor one. However, for

a better understanding of the comparative sizes of the ships, a greater flaw

may be the lack of a common scale, or, for the larger vessels, perhaps even

two or three "common denominators." As it stands, one can refer to Mr.

Glick's data, but this fails to provide a true eye picture for the novice of the

great technological advances made over the course of two centuries.

Nevertheless, the volume is a deserving contribution albeit a costly one.

To understand this, one need only to appreciate the plates, all of which are in

color. To do less would be demeaning and the Dossin Museum should be

lauded for not shrinking to black/white sketches to reduce the costs. It is a

book with a simple design and scenario, beautifully done, and relatively

error-free. In this day of cheaply produced and poorly researched volumes

on the topic, this presentation is like a fresh lake breeze.

Bowling Green State University                          Richard J. Wright