Book Reviews
Proslavery: A History of the Defense
of Slavery in America, 1701-1840. By
Larry E. Tise. (Athens: The University
of Georgia Press, 1987. xix + 510p.;
illustrations, tables, notes, index.
$40.00.)
It is evident that we must at some point
have a meeting of minds regarding
the old anti-slavery war, not at all so
that we can agree on details or even
issues, but in order to rephrase them
for a new era. It is a long time since
specialists argued over the roles of New
England abolitionists as compared
with westerners-that is, of the Old
Northwest. It is a still longer time since
scholars assumed the Civil War to have
been a war between Free Soil as
opposed to proslavery sections.
Meanwhile, the non-scholar has known
without research who Garrison and John
Brown were, and has not puzzled
over the fact that one was against war
on principle and the other was a
committed partisan of terror.
Our own "Second Revolution"
signalled by the Brown and other civil rights
Supreme Court decisions has created a
substantial parity in the legal status of
the several geographic and ethnic
groups, so that new questions are raised
about the role of history in our
concerns. Not surprisingly, our psychological
stakes in history vary, yet we must move
toward some consensus regarding the
roles played in such of our national
crises as the anti- and proslavery drives
which culminated in drastic war.
Consensus will not come easily, so we must
be grateful when serious efforts are
made to contribute to it. Such a work is the
present one. It covers formidable
ground, with considerable thoroughness. It
cannot be definitive; the subject is too
large and involves too much. But it is the
most ambitious of recent writings in the
field, with a thesis which can be
grasped and responded to.
It is not always recognized how
fortunate we are in not having a secessionist
tradition in the Old South, nurtured by
memories of heroes and many dead.
This is not true elsewhere. In Flanders,
for example, there are still groups
which hate the Belgium government and
endure jail in behalf of their cause.
This lack of a dissident nationalism
seems partly the result of empathetic
feelings North and South. Lincoln, in
his First Inaugural Address, referred to
the "mystic chords of memory,
stretching from every battlefield and patriot
grave to every living heart and
hearthstone all over this broad land." Business,
travel, family, and other factors
created everything from tolerance of different
attitudes to sympathy with different
conditions. Lincoln's regard for Alexander
Stephens, who became the Confederate
Vice-President, was not untypical.
But as important was it that both North
and South harbored similar views in
some respects toward the blacks in the
population. Although the North was
averse to slavery, it had been built on
the enslavement of indentured servants,
often treated more harshly than blacks
because they required more discipline
and had service limited by the terms of
indentureship. Naive students used to
say they were in service
"only" from seven to ten years, as though northern
farmers had "only" played at
dominating their white chattel. Modern studies
have spelled out actual working and
living conditions. The public, however,
makes all basic decisions on what it
chooses to be interested in, and it has
Book Reviews
169
chosen not to retain knowledge of the
facts of white chattel enslavement, in
part, probably, because it has a
distaste for remembering that many of its own
ancestors were slaves.
Since our "Second Revolution"
of the 1960s, antislavery sentiments have
not only been succeeded by
"affirmative action" sentiments. They have
required intensive concern for
antebellum conditions affecting blacks, and
versions of history which suit the thesis
of a black population in constant
struggle for freedom, as well as a
dominant white population engaged in
suppressive actions North and South.
There are notable exceptions to this
historical attitude, but the major trend
controls the language of discourse.
Although Allan Nevins's massive Ordeal
of the Union continues to circulate by
way of the Book of the Month Club, it
presently differs from the more
professional-consensus opinion.
In sum, there has been an academic lag
in encouraging new views of
proslavery and anti-slavery. No one will
presently admit to proslavery views,
if only because they are patently
obsolete, but that there was a proslavery party
which contributed to all but rending the
Union has been too obvious to deny.
What has been needed has been a modern
interpretations of the old proslavery
tendency, and this is now provided. It
is desirable to consider what methods
and materials here have been applied to
the subject and to what end.
The author basically proposes that
proslavery was not fostered in the
southern states, but was from the
beginning of settlement a dominant premise
North and South. Moreover, some of the
most potent proslavery arguments
derived not from southern idealogues,
but northern. The argument continues in
terms which should prove stimulating to
historians who may have thought of
southerners as hard and fast in favor of
slavery, and their counterparts in the
North sympathetic to freedom. The author
fastens on northern clergymen as a
powerful social force which believed in
the virtues of slavery. Some of
them-mainly from the Congregationalist
sect-went South to preach their
gospel.
The first question lies with our
author's definition of proslavery, which he
identifies wholly with
"immediatism." Thus, anyone who repudiated
immediatism-that is, the need for
freedom for blacks, immediately, without
compensation, without colonizing
perspectives, without schemes for gradual
emancipation-in one way or another was
proslavery. Seen by that definition,
not only dedicated proslaveryites but
almost all sympathetic or working toward
emancipation find themselves in the
proslavery column.
Tise sees the American Revolution as
having created standards for antislavery
which the nation was unable to sustain.
Colonization, too, after 1816, con-
tained national hopes for relieving the
national bad conscience over continuing
enslavement of blacks. Tise's novel
thesis is that proslavery stayed abreast of
these efforts, and was most vital, not
in the South, as expected, but in the
North, mainly among clergymen, some of
whom went South to carry on their
agitation favoring slavery. Tise
emphasizes throughout that the South, the land
of Jefferson, was not vigorous in
defending slavery; it was the proslavery
ideologues in the North-evidently
representative of northern opinion, since it
persecuted true abolitionists, the
"immediatists"-who foisted slavery apolo-
gies North and South, created a
"counter-revolution" against Revolutionary
ideals, and then formed a
"conservative republican" coalition which was not
merely racist, but proslavery.
If all this is accurate, whence came the
civil war? Tise concedes that there
were nationalists below Mason-Dixon who
wanted or were willing to see the
170 OHIO HISTORY
Union slide, but he does not give
evidence of the immensity of their effort-to
do what? To demand for decades that the
governments at Washington concede
parity to the slave states in dividing
the West and securing their rights to slaves
everywhere in the Union. True, then,
that southerners did not need ideologies
to defend their rights to slaves
forever.
And how did they treat southern citizens
who were "immediatist" enough to
want no more than to express their
distaste for slavery, and government which
sought to carry out national laws and
ordinances? The record is there for all to
see, who are not satisfied with
"ideologue" positions, but want to attach action
to them. Evidence is all but endless in
all aspects. Tise will argue, yes,
abolitionist-minded people were
oppressed-but oppressed North as well as
South; oppression was a national
phenomenon.
But is there no difference? Consider
riots here and there from Massachusetts
to St. Louis, some of which were won by
the rioters, but, increasingly, won by
the speakers, pamphleteers, church
critics, defiers of government writs, and
voters who turned apologists for slavery
out of office, and subjected them to
public scorn. Compare such a record with
that of the southern states where,
true, there was little agitation because
there did not have to be. The Rev.
George Bourne, the Rev. John Rankin, and
Eli Coffin were only several of the
many who were forced to leave the South
for fear of the wrath of neighbors.
Lynching, public whipping, intolerable
threats to families drained the South of
dissidents.
Tise mentions James G. Birney only in
passing. Had he spelled out Birney's
odyssey, from distinguished slaveholder,
sympathetic to Indian rights in
Alabama, he would not be able to hold
North and South as uniform in
proslavery dedication. True, true, that
Birney was seriously threatened in
Cincinnati, as well as in Huntsville,
Alabama, and Kentucky. But he went on
to a career which at one point lost
Henry Clay his anticipated Presidency.
Where below Mason-Dixon could this have
happened?
Censorship of the Federal mails,
suppression of the right of petition in
Congress, imprisonment and enslavement
of free blacks caught in southern
jurisdiction, flouting of the Supreme Court decisions
as in the notorious
instance of the Cherokees, slave-selling
in the District of Columbia, capital of
both sections-here are several fields
where differences between southern
proslavery and northern can be
discerned. There are scores of books which
deal with aspects of these matters in
depth. And still, yes, the North persisted
as basically conservative in its
"counter-revolution" to Revolutionary "ide-
als." (The historian Benjamin
Quarles has spelled out its limitations, the
patriots, for example, having paid off
some of their solders in slaves, and the
blacks having divided into partisans of
the revolutionists and of the British.)
But it is unfair to read proslavery into
all aspects of law and order quarrels
involving "immediatists," into
all church differences which engaged "Come-
Outers" and conservatives. Lincoln,
in his great debates with Douglas, spelled
out their difference in observing that
his great antagonist seemed to see no
difference between freedom and slavery.
Today, we have yet to reach a
working consensus about their definition
in history.
A larger area which will want spelling
out is the matter of representativeness.
Tise has found pamphlets which defend
slavery North and South, written in
large measure by northerners, and he
offers an interesting appendix of several
hundred names of clergymen, again,
largely northern, who offered defenses.
No one has ever denied that they existed
or were all calculating stipendiaries.
Book Reviews
171
After all, the major churches split
before the Civil War into northern and
southern churches.
But how much do the careful reports and
the fine portraits reproduced tell
us? Tise prints a handbill regarding
Bishop Hopkins of Vermont, whose
defense of slavery in 1863 was
circulated in Pennsylvania as a Democratic
Party campaign document. The handbill is
a protest, signed by some 90
clergymen of Philadelphia. By then, of
course, a similar disparity could have
been found everywhere in the North: a
circumstance reflecting the dynamics of
public maturity on the issue, when Free
Soil had become abolition, and, given
the date. all but
"immediatist."
Finally, there are matters of fact. Tise
highlights a number of northerners
whom he sees as dedicated to slavery,
and as feeding white southern defenses
of the "peculiar institution."
He makes much of Robert Walsh's Appealfrom
the Judgments of Great Britain, James Kirke Paulding, early American
novelist, a familiar of Washington
Irving, and the Rev. Leonard Bacon, a
distinguished Congregationalist, among
others. It must suffice here that the
presentation of these worthies is, at
the very least, controversial. It must be
hoped that historians will enter into
the particulars with generous readings.
The basic fact is that without taking
into account the dynamics of these
personalities nothing can be known.
Robert Walsh, to illustrate, did not so
much defend slavery in his Appeal as
speak up for America on nationalistic
grounds; to that extent he was indeed
helpful to more eager defenders of
enslavement proper. But he went on, as
editor of the National Gazette and
Literary Register, to strike clear anti-slavery notes of special use to
the
anti-slavery cause because, as a
Catholic, he was able to reach a sect which
had fewer roots in it than others.
James Kirke Paulding's Letters from
the South (1817) was an open scandal
in the field, being an anti-slavery
report which Paulding, as a crass opportunist,
deliberately reversed in the 1835
edition which Tise uses. The abolitionists
viewed Paulding's turnabout with
disgust, though it won him the Secretary of
the Navy post in Martin Van Buren's
Cabinet.
Most remarkable is Rev. Leonard Bacon's
appearance here as a proslavery
partisan. He was indeed a conservative
in his earlier years of public commen-
tary, and an ardent colonizationist. But
his rise to antislavery-with moderate
views which, in his Slavery Discussed
in Occasional Essays from 1833 to 1846,
reached Lincoln in Illinois-culminated
in his editorship of The Independent,
begun in 1848 and, by the Civil War, the
leading abolitionist paper in the
country. Sufficient detail may be found
in Theodore D. Bacon, Leonard
Bacon: a Statesman in the Church (1931), to make such specialized use of his
career as we see in Tise inappropriate.
It is evident that there must be come
rebuilding of slavery and antislavery
bases before monographs such as we have
seen in recent years can do their
best work. Slavery has had more recent
historical attention than the move-
ments which enabled the country to rid
itself of the system. Tise's book is the
most challenging of such works, and
should receive due attention from
responsible colleagues.
Ovid, Michigan Louis Filler
172 OHIO HISTORY
Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics. By Frederick J. Blue. (Kent: The Kent
State University Press, 1987. xiii +
420p.; illustrations, notes, bibliograph-
ical essay, index. $28.00.)
In this long needed biography Frederick
J. Blue argues that historians have
too callously dismissed Salmon P.
Chase's principles and accomplishments
and focused too much on his political
ambitions. Blue provides a more
balanced and coherent interpretation. As
a lawyer, political manager, U.S.
Senator, Governor of Ohio, Secretary of
the Treasury, and Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court, Chase sincerely and
persistently advocated racial equality.
This motive may not excuse all Chase's
ambitions, but it does place them in
proper perspective.
Chase's early political career was
entwined with family tragedy. Blue
suggests the loss of three wives and
four children led Chase to sublimate his
grief into a more energetic political
career. Blue is frustratingly vague on
Chase's principles as he began his
political career in Ohio. That Chase
identified with the Whig party is
unquestioned. Why he did so may be
attributed to his profitable business
association with the Bank of the United
States in the 1830s. It does obscure,
however, his ready adoption of Demo-
cratic banking views by the early 1840s.
On Chase's association with the
antislavery movement Blue's analysis is
complex, impressive, and convincing.
Despite his growing disgust of slavery,
Chase rejected the radical abolitionist
solutions. Instead he sought a more
tempered and practical approach which
anticipated the Republican Party
platform by many years. His legal
defense of fugitive slaves was challenging
and satisfying, but also very risky
politically.
Chase's political career was certainly
not without paradox. He was willing to
adopt a compromise strategy in order to
achieve some political gains for his
cause. His behind-the-scenes managing in
the Liberty Party, the Free Soil
Party, and the labyrinth of Ohio
politics often suggests a realistic appraisal of
the political possibilities. Ironically
Chase also exhibited a talent for self-
deception, particularly when he assessed
his own political future. A lack of
national organization, unskilled
managers, failure to appreciate larger national
forces, and naivete doomed Chase's
repeated aspirations for the presidency.
Most perplexing was his last try in
1868, when he sought the Democratic
nomination. Blue claims Chase bowed to
"political reality" and "not simple
expediency" (p. 290) in moderating
his stand on black suffrage and repudiating
his own record on banking and currency
as Treasury Secretary. Later Blue
admits that there was no mass movement
for Chase, his old reputation hurt
him, and his former support for black
rights made him unacceptable. It is
therefore not clear to what political
realities Chase was responding.
The Civil War witnessed Chase's greatest
contributions. As Secretary of the
Treasury Chase kept Lincoln's confidence
on financial matters and adjusted to
war necessities and the growth of big
government. While guilty of political
favoritism, Chase's patronage policies
were no different than other cabinet
officers. Fully documented is Blue's
conclusion that while in command of the
Treasury Chase "produced a record of which he
could be justifiably proud" (p.
171). His commitment to racial equality
was a moral force that Lincoln and the
Cabinet could not ignore.
As Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
Chase pursued a course designed to
augment the court's "prestige and
authority" (p. 274), much of which had been
Book Reviews
173
lost under Roger Taney. Despite not
having practiced law for decades, Chase
quickly overcame suspicions and earned
the respect of his fellow justices.
In this first biography of Chase since
1899 Blue relies heavily on Chase's
own diaries and letters to establish the
continuity and patterns of his life. The
insights of recent and abundant
scholarship supplement the retelling of crucial
events in which Chase played a key role.
Accounts of the formation of the Free
Soil Party, the conflict in Lincoln's
cabinet, and Chase's role as presiding
officer in Johnson's impeachment trial,
for example, are well known and Blue
adds little.
Salmon P. Chase emerges from this
biography as the complex, ambitious and
principled person that he undoubtedly
was. For the most part Blue's analysis
is sympathetic, but judicious. In many
ways one suspects this is a biography of
which Chase would approve. Nevertheless
Chase's future critics will not be
able to ignore this well-documented and
well-written perspective.
Cornell College M. Philip
Lucas
Ohio and Its People. By George W. Knepper. (Kent: The Kent State
University Press, 1989. xi + 508p.;
illustrations, bibliography, index. $32.00
cloth; $17.50 paper.)
Recently Francis Lowenheim of Rice
University rebuked Ohio historians for
not challenging an Ohio Board of Regents
staff member who claimed that Ohio
"has not been a place where
research was done in the past." He urged a
"revival of historical . . .
consciousness in Ohio" (Cincinnati Post, January 1,
1990, 9A). George Knepper's Ohio and
Its People marks a good beginning for
that revival. The first new history of
the state in almost 50 years, it brings the
story up-to-date and revises previous
studies by incorporating the scholarship
of the past generation. The new
scholarship has provided much new wine for
old bottles. Throughout the book Ohio's
history is related to national devel-
opments and the story is written with
verve.
Traversing a familiar path, Knepper
begins with a description of Ohio's
geography, the pre-Columbian people and
the Indiana of the historic period.
Then follows the struggle for the land
between the Indians, the French and the
British. "From Territory to
State" reviews the early legal history of the Old
Northwest, the Indian Wars and
diplomacy, and the drive for statehood.
Addressing early statehood issues,
Knepper focuses on a struggle between
those who favored a common law tradition
and those who favored statutory
law. Tecumseh's effort to stymie western
expansion is fit into the context of the
War of 1812. War's end brought
accelerated migration into the state. Examin-
ing most facets of pioneer life, the
descriptions of clearing forests, agricultural
practices and early industrial
development are particularly good. The pioneer
period narrative ends in 1850.
The Civil War era began the state's
maturation period. Ohioans were heavily
involved with abolitionism, and
ethnocultural conflicts were an integral part of
politics in the rapidly changing state.
Referring to Ohio as a "trunk line" on the
underground railroad, the author urges
caution in accepting claims about
support given to runaway slaves. War
accelerated economic growth as Ohioans
supplied both manufactured and
agricultural products to the Union armies.
174 OHIO HISTORY
Ohio politicians, reflecting the state's
power, played a central role in wartime
and reconstruction policies.
Leadership by Ohioans in national
politics during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries is attributed
to the state's mirroring national changes
and the corresponding fact that Buckeye
politics proved a "hard school."
Success in Ohio prepared one for
national success. Political leadership
paralleled economic leadership as the
state "lead the way in nearly every new
growth industry."
Progressive era reforms reflected a
society in transition and a response to the
changes and disruptions wrought by rapid
industrialization. The post-World
War I era brought Ohio approval of
prohibition and voting rights for women,
two issues that long influenced Ohio's
political rhythm. Economic issues stood
center stage during the interwar years.
The failure of the corporate paternalism
of the twenties brought approval by the
majority of Ohioans of federal
intervention in the economy during the
depression of the 1930s. World War II
marked a fourth shift in the state's
development, this time from the mature
state to contemporary Ohio. The postwar
era ushered in affluence, acceptance
of activist federal leadership, and new
demographic and social patterns.
In "Ohio in Transition,"
Knepper notes that "the history of the recent past
is chancy because the conditions ... are
still evolving" and then proceeds to
analyze the late 1970s and the 1980s. He
seems to have the politics right,
pointing out that diversity and a
"conservative bias" keep Ohio politics highly
competitive. In his economic analysis,
Knepper takes the same themes used to
explain Ohio's industrial boom of the
late nineteenth century and applies them
to current economic conditions. While
revealing how things changed, the
model raises questions, foremost being
how significant are the categories in so
different a world?
This book is an excellent synthesis and
a welcome addition to the library of
Ohio history. It fills the need for a
college-level textbook and will serve
teachers and scholars as a reference
tool. One wishes that more attention had
been paid to Ohio's relationship to the
region and to the transformation in
federal-state relations, but perhaps that is another
book. Also future editions
would benefit from a critical reading by
someone more familiar with the history
of southern Ohio. One final quibble: the
Ferguson Act did not prohibit public
employee collective bargaining (pp.
463-464), although it did make it illegal for
public employees to strike if the law
was invoked.
University of Cincinnati James E. Cebula
Raymond Walters College
We Were the Ninth: A History of the
Ninth Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry,
April 17, 1861, to June 7, 1864. By Constantin Grebner. Translated and
edited by Frederic Trautmann. (Kent: The
Kent State University Press,
1987. xxv + 322p.;
illustrations, chronology, poems, word list, notes,
bibliography, indexes. $24.00.)
When President Abraham Lincoln asked his
countrymen to save the Union
in April 1861, among those who responded
were the "Dutch devils," the
German speaking Ninth Ohio regiment of
Cincinnati. These Germans from
Book Reviews
175
Across the Rhine developed a fighting
reputation in West Virginia, at Shiloh,
Corinth, Nashville, Chickamauga, and
Missionary Ridge. In May 1864, the unit
was mustered out of Union service with
about half their original number in
uniform.
In 1870, the Ninth Ohio veterans formed
an association "to remember and to
remind" future generations of their
contributions to the Civil War. Twenty
years later, the veterans commissioned
Constantin Grebner, the much trav-
elled, German-born anthropologist and
writer, to produce a history of the unit.
Not a veteran himself, and writing
several decades after the event, Grebner
relied on interviews, newspapers,
diaries, memoirs, and government docu-
ments to complete the book in the German
language. The adventures of the
Ninth Ohio, the first German regiment in
Ohio, was published first in 1897.
We Were the Ninth has limited appeal to the student of Civil War studies
or
to ethnic studies. Its approach is
almost hero worship and thus looses
credibility. While well written by the
author, the book avoids some important
issues and events that should have been
examined in telling the story of the
Ninth Ohio. Unfortunately, the book does
not adequately raise or address the
issue of Colonel Gustav Kammerling's
dismissal from service, the reasons for
the unit's refusal to reenlist in 1864,
and the universal tendency among ethnic
regiments to lose support from the
communities whence they came. The author
might have also strengthened his work by
some mention of how the Ninth
avoided the political bickering that was
common to other ethnic units of the
Union forces.
In conclusion, the book is not apt to
add significantly to the fields of Civil
War and ethnic studies. The editor has
worked the material successfully and
added color commentary to enhance the
story. A combined index, a sprinkling
of meaningful maps and some appropriate
pictures would have added to the
overall production of this book. A
readable and interesting book for a select
group of readers.
Youngstown State University Hugh G. Earnhart
Brimfield and Its People: Life in a
Western Reserve Township, 1816-1941. By
Edgar L. McCormick. (Grantham, New
Hampshire: Thompson & Rutter
Inc., 1988. 256p.; illustrations,
bibliographic notes, index. $15.95 paper.)
The recent two-decade-long interest in
social history has produced a
significant number of case studies of
particular communities which reveal
details of individual and aggregate
lives indecipherable from a broader per-
spective. They place their findings in
regional and national contexts to add new
dimensions to our understanding of the
past.
Brimfield and Its People has such a narrow, township focus and provides
detailed descriptions of rural life.
However, because it offers little analysis or
context, it is not one of these new case
studies. Edgar McCormick has written
an interesting, and sometimes charming,
almost episodic collection of essays,
vignettes and excerpts describing the
people of the town of Brimfield (located
in Portage County) where he was raised
and now lives. The pages are heavily
laced with selections from diaries,
letters, obituaries, and reminiscences which
detail the lives of over a century of
Brimfield's residents. We learn, for
instance, of house and barn raisings, of
farming chores, and church and school
176 OHIO HISTORY
activities. McCormick seems to delight
in the accurate detail and in the names
and interrelationships of those whose
letters and diaries he has uncovered.
Unfortunately, McCormick uses some of
these sources uncritically. He often
quotes a reminiscence recorded in a
county history sixty or seventy years after
the event with the same credibility as a
diary entry. At other points, his
narrative summarizes a collection of
family letters with no apparent general
goal. In the chapter "News From
Home," a brief paragraph introduces twenty
pages of excerpts from a series of
letters sent from Brimfield to a son in the
California gold fields. There is no text
and no analysis here. One wonders not
only what McCormick thinks but also what
has been deleted. Another four
chapters of the work use the extensive
two-volume diary of Andrew K. B.
Richards. Unfortunately, we do not know
if Andrews or the others are typical
of Brimfield itself or if they are
simply residents described in records which
survive. In fact, we are never sure if
Brimfield township was a coherent
community.
His two chapters on the Civil War depart
somewhat from the format since
they rely on letters home from soldiers
and describe conditions on the
battlefield and in the war rather than
conditions in Brimfield. Nonetheless,
they do successfully convey the anguish
and suffering of the war by the sons
of Brimfield.
Rarely does McCormick comment on whether
the experience of these
soldiers or of other people in his work
is typical of the Western Reserve, the
Midwest, or the nation. The lack of
footnotes and the limited, Brimfield-
dominated bibliographic notes suggest he
was not concerned with a broader
perspective. While not precisely
antiquarianism, the work more closely
approximates a chronologically-based
description of aspects of individual lives
gathered from a rich, if limited,
collection of primary sources. Typically, most
chapters lack conclusions and end when
the source they summarize ends.
Moreover, the chronology is not
particularly balanced since it is so dependent
on sources.
There is some analysis of institutions
in the first three chapters, and there are
elements of a social history here. The
generational shifts of occupations and
the ebb and flow of migration are
suggestive. The township population seems
to parallel the rest of the Reserve.
While overriding themes are not often
present, the later portions of the work
(which describe some of McCormick's own
childhood context) seem to lament
the passing of a rural township way of
living. However, earlier chapters
suggested rural life had changed a great
deal from 1820 to 1900. The demise of
the first generation of leaders, the
migration of many to the west, the influx of
new migrants, and the changing fortunes
of religious bodies in Brimfield all
suggest a township (but perhaps not a
community) in constant flux.
Brimfield and Its Neighbors is interesting reading for the detail and charm of
its people. It is not a history.
The Cleveland State University Robert A. Wheeler
Grand Plans: Business Progressivism
and Social Change in Ohio's Miami
Valley, 1890-1929. By Judith Sealander. (Lexington: The University Press
of
Kentucky, 1988. viii + 263p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
$26.00.)
Book Reviews
177
Grand Plans is a welcome addition to the mounting literature on the
Progressive Era. Professor Sealander
correctly observes that the majority of
work has focused on national and urban
Progressivism. This study of the
Miami Valley provides us "a day in
the country," a look at Progressivism in a
region with a substantial rural
component. Investigations of this type are
particularly valuable as they permit an
examination of the more forgotten
environments in which reform took place
during the period.
The author has chosen to examine the
"hard" side of Progressivism, the
particular contributions of business
leaders, though she is quick to note that
these practical reformers had their
social and religious gospel sides as well.
Professor Sealander identifies and
studies in depth four events or movements
from the early twentieth century history
of the Miami Valley: (1) the welfare
programs introduced at National Cash
Register, Dayton's dominant industry;
(2) flood relief following the March,
1913, disaster and the ensuing establish-
ment of the Miami Conservancy District;
(3) the birth and early development
of the city manager form of government
in Dayton; and (4) the educational
innovations at Moraine Park School, the
Dayton public schools, and Antioch
College reflective of the influence of
the Progressive business community.
In each of these areas of Progressive
activity the business leadership moved
in an efficient, uplifting, albeit
undemocratic, fashion. Each reflected the
business Progressive's faith in
scientific management (Taylorism), the utiliza-
tion of experts, and employment of the
business model to disparate facets of
life. Each featured the attainment of
worthy Progressive ends without apparent
concern about the equity of the means.
John Patterson dispensed reasonable
welfare benefits to the workers at
National Cash Register, but only because his
ruthless business instincts convinced
him that such policy would heighten
efficiency and forestall damaging
strikes. Flood relief in 1913 was a mixture of
self-interest and humanitarianism. The
prime movers of the subsequent Miami
Conservancy District, Edward Deeds and
Arthur Morgan, likewise typified the
Pattersonian paradigm of an
"arrogant willingness" to manipulate the lives of
others to achieve a public good which
they themselves defined. The city
manager governmental structure in Dayton
brought efficiency and economy
but with a substantial reduction in
democracy. The absence of proportional
representation or municipal ownership of
utilities effectively emasculated the
power of all but a small coterie of
leading businessmen. Professor Sealander
makes the point most forcefully that the
notable achievements of the Miami
Valley reformers were the products of
widely diverse motives, some more
noble than others.
I have very few criticisms to make about
this engaging historical work. I
would have liked to have seen more
background about Progressivism in the
State of Ohio. Explanatory and causal
links might have been established with
important Progressive antecedents at
various other Ohio venues. I think the
book would have been more successful
without the lengthy discourse on the
educational innovations. This section
did not seem to fit with the others and
was slightly inappropriate
chronologically. Finally, I would have preferred that
the author cast a wider net in examining
the contributions of business leaders.
To be sure, Patterson, Deeds, Morgan,
and Kettering were the major person-
alities, but what were the lesser
luminaries thinking and doing?
Grand Plans is an extremely well-written and meticulously
researched piece
of work. The notes are copious and lend
much to the reader's understanding.
The bibliography is one of the most complete I have
seen on the subject and
178 OHIO HISTORY
will be a valuable resource for scholars
working in the area. Professor
Sealander has made a first-rate
contribution to the study of Ohio during this
critical formative era.
John Carroll University Richard K. Fleischman
A Photo Album of Ohio's Canal Era,
1825-1913. By Jack Gieck. (Kent: The
Kent State University Press, 1988. xx +
310p.; notes, illustrations, appen-
dix, index. $35.00.)
Everything about this book speaks of
quality, from the front cover of the dust
jacket to the last page of the index.
Profusely illustrated with more than 500
photographs, woodcuts, metal engravings,
salt prints, daguerreotypes, and
other examples of early graphic arts
from archival collections across the state,
it is more than a photo album, it is a
treasure trove of Ohioana.
From the author's preface, with its
highly informative lesson on the
chemistry of early canal-era photography,
through George Knepper's thought-
ful introductory perspective on the
economic and social significance of Ohio's
canals in nineteenth century America,
the reader is introduced to thirteen
beautifully illustrated chapters whose
titles define their content: A Desperate
Need; Construction: The Men and the
Means; Hydraulics and Operation;
Aqueducts, Culverts, and Slackwaters;
The Boats: Naval Architecture of
Another Kind; The Ohio & Erie Canal;
The Miami & Erie Canal; Feeder
Canals; The Canalers and Their Families;
Entrepreneurs, Opportunists, and
Characters; Effects; The Decline; The
End-With a Bang!
Each chapter begins with a short,
topical, interpretive essay; each illustra-
tion is accompanied by an explanatory
link with that interpretation. The
author, Jack Gieck, is both avocational
historian and professional engineer-a
former president of The Canal Society of
Ohio as well as former assistant
director of Firestone's Central Research
Laboratories in Akron. He brings the
best of both his interests to the
enlightenment of the reader in clear and
delightfully readable prose.
The reader, in turn, is tantalized by a
glossary of intriguing canal terms,
many peculiarly Ohio in origin: Portage
Summit, Licking Summit, Loramie
Summit, Maumee Sidecut, Black Hand Gorge
Slackwater, Brimstone Corners,
Crosby's Ditch, Sandy & Beaver, Big
Tunnel, Little Tunnel, Deep Cut. To
these are added spillway, race, lift
lock, weigh lock, lock mill, line boat, state
boat, feeder canal, lateral canal,
hydraulic canal, river lock, lock sill, whaler
gate, sluice gate, sweep, wicket, and
locktender, among others. To the fancier
of Ohio place names, try these of canal
era origin: Canal Winchester, Canal
Fulton, Canal Dover, Canal Lewisville,
Lockbridge, Lockbourne, Lockville,
Lockington, Lockport, Lockland, Lock
Seventeen (now simply Seventeen,
Ohio), Bonner's Lock, Rockcut Towpatch,
Port Jefferson, Port Washington,
Millersport, Groveport, Campbellsport,
Webbsport, Nashport, Millport, Stock-
port, Eagleport, Gaysport, Luke's Chute,
Grand Lake St. Mary's, Buckeye
Lake, Portage Lakes, and even Akron
(meaning the "high place" from the
Greek akros-the "City at the
Summit").
Published in commemoration of the 25th
anniversary of The Canal Society of
Ohio with the support of the Ohio
Humanities Council and the GAR Founda-
Book Reviews
179
tion, this is a book which should find a
wide and enthusiastic reception among
general public and professional
historians alike.
Miami University Phillip R.
Shriver
The Organic City: Urban Definition
and Neighborhood Organization 1880-
1920. By Patricia Mooney Melvin. (Lexington: The University
Press of
Kentucky, 1987. xii + 227p.; figures and
tables, notes, bibliographic essay,
index. $25.00.)
Patricia Mooney Melvin's book is a
provocative work which describes an
obscure portion of American urban
history: the innovative struggle of Wilbur
Phillips to establish neighborhood
government in America's industrial cities.
Phillips, an early 20th century social
reformer, promulgated "social unit
theory" as method for organizing
local government. He envisioned the nation
"as a grand union of
neighborhoods" which could be connected together to
create policy for the nation as a whole.
According to the Phillips' vision,
neighborhoods formed the basic units of
government, and neighborhood
residents could be organized to plan and
implement delivery of local services.
The result would be a "working democracy"
in which citizens would have
direct control over the making of
decisions that affected their lives.
Phillips' social unit plan was fraught
with controversy. Cincinnati's Mohawk-
Brighton social unit organization
(MBSUO), the only application of the
concept, was an initial success after
its creation in 1918. The basic units of the
organization-block councils, citizens'
councils, and occupational councils-
formed, and the social unit began to
attack the problems of health services in
the Mohawk-Brighton neighborhood.
Business people, professional workers,
blue-color ethnics all worked together
democratically and developed a system
of preventative health care which
lowered the rate of infant mortality in the
neighborhood and generally improved the
health of the community's adult
residents.
After World War I, the MBSUO came under
attack. City officials, who had
supported public subsidies for the
organization's projects, as well as the
MBSUO's private benefactors, grew
alarmed at what they perceived as the
organization's socialist tendencies.
Furthermore, social workers and social
work organizations opposed the plan
because it gave too much power to the
recipients of social services, as
opposed to allowing trained experts (i.e. social
workers) the right to administer the
services according to their point of view.
By 1920, the project had lost its public
financing, and private funding had dried
up.
Thus, Melvin's book describes an
interesting history, somewhat forgotten or
perhaps only dimly remembered, of early
neighborhood government and
neighborhood politics. The story
provides an important perspective from
which to evaluate recent efforts, rooted
in the Great Society programs of the
1960s, to create neighborhood
organizations to develop, administer, and
control programs for the delivery of
local services.
In fact, a major shortcoming of Melvin's
work is that she fails to connect
Phillips' work to the relatively recent
attempts at neighborhood self-rule,
including such efforts as neighborhood
community action agencies, neighbor-
hood school boards, and neighborhood
revitalization projects. After describing
180 OHIO HISTORY
the disolution of Phillips' National
Social Unit Organization, the book ends
without projecting the impact that
Phillips or his work might have had on later
efforts at neighborhood organization.
Melvin also fails to appreciate the
radical nature of Phillips' social unit plan.
Indeed, the MBSUO did succeed in
establishing a system of free delivery of
medical services to the neighborhood's
predominantly working class residents.
Admittedly, the focus was narrow; and
superficially at least, free medical care
did not appear to threaten local
business interests. Yet the result, though local,
was the creation of socialized delivery
of medical services. Although Melvin
contends that social workers had the
most to lose from the MBSUO's success,
such an interpretation is simply too
literal. Business interests, along with their
political surrogates, such as Cincinnati
Mayor John Galvin, would have faced
considerable loss of power were the
MBSUO to tackle problems directly vital
to the local political economy, such as
transportation services, utility rates, or
economic development in the
neighborhood. In fact, one could argue that
Mayor Galvin and his political
supporters, as well as the wealthy benefactors,
correctly interpreted the radical nature
of the social unit plan and cut funding
as a means of protecting their own class
interests.
Melvin does not clearly define the
degree of class conflict that might have
prevailed, not only in Cincinnati but in
the persona of Wilbur Phillips. On the
one hand, Phillips appears to have been
a fairly astute bureaucratic politician
who understood the limits of what he
could achieve. But he also appears to be
a somewhat idealistic social reformer
who was out of touch with practical
politics. In other words, Phillips was a
complex historical figure; and Melvin
gives us little insight into his
personality, political style, or world view. The
reader puts down the book sensing
Phillips' importance but not having a clear
understanding of who he was.
Here, the problem is with Melvin's
approach. She has written a careful
description of early efforts at
developing neighborhood organization. And it is
a good and interesting read, which, when
accompanied by inspection of the
bibliographic essay, will give the
interested scholar some ideas for further
research into the subject of
neighborhood society and organization. Yet, the
book would have been much more
satisfying had it been more strictly a
biography of Wilbur Phillips. Such an
effort, though ambitious, would have
given some philosophical muscle to the
ideological and class dimensions of the
story.
The Ohio State University, Lima William Angel
The Hopewell Site: A Contemporary
Analysis Based on the Work of Charles C.
Willoughby. By N'omi B. Greber and Katharine C. Ruhl. (Boulder,
Colo-
rado: Westview Press, 1989. xxix +
334p.; tables, figures, appendixes,
references cited, index. $38.50 paper.)
There are at least 20,000 locations
where pre-European people left evidence
of their occupation within the state of
Ohio from about 11,000 B.C., to the
nineteenth century. Of all these sites
the one located on the farm of Captain M.
C. Hopewell, Ross County, Ohio, in the
last decade of the nineteenth century
is preeminent. This is because of the
size and complexity of the earthworks,
Book Reviews
181
the number of burial mounds, and the
material evidence recovered from them
of the life style and practices of the
people who lived there. The Hopewell
name was given in the early 1900s to all
of the sites in Ohio with similar artifact
forms, earthworks and burial procedures,
from about the beginning of the first
century A.D., to the end of the third
century, a span of 300 years. In addition,
the term Hopewellian is now employed to
refer to contemporary societies with
analogous cultural patterns, from the
eastern Plains states to the Appalachians
and from the Great Lakes and southern
Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico. It is not
far from the truth to assert that almost
every school child in Ohio for decades
has been exposed to a presentation of
the achievements of these prehistoric
Ohioans.
The volume under review is an effort to
recognize the major contribution to
the analysis and interpretation of
Hopewell culture made by Charles C.
Willoughby of the Peabody Museum at
Harvard University. In the planning for
the World's Columbian Exposition in 1892
in Chicago, Professor F. W.
Putnam, Director of the Peabody Museum,
was placed in charge of the
Anthropology exhibits. He chose Charles
Metz, M.D., of Cincinnati, an avid
excavator of prehistoric sites, to be
responsible for collecting exhibit material
in the southern Ohio area. Warren King
Moorehead was hired in 1891 to
excavate under the general direction of
Dr. Metz. Moorehead, in late October
1891, began the Hopewell site
excavations which continued until January 1892.
The materials collected were shipped to
Harvard, and from there to Chicago
for the exposition. Following the
exposition they were returned to the Peabody
Museum. Willoughby was a young artist
protege of Putnam's and prepared his
drawings of artifacts, observations on
their production techniques, and his own
replications of them before the
collection was again shipped back to Chicago
to the newly established Field Museum of
Natural History. Finally, in 1922,
the Field Museum published a report on
The Hopewell Mound Group of Ohio,
with Warren K. Moorehead as the author.
The report was a compilation of
Moorehead's notes, those of his excavation
party, and Willoughby's drawings
and observations. The report was put
into shape for publication by Ralph
Linton who was on the Field Museum staff
at that time and who gave that
information to me in the early 1930s.
This volume emphasizes the major role
that Willoughby has in our current
understanding of Ohio Hopewell culture.
It is an admirable critique of
archaeological field work, museum
curatorial practices, and the influences of
personalities and individuals' character
in the conduct of prehistoric research.
The senior author, Dr. N'omi Greber of
the Cleveland Museum of Natural
History, has devoted many years to
excavations and museum studies of Ohio
Hopewell. This experience and knowledge
is evident in the notes on the several
chapters, in the "Perspectives on
Willoughby and the Hopewell Site," in
Chapter 7 of the book, with Katharine
Ruhl, and endnotes, as well as the
Introduction, the first part of Chapter
2, and other sections. Katharine Ruhl
has been studying the copper artifacts
of the Ohio Hopewell people for some
years. Her major contribution to this
volume is in the sections of Chapter 4
identified by her initials. The several
contributions by Greber and Ruhl add to
our knowledge of the behavior of the
occupants and builders of the Hopewell
site, and correct some erroneous ideas
of other archaeologists in identifying
raw materials and the location whence
they came.
Greber's painstaking investigating work
produces instance after instance
where the individuals who have preceded
her in reports on the Hopewell site
182 OHIO HISTORY
have made errors that impede precise
understanding of what they found, or did
not find, or should have found. The
sections contributed by the several authors
are identified by their initials in
parenthesis. By the time a reader has read
several pages it is possible to forget
who wrote what is being read. If the several
authors could have had a different type
assigned to their contributions, it would
have been helpful.
This reviewer has had a rather long
association with Hopewell studies and
this volume is not without fault in a
number of ways. There is careless
proofreading, wrong identification of
figure numbers, misuse of common
archaeological terms, and misspelled
names of professionals. How is it
possible to misspell E. G. Squier's name
"Squire" at least as often, in the
many citations for example, as it is
spelled correctly?
In the discussion of the construction
features of Mound 25 on pages 41-46 the
empty prepared floors on the east and
west ends of the mound are called
"plazas," but that term has
consistently been used for decades in reference to
the central open areas enclosed within
two or more pyramidal mounds
supporting corporate buildings of the
much later Mississippian period.
My reading of Moorehead's several
accounts of his excavations at Hopewell
Mound 25 and H. C. Shetrone's account of
1926 indicates that there were not
only spatially separated sub-groupings
among the burials, and that some of
these were covered by smaller mound
constructions, but that there were single
and multiple separated burials or other
activities within the subgroups, and that
these were earth covered and later
covered by additional layers of earth, before
the final cappings were added. This is
also recognized in the statement on page
42 and in the whole section B, of
Chapter 2. In the analysis and interpretation
of the burial and living societal
structure a rather short period of time, not exact
contemporaneity, but not hundreds of
years is favored on page 57.
But in the discussion of the great
obsidian caches in Mound 11 and Altar 2
of Mound 25 on pages 191-194, the
hydration dating of about 300 years for the
time period of the flaking done on 19
pieces out of hundreds of worked obsidian
debris from Shetrone's Mound 11 is
accepted. This flint knappers cache can be
assumed, I think, to be the result of
making the hundreds of finished knives and
spears from Altar 2. Another view could
be that that it suggests hydration
dating is an imperfect chronometric art,
for the 300 years time span of the dates
would require 12 generations of knappers
to chip and carefully preserve the
fragments so as to be buried in one big mass.
Such a long time span would also
not be congruent with an apparent desire
for what would also have to be an
almost 24-hour continuous construction
of Mound 25 in order to recognize
"social contemporaneous"
burial practices. For the use of space within
Mound 25, it is said on page 58,
"favor shorter rather than longer estimates of
the time span during which the two (or
more) structures were in use." I would
favor the view that the very large
obsidian deposit in Altar 2 of Moorehead, in
Mound 25 with many hundred of finished
and fired specimens, was put there
within, say, ten to fifteen years of the
chipping debris in Mound 11. Also, the
cremated individuals in the same mound
should be regarded as closely
associated with the acquisition,
ownership and manufacture of the Mound 25
specimens. The complexity of Mounds 25
and 23 with multiple burials and
building stages would suggest that the
entire Hopewell site was occupied for
between 100 to 200 years.
The several sections by Greber in which
she analyses the excavation
strategies, burial groupings, social use
of space and time, her endnotes for the
Book Reviews
183
several chapters, comments on the
artifacts, and her Chapter 7 are particularly
valuable because of her long
participation in Hopewell studies. In these
sections she comments more freely on her
interpretation of the meaning of
much of the Hopewell populations
activities. Her emphasis on Willoughby's
major contribution to reporting on the
Hopewell site collections is well taken.
Moorehead made the first extensive
excavations at the Hopewell site, but it
was Willoughby whose painstaking work on
the collections formed the solid
part of the 1922 Field Museum report. It
is too bad that this volume honoring
his contribution could not have been
published in his lifetime. His good work
has lived after him.
Smithsonian Institution James B. Griffin
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland
History. Compiled and edited by David
D. Van
Tassel and John Grabowski. (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987.
lv + 1127p.; maps, tables, index.
$35.00.)
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
is an extraordinary volume. More
than six years in preparation, it
includes contributions by over 250 scholars. A
local advisory board and a national
advisory board of noted urban historians,
a staff and an editorial review
committee encompass another fifty individuals.
Corporations, foundations, individuals,
and associations who donated funds to
the Encyclopedia fill an entire
two-column page. Some 170 interpretive essays
were prepared on such selected topics as
bridges, crime, economy, gay
community, industry, municipal
ownership, public health, railroads, sports,
and streets. Chronological and topical
essays with a historical overview of
Cleveland from 1796 to 1987 were
prepared as an introduction to the specific
entries. Coordinating such disparate
authors, subjects and donors was no mean
accomplishment for co-editors Van Tassel
and Grabowski and their staff.
There is much of value in the volume.
The editors seem to have embraced
the latest definition of urban studies
with its heavy emphasis on social history.
Along with separate articles on such
topics as child care, contributors have
striven to incorporate a discussion of
social issues where appropriate, such as
Dennis Harrison's entry on
"labor." Much original material on Cleveland
history is thus presented. Accompanying
the articles on geology, politics,
population, and transportation are
series of new maps of the city. A twenty-
three-item subject guide at the back
covers a wide range of general headings,
ranging from "architecture" to
"women and women's issues." The lengthy
index makes it possible to locate the
extensive coverage of important topics
like "Muny Light," which have
no separate entry but are contained within
other larger articles. Even though the
editors decided to omit separate
biographical entries for living persons
like Carl Stokes, the index enables the
user to find the more than twenty other
references to him and his political life.
Other editorial decisions are less
beneficial. Perhaps the most serious
omission is the authors' names on the
vast majority of entries. Apparently the
preparation of "general
entries" with "basic factual information" was as-
sumed to be non-interpretive. Any
experienced biographer recognizes that
even the writing of an outline often requires
interpretive thought, especially
when constrained by the size of an
encyclopedia entry. It would, therefore, add
184 OHIO HISTORY
to the value of the volume to know who
was making these decisions
throughout.
Many agonizing meetings must have been
held to decide what to include and
omit. Articles on the recent history of
topics like the aerospace industry are
especially welcome, but puzzling is the
lack of a general synthesis of the iron
and steel industry in the city.
Admittedly there are specific corporate histories
that address the subject, but there is
not even a cross reference to these entries.
At the risk of being accused of
nitpicking, it is worth noting several fairly
important production problems.
Compressing enough material for at least two
volumes into one resulted in extremely
fine, even eye-straining, print. There
was also an unfortunate frequency of
blurred pages in this review copy.
All told, however, The Encyclopedia is
too well-done and Cleveland is too
important a city to not recommend the
book for both individual and institu-
tional use throughout the state and
Midwest.
Ohio Historical Society David A. Simmons
The Female Frontier: A Comparative
View of Women on the Prairie and the
Plains. By Glenda Riley. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press,
1988. x +
299p.; illustrations, appendixes, notes,
notes on the sources, index. $25.00.)
In The Female Frontier: A Comparative
View of Women on the Prairie and
the Plains, Glenda Riley studies the role of pioneer women of the
Western
frontier for the period 1815 ("when
the effects of the War of 1812 combined
with other factors to propel westward
migration into prairie regions") to 1915
("when most of the Plains districts
contained too many people to continue to
be considered frontier zones by the
United States Bureau of Census"). Noting
that scholars from Turner on, like
contemporary observers, "concentrated
more upon the political and economic
features of the West than on the
establishment of home, family, and
culture in a new land," she finds informa-
tion about frontierswomen so skimpy and
incidental that such notions as do
emerge are often myths and stereotypical
images, not founded wholly in error,
but so distorted as to frustrate
understanding, and indeed to smother interest.
To facilitate a more enlightened
approach to the subject of women's activities
and contributions, Riley offers the
concept of a "female frontier" to supple-
ment the list of "frontiers"
her predecessors have found fruitful for analyzing
the West in American History.
Whereas the "farming
frontier," the "mining frontier,", etc., developed in
close relationship to the economic and
political circumstances of region and
era, of place and time, the "lives
of frontierswomen were affected only
secondarily by the occupations of the
men in their families." A ranch wife
might deliver a calf; a homesteader's
daughter might help in the fields. But for
the most part "frontierswomen's
responsibilities, life styles, and sensibilities
were shaped ... by gender
considerations...." Pioneer women typically
cared for others, helped their family breadwinners, and
worked, usually as
volunteers, to foster social reform and
cultural uplift. Riley finds her general-
izations true for married women, and for divorcees,
widows, and spinsters.
Her thesis holds up for frontier Jews,
Orientals, blacks, and European
immigrant minorities, as well as for
women whose race, religion, or ethnic
Book Reviews
185
origin reflected the largest national
population groups. Some of this book's
most interesting materials concern the
great diversity of gender-related jobs
women were paid to do. Yet even those
gainfully employed outside their homes
accepted, in addition, the customary
female roles. In early prairie and plains
settlements, as elsewhere on the
frontier, economic success and public service
brought family status. No amount of
stratification, however, altered the
tendency of women, regardless of class,
to set their priorities in line with
society's expectations, and their own.
Riley's conclusions about
gender-determination come as no surprise; they
are indeed pretty much what one would
expect. The historic pattern of
women's gender-appropriate function is
so well set in the human social fabric
that even the limited modifications of
quite recent years have brought the
resulting social dislocations to the
forefront of national attention. The value of
Riley's work, then, is in the volume of
detail she presents to fill in outlines so
universally perceived as to be taken for
granted. She has found fresh materials
in numerous conventional history
collections, and in countless unpublished
sources as she has set about to
reconstruct the roles and concerns of pioneer
women, from their own words as much as
possible.
A domestic history whose organization
must often be shaped by itemized
examples from everyday life, whose style
is sometimes pedestrian, and whose
conclusions depend on copious quotations
from the sources, this publication
carries a burden that often falls upon a
social history: it is so saturated with
minutiae that its importance is not
immediately apparent. The value must be
seen as much greater than the sum of its
many parts. Furthermore, the
organization of much of the material as
a comparison of prairie women and
plains women, while justified, presents
little opportunity to make the book
more arresting. With settlement of the
two areas overlapping in time, and the
two geographic categories not always
sharply defined, there are few striking
contrasts. A balanced presentation must
record the similarities alongside the
differences. However, if conditions
intrinsic to the subject at hand pose special
problems of authorship for Riley, they
also underwrite the validity of her
thesis.
Glenda Riley's professional standards
are high all around, with footnotes
voluminous, photographic reproductions
(thirty-three of them) well chosen,
index and appendixes useful. Her
scholarship is especially notable for her
detachment from her subject; she avoids the tiresome
adversarial approach
that damages so much of the output when
the history of women and minorities
is studied.
La Grange, Illinois Dorothy Forbis
Behen
Threshing in the Midwest, 1820-1940:
A Study of Traditional Culture and
Technological Change. By J. Sanford Rikoon. (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1988. xiii + 214p.;
illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliogra-
phy, index. $35.00.)
This is not only the story of threshing
covering from the early 19th century
to the eve of World War II, but an analysis of a
mechanical process involving
the community experience. A rural sociologist and
historian at the University
186 OHIO HISTORY
of Missouri, J. Sanford Rikoon has
traced out a niche in our agricultural past
which has sociological implications for
rural America within recent times.
Wheat, rye, oats and barley were
processed following harvest in which the
grainheads were separated from the
stalks. A traditional method utilized the
grain flail consisting of two stout wooden sticks
joined together by a leather
thong or short metal chain link. Farmers
spread the grain on a hard surface,
such as the barn floor, and
systematically beat loose the grainheads. An
alternate method of separation was treading by which
farm draft animals were
walked back and forth over the spread grain. According to
his research, wheat
and rye responded well to flailing while
oats and barley were usually treaded.
As early as the 1820s, mechanical
horse-powered devices began replacing
flailing or treading. Rikoon's study
pinpoints adoption of this new method
occurring in the older settled areas of
the Midwest between 1825 and 1860,
while other areas of the region turned
to the mechanical thresher usually
between 1860 and 1880. In Ohio,
progressive although not necessarily rich
farmers were the first to adopt the devices
on farms near large cities such as
Cincinnati. Adoption of mechanical
threshing devices had an impact on earlier
farming patterns. Previously farmers
threshed daily with hand flails and fed
fresh residual straw to livestock. The
mechanical thresher accomplished the
task all at once, creating a spoilage
problem since many barns did not have
adequate space for proper storage of
straw for later feed-out to livestock.
A major technological change with
mechanical threshers occurred between
1890 and 1925 when steam power models
replaced the older horse-powered
units. Threshing output expanded
tremendously; and after 1925, flexibility and
ease of operations were further
augmented by the adoption of combustion-
powered engines replacing the cumbersome
steam-powered threshers. But
whether horse, steam or combustion
engine-powered threshers were used, the
mechanical process with its greater cost
and reliance on complicated equip-
ment fostered a strong sense of
community cooperative effort with the local
"threshing rings."
These "rings" were
associations made up of neighboring farmers who
contracted to bring in an outside
thresher, deciding the cost, the order by
which the mechanical thresher would
proceed from one farm to the next, and
the amount of labor each member was to
render, as the entire threshing
operation moved from farm to farm until
finally completed. As Rikoon shows,
each local ring association usually had
bylaws governing all the members'
compliance, including the traditional
harvest meals served to the threshing
crews.
By 1940, these colorful cooperative
associations fell into disuse. Rikoon
discusses several key factors for their
demise. A major factor was the adoption
of the small, multi-purpose gasoline
tractor with the pull-type combine. Now
farmers could use their own equipment
according to personal schedules.
Tractors were moreover only a fifth of
the cost of the steam-powered threshing
rigs and required much less labor,
particularly of a joint or cooperative nature.
Rikoon concludes, almost with a
nostalgic sense of longing, that the threshing
rings of 1880-1940 constituted the last
true cooperative rural activity and a
sense of agricultural community. This is
an important study of a mechanical
agricultural process and sociological
changes within the rural Midwest. Solidly
researched and gracefully written, it
will remain as a classic and definitive
treatment of the subject.
Texas A & M University David E. Schob
Book Reviews
187
The Maverick War: Chennault and the
Flying Tigers. By Duane Schultz. (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. 335p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography,
index. $18.95.)
In the dark, early days of World War II
in the Pacific, the United States
suffered a series of devastating defeats
at the hands of the Japanese. Pearl
Harbor, Wake Island, Bataan, Corregidor,
then the entire Philippine Islands-
the list was a litany of humiliations.
In China, however, the picture was
different. There a handful of maverick
American volunteer flyers, led by
perhaps the biggest maverick of all,
General Claire Lee Chennault, made life
miserable for the Japanese, and in the
bargain created a legend-the Flying
Tigers.
Duane Schultz recounts the epic of the
Tigers, and it is a story far removed
from that told by John Wayne and Dennis
Morgan movies, newspapers, and
magazines which portrayed them as
"wholesome, clear-eyed lovable American
boys fighting for God and country,"
or, as Clare Boothe Luce described them
in The New York Times, the
"most wonderful bunch of kids that ever drew the
breath of life" (pp. 85-86). The
kids ranged in age from twenty-one to
forty-three and, as a group, often made
life just about as difficult for Chennault
as they did for the Japanese. They
drank, they brawled, they shot up friendly
towns with their pistols, and some
dabbled in the black market for personal
profit. To say that they were a
discipline problem would be to understate the
case. The AVG, as the American Volunteer
Group was generally known,
existed for eight months prior to being
absorbed into United States air forces.
During that time, Chennault discharged
twenty-two pilots and forty-three
ground crewmen for disciplinary reasons,
in all approximately one in four of
the AVG.
But they could fly and fight, or at
least they could once Chennault had
trained them in his own version of
fighter tactics. They fought in pairs, and
pilots such as Greg Boyington, Bob
Neale, Ed Rector, Arvid Olson, and David
"Tex" Hill eventually were
shooting down, according to Tiger statistics,
fifteen Japanese planes for every one
they themselves lost. By the end of 1941
the AVG, now dubbed the "Flying Tigers,"
was the darling of the American
press which had accorded it legendary
status.
But the story ended on a rather sour
note. By spring 1942 both pilots and
planes were wearing out, and the pilots,
their morale low because of increas-
ingly dangerous missions, mutinied.
Chennault kept them fighting, but his
relationship with his pilots was never
the same. When their year's enlistment
period ended in July 1942, only five
pilots and twenty-two ground crewmen of
an original AVG contingent of 250 men
accepted induction into the Army Air
Corps. The U.S. Army rewarded those who
refused induction, including some
pilots who had voluntarily served an
extra two weeks, by refusing to fly them
home; the Army also pressured Pan
American Airways, then under contract to
the Army, to do the same. Like Ulysses,
the pilots were left to wander home
as best they could, with many paying
their own way back on slow boats from
China.
The Maverick War, a pleasure to read, is more likely to appeal to general
readers then scholarly ones. The book is
well worth the price, but the definitive
work on the Tigers remains to be
written.
Ohio Historical Society Robert L. Daugherty
188 OHIO HISTORY
The Papers of Henry Clay. Volume 9: The Whig Leader, January 1, 1837-
December 31, 1843. Edited by Robert Seager, II and Melba Porter Hay.
(Lexington: The University Press of
Kentucky, 1988. xi + 969p.; notes,
calendar of unpublished letters, name
and subject index. $50.00.)
As this volume begins, Clay takes the
offensive against the Democrats after
the Whig debacle of 1836. Believing that
"no measure of relief can be
conceived which does not comprehend a
Bank of the U.S.," the Kentuckian
launches a savage attack on the Specie
Circular and the Sub-Treasury. Nor
does he forget to toss barbs at
preemption and graduation. Antislavery puts
Clay at a disadvantage, however. Letters
from Lewis Tappan and John C.
Whittier make it painfully clear that
antislavery men, while admiring Clay, will
not support a slaveholder in 1840-much
less one presiding over the American
Colonization Society. Seeing abolition
as a threat to the Union, Clay defiantly
speaks to the question in 1839, before
the U.S. Senate. Reaffirming his support
for colonization, the Great Compromiser
denounces wholesale emancipation
and warns of the racial clash that would
follow. (It was this speech that led Clay
to remark that he'd rather be right than
be President.) If it gratified "moder-
ates," the speech angered
antislavery men and threatened the Whig coalition
in such states as New York and Ohio.
This, as much as the memory of his
defeat in 1832, prompted Thurlow Weed
and William Seward to look for
another presidential candidate. Not
grasping these realities, Clay believed
himself the frontrunner (and Webster his
main rival) until the Spring of the
Harrisburg convention.
Clay is aggrieved by the nomination of
William Henry Harrison, but
faithfully rallies behind the ticket. He
even abstains from patronage recom-
mendations, lest he offend the sensitive
Ohioan. When Tyler succeeds Harrison,
however, the difficulty is not offices,
but principle. Tyler soon opposes most
Whig measures, including a National Bank
designed to meet his concerns (a
strategy Clay thought unwise anyway). By
1842 Clay holds Tyler in greater
scorn than any other public figure,
always excepting Jackson. Of course Clay's
staunch defense of favorite Whig
policies makes him the party's logical
nominee. A chastened Webster, in
Coventry for his Tyler flirtation, grudgingly
supports him. Even the New Yorkers,
whose boomlets for Scott and McLean
have played out, accept Clay's
nomination as inevitable by 1843. Now the only
question concerns his running mate.
Referring to 1844, but making a comment
relevant for other years too, Clay
observes that "no Candidate for the V.P. will
add much, if any strength to the
Candidate for the first office; but a bad
selection might be of great
prejudice." He predicts a victory in 1844 that will
outshine even that of 1840. Yet as the
book closes, the nagging problem of
antislavery returns, this time in tandem
with the issue of Texas. (Clay's
correspondence barely mentions
annexation prior to 1844, casting further
doubt on the legend that he and Van
Buren discussed the issue, and struck a
bargain, during the latter's visit to
Ashland in 1842.) Meanwhile, local returns
testify to the Liberty Party's
increasing influence on close elections.
The editors dealt with an enormous
amount of papers from these years,
probably too many for one volume. But
the series must be finite. Given that
constraint, one can hardly fault their
decisions as to which letters deserved to
be printed in full, and which
summarized-though the latter necessarily lose
something in the process. Only Senate
speeches of major importance are
summarized at length; the rest are
briefly noted. Here, too, the selection was
Book Reviews
189
judicious. And though the format copies
that of previous volumes, the
reviewer's impression was that the
annotations for each document in this
volume were more extensive than those in
the last. Certainly they followed the
subtle twists and turns of state
politics, and elections, clearly and meticulous-
ly-to the great benefit of the reader.
In all respects this is an impressive
achievement, a work of the highest
quality. It deserves to be in any serious
collection on the Jacksonian era.
Midwestern State University Everett W. Kindig
The Buildings of Main Street: A Guide
to American Commercial Architecture.
By Richard Longstreth. (Washington,
D.C.: The Preservation Press. 1987.
149p.; illustrations, glossary, further
reading, information sources, index.
$8.95 paper.)
The National Trust for Historic
Preservation's decade-old Main Street
program owes much of its success to a
growing appreciation of America's
distinctive commercial architecture, a
result, no doubt, of the popularity of the
historic preservation movement and the
nostalgic imagery of Walt Disney.
Longstreth's glove-compartment size
guidebook describes the types of archi-
tecture that developed along America's
commercial streets during the last 150
years. Among architectural historians,
Longstreth is known for his general
mistrust of purely stylistic
interpretations of architecture, and his interest in
building form rather than ornamentation.
Therefore, instead of emphasizing
architectural styles, such as Victorian
Italianate or Art Deco, the author offers
a typology of Main Street buildings
based on structural systems and massing,
that is form. It is this typology that
is one of this guidebook's greatest
strengths and one of its weaknesses.
Longstreth's rather academic
"compositional types" derive from studies of
vernacular architecture, and are based
on the relationship between the design
of the first floor, or street level, and
the treatment of roof line and/or windows
above. The author regards the
proportions of the building's facade as the major
diagnostic element in classifying Main
Street architecture. Twelve types are
discussed in detail. Some, like the
"two-part commercial block," are among
the most common and appear throughout
almost every time period and in
almost every style. Others, such as the
"Temple Front," are more rare, but are
nevertheless significant because of
their association with important functions
such as banking.
Bridging so many time periods and
covering so many archetypes,
Longstreth's typology is interesting and
functional, but it does not adequately
treat the impact of style (which the
dictionary defines as a distinctive or
characteristic mode of presentation,
construction, or execution in any art, such
as architecture) on building form. In
Ohio, for example, differences between
the "Federal" central hall
commercial structures and the narrow, urbanized
facades of the "Victorian" period mark one of
the great transitions in
streetscape development, yet in this
guidebook's functional system they are
considered to be the same type (the
familiar "two part commercial block")
simply because both have a first floor
devoted to retailing and an upper story
which serves other purposes.
190 OHIO HISTORY
Although other architectural guides have
treated the architectural design of
Main Street buildings for more limited
geographic areas, such as Indiana, this
is the first to systematically tackle
the entire country. Because virtually all the
major building types seen in the U.S.
are illustrated in this guidebook, it will
have broad appeal. The morphology of
Main Street commercial architecture is
a complicated subject, and this
guidebook will provide a rational system for
those who need to simplify it. In
keeping with its visual emphasis, this
guidebook is amply illustrated with good
quality, but rather small, black and
white photographs. Ohio examples are
found scattered throughout the various
sections, a testimony to the diversity,
richness, and long chronology of the
Buckeye State's commercial architecture.
It is hoped that this work will lead to
other, more design-oriented guidebooks
on this subject. Those who want to learn
to read the streetscape of American
towns and cities should recall that
building facades are only one of the elements
that comprise streetscape, which is
really a tapestry of stylized architectural
forms in relationship to one another,
and to the open spaces, or voids, around
them. Longstreth's nation-wide approach,
while commendable, should not
obscure the fact that American
commercial streetscapes still have very rich, if
somewhat subtle, regional identities.
Because The Buildings of Main Street
deals with ordinary structures around us
that reveal so much about the popular
culture, it will go a long way toward
educating Americans, and visitors to this
country, in a new vocabulary of the
commonplace.
Ohio Historical Society Richard Francaviglia
Central State University: The First
One Hundred Years, 1887-1987. By
Lathardus Goggins. (Kent: The Kent State
University Press for Central
State University, 1988. xii + 181p.;
illustrations, notes, index. $30.00.)
In writing the history of Central State
University's first one hundred years,
Lathardus Goggins proposed in his
preface to show CSU's: (1) role as a
pioneer institution in the higher
education of Black Ohioans; (2) contribution to
education; (3) effect on students; (4)
influence on racial development in Ohio;
(5) development since the split with
Wilberforce University; and (6) six
presidents and their impact on the
institution. The author's goals were
ambitious for such a slender volume.
The book is written from the perspective
of top administrators. His narration
provides a good summary of the
objectives and accomplishments of each of
CSU's six presidents, from Charles
Wesley to the current President, Arthur
Thomas. Two heroes emerge, Wesley as
founder of modern-day Central State
University and Lionel Newsom, who was
instrumental in guiding the Univer-
sity through the years of rebuilding
following the destruction caused by the
1974 tornado. Those who are familiar
with the institution will soon realize that
Goggins provides a balanced account of
the role of these men in the
development of the institution. While he
provides glimpses of both the positive
and negative impact of their
administrations, the reader will find a desire for
additional information and more in-depth
analysis.
Four-fifths of the text is devoted to
the period from 1951 to 1987, years
generally described as the period of
expansion, instability and rebuilding. The
years from 1896 to 1930 are ignored. The
years from the origins through the
Book Reviews
191
early growth of Wilberforce University,
the parent institution, are informative
and deserve more attention. Certainly
the author should have have given more
attention to student life. One tends to
lose sight of the fact that students are the
central focus of the institution, and
one searches in vain for a good description
of campus life during the early years of
the institution and wonders about the
differences between lives of students in
the Normal and Industrial Department
and the lives of Wilberforce University
students. Since W.E.B. DuBois served
on the faculty of Wilberforce, an
examination of the DuBois papers may have
shed some light on the development of
his subsequent opposition to Booker T.
Washington and the rise of industrial
education. The last decade of the
nineteenth century and the first decade
of the twentieth century were pivotal
years in the growth of both industrial
and liberal arts education. The Wilberforce
experience was unique in combining both
within one institution, supported by
state and private funding. Yet, Goggins
notes the historic significance of a
religious institution in a state that
legally did not deny black access to state
institutions of higer education.
In moving from the combined Normal and
Industrial Department to Central
State College and finally to Central
State University, Goggins does make the
case for CSU's substantial contribution
to the education of black and non-
black Ohioans. Similar to the other
predominantly black public colleges, CSU
faced the same limitations imposed by inadequate
financial resources to carry
out its educational mandate. In spite of inadequate
resources, CSU achieved its
goal of identifying, accepting, and
graduating students who were not always
prepared for college entrance. Prior to
the time when remediation became
popular, CSU, as other black colleges,
made tremendous strides in responding
to the unique needs of what is known
today as the educationally disadvantaged
students. From Wesley to Thomas, the
mission of CSU has always been clear:
to educate blacks to enable them to make
a positive contribution to the state of
Ohio and to the nation. While one may
wish additional documentation, it
remains clear that CSU has fulfilled its
mission as a a unique institution in Ohio
history.
National Afro-American Museum and
Cultural Center John E. Fleming
Utah's Historic Architecture,
1847-1940: A Guide. By Thomas Carter
and
Peter Goss. (Salt Lake City, Utah:
University of Utah Press, 1988. 192p.;
illustrations, glossary, bibliography.
$36.00.)
Utah's Historic Architecture,
1847-1940, A Guide is not, as the name
might
suggest, a history of the state's
architecture or a field guide to buildings of
particular architectural merit in the
state. It is instead a survey manual for Utah
Architecture. Its usefulness, however,
goes far beyond the Beehive State. The
book is among the first survey manuals
to include a section on building forms,
incorporating much of the most recent
research on building forms and
vernacular architecture, along with the
more traditional section on styles. The
two sections are, in fact, given the
same amount of space. The section on
building types not only includes
residential types, but follows Richard
Longstreth's recent typology for
commercial and public structures, and makes
a pioneering effort at categorizing
apartment buildings and hotels. Industrial
structures are the only major omission.
192 OHIO HISTORY
Each of the sections on residential
types contains a particularly helpful
introductory drawing representing the
idealized building type. These are
followed by from two to twelve examples,
illustrated with photographs and
plans. The book contains over sixty
floor plans, most of which were drawn for
this book. The fifteen residential
building types discussed include the expected
single-cell, Hall-Parlor, and shotgun,
but also include the pair house, a
distinctive Scandinavian house form
found in the state. Specialists will likely
question the inclusion of temple form
and period cottage. The former appears
to be more an orientation than a house
type, and the latter might more properly
be included in the period revival
section under the stylistic classification.
The stylistic section examines
thirty-five styles, organized into six roughly
chronological groups from
"Classical Styles, 1847-90" to "Modern Styles,
1930-40." Each of the thirty-five
sections includes a short introduction which
lists the characteristics of the style
and usually notes the style's history and
when and where it was constructed in
Utah. These sections also benefit from
a number of fine photographs. Most of
the sections deal with standard stylistic
categories. Specialists may question one
or two specific styles such as
"Victorian Eclectic" which is
so broad that it loses any real descriptive ability,
or "PWA Modern," a very
limited category. The distinction used between
Richardsonian Romanesque and Romanesque
Revival, based to a significant
degree on whether the building was
constructed of stone or brick, is also open
to question. It would exclude some of
Richardsonian's own buildings from the
Richardsonian Romanesque category.
In keeping with its design as a survey
manual, the book contains a glossary
of architectural terms designed to
provide the reader with a basic general
architectural vocabulary. The terms, and
illustrations ranging from arch types
to brick bonds, are more designed to
accompany a survey form than provide
information on structures or issues
raised by the text. The bibliography
provides a good introductory
bibliography for house types, general philosophy,
styles, and good bibliography on Utah
architecture.
The book is a handsome paperback. The
large format, excellent illustrations,
and floor plans together with its essays
and bibliography make this work
arguably the best study so far on Utah
architecture. On the other hand, the
large format seems more useful for
coffee table examination or library research
than field work. The hefty price seems
certain to limit the wide circulation a
survey manual should have, and the lack
of correlation with a specific
inventory form makes it impossible to
tell whether it contains sufficient
information to complete the Utah state
inventory form. The book makes a
substantial contribution to both survey
methodology and Utah architecture,
but unfortunately may still fall short
of its stated mission of being a completely
adequate survey manual for survey work
in Utah.
Ohio Historical Society W. Ray Luce
George Rapp's Years of Glory: Economy
on the Ohio 1834-1847. Oekonomie
am Ohio: George Rapp's Third Harmony.
A Documentary History. Com-
piled and edited by Karl J. R. Arndt.
(New York: Peter Lang Publishing,
Inc., 1988. xxxi + 1163p.;
illustrations, index. $193.00.)
Book Reviews
193
The Harmony Society was one of the more
successful religious communal
societies in the United States in the
19th century. In his lifetime pursuit of the
history of this organization, Karl Arndt
has created a huge corpus of written
history and compiled documents worthy of
a Carlyle or Gibbon, of which Years
of Glory is the seventh documentary history. So far, these works
collectively
cover the period from before the
founding of the Society in about 1785 to the
end of 1847. Years of Glory covers
a period from the death of Frederick Rapp
(1775-1834), who was the adopted son of
the founder and the business leader
of the Society, until the death of the
founder of the Society, George Rapp
(1757-1847).
This is a very significant period in the
Society's history. When the Harmony
Society moved back to Pennsylvania
(1824-25) members developed an "out-
ward" mentality. They created the
equivalent of a small intellectual German
court 18 miles north of Pittsburgh, with
a museum, symphony orchestra, a
public press, attempts to appeal to
public opinion, and more. This ended with
their schism in 1832. Very subtly
through Years of Glory the Society is looking
more and more inward. The museum is
closed down, the printing press is
unused, the symphony orchestra is
abandoned, George Rapp does not distrib-
ute his book of thoughts written in
English, and no new members, for all intents
and purposes, are taken in during the
period of this book.
This contraction is seen in more subtle
ways in the documents in this work.
The days of almost unlimited expansion
of the textile industry, which had once
been a model in Western Pennsylvania,
ends with the death of Frederick; and
they made less and less cloth and yarn,
and the mills were almost closed down
at the end of this period. Many of
younger members had left during the schism,
and the mean age of Society members grew
by one year each year, so that the
average age of the members was well into
the fifties when the book ends.
Yet it was a fruitful period for the
Society. Members survived the schism and
the economic difficulties of the period
in better shape than when they started.
If the mills made less cloth, the
Society's economic base was secure, and even
expanded. They were changing from a
manufacturing base to an entrepeneurial
one that was to lead them to the
ownership of several railroads and investments
in the petroleum business and finance
after the Civil War. They retained the
respected place they had in the business
affairs of Western Pennsylvania.
George Rapp was recognized as a powerful
man and a patriarch, and every
Whig politician and social reformer of
any stature paid a duty call on him and
went away impressed.
This is a documentary history, not a
compilation of documents. Arndt's
thesis is that George Rapp had stood in
the shadow of his adopted son
Frederick. Frederick Rapp's death freed
his father, who could now handle the
mundane affairs of the Society without
hindrance. Frederick Rapp in his
lifetime had been recognized as a genius
in what we would now call manage-
ment. He handled all the business
affairs of the Society, and was the one who
had taken the small fulling mill of the
Society and made it into a huge vertical
textile manufacturing operation. It is
easy to contrast the worldly Frederick
Rapp, who was so influential in business
affairs of the upper Ohio Valley, with
an otherworldly George Rapp.
Yet there is no evidence that George
Rapp was not in charge of all the affairs
of the Society, nor of any conflict
between father and son. Arndt, in an earlier
work, documents only one instance of
George Rapp's irritation at Frederick.
This was when Frederick went off leaving
him with no cash and no way to write
a check, something that would irritate a
saint.
194 OHIO HISTORY
Out of this one incident Arndt builds a
rivalry between father and son. None
of this is borne out in the documents
printed so far, or in this book, or in any
other documents that I have read. Nor is
their any evidence that George Rapp
was "freed" of any controls.
If Frederick had "freedom" it was the freedom
that his father's confidence in him
allowed. On the death of Frederick Rapp,
Romulius L. Baker (1793-1868), who was
to become head of the Society at the
death of George Rapp, was made business
head of the Society. Baker moved
easily into Frederick Rapp's place as
head of business affairs and was allowed
the same degree of independence that
Frederick enjoyed. George Rapp, as he
had always done, before and after
Frederick Rapp's death, continued to run
the Society.
Even in a book of this length, some
documents have to be left out. Arndt
achieves a fairly good balance between
the business affairs of the Society, their
dealings with the rest of the world, and
what little is documented about the
inner workings of the organization. One
of the classes of documents that is
severely restricted involves the wool
and textile trade. This would have made
another volume of this size, but would
have been of interest to Ohio readers as
a great deal of it had to do with
business in the state.
The documents are arranged
chronologically by year, with a brief forward to
each year. Almost all the documents have
an editorial comment. Scholars,
however, are going to find this book
frustrating. The scholarly apparatus of
citations of the source of the documents
is totally lacking, and one will not find
the editorial comments of the type found
in most compilations of this sort.
Even the type of document (autograph
letter, copy, etc.) is not mentioned.
Several published documents are printed
in the book. But in a book where
space is at a premium, these surely
could have been cited in a footnote and
other more important documents put in
their place.
The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum
Commission, which holds most of
the documents printed here, is not
mentioned once; or if it is, I cannot find it.
Some documents are listed without being
printed. A large number of the
translations from German are only
excerpts, and some of the German
documents are not translated at all.
There is no bibliography, even of Arndt's
extensive works on the Society; the
index is not very useful; there is no list of
the documents. Scholars will find Robert
M. Dructor, comp., Guide to the
Microfilmed Harmony Society Records
1786-1951: In the Pennsylvania State
Archives (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum
Commission,
1983) useful in trying to track down the
documents in Years of Glory. Since no
sources are listed, scholars who cannot
find a document in Dructor will not be
able to check its accuracy or compare it
with related documents.
This is too bad. The series started off
well with The Indiana Decade, two
volumes (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1975, 1978). Although Arndt
is listed as the editor of Indiana
Decade, the book was actually edited by Gayle
Thornbrough and Dorothy Riker who turned
out a top-notch scholary work.
None of the other six volumes, including
Years of Glory, have made an attempt
at this high standard.
Scholars in Ohio history are going to
find much information in Years of Glory
on business affairs in the upper Ohio
River valley and the eastern tier of
counties that is not available
elsewhere. I always wonder why publishers price
a book like this so high. The $195 price
will limit its sales to just a few large
libraries that simply must have this
book. However, a huge communitarian
history market will not be able to
afford the book. With all its faults, Years of
Book Reviews
195
Glory is a monumental piece of scholarship, and anyone
dealing in a
communitarian and Harmony Society
history is going to have to read it.
Landis Valley Museum Daniel B
Reibel
Letters of Delegates to Congress,
1774-1789. Volume 15: April 1,
1780-
August 31, 1780. Edited by Paul H. Smith, Gerard W. Gawalt, and Ronald
M. Gephart. (Washington, D.C.: Library
of Congress, 1988. xxix + 678p.;
editorial method and apparatus,
acknowledgments, chronology of Congress,
list of delegates to Congress,
illustrations, notes, index. $37.00.)
This valuable series continues, and so
does the saga it documents. Given the
time-frame of the series, 1774 to 1789,
we are now approaching the midpoint of
our story. Indeed, in these spring and
summer days in the year of our Lord
1780, we are only one more year and some
months away from that glorious
victory at Yorktown that will lead in
due course to the formal recognition of
American independence. During those
spring and summer days of 1780
themselves, however, it would have been
exceedingly hard to persuade many
delegates to Congress that so happy a
time lay such a short distance ahead in
the American future. On the contrary,
many delegates wondered if there was
for this nation now struggling for its
very life any future worth having at all.
And, alas, many wondered repeatedly and
out loud.
As has been noted by reviewers before,
this series will be used mainly as a
reference work by specialists
researching a particular delegate or some episode
or another transpiring during the 1770s
or 1780s. The hundreds of letters in
Volume 15, like the more than 22,000
documents collected for this multivolume
project as a whole, shed new light upon
literally scores of people and scores of
topics. There is, in truth, information
here on many disparate subjects, some of
them highly important, some of them
decidedly less so (although often still
interesting in their own way). We learn,
for instance, that in this era of runaway
prices one could pay $320 to $330 for a
pair of leather breeches. One member
of Congress tells us in some
considerable detail about how he has just had an
ailing horse bled. One Rhode Island
delegate uses the ship of state metaphor
effectively as a way of conveying his
alarm about the terrible storms now
buffeting the nation. Another delegate
from the same state is more given to the
use of whimsey and satire.
But these little bits and pieces aside,
these documents are also fascinating for
the general themes they reveal when
taken as a group. On the basis of the
documents contained in the volume under
review, one could do a short
monograph or even a highly dramatic
screenplay on the subject of "Doom and
Gloom in Congress in 1780." Most of
the delegates were openly fearful, and
most of their fears were well grounded
in the hardest of realities. For Congress,
it seems, lacked virtually everything it
needed to fight a successful war-
namely, soldiers, money, and supplies.
The nation's coffers contained no cash,
and the country was fast running out of
credit both at home and abroad. It had,
in fact, reached a most embarrassing and
unenviable position for debtors in any
age-that is, needing to ask for new
loans just to pay the interest on the old
ones. As a consequence of all this, the
war effort had bogged down, and it was
doubtful whether the army could be
cranked up sufficiently to mount a spring
and summer offensive that had much
chance of success. Some even thought
196 OHIO HISTORY
the army might have to be disbanded
shortly. "Our Allies look to us for an
active Campaign lest Negotiation should
take us at a Disadvantage with an UTI
POSSIDETIS; But I fear it will be a
Campaign of PALLIATIVES, EXPEDI-
ENTS and BOTCHES" (p. 19). Such
were the words of James Lovell of
Massachusetts in early April. Such were
the fears of many over the next
several months. And they proved to be
remarkably prophetic words and fears
as well. For in the very last letter in
this volume, President Samuel Huntington
of Congress is writing to George
Washington to apprise the latter of "the
disagreeable Intelligence of the total
Defeat of the Army" under the command
of General Horatio Gates in the South
(p. 640).
In textbookish renditions of American
history and often in academia's
lecture halls, one is informed that
French intervention on the rebellious
Americans' side helped to turn the
Revolution around after the Franco-
American Treaty of 1778. But as of
August 31, 1780, this war is a long way from
being turned around, and nobody knows that better than
the vexed and
troubled delegates to Congress. One of
the everlasting virtues of this series of
books, then, will be its contribution
toward saving us from these simplistic,
textbookish accounts of our nation's
Revolutionary past.
Marquette University Robert P. Hay
American Rubber Workers &
Organized Labor, 1900-1941. By Daniel
Nelson.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1988. 339p.; illustrations, notes,
bibliographical notes, index. $32.50.)
Daniel Nelson has produced an unusually
complex portrait of the efforts of
rubber workers to organize in the years
between 1900 and 1941. Trained as a
business and labor historian, he is
uncomfortable with the worker culture-
worker control models utilized by such
labor historians as Herbert Gutman and
David Montgomery. Rather he places the
worker and owner within the
changing economic, technological,
organizational and political climates. He
assays their strengths and weaknesses as
each tried to adjust to the vicissitudes
of the marketplace.
Nelson organizes his material
chronologically, beginning each chapter with
the general conditions affecting the
rubber industry and then discussing the
workers' responses. He also alternates
consideration of Akron as the central
focus of the rubber industry and the
home of the Firestone, Goodrich and
Goodyear companies with that of the
outlying districts. Through this approach
he produces a portrait of a gradually
evolving system of dealing with employee-
employer conflict.
In order to improve their situation,
workers organized continuously through-
out the period, oftentimes with the
support of an outside union, such as the
IWW, the AFL or the CIO, but sometimes
on their own. Even though the
rubber companies did not accord union
recognition, for the most part, until the
1930s, the workers often gained their
demands as a result of the desire of the
owners to create a stable and more loyal
work force. Thus, Nelson suggests a
measure of continuity within the era
rather than the discontinuity of the
cyclical theory applied by liberal
historians to politics and labor relations.
Skeptical of the traditional portrait of
a stark decline in the 1920s of a unionism
bought off by the welfare capitalism of
owners, such as Frank Seiberling and
Book Reviews
197
Harvey Firestone, Nelson delineates the
decade as bringing an expansion of
benefits and power for rubber workers,
especially because of the Industrial
Assemblies and Factory Councils
established by Goodyear and U.S. Rubber.
The owners often had to make
concessions, according to Nelson, rather than
risk an "alienated company
union."
In the place of alternating cycles of
politics as an explanation of union
successes and failures, Nelson offers a
congeries of factors affecting the
persistence of worker efforts to strike
and to unionize. The factor having the
greatest effect, according to Nelson,
was the economic cycle. Simply put,
workers were more likely to organize and
to succeed during the up cycle.
Another crucial factor was the type of
company. Larger, multi-dimensional,
vertically integrated companies were
more likely to seek accord with workers.
Location in the South, however, even for
divisions within the larger compa-
nies, adversely affected the reception
of workers' efforts to organize. At
Goodyear's Gadsen, Alabama plant, for
instance, incredibly violent reactions
stymied organizers, such as Sherman
Dalrymple. Finally, government assis-
tance correlated highly with the growth
of unions during World War I and the
New Deal.
In Nelson's book there are no heroes or
villains, only "human drama" with
all the limitations that implies for
both management and labor. Management
attitudes toward labor and unions ranged
from the openness of Cyrus Ching of
U.S. Rubber to the outright rejection
and rough tactics of S.T. Campbell,
president of the Aetna Rubber Company.
While sympathetic to workers and
unions, Nelson suggests that workers
failed at times to understand either the
broader economic context of the rubber
industry or the implications of their
demands. Akron workers, for instance,
received significantly higher wages and
benefits than those of outlying firms;
yet, its workers were the most militant,
employing the sitdown strike even before
the auto workers. Without passing
judgment, Nelson traces the fact that
the major companies, even as early as the
1920s, reacted by beginning the
decentralization of the industry. The implica-
tion is obvious given the decay of the
Akron rubber industry in the 1980s.
In general, Nelson's book is a
well-researched, invaluable account of worker
organizations within the rubber
industry. It serves as a balance to those who
might over-romanticize management or
labor. I would raise a minor question,
though, about the extent to which the Ku
Klux Klan could be classified as a
worker organization. Admittedly,
numerous workers joined, but usually as
Protestants rather than as workers.
Overall, Nelson has produced an important
and creditably written book, but it does
at times overwhelm the reader with too
many names or strike details. The
analytical framework becomes subordinate
in some instances to the material.
Youngstown State University William D. Jenkins
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Volume 15: May 1-December 31, 1865. Edited
by John Y. Simon. (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press,
1988. xxv + 691p.; illustrations,
editorial procedure, chronology, calendar,
index. $47.50.)
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Volume 16: 1866. Edited by John Y. Simon.
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1988. xxvi +635p.; illus-
trations, editorial procedure, calendar,
index. $47.50.)
198 OHIO HISTORY
These volumes begin with Grant at the
apex of his military career and end
with him becoming an important political
figure in the dispute over Recon-
struction policy between the Congress
and President Andrew Johnson. In these
twenty months Grant dealt with many
tasks ranging from the mundane to the
momentous. Among the mundane duties was
writing recommendations - for
applicants to West Point, men seeking
appointments as army sutlers, former
Confederates who desired presidential
amnesty, Southern Unionists seeking
reimbursement for wartime property
losses, and Union officers who deserved
promotions.
More significant matters demanded
Grant's attention. Both national borders
had the potential for spawning serious
international disputes. During the Civil
War, Napoleon III had established
Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico, and
supported him with an army. Grant
believed the French-sponsored regime had
aided the Confederacy despite official
French neutrality. Detesting this viola-
tion of the Monroe Doctrine, he
regretted that the United States had not
invaded Mexico to drive the French out
immediately after the Confederacy
collapsed, and despised Secretary of
State William S. Seward for preventing
vigorous action against the
Imperialists. The commanding general persistently
advocated greater aid to the
anti-Imperialist forces and did what he could to
further their cause, including telling a general to disobey
a law that hindered
weapons from reaching them. When the
French agreed to withdraw, Grant
doubted that Napoleon III would honor
the promise. On the northern border,
Grant was equally angry with the
British. When the Fenians threatened to
invade Canada, Grant reluctantly issued
orders to prevent it. He wrote that
"neither the British Government or
the Canadian officials gave themselves
much trouble to prevent hostilities
being organized against the United States
from their possessions." Still,
"two wrongs never make a right and it is our
duty to prevent wrong on the part of our
people" (vol. 16, p. 108).
Another vital task involved demobilizing
the Union Army's approximately
1,000,000 volunteers, who were returned
to their homes with astonishing
rapidity, and reorganizing the regular
army. The postwar peacetime army
authorized by Congress in mid-1866,
although bigger than the prewar army,
was none too large because as settlers
streamed westward Indian hostilities
increased. Grant was sympathetic to the
Indians yet believed that whites
deserved protection even if they
provoked the violence.
Grant, however, did not have the
manpower to provide adequate protection
because of a third momentous issue: the
necessity for an occupation force in
the former Confederacy. Grant's initial
optimism about sectional reconciliation
waned as the South's intransigence
intensified, aided, Grant believed, by
President Johnson. Fearing renewed
insurrection, Grant recommended against
giving arms to southern militia units,
rejected the request of Texas authorities
for permission to raise volunteers
(ostensibly to fight Indians), quietly ordered
all surplus arms removed from southern
posts, and strove to protect loyal
inhabitants and the occupation army,
even though this meant opposing the
commander-in-chief and siding with
Congress.
Along with his official duties, these
volumes provide insight into Grant's
private side. He wrestled with personal
business matters, and accepted gifts
from grateful citizens, including a
house, a library, and $105,000! Although he
supposedly had little love for West
Point, he went there to visit his old
professors and got an appointment to the
academy for his son. Grant could also
display a wry humor. "I
suppose," he wrote, "a man out of debt would be
unhappy. I never tried the experiment
myself however" (vol. 15, p. 372).
Book Reviews
199
Scholars have come to expect the highest
standards from Simon and his
associates, and they will not be
disappointed. Both volumes are splendid
examples of editorial craftsmanship and
continue to reveal a man who was
more fascinating than most historians
assumed when this project began.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Peter Maslowski
History of Academic Freedom in Ohio:
Case Studies in Higher Education,
1808-1976. By Erving E. Beauregard. (New York, Bern, Frankfurt,
Paris:
Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1988. xii +
300p.; appendixes, notes, bibliog-
raphy, index. $39.50.)
As with earlier historical studies of
academic freedom in America, this book
concentrates on violations of freedom,
and the record is rather sordid. From
the beginning of American educational
institutions, teachers have been ha-
rassed and often dismissed for their
views, or what others have perceived to be
their views. Most of Ohio's early
colleges were closely connected to religious
denominations, and much infringement of
the freedom to teach involved
accusations of religious unorthodoxy or,
worse yet, of a secular emphasis in
the classroom. Religion continues to
restrict the freedom of some teachers.
One Ohio college requires faculty, staff
and students to agree to a doctrinal
statement as the price of admission or
employment. Restrictions on teachers
have also involved charges of communism,
unorthodox economic theory,
disloyalty during time of war, and
unacceptable politics. Some academic
freedom cases involved nothing more than
personality squabbles in depart-
ments or between faculty and
administration.
Professor Beauregard's approach is
encyclopedic, and the result is as much
a reference book as a monograph. The
author's practice of following first
mention of an individual with a list of
that person's degrees and work
experience interrupts the narrative
flow. Nevertheless, the book is a gold mine
of information.
The book's assumption is that absolute
academic freedom is vital to a
meaningful education and to a democracy.
Professor Beauregard is a passion-
ate defender of academic freedom and
gives no quarter to those who would
limit it. Among the villains are
governing boards, dictatorial presidents,
legislators, outside pressure groups,
donors, and the press. And the damage
they have inflicted on individuals and
institutions is great. Very few Ohio
institutions have escaped one or more
violations of academic freedom.
The author's broad view of academic
freedom includes a concern for
administrators as well as classroom
teachers, jobs that were often combined. A
number of Ohio college presidents were
dismissed for their religious or
economic views. For Ohio's teachers,
academic institutions were full of booby
traps, with some surprising results.
Even liberal colleges like Oberlin and
Antioch have such skeletons in their
closets. Despite the book's comprehen-
siveness, the record is incomplete.
Nearly any Ohio academician could provide
additional examples which have never
received public notice. Where possible,
Beauregard has outlined the later
careers of those involved in academic
freedom cases. Some, like Arthur
Schlesinger, Sr., went on to illustrious
careers, while others, like Scott
Nearing, left the academic world entirely.
200 OHIO HISTORY
Despite the emphasis on the darker side
of academic life, there are some
encouraging exceptions. President
Charles H. Wesley of Central State Univer-
sity resisted pressure to fire pacifist
Ralph Templin and used the occasion to
praise Templin's contributions to the
university. Similarly, Bluffton College
President Lloyd L. Ramseyer rejected
demands that he dismiss an instructor
whose opposition to the draft resulted
in a criminal trial. Apparently neither of
those institutions suffered from their
strong stand for academic freedom.
Several appendixes add to the book's
usefulness as an important reference
work. Appendix A lists eight pages of
Ohio academic freedom cases. Others
reprint the Cedarville College Doctrinal
Statement which, according to
Beauregard, outlaws academic freedom;
the speech of an Ohio State Univer-
sity professor supporting Gandhi's
campaign for the freedom of India, a speech
which led to his dismissal; and the
nefarious Ohio State loyalty oath.
A lengthy and inclusive bibliography
attests to the solid research on which
the book is based. Professor Beauregard
has given us a treasure house of facts
and interpretations for anyone concerned
with teaching and the larger question
of the freedom to teach.
Wilmington College Larry
Gara
Book Reviews
Proslavery: A History of the Defense
of Slavery in America, 1701-1840. By
Larry E. Tise. (Athens: The University
of Georgia Press, 1987. xix + 510p.;
illustrations, tables, notes, index.
$40.00.)
It is evident that we must at some point
have a meeting of minds regarding
the old anti-slavery war, not at all so
that we can agree on details or even
issues, but in order to rephrase them
for a new era. It is a long time since
specialists argued over the roles of New
England abolitionists as compared
with westerners-that is, of the Old
Northwest. It is a still longer time since
scholars assumed the Civil War to have
been a war between Free Soil as
opposed to proslavery sections.
Meanwhile, the non-scholar has known
without research who Garrison and John
Brown were, and has not puzzled
over the fact that one was against war
on principle and the other was a
committed partisan of terror.
Our own "Second Revolution"
signalled by the Brown and other civil rights
Supreme Court decisions has created a
substantial parity in the legal status of
the several geographic and ethnic
groups, so that new questions are raised
about the role of history in our
concerns. Not surprisingly, our psychological
stakes in history vary, yet we must move
toward some consensus regarding the
roles played in such of our national
crises as the anti- and proslavery drives
which culminated in drastic war.
Consensus will not come easily, so we must
be grateful when serious efforts are
made to contribute to it. Such a work is the
present one. It covers formidable
ground, with considerable thoroughness. It
cannot be definitive; the subject is too
large and involves too much. But it is the
most ambitious of recent writings in the
field, with a thesis which can be
grasped and responded to.
It is not always recognized how
fortunate we are in not having a secessionist
tradition in the Old South, nurtured by
memories of heroes and many dead.
This is not true elsewhere. In Flanders,
for example, there are still groups
which hate the Belgium government and
endure jail in behalf of their cause.
This lack of a dissident nationalism
seems partly the result of empathetic
feelings North and South. Lincoln, in
his First Inaugural Address, referred to
the "mystic chords of memory,
stretching from every battlefield and patriot
grave to every living heart and
hearthstone all over this broad land." Business,
travel, family, and other factors
created everything from tolerance of different
attitudes to sympathy with different
conditions. Lincoln's regard for Alexander
Stephens, who became the Confederate
Vice-President, was not untypical.
But as important was it that both North
and South harbored similar views in
some respects toward the blacks in the
population. Although the North was
averse to slavery, it had been built on
the enslavement of indentured servants,
often treated more harshly than blacks
because they required more discipline
and had service limited by the terms of
indentureship. Naive students used to
say they were in service
"only" from seven to ten years, as though northern
farmers had "only" played at
dominating their white chattel. Modern studies
have spelled out actual working and
living conditions. The public, however,
makes all basic decisions on what it
chooses to be interested in, and it has