Book Reviews
In Pursuit of Happiness: American
Conceptions of Property From the Seventeenth
to the Twentieth Century. By William B. Scott. (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1977. xi + 244 p.; notes, index.
$12.50.)
Scott's admirably lucid survey traces
not only changing conceptions of property
rights, but also alterations in
expectations of what private ownership may
contribute to the pursuit of happiness.
His spokesmen of "American conceptions"
are mainly politicians, jurists, and
social reformers.
During the colonial period, individual
proprietorship of land was expected to
maximize productivity, provide freemen
with the means to pursue a calling, and
secure to labor its appropriate reward.
Though claims to land based on purchase
from Indians provided a justification
for landholding other than "need and use,"
several advocates of confiscatory
taxation challenged the right of proprietors to
hold idle land for speculative purposes.
The Harringtonian founding fathers
agreed that widely distributed landed
property gave citizens a stake in
society; but most of them came to agree with
Madison that a balance of interests
rather than universal proprietorship offered the
most promising guarantee of social
stability. Later suffrage reformers uncritically
substituted the vote itself for
landholding as a foundation for political in-
dependence.
In some northern states, "natural
rights" theories provided the legal rationale for
emancipation. Some southern defenders of
slavery sought to define slaves with
other property as possessions for whose
protection government was instituted.
Other defenders of the peculiar
institution eschewed natural rights theories in favor
of positive law and positivist sociology.
The economic transformations associated
with factory technology, the wage
system, and the corporation led to
further re-evaluation of the role and definition of
property. Antebellum judges chose to
protect corporate property as in-
distinguishable from individual
proprietorship. Justice Stephen J. Field, speaking
emblematically for the later nineteenth
century courts, included use of and revenues
from corporate property among the rights
protected by constitutional guarantees
of substantive due process. But where
economic development required the
abridgement of individual proprietary
rights, judges construed those rights as
narrowly as possible. Political
economists defined wages as property and perceived
owners, managers, and laborers as
functionally equivalent, if differentially
rewarded, participants in the productive
process.
By the mid-twentieth century, most
Americans "accepted with only sentimental
protest their virtual loss of
entrepreneurial opportunity" originally associated with
private property (p. 158). Courts tended
to define equal opportunity in terms of
access to education and employment
rather than to ownership of productive
resources.
Concurrently with these transformations,
social critics from Robert Owen and
Alfred Brisbane to Edward Bellamy and
John Dewey announced that the industrial
system required cooperative ownership
and management of the means of
production. Non-Marxist critics
virtually abandoned the labor theory of value-
and reward-as anachronisms.
Scott's 205-page summary ignores
countless struggles over the definition of
214 OHIO HISTORY
property from the quit-rent
controversies of the colonial era to the nineteenth
century movement for the forfeiture of
railroad land grants, to the CIO's post-
World War II demand for worker
participation in managerial decisions, to efforts
by labor unions and other associations
of workers to secure seniority rights and
tenure contracts that virtually define
jobs as property. His summaries of judicial
redefinitions hardly replace the more
extended analyses by such scholars as
Scheiber, Horowitz, Haines, and Twiss.
Nonetheless, his clear, concise review
should provide an admirable introduction
for students seeking an opening into an
extraordinarily complex subject.
University of Rochester Mary Young
The Remembered Gate: Origins of
American Feminism. By Barbara J. Berg.
(New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978. xvi
+ 334 p.; illustrations, notes,
bibliography, index. $14.95.)
Barbara Berg's well written monograph is
intended as a direct assault on what she
calls the "abolition-feminist
theory." According to the author's interpretation, a
disservice has been done to the history
of American women by those who insist on
tracing the roots of feminism only to
the female antislavery societies, thereby falsely
crediting "abolitionism with the
creation of the nineteenth century woman's
movement" (p. 4).
Based upon extensive archival research,
this study reveals how women after 1800
began to take steps to expand their
spheres of activity, for women did not have to
wait until they became aware of the
slaves' plight before recognizing their own
predicament. Indeed, it is Berg's
assertion and the primary thrust of her book that
"woman's sense of the oppression of
her sex originated in American cities" (p. 7).
For the purpose of the author's work.
New York City is chosen as the analog of
all American cities in the period
between 1800 and 1860. Berg draws upon the
wealth of documentary material available
about New York as well as upon an
impressive knowledge of contemporary
American literature in order to substan-
tiate her points. Indeed, the author is
an excellent literary historian, ranging
through literature and ideas to cull informative
glimpses of womankind in the first
half of the nineteenth century. Perhaps
her most provocative paradigm envisions
woman as the representative of nature, a
fiction created by man in order to afford
himself a place of refuge from the
maelstrom of urban society.
While scholars of feminism may not
regard Berg's findings as novel, they will find
them useful and interestingly brought
together in this book. The volume should be a
useful corrective to the intense
interest which scholars have recently given to
abolitionism and its milieu. Berg's work
should be a model for others to follow in
delineating aspects of social history
contemporary with and independent of the
antislavery movement.
Some readers may question the
applicability of the urban woman as fully
representative of emergent feminism
during the period from 1800 to 1860. While the
author might counter with the suggestion
that only in a densely populated setting
could feminism emerge, one wonders,
nevertheless, about all those other women
comprising the non-urban majority of the
population. New York City as the single
model may likewise be troubling to some
since there were other, older cities, such as
Book Reviews
215
Boston, whose lively feminine society
had been much in evidence as early as 1744.
As Dr. Alexander Hamilton observed;
"I must take notice that this place abounds
with pritty women who appear rather more
abroad than they do at York and dress
elegantly. They are, for the most part,
free and affable, as well as pritty. I saw not
one prude while I was here." Had
the women of Boston likewise been forced to
submerge in the late eighteenth century
and then fight their way outward once
more?
Was the woman-belle ideal no less true
in rural America than in the urban setting
which Berg uses? Her case for the
repression of woman's identity as man's response
to the crisis of urban expansion seems
somewhat less attractive when viewed against
the background of similar practices in
non-urban America. How, moreover, does
this urban threat and its woman-belle
response apply as a paradigm when
examining European feminism? Is the
threat of urban life equally stressful there,
and the quality of the feminist response
similar?
Whatever methodological or interpretive
differences one may have with the
author, the work remains a clearly
written, well-organized essay that should be a
model for others to follow.
Marietta College Mabry
O'Donnell
Woodlot and Ballot Box: Marathon
County in the Twentieth Century By
Howard
R. Klueter and James J. Lorence.
(Wausau, Wisconsin: Marathon County
Historical Society, 1977. x + 414p.;
notes, selected bibliography, index. $6.20.)
According to the authors of this
detailed study of Marathon County, Wisconsin,
Woodlot and Ballot Box was designed "to fill a notable void" in the
state's history
by describing one very important county
in this century. The book is a result of the
upsurge in historical studies which have
been a product of the Bicentennial
Committee and originated in the Marathon
County Bicentennial. In addition, the
authors received financial assistance
from the Marathon County Board of Super-
visors, Employers Insurance of Wausau,
and the American Revolution Bicen-
tennial Committee, among many others.
This may explain why a large portion of
the book reads like boomer literature or
a tract published by the Chamber of
Commerce.
Klueter and Lorence divided their study
of Marathon County into two parts, one
on the economy of the area and the
second on its politics. The economics of
Marathon County changed dramatically
during the early 1900s. Lumber
dominated the area in the late
nineteenth century and only gradually succumbed to
waste and poor cutting practices. A more
diversified system replaced lumber during
the early 1900s, but it was one which
still relied on forestry products. An example
was the Marathon Paper Mills Company
which prospered under the guidance of D.
C. Everest. This section also deals with
agriculture in the county, where the dairies
of German immigrants became the primary
element of Marathon farming.
Marathon County politics in the
twentieth century were characterized by a
movement from conservatism to
progressivism to liberalism, and from Democrat
to Republican and then back to Democrat.
During the early years of the century,
ethnic identification played a major
role in determining county politics, with the
Germans strongly supporting the
Democrats. These people displayed a great deal
of antagonism to progressive reform in
its early stages by opposing such programs
as women's suffrage, the graduated
income tax, and prohibition. But as the farmer-
216 OHIO HISTORY
labor coalition grew to maturity during
the 1920s and 1930s, this opposition
changed to support. However, by 1938
progressives and liberals within both parties
were badly divided, and as a result the
Republicans were able to regain a dominant
position and maintain it well into the
1950s. The county then returned to the liberal
Democratic fold, mainly due to the
rebuilding efforts of a county lawyer, Robert
Dean.
As indicated by their footnotes and
bibliography, the authors have incorporated
a monumental amount of research into
their story of Marathon County in the
twentieth century. Unfortunately, in its
analysis of that material Woodlot and
Ballot Box reveals several major shortcomings. The book explores
far too many
boring, minute and often insignificant
details which tend to blind the reader to the
importance of the county in the history
of Wisconsin and the nation. The authors
spend too much time on events which took
place prior to the turn of the century;
background is essential, but here it
takes up more space than is necessary. The
balance of the work also leaves
something to be desired. For example, of the 225
pages devoted to Marathon County
economic history, only nineteen discuss the
Great Depression. Surely the 1930s had
more impact on the area than this analysis
implies. Scholars across the nation are
doing some exceptionally fine work on local
American history. Unfortunately, Woodlot
and Ballot Box does not rank near the
top of this effort.
Louisiana State University at
Eunice James W. Ware
The Diaries of George Washington. Edited by Donald Jackson and Dorothy
Twohig. (Charlottesville: The University
Press of Virginia, 1978. Vol. III, 1771-
75, 1780-81, xv + 494p.; Vol. IV, 1784-June 1786, xv
+ 405p.; illustrations,
maps, notes, bibliography, index. $20.00
Vol. III; $15.00 Vol. IV.)
The third and fourth volumes of The
Diaries of George Washington continue the
superb editorial standards begun in the
first two installments of this series (see
review, Ohio History, 86; 281-2).
Every possible detail, from persons, to places, to
plants, is identified and commented
upon. Washington's brief entries are amplified
for the reader to achieve full
understanding of a day's events. For instance, as a
delegate to the second Continental
Congress in Philadelphia he entered for June 15,
1775: "Dined at Burns's in the
Field. Spent the Eveng on a Committee" (III, 336).
Washington does not hint that the same
day he was unanimously chosen
commander-in-chief of the Continental
Army. Although some may complain that
parts of the annotation are excessively
detailed, editors Donald Jackson and
Dorothy Twohig merit the encomiums of
all for their thoroughness and accuracy.
When they are in doubt, they express
doubt, when they are sure, they state
positively their position. Nowhere is
this more apparent than in their note on
Gilbert Simpson's poor management of
Washington's Pennsylvania properties:
"Simpson was, in truth, a fickle
and careless manager who knew only one art well,
that of ingratiating himself with a
studied humility and professions of good
intentions while feathering his own
nest" (IV, 1).
These diaries, which unfortunately were
not written during most of the war years,
deal largely with the seemingly trivial
activities of a planter, land speculator,
weather recorder, and entertainer of
numerous visitors. Out of such details could
Book Reviews 217
emerge several studies of daily life
among the Chesapeake gentry at the acme of
their influence in American history.
Most readers will find it fortunate that
His Excellency began in May 1781 "a
concise Journal of Military
transactions" which culminated in the Yorktown
capitulation. It begins with a gloomy
assessment of the year's prospects: "In a
word-instead of having everything in
readiness to take the Field, we have nothing"
(III, 356). Near its conclusion
Washington wrote: "About ten Oclock the Enemy
beat a parley and Lord Cornwallis
proposed a cessation of Hostilities . . . to settle
terms for the surrender" (III, 429).
A recurrent theme is Washington's
interest in the trans-Appalachian West.
Throughout both volumes he is concerned
not only for his own landholdings, but
also with the improvement of
transportation, especially up the Potomac River into
the Ohio River system. Although Indian
troubles prevented his going farther west
than the Monongehela valley in 1784, his
assessment of western prospects and
problems (IV, 57-68) should be of
considerable interest to Ohioans.
These books are for scholars. Their
excellent typography, paper, and binding will
insure their use for generations. Their
only weakness involves maps. Many of those
from volume I should have been included
in these volumes and a few others added.
The attempt to reproduce eighteenth
century maps results in a total cartographic
failure (IV, 58) or incomplete coverage
(IV, 34-5). It would have been better if the
editors had included in each volume a
collection of maps illustrating places
mentioned therein. Even scholars will
need more than "The Campaign of 1781 in
the North" to keep track of where
one is in the wide geographic area encompassed in
these diaries.
Bowling Green State University David Curtis Skaggs
Descriptive Inventory of the Archives
of Illinois. By Victoria Irons and
Patricia C.
Brennan. (Springfield: Illinois State
Government, 1978. xxv + 707p.; index.
$20.00.)
The descriptive inventory published by
the Illinois State Archives and the
Secretary of State of Illinois is
another addition to the growing list of publications
describing public records held in
archival repositories. The inventory is also an
excellent example of the increasing
sophistication of and importance attached to
these publications. Making use of
computer technology, the staff of the Illinois
State Archives was able to compile an
inventory and index to the state records
which opens the way for researchers to
explore and trace the development of Illinois
state government and the records that
agencies and their successors created.
The holdings of the Illinois State
Archives cover the territorial and early
statehood papers collected through 1975.
Material placed in the state archives after
January 1976 will be contained in the
first update, promised in two years. The
descriptive inventory contains both an
administrative history of each agency and
full series descriptions for each record
series, including series title, inclusive dates,
cubic footage and whether an index is
available. The administrative histories are
quite valuable for they trace the
development of each agency, listing its
predecessors, the agency's duties and
responsibilities and any successor agencies.
The series descriptions list all
pertinent material contained in the series. It is to these
218 OHIO HISTORY
descriptions that the index applies.
Unfortunately, the series descriptions do not
indicate how material such as
correspondence, letters, journals, ledgers, and
registers are arranged alphabetically,
chronologically or what.
The basic organization of the inventory
divides the record groups into several
broad categories: territorial records;
constitutional officers; code departments
(administrative agencies of broad
purpose such as the Department of Agriculture);
state institutions (prisons and
hospitals); nonregulatory boards; regulatory
boards pre-1917; regulatory boards
post-1917; higher education governing boards;
internal improvement boards (canals and
turnpikes); temporary boards for
projects; temporary boards for
legislation, legislature; judiciary; federal records
and appendices. Such divisions make a
reliance on the index and table of contents
imperative because of the complexity of
the organization and the ever-changing
nature of state government. The federal
records contained in the archives relate to
census records, land records, surveyors'
records and the Works Progress
Administration records. The four
appendices contain a list of all items relating to
Abraham Lincoln or his family in the
state archives, a valuable table describing the
Illinois census population schedules
(territorial, state and federal 1818-1880), a
listing of the published inventories of
the Illinois Historical Records Survey, and a
chronological breakdown of accessions of
series by decade. Unfortunately, there is
no organization chart of the present
Illinois state government; it would have made
an ideal fifth appendix and added much
to the agency histories.
One of the major strengths of the
inventory is the accompanying index.
Containing over 8400 tracings, the index
has been programmed for computer tape
and thus is easily updated. Although the
index follows Library of Congress
headings, its limitations are those of
the agency histories and series tracings. Thus
there is no listing for the present
supervisor of insurance regulation in the index, for
no such listing appears in any series
description or agency history.
Taken as a whole, the Descriptive
Inventory of the Archives of the State of
Illinois represents a major achievement. Its few errors can be
easily corrected in
subsequent updates. A word of caution,
however: the inventory is not a history of
state government in Illinois. It is an
inventory of records held by the Illinois State
Archives. If an agency's records are not
housed in the archives, the agency is not
described.
At first glance the cost of the
publication might seem prohibitive to libraries on
tight budgets. However, the $20.00 price
includes all updates both to the inventory
and the index. An outstanding work, the
inventory serves as a challenge to other
archivists to produce works of
comparable quality. It also serves as a skeletal
history of state government and an
introduction to record series of great potential
for historical and genealogical
research.
Ohio Historical Society Thomas
Rieder
Abortion in America: The Origins and
Evolution of National Policy. By James
C.
Mohr. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978. xii + 331p.; notes, appendices,
index. $12.50.)
By 1900 virtually every state in the
union had enacted anti-abortion legislation.
Yet one hundred years earlier, no
anti-abortion statutes had even existed. James C.
Mohr's incisive analysis of the
development of abortion policy in the United States
Book Reviews 219
during the nineteenth century is a
thought-provoking and stereotype-shattering
view of how control over their own
bodies was gradually taken away from millions
of American women by the passage of laws
designed not only to "protect" the lives
of pregnant women, but, more
significantly, to bolster the authority of the regular
medical profession and its influence on
public policy.
Prior to the 1820s, the decision to have
an abortion had been almost exclusively
the prerogative of the woman involved
and depended chiefly on her ability to find a
willing practitioner, be it a physician
or not, either to perform the act or provide her
with the pharmaceutical means to do so.
Beginning in the third decade of the
nineteenth century, however, the pursuit
of professionalism among medical
practitioners also led to the
suppression, especially through legislative restrictions
and regulations, of the activities of
so-called "unscientific" practitioners-the
eclectics, homeopaths, herbalists, and
incidentally, abortionists. By forcing non-
conformists out of practice, the AMA and
other medical society-backed "regulars"
not only guaranteed their own viability
as professionals, but limited the treatment
choices available to prospective
patients, be they water cures or abortions.
Although much of Mohr's book details how
various medical societies and
influential individual professionals
promoted and lobbied (successfully) for the
passage of anti-abortion legislation, an
equal focus of the book is its discussion of
abortion itself and the social climate
in which it has existed, or not, throughout
American history. In addition to its own
professional objectives, the medical
profession pushed so strongly for
anti-abortion laws from about 1840 on because
many married women, especially the
native-born, as well as the usual single women,
were actively seeking and having
abortions, primarily as a means of family
limitation. Near-hysteria reigned in
some of the medical rhetoric, and labor pangs
of nativist prescience led regular
practitioners to predict the downfall of the
American (read WASP) race unless the
fearful tide were halted. American
womanhood was being corrupted, for, as
everyone knows, it is unnatural and
immoral for women to voluntarily deny
their God-given role as mothers.
None of these men, of course-either the
physicians or the legislators-ever
asked women how they felt about such
questions as how it felt to be incontinent
from vesico-vaginal fistula, how it felt
to have so many children that it was
impossible to feed them all properly, or
how it felt to be dying from peritonitis,
perforation of the uterus, or any of the
other conditions that so often resulted from
bungled abortions. For no amount of
punitive legislation kept women from having
abortions. True, middle and upper-class
women turned to other types of
contraception. But the single, the poor,
and the frightened women continued to
turn to the warehouse districts and back
alleys for a resolution of their problem.
It was perhaps ironic, as Mohr points
out, that abortion was being outlawed just
at the time when antiseptic procedures
were being generally accepted by
practitioners, procedures which would
ultimately make abortions within the first
three months of pregnancy much safer
than childbirth itself. It was also ironic,
given the nature of present-day
anti-abortion activism, that the public and even the
clergy were noticeably silent on the
issue during the nineteenth century, leaving the
heat of the battle to the physicians and
legislators.
Mohr's sources, chiefly published
medical treatises, state legislative records, and
journalistic accounts, provide a clear
view of the public side of the abortion
controversy. The book would have been
richer, but probably not more persuasive,
if it had attempted to uncover some of
the more elusive sources such as individual
women's letters or hospital records
relating to bungled abortion victims that might
have shed light on the more private side
of the issue, particularly from the point of
220 OHIO HISTORY
view of women themselves. This, however,
is an area that might best be pursued by
further research. Mohr has done a superb
job. Those who think that religious and
moral objections were the cause of
nineteenth century anti-abortion legislation,
legislation that was virtually unchanged
until the 1973 Supreme Court decision in
Roe v. Wade, should read this book and have their eyes opened, and
perhaps their
minds as well.
National Historical Publications and
Records Commission Nancy Sahli
American Forts: Architectural Form
and Function. By Williard B. Robinson.
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1977. xiii + 229p.; illustrations, appendix,
glossary, bibliography, index. $15.00.)
Formerly almost entirely the provenence
of antiquarians, the study of military
architecture has expanded to such an
extent in recent years that it is now clearly a
legitimate subject for the academically
oriented historian. Although much has been
written on individual fortifications,
Willard Robinson's American Forts is the first
scholarly effort to comprehensively
analyze the topic.
The author has ambitiously described and
evaluated over 300 years of
fortifications in America, beginning
with the colonial era and concluding with the
army's efforts in the trans-Mississippi
frontier. An architectural historian at Texas
Tech University, Robinson argues that
the architectural form of a fort was the
result of an interplay between its
function and the surrounding geography. In other
words, the purpose of a fort, whether to
defend a coastal harbor or to ward off
Indians, and the geographical
constraints of its site were both reflected in its
physical structure.
Robinson convincingly demonstrates the
validity of his thesis. He begins with a
discussion of the European antecedents
for American forts. The forts built by the
Spanish, French and English in America
were based on the Vauban bastioned
system of fortification. This system was
developed in Italy in response to the
development of artillery that made
medieval castles obsolete and received its name
from its leading practioner during the
seventeenth century, Sebastien Le Prestre de
Vauban, the military engineer for Louis
XIV. During the Revolution and early
nineteenth century, foreign-born
engineers, such as the Louis-Lebeque Duportail,
Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and Simon Bernard,
were the first to analyze the needs of the
new United States and create an American
system of forts. Robinson follows the
increasing sophistication of military
science in the nation and the demand for
coastal defense that resulted in the
creation of vertical casemented masonry forts.
He also shows that American military
engineers, most notably Joseph Totten, were
instrumental in developing a
"permanent system" with distinctive corner tower
bastions. The eventual introduction of
rifled artillery during the Civil War, as the
author dramatically illustrates with a
lithograph of the "bombed out" Fort Sumter
at Charleston, demonstrated the
fallibility of masonry fortifications. The ultimate
expression of Robinson's form and
function concept were the frontier forts of the
1870s and 80s, where a scarcity of
materials and the nature of Indian warfare
combined to make the walls, a seemingly
essential item, superfluous.
Unfortunately, the final chapter dealing
with "Land Frontier Forts" is the
weakest portion of the text. After
establishing that forts without walls were the
Book Reviews 221
norm in the West, Robinson seems to
belabor the point by listing numerous
examples. In addition, the author gives
no real attention to the frontier forts in a
number of states east of the Mississippi
River; thus the person generally looking for
information on Ohio Valley
fortifications will be disappointed. Finally, his
statement that "a second
stockade" outside a fort wall as "a second line of defense
was unusual on the [eastern]
frontier" (p. 134) is not supported by evidence
presented by the author or available
elsewhere.
The choice of illustrations in the
volume and the quality of reproduction are
exceptional. Robinson has assembled
contemporary drawings, paintings, plats,
and cross sections of the forts into a
valuable research tool, and an appendix has
been included with helpful observations
concerning the drawing techniques
utilized. In spite of its minor
shortcomings, American Forts should definitely be on
the shelf of any serious student of
military architecture.
The Ohio Historical Society David A. Simmons
The Political Economy of Urban
Transportation. By Delbert A. Taebel
and James
V. Cornehls. (Port Washington, N.Y.:
Kennikat Press, 1977. ix + 218p.; tables,
figures, appendix, notes, index. $13.95
cloth; $8.95 paper.)
That streetcars and then highway
construction and automobiles permitted a
general reshuffling of home and business
sites has long been known to historians
and social critics. The strength in the
political arena of trolley operators and
highway promoters has regularly served
as a topic in contemporary accounts of
American politics on the local, urban
level. Taebel and Cornehls write in these
traditions, pointing to the influence of
highway lobbyists in legislatures and the
subsequent decentralization of homes and
businesses along new routes.
During the years after World War II,
they report, highway enthusiasts such as
automobile and truck manufacturers,
engineers, contractors, and truck operators
worked together in national and state
governments to bring additional mileage
to urban centers. The Interstate system,
their favorite network since the mid-1950s,
has consumed billions of dollars and
thousands of square miles of rural and urban
land. Friends of mass transit found
themselves increasingly isolated in politics
because prosperity had become contingent
upon the sale of new automobiles and
members of associated industries were
"in some degree engaged in tacit collusion to
protect the automotive
manufacturers" (68).
Highway construction, according to the
authors, reshaped urban areas. The
builders of factories, offices, and
housing developments selected sites at the
periphery, leaving minority Americans
without jobs and forcing the elderly and
handicapped to get about as they could.
Autos and highways mangled the city, its
residents, and their lives. As a
solution to this condition, the authors recommend
mass transit facilities whose
construction presumably would require a self-
conscious evaluation by designers of the
broader land use, economic, and social
complexes in a city.
The authors sustain the erroneous notion
that technology is autonomous and
that urban problems are of recent
origin. Long before World War I, streetcars as
well as gas, electric, and sewer lines
facilitated the outward movement of city
dwellers seeking rural landscapes and
urban services. Highways only allowed
homebuilders to fill in the pockets
between trolley lines and to extend new
222 OHI0 HISTORY
developments still further into the
countryside. But the overall pace of outward
movement between 1945 and 1970 may not
have been as fast as the one established
by business relocations before World War
II.
Taebel and Cornebls also fail to develop
an appropriate framework for the study
of highway politics. Promoters of road
building simply never achieved the unity of
vision described here. In 1944 Congress
had authorized construction of the
Interstate system, but not until
1956-following a doubling of traffic, the threat of
uncoordinated building at the local
level, and major losses of life and income in
traffic jams could truck operators,
engineers, and others who wrote, argued, and
lobbied about highway legislation agree
to a program of accelerated construction.
In short, those seeking a tendentious
personal document will find little new in this
book; those who wish an accurate account
of highway development and urban
affairs and a contribution to our
understanding of the patterns of urban and
political change should look elsewhere.
The Franklin Institute,
Philadelphia Mark H.
Rose
The Emergence of Professional Social
Science: The American Social Science
Association and the
Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority. By
Thomas L.
Haskell (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1977. ix + 276 p.; notes, index.
$12.00.)
This imaginative and intellectually
adventurous book is about the development
of American social science from the
mid-nineteenth century, when such study was
an avocation of gentlemen-scholars and a
diversion for men in the traditional
professions, to the end of that century,
when social science became a full-time
occupation of academics based in the
universities. Professor Haskell discusses the
broad social background of that shift
and illuminates it by tracing the rise and fall of
the American Social Science Association.
The ASSA was much the work of Frank
Sanborn, teacher, poet, abolitionist,
government official, and journalist who
linked the ante-bellum reform movement
with post-Civil War Mugwumpery. The
Association was also an offshoot of the
Massachusetts Board of Charities and
retained a bias toward ad hoc and eclectic
social science-favoring investigations
arising out of particular and pressing social
problems. The "scientific"
work of the ASSA consisted largely in its meetings and
publications, which provided a forum for
the discussion of social issues by men of
varied backgrounds and training. Its
reform work comprised, for the most part,
efforts to improve Civil Service and to
promote public investigatory commissions
as a means of social regulation. Professor
Haskell argues that the decline of this
kind of social science was linked to an
"explosive growth of interdependence" in the
second half of the nineteenth century,
stemming from technological developments
and the ongoing transportation
revolution that undermined "the sovereignty of
America's island communities." The
resulting interdependence, he suggests, led the
major thinkers of the era into the
perplexities of the "recession of causation." They
turned away from the study of men and
even local groups as social agents, and
toward broader, more remote, and more
general factors of social causation. This
"crisis in conventional causal
attribution" among "men of insight," Professor
Haskell believes, undermined customary
beliefs, disrupted the authority of the
traditional professions, and gave rise
to academic sociology, that science of remote
causal attribution.
Book Reviews 223
Possibly an aside addressed particularly
to readers of this journal might not be
out of place at this point. Many of the
most exciting works of American history
written over the past decades advance
arguments that seem to beg for consideration
and appraisal by regional and local
historians drawing upon the special erudition of
their vicinage. For example, Professor
Robert H. Wiebe's notion, so important to
Professor Haskell's book-that America of
the mid-nineteenth century was a
nation of "island communities"
and that at the end of the century those
communities had lost much of their
sovereignty, being overwhelmed by sweeping
social and economic changes-is one such
argument that might be examined
closely. Does the metaphor of
"island communities" overstate the separation of
mid-nineteenth century communities from
their broader economic and social
surroundings? In what sense were
Cincinnati or Ashtabula, Xenia, Youngstown,
and Zanesville (or even their
components) ever "island communities," and in what
sense were they overwhelmed? How did the
nature of local attachments change over
these years? The local and regional
historian can help us all to more precise
judgments on these and similar issues;
and that is clearly the kind of scholarly
cooperation which can be particularly
invigorating.
It may seem odd to suggest of Professor
Haskell's study, whose key concept is
increasing interdependence, that its
lively history of the ASSA and the general
discussion which sandwiches that history
are not necessarily dependent; that the
discussion of broad social trends and
their connection to the history of the ASSA
are less persuasive than the history
itself. The chief difficulty is his use of the concept
of interdependence. Professor Haskell
defines it tightly but uses it loosely. At some
points it seems to mean little more than
interconnection, but at others it merges into
the old-time metaphysical notion of
all-embracing causality. Remarkably
reminiscent of Herbert Spencer (one of
the important figures in this study),
Professor Haskell puts forward the
notion of interdependence in a way that is
abstract, unidirectional, and that leaks
intimations of ineluctability. Therefore it is
not surprising that he believes "a
web of dependence shapes each individual's
behavior at every moment," or
asserts somewhat more specifically that increasing
interdependence of the late nineteenth
century devitalized everyone's "personal
milieu." Yet if one descends from
these abstractions to the lives of particular men
and women at the end of the nineteenth
century, then it appears that something
close to the opposite was true. For
there is good reason to believe that growing
numbers of Americans at that time, even
in "island communities," were given many
more choices for doing and belonging
than ever before.
It is also striking how little
contemporary evidence Professor Haskell presents for
the "intellectually wrenching
experience" that he believes arose from the
"regression of causality" and
that led to the creation of modern American
sociology. The American thinkers he does
discuss seemed to have had little
difficulty in obviating such a
regression to their satisfaction, if not to his. Moreover,
when someone like Albion Small took up
the concept of interdependence directly,
he seemed to be more patently beholden
to the organic metaphors of the German
academicians with whom he studied, and
more intent upon finding "scientific"
language for his sense of Christian
obligation than he was for giving expression to
an exceptional sensitivity to the
transportation revolution, market developments,
and occupational specialization.
These reservations about the conceptual
backdrop of this study should not
distract from the impressive achievement
of the work. Professor Haskell has
unearthed one of the important missing
links (the ASSA) that helps us to
understand, as we could not before, the
evolution of American sociology out of the
224 OHIO HISTORY
earlier American social science. His
history of the American Social Science
Association is careful, thoughtful, and
informative. Even his more sweeping
reflections, though they may be less
convincing, are no less provocative. This is a
work that no serious scholar of late
nineteenth century American history can
ignore.
University of California, Berkeley Samuel Haber
American Socialism and Black
Americans, From the Age of Jackson to World War
II. By Philip S. Foner. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978.
xiv + 462 p.; notes,
bibliography, index. $22.95.)
In this most recent work, Philip Foner
examines the attitudes adopted by the
American Socialist party and its
nineteenth century prodecessors towards the
nation's black population. In a
subsequent volume, Foner plans to offer a similar
examination of the relations between the
Communist party and American blacks.
In the preface to American Socialism
and Black Americans, Foner takes
exception to historian David Shannon's
observation about the Socialist party that
Negroes "were not important in the
party, the party made no special effort to attract
the Negro members, the party was generally
disinterested in if not hostile to the
efforts of Negroes to improve their
conditions in American capitalist society."
Foner agrees that American socialists
often did display the dominant racial
attitudes of the society they lived in,
but argues: "Few issues were more widely
discussed in the party press than the
Negro question, and . . . significant forces in
the Socialist party fought racism in the
party's ranks, took an advanced position on
the Negro question and did not confine
themselves merely to parroting the usual
line." Moreover "Socialist
ideas and movements exercised an important influence
upon several generations of black
intellectuals and writers."
The argument that Foner makes is not
without its merits. Too many historians of
pre-First World War socialism have
contented themselves with citing Victor
Berger's well known racist attitudes, or
quoting the comment by Eugene Debs who,
despite his own belief in racial
equality, declared that Socialists "have nothing
special to offer the Negro, and we
cannot make separate appeals to all the races."
Foner makes it abundantly clear that
this was not the entire story. In the nineteenth
and increasingly in the twentieth
century, a number of Socialists did come to believe
that there were national as well as
class aspects to the oppression faced by American
blacks, and that it was a legitimate
concern (and indeed a responsibility) for
American Socialists to work to oppose
such special forms of oppression as
lynchings and Jim Crow laws. Foner offers
the example of a white Pennsylvania
Socialist, Caroline Hollingsworth
Pemberton, who took an active interest in the
plight of black Americans in the early
years of this century. In a 1901 article in a
Socialist newspaper, she argued that
unlike white laborers, who could shed the
symbols of their class should
circumstances favor them, "the negro cannot shed his
skin. The white South not only adheres
firmly to its traditional scorn of the laborer,
but enjoys the immense advantage of
dealing with its laborer as a race rather than as
a class." Pemberton tried, with
mixed success, to involve the Socialist Party in the
black struggle against lynching and the
sharecropping system, and she insisted that
Socialists should set an example for
white Americans by abandoning their own
racial prejudices. Foner also describes
the political activities of a number of black
Book Reviews 225
Socialists, including obscure figures
like the Reverend George Washington
Woodbey as well as such famous figures as W.E.B. DuBois
and A. Philip
Randolph. After the split in the
Socialist movement in 1919, Foner seems to lose
interest in his subject, and his
perfunctory narrative adds little to existing accounts
of the Socialist party's efforts to
organize in Harlem and among the South's
sharecroppers during the Depression.
Despite its detail, American
Socialism and Black Americans is not a persuasive
challenge to more conventional
interpretations like Shannon's. Simply multiplying
instances where individual Socialists
did recognize the special characteristics of
black oppression does not disprove the
generalization that the Socialist party on
the whole was disinterested in the
struggle against racism. The "Negro Question"
may have been mentioned more often in
the Socialist press than commonly
believed, but the issue hardly aroused
the interests of or divided Socialists the way
that debates over "direct
action," industrial unionism, or even prohibition did.
As in his writings on the American labor
movement, Foner approaches his
research with an abstract timeless model
of how Marxists should ideally respond to
a given problem, then awards praise or
criticism to the real historical actors he
encounters along the way, depending to
what extent the things they say seem to live
up to the ideal. This approach leads
Foner to many anachronistic judgments,
particularly in his discussion of
nineteenth century Socialists, as he picks away at
their racial attitudes, theories, and
terminology. And it often obscures more
interesting questions than it answers.
For example, why did some Socialists
respond more sympathetically to black
Americans than others? (In the case of
Caroline Pemberton, it probably had more
to do with her Quaker ancestry than to
any superior capacity for Marxist
analysis.) Foner's book provides useful detail but
few insights into the relations between
Socialists and American blacks.
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts Maurice Isserman
The Kirtland Economy Revisited: A
Market Critique of Sectarian Economics. By
Marvin S. Hill, Keith Rooker, and Larry
T. Wimmer. (Provo: Brigham Young
University Press, 1977. viii + 85p.;
tables, illustrations, appendices,
bibliography, index. $4.95.)
This study delves into the vicissitudes
of founding a bank for a religious group in
northern Ohio during the late 1830s. The
expectations of the founders exceeded the
resources that could be commanded. The
authors question the conclusions of some
previous writers concerning the failure
of the Kirtland Safety Society Bank. Among
these are Fawn Brodie in No Man Knows
My History, W. A. Lynn in The Story of
Mormonism, and J. H. Kennedy in The Early Days of Mormonism. These
writers
question Joseph Smith's motives in the
founding and handling of the bank's
resources. This work uses tables of
statistics concerning the viability of the Kirtland
economy, from the time of the bank's
beginning to its end. The local economy had
reached a peak slightly before the bank
was started; then the decline took place
which dampened its prospects, then
liquidated it as it did numerous other banks by
1837. So the Mormon-founded bank
struggled vainly in the same economic net.
The authors say the depression of 1837
did not entirely cause the failure; at least
they do not emphasize it as a sole
cause. Another difficulty the bank had to
surmount was the unwillingness of the
Ohio legislature to grant a charter of
226 OHIO HISTORY
incorporation, not because of
anti-Mormonism but because the Locofocos
controlled the voting in that body.
There is a possibility that Joseph Smith
hoped to provide the Mormon Church
with a strong economic base as its
foundation. The authors do not emphasize this
possibility, probably because it was not
emphasized at the time as it was later in the
Order of Enoch and in other Utah
attempts in cooperation efforts assisted by the
Church. Brigham Young later pointed out
disadvantages a religious leader would
meet in mundane pursuits (p. 41). The
work illustrates the difficulty of a prophet
dealing with profit. The authors on page
4 sum up, with the help of their
tabulations, the point of the study:
"Previous historical accounts of the Kirtland
economy have overlooked the fact that
Smith provided his credits with assets, that
he was buying and selling land at market
prices and that the economic reversals in
the Kirtland economy involved a change
in economic conditions 'that reasonably
prudent economic men probably would not
have anticipated.' "
Oxford, Ohio W. J. McNiff
Almost Persuaded: American Physicians
and Compulsory Health Insurance, 1912-
1920. By Ronald L. Numbers. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press,
1978. xii + 158p.; notes, bibliography,
index. $10.00.)
Traditional histories of the early
reform movement for compulsory health
insurance in the United States deal with
the interaction and conflicts of various
interest groups as if frozen in time. In
this innovative work, Ronald L. Numbers, an
historian of science and medicine at the
University of Wisconsin, Madison, centers
his research "primarily on the
changing attitudes of the medical profession, leaving
detailed analyses of labor, business,
and political opinion to others" (p.xi). He
corrects the static view by placing the
shifting views of prominent physicians and
national, state, and local medical
organizations within the historical context of
Progressive reform activities. By
detailing the medical profession's "brief flirtation"
(p. 110) with reform through research in
such primary sources as the American
Association for Labor Legislation (AALL)
papers, records of the American
Medical Association (AMA), reports of
state social insurance commissions, and
journals of state and local medical
societies, Numbers convincingly reworks the
historical picture of a staid, politically
conservative medical profession.
With concise, well-documented prose, he
depicts reformers' concerns with the
problem of sickness in an
urban-industrial society, puts the German, British, and
American health insurance plans in
comparative perspective, introduces the chief
reformers in the AALL and the AMA, and
gives good brief biographies of
opponents. Drawing on the work of state
and local investigatory bodies for
background, Numbers notes the extent of
sickness among industrial workers, the
expansion of governmental activity in
providing medical care, and the financial
interests of American doctors in the
second decade of the twentieth century.
Through particular examination of
insurance benefits and administrative
structures in Germany, Britain, and the
AALL-proposed Standard Bill, he reveals
American confusion and ignorance about
European plans as late as 1911. Numbers
rescues such reformers as Isaac M.
Rubinow and John B. Andrews of the AALL,
Alexander Lambert and S. S. Goldwater of
the AMA, and various state politicians
from historical limbo. This
interpretation also carefully develops the growth of
Book Reviews 227
opposition to compulsory health
insurance plans among leaders in the commercial
insurance field, state medical
organizations, and, most importantly, the divergent
county medical societies.
In chronicling the political battles in
New York, Massachusetts, Wisconsin,
Illinois, and California from 1916
through 1920, Numbers follows the changing
opinions of physicians and their
professional organizations from a "surprisingly
positive" (p. xi) first response in
1916 to the triumph of the anti-health insurance
faction with the 1920 AMA House of
Delegates' resolution opposing reform
amounting to "Death By
Hysteria" (Chapter 9). In 1916, reform leaders such as
Lambert in the AMA formed links with the
AALL to seek practical compromises
for the profession as part of what
seemed to be the inevitable victory of health
insurance bills in the state
legislatures of the Northeast and Midwest. Yet, the
coming of the First World War in 1917
"unquestionably intensified the criticism
already developing and further
encouraged intemperate rhetorical attacks, based
largely on the German origin of social
insurance" (p. 75). By the time of the Red
Scare, many physicians had joined in the
war and postwar "hysteria" to
opportunistically oppose health
insurance on the grounds of monetary loss under a
contract system, foreboding experience
under workmen's compensation laws, and
the recognition that reform legislation
was not inevitable.
Due to his focus on the national arena
and one interest group's changing response
to reform efforts, Numbers
overemphasizes the role of the AALL after 1916. The
political battles occurred on the state
level around the investigating commissions
such as in Ohio, amidst actual
legislative debate as in New York, and, in the
California case, over the climactic
defeat in November 1918 of a constitutional
amendment by a margin of two-to-one. In
Chapter 7, Numbers stresses the negative
impact of World War I on reform plans
then inconsistently downplays this factor in
the conclusion (p. 113). Yet the record
of the state commissions (mistakenly citing
the 1917 Massachusetts commission as in
favor-p. 99) shows that the war did not
really play such a central role in the
later defeats: before 1919, two (not three)
favored health insurance, one opposed,
and one was undecided; in 1919, three
favored, three opposed, and one was
undecided. The war period's impact was more
equivocal than Numbers' argument
indicates.
In centering on the medical profession's
reactions, Numbers overlooks positive
interest group interaction at the state
level among business, labor, insurance, and
medical leaders, though he does write in
"A Note on Sources" that the best
historical accounts "tend to
overlook events below the national level" (p. 115).
Despite his novel interpretation of the
actions of American physicians in regard to
compulsory health insurance,
Numbers-along with other historians-searches for
liberal successes and defeats. He and
others neglect the essentially conservative
nature of the early health insurance
movement, while overstating the liberal
elements in social insurance activists'
ideas and behavior. Were they to examine the
social backgrounds of state health
insurance commissioners, the political dynamics
of the commissions, and reforms in
public health administration such as found in
the Ohio case, a different picture might
well emerge.
In an "Epilogue," Numbers
rejects previous theories that the conservative stance
of the AMA by 1920 arose out of either
the abdication of responsibility by the
scientific and academic leaders of
American medicine or a grass roots revolt of
general practitioners fearing a loss of
income, occupational liberty, status, and the
closeness of the doctor-patient
relationship. Almost Persuaded sets the stage for
further in-depth research of interest
group activity in the early social insurance
movement. Numbers provides the first
well-researched history of the changing
228 OHIO
HISTORY
response of an influential professional
group that initially favored but later resisted
compulsory health insurance in the late
Progressive years.
The Ohio State University Patrick D.
Reagan
American Midwives: 1860 to the
Present. By Judy Barrett Litoff.
(Westport:
Greenwood Press, 1978. xi + 197p.;
notes, bibliography, index. $15.95.)
"Midwifery has been the almost exclusive
province of women throughout
recorded history," begins Litoff in
her well-written study of the midwife's decline in
the United States. Rarely were men in
the lying-in chamber before the eighteenth
century when the growth of
"scientific" obstetrics and the development of
instrument deliveries increased the
likelihood of physician-attended births.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the
American midwife's proponents accused
physicians, primarily male, of the
unnecessary use of drugs and instruments
("meddlesome midwifery") and
described male birth attendants as an affront to
modesty; but developments in anesthesia,
antisepsis, asepsis, and the use of
diagnostic instruments like stethoscopes
and x-rays popularized the growing
specialty of obstetrics. By the end of
the century, physician-attended births became
the norm, and though midwives as late as
1910 conducted at least as many births as
physicians, these women served mostly
the poor and ethnic minorities.
Litoff focuses on the early twentieth
century controversy over the midwife.
Physicians upset with the low status of
obstetrics and worried about "overcrow-
ding" in the profession observed
that obstetrics would never become a respected
medical specialty as long as ill-trained
midwives practiced. They also feared that the
continued existence of midwives would
limit the availability of "clinical material"
needed to upgrade obstetrical education.
By 1910 public health statistics showed
extremely high rates of maternal and
infant mortality, a situation opponents
blamed on unskilled midwives. The
midwife's supporters cited comparative studies
that showed American midwives often had
lower mortality rates than physicians;
they noted that European countries where
midwives delivered a large proportion of
infants had mortality rates lower than
the United States.
By 1930 only 15 percent of American
births were midwife-attended. Litoff
discusses several factors influencing
the midwife's decline. Opponents were well-
organized; midwives themselves had few
organizations, and they were not
powerful. Even proponents of midwives
believed in formal training and regulation,
but few institutions for midwifery
education existed. In addition, various social
forces contributed to the demise of the
midwife. Immigration restriction laws of the
1920s eliminated much of her clientele.
By 1930, 80 percent of the midwives
practiced in the South. The number of
hospital deliveries ("the American way")
grew. Women demanded time- and pain-saving
procedures best practiced in a
hospital under physician care. The
decreasing birthrate made birth seem less
"routine" and more a special
event. By 1973, 99.3 percent of all births were
physician-attended hospital deliveries.
Litoff brings her study to the present with a
brief history of the nurse-midwife and a
discussion about current interest in lay-
midwifery and home-births.
Using the limited statistics available,
Litoff demonstrates the midwife's
precipitous decline and provides a clear
picture of the medical and professional
debate over midwifery in America.
Drawing on the medical and lay literature of the
Book Reviews 229
period, she analyzes the argumentation
within the medical profession: certain
physicians worked totally to eliminate
the midwife, others saw her as a "necessary
evil," and still others viewed her
as a positive good. The book's concluding chapter
is a succinct summary of the topic.
Unfortunately, certain participants stand mute.
One would like to know more about the
women who became midwives. Similarly,
what of the parturient women: how much
control did they have over the birthing
situation, and on what grounds does a
woman choose between available types of
birth attendants? These are minor
criticisms, however. Litoff has written a non-
polemical book, one that elucidates the
many elements influencing the rise of a
medical specialty at the expense of a
relatively inarticulate and unorganized group.
University of Wisconsin Rima D.
Apple
Lincoln and the Economics of the
American Dream. By G.S. Boritt.
(Memphis:
Memphis State University Press, 1978.
xxiv + 432p.; notes, appendix,
bibliography, index. $15.00.)
In Lincoln and the Economics of the
American Dream, G. S. Boritt argues that
economics (read political economy) is
the key to understanding Lincoln's vision for
American society. Boritt convincingly
demonstrates that as a young Illinois state
legislator, a freshman Whig Congressman,
and President of the United States,
Lincoln consistently supported those
policies which enabled all men to receive "a
full, good, and ever increasing reward
for their labors so that they might have the
opportunity to rise in life" (p.
lx). Lincoln's commitment to a labor theory of value,
equal opportunity, and a rising standard
of living, lay at the root of his support of a
national banking system, a protective
tariff, liberalized land policies, legalization of
labor unions, internal improvements, a
graduated tax policy, and the prohibition of
slavery in the territories. Lincoln
wanted to provide all Americans, whether
entrepreneurs, laborers, farmers, or
slaves, "an unfettered start, and a fair chance in
the race of life" (p. 275). For
Lincoln, issues of civil liberty and constitutionalism
were, at best, secondary concerns-means
to economic liberty and equality of
opportunity.
Boritt divides his book into two
parts-the early Lincoln and the post-Kansas-
Nebraska Lincoln. Even so, Boritt does
not seek to perpetuate the tendency of some
other Lincoln scholars to treat
separately the earlier and later Lincolns. Rather, he
demonstrates that Lincoln's opposition
to slavery after 1854 was a logical extension
of the "economic" ideas and
values which he had adopted prior to 1854. The
practice of dividing Lincoln's career
into two discrete and largely unrelated phases
has created several problems of
interpretation. It has made the early Lincoln appear
as little more than a calculating
opportunist. Lincoln, an unprincipled man with an
insatiable appetite for political
office, changed his "principles" as it become
expedient. Prior to 1854, he championed
Whig economic policies; after 1854, when
public opinion changed, he jettisoned
his Whiggism and transformed himself into a
champion of the anti-slavery cause.
Another difficulty posed by the
"divided Lincoln" interpretation is that it fails to
account for the greatness of the
presidential Lincoln. Suddenly, in 1863 Lincoln, the
political hack, became the Great
Emancipator. Boritt finds this image unconvinc-
ing. If Lincoln was great after 1863,
the ingredients of that greatness must have
been present earlier. Further, the
division of Lincoln's career into two distinct
230 OHIO HISTORY
periods obscures why Lincoln viewed
slavery an evil even as he retained certain
notions of Negro inferiority. One of
Boritt's purposes is to show that a divided
Lincoln is artificial and ignores
significant continuities. The result is a compelling
interpretation of Lincoln which
recognizes his greatness, explains its background,
and reconciles Lincoln's ideas on
slavery and race with his earlier economic
Whiggism. Boritt concludes that
Lincoln's economic principles ultimately led
Lincoln to believe that slavery, more
than anything else, stood in the way of the
realization of the American economic
dream. Slavery allowed masters to confiscate
the product of their slaves' labor, it
denied blacks the opportunity to better
themselves, and it inhibited the
modernization of the southern economy. Boritt
insists that Lincoln's seemingly most
moralistic position, opposition to slavery, was
but a part of an even loftier economic
dream.
Lincoln and the Economics of the
American Dream has some minor
problems.
The first half of the book is far more
successful than the second half. In part, this is a
function of the strength of Boritt's
argument. His thesis of an "economic" Lincoln is
so convincing that the anti-slavery
Lincoln seems anti-climactic. Still, as Boritt
admits, Lincoln after 1854 did relegate
economic policy to a secondary role. Boritt
goes to some pains to explain why
Lincoln, given the new-found power of the
presidency and the exigencies of war,
gave only casual attention to economic issues.
Boritt points out that Lincoln and
Congress successfully enacted the old Whig
economic program, but nevertheless
admits it was a piecemeal effort frequently
pushed through by Congress or members of
Lincoln's cabinet. As president,
Lincoln personally gave surprisingly
little attention to economic policy. Seemingly,
by 1861 Lincoln found his own economic
dream much less infatuating, perhaps
even tawdry. All too quickly, Boritt
passes over the possibility that either Lincoln
had begun to outgrow his economic dream
or had become immobilized by ambiv-
alence. Boritt offers suggestive, but
not entirely convincing, explanations.
A less substantive problem is Boritt's
style. On the whole, he writes with clarity
and force, but he has a curious penchant
for classical and literary allusions. For
instance, page 100 contains this
sentence: "Certainly his [Lincoln's] political
effectiveness appears to have been
enhanced thereby, somewhat in the manner of
Cato the Elder's 'Delenda est Carthago,'
" which is translated at the bottom of the
page, "Carthage must be
destroyed." At worst, such allusions are distracting and
pretentious. Still, there is irony in
Boritt's genuine admiration of Lincoln's common
touch, and Boritt's own somewhat
pretentious style.
Minor objections aside, Boritt has
written a sophisticated and important book
which significantly enlarges our understanding
of Lincoln, and in the process has
brought Lincoln scholarship in line with
the mainstream of the historical
scholarship on the nineteenth century.
No one with a serious interest in American
history can afford to ignore Lincoln
and the Economics of the American Dream.
Kenyon College William B. Scott
Iron Road to the West: American
Railroads in the 1850s. By John F.
Stover (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1978.
xii + 266p.; illustrations, tables, maps,
notes, bibliography, index. $14.95.)
As the title suggests, Iron Road to
the West: American Railroads in the 1850s, is
an overview of the country's emerging
rail net at mid-nineteenth century. Purdue
Book Reviews 231
University Professor John F. Stover, a
leading student of American railroading,
develops his study largely into a regional review of
the growth of rail services. Thus
there are individual chapters on "Yankee
Railroads," "The Railroads of Dixie,"
and the "Iron Roads in the
West." Additional sections chronicle the iron horse's
ascendancy over the turnpike, canal, and
steamboat; the advances in antebellum
rail technology; and an overview of the
American rail network on the eve of the
Civil War.
Stover marshalls evidence effectively to
support his belief that "no decade was
more important in the history of
American railroads than the antebellum 1850s" (p.
xi). Perhaps the most telling testimony
to the significance of this ten-year period
was that the outline of today's railroad
map east of the Mississippi River became
apparent by 1860. Specifically, the rail
net more than tripled in size, from 9,000 to
30,000 miles. And, according to Stover,
the fact that expanding rails typically
linked the New England and Mid-Atlantic
states with those of the Old Northwest
helps to clarify why the West allied
itself with the North and not the South during
the era's bitter sectional struggles. As
he writes, "The thousands of miles of new
railroad between the Hudson and
Mississippi rivers resulted in a new east-west
trade axis which was replacing the
earlier north-south trade of the Mississippi and
Ohio steamboats. This shift goes far in
explaining the loyalty of the Old Northwest
to Lincoln and the Union during the
Civil War" (pp. 219-220).
Iron Road to the West should appeal to the professional and lay reader.
Railfans
especially will appreciate the material
on locomotives and their three principal
builders: Thomas Rogers, Matthias
Baldwin, and the Norris brothers. The volume
is well researched and generally well
written. However, the narrative on regional
rail development, while essential, lacks
vitality. While a surprisingly large number
of typos mar the work, a marvelous
collection of illustrations enhance it. And, too,
a splendid set of tables and maps
complement the text. Regretfully, Stover did not
explore fully growing demands for the
standardization of railroad practices. And
he might have discussed the evolution of
railroad architecture, particularly the
ubiquitous depot. Still, Iron Road to
the West is a fine publication.
The University of Akron H. Roger
Grant
The Political Crisis of the 1850s. By Michael F. Holt (New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 1978. xix + 330p.; tables,
bibliography, notes, index. $10.95.)
This book is part of a series which
re-examines past periods of crisis in light of the
revived interest in political history
which has emerged in recent years. Michael
Holt, author of related works on this
subject, defines the political crisis of the 1850s
as the loss by the American party system
of its earlier ability to contain sectional
differences between North and South. For
almost thirty years before this time, the
two major parties had sustained
political competition over a broad range of issues
which did not pit North against South.
As long as each party possessed both
Northern and Southern adherents,
national partisan loyalties transcended
sectional differences, thereby defusing
any potential threat to the Union's
solidarity. By providing for the
interests of North and South, a strong party system
held sectional differences within safe
bounds from the 1820s through the 1840s.
In the 1850s, the Second
American Party System collapsed, as old partisan
232 OHIO HISTORY
loyalties waned and political
organizations reshaped along sectional lines. Many
historians traditionally have attributed
this change to the intensification of
sectional differences over slavery since
the late 1840s. Other historians have as-
cribed the realignments to current
ethnocultural strain over such issues as pro-
hibition, anti-Catholicism, and
nativism. Professor Holt considers both those
interpretations inadequate, contending
instead that the breakdown of the old party
system in the fifties was the cause
rather than the result of intensified sectionalism.
Although differences over slavery were
significant, he regards it an oversimplifica-
tion to cite slavery issues alone as the
political cause of disunion. He believes that
the explanation is more properly found
in studying the dynamics of partisan
behavior.
Holt expounds his thesis by tracing
party activity from 1820 through 1860. He
shows how Democrats differed with
National Republicans, and later Whigs, over
economics and personalities, while
managing to accommodate sectional
differences, even through the
controversies of the late 1840s over the acquisition of
new western lands from Mexico. His
attempted political synthesis of the
Jacksonian era may seem imperfect to
specialists in those years, as certain
statements are left unqualified and/or
unsubstantiated. It is also curious that while
analyzing every other presidential
election from 1836 to 1860, he omits the
campaign of 1840, in which the
conjunction of Northerners and Southerners to
create the national Whig party offers a
significant example for his thesis.
Holt moves to stronger ground in dealing
with his principal time period, from the
late 1840s onward. His most unique
contribution is his portrayal of the political
consensus that developed in the early
1850s, when both major parties accepted the
Compromise of 1850 and their old
economic differences were obliterated by a new
period of prosperity and constitutional
revision in many states. The political
uncertainty caused by this consensus
then moved politicians to divide on sectional
issues, not with the intent of weakening
the Union but in order to revitalize their
parties. This strategy became damaging,
however, as parties grew totally
sectionalized over the critical events
of the late 1850s. The Republican party then
emerged as a new pro-Northern
organization, while Northern and Southern
Democrats became divided. Within that
polarization, secession and civil war
followed the election of Abraham Lincoln
in 1860, as each side now saw in the
other's course a threat to its own
republican ideals. In the long run, it was not simply
differences over slavery, but that
issue's late absorption into partisan dynamics that
destroyed the party system as a bond of
union.
The book includes several tables that
employ numerical indexes as measures of
party differences, varying by particular
economic issues, states, and years. There is
also an extensive bibliographical
discussion. Holt's theory is thought-provoking
and provides new insight to his subject.
Individual readers will be left to form their
own opinions of the theory that
disruptive sectionalism was the effect rather than
the cause of partisan realignment in the
1850s.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Sylvan H. Kesilman
George W. Norris: The Triumph of a
Progressive, 1933-1944. By Richard
Lowitt.
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1978. xiii + 493p.; notes, illustrations,
bibliographical essay, index. $20.00.)
Book Reviews 233
Richard Lowitt has now finished his
three-volume study of George Norris, a
study that has consumed two decades. The
first volume began with Norris's birth in
Ohio in 1861 and traced his life there
until he settled in a small town in Nebraska in
1885 as a young lawyer. In 1902 after a
successful political career as county
prosecutor and district judge, Norris
was elected to Congress. Quickly the young
Nebraskan established his life-long
trademark-independence and a capacity to
accept and champion the progressive
changes of American life. His leadership in
the overthrow of the oppressive
leadership of Speaker Joseph Cannon made him
well known in Nebraska and the nation.
Lowitt's second volume begins with
Norris's election to the Senate in 1912 and
details his support for the flood tide
of Progressivism, and then his battles in the
1920s as a Republican dissident against
presidents and anti-Progressives
everywhere. In those years the skill of
his opposition and his quiet integrity would
make him a major political figure in
American politics. In 1933, as the subtitle of
this volume indicates, Norris found his
effective outsider role turned on its head. As
an ardent lover of the New Deal and
personal friend of F.D.R., he was constantly
active at the center of the New Deal
effort in the Senate. By the late 1930s, the
Nebraskan, famous as the father of TVA,
had also established a reputation as one
of the nation's foremost liberals.
William Allen White wrote in 1936: "In all this
land no one living has done so much as
George Norris to change the old habits and
customs and set us moving along wise
political paths and new ways of strength and
light" (p. 157). In 1936 because of
his support for Roosevelt, he in good conscience
ran as an Independent and won handily
his fifth term in a three-way race. Even in
the court fight Norris quietly stood
beside the President. By 1938 Norris, one of the
lonely few who had voted against the
World War I declaration, had moved from
isolationism to become a reluctant but
effective voice for F.D.R.'s foreign policy.
This was too much for Nebraska, which in
the late 1930s had slipped to the
Republican column. In 1942 the
eighty-one year old Senator lost his bid fora sixth
term and, spurning all offers of New
Deal employment, he lectured and wrote for
his causes until he died, August 28,
1944.
In this volume on Norris, Lowitt first
wanted to examine Norris's role in the
founding of and decade-long history of
TVA. Without doubt the several chapters
sprinkled through the book represent a
significant contribution to TVA history.
Relying heavily on the large collection
of Norris's letters and the Congressional
Record, Lowitt constructs a running history of TVA as seen by
Norris. Historians
of the TVA, public power, and those
generally interested in the question of public
rights vs. corporate America cannot
overlook this volume. But Lowitt ambitiously
wanted his work on Norris to represent
broadly a senatorial angle of view on the
entire New Deal period in all of its
domestic and foreign aspects. There is some
success here as well. Due to the patient
examination of every Senate session
between 1933 and 1942, little nuggets of
insights about important New Deal
questions are everywhere in this volume.
Unfortunately, Norris was first a
Republican minority Senator and then
later an Independent, so despite his
seniority he chaired no important
committee. Too often, except for TVA, he was
merely a cheerleader and follower,
although an important and thoughtful one.
Perhaps his greatest contribution to
important New Deal legislation lay in his
superb parliamentary skill, which he
used frequently to save, or to make better,
New Deal legislation. Impressively,
Norris the small-town mid-American,
frequently found himself to the left of
F.D.R. and the New Deal. Finally, Lowitt
hoped to make more clear the impact of
the New Deal on a single state, Nebraska,
where Norris, after a long struggle,
helped to create a "little TVA." Lowitt, bound
234 OHIO HISTORY
by his close following of Norris's
papers and Senatorial work, is least successful
here. He gives a clear account of
Nebraska's agricultural distress and Norris's
winning effort to create public power,
but this is only a beginning for those who
would like to see in larger terms the
New Deal's impact on Nebraska.
Norris's career in the 1920s and 1930s
appears counter to some accepted
generalizations about American political
life. Norris, noted by Washington
correspondents in the 1930s as the best
and most effective Senator, spurned
partisanship and a dramatic style.
Rather, as Lowitt writes, he used logic, command
of the facts, integrity, and quiet
persuasion; and it often worked. Norris, the fully-
blown Progressive, kicked hard against
the conservative trends of the 1920s. Norris,
the Progressive, moved easily and
enthusiastically into the New Deal. Indeed,
Lowitt writes that "Franklin
Roosevelt and the New Deal brought fulfillment to
Norris's progressivism" (p. 475).
Lowitt early in the book summarizes why Norris is
so important: "In his career,"
Lowitt writes, "was illustrated the transition of
middle-class liberalism from a
nineteenth-century individualistic base concerned
with a limited state to a
twentieth-century cooperative outlook involved with a
positive welfare state" (p. 173).
Lowitt's superb three-volume political biography of
George Norris enlightens us all on this
transition.
The College of Wooster James A.
Hodges
Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. By William G. McLoughlin. (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1978. xv +
239p.; suggestions for further reading,
index. $12.50.)
The key to William McLoughlin's new book
is his definition of awakenings as
revitalization movements. Such movements
occur, he argues, when the dominant
myths, symbols, values, or ideology of a
culture break down because of economic,
intellectual, or social change.
Awakenings produce revisions in the ideology of the
culture, revitalizing it, which in turn
revitalizes the culture as a whole. Revivals have
been a part of each of four awakenings
in America, and all of our awakenings have
issued in reform.
Using this definition, McLoughlin
suggests that "America was born in an
awakening" in England. The
emergence of bourgeois capitalism in the sixteenth
century challenged an established world
view. Puritanism evolved as a belief system
capable of sanctifying the new economic
structure, and became the new consensus.
Indeed, Puritanism provided
Anglo-America with a set of myths, symbols, and
values which have taken new form in each
succeeding awakening and remain alive
today.
Historians are familiar with the first
two American awakenings, both of which
were marked by widespread revivals.
McLoughlin presents them as revitalization
movements. The Puritan world view could
not accomodate eighteenth century
opportunities for individual advancement
and economic prosperity, he argues. A
new belief system, which elevated the
importance of the individual and challenged
the traditional hierarchy, emerged from
the Great Awakening (1730-60).
Ultimately this new perspective led to
the Revolution. However, it could not survive
changes wrought by the Enlightenment and
republican politics. A Second Great
Awakening (1800-30) forged a fresh
synthesis which could. Ironically, this new
consensus drove half of the nation to
attack various social ills, including slavery,
Book Reviews 235
while the other half sought purity in
more personal matters. The new synthesis led
to another holy war in 1860.
Two other eras of cultural change
constitute McLoughlin's third and fourth
awakenings. Neither the Prayer Meeting Revivals of
1857-8 nor the mass revivals
led by Dwight L. Moody qualify as
awakenings, since they produced no significant
shifts in American culture. Billy Sunday
can only be considered a leader in the third
awakening (1890-1920) because his
revivals coincided with other movements which
led to cultural change. Whereas the
revivalists of the first two awakenings had
helped forge new syntheses, however,
Sunday was one of the final champions of a
passing culture. The new world view of
the third awakening was shaped by social
scientists and liberal theologians who
read their works. The old belief system was
challenged by science in 1890, and the
new consensus drew from science as well as
religion. Nevertheless, it so
revitalized the American people that they again went to
war for a holy cause in 1917.
McLoughlin believes that we are
presently in the midst of the fourth awakening.
He once wrote that it began with Billy
Graham's revivals in the 1950s, but has now
revised his analysis. The basic ideas
which dominated most of this century were not
seriously challenged until the 1960s;
then the challenge came from the civil rights
movement and the counter culture. A new
evangelicalism has arisen, but so have a
plethora of other movements in which
individual Americans have been "reborn."
Revivalism is a small part of this
latest awakening, and McLoughlin concludes that
neo-evangelicalism is not likely to
revitalize America. A new consensus, he
counsels, will take a full generation to
emerge.
Some will argue with McLoughlin's
scheme. Important claims are made for five
periods of our history, and little is
said of other periods. Church historians have
seen the years between awakenings as
times of religious decline; McLoughlin
implies that they were merely times of
relative calm, when the dominant world view
functioned satisfactorily to explain
events. Social historians have not always
chosen his periods of awakening as the
times of deepest crisis. Political historians
may question whether awakenings led
directly to three wars. This reviewer objects
that the late eighteenth century is
neglected. Why treat the Revolution as the
product of an awakening rather than
identifying it as a separate revitalization
movement? Were there not important
shifts in the American world view between
1763 and 1789?
However, McLoughlin's concept of an
awakening enables him to synthesize a
wide variety of works on the first and
second great awakenings. Moreover, it
highlights the cultural significance of
these two movements and may interest secular
historians in studying them further.
What the concept contributes to our
understanding of the third awakening is
less clear. Morton White and Robert
Wiebe have adequately described the same
movement McLoughlin discusses in
different terms. Finally, it allows him
to make sense out of the present, and even to
make some predictions concerning when a
new consensus will emerge and what it
will look like.
McLoughlin describes this book as
"an essay rather than a scholarly
monograph." Several other books by
the same author are important for their
scholarship. This book is important
because it suggests a new paradigm for
interpreting American religious and
cultural history.
The Ohio State University Richard D.
Shiels
236 OHIO HISTORY
The Social Order of a Frontier
Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-70. By Don
Harrison Doyle. (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1978. xiii + 289p.; notes,
maps, illustrations, appendix, tables,
bibliographical essay, index. $12.50.)
Don Harrison Doyle's study of
Jacksonville, Illinois, speaks to a much-debated
issue in recent historiography, the
maintenance of community cohesion in the face
of rapid change. Unfortunately, the
vigor of this debate has not been matched by its
clarity or precision, and Doyle's study
forms no exception to this rule. The Social
Order of a Frontier Community suffers from serious conceptual and
methodological weaknesses, as well as
faults in the handling of data. Some of its
problems derive from uncritical
acceptance of the vague terms of the debate over
community cohesion; others are Doyle's
alone.
The book consists of a series of
descriptions of the forces in Jacksonville making
for chaos or community. On the side of
chaos we find geographic and social
mobility; ethnic and regional
identities; religious, political and moral com-
mitments. At the same time churches,
political parties, voluntary associations, the
booster ethos, and nationalism pushed in
varying degrees toward cohesion. Doyle's
fluent style brings alive the men and
events behind these categories, portraying them
with an interest and affection not
always found among academic historians. But his
inability to resolve the theoretical
issues raised by his book means that it will be of
more interest to those who share his
affection for Jacksonville than to analytically
oriented scholars.
Doyle's troubles begin with his
dependent variable, community cohesion. No one
has yet devised a measure of cohesion
for communities which fall somewhere on the
continuum between disintegration and
conformity. Since his community, like most
others, neither disintegrated nor
achieved total consensus, Doyle cannot make up
his mind whether Jacksonville can be
described as cohesive. He tells us that he finds
plausible an interpretive framework
which places conflict at the center of the
community-building process (p. 10); in a
later aside, however, he rejects that
framework, suggesting instead that
internal conflict in Jacksonville was controlled,
if not eliminated, by the suppression of
hostile public rhetoric (p. 123). Presumably
we are to accept as his thesis the claim
that Jacksonville's social order, because of
"its paradoxical combination of
mobility and stability, voluntarism and collective
discipline," managed "to
strike a workable compromise between the chaos of an
expansive capitalist society and the
enduring human need for community" (p. 15).
The crucial adjective
"workable" is not defined and so cannot be tested. Doyle's
thesis thus leaves unanswered the
essential question of whether or not, or to what
degree, Jacksonville was a cohesive
community.
The perilous logic necessitated by the
inability to measure cohesion is exemplified
by Doyle's treatment of ethnicity. While
granting that separate ethnic churches,
voluntary associations, and celebrations
fragmented the community, Doyle claims
that these common forms of organization
"betrayed a deeper level of community"
(p. 154). By this reasoning, the fact
that in 1861 North and South similarly
organized armies to destroy each other
betrayed a deeper level of community
beneath the differences over which they
fought.
Even if Doyle had managed to measure
cohesion, however, it is unlikely that a
research strategy limited to a single
community could produce anything but the
most tenuous hypotheses to explain what
had been found. Doyle has compounded
this problem by casting much of his data
into forms which make it impossible to
compare his findings with those of other
community studies. In measuring the
Book Reviews 237
distribution of wealth, for example, he
uniquely applies the Gini index of inequality
only to holders of real property rather
than to the population theoretically capable
of holding property, thus seriously
understating the extent of inequality as that
term is understood by other scholars.
When Doyle deals with the most important
questions, his study group is neither
the entire population, the adult population,
household heads or adult males, but the
"non-dependent" population. This
includes all household and family heads,
all gainfully employed persons, and all
males twenty years or older. Use of this
category is a defensible strategy (although
Doyle does not defend it), but it need
not preclude reporting one's findings on such
commonly investigated matters as
mobility, occupation, wealth, and ethnicity in a
form which will facilitate rather than
frustrate comparison.
When Doyle attempts to make analytical
points, he too often builds his case upon
weak empirical grounds. A case in point
concerns one of his most important
arguments: that voluntary associations
played a significant dual role by promoting
community interests while boosting
individual careers (pp. 178-93). The evidence
for the latter point is presented in
Table 17, which shows that voluntary association
officers before and after 1860 increased
the average dollar amount of their real
property holdings by more than the
average dollar increase in real property
holdings of the total non-dependent
population. Unfortunately for Doyle's
argument, Table 17 also shows that the
voluntary association officers began in 1850
and 1860 with larger holdings. When the
respective increases are converted to
percentages, it is clear that the
holdings of the voluntary association officers
actually increased less rapidly
than those of the total non-dependent population,
thus supporting the very opposite of
Doyle's claim.
Although this book presents a lively
account of some important aspects of
Jacksonville's past, it cannot be
regarded as a significant contribution to the new
social history. Readers interested in a
sophisticated exploration of the major issues
of historical community studies would be
better advised to turn to Robert Doherty,
Society and Power: Five New England
Towns (1977). Hopefully Doherty's
example rather than Doyle's will be the
starting point for future studies of
Midwestern communities.
Huron College, London, Ontario Jack S. Blocker Jr.
Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black
Folk Music to the Civil War. By Dena
J.
Epstein. (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1977. xix + 433p.; illustrations,
appendices, bibliography, index.
$17.95.)
Until recently, most work on the history
and the importance of early black folk
music in American life has been
speculative in nature. Earlier researchers could find
little primary documentation for their
beliefs about the centrality of the musical
experience in American slave life.
However, the publication of works such as Eileen
Southern's The Music of Black
Americans (1971) and Paul Oliver's Savannah
Syncopators (1970) opened new avenues for research. Now, with the
publication of
the impressive results of Dena Epstein's
twenty years of research, we can maintain
with even greater confidence than before
that black secular and sacred music
thrived despite the dehumanizing effects
of slavery.
This book furnishes us with a massive
amount of primary source material on
black music before 1867. In her
presentation Epstein relies heavily on accounts and
238 OHIO
HISTORY
descriptions of the music by travelers
in the New World, slaves, slaveholders,
clergymen, and other residents of the
American colonies. Some of the material will
be familiar to folklorists, historians,
and other scholars, but most of it has not been
examined previously in a work such as
this.
Epstein was faced with the problem of
documenting the existence of black music
in the New World from the time of the
slaves' earliest arrival in 1619 to roughly
around the time of the American
Revolution. She explains that contemporary
descriptions from the mainland were both
fragmentary and few in number.
However, she discovered numerous
descriptions of African singing and dancing
from the West Indies that she felt were
relevant for understanding black music on
the mainland. Epstein points out that
until the Revolutionary War "Britain and
France considered all their colonies in
the New World as part of the same colonial
structure" (p. xvi, 22), and that
"contemporary descriptions of these colonies
intermixed them, making little
distinction between the islands and the mainland"
(p. xvi). The abundance of reports of
music and dancing from the West Indies, all of
which were consistent with the few
accounts from the mainland, render it likely that
West African musical practices persisted
on the mainland as well as on the islands
despite the former's smaller slave
population. Throughout the book, especially in
the initial chapters, Epstein makes
profitable use of the literature from the islands to
support her thesis.
In Part One, Epstein concentrates on
reports of African music up to 1800. A
majority of the accounts from the
colonies describe a dance known as La Calinda,
that was usually accompanied by an
instrument called a banza (or banjo). She
believes that these reports conclusively
confirm the frequently disputed claim that
the banjo was of African origin. In
addition, she provides well-researched
discussions of the whites' attempts to
outlaw drums, of the joyful musical activities
at funerals that so offended many
Europeans, and of the gradual replacement of
certain aspects of African music with
European musical elements. Epstein also
furnishes new information on various
types of worksongs. On the whole, this
information tends to support the widely
held belief that such songs were of African
origin. However, she is careful to point
out that "it is still not possible to document a
specific worksong's origin in Africa and
its persistence in the New World" (p. 69).
During the antebellum period, discussed
in Part Two, descriptions of black
music performed on the mainland were
plentiful. Epstein contends, on the basis of
further first-hand reports, that black
secular singing and dancing persisted after
1800, even though many observers
insisted that the slaves did not dance and sang
only hymns. She emphasizes that
religious opposition to dancing was responsible
partly for the latter view. However, as
she ably demonstrates, a rich and distinctive
form of black religious music developed
along with the persisting secular forms.
Many of the "Negro spirituals"
incorporated African elements that were present
in the earlier non-sacred music,
including pentatonic or other nondiatonic scales,
unison singing, and bodily movement,
such as the so-called religious "shout."
Although Epstein's book is almost
entirely descriptive in nature, I do not believe
that this should be considered a defect.
The almost complete lack of musical
transcriptions (at least until 1867)
renders it very doubtful that interpretation or
analysis of existing documents could
pretend to be anything but conjecture. As she
rightly points out about the
transcriptions that did exist prior to 1867,
"conventional musical notation was
inadequate to capture the distinctive features
of the music as it was performed, and
the transcribers were struggling with a task
wholly beyond their abilities" (p.
347).
It is no exaggeration to say that Sinful
Tunes and Spirituals is one of the most
Book Reviews
239
well-researched histories of one of
America's few indigenous musical forms. It is a
major contribution to our understanding
of the development of a significant part of
Afro-American culture. Dena Epstein is
to be thanked for producing the kind of
documentary study that has been needed
for many years.
There are only a few typographical
errors in the text. The excellent forty-page
bibliography is partially annotated with
convenient page references provided for
the relevant section of each text.
University of Cincinnati Eric Melvin
H. M. Daugherty and the Politics of
Expediency. By James N. Giglio. (Kent:
The
Kent State University Press, 1978. xii +
256p.; illustrations, notes, bibliography,
index. $15.00.)
Harry Micajah Daugherty was one of the
more controversial and visible
politicians of the first quarter of the
twentieth century. Yet historians know little
about him, except for the corruption
associated with his tenure as Attorney General
of the United States. James N. Giglio's
work, H. M. Daugherty and the Politics of
Expediency, gives a human dimension to Daugherty and details
aspects of his life
hitherto neglected. It is not a new
interpretation of the Harding era, nor does it take
fundamental issue with what historians
have previously written about Daugherty.
Giglio has, however, illuminated
Daugherty's life and career, most notably that
aspect of his life that relates to his
long political career, and cogently concludes that
his life represented the politics of
expediency. In the process Giglio also offers good
insight into Republican politics from
the 1890s to the early 1920s.
Giglio's brief study is highly readable
and well researched despite his inability to
obtain Daugherty's papers, which were
apparently destroyed. A scholar will find
the work abundantly documented
nonetheless, using the Harding Papers and a host
of manuscript collections of
contemporary public figures; the twentieth century
politician will find it rich with
political maneuvering and manipulation, since
Daugherty was a master at such activity.
Although he had served in elective
capacity only a short time himself,
Daugherty made his mark as a party organizer,
manager, and state factional leader.
Throughout the work Giglio asserts that
despite his Machiavellian approach to
politics, Daugherty was dedicated to the
success of his party as much as to his
personal advancement. Above all, Daugherty
was a pragmatist who sacrificed ideology
and principle. This quality, coupled with
an excessive competitive and combative
nature, characterized his political life.
Accordingly, Giglio details Daugherty's
indiscretions in Ohio politics around the
turn of the century, his involvement in
the Morse case in 1911, his role in the
Columbus and Trust debacle in 1913, his
continuous and frequently illicit lobbying
activities with the American Gas and
Electric Company, the Western Union
Telegraph Company, and the Ohio State
Telephone Company, as well as his abuse
of power when he served as President
Harding's Attorney General.
Giglio's view of Harding follows the
interpretations offered by other scholars
since the release of the Harding Papers:
it is an interpretation that points to the
assertiveness of Harding and his
positive contributions as a conciliator. The
dissimilar natures of the President and
the Attorney General suggest that the
relationship between Harding and
Daugherty was not always amicable. Indeed,
Giglio writes that Daugherty was
important to Harding during the primary
240 OHIO HISTORY
campaign and perhaps during the first
year of the administration, after which
Harding was far more interested in the
advice of Hughes and Hoover.
Daugherty sought the office "to
vindicate a past which was constantly under
suspicion," and he determined to
stay in office once he got it. Harding was obliging:
he appointed Daugherty as Attorney
General, having promised it to him as early as
November, 1920, and defended that
appointment until he died in August, 1923.
While it may have been a personal
triumph for Daugherty, he was not successful as
an attorney general, even in the mind of
President Harding who, although he
continued to defend him, sought Daugherty's
advice less and less. President
Coolidge, under whom Daugherty served
after Harding's death, did not seek his
advice at all.
Giglio's H. M. Daugherty and the
Politics of Expediency is a most readable study
of an important twentieth century figure
whose political life exemplified what
happens when the electorate so casually
elect their public servants. He, his
President, and many around them lacked
ideology and principle, and therefore
lacked the ability to lead the American
people. The work is a valuable contribution
to the literature of twentieth century
political history, but perhaps more
importantly as a case study of the kind
of politics that Americans ought to find
anathema to the democratic political
process.
Youngstown State University George D. Beelen
The Delaware Indian Westward
Migration: With the Texts of Two Manuscripts
(1821-22) Responding to General Lewis
Cass's Inquiries About Lenape Culture
and Language. By C. A. Weslager. (Wallingford, Pa.: The Middle
Atlantic Press,
1978. xiii + 266p.; illustrations, maps,
references, index. $16.00.)
Students of native American history
continue to remain in debt to C. A.
Weslager, because his excellent tribal
history of The Delawares (1972) is now
complemented by the present publication.
Weslager's mastery of the subject is
obvious as he constructs a tight
synopsis of Delaware tribal experiences, correcting
interpretations where new data has
become available, and gives the reader an
overview of the trek by the Delaware
peoples from the eastern seaboard to
Oklahoma. Indeed, the tribal journeys
may be followed more closely because of the
maps which have been provided in the publication.
The most significant contribution of
Weslager's new book, however, is the
printing of the questions and answers
distributed and collected in the 1820s by
Governor Lewis Cass of the Michigan
Territory. The author's unequalled
knowledge has enabled him to reconstruct
both the questions distributed and the
answers received by Cass wherever one or
the other was missing. Because many of
Cass's Delaware informants were older
persons whose memories reached back into
the eighteenth century, the information
uncovered provides an enormous store of
cultural material. Among the subjects
touched upon are government, war, and
peace; death, birth, marriage and
family; tribal traditions and social relations;
medicine, astronomy, and mathematics;
music and poetry; religion, manners and
customs; food, games, dances, and
amusements; and hunting, dress, and personal
appearance.
Useful to the student of native American
demography is the inclusion of 1977
population statistics enumerating
present people of Delaware descent. Those
Book Reviews 241
interested in current trends in
demographic methodology relating to pre-
Columbian populations also will note
with interest a passage in the first manuscript
in which the Delaware informant recounts
the onset of a great epidemic concurrent
with the arrival of the Europeans.
Of considerable significance also are
the word lists in the Delaware language
which the author has included. Because
of Weslager's long acquaintance with the
Delaware tongue, he has noted
differences in the two principal Delaware dialects
("U" and "M"), as
well as in verb constructions and the evolution of terms
introduced from outside influences such
as European languages.
While this publication in no way
supplants Weslager's more complete tribal
history, it is an extremely useful
synopsis. Indeed, the author and his publisher are
to be congratulated for avoiding the
temptation to shorten the historical setting in
order to reduce costs. No price saving
would have been sufficient to justify losing
the invaluable contextual material.
Without the background material, the
manuscripts would lose much of their
meaning. As it is thus presented, the book is
useful to both the specialist and the
interested general reader. The former will be
grateful for the documentary information
(as well as the handy corpus of general
information), and the latter will have
no trouble appreciating both the readable
introductory chapters and the more
specific materials.
With the publication of this volume, C.
A. Weslager becomes the author of both
the best brief account and the best
comprehensive treatment of the Delaware
peoples. No library collection of native
American material should be without this
outstanding piece of work.
Marietta College James H.
O'Donnell, III
The Trans-Appalachian Frontier:
People, Societies, and Institutions 1775-1850. By
Malcolm J. Rohrbough. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978. xiv + 444 p.;
tables, maps, notes, bibliography,
index. $17.50.)
Malcolm J. Rohrbough, writing about the
settlement of the region west of the
Appalachian Mountains, looks at its
development in several ways. First, he defines
it chronologically, arguing that changes
occurred in four time periods: 1775-1795;
1795-1815; 1815-1830; and 1830-1850.
Second, he sees the settlement of the frontier
regions progressing geographically, from
Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1770s and
1780s to the Old Northwest and the Old
Southwest after the turn of the century, and
gradually into more remote regions such
as Michigan, Florida, Arkansas, and
finally Wisconsin and Iowa. The pattern
of movement, he feels, was linked to
specific events such as Indian cessions
of land to the federal government,
speculation in land and the increased
availability of credit, growing markets for
both staples and raw materials, and
developments in international relations that
opened new land for settlement and in
other ways affected the inhabitants of the
various sections.
The evolution of the frontier can also
be traced through the arrival of certain
institutions that Rohrbough sees as
going hand-in-hand with the progress of
settlement. The desire of pioneers for
security created the need for military
protection. Once this had been achieved
through the militia, and good harvests had
provided a measure of economic
well-being, settlers turned their attention toward
the achievement of stability. This
usually took two forms: formal government to
242 0HIO HISTORY
preserve law and order and the creation
of certain aids to economic progress. Of the
several levels and types of government,
Rohrbough sees territorial and county units
as having been the most beneficial and
influential in the lives of the settlers. Urban
centers, improved transportation
facilities, and the means to carry on commerce
with other parts of the world made it
possible for both farmers and townspeople to
prosper. Once these necessary
institutions were flourishing, people usually, but
often only slowly, turned their minds to
the establishment of desirable but less
necessary amenities, such as churches
and schools.
Rohrbough points out that, even though
the process described above began over
and over again as people moved westward,
the efforts were usually less strenuous in
later decades. The process of trial and
error in older areas often provided
indications of what techniques were most
likely to succeed in the newer areas,
whether they involved clearing land or
establishing a legal clientele. As urban areas
and established governmental units began
to flourish, they often actually preceded
the agricultural settler. Improved
methods of transportation came more quickly in
the 1830s and 1840s than they had in the
1790s, making it easier for the immigrants
to reach their destinations and, later,
to ship goods to market than it had been for
their predecessors.
This book is well written and well
organized. Rohrbough has made it easy to
follow his discussion through the use of
introductory material in each section,
excellent maps, and tables. He has
chosen to cite in his footnotes sources of three
major types to which he turned for
specific material: manuscript collections;
newspapers; unpublished theses;
dissertations, and other papers. While such
citations reveal a wealth of sources
with which the reader may well be unfamiliar,
one wishes for at least a partial
bibliography of the many secondary sources to
which the author had occasion to refer.
The book is, unfortunately, marred by a
great many misspellings or printer's
errors, which range from the merely annoying,
such as "florests" for
"forests," to those that are actually misleading, as in the
repeated use of "country"
where "county" was obviously intended.
Overall, Rohrbough's approach to the
settlement of the trans-Appalachian
frontier provides a useful synthesis of
what has become an almost unmanageable
amount of material. The book will be
appreciated especially by those who do not
wish to spend a goodly portion of their
careers exploring the growth and
development of America's early frontier.
Centennial History of the
Indiana General Assembly Rebecca A. Shepherd
Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic
Service in Industrializing America. By
David M. Katzman. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978. xi + 374p.;
illustrations, tables, appendix, notes,
note on sources, index. $14.95.)
Any new discipline has hidden gaps which
only become obvious when some work
goes a substantial way toward filling
them. Certainly this is the case with the new
social history, and especially with its
sub-field, women's history. David M.
Katzman's Seven Days A Week: Women
and Domestic Service in Industrializing
America, being the first recent scholarly book on this topic, is
a major contribution
and is to be applauded. Nonetheless, it
is but a first treatment and the need for
further research and analysis is
obvious.
Book Reviews 243
Previously unheard have been the voices
of the domestics themselves. Now their
cries are audible: their tiredness and
fatigue after an eleven hour day, their
humiliation and resentment at having to
wear livery, as well as their loneliness and
isolation in the midst of another's
crowded home. Especially poignant are the
laments of the culturally alienated
live-in immigrant domestics, the sexually
exploited young, and the racially
scorned Southern blacks. All shared a low status,
a personal loss of freedom, and a lack
of better options.
Katzman does not stop with poignant
quotes and anecdotes, however. He also
provides solid, often quantitative, data
about the servant situation in different
times, in different cities and regions,
and in different ethnic and racial groupings.
Recruiting, salaries, living quarters,
and duties are all treated in some depth. In
addition to being a serious work in
women's history, Seven Days A Week is also a
contribution to economic history, black
history, family history, and Progressive
reform history.
Of especial interest is Katzman's
presentation of the complex image of women in
the nineteenth century. True, as is
known, white middle class women were seen as
fragile, physically weak, and often
overwrought. But their servants were also
female, and thus, one might suppose,
subject to the same ills. Such of course was not
the case. Clearly the concept, the
"image of women," must be broadened to include
class as well as other variables.
Fascinating as well is Katzman's
discussion of the debate over the development of
educational programs in domestic
science. How best to professionalize the
occupation was a matter of great
dispute, with some urging the education of
domestics, while others argued for the
formal training of mistresses. "Reforms" of
each type were often supported by the
Progressives, although there was great
resistance by both the housewives and
the servants.
Although Katzman has made a real
contribution, nonetheless the work has some
obvious deficiencies. The book, overly
long given its substance, is often tedious and
repetitious. The same few quotes and
examples reappear in many different
contexts. The text is often choppy, due
in part to the inclusion of much quantitative
data in the body of the writing. Both
his sources and tools can be criticized, though
Katzman is honest with the reader
concerning most of these methodological
difficulties.
A more important problem, however, is
that the theoretical implications of the
findings are but touched upon. What was
the significance of occupation in the self-
image of nineteenth century American
women? Did servant women truly choose
domestic service because it was
feminine, even though most working women
considered it quite unacceptable? How
could the American ideal of equality coexist
with the stereotype of the inferior
servant and the "maternalistic" employer? Why
did the feminization of the occupation
occur? What was the relationship between
skill and specialization, or rather the
lack of both, to status?
Nevertheless, despite these minor
deficiencies, Seven Days A Week deserves a
positive recommendation. The statistical
appendices, the excellent notes (unfor-
tunately at the back), and the truly
fine annotated bibliography are valuable. In his
substance Katsman conveys much of value,
while still leaving enough room for
further embellishments. The book serves,
as well, the additional vital function of
provoking thoughts about the present
exploited domestic, the "cleaning lady." This
present-day domestic works most often
without the security of the minimum wage,
social security, pension, or a paid
vacation. The story of women exploiting women
has not only a long history, but also a
present.
Marietta College Michele
Hilden Willard
Book Reviews
In Pursuit of Happiness: American
Conceptions of Property From the Seventeenth
to the Twentieth Century. By William B. Scott. (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1977. xi + 244 p.; notes, index.
$12.50.)
Scott's admirably lucid survey traces
not only changing conceptions of property
rights, but also alterations in
expectations of what private ownership may
contribute to the pursuit of happiness.
His spokesmen of "American conceptions"
are mainly politicians, jurists, and
social reformers.
During the colonial period, individual
proprietorship of land was expected to
maximize productivity, provide freemen
with the means to pursue a calling, and
secure to labor its appropriate reward.
Though claims to land based on purchase
from Indians provided a justification
for landholding other than "need and use,"
several advocates of confiscatory
taxation challenged the right of proprietors to
hold idle land for speculative purposes.
The Harringtonian founding fathers
agreed that widely distributed landed
property gave citizens a stake in
society; but most of them came to agree with
Madison that a balance of interests
rather than universal proprietorship offered the
most promising guarantee of social
stability. Later suffrage reformers uncritically
substituted the vote itself for
landholding as a foundation for political in-
dependence.
In some northern states, "natural
rights" theories provided the legal rationale for
emancipation. Some southern defenders of
slavery sought to define slaves with
other property as possessions for whose
protection government was instituted.
Other defenders of the peculiar
institution eschewed natural rights theories in favor
of positive law and positivist sociology.
The economic transformations associated
with factory technology, the wage
system, and the corporation led to
further re-evaluation of the role and definition of
property. Antebellum judges chose to
protect corporate property as in-
distinguishable from individual
proprietorship. Justice Stephen J. Field, speaking
emblematically for the later nineteenth
century courts, included use of and revenues
from corporate property among the rights
protected by constitutional guarantees
of substantive due process. But where
economic development required the
abridgement of individual proprietary
rights, judges construed those rights as
narrowly as possible. Political
economists defined wages as property and perceived
owners, managers, and laborers as
functionally equivalent, if differentially
rewarded, participants in the productive
process.
By the mid-twentieth century, most
Americans "accepted with only sentimental
protest their virtual loss of
entrepreneurial opportunity" originally associated with
private property (p. 158). Courts tended
to define equal opportunity in terms of
access to education and employment
rather than to ownership of productive
resources.
Concurrently with these transformations,
social critics from Robert Owen and
Alfred Brisbane to Edward Bellamy and
John Dewey announced that the industrial
system required cooperative ownership
and management of the means of
production. Non-Marxist critics
virtually abandoned the labor theory of value-
and reward-as anachronisms.
Scott's 205-page summary ignores
countless struggles over the definition of