Book Reviews
Spirit Fruit: A Gentle Utopia. By H. Roger Grant. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 1988. xiv + 203p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography,
index. $22.50.)
The Reluctant Radicals: Jacob L.
Beilhart and The Spirit Fruit Society. By
James L. Murphy. (Lanham, Maryland:
University Press of America, 1989.
xii + 263p.; illustrations, notes,
appendixes, bibliography, index. $32.50.)
Each of these books provides a detailed
picture of the Spirit Fruit commu-
nity which was founded and led by Jacob
Beilhart, a religious seeker who
hoped it would enable him and his
followers to live a totally unselfish life.
Before his community was established and
incorporated under Ohio law in
1901, Beilhart was influenced by the
teachings of the Seventh Day Adventists,
Christian Scientists, Theosophists, and
Spiritualists, as well as promoters of
sexual freedom. Though Beilhart rejected
the idea that Spirit Fruit was a
religion, many of the community's
practices resembled the Christian Perfec-
tionism which John Humphrey Noyes had
incorporated into his Oneida
Community. Spirit Fruiters, however, had
much more private space than did
the Oneida communitarians. Moreover,
they did not agree on all matters, they
kept their own property, and largely chose
their own work assignments. The
Spirit Fruit community consisted of an
original ten members, and because
there was much coming and going, the
total population was never much larger
than that. For a person with such
determined ideas and leadership talent, Jacob
Beilhart was amazingly tolerant of
dissent. Unlike many other community
founders, he never assumed the role of dictator.
Beilhart envisioned Spirit Fruit, or
Universal Life, as an advanced state of
being available only to a select
minority. Since its teaching and practices
contradicted much of organized
Christianity, Beilhart frequently critized the
clergy and denied that his beliefs constituted a
religion. Yet he never denied
spirituality, which was the very heart
of his teaching. His was a philosophy of
"live and let live," so long
as no one infringed on the rights of others. He also
practiced a kind of nonresistance. When
an irate father arrived with law
officers to remove his daughter from the
community, Beilhart made no attempt
to stop them. To Spirit Fruiters the
individual was paramount. Although he
strongly denied any affinity with the
anarchism of Emma Goldman, Beilhart's
philosophy could properly be described
as anarchism of the individualist,
nonviolent variety, similar to that of
Josiah Warren. Apparently, all the
communitarians thoroughly understood
Beilhart's teachings, for when he died
suddenly in 1908-at age 41 of
complications of appendicitis-the community
continued without interruption for another twenty
years.
Although Beilhart's philosophy is now
virtually forgotten, both authors
evaluate Spirit Fruit as a successful venture. Indeed,
it was a way of life highly
satisfactory to those who chose it.
Members, who were self-chosen, often
brought special skills to the community, all were
willing to work hard, and
there were few personality problems. They were all
"nice people," said one of
Jacob's followers, and only one really
disruptive member joined near the end
of the community's life. Beilhart, who was always
referred to as Jacob, often
spoke publicly about his philosophy of
life and published two periodicals for
the same purpose. Not surprisingly,
Jacob's views, especially those concerning
Book Reviews
71
the rejection of marriage, met anger and
rejection from the world at large.
Pulpit and press attacked him, and
partly because of such attacks the
community moved several times. Starting
in Lisbon, Ohio, Spirit Fruit later
moved to Chicago, then to rural Illinois
where Jacob died. Following his death
the group moved to California where
members lived according to their Spirit
Fruit ways until 1928, when old age and
disease forced them to abandon
community life. It was a remarkable
example of an alternative style of living
that lasted for three decades, truly a
"gentle utopia."
Although both books cover the same
ground, they complement each other.
Roger Grant's Spirit Fruit is a
well-researched, highly readable account of the
utopian venture. Grant places Spirit
Fruit in the context of other radical and
community movements. Besides discussing
Jacob's philosophy, Grant in-
cludes information about each of the
Spirit Fruiters and sprinkles his text with
short, appropriate quotations. Most of
his material comes from published
sources and from extensive
correspondence with two individuals who were
born into the community. His work, in
handsome format with a number of
useful photographs, provides an
excellent introduction to Spirit Fruit.
Readers whose appetites have been
whetted for more information should
then turn to James L. Murphy's The
Reluctant Radicals, which includes
extensive details not found in Grant's
study, and lengthy quotations from the
sources. While it contains more
information, it is not as readable either in style
or format as the Grant volume, and the
photographs are poorly reproduced.
Nevertheless, Murphy's book is
especially useful for unraveling the connection
between Jacob Beilhart and C.W. Post of
cereal fame, who was the biological
father of the two Beilhart children as a
result of a love affair unrelated to
community practices. There is also an
extended discussion of the Overbrook,
Massachusetts, colony of Frederick Reed,
the only spin-off from the original
Spirit Fruit community. Three appendices
include material on the Beilhart
genealogy, the constitution and
regulations of the Spirit Fruit Society, and the
connection between Beilhart and Post.
Spirit Fruit was a unique way of life
providing a handful of Americans with
an environment for creative living which
they believed unavailable in the world
at large. It was, however, an
introspective approach. Spirit Fruiters had little
knowledge of social injustice and did
not concern themselves with such
matters. They believed that eventually
all would follow their example, but only
through progress toward an advanced
spirituality. Theirs was an important
contribution to the complex heritage of
American life and thought, and both
these books bring that contribution to
our attention. Reading them and meeting
Jacob and his extended family leaves the
reader with a sense of regret that they
have all disappeared from our midst.
Wilmington College Larry
Gara
American Temperance Movements: Cycles
of Reform. By Jack S. Blocker Jr.
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989. xvi +
199p.; illustrations, notes and
references, bibliographic essay.
$24.95.)
In many ways the history of America is a
history of reform movements, and
Ohioans have often been on the cutting
edge. Temperance is no exception. As
a social crusade temperance preceded
abolitionism and women's suffrage, and
72 OHIO HISTORY
it has outlasted them. Patterns of
drinking, the Protestant ethic, immigration,
ethnicity, and the evolution of
capitalism have all played a part in the
movement. In turn, temperance has
affected many aspects of American life,
and has called into question some of our
most basic assumptions about
individual freedom, community, and morality. Blocker,
who teaches at Huron
College in Ontario, asserts that campaigns against
alcohol are cyclical. They
always begin with righteous indignation,
progress through moral suasion and
political organizing, and lead
eventually to attempts to enforce prohibition. But
temperance strategies have been highly
diverse, ranging from pulpit-pounding
to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. More
important, the temperance move-
ment has always been closely tied to
other crusades for social change, notably
women's rights. Blocker demonstrates
persuasively that those who campaign
against drinking always end up
questioning attitudes toward class, race, gender
and the American democratic process.
Ohioans took an early lead in the
prohibition battle. Bethiah Yeoman Ogle of
Washington Court House and others like
her founded the Woman's Christian
Temperance Union, and the headquarters of the
Anti-Saloon League was in
Westerville. The League was a genuine
grassroots organization, beginning in
the churches and small towns of Ohio,
then linking up with local prohibition
societies in other states. Its
Westerville presses turned out countless books,
pamphlets and broadsides that helped
convert Americans to the crusade. Still,
Ohio lagged far behind in the effort to
outlaw sales of intoxicating liquors.
During the late nineteenth century many
counties and states went "dry," but
the prohibition campaign in Ohio was
particularly complex and indecisive.
Efforts by the brewing industry and the
saloonkeepers to deflect the crusade,
by calling for greater government
regulation and self-policing, often began in
Ohio. The state's ethnic and economic
diversity may have been partly
responsible for the extended
controversy. And as late as 1935, Alcoholics
Anonymous grew out of a chance meeting
between two desperate men in
Akron.
Anyone interested in American social
history will find a wealth of ideas and
unexpected interconnections in this
book. We learn how prohibitionism
enabled a half-dozen major brewers to
eliminate the competition, and discover
who bankrolled the campaign for the Eighteenth
Amendment. Blocker's
research leaves no doubt that American
reform movements are interrelated in
often unexpected ways and that their
effects ramify far beyond their original
purposes. In addition, he explores past
and present scholarly writing on the
subject, and summarizes his opinions in
an informative bibliographic essay.
Perhaps the book does not go far enough
in its critique of the movement to
identify alcoholism as a disease, but
this might require another full volume.
Blocker's cyclical theory is an original
contribution to the field, and may prove
to have application to other reform
movements as well. An epilogue covers
major events since 1975, and the notes
are comprehensive.
The Twayne Social Movements series also
includes studies of civil rights,
feminism, conservatism, and gay/lesbian
activism.
Sinclair Community College Thomas S. Martin
Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in
Confederate Military History. By
Richard M. McMurry. (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press,
1989. xvi + 204p.; notes,
bibliography, index. $19.95.)
Book Reviews
73
In 1982 Professor Richard McMurry
published a commendable biography of
General John Bell Hood. Since then
McMurry has done a great deal of research
and thinking about the Army of Tennessee
and the Army of Northern Virginia.
In Two Great Rebel Armies, he
offers an essay that contrasts these two major
Confederate field forces.
Some of the ideas in this book are
little more than suggestions, which call for
more discussion. One example is
Professor McMurry's evaluation of Robert E.
Lee. Few will disagree with his
assertion that this Virginian "stands as the
colossus of Confederate military
history" (p. 139), far and away the most
successful of the South's field
commanders. Yet it is also true that Lee
launched vigorous tactical offensives
and lost thousands of his men and
officers in 1862 and 1863, both in
tragic defeats such as Malvern Hill and
Gettysburg and also in costly victories
such as Second Manassas and
Chancellorsville-losses in leadership
and manpower that the Army of North-
ern Virginia could not afford. Lee was
indisputably a better general than his
counterparts in the Western theater, but
the casualties he suffered during two
years of aggressive campaigning left him
in May 1864 in much the same straits
as General Joseph E. Johnston in
northern Georgia. That spring found both of
these Southerners confronted by forces
much larger than their own-armies
led by able, experienced, and determined
commanders.
A second example is the discussion in
the chapter on the officers and enlisted
men of the Eastern and Western
Confederate armies which, in arguing that the
Army of Northern Virginia was better
trained than the Army of Tennessee,
blurs the distinction between training
and discipline. Training helps give
soldiers the ability to do things
"by the book," but it is not discipline, which
is the conduct of operations
"by the book"-in camp, on the march, or in
battle. McMurry may well be right that
the company officers of the Army of
Northern Virginia were better trained
than those of the Army of Tennessee,
but this does not mean that the soldiers
of either organization were well
disciplined. He is correct in depicting the Western army as poorly
disciplined
but so, too, was the Army of Northern
Virginia. Lee himself lamented: "The
great want in our army is firm
discipline." Straggling hurt the Army of
Northern Virginia during the crucial
campaigns of Sharpsburg and Gettysburg.
General D. H. Hill, who served in both
theaters of war, drew no distinction
between the Eastern and Western
Confederate infantryman when he wrote:
"Of the shoulder-to-shoulder
courage, bred of drill and discipline, [the
Southern soldier] knew nothing and cared
less."
This is not to say that Professor
McMurry is wrong about these issues, only
that they deserve more examination, and
the tone of this work in fact invites
further discussion. Two Great Rebel
Armies is a research report, rather than a
definitive book that attempts to
"prove" a tightly argued thesis. It is a
stimulating essay, one that improves our
knowledge of both the Army of
Northern Virginia and the Army of
Tennessee. This book establishes, for
example, how the graduates of the Virginia
Military Institute and the Citadel
gave Lee's army a sturdy foundation of
company and regimental officers, while
the Western Confederacy had no
comparable sources of well trained small-unit
leaders. There are valuable insights,
too, in McMurry's assessments of the
South's generals. His delineation of the
debate between historians Thomas
Connelly and Albert Castel over Lee's
generalship will be helpful to two
audiences: it will introduce some
readers to this historiography and it will help
more advanced students sort out their
ideas about it.
74 OHIO HISTORY
Two Great Rebel Armies is an appealing book, written in a positive tone.
McMurry generously acknowledges the
contributions of others in his field and
he enlivens his prose with some
sparkling side-comments. He also exhibits a
sense of humor, defying the notion that
serious history has to be dull. About a
quarter of the way into his essay, for
example, McMurry speculates that only
a computer could determine whether a Federal force
under Grant, Sherman,
Thomas, and Sheridan could have defeated a Confederate
one commanded by
Lee, Longstreet, Jackson, and Stuart. He
later (p. 132) returns to this idea and
gives it a facetious twist: "Some
historian who really wants to melt the
microchips might try asking one of the
infernal machines what would have
happened if a Union army led by
McClellan, Pope, Burnside, and Hooker had
tangled with a band of Rebels under
Joseph E. Johnston, Bragg, Hood, and
Pillow." Two Great Rebel Armies is
that rare treat, a scholarly book that makes
for enjoyable reading.
Office of Air Force History Perry D. Jamieson
Andrew Johnson: A Biography. By Hans L. Trefousse. (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1989, 463p.;
illustrations, notes, index. $25.00.)
Anyone expecting this latest biography
of Andrew Johnson to revise recent
scholarship on his presidency and
impeachment or bring to light new evidence
will be disappointed. Trefousse is the
first Johnson biographer to make use of
the entire mass of papers of Andrew
Johnson. The work is heavily document-
ed, no doubt as a result of the
tremendous store of information obtained by the
author from his earlier works on the era
and the biographies of Benjamin Wade
and Ben Butler. This wide-ranging
compilation of sources over several decades
has led to several inconsistencies in
the citation of repositories for primary
source materials. The institution known
today as the Cincinnati Historical
Society (CHS) has been cited by that
name as well as the Historical and
Philosophical Society of Ohio and the
Historical Society of Cincinnati. These
latter two names were ones which have
been used to describe CHS, but to the
outside researcher may be confusing.
Another example is the State Historical
Society of Wisconsin cited by that title
and also cited as the Wisconsin
Historical Society. There are a number
of misspellings of names of political
figures, which, like the citation
problem, point to the need for a closer
inspection of the page proofs.
Despite these problems, this is an
interesting work. Perhaps more than any
previous biography of the seventeenth
president, we learn of the personal
tragedies affecting Johnson, his family
and immediate circle of friends. His
spouse Eliza's near-lifetime invalid
status, son Charles' death in a fall from a
horse in 1863, son Robert's alcoholism
and suicide, Johnson's own affliction
with painful kidney stones, and the
death of several political intimates at
critical points in his career provide
ample evidence that his was a complex life.
These complexities also help explain
certain behavior patterns exhibited at
crucial times in Johnson's career. In
addition, Trefousse pounds home the
darker side of Johnson's basic
attitudes, more especially his intense racial
bigotry. Despite protestations of
friendship to the freedman, Johnson's public
and private utterances revealed a
long-standing racism.
Book Reviews
75
Johnson, Trefousse points out, was an
effective stump speaker when
campaigning for local or state office in
Tennessee. He thought that this
oratorical style would be successful
across the nation and was surprised when,
instead, it backfired. As Johnson sadly
discovered, he was a representative of
an era that time and the nation had
passed by. Despite the nation's move from
an agrarian to a more urban,
industrialized orientation, Johnson held fast to the
Jeffersonian-Jacksonian notions of a
nation of small farmers and merchants.
While the biography is especially strong
in its coverage of the presidential
years, it provides more coverage than
previous biographies of Johnson's early
political career in Greeneville,
Tennessee. Trefousse makes good use of local
public records to clarify Johnson's
activities and correct previous errors about
the beginnings of his career. The
gubernatorial years, however, may have been
more accurately analyzed had greater use
been made of published state
documents (annual reports of government
agencies) and the public papers of
the governor.
Trefousse's biography will no doubt
stand as the best biography on the
subject for some time. While slightly
flawed by inaccuracies of citation and
misspellings, these problems are far
outweighed by the extensive documenta-
tion used by the author in the
preparation of the biography. Trefousse does
present a balanced portrait of Johnson,
including both his racism and failure to
read the political times, as well as
pointing out the personal tragedies that add
a more human dimension to Andrew Johnson
than previous biographers have
shown. The biography is an essential
addition to the bookshelf of those desiring
to understand more about the era of the
Civil War and Reconstruction.
Kentucky Department for Libraries and
Archives Frank R. Levstik
Making Better Citizens: Housing
Reform and the Community Development
Strategy in Cincinnati, 1890-1960. By Robert B. Fairbanks. (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1989. xii
+ 243p.; maps, tables, notes, biblio-
graphic note, index. $24.95.)
Since 1974, when Zane Miller and Henry
Shapiro first organized the
University of Cincinnati's Laboratory
in American Civilization, Cincinnati has
been the subject of an experiment in
"symptomatic" history. Symptomatic
history is based on the belief that
local history is of greater than merely local
significance, that it can reveal the way
in which Americans generally have
defined their society and its problems
in a given period. One of the more
important results of this experiment is
Robert Fairbanks's Making Better
Citizens which explores the development of housing reform and
city planning
in Cincinnati between 1890 and 1960. As
Fairbanks convincingly illustrates, the
Cincinnati story was not only
symptomatic of national developments but also
intersected the national planning
movement at important points. Several local
planners including Alfred Bettman, an
expert on zoning and urban redevelop-
ment legislation, and Ladislas Segoe,
research director for the New Deal report
Our Cities: Their Role in the
National Economy, were major actors on
the
national scene. A series of Cincinnati
projects, including the planned commu-
nities of Mariemont and Green Hills, won
national attention for breaking new
ground in the planning field. An
apparently indefatigable researcher, Fairbanks
76 OHIO HISTORY
tells this story in both a thorough and
concise manner. His book is an important
contribution to planning history.
Fairbanks's central contention is that
between 1890 and 1920 reformers and
planners redefined the housing issue as
no longer simply a problem of
inappropriate dwellings but as a larger
problem of inadequate community. In
the 1890s tenement reformers focused
their attention on the dilapidated and
unhealthful housing of Cincinnati's
lower classes and on improving low-income
housing through minimum standards,
government regulation, and the construc-
tion of model tenements. In the second
decade of the twentieth century,
however, reformers and planners focused
less on the poor than on the larger
metropolitan community. Believing in the
interdependence of all the city's
parts, Alfred Bettman argued that there
was a "close organic relationship
between each city improvement and every
other city improvement." A housing
strategy that focused on one part of the
city to the exclusion of others was
doomed to failure. Consequently
reformers and planners embraced compre-
hensive city and regional planning and
such techniques as city-wide housing
codes, zoning, and a master plan as
solutions to the housing problem. The
immediate problems of the poor were
deferred in the hope that in the general
improvement of city conditions they
would ultimately benefit.
Over the next two decades, Fairbanks
argues, reformers and planners
developed a community development
strategy in an effort to "make better
citizens." Arguing that the housing
problem involved not only dwellings but
the environment surrounding those
dwellings, they planned housing projects
which included such
"amenities" as recreational and community buildings,
schools, and local commercial centers.
The creation of "neighborhood units,"
planners and reformers believed, would
promote a sense of local community as
well as a civic consciousness and loyalty.
With the help of federal New Deal
monies the Cincinnati Metropolitan
Housing Authority constructed several
public housing projects which, within
the limits imposed by financial con-
straints and political controversy,
reflected this strategy. In a final section on
the period from 1945-1960 Fairbanks
briefly outlines the decline of the
community development strategy and the
rise of a new strategy based less on
community services than on individual
desires. Planners no longer saw the
metropolis and its constituent
neighborhoods as an organic social system but as
an artificial and mechanistic entity.
The real and fundamental unit of society,
they believed, was the individual. This
period coincided, Fairbanks explains,
with the social fragmentation of the
metropolis, the declining fortunes of public
housing, and an increased emphasis on
the central business district. In light of
contemporary urban problems, he
concludes, the community development
strategy has much to teach us.
Fairbanks has offered an important
challenge to historians who have argued
that city planning and housing reform
went their separate ways in the 1920s and
after. He provides abundant evidence of
the continuing interest in housing
among Cincinnati planners. But he does
less to contradict the assertion that
city planning not only failed to solve
the low-income housing problem but
probably exacerbated it. Some slums were
cleared, but slum-dwellers were
forced to crowd into other neighborhoods
which, in turn, deteriorated. Most of
the projects described here, Fairbanks
admits, did not provide housing for the
displaced poor, and especially the black
poor. While several historians have
traced this failure to the political
realm, to the divorce of professional planning
from any popular demand for change,
Fairbanks traces it to the intellectual
Book Reviews
77
realm, to the ways in which planners
redefined the housing problem. But one
wonders whether these two realms intersected at any
point, whether the
constellation of political forces
influenced the process of problem definition.
Unfortunately Fairbanks has relatively
little to say about the political context
in which the planners worked. Without such an analysis
his assertion that the
persistence of inadequate housing
"shows the limitations of a movement
dominated by white professionals and businessmen and
suggests how power-
less this group was in some
circumstances to affect change as they perceived
the need" (p. 177) is somewhat less than
convincing.
Xavier University John D.
Fairfield
The Cincinnati Game. By Lonnie Wheeler and John Baskin. (Wilmington,
Ohio: Orange Frazer Press, 1988. 272p.;
illustrations, appendix, bibliogra-
phy, index. $29.95.)
In 1948 Lee Allen, baseball's foremost
historian and statistician, published
The Cincinnati Reds, a seminal work still regarded by many baseball enthusi-
asts as the prototype of the
team-history genre. Wheeler and Baskin's long
awaited The Cincinnati Game, the
first monograph on the Reds in forty years,
is an updated and considerably more
spirited account that skillfully weaves the
fascinating history of baseball's oldest
franchise into that of its host city.
Wheeler, previously a Cincinnati
newspaper sportswriter and columnist, and
Baskin, senior editor of Ohio
Magazine and author of New Burlington: The
Life and Death of an American Village
(1976), have collaborated on what
Baskin describes as an "eccentric
history of baseball's influence on Cincinnati
and Cincinnati's influence on the
national game." Although Cincinnati Game
is essentially a local history
publication, it does manage to provide readers with
good stories as well as good historical research. A
veritable treasure trove of
facts, anecdotes, and human interest
stories, Cincinnati Game is divided into
twenty-five subject headings that are
arranged topically rather than chronolog-
ically.
Decade by decade accounts are given of
the best teams, the worst teams, and
most memorable players. There are special
features on an impressive roster of
local talent, including Hall of Fame
candidates Buddy Bell and Jim Bunning,
managers Jim Frey and Miller Huggins,
and, from the great Western Hills high
school teams, players such as Don
Zimmer, Eddie Brinkman, and "Charlie
Hustle" himself, Pete Rose.
Interspersed throughout the volume are time
lines, players profiles, quotes, and a
chronology of all the Reds ballparks,
including such twentieth century confines
as Riverfront Stadium, Crosley Field
(Redland Field) and the original
"Palace of the Fans."
Significant baseball "firsts"
ranging from night baseball, air travel, and color
television broadcasts are chronicled,
along with the more trivial such as the
first player with glasses, the first
catcher to squat, and the first known use of
the term fanatic. Not content with these
superlatives, the authors provide
accounts of the heaviest bats, the best
and worst trades, and even the slowest
and the loudest Reds players. We also
are informed of the greatest games, the
biggest brawls, legends of the broadcast
booth, and the most forgettable
superstar, just to name a few of the
more ephemeral topics. More serious
analysis of the franchise's black and
Latin heritage is provided, including the
78 OHIO HISTORY
stark fact that only nine of the 238
Cincinnatians who have appeared in the
major leagues have been black.
Enthusiasts will be impressed with the
attention to detail and analysis in the
volume. Fascinating statistical
comparisons are made between the 1927
Yankees and the 1976 Reds, widely
acknowledged as two of baseball's
"best-ever" teams. Rankings of
the best single seasons for Reds hitters and
pitchers are given, as well as the
standard citation of team records. Among
Cincinnati's roster of luminaries who
began their careers with the Reds
organization are Hall of Fame announcer
Red Barber, who gained his first
broadcasting job with the Reds in 1934,
Larry MacPhail, the Reds general
manager from 1933-1940 and pioneer of
night baseball, James Reston, the New
York Times columnist who began his career as public relations
director for the
Reds during the 1930s, and Ban Johnson,
a Cincinnati sportswriter who, along
with Charles Comiskey, conceived the
American League in an Over-the-Rhine
saloon. Even the games greatest clown,
Nick Altrock, was born and raised in
Cincinnati.
The physical appearance of this
clothbound volume is enhanced by hundreds
of illustrations, an attractive type
face, timelines, and sidebars in the margins
that are linked to the main text by
arrows. Many of the photos, taken from the
archives of the Sporting News, are
seen for the first time. Reds highlights,
often done tongue in cheek, have been
added throughout the book to the black
and white images. Especially welcome
features in Cincinnati Game are the
bibliography and index, both of which
are absent in Allen's work. Curiously
absent, however, is an examination of
the team logo and uniform and how they
developed through the years.
The historian Milton Plesser noted
several years ago in Ohio History
(Winter, 1984) that sports, along with
other areas of popular culture, deserve
more serious attention and respect from
scholars. With sports playing an
increasingly important role in American
culture, the need for player biogra-
phies and franchise histories will
continue. Public interest in professional
sports and baseball especially has never
been higher, as evidenced by the
dramatic rise in attendance, the
increase in television contracts, and the recent
popularity of Hollywood films such as The
Natural, Eight Men Out, and Field
of Dreams.
The Cincinnati Game, while perhaps not a historical monograph in the
traditional sense, still provides
something for both scholarly and general
readers alike. American sports and
baseball in particular will continue to be, as
Lee Allen found four decades ago, a
fallow field awaiting the plow of historical
exploration.
Ohio Historical Society Steve Gordon
A History of Noble County, Ohio,
1887-1987. By Roger Pickenpaugh.
(Balti-
more: Gateway Press, 1988. 396p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
$35.00.)
A handful of historical societies and
historians around Ohio have in recent
years taken on projects to create new or
updated local histories. The results of
these efforts fall into a least three
general groups. Celebrations and commem-
orations are often excuses for producing
"new" histories where collections of
Book Reviews
79
uncaptioned historic photos are
interspersed among brief, and generally
incomplete, articles on various aspects
of a community's heritage. Necessitat-
ing a greater level of sophistication
are those which follow the format of the late
nineteenth century histories where
narrative articles are combined with short,
invariably laudatory, family histories.
A third and truly rare type are those
written by individuals who invest the
time and effort into producing interpre-
tive histories of their county or
community.
Roger Pickenpaugh, a school teacher in
Caldwell, is among this unique latter
group of individuals. He spent eight
years researching, organizing facts, and
writing a history of Noble County, using
as his beginning point the year that the
county's late nineteenth century history
was published. Newspapers published
in Caldwell, the county seat, were his
primary source, and, as could be
expected, the topics covered in the
volume and their treatment have a
journalistic flavor. In a yeoman effort,
Pickenpaugh gleaned news stories on
the business, industrial, urban,
agricultural, social, political, and military
history of the county and carefully
organized them into seven chronological
chapters. Over sixty reproductions of
historic photographs further enhance the
volume.
There is a wealth of material here and
grist for many a future historian's mill.
In that strength of the volume also lies
its greatest weakness. The index,
prepared with the assistance of the
author's students and friends, unhappily
only includes names. Historians of
mining, or religion, or medicine, or any of
the other seemingly innumerable topics
that Pickenpaugh touches upon will
have to wade through the entire volume
to find the material they need. Not
even the famous crash of the USS Shenandoah
rates a reference in the index,
although nearly four full pages were
devoted to it. Hopefully genealogists will
not be the only users of this new
history of Noble County, but it will require a
dedicated perseverance almost as great
as the author's original accomplish-
ment.
Ohio Historical Society David A. Simmons
The Yellow Kids: Foreign
Correspondents in the Heyday of Yellow Journalism.
By Joyce Milton. (New York: Harper and
Row, 1989. xvii + 412p; notes,
bibliography, index. $22.95.)
Creating America: George Horace
Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post.
By Jan Cohn. (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh, 1989. x + 325p.; notes,
index. $34.95.)
The Party of Reform: Democrats in the
Progressive Era. By David Sarasohn.
(Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1989. xvii + 265p.; bibliograph-
ical essay, index. $30.00.)
It is generally not notorious that the
Progressive era requires a broad cultural
evaluation it has yet to receive. This
is possibly because several eras, including
the New Deal era, suffer from the same
problem: an historical hiatus caused by
the stormy sixties conflicts, which
harmed the continuity required for sound
historical study.
Still, evaluations, if not revaluations,
are being attempted, and deserve close
attention. The Yellow Kids is
highly relevant because it involves not only a
then-new journalism, but journalists who
often aspired to writing beyond
80 OHIO HISTORY
immediate affairs: people like Harold
Frederic, who merits consideration
beyond his The Damnation of Theron
Ware, and Frank Norris, another staple
of the time's cultural ambitions, among
others.
The Yellow Kids is well-researched and written in clear, communicative
prose. It contributes to information
about the famous 1890s duel between
William Randolph Hearst and Joseph
Pulitzer, and the role of New York
Journal and World writers in fanning the flames of war
against the Spanish in
Cuba. Much is made here of Sylvester
Scovel, long forgotten, who was in the
forefront of the "Yellows." An
interesting contrast could be made with
"investigative journalists" of
our own time.
It needs to be asked, however, whether
heavy revision is now called for in
writing of the sensationalist press of
the 1890s. Of the journalists, only Richard
Harding Davis and Stephen Crane are
well-remembered, but Davis mainly as
a period piece. Crane has long been tall
in the literary records of the time, with
his journalism no more than rounding out
his short, brilliant life at home and
abroad. Key factors influencing the
scene are here left untouched. They
include strong immigration into new
chaotic cities with populations which
thirsted for understanding and
communication. Nor can the impact of the
Darwinian hypotensis be overrated, since
it turned ministers's sons like Crane
into atheists. Finally, people,
especially in western states, who feared the
mighty trusts of the time-feared that
they might become almighty.
The 1890s were clearly a transitional
era which would spillover into the new
century. This helps explain why the
reckless journalists of the last decade of
the nineteenth century, with their scare
headlines and often irresponsible
scoops, Scovel's included, passed from
notoriety to oblivion. The nation's
serious readers settled down in the
1900s to coping with their basic human
problems, unfortunately giving too
little of their attention to the generals and
military technicians who were brewing
World War I.
But to repeat. The Yellow Kids is
a well-researched work which should affect
new studies in the field, and may well
do so.
Also highly researched, and forming a
companion piece to the tale of yellow
journalism is Creating America, for all that its
title is more a la mode than
accurate. George Horace Lorimer scarcely
"created" America in a time
featuring Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow
Wilson, and extending over to the
later Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Saturday
Evening Post indeed did reflect the
America of middle-class leaders and
would-be leaders, whom Lorimer read
accurately. He forged a program to which
he held rigidly. Articles, fiction,
editorials, memories had to avoid the
seamier side of life, to be accepted. For
example, there was no place in the SEP
for any man's unmarried female
companion. There were poor people, but
with dignity and pride, and never in
dire straits. There had to be loyalty to
American ideals, and at the very least,
hope.
Although Lorimer was unbending in his
faith, he nevertheless was able to
find enough in controversial writers to
publish major works by Frank Norris,
Edith Wharton, David Graham Phillips,
and numerous others of stature. The
bottom line in such relations was that
he was The Boss, who never hesitated to
delete whatever he deemed offensive to Post
standards, let it be by Will Rogers
or William Faulkner.
The author is as fair and conscientious
as she can be, noting, for example,
Upton Sinclair's bitter denunciation of
Lorimer as harming freedom of the
press. However, her research carries her
only over the surface. She thinks of
Book Reviews
81
Phillips, for example, as almost a
staff-writer for Lorimer, apparently unaware
that Phillips was the outstanding
pro-feminist of his time, as well as author of
the formidable Susan Lenox: Her Fall
and Rise. Phillips did accept Lorimer's
early "assignment" of a
diary-story, The Social Secretary, one which the
distinguished essayist Charles M.
Flandreau, tired of Lorimer's preference for
innocuous themes, had turned down. But
Phillips was then working for a living
and reputation as a novelist; and he
took pains in what was apprentice writing,
to make of the theme something
democratic and womanly.
Lorimer and Phillips were friends, but
when Lorimer rejected his essays or
tales, Phillips merely took them
elsewhere, until his outlets increased far
beyond the parameters of the Post. Phillips,
from the first, was determined to
be his own man.
The author's research has been wide, but
too directed to get beyond the
Lorimer facade. She writes knowledgably
about Lorimer's own successful
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to
His Son (1902). But here as elsewhere
the culture factor betrays her. She has
no inkling that Phillips, critical of
Lorimer's admiration for self-made
brutal exploiters, indirectly, but firmly,
parodied Lorimer in Phillips's own The
Master Rogue (1903). Creating
America adds a dimension of fact to earlier SEP studies,
but until older
writings are read with a sense of context,
our insight and continuity will suffer.
This is true in politics as in
literature. Mr. Sarasohn, a frank partisan of
Democrats, in his interesting
introduction, summarizes the arguments in
academe intended to demean the
Progressives as having done too little too late.
It is striking that ordinary readers, as
distinguished from a handful of involved
academics, have scarcely heard of these
challenges to historically outstanding
Progressives. A check of recent
textbooks indicates that their authors have
avoided puzzling youthful readers with
derogatory accounts of such figures as
Theodore Roosevelt and Robert M.
LaFollette.
The Party of Reform, though with its doubtful title, is absorbing simply
because it necessarily covers two
decades of day-in day-out national politics
and public figures; but it must be read
as opening debate, rather than closing it.
The author not only denies that
Progressivism was biparty, he declares that its
achievements were Theodore
Roosevelt-led, true, but Democratic-supported.
To do this, he must provide rationales
for obvious Democratic anti-reform
failings. The Democrats in 1904, for
example, in opposing T.R., obviously
offered a conservative Presidential
slate; but that was only because, the author
claims, they hoped to attract corporate
money. Basically, they remained the
"reform" party of low-tariff,
pro-labor, and direct election of senators
principles. Yes, he adds, Insurgency was
a Republican phenomenon, but
crucially supported by progressive
Democrats.
And so it goes, into the elections of
1910, which overthrew the Taft portion
of Republicans and led to the rise of
Woodrow Wilson. With nothing said of the
Ballinger-Glavis affair involving the
dispensing of Alaskan lands: a wholly
Insurgent achievement.
Unnoted is the fact that Woodrow Wilson
began his political career as a
declared conservative Democrat,
nominated for governor of New Jersey on
that understanding, and only later the
candidate of insurgent New Jersey
leaders, whom he in time disappointed.
Nevertheless, the book is filled with
issues and events, and personalities
many of whom have been all but lost to
historical study, but who need to be
recalled. The terrible Triangle Fire,
for example-a tragedy of New York
82 OHIO HISTORY
female labor-has its book, but it is
separated from the politics of its time. Yes,
there were Democratic reforms, but
forced from the party leaders, whose high
concentration continued to be on
wheeler-dealer activities. Nor is the tragedy
of William Sulzer adequately recalled
for the ruthless destruction of his career
as governor of New York, the Democrats
simply massing votes to have him
impeached and flung from office.
Achievements and anti-achievements of
the time can be laid to both parties.
The truth is that the greatest hero of
the time was Demos, which demanded
reform. Unfortunately, it often also
opposed reform, as in Georgia, which
"elected" to lynch Leo Frank,
an innocent man, in the face of national
Progressive protest. An overview of
reform is complicated, but needs to be
recaptured. The above books help.
The Belfry, Ovid, Michigan Louis Filler
John Mercer Langston and the Fight
for Black Freedom, 1829-1865. By
William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek.
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1989. 478p.; illustrations, notes,
bibliography, index. $34.95.)
John Mercer Langston (1829-1897) has
long merited a detailed, scholarly
study. His life's story is seemingly the
biographer's dream. Here is the tragedy
of a priviledged childhood struck down
by law, the play of eloquent words and
lofty ideals, the stress and drive of
politics; but above all else, here is the
passionate drama of one man's constant
achievement in spite of oppression.
Langston's accomplishments in black
politics and protest are stunning: the first
black lawyer in the West, the first
black to hold elected office, a principal force
in recruiting black troops into the
Union Army, an inspector for the Freedmen's
Bureau, the first black to represent
Virginia in Congress, as well as, the United
States' minister to Haiti and Santo
Domingo. Why then the lack of learned
assessments, heretofore, of Langston's
life? The answer lies in a lack of
sources. There is little information on
the inner world, or private life of John
Mercer Langston. Although he published
an autobiography, it reads like a
heroic resume, and speaks little more
than cryptically of his personal life.
Once, the recital of Langston's
political accomplishments was the virtual alpha
and omega of his biography.
Thankfully, with the publication of John Mercer
Langston and the Fight for Black
Freedom, 1829-1865 that is no longer
true.
William and Aimee Lee Cheek, the authors
of this successful biography,
developed a method of clearing away the
obstacles to telling Langston's life
story. They approach their subject from
three separate perspectives: I) con-
text; 2) Langston's association with
other figures of the time; 3) an easy use of
psychology to glimpse Langston's
motivation. In so pursuing their subject, the
authors' work fits an eclectic range of
scholarly categories-political history,
social history, African-American
history, and historical biography, to name but
a few. Consequently, John Mercer
Langston and the Fightfor Black Freedom,
1829-1865, while ostensibly a biography of one man, is also an
effort to address
other gaps in our historical knowledge
on a broad front. This is particularly true
in the areas of context, and Langston's
associations. The Cheeks have
explored well the world created by free
blacks in Ohio, as well as the once
neglected topic of black involvement in
western antislavery efforts. The
authors have rightly assumed that to
understand Langston the political leader
Book Reviews
83
in these areas, we must also understand
the other black leaders with whom he
worked.
The most fascinating feature of this
biography is the emphasis on Langston's
marginality. This is the central,
motivating paradox of John Mercer Langston's
life. Born the son of a wealthy, white
slaveholder and a free, part-black
bondswoman, Langston spent his early
childhood in an environment of
aristocratic, white sensibilities. But because of the
death of his father, and the
vicissitudes of law, the young Langston
was jerked from a world of priviledge
to the confined world of his black
relatives. Thus, according to the psycholog-
ical interpretation offered by the
Cheeks, Langston saw himself as redeeming
both black and white-for he understood
himself to be a representative of both
races.
This sense of redemption, birthed by the
paradox of his position, influenced
every action of Langston's life. He
chose Oberlin-a school and a town located
at the far margins of nineteenth century
American race relations-as his place
of education. There he developed a
secular theology that merged Emerson's
concept of self-reliance with Finney's
gospel of moral perfectionism; thus,
slavery was a sin that morally deformed
the nation that tolerated it. This
philosophy was Langston's political
foundation, the goal of his politics: end
slavery, but give blacks as well the
equal rights of any American to succeed or
fail.
The occasional overuse of psychology is
the one weakness of this biography.
John Mercer Langston often appears as a
seminal figure of one dimension. But
this can be blamed again on a lack of
sources regarding the man's inner life.
Regardless of this shortcoming, the
appearance of John Mercer Langston
and the Fight for Black Freedom,
1829-1865 is still heralded a
scholarly event.
The authors have made innovative use of
their sources, and, as the footnotes
reveal, they have read them with
critical attention. Their writing style is clean
and often elegant; they possess a flair
for narrative detail. In sum: this
biography is inspiring without bathetic
moralizing; instructive without falling to
pedantry; a great story well told. Would
that other biographies from scholar's
pens could claim such virtues! The
authors tell us this is the first of a
two-volume biography. We eagerly await
the next.
University of North Carolina Peter M. Ostenby
Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle:
Stories of Black Pullman Porters. By
Jack
Santino. (Urbana: The University of
Illinois Press, 1989. x + 160p.;
illustrations, notes, appendix,
resources, index. $21.95.)
This is both an oral and narrative study
of the lives of black Pullman porters.
It is also a story about race relations,
of a lost tradition in railroad history, and
of black social and cultural life. In
1978, author Jack Santino interviewed a
number of retired members of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters for the
Festival of American Folklife which
became the basis for an award winning
documentary film he produced in 1982. Miles
of Smiles, Years of Struggle
retains much of its cinematic oral focus
as the porters talk about their
remarkable life experiences and the
complexities of their work. Pullman porter
history constitutes a transitional phase
in Afro-American history linking
84 OHIO HISTORY
slavery and post-slavery segregation to
the civil rights movement of the late
1950s and early 1960s. When George
Pullman began his elite sleeping car
service following the Civil War, he
consciously recruited former black slaves
as his porters. And by the end of the
Pullman and porter eras, certain Pullman
porter leaders had assumed key roles in
the contemporary struggle for racial
justice.
But Santino's book is essentially a
source in understanding how the Pullman
porter saw their own unique experiences
during these years. To be a porter was
to live a "duality" where
one's occupation was both a source of status and
honor and a constant challenge to black
dignity. A Pullman porter was a black
man's job, created by Pullman to serve
the needs of white patrons which
effectively served to reinforce racial
stereotypes and images of black people
that were rooted in the slave
experience. As in slavery, porters learned how to
survive and even prosper under working
conditions in which they had only
limited control until the later
formation of their union Brotherhood. Many of
their stories detail, often in a
humorous manner, the ways in which they served
their white customers making up beds,
shining shoes, catering to numerous
wants, and acting as personal confidants
while they held on to their own
self-respect.
What always complicated the porters'
attitudes was that the "bad" part of
their occupation also had its
"good" side; it offered status and respect within
black communities where few employment
opportunities existed for black
males; it paid reasonably well (many
porters sent their children to college from
their railroad earnings); it provided
freedom of mobility, the opportunity often
to meet important people, and to see
interesting parts of the country. And yet
the power of corporate capitalism and
societal racism always defined the
boundaries in which porters worked even
if they were never able to ultimately
define the porter himself. In discussing
the evolution of the porters' Brother-
hood and some of their leaders like A.
Philip Randolph, C.L. Dellums, and
Milton Webster, Santino makes clear that
occupational pride and honor
became much more of a reality for the
porters once the union became
recognized in the mid-1930s. Although
not a porter himself, Randolph emerges
from the porters' tales as an authentic
black folk hero, one who could not be
"bought" and whose courage and
tenacity assured the porters finally a voice
in determining some of the class and
racial conditions of their work. In
Randolph and union loyalists like E.D.
Nixon, a major force in the 1955-56
Montgomery boycott that elevated Martin
Luther King, Jr., to prominence, the
link between black unionism and civil
rights, the porter's oral tradition and that
of the rights movement, is firmly
established.
Jack Santino does a marvelous job
combining porter reflections with a
careful analysis of their oral
experience and a narrative account of their lives.
Although there are areas where some
observations seem belabored, what
emerges from this significant
contribution to black history and the oral
tradition is the wonderful humanness of
the porters. Contrary to all that the
Pullman company and a racist society
wished to portray the porters as, they
remained men who often knew themselves
and the people they served better
than their supposed
"superiors" and benefactors. And although the world of
work in which they both labored and
loved is no longer part of our collective
experience, in their self-knowledge the
porters continue to serve well other
people's lives.
Denison University John B.
Kirby
Book Reviews
85
Distribution of Wealth and Income in
the United States in 1798. By Lee
Soltow. (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1989. xix + 328p.;
appendices, notes, index. $49.95.)
Unfortunately, Soltow's table-like title
belies his topic's significance: histor-
ic economic inequality in the
United States. While recognition of inequality is
not new, Soltow's method of exposing its
persistence is. He applies a
mathematical model called the
"lognormal frequency curve" to the federal
government's exhaustive assessment of
every dwelling in the United States in
1798 and various population censuses.
(For example: If one knows the share of
wealth of the top 10 percent of wealth
holders, he can then determine the
shares of all other perceptible groups.)
These frequencies provide clues to how
wealth was distributed in America in
1798, and, "since housing consumption
can serve as a proxy for income"
(p. 3), of income as well.
The author asks several important
questions and gives some unconventional
answers, but with uneven success: Did
the American experience begin from a
position of high or low inequality?
(Low). Did the American Revolution result
in lesser or greater inequality of
wealth? (Greater). Would the American people
have accepted the Constitution if the
rules had permitted them to vote? (No).
Was the frontier more egalitarian than
urban areas? (Yes and no). Did the
Industrial Revolution increase or reduce
inequality? (Reduced).
"Extensive" inequality of
wealth prevailed in 1798. Then, as in 1850 and
1860, the top 10 percent of adult male
wealth holders held about half of
all wealth; the top 5 percent controlled
almost a third. The United States was
not a middle-class democracy; a minority
of freemen of voting age owned
land. Expanded liberty (the Revolution
and Constitution) generated deeper in-
equality.
Some European countries had immensely
greater inequality than the United
States. Only 10 to 30 percent of adult
males possessed land in England,
Scotland, Sweden, and Denmark, in
contrast to 50 percent across the Atlantic.
Moreover, among only free men
with positive wealth, the American had three
times as much as the Swede and six times
more than the Finn.
The author's treatment of the Turner
thesis-which he rejects-and Consti-
tutional ratification are particularly
unconvincing. He appears unsure whether
the frontier was more likely than
settled areas to foster equality (pp. 236, 248),
and he acknowledges the effect of a
frontier "safety valve" (p. 248).
Soltow confesses that his discussion of
the ratification process is "specula-
tive" and subject to "substantial measurement
error" (p. 215). Again, the
lognormal distribution of housing values
of those who empowered their
delegates reveals a
"probability" that voters would have defeated the Consti-
tution 2-1 if all free males over 21 had
participated; defeated it if half the eligible
population had voted; and easily
accepted it if only 1 or 2 percent (the wealthy)
had gone to the polls (p. 221). Thus a
positive relationship existed between the
probability of voting and economic well-being. This
latter idea holds some
promise, but overall Soltow's analysis is too
deterministic. He admits that
ratification is a "very complex
subject" (p. 217) and that scholars must
consider other influential variables; he
suggests some.
Soltow's strengths lie in his
introduction of complex mathematical models
and his boldness in applying them to
some economic data, rather than in what
the numbers portend. The book's 288 pages include 94
tables, 20 figures, 13
appendices, and 18 appendix tables. With the exceptions
of his references to
86 OHIO HISTORY
the Turner thesis and the Constitution,
Soltow does not comment on the social
and political consequences of his
findings. He confesses that inequality played
a "wide role" in the nation's
social and cultural activities in the early federal
period and antebellum years, but he
leaves it to others to determine its effects.
Humboldt State University Stephen C. Fox
The Magic City: Unemployment in a
Working-Class Community. By Gregory
Pappas. (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1989. xvii + 204p.; illustrations,
notes, bibliography, index. $9.95 paper;
$29.95 cloth.)
With the dawning of Reagan's America,
the specter of factory shutdowns
became an ever-increasing reality for
many American communities, particu-
larly those located in the Midwest. The
historical literature on this develop-
ment has primarily focused on the larger
economic forces which shaped this
new stage of corporate capitalism, Barry
Bluestone and Bennett Harrison's
The Deindustrialization of America (1982) is the most obvious example; or, as
in the case of Staughton Lynd's The
Fight Against Shutdown (1984) or Eric
Mann's Taking on General Motors (1987),
on those communities which were
able to wage impressive battles to keep
their factories open in an attempt to
preserve their communities. In contrast
to the work of Lynd and Mann,
Gregory Pappas's The Magic City examines
the comparatively tranquil shut-
down of the Seiberling tire factory in
Barberton, Ohio. But, though the
Barberton shutdown did not precipitate
the dramatic worker protest of a
Youngstown, as Pappas's Magic City shows,
the Barberton workers were not
simply passive victims of corporate
America.
Pappas, an anthropologist and an M.D.,
opens his work with an overall
analysis of the economic factors and
corporate policies which produced the
Seiberling shutdown in March of 1980. He
then provides an ethnographic
analysis of the rubberworkers' lives as
they were about to face, unknowingly,
the closure of their factory, a mainstay
in the Barberton economy for nearly
sixty years. Describing this post-World
War II working-class existence as
"fragile affluence," Pappas
details the high degree of workers' personal
indebtedness, especially car loans and
mortgage payments, which left them
ill-prepared to face the economic
deprivation of a shutdown. With the
deindustrialization of the Midwest well
underway, there were few comparable
jobs in the Barberton area to absorb this dislocated
industrial workforce, which
numbered well over one thousand.
Pappas offsets this initial foray into
working-class life with an historical
overview of Barberton's laborers.
Relying primarily on Mike Davis's analysis
of the post-World War II American
working-class, Pappas describes the
bureaucratization of the Barberton labor
movement that in effect snuffed out
the working-class militance which came
to the fore in the turbulent thirties. It
might have been interesting if he had
looked more deeply into just exactly how
this process of bureacratization played
itself out at the local level, especially
considering Barberton's reputation
(based largely on the activity of Seiberling
workers) as the king of the wildcat,
particularly in the 1950s. Nevertheless, any
generalization regarding the growing
conservatism of the American labor
movement in the modern era is difficult
to dispute.
Book Reviews
87
The final portion, in which Pappas
examines the local response in a series of
case studies, is the strongest of the
work. Employing Anthony Giddens's
"structurationist" approach,
Pappas shows that many workers were unable to
confront the debilitating disruptions of
a factory shutdown. The divorce,
murder, suicide, and chemical dependency
rates all rose dramatically in the
months that followed. But though some
workers were so affected, for others
not all the results were
self-destructive. Pappas takes us into the world of
unemployed workers, accompanying them as
they answer the newspaper want
ads, fill out yet another job
application, and wait in the stretching unemploy-
ment line. Their failure to find a
comparable job, Pappas shows us, was not the
result of workers' laziness, bad luck,
or lack of qualification. Rather it was a
structural failure of an unresponsive
economic system.
Most importantly, however, Pappas makes
it clear that these workers were
more than passive victims. Barberton
workers did take action, forming
unemployment groups, political action
committees, tenant organizations, and,
ultimately, a free medical clinic for
the Barberton area. Significantly, these
organizations (consisting of both
unemployed Seiberling workers and laborers
still employed in the city's other
factories) and Pappas's scholarship should
help to dispel many of the notions
surrounding the unemployed's inactivity as
well as the characterization of unions
pursuing only vapid economic goals. In
Barberton, workers fought both
individually and collectively to preserve the
community that they had created decades
before.
Indiana University John Borsos
Great American Bridges and Dams. By Donald C. Jackson. (Washington,
D.C.: The Preservation Press/National
Trust for Historic Preservation, 1988,
360p.; illustrations, further reading,
information sources, photographic sourc-
es, index. $16.95 paper.)
The vision of what in the man-made
environment has value and is worth
fighting to preserve has expanded
steadily ever since the birth of the national
preservation movement in the United
States during the mid-nineteenth century.
Significantly, that the prestigous
National Trust for Historic Preservation, the
private nonprofit organization chartered
and, in part, funded by Congress, has
seen fit to publish a guide book on
bridges and dams. Both are structures
regarded by many as practical, but on
the whole rather mundane and
unspectacular, engineering structures.
This guide eloquently serves to demon-
strate the shortsightedness of such
thought.
While at first the two structures would
seem to represent divergent types of
engineering, they make a logical
marriage in a single guidebook since you are
likely to find one while searching for
the other. The volume is written for a
general audience and the specialist in
technological history will find few new
revelations here. There is, happily, a
clear attempt to tie the structures,
especially dams, into the social and
political history of localities, an element
too often neglected in historic
technological studies.
Concise and informative summary
histories of both types of structures are
provided as introductory material. These
are followed by a discussion of the
preservation techniques for engineering
structures, based on the author's long
88 OHIO HISTORY
experience as staff engineer for the
Historic American Engineering Record of
the National Park Service.
The main body of the text is a
state-by-state guide. Structures both small and
large are included. An excellent index
allows reseachers searching for the
appropriate historical background or
"context" for a favorite structure to
conduct national comparisons.
Illustrations from the author's extensive photo
and postcard collection are one of the
special treats of the volume.
Ohio Historical Society David A. Simmons
Technology in America: A Brief
History. By Alan I Marcus and Howard
P.
Segal. (Chicago: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Publishers, 1989. xii + 380p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography,
index. $10.00 paper.)
It has been an entire generation since
the 1956 appearance of John W.
Oliver's survey, History of American
Technology. Perhaps the failure of that
attempt to deal coherently with the
subject has helped discourage subsequent
effort, but in the meantime the history
of technology has burgeoned and
become a thriving and established
subdiscipline of historical studies. Beginning
with the establishment of the Society
for the History of Technology in 1958,
and the publication of its journal Technology
and Culture (both founded at the
then-separate Case Institute of
Technology in Cleveland), that intervening
generation has produced a rich harvest
of scholarly studies of the subject.
Marcus and Segal, drawing upon this
now-sizeable literature, have produced
a dense survey, at once more dependable
and complex than that attempted by
Oliver. Relying upon a rather
conventional periodization of American history,
they concentrate on trying to show
"the impact of American society and
culture on technology, rather than vice
versa" (p. iv). To do this they
"identified specific, dominant
cultural notions and social themes for different
eras in the American past" (p. iv), then related
those to various technologies.
Given the vast amount of material that
could be logically "covered," some
such strategy was necessary, but of
course the authors leave themselves
vulnerable to second-guessing at every
turn. It can be argued that while
technology both influences and is
influenced by other aspects of life, the
former is at least as important as what they chose to
emphasize. Indeed, to the
extent that one emphasizes the impact of technology on
society one is led to
question whether received chronological
divisions of our history are, in fact,
the best for such a study. The 1870s is
the traditional breaking point
(Reconstruction, breakdown of the
"presidential synthesis," etc.), but when
our history is looked at from the
vantage point of technology rather than
politics, does it still make sense?
Of equal importance, which
"cultural notions and social themes" should one
emphasize? The scholarly literature on
the subject has largely ignored such
issues as race, gender, class,
ethnicity, and religion, making these difficult to
deal with in a survey based on secondary
literature. It seemed to me, for
example, that the authors spend an
inordinate amount of precious space
explaining the British policy of
mercantilism, at the cost of other possible
subjects. And finally, which
technologies should be dealt with? To mention
them all is clearly impossible, but to
make a selection is to run the risk of
leaving out everyone's favorite machine
or tool. The authors confess to
Book Reviews
89
shirking petroleum, but that will hardly
save them from the disappointment of
a host of buffs who want to read about
other neglected devices as well.
This bare recital of pitfalls
underscores the importance of Marcus and
Segal's effort. Their survey is not only
long overdue; it is a first-rate beginning.
Their hard choices seem to me to have
been largely sensible, and where they
have gone wrong it is easier to see how
and why for their having pioneered the
attempt. This is frankly a textbook, but
stands alone in a field which is
increasingly in the public's interest.
Case Western Reserve University Carroll Pursell
The Group Bases of Ohio Political
Behavior, 1803-1848. By Stephen C.
Fox.
(New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.,
1989. xix + 349p.; tables, notes,
bibliography. $50.00.)
This provocative (and provoking) work is
one of the first in the Garland
series of Dissertations in
Nineteenth-Century American Political and Social
History, edited by Ronald P. Formisano.
The series is welcome, but one hopes
for higher publishing standards in other
volumes. Nothing in this volume tells
the reader that this was a University of
Cincinnati dissertation produced in
1972; nothing in the preface to this
edition reveals that the author's interpre-
tation was discussed at length in this
journal in 1979 (Volume 88/Winter
1979/Number 1, pp. 5-36); nothing
explains the alterations and omissions that
have been made in the text, though these
changes fall well short of updating.
The footnotes have been consolidated and
moved to the end-but the endnote
numbers to chapter III now no longer
match those in the text! Resetting has
reduced the number of pages, but
cross-references in the text are to the original
page numbers-and to maps and charts
which are now excluded! This is
shoddy, shabby treatment of both
purchaser and author.
The object of the dissertation was to do
for Ohio politics what Lee Benson
had done for New York and Formisano for
Michigan. Dr. Fox indicts earlier
generations for imposing a single-factor
economic analysis on American voting
behavior, and demonstrates that Ohio
politics between 1803 and 1848 cannot
be interpreted simply in terms of
economic or class conflict. Instead, he argues
eloquently for evangelicalism as the
polarizing force in electoral politics: in the
1820s and 1830s revivalized
Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists
strove to impose their own moral
standards on society, notably supporting
Antimasonry, temperance, abolitionism,
and Whiggery, while religious and
liberal groups which opposed this
cultural imperialism rallied round the
laisser-faire Democratic party. This
critical division was reinforced by cleav-
ages between new immigrants from Britain
and those from elsewhere, between
New Englanders and native-born settlers
from Pennsylvania and Virginia.
These ethnocultural divisions, he
claims, explain the deep-rooted party cleav-
age of the years 1836-1848, which came into being
because the evangelicals in
New England-dominated "corporate
communities" refused to accept the new
partisan ethos and organizational values
being introduced by the Jacksonian
Democrats.
In building up his forceful case, Dr.
Fox does not present a detailed analysis
of what was actually happening in Ohio elections. He
presents instead an
interpretation of Jacksonian politics
which is based upon well-known general
90 OHIO HISTORY
works and studies of other states, and
he relies on secondary works for his
understanding of Ohio developments. No
use is made of manuscript collec-
tions, little of published correspondence, and the
newspaper record is sampled
more or less at random; the primary record is therefore
not the source of his
understanding, and the examples he offers from Ohio
primary sources are only
illustrations of points derived from
elsewhere. Furthermore, his detailed grasp
is limited and he repeatedly sees
novelty in measures and practices which had
a long history in Ohio. For example,
here as in his second article in this journal
(Volume 88/Summer 1979/Number 3, pp. 253-76), he makes
much of the
introduction of county nominating
conventions during the Bank War of
1818-1821, when they had in fact been a
common feature of Ohio politics since
statehood. Most worrying of all, he
repeatedly uses as his chief example of an
Ohio evangelical the well-known
abolitionist Lewis Tappan-who never set
foot in Ohio in his life!
However, at the heart of this work lies
a statistical analysis of fifty-one rural
townships and urban wards selected at
random from thirty counties, comparing
electoral behavior in 1848 with social,
economic, religious, and demographic
data from the 1850 Census. This is a
real contribution, though Dr. Fox is surely
mistaken to imagine that this evidence
necessarily in itself proves anything
about electoral behavior in earlier
decades. Moreover, he obscures the force of
his evidence by lumping the Freesoil and
Whig votes together: if the Freesoilers
were allowed to secede as they wished,
the remainder of the Whig party would
be seen to depend on many groups besides
the evangelicals and morally-
minded New Englanders. It is, indeed,
his failure to give room to the
exceptional cases on his tables, to
recognize what a small proportion of the
population his thesis actually makes
allowance for, which makes his interpre-
tation even more monocausal than those
he criticizes.
University of Durham Donald J.
Ratcliffe
Book Reviews
Spirit Fruit: A Gentle Utopia. By H. Roger Grant. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 1988. xiv + 203p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography,
index. $22.50.)
The Reluctant Radicals: Jacob L.
Beilhart and The Spirit Fruit Society. By
James L. Murphy. (Lanham, Maryland:
University Press of America, 1989.
xii + 263p.; illustrations, notes,
appendixes, bibliography, index. $32.50.)
Each of these books provides a detailed
picture of the Spirit Fruit commu-
nity which was founded and led by Jacob
Beilhart, a religious seeker who
hoped it would enable him and his
followers to live a totally unselfish life.
Before his community was established and
incorporated under Ohio law in
1901, Beilhart was influenced by the
teachings of the Seventh Day Adventists,
Christian Scientists, Theosophists, and
Spiritualists, as well as promoters of
sexual freedom. Though Beilhart rejected
the idea that Spirit Fruit was a
religion, many of the community's
practices resembled the Christian Perfec-
tionism which John Humphrey Noyes had
incorporated into his Oneida
Community. Spirit Fruiters, however, had
much more private space than did
the Oneida communitarians. Moreover,
they did not agree on all matters, they
kept their own property, and largely chose
their own work assignments. The
Spirit Fruit community consisted of an
original ten members, and because
there was much coming and going, the
total population was never much larger
than that. For a person with such
determined ideas and leadership talent, Jacob
Beilhart was amazingly tolerant of
dissent. Unlike many other community
founders, he never assumed the role of dictator.
Beilhart envisioned Spirit Fruit, or
Universal Life, as an advanced state of
being available only to a select
minority. Since its teaching and practices
contradicted much of organized
Christianity, Beilhart frequently critized the
clergy and denied that his beliefs constituted a
religion. Yet he never denied
spirituality, which was the very heart
of his teaching. His was a philosophy of
"live and let live," so long
as no one infringed on the rights of others. He also
practiced a kind of nonresistance. When
an irate father arrived with law
officers to remove his daughter from the
community, Beilhart made no attempt
to stop them. To Spirit Fruiters the
individual was paramount. Although he
strongly denied any affinity with the
anarchism of Emma Goldman, Beilhart's
philosophy could properly be described
as anarchism of the individualist,
nonviolent variety, similar to that of
Josiah Warren. Apparently, all the
communitarians thoroughly understood
Beilhart's teachings, for when he died
suddenly in 1908-at age 41 of
complications of appendicitis-the community
continued without interruption for another twenty
years.
Although Beilhart's philosophy is now
virtually forgotten, both authors
evaluate Spirit Fruit as a successful venture. Indeed,
it was a way of life highly
satisfactory to those who chose it.
Members, who were self-chosen, often
brought special skills to the community, all were
willing to work hard, and
there were few personality problems. They were all
"nice people," said one of
Jacob's followers, and only one really
disruptive member joined near the end
of the community's life. Beilhart, who was always
referred to as Jacob, often
spoke publicly about his philosophy of
life and published two periodicals for
the same purpose. Not surprisingly,
Jacob's views, especially those concerning