Book Reviews
First Generations: Women in Colonial
America. By Carol Berkin. (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1996. xiv + 234p.;
bibliographical essay, index. $23.00 cloth;
$12.00 paper.)
In First Generations, Carol
Berkin has written a marvelous synthesis of the ex-
isting literature on women in the
colonial era. It will likely become a classroom
standard.
Clearly the area of colonial women's
history has been one in need of synthesis.
Imaginative and meticulous scholars have
been creating histories out of the
sparest sources for more than a
generation now. But the nature of the evidence
from this period has dictated a somewhat
more scattershot result than is the case in
many other areas of American history.
Women's histories have often consisted of
individual case studies, pieced together
out of the scraps of letters or diaries, ac-
count books, demographic records, or
court cases that we have extant; sociologi-
cal-type studies that have made
statistical generalizations about cohorts of women
but which have been hamstrung in
connecting social abstractions to life as expe-
rienced; and what glimpses of women we
can glean from institutions in the public
sphere (such as the courts) that
habitually invited only the presence of men. Add
to this mix a social milieu that for at
least a century was mind-bogglingly diverse,
racially, ethnically, linguistically,
politically, and religiously, and it is not sur-
prising that it has taken until now for
someone to weave the pieces together into
something of a coherent narrative.
Berkin's is a story elegantly told. In
clear and lucid prose, she is able to com-
municate both what historians now think
we know about women in the first two
centuries of European settlement and
what is probable, possible, or simply a good
guess as to what was the case. In seven
well-organized chapters, Berkin carefully
presents us with the stories of women
from the Chesapeake, New England, and the
Middle Colonies, African-American and
Indian women, genteel and rustic women,
patriot and loyalist. To begin each
chapter, she provides us with a portrait of an
individual woman who puts a human face
on the topics at hand before going on to
tell us what scholars have come to know
about the category of woman her touch-
stone subject was. This is not to say
that Berkin homogenizes colonial women
into a few basic types. On the contrary,
she is careful to clue us in to whatever
variations on her basic themes she knows
of. Moreover, she cautions us periodi-
cally about the kinds of evidence on
which she, like other historians, has had to
rely for her information, the
limitations of that evidence, and important lacunae
within it.
One of Berkin's outstanding
accomplishments in this book is culling informa-
tion from a wide variety of monographic
sources-not simply those focused on
women and gender-to address and develop
areas where little freestanding informa-
tion exists. Her chapters on enslaved
African American women, women of the
Middle Colonies, and Indian women
particularly represent challenges well met.
For a variety of reasons, research in
these areas has been especially piecemeal, and
Berkin does us a service by pulling
together what there is and showing thereby
that there is far more extant than many
of us perhaps thought. (An extensive bib-
liographic essay is also helpful in
pointing toward both standard secondary
sources in colonial women's history and
lesser-known ones, especially in the un-
Book Reviews 79
derdeveloped areas.) Also of note is
Berkin's ability to limn her subjects in a way
that seems judicious and balanced. Each
of the women she treats is an active agent
within her world, but she is also hemmed
in by limitations on her agency that
Berkin describes well. Particularly
poignant and memorable in this regard is the
story of Margaret Hardenbroeck, an
entrepreneur of New Netherlands whose ability
to control her own personal and economic
fate becomes gradually but inexorably
constricted with the imposition of
English law and custom in that colony over the
latter third of the seventeenth century.
First Generations is a welcome work of synthesis, a model of its kind. It
will be
of enduring value to students of both
colonial and American women's history.
Miami University Mary
Kupiec Cayton
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from
the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the
Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944-May 7, 1945.
By Stephen E. Ambrose.
(New York: Simon & Schuster,
1997. 512p.; illustrations, notes,
index.
$27.50.)
Stephen Ambrose who recently finished
that splendid account of the Lewis and
Clark expedition, Undaunted Courage, returns
to his primary area of writing, the
European Theater of World War II.
This book draws heavily from American and
German soldier's oral histories now in
the Eisenhower Center at the University of
New Orleans.
The book follows chronologically from
D-Day, June 1944 to the war's end in
May 1945. A few chapters are topically
oriented such as medics, prisoners of war,
and the air war. Because soldier's oral
histories seldom deal with the big picture,
the author briefly sets the events of a
time period, then uses quotes from soldiers
to show the "foxhole view" of
the events. The reader hears what was important to
the soldier, and sees how large his war
really was, maybe only a field 100x100
yards outside a town you never heard of.
The reports give a fresh, interesting per-
spective on war from that usually
reported.
Using these narratives the author
discusses some interesting questions such as,
"What kept the troops going
forward?" The author will decide,
Discipline, to be sure, just as it was
in the German army, and unit cohesion, and training. But
for many, it was a sense of having no
option and a realization that the only way out of combat
was to annihilate the German army.'They
instinctively realized that the only way for them to
go home was to keep pushing forward.'
One soldier summed it up, for most of
the Gls, when he said,
We were miserable and cold and exhausted
most of the time, we were scared to death.... But
we were young and strong then, possessed
of the marvelous resilience of youth, and for all the
misery and fear and the hating every
moment of it the war was a great, if always terrifying,
adventure. Not a man among us would want
to go through it again, but we are all proud of
having been so severely tested and found
adequate. The only regret is for those of our friends
who never returned.
There were interesting accounts of how
men coped with getting food, staying
warm, deciding what German prisoners
would live or die, and many other daily
challenges. There were new or unusual
stories. One reported by Andy Rooney is
80 OHIO
HISTORY
of a ball-turret gunner in a bomber
whose only exit was to the outside under the
plane. The plane's wheels would not go
down. The gunner, pilot and the tower
talk about the situation. But eventually
Rooney wrote, "We all watched in horror
as it happened. We watched as this man's
life ended, mashed between the concrete
pavement of the runway and the belly of
the bomber."
One I had never heard was when soldiers
of the American 83rd Division ap-
proached the Rhine River they devised a
ruse they had earlier executed Germans for
trying. The 83rd assembled a task force
of German-speaking Gls, put them in
German uniforms, gave them captured
vehicles and sent them ahead to talk their
way through the German lines to capture
a bridge intact. A firefight broke out and
the task force was not strong enough to
fight its way out. Presumably the
Americans died, and the Germans did
destroy the bridge.
Then as the war was well into the fall
of 1944 the Germans had to rely on boys,
wounded soldiers, and older men to
replenish their ranks. The Americans had put
over 150,000 of her brightest draftees
into special college, pilot, and officer pro-
grams. We realized we would not need
these graduates, and so transferred them to
the Infantry. At this critical time,
then, we had quality replacements, as a matter
of fact our best young men, to match the
dregs of the German replacement system.
The book has a good index, excellent
maps, and action pictures of GIs at the
front. Their stories run the range of
emotions and ruthlessly pull the reader into
the narrative. It is the kind of book
one reads in great chunks, as it is intensely
interesting. After finishing it, one
probably will wish he had never read it so he
can have the pleasure of reading it
again for the first time. Highly recommended.
Combined Arms Support Command Lynn L. Sims
Fort Lee, Virginia
The Salmon P. Chase Papers, Volume 3: Correspondence, 1858-1863. Edited by
John Niven, James P. McClure, and Leigh
Johnsen. (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State
University Press, 1996. xxxi + 450p.;
chronology, illustrations, notes, edito-
rial procedures, bibliography, index.
$45.00.)
The third volume of the papers of Ohio
politician and reformer Salmon P. Chase
consists of correspondence from 1858,
when Chase was governor of Ohio,
through March 1863, during Chase's
tenure as Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the
Treasury. As with volume two, which
begins Chase's correspondence, this vol-
ume is very selective, especially
because, as the editors lament, "the quantity of
Chase's correspondence from his forty
months as Secretary of the Treasury
matches that of all of the rest of his
life" (p. xxvii). Nevertheless, the Ohio reader
may wonder with this reviewer whether
this volume might not be a bit too selec-
tive at the beginning since the only
correspondence included for 1858 consists of
four letters from March. The next
printed letter is dated April 26, 1859. One
might suppose that as governor of Ohio
during this period Chase would have re-
ceived or produced more than four
letters of significance.
This reviewer has one other quibble with
editorial choice: why did the editors
end the volume with March 1863? There is no obvious reason for the break, as
Chase is still at his treasury post. No
doubt the editors had good cause, but this
reader wishes that they had explained
their reasons in the introduction.
However, there are many positive
features of this volume. Most of the letters
date from the Civil War period and
provide good examples of Chase's perspective
Book Reviews 81
on various events as well as give
evidence of his sources of information. Several
major topics are discussed. In the early
summer of 1861 Chase was very concerned
about keeping Kentucky in the Union, and
he corresponded with William Nelson
and others about organizing an army for
that purpose. Another very interesting
and valuable section is a series of
letters to and from special treasury agent Edward
L. Pierce who was involved in setting up
the so-called "Port Royal Experiment,"
attempting to help blacks in the South
Carolina sea islands become productive and
self-supporting. The letters discuss
getting orders and supplies, conditions on the
plantations, attitude of the
supervisors, issues of authority, and the productivity
and accomplishments of the workers.
Later in 1862 and 1863 Chase would get
information on the situation in
Louisiana and Texas from another of his special treasury agents,
George S.
Denison in New Orleans, who mourned the
removal of Benjamin F. Butler as
commanding general and his replacement
by Nathaniel P. Banks. Since Chase fa-
vored the recruitment and use of black
troops, a number of his letters to Denison
and others also encourage such projects.
Early in the war Chase seems to have had
some influence on the course of the
conflict. In May 1862 he traveled with
Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin M.
Stanton to Hampton Roads, Virginia, to
investigate the military situation there.
In fact, Chase even helped to accept the
surrender of Norfolk,Virginia, as re-
counted in several letters to his
daughter Nellie. He also gave procedural sugges-
tions to generals with whom he was
acquainted, such as Irvin McDowell and
Benjamin F. Butler. He apparently gave
advice to Lincoln as well. But as 1862
progressed Chase's influence decreased,
a situation about which he complained to
many correspondents, lamenting that he
knew little beyond what he read in the
newspapers, and that it was his responsibility
to figure out how to finance a war
over which he had no influence.
In late 1862 and early 1863 Chase was
very much concerned about financing the
war. The editors have explicitly omitted
most of Chase's correspondence about
financial matters since it is both
complex and, for most readers, dull. But the
amount printed for this period increases
as Chase consulted several New York fi-
nanciers, trying to determine the best
ways to finance the war while keeping the
debt and inflation as low as possible.
The editors have done their usual good
job of briefly identifying persons and
events mentioned in the documents.
Students of the period will anxiously await
the continuation of Chase's wartime
experience in volume 4.
University of Tennessee, Knoxville Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein
The Papers of James Madison,
Presidential Series, Volume 3; 3
November 1810-
4 November 1811. Edited
by J.C.A. Stagg, Jeanne Kerr Cross, and Susan
Holbrook Perdue. (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1996. xlii +
548p.; editorial method, Madison
chronology, notes, index. $55.00.)
Although overshadowed by later events,
the twelve-month period covered by
this volume proved to be a critical one
for James Madison's presidency. After
more than a year of waffling, Madison at
last moved to resolve the domestic and
diplomatic troubles that had hobbled his
administration since 1809. By the clos-
ing date of this volume, Madison had
taken decisive action on both fronts, quiet-
82 OHIO
HISTORY
ing the discord in his own cabinet and
pointing the nation clearly down the road
towards war with Great Britain.
While students of Madison's foreign
policy will not find any major revelations
here, the contents still afford some
useful insight into his views on both Britain
and France. His private correspondence
for the months of April through June
1811 is particularly enlightening,
demonstrating that Madison saw little hope of
reaching a settlement with London even
before Britain's new diplomatic envoy ar-
rived to resume negotiations in July.
Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin's memo-
randum on the address Madison planned to
deliver to Congress in early November
1811 also furnishes some important clues
about his intentions towards Britain.
From the substance of the memorandum, it
is clear that, while Gallatin still coun-
seled peace, Madison approached the new
session of Congress leaning towards, if
not already committed to, going to war
if necessary. The President's correspon-
dence concerning France, on the other
hand, reveals not so much pessimism as
simple perplexity. Madison and his
advisors fully realized that Napoleon could
not be trusted. But what they could not
comprehend was why Napoleon continued
to obstruct a trade with the United
States that plainly benefited France as well.
Foreign affairs were of prime concern to
Madison during these twelve months,
but problems closer to home also
commanded his attention. Chief among these
was the duplicity of his own Secretary
of State, Robert Smith, whom Madison fi-
nally dismissed in March. Madison
recorded the details of his final tense and
stormy meeting with Smith in a lengthy
memorandum that, for sheer dramatic con-
tent, ranks as one of the highlights of
the collection. The confrontation with
Smith is also significant because it
produced one of the most succinct and impor-
tant statements Madison ever issued as
President on his theory of executive-leg-
islative relations. After reproving
Smith for not working more closely with
Congress, Madison asserted that,
providing "the intention was honest & the ob-
ject useful," it was entirely
permissible for members of the executive to "furnish
hints & lights for the
Legislature" (p. 259). Madison has often been faulted for
his extreme reluctance to infringe upon
congressional prerogatives. But as this
statement suggests-and as recent
scholarship on his conduct during the war de-
bates in the Twelfth Congress has borne
out-the Virginian was not quite the doc-
trinaire that some historians have made
him out to be.
Weighty matters of state aside, the bulk
of this volume consists of the more rou-
tine papers that crossed the President's
desk on a day-to-day basis. Letters from
job seekers and from those seeking to
promote (or, in some cases, block) the ap-
pointment of other candidates for
government office constitute probably the
largest category of correspondence. Much
of this material is fairly mundane, but a
few items stand out. The regular reports
filed by Mississippi territorial magistrate
Harry Toulmin bear vivid witness to the
confusion and disorder that prevailed in
West Florida following the collapse of
Spanish authority in 1810. Letters from
various informants warning Madison of
the intrigues brewing within his own
party also attest to the persistent factionalism that plagued Republican politics
during his first administration.
Finally, his personal correspondence, with its fre-
quent talk of sheep breeds, wheat crops,
and similar subjects, shows that the im-
mense responsibilities of office in no
way dulled Madison's keen interest in farm-
ing and agriculture.
Prepared under the direction of J.C.A.
Stagg, this volume conforms in every re-
spect to the high editorial standards
that distinguished the first two entries in the
Presidential Series. The footnotes,
while confined largely to matters of fact rather
than interpretation, are encyclopedic in
scope and do a superb job of illuminating
Book Reviews 83
the historical context of the individual
documents. The introductory essay also
gets high marks for its incisive
analysis of the issues and events that confronted
Madison during this twelve-month cycle
of the calendar. Besides serving as an
important resource for scholars, this
volume stands as a fine piece of scholarship
in its own right.
The Ohio State University Jeff
Seiken
The Papers of Andrew Johnson. Volume 13: September 1867-March 1868. Edited
by Paul H. Bergeron. (Knoxville: The
University of Tennessee Press, 1996.
xxix + 234p.; illustrations,
notes, appendices, index. $49.50.)
This volume of Andrew Johnson's papers
covers the seven months prior to the
President's trial before the Senate
starting on March 30, 1868. Apparently,
Johnson never noticed that his actions
were cementing a fractured Republican
party. Instead, he believed that several
Democratic election victories in the fall
were a prelude to his receiving a
general mandate from the voters. Among other
things during this period, Johnson
expanded amnesty for ex-Confederates, ordered
all military and civil officers to obey
the Constitution and the laws, replaced most
of his original military district
commanders, warned Congress not to try to get rid
of him short of the impeachment process,
and openly questioned whether the
black race could ever learn to govern
competently. More importantly, the
President decided to test the
constitutionality of the Tenure of Office Act by dis-
charging Radical Edwin Stanton as
Secretary of War, and fought a bitter and pro-
tracted warof words with Ulysses S.
Grant. Grant had opted to resign as acting
Secretary of War in favor of Stanton as
the Senate ordered. Failing to entice
General William T. Sherman to take the
position, Johnson finally appointed
General Lorenzo Thomas, who was quickly
arrested. Late in February 1868, the
House approved eleven impeachment
articles that dwelled on the President's viola-
tion of the Tenure of Office Act. As his
trial approached, the Supreme Court de-
layed any involvement in the crisis, but
Johnson's friends rallied to his side.
Some, including an ex-Confederate
general and a member of the G. A. R., offered
him military aid, while others inundated
him with both clever and contradictory
legal strategies. As he assembled his
legal team, this President seemed genuinely
serene and confident about the trial's
outcome.
Impeachment was, of course, the dominant
issue at this time, but this volume
also includes other matters, both
serious and humorous. There is a series of letters
promising to expose Johnson for an
illicit sexual encounter unless he paid money
in exchange for silence. In addition, someone calling himself the
"Avenger"
wrote "let me inform you Tyrant Usurper
TRAITOR that your end is near .... Mark
me A. Johnson Tailor. . ." (p.
275). There are, on the other hand, documents that
tend to evoke laughter. Those seeking
patronage remained persistent, one of
whom assured Johnson that he was
"not smart enough to make money out of a po-
sition" beyond his salary (p. 136).
Another touted his grandson as "trust worthey
and well quillified" to handle any
job "after a little practice" (p. 95). From St.
Louis. Sherman telegraphed the President
at the request of a young soldier named
James Johnson. He claimed to be
Johnson's son and had asked for two hundred
dollars. Johnson immediately informed
Sherman that he had no son named James.
And again, George Bancroft wrote the
President from Prussia offering an insight
into the difference between our two
nations' political perspectives. A
teacher
84 OHIO
HISTORY
asked a young student to name the
world's largest mammal and he answered, "the
King" (p. 488).
Paul Bergeron and his staff have
selected a wide-ranging and compelling array of
documents from an immense supply at
their disposal. Bergeron's introduction
gives the reader an excellent
perspective on these crucial months; the index is ex-
ceptionally thorough, and the appendices
are very helpful. Moreover, as was evi-
dent in past volumes in this series. the
footnotes provide wonderful information
and reflect difficult and meticulous
research. For example, for a twenty-two page
letter from Jonathan Worth, the editors
provide ninety-nine notes and only eight
individuals appearing in the document
are not identified (pp. 402-28). How ob-
scure are some of these individuals?
Note 99 tells us that Thomas K. Feagan "a
former coach painter was a jailer, from
1840 to 1870. . ." (p. 428). When these
scholars finally complete this project,
one hopes that they will decide to work on
yet another important collection.
South Dakota School of Mines and
Technology Gerald W. Wolff
Lewis Cass and the Politics of
Moderation. By Willard Carl Klunder.
(Kent, Ohio:
The Kent State University Press, 1996.
xiv + 416p.: illustrations, notes, bibli-
ography, index. $39.00.)
Earlier studies of Lewis Cass relied on
selected letters, or stressed certain phases
of his career. Willard Klunder's
biography scrutinizes all of Cass' life and corre-
spondence. Which helps explain why it is
the best.
After moving to Ohio young Cass rejected
his father's Federalism for
Jefferson's ideals-majority rule, and
(excepting minorities) individual rights. He
kept that faith most of his life.
Klunder details Cass's early talents as
a vigorous Governor of Michigan, and
Jackson's Secretary of War, as well as
diplomat (Ambassador to France). He had
not the oratorical skills of Clay and
Webster, but by the 1840s was ready for larger
things. Cass supporters liked him for
his biases: his Anglophobia, western in-
terests, and rampant expansionism. These
did not suffice for his attempt at the
Presidency in 1844, poorly handled
anyway. But Cass learned. More impor-
tantly, by 1848 he had something else:
the ideal of popular sovereignty that
thereafter defined his career. If not
original with Cass, it became central to his
thinking. Klunder is persuaded that for Cass popular sovereignty was no
sophistry for winning Southern votes.
Though sensible that it could unite party
moderates, Cass believed deeply in the
concept that sovereignty rested not in
Congress but the people-and the sooner a
territory exercised it the better.
Morally blind to the ethics of slavery.
Cass thought majoritarianism could solve
questions raised by the Mexican War.
Whether the voters of 1848 made the better
or worse of a bad choice (probably the
worse), party feuds helped deny Cass a vic-
tory. Only the ambitions of Buchanan and
Douglas kept the nomination from him
in 1852.
Unluckily for Cass, popular sovereignty
grew less a means of compromising
sectionalism, and more a cover for
Southern hopes. Gradually he saw it not as a
solution to controversy, but a technique
for preserving the Democratic Party
("essential" to the Union's
survival). Acquiescing to Southern pressure, Cass
even abandoned true majority rule in
Kansas for legalities (though Douglas balked
at the frauds). But by then all of
Cass's ideals had given way to the Union's sur-
Book Reviews 85
vival-by whatever means. The compromiser
faced an issue which brooked no
compromise.
Klunder avoids overly admiring his
subject, aware of Cass's flaws: a timorous
dislike of personal confrontation, and
an eagerness to compromise even most
principles. He also details the
Secretary of War's role in the cruel Cherokee re-
moval. Still, he is sympathetic. When
Jackson removed the Deposits, Cass and
Louis McLane (who opposed) threatened to
resign from the Cabinet. But once
Jackson promised to say it was not his
advisors' idea, Cass agreed to remain-and
even removed military pension funds!
Klunder suggests "the Bank War demon-
strated that Cass would remain true to
his principles . .[as] he had been prepared
to resign rather than compromise his
conservative fiscal views." To some, an al-
ternative explanation might easily
suggest itself.
Klunder undercuts one myth, Cass's
pervasive "lethargy" of the 1850s.
Advancing years and his size indeed
required Cass to divest himself of much pa-
perwork. But his intelligence and
political interests remained. As Buchanan's
Secretary of State, Cass served a
President experienced in diplomacy. But
their
policies matched so well Buchanan often
left negotiations to Cass. It was Cass's
particular pride to finally settle
long-standing differences with Britain over
searches on the high seas.
Klunder's biography will be compared to
Frank Woodward's, which is better in
one respect: it is written with more
verve than Klunder's, whose style reflects the
dissertation underlying it. But
Klunder's research, judicious assessments and de-
tails of Cass's post 1852 career make it
the superior in all else. This is now the
standard biography of Cass. It deserves
to be on the shelves of major public and
all academic libraries.
Midwestern State University Everett W.
Kindig
Elusive Empires: Constructing
Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800. By
Eric Hinderaker. (Cambridge: The
Cambridge University Press, 1997. xv +
299p.: maps, notes, bibliography, index,
$49.95)
Elusive Empires: Constructing
Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 by
Eric Hinderaker, assistant professor of
history at the University of Utah, repre-
sents a major contribution to our
understanding of the cultural and political devel-
opment of Ohio during the early frontier
and territorial periods. The book focuses
on the attempt by France, Great Britain,
and the United States to extend political
hegemony over the Ohio Valley. According
to Hinderaker, three distinct models
of empire accompanied this process. Two of these models, empires of com-
merce-based upon the creation and
expansion of trade and commercial activity-
and empires of land based upon the
acquisition of territory and the importation
of european populations-were used by
both England and France throughout the
colonial era. Though differing in their
particulars, both models shared the convic-
tion that colonies existed solely for
the benefit of the mother country and, as a re-
sult, governmental authorities were
obligated to control or limit the activities of
imperial subjects living within these
areas to a considerable degree.
The American Revolution sparked the
creation of a third model of empire, an
empire of liberty. This third model was
uniquely American in character and differed
fundamentally from the models used
previously within the region. Rather than be-
ing a constraining force, government in
the new empire of liberty became an
86 OHIO
HISTORY
agent of liberation. Settlers took land
whenever, wherever, and however they
could get it, all with the overt
encouragement of national authorities. Ironically,
as this empire of liberty facilitated
white settlement, it also degraded the status of
Indians who, as a result, were
eventually subjugated and dispossessed.
"The
Revolution," claims Hinderaker,
"invented a powerful new engine of imperial ex-
pansion: the liberty of its people,
freed to act outside older constraints of public
authority." But while the war
established a "dynamic national empire in the Ohio
Valley," it also left "an
indelible legacy of violence and conquest that shaped the
development of the region and the nation
for generations to come" (xiv).
Hinderaker divides his book into three
parts dealing with commercial expan-
sion, territorial acquisition, and the
causes, course, and consequences of the
Revolution in the Ohio Valley,
respectively. Throughout the text, Hinderaker
makes use of an impressive array of
primary and secondary materials. Further, his
three-empire paradigm is a compelling
organizational and explanatory thesis.
Capacious in scope and erudite in
expression, Elusive Empires stands with the
works of Clarence Alvord, Jack Sosin,
and the more recent efforts of Richard
White and Michael McConnell as an
important reinterpretation of the Ohio fron-
tier. All students of the era will find
something of interest here.
Ohio Historical Society Larry L.
Nelson
The Life and Careers of William Henry
Gorrill, 1841-1874. By R. Bruce Way.
(Lanham, Maryland: University Press of
America, Inc., 1996. x + 233p.; illus-
trations, notes, bibliography, index.
$42.00.)
In 1874 William Henry Gorrill died in
Oakland, California, at age 33. He left
behind a young widow, three very small
children, and an extensive body of ac-
count ledgers, diaries and
correspondence. With this latter material, the bulk of
which is housed at Bowling Green State
University's Center for Archival
Collections, Bruce Way has expertly
crafted an engaging and informative biogra-
phy of Gorrill's brief, yet
far-reaching, life and career.
Gorrill was the son of English
immigrants who came to a Wood County farm in
the early 1830s. After a public school
education and a brief stint as a teacher in
the Troy school system, he entered law
school at the University of Michigan.
Moving to Toledo in 1862, he was soon
prospering in a sizable legal firm and, af-
ter establishing himself in a variety of
social and literary clubs, was well on his
way to a successful middle class career
among the city's young elite, Gorrill was
comfortable enough in his new-found
success to propose marriage to Addie
Walker, the twin daughter of a St.
Clair, Michigan, judge in December 1868.
But intruding upon his well-laid plans
were a recurring cough and side pain that
were the early symptoms of the great
scourge of the second half of the nineteenth
century: the "great white plague of
consumption" or tuberculosis. An acknowl-
edged workaholic, Gorrill at first
attempted to will himself over the affliction with
hard work and an occasional trip out of
doors. Finally admitting to the serious-
ness of his disease, he left on an
extended steamer trip through the upper Great
Lakes, a less-expensive version of one
of the more typical medical treatments for
the disease at the time: a long sea
voyage. As the disease continued its steady
progression, Gorrill came to the
reluctant conclusion that he must seek a new
home, far away from the damp springs and
hot, humid summers of Toledo. If he
would not slow down and rest, his doctor
insisted that he at least begin what was
Book Reviews 87
known at the time as a more
"healthful respiration" of "pure air." The dry air and
sunny skies of the far West beckoned.
So in the summer of 1869, Henry Gorrill
left his midwestern legal career and fi-
ancee behind for a trip with an
uncertain destination and duration to restore his
health and possibly acquire a new and,
for him, healthier profession. For a time
the trip was open-ended as he wandered
from Minnesota to Utah to Montana to
Idaho to Oregon. Once Gorrill made it to
the Pacific coastline, however, he never
left, eventually settling in the San
Francisco Bay area, although the improvement
of that particular environment over
northwest Ohio was questionable.
In hopes that an outdoor job might
improve his health, Gorrill agreed to be-
come the west coast agent for fellow
Buckeye Robert Smith's patent truss bridge.
Gorrill and Smith had shared the same
office building in downtown Toledo and
Smith was steadily gaining a national
reputation for his distinctive wooden
bridges. After creating the Pacific
Bridge Company and suffering through a long
dry period, Gorrill landed his first
contract in Oakland in the summer of 1870. One
of the firm's bridges, a 168-foot Smith
truss covered bridge near Santa Cruz, still
survives. Two of his brothers soon
joined him in the neophyte bridge-building
operation. With success in his new
profession seemingly in hand, he consented
to Addie Walker's joining him in
California. They were married the day she ar-
rived. But the Gorrills' marriage did
not even last three years before Henry sud-
denly succumbed to typhoid fever, the
bane of urban water supplies.
The author's epilogue expertly assesses
Gorrill's life in the context of the late
nineteenth century value system that
"equated material progress with moral
progress." A solid Republican in
the post-Civil War days of radicalism, Gorrill
firmly believed in self-improvement
through hard work. But his interests in wom-
en's rights placed him ahead of his
fellow radicals. Gorrill's long struggle with
the tuberculosis bacterium, seen as the
century's greatest killer, is even more rep-
resentative of the era. It is ironic
therefore, but no less descriptive of his time,
that his ultimate demise should come
from contaminated water. It was, of course,
for his health that Gorrill became a
part of the great American westward move-
ment, but his irresistible attraction to
an urban environment undermined his own
well-being. In the process, nonetheless,
he created what became one of the west
coast's largest construction firms,
Pacific Bridge Company.
The transformation of Way's doctoral
dissertation into this slender volume is
done reasonably well by University Press
with one major exception: no chapter
headings were used and the citations
were placed at the end of each chapter, making
them a challenge for all but the most
persistent to find. If one's tolerance for that
kind of irritation is high, I would
recommend the volume as an interesting and en-
lightening biographical study.
Ohio Historical Society David A.
Simmons
Grand Eccentrics. Turning the
Century: Dayton and the Inventing of America. By
Mark Bernstein. (Wilmington, Ohio:
Orange Frazer Press, 1996, 271p.; notes,
bibliography, illustrations, index.
$29.95.)
Collective biography should be a
tapestry, the separate patterns-though indi-
vidually splendid-woven into a
spectacular historical display. Perhaps
Ray
Ginger's chestnut, Altgeld's America,
best exemplifies this genre, as the lives of
Louis Sullivan, Jane Addams, Eugene
Debs, Clarence Darrow, John Dewey, and
88 OHIO
HISTORY
Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld all
unfold against the backdrop of Chicago at
the turn of the 20th century. The result
is a gripping analysis of America trying to
hold onto its agrarian past while moving
into an industrial future. In Altgeld's
America, the individual lives are subsumed within an
interpretation that cannot
easily be explored through simple
biography or chronological narrative.
Presumably Mark Bernstein is attempting
a similar objective in Grand
Eccentrics; his subtitle certainly implies as much. The context is
Dayton, Ohio,
the first third of the 20th century,
home at various times to such a diverse crew as
Orville and Wilbur Wright, John H.
Patterson, James M. Cox, Charles H.
Kettering, and Arthur Morgan. The
well-known story of the Wright brothers and
the less-familiar accounts of the other
figures provide fascinating glimpses of cre-
ative, persistent,
and-sometimes-peripatetic eccentricity. John H. Patterson
built National Cash Register into a
multinational corporation but lacked the fore-
sight to prepare it for competition in
today's computerized business climate.
(Indeed, he once fired Thomas Watson,
founder of IBM.) James Cox, former gov-
ernor and Presidential candidate, became
wealthy in the newspaper business.
Charles Kettering, who once worked for
Patterson at NCR, became a pioneer in au-
tomotive and industrial research,
producing electrical ignition and discovering the
chemical process to take the knock out
of gasoline. In the aftermath of Dayton's
1913 flood, engineer Arthur Morgan built
a system of dams that protected the city
from future floods, then went on to
become president of Antioch College, trying
and failing to build it into a utopian
community.
However interesting these people are,
Bernstein fails to place them in either an
historical or a geographical context. As
for geography, Dayton is a bit player in
this narrative, mentioned only when
events such as the 1913 flood force its pres-
ence into the story, and it is never
clear how Dayton shaped and was shaped by the
lives under discussion. For instance, in 1914 and in response to
local
government's ineptitude in coping with
the flood, the city changed its charter to a
city manager system. Yet Bernstein gives
only superficial attention to the
politics surrounding this monumental
reform, the "Dayton Plan," which was
copied by hundreds of cities throughout
the country.
Clearly, the lives of Bernstein's
eccentrics signal an America in transition. For
one thing, the state itself was becoming
a greater force in people's lives. It is
hard to imagine but Wilbur Wright
struggled to convince the American govern-
ment to buy his airplane. Yet 40 years
later, the technocratic state would emerge
to foment a diverse array of
technologies, ranging from atomic weapons to inter-
galactic spacecraft to the internet. But
Bernstein does not take the opportunity to
explore how historical forces shaped the
lives of eccentrics such as the Wrights,
nor does he discuss how their respective
contributions assisted the transition, for
example, to a more energetic state
apparatus. Individual lives are revealed but not
in the contextual swirl of history.
Nor are the lives explored in relation
to each other. Kettering, Patterson, Cox,
and the others bump into one another, to
be sure, but Bernstein never clearly es-
tablishes substantive relationships
among them, never explains how they may
have affected each other, aside from
occasionally jousting over political turf or
sitting together on a variety of boards
and clubs. Yes, Bernstein reveals their in-
dividual lives, but as a collective
biography his effort resembles less a tapestry
and more a box of brightly colored
marbles.
The Ohio State University, Lima William Angel
Book Reviews 89
The Man Who Found the Money: John
Stewart Kennedy and the Financing of the
Western Railroads. By Saul Engelbourg and Leonard Bushkoff. (East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 1996.
xiv + 257p.; illustrations, notes, bib-
liography, index. $34.95.)
Among the numerous titles devoted to
railroad history, only a few address the
complicated, often secretive, but always
crucial aspect of finance. This book fo-
cuses on the career of a significant
19th century entrepreneur who became a lead-
ing banker for James Jerome Hill and who
amassed a large personal fortune as
well.
Kennedy was born in Blantyre, Scotland,
in 1830, the sixth of nine children.
The family soon moved to Glasgow, where
Kennedy grew up, receiving an excel-
lent education, and where he began work
as a clerk at age thirteen. Rising rapidly,
he became a traveling sales agent in
1850 for an iron manufacturer, which sent
him to the United States, where he
became acquainted with the booming railroad
industry. He also gained experience with
private bankers and commission mer-
chants, one of whom was Morris Jesup. In
1856, he became a junior partner in
Jesup's firm and in the following year
he emigrated to the United States and be-
came a citizen, and settled in New York
City. He married Emma Baker, of a promi-
nent family, which gave him access to
the city's financial elite.
M. K. Jesup & Company became
involved in financing midwestern railroads,
and Kennedy added to his knowledge and
expertise during the Civil War era. By
1867, he had a net worth of $600,000.
The following year Kennedy established
his own firm, J. S. Kennedy and Co.,
which combined commission merchantry
with private banking, with an increasing
stress on the latter function. He became
involved in the management of several
roads and in 1873 he became the American
agent of the Scottish-American
Investment Company, which proved to be an im-
portant link between the railroad
builders of America and the capital surpluses of
the old country. Kennedy remained a key
member of its advisory board for the rest
of his active life, increasing his
personal wealth and becoming a major player in
the New York financial world.
By the 1870s, Kennedy developed further
skills by helping to reorganize trou-
bled lines such as the Central Railroad
of New Jersey and the St. Paul & Pacific,
soon renamed the St. Paul, Minneapolis
and Manitoba in 1879. Kennedy estab-
lished close relationships with George
Stephen and Donald Smith of Canada and
Norman Kittson and James J. Hill of
Minnesota. By 1883, with his net worth
topping two million dollars, Kennedy
dissolved his firm, which was succeeded by
one headed by his nephew, and became
vice president and financial manager of his
expanding Manitoba, later to be renamed
the Great Northern. He not only helped
secure capital but advised on the
purchase of locomotives and rails. Hill's original
aim of tapping the trade of western
Canada was thwarted by the construction of the
Canadian Pacific, so he turned west, to
Montana and beyond. Kennedy, under con-
stant pressure to raise money, began to
withdraw from an active role by 1890. He
traveled extensively and was active in
many charities and philanthropies, dying in
October 1909 at the age of 79. He left
an estate of S67 million, much of which
went to charity.
The authors are competent and
sure-footed guides to the complex world of high
finance. They describe in extensive
detail the involved transactions necessary to
meet the insatiable needs of the
railroad builders. In this small arena, experience,
skill, personal contacts, business
acumen, hard work and, above all, integrity
90 OHIO
HISTORY
contributed to success. Kennedy had
these attributes, supplying the needed funds
and benefiting himself as well.
The research behind this book is
impressive; the authors have mastered their
topic and written the definitive study
of Kennedy, the financier. Although it is not
quite a biography, because of source
limitations, they have nonetheless added to
our knowledge of high finance and of one
of the key figures who helped to make
possible the growth of modern America.
East Stroudsburg University James N. J. Henwood
Organizing the Unemployed: Conmmunity and Union
Activists in the Industrial
Heartland. By James J. Lorence. (Albany: State University of New
York Press,
1996. xx + 407p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $22.95 paper.)
Professor James J. Lorence's study of
unionism among Michigan's unemployed
during the Great Depression will be of
interest to a varied audience of readers. Of
course, labor and working class
historians and regionalists will find the work to
be valuable as well. The book looks at
the unemployed as a group with organiza-
tions, plans, deliberations, and
factions rather than as a mass of angry individuals
who periodically formed together and
rose up to challenge the status quo during the
Great Depression. Lorence places a piece
in a historical puzzle by providing an
examination of the unemployed and their
organizations.
By taking a regional approach, Lorence
makes the study digestible.
Examinations of such complex subjects on
a national level seldom allow a look at
the intricacy of organizations and
politics as does this book. The professor draws
an understandable picture of the
regional ethnic and sectional influences that often
determine history. While Lorence's
approach provides an example of the dynam-
ics at work among the unemployed that
could be transposed to many regions of the
country, he fails to make the leap in
comparison, however. For example, in his
discussion of the relationship of the
upper peninsula of Michigan and its rural and
extra active industrial economy with the
automobile producing areas of the state,
Lorence could draw comparisons with
similar relationships in other states.
Downturns in the economy of the upper
peninsula led to the relocation of workers
in that region to Detroit and other
manufacturing areas of Michigan. This exacer-
bated the unemployment problems in the
urban areas when the depression hit.
When some reverse migration occurred, it
did nothing to help the cities' problems
but only added to the plight of the
upper peninsula. A similar situation existed in
Ohio, for instance, where unemployment
in the extractive industries of nearby
Appalachia led to migration to Ohio's
industrial belt and caused greater unem-
ployment problems after the onset of
depression in Ohio. Again, reverse migra-
tion produced similar results.
While one certainly can infer from Organizing
the Unemployed that events in
Michigan corresponded with those in the
rest of the country in many ways, the
book could have been more useful if
direct correlations were made not just to other
regions but to the nation as a whole.
Fleeting mentions are made of unemployed
movements in other parts of the United
States, but solid connections between de-
velopments in Michigan and the rest of
the nation are absent. This is especially
curious considering Professor Lorence's
lengthy discussion of activism among
displaced workers within the Works
Progress Administration.
Book Reviews 91
Overall, however, the book is an
important addition to the scholarship of the
era, the region, and labor and social
activism. Lorence ably tracks Michigan's un-
employed through the early Great
Depression years when Communist and Socialist
groups courted the unemployed through
relief programs sponsored through unem-
ployed Councils and the Workers
Alliance. In these early depression years, such
movements had the face of social
activism. Factional rivalries added to the inabil-
ity of these political groups to attract
the true allegiance of many of the unem-
ployed, who were largely interested in
the relief efforts. With the advent of the
WPA in 1935, the Workers Alliance,
mostly controlled by Socialists after their
battle with the Communists for influence
over the unemployed, took advantage of
the organization of the government
agency to give more structure to its own ef-
forts. The WPA helped to bring
unemployed workers under a ready-made umbrella
organization. However, the WPA also
forestalled the radical activism of some fac-
tions of the unemployed groups. Workers
in the WPA no longer were truly unem-
ployed, and drastic social change made
less sense. When the United Auto Workers
was legitimized in 1937, many of the
unemployed enjoyed the brotherhood of that
union as out-of-work auto workers. The
UAW reached out to the unemployed, and
the resulting sense of belonging in a
labor organization weakened the usefulness
of the leftist political movements,
which preyed upon the unemployed workers'
sense of exclusion from society.
No historian of these times and of the
labor movement can afford to pass over
this book. It gives a new perspective to
the Great Depression and organized labor
through a refreshing regional approach
and use of an impressive body of primary
materials.
Youngstown Historical Center of Industry
and Labor Randall S. Gooden
James J. Hill: Empire Builder of the
Northwest. By Michael P. Malone. (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. xiv
+ 306p; illustrations, bibliographic
essay, index. $14.95 paper.)
The Oklahoma Western Biographies series
seeks to illuminate the lives of no-
table westerners and explicate trends in
the development of the American west.
Malone's interpretive study of James J.
Hill fulfills both objectives. Relying
primarily on secondary sources, Malone
strives to depict objectively Hill's many
interests and activities.
Lucidly telling the story of Hill's rise
from humble small-town Canadian ori-
gins to international prominence and
wealth as a railroad builder and investor,
Malone demonstrates how Hill rationally
integrated functions first in riverboat
commerce and then in railroads. He
credits Hill's determination, hard work, inno-
vativeness and talented subordinates for
his success. Hill's genius lay in his abil-
ity to master details while fashioning a
broad vision and strategy to achieve that
vision. Early on he found powerful
mentors and later skillfully built alliances
with people of mutual interests. To tell
a balanced story, Malone does not short-
change those aspects of Hill's character
which led him to engage in unethical ac-
tivities and to behave in a ruthless and
domineering manner.
Hill built his railroads and spearheaded
the development of the trans-
Mississippi northwest with a trunk and
branch system. As circumstances allowed,
Hill recognized the potential for wheat
fields and extended his railroad into the up-
per great plains while simultaneously
recruiting immigrants into areas served by
92 OHIO
HISTORY
his various railroads. A similar process
unfolded in mining and timber areas. He
built his railroads efficiently with low
grades and minimal curvature over the most
direct routes, even as this process
initially meant higher up-front costs. Over the
long haul, it lowered operating costs on
lines carrying heavier loads at lower rates
than his competition. Promoting a theme
of community of interest and mutual de-
pendence between his railroads and the
regions they served, Hill offered special
services to his customers and extracted
special treatment from local and state gov-
ernments.
Malone nicely debunks the old saw that
Hill built his railroad empire without
subsidy. He points out that the
Minnesota and Pacific Railroad had a 2.46 million
acre land grant from the Minnesota
territorial legislature and that Hill successfully
lobbied to get legislation which allowed
him to keep the land grant when he took
control of the bankrupt line. Hill also
lobbied successfully to get the Army Corps
of Engineers to improve the port
facilities at Duluth. The northern terminus of the
Saint Paul and Pacific which he came to
control, Duluth also became the home port
for Hill's Northern Steamship Line. The
Federal government also helped the
"Empire Builder" build the
Great Northern Railroad when Congress passed and
President Cleveland signed legislation
giving Hill a right-of-way through the
Highline reservation lands and three
military reserves in Montana. To win gov-
ernmental support for his various
projects, Hill regularly financially supported
politicians who served his interests.
After the Democrats fused with the Populists
he openly joined forces with Mark Hanna in
raising huge sums of money for the
new McKinley Republican party.
Malone's work admirably gets beyond the
Captain of Industry-Robber Baron
debate. He follows the business history
model developed by Alfred D. Chandler
but also extends that model to show how
the state interacted with business inter-
ests to develop public policy. In the
area of international business history he ex-
plores
transportation and financial connections between
Americans and
Canadians. He also examines Hill's
prescient efforts to establish commercial
links with Japanese shipping interests
and tells the story of Hill's failed efforts to
get government support for his Pacific
merchant fleet.
One weakness of this otherwise fine work
is the scant attention paid to the bur-
geoning fields of labor and personnel
policy history. This is especially glaring
given the role played by the Federal
government in the wake of the Pullman strike.
Also, unfortunately the book lacks notes
and a bibliography.
University of Cincinnati, Raymond
Walters College James E. Cebula
For Cause & Comrades: Why Men
Fought In The Civil War. By James M.
McPherson. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997. 237p.; notes, ap-
pendix, notes on sources, index.
$25.00.)
In For Cause & Comrades Professor
James McPherson explores the combat mo-
tivation of Civil War soldiers, a
subject which has attracted historians since Bell
I. Wiley's pioneering volumes, The
Life of Johnny Reb (1943) and The Life of
Billy Yank (1952). Researchers who have struggled to puzzle out
the handwriting
of some the veterans of the 1860s will
readily appreciate McPherson's achieve-
ment. His work draws on an impressive
number of letters and diaries, representing
more than 1,000 soldiers, 647 Federals
and 429 Confederates. The author of
Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson brings an unsurpassed understanding of the
Book Reviews 93
fundamental issues of the Civil War to
the analysis of these primary sources. He
also shows his command of the secondary
literature on combat motivation during
the War Between the States, and other
conflicts. His text, essay on sources, and
endnotes guide the reader to important
works by John Keegan, Reid Mitchell,
Gerald Linderman, S.L.A. Marshall, and
others.
For Cause & Comrades concludes that "duty, honor, patriotism, and
ideology
functioned as the principal sustaining
motivations of Civil War soldiers" (p.
131). During the 1860s, McPherson
argues, "patriotism was not the last refuge of
the scoundrel; it was the credo of the
fighting soldier" (p. 103). He realizes that
since the Vietnam War-indeed, since
World War I--Americans have had difficulty
believing that troops could be motivated
by ideals. Having acknowledged this,
McPherson counsels against transferring
our twentieth century assumptions to the
values of Civil War volunteers.
"Our cynicism about the genuineness of such sen-
timents is more our problem than
theirs," he contends, "a temporal/cultural barrier
we must transcend if we are to
understand why they fought... And how
smugly
can we sneer at their expressions of a
willingness to die for those beliefs when we
know that they did precisely that?"
(p. 100).
McPherson's assertion that patriotism
helped Civil War soldiers sustain their
ordeal runs counter to other recent
works, in particular Gerald Linderman's
Embattled Courage; The Experience of
Combat in the American Civil War (1987).
Linderman concluded that the volunteers
of 1861 carried romantic notions into
their first combats, but as the bloody
conflict dragged on, they became disillu-
sioned and abandoned their initial
ideals. McPherson concedes that the late war
letters of some soldiers have a negative
tone, but believes that these writings usu-
ally come from conscripts, substitutes,
and bounty men. He argues that, in con-
trast to these reluctant warriors, the
reliable members of the regiments which saw
the hardest service were sustained by
their patriotism until the decision was ren-
dered in the spring of 1865. "For
the fighting soldiers who enlisted in 1861 and
1862," McPherson insists, "the
values of duty and honor remained a crucial com-
ponent of their sustaining motivation to
the end" (p. 168). He emphasizes that
both sides withstood unrelenting
hardships during the campaigns of 1864 and that
the morale of the beleaguered South
collapsed only at the painful conclusion of the
war.
Readers of this journal will be
interested in McPherson's treatment of Ohio sol-
diers. He estimates that the state
provided about 11.8 percent of the Union ranks,
and Ohioans represent roughly the same
percentage in his sample of Federal sol-
diers. Among the Buckeyes quoted in For
Cause & Comrades are members of one
cavalry, one heavy artillery, and at
least twenty infantry regiments. The book
closes with a quotation from a letter
written by a captain of the Forty-seventh
Ohio.
Air Force History Support Office Perry D. Jamieson
Making Peace with the 60s. By David Burner. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1996. 295p.;
illustrations, bibliography, index. $29.95.)
While David Burner's title is clever, it
hardly reflects the actual tone of the
book. Burner is anything but at peace
with the '60s. Rather he depicts an era that
began with the promise of an inclusive
society based on New Deal liberalism and
ended with social segmentation,
incivility, and the decline of liberalism. In ex-
94 OHIO
HISTORY
plaining such declension, Burner, a
student of Richard Hofstadter, seeks to provide
the same kind of provocative
interpretation of the 1960s as his mentor did in the
Age of Reform.
The topics covered by Burner are
familiar: the civil rights movement, black
power, the cold war under Kennedy, the
counter culture, the student rebellion, the
war on poverty, and Vietnam. Yet through
the book runs a common motif. By
1960 New Deal liberalism, with its
confidence in social science and technology
and its commitment to legal formalities,
had lost vitality and needed repair. The
early movements of the 1960s-civil
rights under King, campus protest under
Mario Savio, and even SDS at the time of
the Port Huron Statement-had the po-
tential of providing that revitalization
through injections of moral action and par-
ticipatory democracy. Instead, each
spewed forth an antagonist to New Deal liber-
alism-black separatism and its culture
of victimization, student incivility and
anti-intellectualism, and leftist
political correctness and self-indulgence. These
forces undermined New Deal liberalism
and produced much of the social pathology
Burner sees in the nation today.
Making Peace with the 60s would be a hard volume to review no matter how
many words allotted. It contains many
insights the two chapters on the civil
rights movement and black power are
among the best short treatments on the sub-
ject that I have read (even if Burner
must passionately entitle the latter chapter
"Killers of the Dream"). But
it also contains much silliness and many faults. It is
plain silliness to write: "Had the
New Left supported Humphrey, he might have
been the victor" in 1968 (p. 214).
How many votes did the New Left amount to?
What of Nixon's highly successful
southern strategy (not discussed)? Had not the
die already been cast before the
Democratic National Convention? Burner fails to
provide a rich context for understanding
the sixties. For all his eloquence, Burner
does not go much beyond Kris
Kristoferson's "Marvin Middleclass" who, dis-
traught over social developments, could
only "blame it on the Stones." Burner's
villains are ideological New Leftists,
male-hating feminists, and black power ad-
vocates. He provides no meaningful
analysis of racism, consumerism, or conser-
vatism in the 1960. (Remember, for
instance, that in Ohio in 1962 James
Rhodes, who ran on the slogan that
profit was not a dirty word, trounced incum-
bent liberal governor Mike DiSalle and
started his legendary reign.) Burner like-
wise leaves unexamined changes in family
structure, divorce, and employment.
Nor is there any attempt to understand
what "played" outside of elitist circles.
Clearly the residents of Springfield,
Ohio (at the time the demographic center of
the nation), knew little and perhaps
cared less about the goings-on at Berkeley or
Columbia or that Jerry Rubin predicted
that the Pentagon would levitate. And fi-
nally, Burner fails to explain how New
Left vices became commonplace within the
larger culture. If political correctness
was born of the marriage of bra-burning
feminists and unshaven radicals, how is
it that it got incorporated into mainstream
society and institutions? Are school principals
who expel seven-year old boys for
kissing seven-year old girls aged New
Leftists? Are all college presidents who
create Black Student Unions closet
radicals from the late 60s? Burner needs to dig
deeper and explain more.
Let me end by noting that if the above
review seems discombobulated, try the
book. But try it! It's a trip!
The Ohio State University Warren R. Van
Tine
Book Reviews 95
Labor Market Politics and the Great
War: The Department of Labor, the States, and
the First U.S. Employment Service,
1907-1933. By William J. Breen. (Kent,
Ohio: The Kent State University Press,
1997. xix + 233p.; notes, essay on
sources, index. $35.00.)
Exploring how World War I shaped the
evolution of the United States
Employment Service (USES), Breen focuses
on the Department of Labor's efforts
to establish control over the placement
of unskilled workers in the national labor
market and the resistance to centralized
control by the states and various interest
groups. Examining the role of the
government in state building, he concludes that
in labor market regulation, it was
public officials confronting the wartime crisis
rather than interest groups who took the
lead.
With the Department of Labor's mandate
to promote the welfare of wage earners
and advance their opportunities for
profitable employment, in 1914 Secretary of
Labor William B. Wilson transformed the
Bureau of Immigration's Division of
Information into the USES. In late 1917
President Wilson provided additional
emergency funding. Once the war ended,
the Department of Labor lacked the polit-
ical support for statutory existence and
permanent funding.
They failed because of the nature of
federalism, the administrative struggles in
wartime Washington, and the lack of
administrative capacity in the Department of
Labor. Without detailed statistical
information about labor markets, wartime pol-
icy decisions forced the USES to turn to
experts from the American Association of
Public Employment Offices, state
employment programs, and various advisory
boards for information to implement
policies. Breen shows how the success of
the Ohio employment program developed in
1917 by Fred Croxton led to a federal-
ist system of employment offices during
the labor emergency of the Summer and
Fall of 1918.
Bureaucratic opposition, led by
Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post, pre-
vented legislation that would have
permanently federalized the USES and bring it
under the oversight of an advisory
committee with representatives from employ-
ers, employees, and the public. Breen is
unclear if the opposition to the advisory
committee was to protect the Department
of Labor's control of the program, or if
it was a fundamental policy disagreement
over the role of the USES during strikes.
The Seattle experiment, in which the
USES provided labor for the Emergency
Fleet Corporation in conjunction with
the metal trade unions, brought charges
that the USES was controlled by
unionists. Labor Department
administrators
countered that the labor market
effectively created a union shop environment, pro-
ductivity increased, and contracts were
being met. Charges that the agency was
not neutral raised questions about the
Department's capacity to administer a na-
tional employment program. This was no
small issue. The war revitalized the
American labor movement and the policies
of the National War Labor Board facili-
tated unionization. Between 1917 and
1920 union membership grew by almost 70
percent and strike activity during the
postwar reconstruction was at its highest in
American history.
Secretary Wilson did not believe the
USES should supply labor during a strike
and he rejected oversight committees.
The state employment services usually ad-
vised job applicants that a strike was
in progress. By not compromising on these
issues, in Breen's view, Wilson missed
an opportunity to get legislation estab-
lishing the USES along federalist lines.
Instead, the USES muddled through the
war and failed to get adequate funding
during the postwar reconstruction.
96 OHIO
HISTORY
Lacking statutory existence, the USES
remained a minor organization until
1933. The Wagner-Peyser Act gave it a
clear mission to establish and maintain a
system of public employment offices in
the states, set minimum standards, pro-
mote uniform statistical procedures, and
maintain a labor clearing house between
the states.
Breen tells "a tale of an attempt
at state building . . . that failed" (p. xviii). This
is bureaucratic history with close
attention to bureaucratic politics, but social is-
sues are hardly touched upon. This is
troubling. As Melvyn Dubofsky observes in
The State and Labor in Modern America
(1994), p.236, "no sharp line
ever sepa-
rated state from society...." A more realistic explanation of why the USES
limped along until the Great Depression
is that the elections of 1918 and 1920
brought to power elected officials and
administrators who rejected an activist fed-
eral government in general, and
Department of Labor in particular.
University of Cincinnati James E.
Cebula
Raymond Walters College
Lyndon Johnson's War: America's Cold
War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968. By
Michael H. Hunt. (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1996. ix + 146p.; maps, notes,
recommended reading, index. $18.00.)
In this short work, Michael H. Hunt
writes to exorcise the "ghost" of Vietnam
that has haunted him and the nation
since 1975 (p. ix). Hunt poses the question
that has persisted from the late 1960s
to this day: why did the United States wage
war in Vietnam? As his title suggests,
Hunt contends that "Lyndon Johnson must
bear the primary responsibility for the
Vietnam war" (p. 106).
Before taking up the issue of Johnson's
culpability, Hunt reviews American in-
volvement in Indochina from 1945 through
the assassination of John F.
Kennedy. Ignorance and paternalism
shaped the Indochinese policy of Harry S
Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, as both
presidents all too easily responded to
turmoil in Vietnam by interpreting
conflict there as part of the Cold War. The
American response, although limited,
sought to stem the tide of expansive com-
munism. So began our commitment to the
Republic of Vietnam. Hunt then as-
sesses Ho Chi Minh's efforts to unite
the country under the Democratic Republic
of Vietnam (DRV). Ho's reliance on a
Leninist-style Communist party, innate
Vietnamese nationalism, and a populist
program of rural reform gave the DRV a
capacity to wage a struggle the southern
republic could not counter.
Hunt then returns to the United States
to evaluate the Kennedy administration.
The avid, can-do Cold War whiz kids
under the dynamic JFK receive yet another
telling. All were eager to turn back
Communist aggression, but Kennedy, if not
his national security advisors,
displayed a reluctance to commit fully in Vietnam.
Hunt does not maintain that JFK was on
the verge of leaving Indochina when he
died but does assert that he "seems
to have developed second thoughts" late in
1963 (p. 68).
It is at this juncture, halfway through
the book, that Lyndon Johnson appears.
Hunt devotes his longest chapter to
explaining why Vietnam was Lyndon
Johnson's War. Simply put, unlike his predecessors, Johnson proclaimed
his in-
tent to win in Vietnam, then committed
American air power and ground combat
troops in an escalating effort to win
through force of arms. Vietnam was
Johnson's war because LBJ was willing to
go for victory. However, the long train
Book Reviews 97
of American ignorance of Vietnam, our
cultural arrogance, paternalism, and Cold
War simple-mindedness led the usually
shrewd Johnson to overreach himself and
engage in a disastrous war.
There is little to quibble with in
Hunt's basic argument. It is particularly strong
on the cultural arrogance and ignorance
of American policy makers. Strength ap-
pears as well in the chapter examining
Ho Chi Minh's mobilization of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam. However,
one wonders what audience Hunt and
his publisher aimed to serve with this
book. It is too generalized, drawing almost
wholly on published documents and a few
secondary works, to offer something
new to scholars or well-read lay
persons. Conversely, the book is too brief to
serve an undergraduate audience. The
book offers a conventional treatment, offer-
ing no new information or interpretive
insights.
In the end, Hunt even weakens his
central thesis that the war belonged to
Lyndon Johnson. He describes Johnson's
personal traits, beliefs, and leadership
style, depicting a man eager to make
hard decisions. Yet after this long explica-
tion, Hunt backtracks and contends that
as a prisoner of American culture, Cold
War thinking, and his own macho values,
Johnson could not have done otherwise.
Vietnam, the author suddenly argues,
"was also America's war, a national crusade
whose sources transcended one man"
(p. 107). The reader is left wondering, which
should Hunt's title be, Lyndon
Johnson's War or American
Culture's War?
University of Missouri-St. Louis Jerry Cooper
The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan
Trials, 1871-1872. By Lou Falkner
Williams. (Athens: The University of
Georgia Press, 1996. xiii + 197p.; illus-
trations, notes, bibliography, index.
$35.00.)
If the Civil War was about the
enslavement of African Americans,
Reconstruction defined how far they
might stray from that status. White southern-
ers, insulted by the dilemma of having
to deal politically with former slaves and
desirous of restoring control to white
men of property and education, resisted
northern efforts to uplift the freedmen.
When Republicans passed the Thirteenth,
Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments,
white Southerners reacted violently. In
nine northern counties in South Carolina
the Ku Klux Klan responded by intimi-
dating and terrorizing black men and
women. Although the Republican majority
in Congress passed Enforcement Acts to
halt such activities in all parts of the
South and successfully prosecuted a
range of participants, Lou Falkner Williams
offers us a tale of how white
southerners shaped the legal interpretations of these
laws and blunted federal power to create
a full citizenship for the African American
male.
In The Great South Carolina Ku Klux
Klan Trials, 1871-1872, Williams exam-
ines the arguments of both prosecution
and defense and the constitutional question
of what impact the Thirteenth,
Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments might have
on federal-state relations. She portrays
these cases as an opportunity for prosecu-
tors to use the recently passed federal
amendments to guarantee the application of
the Bill of Rights to African Americans,
and to assert federal power to protect any
citizen, in any state, from the
violation of that protection. Defense lawyers, on
the other hand, countered with the
traditional view that the Bill of Rights pro-
tected citizens against federal, not
state, actions, and that the new amendments, as
well as the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and
1871, did not apply to the lack of state
98 OHIO
HISTORY
action against private citizens who
deprived blacks of their rights. They also ar-
gued that the states defined who could
vote, and, thereby, that the Fifteenth
Amendment applied only to deliberate
state actions to deny suffrage on a basis of
race, not to the actions of private
individuals. The outcome of these cases, as well
as the limited review given them by the
Circuit Court and the Supreme Court,
rested on a narrow interpretation that
the federal government could outlaw con-
spiracies to deprive people of their
right to vote on a basis of their race only.
This interpretation provided northern
Republicans with face-saving convictions
that temporarily ended the violence, and
southern lawyers and their supporters
with decisions that restricted the power
of the federal government to provide the
full rights of citizenship for the
freedmen.
Williams has offered a textured
interpretation of this southern victory. It was
not merely southern intransigence, but
also practical problems, such as the depar-
ture of the leaders of these atrocities
to other countries, the plea bargaining neces-
sary to obtain witnesses, the
idiosyncrasies of the cases available to prosecute,
and the large number of potential
prosecutions, that circumscribed the federal
prosecutors. Williams also adeptly
analyzes the assortment of federal officials
involved, their backgrounds, and the
differentiated approaches that they took to-
ward prosecution of these crimes based
on legal strategy and political considera-
tions. In the final analysis, though, it
was the replacement of the Attorney
General Amos T. Ackerman with George H.
Williams, a Grant appointee much in
sympathy with Southern attitudes, that
stymied efforts to present legal arguments
for the expansion of federal power. Even
had Ackerman remained in office, how-
ever, the Slaughterhouse and Cruikshank
cases of 1873 and 1874 indicated that he
could not have won the argument.
This well-written and well-organized
book is intended for the specialized reader
in legal history. It successfully places
the numerous constitutional questions and
arguments within the intolerant social
and political context of the post-emancipa-
tion South. Its basic theme is
available, however, in several shorter articles pub-
lished in Civil War History and
the Georgia Journal of Southern Legal History.
Youngstown State University William D. Jenkins
Wanted Dead or Alive: The American
West in Popular Culture. Edited by
Richard
Aquila. (Champaign: University of
Illinois Press, 1996. x + 313p.; illustra-
tions, notes, suggestions for further
reading, contributors, index. $29.95.)
No region has been more prominent in
American mass culture than the West. In
Wanted Dead or Alive, ten historians explore western imagery in American fic-
tion, performance, film, television,
music, painting and advertising.
Each of the authors offers intelligent
chronologies; some rely heavily on sec-
ondary accounts, some provide much more.
Ray White's fascinating exploration
of the B Western, the cheap theatrical
films of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, is one
of the few scholarly studies of what was
a Hollywood staple. The B Western,
White argues, engaged in racial and
gender stereotyping, though Native Americans
fared comparatively well. At the same
time, the B Western showed little regard for
the rule of law. Indeed, the typical B
Western hero often had to circumvent the le-
gal system to achieve justice. Richard
Aquila's essay on the image of the West in
popular music is especially effective at
conveying one of the collection's main
themes. Once celebratory of Western
history and the West as a place, songwriters
Book Reviews 99
beginning in the 1960s engaged in a
revisionism that anticipated "the
new
Western history" two decades later
while treating the region as paradise lost.
Similarly impressive is Elliott West's
review of Western imagery in advertising,
from the earliest tourist promotions by
the region's railroads to the western look
of Ralph Lauren. "The Lauren Man is
a buckaroo with eastern savvy," West writes,
"Jay Gatsby in Marlboro
Country" (p. 286). Most deserving of praise is Joni L.
Kinsey's analysis of popular Western
visual treatments. Kinsey brilliantly recon-
structs the sources-both governmental
and commercial-of nineteenth century
paintings and prints of the West. At the
end of the century, Frederic Remington
led a movement that affected to realism
but in truth brokered in myth making.
Throughout Wanted Dead or Alive, one
theme emerges. The western image has
hardly been static, but constituted an
ever changing series of representations of
dominant mores regarding gender, race
and authority. As Christine Bold notes, a
woman, Ann S. Stephens, wrote one of the
first dime novels about the west,
Malaeska (1860). Stephens sympathetically described the tragic
plight of a
Native American woman. Very quickly,
however, dime novel publishers hired
males to write stories celebrating the
exploits of white men out West. "The story
of male heroism became entrenched as the
dominant dime novel formula," Bold
writes (p. 23).
The collection's only serious weakness
comes when some authors infer too
much from their subjects. Not content to
describe mass cultural images, they must
transform them into mirrors. Although
identifying popular trends in mass culture
seems fair enough, the historian must do
so cautiously. A mass cultural product,
like the recent CBS TV series, "Dr.
Quinn, Medicine Woman," may say more
about the creators' politics than the
audience's enthusiasm for ethnic diversity and
the environment. Many viewers may watch
the program not because they accept
the program's chronic political
correctness, but because of its overall superiority
to the lame competition elsewhere on the
dial (or remote). At the same time, the
audiences for some mass cultural
enterprises may not have been representative of
the national population. Followers may
have shared distinct demographic charac-
teristics. Instead of acknowledging this
possibility, White declares that the B
Westerns "reflected the events,
attitudes, and thinking in the 1930s and 1940s,"
Whose thinking? Whose attitudes? Were
the B Westerns popular with all movie-
goers, or largely with young men and
boys, often in smaller towns? In his essay,
Kenneth Bindas acknowledges that country
music has appealed to lower-middle-
class whites. But he then argues that
country performers "used the music to com-
ment on the tensions, fears and values
of American society and culture" (p. 235).
Again, can he be so sure? Or are country
musicians speaking to a subgroup?
Bindas has to have it both ways-regard
part of the audience as the entire audience.
The contributors take enormous pains to
discuss the latest work in Western his-
tory. Some should have taken the same
care in discussing the audiences for
Western mass culture.
University of Wisconsin-Madison James L. Baughman
Peopling Indiana: The Ethnic
Experience. Edited by Robert M.
Taylor, Jr., and
Connie A. McBirney. (Indianapolis:
Indiana Historical Society, 1996. xiii +
703p.; illustrations, notes, appendices,
index. $39.95.)
100 OHIO HISTORY
"To give an accounting of the
peopling" of Indiana "in all its ethnic and na-
tional variegation," the Indiana
Historical Society launched projects in 1989 such
as a concert, photography contest,
traveling exhibits, collecting materials for its
library, and observance of the Columbus
quincentennial, all with ethnic themes.
This program culminated with the
publication of Peopling Indiana, which includes
distinguished historian John Bodnar's
introductory essay on "Ethnic History in
America and Indiana" and thirty
historical essays by thirty-three authors address-
ing either individual ethnic groups or
several closely related ones. Under this
format some fifty nationalities present
in the state are profiled. The volume con-
cludes with Gregory Rose's essay on
Indiana's ethnic distribution in 1850 as well
as tables and maps revealing the state's
past demographic data. Enriched with his-
toric photographs and maps throughout,
the volume magnificently addresses an
overlooked dimension of Indiana's past.
In doing so, it should lay to rest any re-
maining assumptions-long held in
Indiana-concerning the state's presumed
homogeneity within a culture of farms
and small towns marked by minimal ethnic
diversity.
For this ambitious undertaking, editors
Taylor and McBirney adopted They
Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the
State's Ethnic Groups (1981) as a
model and
recruited mostly Indiana-based authors
to write the thirty essays on ethnic groups.
Over half the authors are trained
historians with the rest drawn from other disci-
plines. Many have previously published
studies on their topics, though some
contributors belong to the ethnic group
but had not previously studied it. For
some ethnic groups recently arrived in
the state, a capable member of that group
was recruited though not a professional
scholar. The resulting essays are emi-
nently readable and informative, thereby
achieving the editors' goal of avoiding
the "antiquarian or
filiopietistic" as well as "esoteric and narrow scholastic" ap-
proaches.
Given the nature of a multi-authored
volume and the historiographical problems
of some ethnic groups, not all essays
have the same depth of interpretation or in-
sight. Scholars who have previously
written on their subject's Indiana experience
produced the most valuable essays: the
late Emma Lou Thornbrough on African-
Americans, James J. Divita with separate
pieces on Italians and Slovenes, Giles
Hoyt on Germans-the book's longest
essay-and Carl Cafouros on Greeks.
Robert Swierenga's essay on the Low
Countries reflects its author's expertise with
general studies of Dutch immigrants.
Other fine essays address nineteenth-century
immigrant groups such as the French,
Jews, Hungarians, Romanians, Poles,
Scandinavians, Slovaks,
Bulgarians/Macedonians, Serbs, and Swiss. Despite the
substantial nineteenth-century
immigration from the British Isles, the essays on
English and Welsh, Scots, and Irish are
groundbreaking efforts to deal with groups
whose influence was diffused across the
state. In the latter essays, endnotes reveal
the creative use of biographical data
from local histories in coming to terms with
ethnic experiences. Perhaps these essays
may stimulate further historical writing
about these major groups. The Native
Americans essay of Elizabeth Glenn and
Stewart Rafert draws from a wide range
of sources on scattered peoples from pre-
historic times to the present. Another
of the volume's strengths is the attention
given to groups arriving in substantial
numbers only in the past half-century or
so. In this category are essays on Asian
Indians, Baltic Peoples, Canadians,
Chinese, Hispanics, Japanese, Koreans,
Middle Easterners, Peoples of the Pacific,
and Southeast Asians.
Peopling Indiana is a milestone in the historiography of the Hoosier
state. In
addition to the breadth of its coverage
and the vast amount of new information it
Book Reviews 101
holds, it should serve as an impetus to
further investigation of the state's ethnic
history. It joins L.C. Rudolph's
encyclopedic Hoosier Faiths: A History of
Indiana's Churches and Religious
Groups (1995) in revealing the great
diversity of
a state once thought to have so little.
Indianapolis, Indiana Joseph M.
White
Horse Trails to Regional Rails: The
Story of Public Transit in Greater Cleveland.
By James A. Toman and Blaine S. Hays.
(Kent, Ohio: The Kent State
University Press, 1996. xiii + 352p.;
illustrations, appendix, bibliography, in-
dex. $49.00.)
More than any other technological
advancement, public transit shaped the
physical and social landscape of modern
cities. As urban America experienced
rapid and massive expansion in the
mid-nineteen century, public transportation,
from horse-drawn streetcars to modern
rapid-rail systems, buses, and automobiles,
became a crucial infrastructure, a
necessity of daily urban life. In this respect,
Horse Trails to Regional Rails by James A. Toman and Blaine S. Hays tells the
dynamic story of public transit
development in metropolitan Cleveland. The
book begins with the story of
Cleveland's founding in 1796 and ends in 1995. In
between those dates, with an emphasis on
rail systems, Toman and Hays present a
comprehensive history of the physical
and technological development of public
transportation in Cleveland.
In the early nineteenth century,
Cleveland began to grow into one of America's
great industrial cities and soon
realized the need for public transportation. Along
with New York City, it was one of the
first cities to experiment with street rail-
ways in the 1830s. Real public transit
began when two lines established regular
street railway service in 1860: the East
Cleveland Street Railway and the Kinsman
Street Railway. For the remainder of the
century, horse-drawn street cars, then
electric trolleys, transported an
ever-increasing number of citizens to work, home,
and play. By 1909, Cleveland had an
extensive street railway network, but where
10 transit companies existed in 1884,
only one was left: the Cleveland Railway
Company, locally known as "Con
Con."
The portrait of public transit in the
twentieth century is complicated and turbu-
lent. Competition in the form of
automobiles, bus service, expressways, and the
Cleveland Hopkins Airport emerged as
street railways peaked, then disappeared.
The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit
Authority was established in 1974 and re-
mains in control of the city's current
transit network. Toman and Hays sort out
the myriad of franchises, technological
improvements, administrative decisions,
economic contingencies, and transit
plans that occurred during this era, and pre-
sent the key political events and
technological developments.
This book possesses a number of
strengths. The authors deliver a clearly-writ-
ten, solid history of the physical and technological
development of public transit.
They also interweave demographic,
economic, political, and architectural bench-
marks into the narrative, thereby
placing transit development within the larger
context of the city's urban history.
Gathered from a variety of sources, the selec-
tion of photographs is superb. To their
immense credit, the 332 images displayed
show the history of Cleveland's urban
life and architectural achievements, as well
as its streetcars and buses. This book
was written by railway enthusiasts for rail-
102 OHIO HISTORY
way enthusiasts, and readers with a
general interest in the history of Cleveland. In
this context, the work admirably meets
its goals.
Scholars will find this book useful, but
limited. Decision makers and the poli-
tics of transit operations are addressed
throughout the narrative; however, the nar-
rative could be greatly enhanced with
full discussions of the roles of transit em-
ployees, union development, and
workforce evolution. The bibliography is mod-
est, and thin research sometimes shows
itself. For example, Tom Johnson, one of
the leading characters in American urban
history, as well as the political history
of Cleveland, is credited with an extra
term as a congressman and establishing the
"viability" of the three-cent
fare in Detroit. Regarding the latter point, while he
controlled the Detroit Citizens Street
Railway in the early 1890s, Johnson fought
tenaciously against lowering the
standard five-cent fare, engaging in an epic
struggle with Detroit Mayor Hazen
Pingree over this issue.
Nevertheless, Horse Trails to
Regional Rails provides a good history and an
outstanding visual panorama of public
transportation development and urban
growth in Cleveland. Readers interested
in transit, Cleveland, or urban history in
general will find this book appealing
and informative.
Wayne State University Michael 0. Smith
"We Are All Leaders": The
Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s. Edited by
Staughton Lynd. (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1996. 343 p.; notes,
notes on contributors, index. $44.95
cloth; $17.95 paper.)
In this volume, Staughton Lynd, coeditor
with Alice Lynd of the classic oral
history collection, Rank and
File: Personal Histories by Working-Class
Organizers (1973),
brings together case studies by younger scholars, scholar ac-
tivists, and relatives of former unionists
and one first-person narrative memoir.
Contributors argue that
community-oriented unionism growing out of working-
class social life rather than the shop
floor or the union meeting hall set the stage
in the early 1930s for unions that might
have provided an alternative to both job-
conscious business unionism of the
American Federation of Labor and the top-
down bureaucracies of later CIO unions.
In a brief introduction, longtime labor
activist Lynd defines alternative union-
ism, notes its similarity to the
Industrial Workers of the World, criticizes the CIO
model, and suggests that these examples
of community-based or solidarity union-
ism hold lessons for the present and the
future. Rosemary Feurer traces the racial
and gender complexities of the
"nutpickers" union in St. Louis which laid the
groundwork for later CIO and civil
rights actions. Peter Rachleff rediscovers the
role of political radicals in the
Independent Union of All Workers in Austin,
Minnesota. Janet Irons presents the
general strike of 1934 as stemming from ear-
lier textile community activism and
leading to national union and government
leaders' betrayal of operatives. Mark
Naison suggests that the Southern Tenant
Farmers Union erred in allying with CIO
radicals, thus betraying poverty-stricken
cotton farmers. Eric Davin develops a
stunning picture of independent labor polit-
ical action between 1934 and 1936 in Akron, Ohio, and New Bedford,
Massachusetts, as a once-viable
alternative to labor's alliance with the New Deal
Democrats. Elizabeth Faue summarizes her
earlier work on how bureaucratic
unionism displaced community activism
and working women's autonomy in the
Minneapolis labor movement. Michael
Kozura details the rise of bootleg mining
Book Reviews 103
in eastern Pennsylvania, one of the few
examples of worker expropriation of
property in U.S. history, to argue that
family and community concerns led unem-
ployed anthracite miners to engage in
radical class action. In perhaps the best-re-
searched, written, and argued essay,
John Borsos clarifies the role of local mili-
tants in Barberton, Ohio, in building
federal local unions within the American
Federation of Labor into local
solidarity unions. Stan Weir provides a first-person
memoir of a 1943 job action aboard the
freighter S.S. Hanapepe inspired by two
veterans of the 1934 maritime general
strike on the West Coast.
As historical interpretation, these essays
make a good start for modifying exist-
ing interpretations of working-class
activism prior to the CIO industrial union
drives of the 1936-1937 and 1941
periods. In the best essays Feurer, Rachleff,
Davin, Kozura, and Borsos build on
careful research to suggest that the relation-
ships among worker discontent, rank and
file militancy and leadership, the inter-
play of ideological radicals and
pragmatic activists long rooted in their communi-
ties, and the key place of federal labor
unions as transition institutions between
the old and the new unionism need much
more examination. Yet the element of
presentism implicit in the introduction
and in several of the essays by scholar ac-
tivists seems as thoroughly based in a
contemporary secular faith in the transfor-
mative power of community class
consciousness regardless of race, ethnicity, re-
ligion, gender, age, and employer power
as the older labor history's focus on
pragmatic, job consciousness. Perhaps
most importantly, these essays suggest a
contingency to working people's lives in
the 1930s which may spark a renewed
interest in how ordinary Americans
survived hard times with dignity, respect, and
a sense of their own agency as family
members, citizens, and participants in a
democratic republican society.
Tennessee Technological University Patrick D. Reagan
George Ball: Behind the Scenes in
U.S. Foreign Policy. By James A. Bill.
(New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. ix +
274p; illustrations, notes, bibliogra-
phy, index. $30.00.)
James A. Bill's study of George Wildman
Ball has the apt subtitle Behind the
Scenes in U.S. Foreign Policy. Given Ball's long service in a variety of subcabi-
net positions and his backstage
involvement in numerous important national and
international causes, such a descriptive
phrase is indeed fitting. Bill makes clear
at the outset that this is not a
conventional biography; it does not pretend to
comprehensive coverage of every aspect
of Ball's life. Rather, Bill provides in-
troductory chapters on Ball's personal
and professional roots and devotes the bulk
of the book to a series of case studies
that focus on Ball's work in foreign policy-
making. The book concludes with an
interesting and provocative essay that
makes the case for what Bill calls
phronesis, "a practical wisdom that involves the
selection of the proper means to achieve
a good or moral end" (p. 203). Much of
this material will be familiar to
students and scholars of American foreign policy.
Ball's opposition to American
involvement in Vietnam while undersecretary of
state during the Johnson administration
is well known, as is his support for
European integration and his membership
in the transatlantic Bilderberg Group.
Ball's career as a lawyer with Lehman
Brothers, his longtime friendship with Adlai
Stevenson (he was deeply involved in the
Illinoisan's 1952 and 1956 presidential
campaigns), and his disdain for Richard
Nixon have also received coverage in the
104 OHIO HISTORY
literature. Nevertheless, Bill manages
to add new insights regarding these aspects
of Ball's life, particularly insofar as
they illustrate the latter's overall view of for-
eign policymaking and public life in
general.
Bill also introduces the reader to
several not-so-familiar episodes that took
place on the sidelines and out of the
limelight but that illustrate the kind of
"sensitive, courageous, prescient,
and prudent leadership" that Ball represented (p.
xvii).
One such episode was Ball's defense of Henry Wallace before the
McCarthyite McCarran Committee in 1951,
a task that Ball accepted after "every
[other] competent lawyer in
[Washington]" refused to become involved. Bill de-
scribes Ball's willingness to defend
Wallace as "courageous" and reports the sin-
cere appreciation it netted Ball from
Joseph Alsop and others in the liberal com-
munity (p. 43). Another little-known but
highly significant episode in Ball's life
was his quiet, behind-the-scenes
intervention to rescue Harper's magazine during
the early 1980s. As was his wont, Ball
kept his involvement in saving Harper's a
secret, even from his family and close
associates. He took up the cause because it
was the right thing to do, not because
of any personal accolades he might receive.
The steadfast devotion to doing the
right thing regardless of the personal cost or
lack of recognition that both of these
episodes reveal lies at the heart of the
phronesis that Bill ascribes to Ball.
Bill's conclusion, in which he compares
Ball's phronesis style of statecraft to
the realpolitik practiced by Henry
Kissinger, is the most original portion of the
book. It lays out Bill's generally
favorable assessment of Ball's more than four
decades in public life and offers
prescriptive guidelines for present and future poli-
cymakers based on Ball's example. Bill
does not commit the common mistake of
biographers who idolize their subjects.
His Ball does have faults, most notably
Eurocentrism, elitism, a tendency toward
dogmatism and stubbornness, and an
ability to be manipulative within the
bureaucratic context. That Bill can recog-
nize Ball's shortcomings and still
pronounce him "a leader of prudence and wis-
dom" (p. 232) is a mark of how well
this book succeeds as a balanced look at one
of this century's most influential
shapers of American foreign policy. Specialists
as well as general readers would do well
to give it a reading.
Kent State University Mary Ann Heiss
Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army
and the Pacific, 1902-1940. By Brian
McAllister Linn. (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
xvi + 343p.; illustrations,
notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $39.95.)
In Guardians of Empire, Brian
Linn focuses on the U.S. Army's efforts to defend
Hawaii and the Philippines from both
internal and external threats. Linn also
provides a fascinating social history of
the Pacific Army, reminiscent of Edward
Coffman's fine work on the Old Army of
the nineteenth century. Viewing the
army that James Jones depicted in From
Here to Eternity through scholarly eyes,
Linn presents an engaging survey of polo
playing officers and their enlisted sub-
ordinates in an army that devoted much
of its time to sports, sex, and the spit and
polish of the parade ground.
The book begins with a superb summary of
the 1899-1902 Philippine War,
blending the latest in secondary
scholarship with a vast body of primary material.
In describing the relationship between
the war and the Army's postwar pacifica-
tion efforts, Linn notes both the long
period of transition to stability and the wide
Book Reviews 105
variety of the Army's work in the
islands. Internal security concerns in the
Philippines and Hawaii that led to the
rejection of proposals for creating a
"native" colonial army
exacerbated the problems of insular defense for decades.
Although Army officers recognized the
dangers inherent in the growth of
Japanese power and Philippine
vulnerability, disagreements between the Army
and the Navy, as well as within the
Army, made defense planning difficult. The
exposed nature of the Philippine
position made the problem insoluble. The Army
could never create adequate defenses
because it lacked the manpower, resources, and
support required.
With only limited coordination between
Washington and Pacific commanders,
the latter often went their own way in
planning despite the absence of the support
needed to bring their defense plans to
fruition. The supposed advantages of air
power led some Americans to be overly
optimistic about the chances of defending
their insular possessions, and when
plans to abandon the Philippines were over-
turned in 1941, the stage for disaster
was set.
Although the Japanese attack on the
Philippines was foreshadowed in Army as-
sessments in the 1920s and 30s, work to
defeat it never moved far beyond the the-
oretical. While the Army focused in the
1930s on Hawaiian defense, confusion
reigned in the Philippines, where the
Army remained "a hollow deterrent" (p.
245).
Linn makes an excellent case that more
could have been done to defend the
Pacific empire, but one wonders if the
problems noted actually needed solving be-
fore the 1930s. Earlier threats seem
more imagined than real, and from 1902 to
the mid-1930s the Pacific Army provided
colonial security at a very low cost. The
case for better planning, greater
manpower, and more financial support for insular
defense is convincing only for the last
decade preceding the Japanese attack.
Linn's extensive research is impressive,
and his conclusions are thoroughly
documented by references to a wide
variety of sources, ranging from recent inter-
views and correspondence to archival and
manuscript materials in libraries
throughout the U.S. and in the
Philippines. One may question the value of remi-
niscences some fifty or more years after
the fact, but such sources represent only a
small fraction of the material
supporting Linn's argument.
Individuals desiring to understand the
disasters that befell the United States in
the Pacific at the start of World War II
will find this very readable book a good
place to begin. Veterans of the Pacific
Army should enjoy Linn's engaging com-
mentary on that force's "distinct
social milieu" (p. 51), and Ohio readers can take
some pride in the fact that Professor
Linn is a product of Ohio State's excellent
graduate program in military history.
The College of Wooster John M.
Gates
Medical Histories of Union Generals. By Jack D. Welsh, M.D. (Kent, Ohio: The
Kent State University Press, 1996. xx +
422p.; appendix, glossary, bibliogra-
phy, index. $35.00.)
Over 350,000 Union soldiers lost their
lives during the Civil War, but only
one-third of these deaths were combat
related. The remaining 225,000 soldier
deaths resulted from six million cases
of illness from disease and accidents. What
conditions prevailed among the leaders
of the Union troops during the Civil War?
In the general literature of the Civil
War, medical events are usually mentioned
106 OHIO HISTORY
only because they forced an officer to
leave the field or prompted a change in
command. Since the author of this book
is a retired physician, he wanted to know
more about the conditions of the general
officers and the details of their medical
problems and the outcome of their
conditions.
Dr. Welsh probed a number of primary
sources of health conditions for the 583
Union generals included in this book. He
found that his best sources were reports
of Civil War service, the registers of
the Cadet Hospital at the U. S. Military
Academy, and requests for retirement and
pension applications. In some cases the
only sources of information were
autobiographies, letters and diaries. The author
did not limit the medical histories of
Union generals to the period of the Civil
War. Rather, he attempted to trace a
complete, life-long medical history for each
general officer, but successfully
located prewar health conditions for less than half
of the generals.
Welsh was the author of a book entitled Medical
Histories of Confederate
Generals which was published in 1995. The medical information
about the 425
Confederate general officers is less
complete than the information about the
Union generals, since much of the
Confederate medical information was destroyed
with the burning of Richmond late in the
Civil War. It is interesting to note that
ninety-six [22.6 percent] of the
Confederate generals died during the Civil War,
while only sixty-eight [11.5 percent] of
the Union generals died during the con-
flict. Seventy-seven [18.1 percent] of
the Confederate generals were killed in ac-
tion or died of their wounds, and only
forty-eight [8.2 percent] of the Union gen-
erals suffered the same fate.
The pre-Civil War medical data for the
Union generals revealed that sixty-eight
had been wounded and ten of these were
wounded twice. Forty-six were wounded in
Mexico and fourteen by Indians. Unlike
the Confederate generals, twelve of whom
had received wounds from duels or
fights, only two future Union generals suffered
such injuries. Nearly half of the Union
generals had one or more nonfatal wounds
during the Civil War. About 20 percent
of the Union generals had accidents,
which were usually associated with a
horse. The horse was frequently shot from
under the rider and fell upon him, or
the horse fell in a bad jump. Many of these
accidents resulted in injuries serious
enough to cause the general to be away from
the field.
Three quarters of the total group of
Union generals had recorded medical ill-
nesses during the Civil War. These
illnesses were usually diarrhea, dysentery,
fever, debility, rheumatism,
respiratory complaints, typhoid and malaria.
Although excessive alcohol consumption
was not uncommon among the Union
generals, it was not possible for the
author to label any of the generals as alco-
holics on the basis of the available
information.
The author feels that medical practice
of the Civil War did not provide a signifi-
cant improvement in the general medical
care of veterans and civilians. He argues
that there were improvements in military
medicine, particularly in logistics and in
the treatment of trauma, while the
experience gained in the use of aesthetics al-
lowed more complicated surgery. However,
the concept of scientific evaluation of
medical therapy had not been developed.
The author acknowledges that the medical
histories of Union generals, as was
the case with their Confederate
counterparts, are incomplete, but still present a
picture of dedication to their beliefs,
in spite of suffering from illness or wounds.
What is the utility of this book? It
provides a quick reference for the medical
conditions of Union generals in the
Civil War. It is likely that readers will obtain
new information about the health
conditions during the Civil War of most any
Book Reviews 107
Union general they find in this
reference. In a number of cases, the medical condi-
tions of individuals before and after
the war are set forth. While this is strictly a
reference volume, it is a very useful
publication for those who have a continuing
interest in the Civil War.
The Ohio State University Robert W.
McCormick
Whitaker Chambers: A Biography. By Sam Tanenhaus. (New York: Random
House, 1997. xiv + 638p. illustrations,
bibliography, notes, index. $35.00.)
Few Americans in public life have ever
experienced the agonies of Whittaker
Chambers. From his youth, it appears, he
was never a man at peace. In turn a ro-
mantic poet, political revolutionary,
and religious pilgrim, Chambers has aptly
been called by Arthur Koestler "the
most misunderstood person of our time." The
major witness in two of the most
celebrated spy trials of this century, he achieved
lasting fame as the accuser of Alger
Hiss. Yet he deserves recognition for
an
equally significant reason as well. Put
quite simply, Chambers was a master of ex-
pository prose, and his Time magazine
portraits of Marian Anderson and Reinhold
Niebuhr remain classics of their genre.
Fortunately we have a biographer, Sam
Tanenhaus, equal to his subject. A pro-
fessional writer by trade, Tanenhaus
shows empathy without internalizing
Chambers's politics or his behavior. The
work is one of great sensitivity and ex-
hibits extensive scholarship as well.
Indeed the research is awesome: the papers
of Alger Hiss, Richard Nixon, Time magazine,
liberal anti-Communist Herbert
Solow, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, and Soviet intelligence; extensive in-
terviews, including Chambers's son John;
courtroom records: government testi-
mony taken in executive session.
Tanenhaus ably conveys the instability
of Chambers's background. Chambers
grew up in Lynbrook, a Long Island
suburb, of a most unstable family: his father
was a drifting magazine illustrator
often absent from home, his mother a failed ac-
tress ever avoiding bill collectors, and
his brother a college dropout who killed
himself at age 22. By age 31 Chambers had laid rails in
Washington, D.C.,
dropped out of Columbia University,
helped staff the newspaper room of the New
York Public Library, traveled as a hobo
in the Far West, and served on the editorial
board of the Communist weekly, New
Masses. In his thirties Chambers
left maga-
zine work to serve as a key operative in
the Soviet espionage apparatus. His was
the sordid world of clandestine
encounters, forged passports, and assumed identi-
ties, and brief homosexual liaisons as
well.
In 1938, when he broke with the
Communists, he was happily married and the
father of two children. At the time,
writes Tanenhaus, his knowledge of Soviet
spy activity was unparalleled. As a top
staffer for Henry Luce's Time, Chambers
became influential in determining the
news weekly's policy and, as foreign editor,
he did not hesitate to dismiss accounts
of correspondents he found too pro-
Communist. Indeed Tanenhaus finds
Chambers more correct on world develop-
ments than those field journalists whose
dispatches he ignored.
Much of the book centers on the Hiss
case, in which Tanenhaus catches the his-
torical actors in one lie after another.
Contrary to Nixon's claim in his Six Crises
(1962), it was not Chambers who first
introduced the congressman to the name of
Alger Hiss. Chambers later said that in
1948 he had never intended to implicate
108 OHIO
HISTORY
Hiss, a patent
untruth. Tanenhaus finds Hiss 's lies so blatant that he is surprised
that anyone could
ignore such damning evidence.
In the course of his
narrative Tanenhaus brings many salient facts to the fore.
To break with
Communist espionage in 1938 was no light matter, for Stalin had
ordered the execution
of some major defectors. There was little need for many of
the underground precautions,
for American counterespionage scarcely existed.
Similarly State
Department security procedures were notoriously lax. Despite
Hiss's polished
demeanor, his own background was hardly less marginal than
Chambers's. Chambers's
moving autobiography Witness showed how much of a
Bolshevik he remained,
not in his objectives but in his entire mind cast. After
briefly supporting Joe
McCarthy, Chambers moved to the political center, acqui-
escing in Eisenhower
Republicanism.
The biography has some
minor factual errors. The Freeman that was founded in
1950 was not the same
one founded in 1920 by Albert Jay Nock, and Senator
Millard Tydings
(Dem.-Md.) was in political trouble long before Joe McCarthy
began his attack. All
in all, however, Tanenhaus offers a first-rate account.
New College of the
University of South Florida Justus
D. Doenecke
Farm and Factory:
Workers in the Midwest 1880-1990. By Daniel Nelson.
(Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995. ix + 258p.; notes, tables, in-
dex. $29.95.).
Anyone interested in
learning about the Middle West, or American "Heartland,"
can be assumed to have
read certain books about the region's history and culture.
Lists of titles would
undoubtedly vary, but would likely include Sherwood
Anderson's Winesburg,
Ohio, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Robert and Helen
Lynd's Middletown, and
even a more recent regional genre, And Ladies of the
Club, by Helen Hooven Santmyer. Each chronicle themes that
give the Midwest
much of its vitality
and regional identity: the struggles of
labor, family life,
farms and factories.
Nelson, professor of
history at the University of Akron, and one of the coun-
try's leading labor
scholars, is the most recent writer to delve extensively into the
topic of workers and
organized labor. In his preface Nelson observes that the es-
sential feature of the
region's labor history which sets it apart from other
American regions was
the sustained, simultaneous growth of agriculture and indus-
try. Implied but not
explicitly stated are such key factors as glacial soils, a gentle
topography, access to
raw materials, water and an abundant pool of labor, all of
which helped sustain
the growth of farm and factory. This is a disciplined and
chronologically
presented work that makes two fundamental points: the shift of
labor from Midwest
farm to factory did not occur until after World War II; and the
emphasis on
manufacturing, especially metals, food processing, machinery and
autos after 1945
thwarted development of an emergent service sector. These basic
tenets constitute the
author's point of departure: regional identity was and still is
reflected in the
occupations of Midwestern workers.
The topic's breadth
permits Nelson to generalize, for he comes well armed with
solid primary and
secondary sources. He chronicles how immigrants who had ade-
quate means to buy
good land opted for farm work, while poorer immigrants, pri-
marily after 1880,
joined the larger movement to urban centers. Industrial work-
ers, having less
contact with family members, used tools and machines but unlike
Book Reviews 109
farmers did not borrow them. Since
machinery required more energy than an indi-
vidual worker could provide, the focus
of many factory owners shifted from the
worker to the machine and the relations
between machine operations. Farmers re-
sponded with alliance activities while
industrial workers were more active in form-
ing collective actions, albeit with
mixed results. Still, throughout the Midwest,
socialists during the early 1910s
enjoyed greater success than in any other region;
in Dayton 63 percent of socialists were
skilled industrial workers. Meanwhile, the
evolving business sector saw rapid
expansion in white collar jobs, notably spe-
cialists and professionals, driven by
advancing technologies such as typewriters
and mimeograph machines.
The 1910s was a watershed for the
Midwest: elites applied new knowledge to
production evidenced by managers in the
factory and county agents on the farm.
Large factories became well-organized
machines, where mass production tech-
nologies could be applied. With three
Midwestern plants employing 6,000 work-
ers in 1900-evidence that mass
production had reached new heights-Nelson
points out how improved efficiency
alienated factory workers and contributed to
the emergence of the elites. One result
was any improvements in employee pro-
ductivity were not matched by the
organization. Nonetheless, workers, outside of
open shop laborers, were generally more
prosperous and assertive after 1900.
There were dark moments, too. Postwar
disillusionment, the unrest of the 1920s
and what Nelson describes as a backlash
against the elites fostered a rise in the
KKK, where in the Midwest it achieved
its greatest support-in Indiana it over-
shadowed membership in the Methodist
Church and the American Legion.
In contrast to other regions during the
nineteenth century, there were few mi-
norities and women in Midwestern
industry. Most middle class families before
1910 had one live-in servant, typically
an unmarried woman, yet Irish domestics
failed to gain favor in the Midwest.
World War I ushered in the million man, pre-
dominantly black, southern migration to
the cities, finding employment in the
meat packing and other unskilled trades.
The twenties saw more women in white
collar jobs, particularly in the retail
sector, where customers were disproportion-
ately female, while ethnic shifts
witnessed a decline in northern European immi-
gration as the cities attracted more
slavic and southern European populations. By
1930, 20 percent of rubber workers were
women, while Italians dominated cloth-
ing and textiles and Poles large-scale
manufacturing.
The Midwest, like its climate, is a
region of extremes, evidenced by workers and
their plight during the Great
Depression. From 1930-1939 the farm bankruptcy
rate in Minnesota and Iowa was much
higher than national trends, forcing agoniz-
ing foreclosures. Indeed the Midwest
experienced the greatest decline and slowest
recovery of any region from 1929-1939.
Ohio was especially hard hit-in 1930
three-fourths of black workers in
Columbus were unemployed-five years later 1.2
million Ohioans, or 20 percent of the
total population, were on assistance. Such
adversity ushered in a revival of labor
activism, led by the creation of the UAW
and URW in 1935, and expanded
governmental intervention in industrial relations
and mediation. If New Deal relief
programs were vital to the Midwest, they were
soon overshadowed by World War II.
Wartime labor gains, including black em-
ployment and black membership in the
UAW, were followed by postwar advances
in employer financed benefit plans.
Unions found a greater following in the heart-
land than in any other region.
While traditional heavy industries and
food processing remained the foundation
of the Midwest's postwar manufacturing
base, "deindustrialization" was changing
the face of the economy. The decline of
traditional agriculture, primarily the small
110 OHIO HISTORY
family-owned farm corresponded with a
rise in industrial growth in the region's
small towns. Quietly, at least to urban
observers, Ohio lost 40 percent of its farm
population in the 1950s. By 1970, as
Nelson aptly recounts, village life was
more likely to revolve around a factory
than an agricultural hinterland. In the old
"magic cities," mass
production industries, facing increased competition and un-
dercapitalization, were slow to respond,
being largely preoccupied with labor rela-
tions issues. Mine closures, an exodus
to smaller, and typically southern non-
union plants, or in the now infamous
case of Youngstown, Ohio, which witnessed
total plant closure, contributed to the
rust belt image. In 1981 nine of ten cities
with the nation's highest unemployment
were in the Midwest. Despite such se-
vere downturns during the dark days of
the 1980s, by 1990 farms and factory still
remained important, albeit less so
within the region's economic hegemony. Most
workers found employment in offices,
stores and other white-collar settings.
Academic, not mechanical skills emerged
as the basis of the new service economy.
Nelson's work provides an invaluable if
at times slightly ponderous guide to
understanding a critical region where,
like much of the nation, in only a few
decades the service economy displaced
the century-old twin pillars of farm and
factory. This reviewer has learned a
good deal: and as I evaluate the context of his-
toric properties associated with Ohio's
farms and factories, I shall reference much
of what Dr. Nelson has provided.
Ohio Historical Society Stephen C. Gordon
The Emergence of the Modern Theater
1914-1929. By Ronald H. Wainscott.
(New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University
Press, 1997. 288p.; illustrations,
notes, bibliography, index. $30.00.)
During the 1920s, the American theater
saw a pronounced maturation in the ar-
eas of staging and content. The story of
this growth has been told often in count-
less books on theater history. What
Ronald H. Wainscott accomplishes in The
Emergence of the Modern American
Theater 1914-1929 is to take this
familiar
story and to retell it in such a way
that gives the reader a better idea of the context
in which the important changes in the
1920s occurred.
Wainscott's extensive knowledge of the
plays produced in New York during the
1920s allows him to move beyond the
familiar titles that frequently appear in the-
ater histories. Similarly, it also
allows him to place Eugene O'Neill in context.
Without diminishing the great
playwright's many accomplishments, Wainscott
continually illustrates that O'Neill was
one of many theater artists being influ-
enced by a variety of the same
progressive trends.
Wainscott has made some interesting
discoveries. The author is able to illus-
trate that, during the 1920s, Broadway
playwrights were more prone to question
the prevailing conservative assumptions
of the era than might be expected.
Patriotism, assimilation, and capitalism
were particularly popular targets for criti-
cism. One of Wainscott's most startling
discoveries is that there were virtually no
pro-business plays on the Broadway stage
after 1925. As Wainscott writes,
"Nearly all treatments of the
commercial world consider it a place of shark-infested
waters, where the casualties are
catastrophic (p. 154)." This hardly reflects the
picture of the era of Coolidge that most
people hold. Wainscott effectively argues
that the left-wing, social protest
dramas of the American theater in the 1930s were
anticipated by Broadway playwrights in
the years before the Crash.
Book Reviews 111
In the process, Wainscott frequently and
correctly criticizes the smug, self-delu-
sory nature of many American
conservatives during the 1920s. Playwrights with
leftist views are generally presented as
progressive liberators of content. That
such playwrights, for all their fresh
perspectives, could also be smug and self-
delusory is left to the reader to
deduce.
Wainscott's chapters on expressionism
present less new material because the
expressionistic nature of much of 1920s
American theater is already fairly com-
mon knowledge. Still, Wainscott does a
good job of illustrating that American
expressionism was a mixture of the ideas
of not only the German expressionists,
but also of Gordon Craig, Jacques
Copeau, and the Irish Players, all of whom
staged productions in America before
1920.
Three of the most interesting chapters
in Wainscott's book involve the popu-
larity of sex farces following the war
as well as the ability of theater owners to kill
a proposed increase in federal taxes on
theater tickets at the beginning of that
same period. All of these chapters
involve good and detailed scholarship on the
important but largely forgotten issues
involved, and as such make important con-
tributions. However, the remaining four
chapters-really the bulk of the book-
involve, in one form or another, the
maturation of American plays during the
1920s in terms of content and staging.
Sex farces and ticket prices really do not
fit this. It would have been helpful had
the chapters on those topics been more in-
tegrated with the others. As is, they
read like separate articles in an otherwise co-
hesive book.
Overall, Wainscott has written a useful
book which gives the reader some idea of
the growth in American theater in the
1920s. Wainscott's detailed research fre-
quently moves beyond where most general
histories of the theater of the era go and
as such is a useful addition to any
theater historian's library.
Texas A&M-Kingsville
Patrick Faherty
Wilder Times: The Life of Billy
Wilder. By Kevin Lally. (New York:
Henry Holt
and Company, 1996. xv + 496p.:
illustrations, notes, index. $ 30.00 cloth.)
Billy Wilder marked his ninetieth
birthday last June, making him the last of the
"legendary" Hollywood
directors left alive. Hawks (1896-1977) is dead, as are
Hitchcock (1899-1980) and Ford
(1895-1973) and Welles (1915-1985), etc. Such
a state of affairs makes
biography-as-adulation an obligatory ritual. Kevin Lally's
Wilder Times, long on Auteurist assumptions, workman-like on matters
of
chronology and behind-the-scenes
tidbits, manages to be genuinely informative
and lock-step dull at one and the same
time. Wilder Times exhibits stylistic and
thematic features common to the genre of
serious, celebrity biography, books that
tell you the news in a no-nonsense sort
of way, but quite without inflection or a
ranking of particulars. Instead of
interpretation, we get a recitation designed to
make the subject look good.
Lally's biography is organized
chronologically-early years in Vienna, then
Berlin, then Hollywood. Within chapters,
once Wilder's career is in high gear,
there is a formula: describe the film
with a plot summary, what actors got snared
(often second or third choices), which
ones got away, problems in production,
how the picture did at the box office,
and for Wilder's more recent films, what the
critical journalistic establishment
(Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, the reporter from
Variety, etc.) thought. Such formulae
are positively useful in providing time
112 OHIO
HISTORY
lines, and especially in recording the
changing conditions underlying the art of
the deal, now recognized as the
essential ingredient for understanding how main-
stream films get made and how they get
messed up in the making. A couple of sen-
tences from the backgrounding of
Wilder's last film, Buddy, Buddy, a limp flop by
all accounts, will suffice to give the
flavor: the new owner of MGM, "Kirk
Kerkorian sought to increase the
studio's output and hired David Begelman, a for-
mer Columbia production chief recently
at the center of a bizarre forgery-and-em-
bezzlement scandal, to oversee MGM's
stepped-up production. Among the first
projects Begelman green-lighted was Buddy,
Buddy." Such information is espe-
cially interesting in the case of Wilder
because of his undeniable and equally prob-
lematic greatness. The spectacle typical
of all the great ones is that their later
films are diminished accomplishments, if
not outright failures, compared to the ef-
forts of ardent youth and, sometimes at
least, robust middle-age. Hollywood has
always been a country for the young.
For people who consider film as art, as
social comment and as a cultural-histori-
cal base of knowledge, biographies such
as Lally's make for required, if unsatisfy-
ing, reading. Lally's early chapters,
providing lots of raw information, trace
Wilder's career in the Berlin UFA
studios, his career as a free-lance journalist, and
his taste for running after the
outrageous story likely to make a splash. What
comes through most vividly is Wilder's
cultivation of a fast-talking, brash per-
sonal style. Already in Europe, Wilder's
"sophisticated" Viennese humor had
more than a little of the Sammy Glick in
it. But it was a real style and that is what
he took with him to Hollywood.
The status of Wilder's Double
Indemnity as an "American classic" provides a
case in point. Although probably too
much has already been written about the
Rise of Film Noir, and while Kevin Lally
correctly describes Double Indemnity as
"a seminal film noir," he
avoids developing the interesting irony that this most
American of artifacts was produced by a
Jewish, mittel Europa refugee from the
Hitlerian calamity. Billy Wilder wore
extremely sensitive refugee antennae during
the surprisingly brief period of his
strong films and was therefore able to discern
perturbations and dark rumblings on the
American scene well ahead of most. The
famously cynical Wilder tone as well the
eye for outdoor location shooting owes
much to his apprenticeship work in
Berlin in the late twenties, particularly the
street-corner realism of Menschen am
Sonntag. That early realism translates di-
rectly to the location shot of Fred
MacMurray in Double Indemnity at the corner
newsstand in Hollywood looking to see if
his crime made the papers yet. The noir
sense of crime-in-everydayness comes
with the luggage any refugee from Europe
between the wars might well bring along.
There is one moment of ineffable humor
and beauty in this book that is entirely
worth the price of admission: a picture
from the set of Some Like it Hot wherein
Wilder teaches Jack Lemmon, in full
twenties flapper drag, a tango step. Lemmon
is more or less profile to the camera,
pouting, lipsticked mouth pursed in concen-
tration, hand resting, pinkie raised, on
Wilder's shoulder. A gardenia wrist cor-
sage tied delicately over an arm-length
black, sparkly glove with finger-tips cut
off completes the effect. Wilder,
wearing his workaday, short-sleeved white shirt,
in three-quarter profile, gazes up and
past his partner (possibly at a camera on a
crane, possibly at the God of
imagination).
Wilder was in his early fifties when he
worked on Some Like it Hot, but here his
expression is that of a teenager. He
looks owlishly studious, like an erotically en-
tranced schoolboy. It is a hugely funny
photograph. As Adam Gopnik, in a recent
New Yorker, observes, "What makes drag funny is not how well
it works but how
Book Reviews 113
poorly. Milton Berle in a bustier and
wig always looked like Milton Berle: that
was the joke." Kevin Lally makes
much of the theme of masquerade running
through Wilder's movies, but he usually
does not quite get the joke that is in-
volved. Fortunately, Wilder's
wise-cracking attitude and his genial spirit of tak-
ing life not too seriously, despite the
darkness, adds just the right, attractive leav-
ening to Wilder Times.
SUNY, Buffalo Stefan Fleischer
Encyclopedia of the American West. Volume 1: Abbe-Cutt. Edited by Charles
Phillips and Alan Axelrod. (New York:
Macmillan Reference USA/Simon &
Schuster Macmillan, 1996. lxxvii +
428p.; illustrations, maps, list of contribu-
tors, list of entries, list of
biographical entries by profession, suggested read-
ings, index. $95.00.)
Encyclopedia of the American West. Volume 2: Dako-Lync. Edited by Charles
Phillips and Alan Axelrod. (New York:
Macmillan Reference USA/Simon &
Schuster Macmillan, 1996. 491p.;
illustrations, maps, list of contributors, list
of entries, list of biographical entries
by profession, suggested readings, index.
$95.00.)
Encyclopedia of the American West. Volume 3: Mack-San. Edited by Charles
Phillips and Alan Axelrod. (New York:
Macmillan Reference USA/Simon &
Schuster Macmillan, 1996. 507p.;
illustrations, maps, list of contributors, list
of entries, list of biographical entries
by profession, suggested readings, index.
$95.00.)
Encyclopedia of the American West. Volume 4: Sant-Zuni. Edited by Charles
Phillips and Alan Axelrod. (New York:
Macmillan Reference USA/Simon &
Schuster Macmillan, 1996. 506p.;
illustrations, maps, list of contributors, list
of entries, list of biographical entries
by profession, suggested readings, index.
$95.00.)
Readers typically evaluate encyclopedias
according to the success of an individ-
ual search: Do you find the entry you
are looking for? Does it explain what you
need to know? Most readers will find
that Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod's
Encyclopedia of the American West satisfies both of these questions, as it leaves
few stones unturned. Amply illustrated
and especially rich in biographical entries
and in histories of the western states,
the encyclopedia is also a fascinating docu-
ment in and of itself.
Coming a decade after the development of
the "new Western history"-a move-
ment which aimed to counter the heroic
narratives of mostly white, male enter-
prise in the West-the encyclopedia
provides a comprehensive overview of the
region as studied by scholars today. And
in fact it encompasses a range of topics
that cover the spectrum of both the
"old" and the "new" western history. Here, you
will find plentiful discussions not only
of such tried and true western subjects as
the "Cattle Industry,"
"Exploration," and the
"Fur Trade," but also of
"Childrearing,"
"Intermarriage," and "Immigration Law." For readers
unfamiliar
with the West, the encyclopedia will
take them into plenty of uncharted territory;
even those familiar with the field will
find many surprises, as it has done an excel-
lent job of including the biographies of
extraordinary people who have long been
left out of Western history.
114 OHIO HISTORY
Phillips and Axelrod note in their
preface that the editorial board came to a rela-
tively quick consensus over the melange
of old and new, and it is a very laudable
goal. However, the results of the work
suggest that consensus was built perhaps
too much by accretion. This would not
necessarily be a problem, given that ency-
clopedias are not meant to synthesize
knowledge but to break it down into discrete
units. But when evaluated as a whole,
the encyclopedia sometimes lacks propor-
tion and consistency. Perhaps this is
best illustrated by describing the route
through one area of western history:
land policy. The search itself highlighted
several of the drawbacks to the text.
Surely, the struggle over private and
public property is one of the keystones of
western history, old or new; as Patricia
Nelson Limerick has written, "If
Hollywood wanted to capture the
emotional center of Western history, its movies
would be about real estate." And at
the center of the story of western real estate is
the federal government, which owns
almost fifty percent of the land in the inter-
mountain West. So I was first struck by
the entry for the Bureau of Land
Management, which receives only three
paragraphs, although it administers more
land than any other federal agency in
the West. The BLM's roots actually lie in
the General Land Office, established in
1812 to distribute the vast amount of west-
ern property that the United States had
acquired. But although it was one of the
more important government agencies
during the nineteenth century, the GLO re-
ceives only two paragraphs.
From there I went to "Land
Policy," which fortunately was several pages long,
but which is thin, at best. The
"historical overview" moves at breakneck speed (it
is a much shorter entry than such
entries as "Mormons" or "Colleges and
Universities" or even just the
"National Park Service"); it says little about land
policy after the late-nineteenth
century; and it refers in only a hit-or-miss way to
related entries, neglecting, for
instance, to tell readers to search under "National
Expansion" and "Federal
Government," which both have lengthy essays.
Indeed, the lack of consistency in cross-referencing
is a problem throughout the
encyclopedia. Much more puzzling,
however, is the work's focus "on the trans-
Mississippi West from the early Spanish
period through the early twentieth cen-
tury" (p. xi). Why the editors
chose not to extend the encyclopedia further is
never explained, which is curious given
that this is an encyclopedia "of the
American West," and not simply of a
finite historical period. By not doing so, it
surely reinforces a popular notion-and
perhaps it is one with which the editors
agree-that the American West as a region
ceased to exist after the modern era. As
Phillips and Axelrod freely admit,
however, this chronological line-in-the-sand is
often crossed in individual cases, and
many entries bare this fact out. Other en-
tries, like that about land policy,
suffer greatly from having such a truncated ac-
count.
Finally, the encyclopedia is
occasionally heavy with overlapping categories.
For instance, I would be surprised if a
reader would know to look up the entry
"West-as-Region School," which
goes into a long discussion about the arguments
by some new western historians that the
West has had distinctive regional charac-
teristics through its history. It would be surprising because these
arguments
hardly represent a coherent
"school"; and it might also seem a bit redundant, given
the other lengthy entries on "Arid
Lands Thesis," "Borderlands Theory,"
"Frontier: Frontier Thesis,"
and "New Western History." These might have con-
ceivably been brought together under one
entry on Western historiography-
which, as it turns out, also has its own
entry ("Historiography, Western"). All
told, these essays add up to 23 pages.
Book Reviews 115
It would seem, then, that the
encyclopedia may be all too self-conscious about
its timing in the debates about what is
"old" and "new" in western history. Still, it
is an error in the right direction. The
encyclopedia is an invaluable source, partic-
ularly for readers who are just
beginning their journeys into western history. By
seeking to pull together a very diverse
and thriving scholarship, it will certainly
give readers a sense for the current
vitality of the field and for the many historical
trails that remain to be explored.
Princeton University
Karen Merrill
Book Reviews
First Generations: Women in Colonial
America. By Carol Berkin. (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1996. xiv + 234p.;
bibliographical essay, index. $23.00 cloth;
$12.00 paper.)
In First Generations, Carol
Berkin has written a marvelous synthesis of the ex-
isting literature on women in the
colonial era. It will likely become a classroom
standard.
Clearly the area of colonial women's
history has been one in need of synthesis.
Imaginative and meticulous scholars have
been creating histories out of the
sparest sources for more than a
generation now. But the nature of the evidence
from this period has dictated a somewhat
more scattershot result than is the case in
many other areas of American history.
Women's histories have often consisted of
individual case studies, pieced together
out of the scraps of letters or diaries, ac-
count books, demographic records, or
court cases that we have extant; sociologi-
cal-type studies that have made
statistical generalizations about cohorts of women
but which have been hamstrung in
connecting social abstractions to life as expe-
rienced; and what glimpses of women we
can glean from institutions in the public
sphere (such as the courts) that
habitually invited only the presence of men. Add
to this mix a social milieu that for at
least a century was mind-bogglingly diverse,
racially, ethnically, linguistically,
politically, and religiously, and it is not sur-
prising that it has taken until now for
someone to weave the pieces together into
something of a coherent narrative.
Berkin's is a story elegantly told. In
clear and lucid prose, she is able to com-
municate both what historians now think
we know about women in the first two
centuries of European settlement and
what is probable, possible, or simply a good
guess as to what was the case. In seven
well-organized chapters, Berkin carefully
presents us with the stories of women
from the Chesapeake, New England, and the
Middle Colonies, African-American and
Indian women, genteel and rustic women,
patriot and loyalist. To begin each
chapter, she provides us with a portrait of an
individual woman who puts a human face
on the topics at hand before going on to
tell us what scholars have come to know
about the category of woman her touch-
stone subject was. This is not to say
that Berkin homogenizes colonial women
into a few basic types. On the contrary,
she is careful to clue us in to whatever
variations on her basic themes she knows
of. Moreover, she cautions us periodi-
cally about the kinds of evidence on
which she, like other historians, has had to
rely for her information, the
limitations of that evidence, and important lacunae
within it.
One of Berkin's outstanding
accomplishments in this book is culling informa-
tion from a wide variety of monographic
sources-not simply those focused on
women and gender-to address and develop
areas where little freestanding informa-
tion exists. Her chapters on enslaved
African American women, women of the
Middle Colonies, and Indian women
particularly represent challenges well met.
For a variety of reasons, research in
these areas has been especially piecemeal, and
Berkin does us a service by pulling
together what there is and showing thereby
that there is far more extant than many
of us perhaps thought. (An extensive bib-
liographic essay is also helpful in
pointing toward both standard secondary
sources in colonial women's history and
lesser-known ones, especially in the un-