Ohio History Journal

Book Reviews

In Pursuit of Happiness: American Conceptions of Property From the Seventeenth

to the Twentieth Century. By William B. Scott. (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1977. xi + 244 p.; notes, index. $12.50.)

Scott's admirably lucid survey traces not only changing conceptions of property

rights, but also alterations in expectations of what private ownership may

contribute to the pursuit of happiness. His spokesmen of "American conceptions"

are mainly politicians, jurists, and social reformers.

During the colonial period, individual proprietorship of land was expected to

maximize productivity, provide freemen with the means to pursue a calling, and

secure to labor its appropriate reward. Though claims to land based on purchase

from Indians provided a justification for landholding other than "need and use,"

several advocates of confiscatory taxation challenged the right of proprietors to

hold idle land for speculative purposes.

The Harringtonian founding fathers agreed that widely distributed landed

property gave citizens a stake in society; but most of them came to agree with

Madison that a balance of interests rather than universal proprietorship offered the

most promising guarantee of social stability. Later suffrage reformers uncritically

substituted the vote itself for landholding as a foundation for political in-

dependence.

In some northern states, "natural rights" theories provided the legal rationale for

emancipation. Some southern defenders of slavery sought to define slaves with

other property as possessions for whose protection government was instituted.

Other defenders of the peculiar institution eschewed natural rights theories in favor

of positive law and positivist sociology.

The economic transformations associated with factory technology, the wage

system, and the corporation led to further re-evaluation of the role and definition of

property. Antebellum judges chose to protect corporate property as in-

distinguishable from individual proprietorship. Justice Stephen J. Field, speaking

emblematically for the later nineteenth century courts, included use of and revenues

from corporate property among the rights protected by constitutional guarantees

of substantive due process. But where economic development required the

abridgement of individual proprietary rights, judges construed those rights as

narrowly as possible. Political economists defined wages as property and perceived

owners, managers, and laborers as functionally equivalent, if differentially

rewarded, participants in the productive process.

By the mid-twentieth century, most Americans "accepted with only sentimental

protest their virtual loss of entrepreneurial opportunity" originally associated with

private property (p. 158). Courts tended to define equal opportunity in terms of

access to education and employment rather than to ownership of productive

resources.

Concurrently with these transformations, social critics from Robert Owen and

Alfred Brisbane to Edward Bellamy and John Dewey announced that the industrial

system required cooperative ownership and management of the means of

production. Non-Marxist critics virtually abandoned the labor theory of value-

and reward-as anachronisms.

Scott's 205-page summary ignores countless struggles over the definition of

214                                                     OHIO HISTORY

property from the quit-rent controversies of the colonial era to the nineteenth

century movement for the forfeiture of railroad land grants, to the CIO's post-

World War II demand for worker participation in managerial decisions, to efforts

by labor unions and other associations of workers to secure seniority rights and

tenure contracts that virtually define jobs as property. His summaries of judicial

redefinitions hardly replace the more extended analyses by such scholars as

Scheiber, Horowitz, Haines, and Twiss. Nonetheless, his clear, concise review

should provide an admirable introduction for students seeking an opening into an

extraordinarily complex subject.

University of Rochester                                   Mary Young

The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism. By Barbara J. Berg. (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1978. xvi + 334 p.; illustrations, notes,

bibliography, index. $14.95.)

Barbara Berg's well written monograph is intended as a direct assault on what she

calls the "abolition-feminist theory." According to the author's interpretation, a

disservice has been done to the history of American women by those who insist on

tracing the roots of feminism only to the female antislavery societies, thereby falsely

crediting "abolitionism with the creation of the nineteenth century woman's

movement" (p. 4).

Based upon extensive archival research, this study reveals how women after 1800

began to take steps to expand their spheres of activity, for women did not have to

wait until they became aware of the slaves' plight before recognizing their own

predicament. Indeed, it is Berg's assertion and the primary thrust of her book that

"woman's sense of the oppression of her sex originated in American cities" (p. 7).

For the purpose of the author's work. New York City is chosen as the analog of

all American cities in the period between 1800 and 1860. Berg draws upon the

wealth of documentary material available about New York as well as upon an

impressive knowledge of contemporary American literature in order to substan-

tiate her points. Indeed, the author is an excellent literary historian, ranging

through literature and ideas to cull informative glimpses of womankind in the first

half of the nineteenth century. Perhaps her most provocative paradigm envisions

woman as the representative of nature, a fiction created by man in order to afford

himself a place of refuge from the maelstrom of urban society.

While scholars of feminism may not regard Berg's findings as novel, they will find

them useful and interestingly brought together in this book. The volume should be a

useful corrective to the intense interest which scholars have recently given to

abolitionism and its milieu. Berg's work should be a model for others to follow in

delineating aspects of social history contemporary with and independent of the

antislavery movement.

Some readers may question the applicability of the urban woman as fully

representative of emergent feminism during the period from 1800 to 1860. While the

author might counter with the suggestion that only in a densely populated setting

could feminism emerge, one wonders, nevertheless, about all those other women

comprising the non-urban majority of the population. New York City as the single

model may likewise be troubling to some since there were other, older cities, such as

Book Reviews                                                      215

Boston, whose lively feminine society had been much in evidence as early as 1744.

As Dr. Alexander Hamilton observed; "I must take notice that this place abounds

with pritty women who appear rather more abroad than they do at York and dress

elegantly. They are, for the most part, free and affable, as well as pritty. I saw not

one prude while I was here." Had the women of Boston likewise been forced to

submerge in the late eighteenth century and then fight their way outward once

more?

Was the woman-belle ideal no less true in rural America than in the urban setting

which Berg uses? Her case for the repression of woman's identity as man's response

to the crisis of urban expansion seems somewhat less attractive when viewed against

the background of similar practices in non-urban America. How, moreover, does

this urban threat and its woman-belle response apply as a paradigm when

examining European feminism? Is the threat of urban life equally stressful there,

and the quality of the feminist response similar?

Whatever methodological or interpretive differences one may have with the

author, the work remains a clearly written, well-organized essay that should be a

model for others to follow.

Marietta College                                      Mabry O'Donnell

Woodlot and Ballot Box: Marathon County in the Twentieth Century By Howard

R. Klueter and James J. Lorence. (Wausau, Wisconsin: Marathon County

Historical Society, 1977. x + 414p.; notes, selected bibliography, index. $6.20.)

According to the authors of this detailed study of Marathon County, Wisconsin,

Woodlot and Ballot Box was designed "to fill a notable void" in the state's history

by describing one very important county in this century. The book is a result of the

upsurge in historical studies which have been a product of the Bicentennial

Committee and originated in the Marathon County Bicentennial. In addition, the

authors received financial assistance from the Marathon County Board of Super-

visors, Employers Insurance of Wausau, and the American Revolution Bicen-

tennial Committee, among many others. This may explain why a large portion of

the book reads like boomer literature or a tract published by the Chamber of

Commerce.

Klueter and Lorence divided their study of Marathon County into two parts, one

on the economy of the area and the second on its politics. The economics of

Marathon County changed dramatically during the early 1900s. Lumber

dominated the area in the late nineteenth century and only gradually succumbed to

waste and poor cutting practices. A more diversified system replaced lumber during

the early 1900s, but it was one which still relied on forestry products. An example

was the Marathon Paper Mills Company which prospered under the guidance of D.

C. Everest. This section also deals with agriculture in the county, where the dairies

of German immigrants became the primary element of Marathon farming.

Marathon County politics in the twentieth century were characterized by a

movement from conservatism to progressivism to liberalism, and from Democrat

to Republican and then back to Democrat. During the early years of the century,

ethnic identification played a major role in determining county politics, with the

Germans strongly supporting the Democrats. These people displayed a great deal

of antagonism to progressive reform in its early stages by opposing such programs

as women's suffrage, the graduated income tax, and prohibition. But as the farmer-

216                                                      OHIO HISTORY

labor coalition grew to maturity during the 1920s and 1930s, this opposition

changed to support. However, by 1938 progressives and liberals within both parties

were badly divided, and as a result the Republicans were able to regain a dominant

position and maintain it well into the 1950s. The county then returned to the liberal

Democratic fold, mainly due to the rebuilding efforts of a county lawyer, Robert

Dean.

As indicated by their footnotes and bibliography, the authors have incorporated

a monumental amount of research into their story of Marathon County in the

twentieth century. Unfortunately, in its analysis of that material Woodlot and

Ballot Box reveals several major shortcomings. The book explores far too many

boring, minute and often insignificant details which tend to blind the reader to the

importance of the county in the history of Wisconsin and the nation. The authors

spend too much time on events which took place prior to the turn of the century;

background is essential, but here it takes up more space than is necessary. The

balance of the work also leaves something to be desired. For example, of the 225

pages devoted to Marathon County economic history, only nineteen discuss the

Great Depression. Surely the 1930s had more impact on the area than this analysis

implies. Scholars across the nation are doing some exceptionally fine work on local

American history. Unfortunately, Woodlot and Ballot Box does not rank near the

top of this effort.

Louisiana State University at Eunice                   James W. Ware

The Diaries of George Washington. Edited by Donald Jackson and Dorothy

Twohig. (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1978. Vol. III, 1771-

75, 1780-81, xv + ⁴⁹⁴p.; Vol. IV, 1784-June 1786, xv + 405p.; illustrations,

maps, notes, bibliography, index. $20.00 Vol. III; $15.00 Vol. IV.)

The third and fourth volumes of The Diaries of George Washington continue the

superb editorial standards begun in the first two installments of this series (see

review, Ohio History, 86; 281-2). Every possible detail, from persons, to places, to

plants, is identified and commented upon. Washington's brief entries are amplified

for the reader to achieve full understanding of a day's events. For instance, as a

delegate to the second Continental Congress in Philadelphia he entered for June 15,

1775: "Dined at Burns's in the Field. Spent the Eveng on a Committee" (III, 336).

Washington does not hint that the same day he was unanimously chosen

commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. Although some may complain that

parts of the annotation are excessively detailed, editors Donald Jackson and

Dorothy Twohig merit the encomiums of all for their thoroughness and accuracy.

When they are in doubt, they express doubt, when they are sure, they state

positively their position. Nowhere is this more apparent than in their note on

Gilbert Simpson's poor management of Washington's Pennsylvania properties:

"Simpson was, in truth, a fickle and careless manager who knew only one art well,

that of ingratiating himself with a studied humility and professions of good

intentions while feathering his own nest" (IV, 1).

These diaries, which unfortunately were not written during most of the war years,

deal largely with the seemingly trivial activities of a planter, land speculator,

weather recorder, and entertainer of numerous visitors. Out of such details could

Book Reviews                                                       217

emerge several studies of daily life among the Chesapeake gentry at the acme of

their influence in American history.

Most readers will find it fortunate that His Excellency began in May 1781 "a

concise Journal of Military transactions" which culminated in the Yorktown

capitulation. It begins with a gloomy assessment of the year's prospects: "In a

word-instead of having everything in readiness to take the Field, we have nothing"

(III, 356). Near its conclusion Washington wrote: "About ten Oclock the Enemy

beat a parley and Lord Cornwallis proposed a cessation of Hostilities . . . to settle

terms for the surrender" (III, 429).

A recurrent theme is Washington's interest in the trans-Appalachian West.

Throughout both volumes he is concerned not only for his own landholdings, but

also with the improvement of transportation, especially up the Potomac River into

the Ohio River system. Although Indian troubles prevented his going farther west

than the Monongehela valley in 1784, his assessment of western prospects and

problems (IV, 57-68) should be of considerable interest to Ohioans.

These books are for scholars. Their excellent typography, paper, and binding will

insure their use for generations. Their only weakness involves maps. Many of those

from volume I should have been included in these volumes and a few others added.

The attempt to reproduce eighteenth century maps results in a total cartographic

failure (IV, 58) or incomplete coverage (IV, 34-5). It would have been better if the

editors had included in each volume a collection of maps illustrating places

mentioned therein. Even scholars will need more than "The Campaign of 1781 in

the North" to keep track of where one is in the wide geographic area encompassed in

these diaries.

Bowling Green State University                      David Curtis Skaggs

Descriptive Inventory of the Archives of Illinois. By Victoria Irons and Patricia C.

Brennan. (Springfield: Illinois State Government, 1978. xxv + 707p.; index.

$20.00.)

The descriptive inventory published by the Illinois State Archives and the

Secretary of State of Illinois is another addition to the growing list of publications

describing public records held in archival repositories. The inventory is also an

excellent example of the increasing sophistication of and importance attached to

these publications. Making use of computer technology, the staff of the Illinois

State Archives was able to compile an inventory and index to the state records

which opens the way for researchers to explore and trace the development of Illinois

state government and the records that agencies and their successors created.

The holdings of the Illinois State Archives cover the territorial and early

statehood papers collected through 1975. Material placed in the state archives after

January 1976 will be contained in the first update, promised in two years. The

descriptive inventory contains both an administrative history of each agency and

full series descriptions for each record series, including series title, inclusive dates,

cubic footage and whether an index is available. The administrative histories are

quite valuable for they trace the development of each agency, listing its

predecessors, the agency's duties and responsibilities and any successor agencies.

The series descriptions list all pertinent material contained in the series. It is to these

218                                                          OHIO HISTORY

descriptions that the index applies. Unfortunately, the series descriptions do not

indicate how material such as correspondence, letters, journals, ledgers, and

registers are arranged alphabetically, chronologically or what.

The basic organization of the inventory divides the record groups into several

broad categories: territorial records; constitutional officers; code departments

(administrative agencies of broad purpose such as the Department of Agriculture);

state institutions (prisons and hospitals); nonregulatory boards; regulatory

boards pre-1917; regulatory boards post-1917; higher education governing boards;

internal improvement boards (canals and turnpikes); temporary boards for

projects; temporary boards for legislation, legislature; judiciary; federal records

and appendices. Such divisions make a reliance on the index and table of contents

imperative because of the complexity of the organization and the ever-changing

nature of state government. The federal records contained in the archives relate to

census records, land records, surveyors' records and the Works Progress

Administration records. The four appendices contain a list of all items relating to

Abraham Lincoln or his family in the state archives, a valuable table describing the

Illinois census population schedules (territorial, state and federal 1818-1880), a

listing of the published inventories of the Illinois Historical Records Survey, and a

chronological breakdown of accessions of series by decade. Unfortunately, there is

no organization chart of the present Illinois state government; it would have made

an ideal fifth appendix and added much to the agency histories.

One of the major strengths of the inventory is the accompanying index.

Containing over 8400 tracings, the index has been programmed for computer tape

and thus is easily updated. Although the index follows Library of Congress

headings, its limitations are those of the agency histories and series tracings. Thus

there is no listing for the present supervisor of insurance regulation in the index, for

no such listing appears in any series description or agency history.

Taken as a whole, the Descriptive Inventory of the Archives of the State of

Illinois represents a major achievement. Its few errors can be easily corrected in

subsequent updates. A word of caution, however: the inventory is not a history of

state government in Illinois. It is an inventory of records held by the Illinois State

Archives. If an agency's records are not housed in the archives, the agency is not

described.

At first glance the cost of the publication might seem prohibitive to libraries on

tight budgets. However, the $20.00 price includes all updates both to the inventory

and the index. An outstanding work, the inventory serves as a challenge to other

archivists to produce works of comparable quality. It also serves as a skeletal

history of state government and an introduction to record series of great potential

for historical and genealogical research.

Ohio Historical Society                                     Thomas Rieder

Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy. By James C.

Mohr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. xii + 331p.; notes, appendices,

index. $12.50.)

By 1900 virtually every state in the union had enacted anti-abortion legislation.

Yet one hundred years earlier, no anti-abortion statutes had even existed. James C.

Mohr's incisive analysis of the development of abortion policy in the United States

Book Reviews                                                       219

during the nineteenth century is a thought-provoking and stereotype-shattering

view of how control over their own bodies was gradually taken away from millions

of American women by the passage of laws designed not only to "protect" the lives

of pregnant women, but, more significantly, to bolster the authority of the regular

medical profession and its influence on public policy.

Prior to the 1820s, the decision to have an abortion had been almost exclusively

the prerogative of the woman involved and depended chiefly on her ability to find a

willing practitioner, be it a physician or not, either to perform the act or provide her

with the pharmaceutical means to do so. Beginning in the third decade of the

nineteenth century, however, the pursuit of professionalism among medical

practitioners also led to the suppression, especially through legislative restrictions

and regulations, of the activities of so-called "unscientific" practitioners-the

eclectics, homeopaths, herbalists, and incidentally, abortionists. By forcing non-

conformists out of practice, the AMA and other medical society-backed "regulars"

not only guaranteed their own viability as professionals, but limited the treatment

choices available to prospective patients, be they water cures or abortions.

Although much of Mohr's book details how various medical societies and

influential individual professionals promoted and lobbied (successfully) for the

passage of anti-abortion legislation, an equal focus of the book is its discussion of

abortion itself and the social climate in which it has existed, or not, throughout

American history. In addition to its own professional objectives, the medical

profession pushed so strongly for anti-abortion laws from about 1840 on because

many married women, especially the native-born, as well as the usual single women,

were actively seeking and having abortions, primarily as a means of family

limitation. Near-hysteria reigned in some of the medical rhetoric, and labor pangs

of nativist prescience led regular practitioners to predict the downfall of the

American (read WASP) race unless the fearful tide were halted. American

womanhood was being corrupted, for, as everyone knows, it is unnatural and

immoral for women to voluntarily deny their God-given role as mothers.

None of these men, of course-either the physicians or the legislators-ever

asked women how they felt about such questions as how it felt to be incontinent

from vesico-vaginal fistula, how it felt to have so many children that it was

impossible to feed them all properly, or how it felt to be dying from peritonitis,

perforation of the uterus, or any of the other conditions that so often resulted from

bungled abortions. For no amount of punitive legislation kept women from having

abortions. True, middle and upper-class women turned to other types of

contraception. But the single, the poor, and the frightened women continued to

turn to the warehouse districts and back alleys for a resolution of their problem.

It was perhaps ironic, as Mohr points out, that abortion was being outlawed just

at the time when antiseptic procedures were being generally accepted by

practitioners, procedures which would ultimately make abortions within the first

three months of pregnancy much safer than childbirth itself. It was also ironic,

given the nature of present-day anti-abortion activism, that the public and even the

clergy were noticeably silent on the issue during the nineteenth century, leaving the

heat of the battle to the physicians and legislators.

Mohr's sources, chiefly published medical treatises, state legislative records, and

journalistic accounts, provide a clear view of the public side of the abortion

controversy. The book would have been richer, but probably not more persuasive,

if it had attempted to uncover some of the more elusive sources such as individual

women's letters or hospital records relating to bungled abortion victims that might

have shed light on the more private side of the issue, particularly from the point of

220                                                        OHIO HISTORY

view of women themselves. This, however, is an area that might best be pursued by

further research. Mohr has done a superb job. Those who think that religious and

moral objections were the cause of nineteenth century anti-abortion legislation,

legislation that was virtually unchanged until the 1973 Supreme Court decision in

Roe v. Wade, should read this book and have their eyes opened, and perhaps their

minds as well.

National Historical Publications and Records Commission       Nancy Sahli

American Forts: Architectural Form and Function. By Williard B. Robinson.

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. xiii + ²²⁹p.; illustrations, appendix,

glossary, bibliography, index. $15.00.)

Formerly almost entirely the provenence of antiquarians, the study of military

architecture has expanded to such an extent in recent years that it is now clearly a

legitimate subject for the academically oriented historian. Although much has been

written on individual fortifications, Willard Robinson's American Forts is the first

scholarly effort to comprehensively analyze the topic.

The author has ambitiously described and evaluated over 300 years of

fortifications in America, beginning with the colonial era and concluding with the

army's efforts in the trans-Mississippi frontier. An architectural historian at Texas

Tech University, Robinson argues that the architectural form of a fort was the

result of an interplay between its function and the surrounding geography. In other

words, the purpose of a fort, whether to defend a coastal harbor or to ward off

Indians, and the geographical constraints of its site were both reflected in its

physical structure.

Robinson convincingly demonstrates the validity of his thesis. He begins with a

discussion of the European antecedents for American forts. The forts built by the

Spanish, French and English in America were based on the Vauban bastioned

system of fortification. This system was developed in Italy in response to the

development of artillery that made medieval castles obsolete and received its name

from its leading practioner during the seventeenth century, Sebastien Le Prestre de

Vauban, the military engineer for Louis XIV. During the Revolution and early

nineteenth century, foreign-born engineers, such as the Louis-Lebeque Duportail,

Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and Simon Bernard, were the first to analyze the needs of the

new United States and create an American system of forts. Robinson follows the

increasing sophistication of military science in the nation and the demand for

coastal defense that resulted in the creation of vertical casemented masonry forts.

He also shows that American military engineers, most notably Joseph Totten, were

instrumental in developing a "permanent system" with distinctive corner tower

bastions. The eventual introduction of rifled artillery during the Civil War, as the

author dramatically illustrates with a lithograph of the "bombed out" Fort Sumter

at Charleston, demonstrated the fallibility of masonry fortifications. The ultimate

expression of Robinson's form and function concept were the frontier forts of the

1870s and 80s, where a scarcity of materials and the nature of Indian warfare

combined to make the walls, a seemingly essential item, superfluous.

Unfortunately, the final chapter dealing with "Land Frontier Forts" is the

weakest portion of the text. After establishing that forts without walls were the

Book Reviews                                                        221

norm in the West, Robinson seems to belabor the point by listing numerous

examples. In addition, the author gives no real attention to the frontier forts in a

number of states east of the Mississippi River; thus the person generally looking for

information on Ohio Valley fortifications will be disappointed. Finally, his

statement that "a second stockade" outside a fort wall as "a second line of defense

was unusual on the [eastern] frontier" (p. 134) is not supported by evidence

presented by the author or available elsewhere.

The choice of illustrations in the volume and the quality of reproduction are

exceptional. Robinson has assembled contemporary drawings, paintings, plats,

and cross sections of the forts into a valuable research tool, and an appendix has

been included with helpful observations concerning the drawing techniques

utilized. In spite of its minor shortcomings, American Forts should definitely be on

the shelf of any serious student of military architecture.

The Ohio Historical Society                           David A. Simmons

The Political Economy of Urban Transportation. By Delbert A. Taebel and James

V. Cornehls. (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977. ix + 218p.; tables,

figures, appendix, notes, index. $13.95 cloth; $8.95 paper.)

That streetcars and then highway construction and automobiles permitted a

general reshuffling of home and business sites has long been known to historians

and social critics. The strength in the political arena of trolley operators and

highway promoters has regularly served as a topic in contemporary accounts of

American politics on the local, urban level. Taebel and Cornehls write in these

traditions, pointing to the influence of highway lobbyists in legislatures and the

subsequent decentralization of homes and businesses along new routes.

During the years after World War II, they report, highway enthusiasts such as

automobile and truck manufacturers, engineers, contractors, and truck operators

worked together in national and state governments to bring additional mileage

to urban centers. The Interstate system, their favorite network since the mid-1950s,

has consumed billions of dollars and thousands of square miles of rural and urban

land. Friends of mass transit found themselves increasingly isolated in politics

because prosperity had become contingent upon the sale of new automobiles and

members of associated industries were "in some degree engaged in tacit collusion to

protect the automotive manufacturers" (68).

Highway construction, according to the authors, reshaped urban areas. The

builders of factories, offices, and housing developments selected sites at the

periphery, leaving minority Americans without jobs and forcing the elderly and

handicapped to get about as they could. Autos and highways mangled the city, its

residents, and their lives. As a solution to this condition, the authors recommend

mass transit facilities whose construction presumably would require a self-

conscious evaluation by designers of the broader land use, economic, and social

complexes in a city.

The authors sustain the erroneous notion that technology is autonomous and

that urban problems are of recent origin. Long before World War I, streetcars as

well as gas, electric, and sewer lines facilitated the outward movement of city

dwellers seeking rural landscapes and urban services. Highways only allowed

homebuilders to fill in the pockets between trolley lines and to extend new

222                                                    OHI0 HISTORY

developments still further into the countryside. But the overall pace of outward

movement between 1945 and 1970 may not have been as fast as the one established

by business relocations before World War II.

Taebel and Cornebls also fail to develop an appropriate framework for the study

of highway politics. Promoters of road building simply never achieved the unity of

vision described here. In 1944 Congress had authorized construction of the

Interstate system, but not until 1956-following a doubling of traffic, the threat of

uncoordinated building at the local level, and major losses of life and income in

traffic jams could truck operators, engineers, and others who wrote, argued, and

lobbied about highway legislation agree to a program of accelerated construction.

In short, those seeking a tendentious personal document will find little new in this

book; those who wish an accurate account of highway development and urban

affairs and a contribution to our understanding of the patterns of urban and

political change should look elsewhere.

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia                     Mark H. Rose

The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science

Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority. By Thomas L.

Haskell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. ix + 276 p.; notes, index.

$12.00.)

This imaginative and intellectually adventurous book is about the development

of American social science from the mid-nineteenth century, when such study was

an avocation of gentlemen-scholars and a diversion for men in the traditional

professions, to the end of that century, when social science became a full-time

occupation of academics based in the universities. Professor Haskell discusses the

broad social background of that shift and illuminates it by tracing the rise and fall of

the American Social Science Association.

The ASSA was much the work of Frank Sanborn, teacher, poet, abolitionist,

government official, and journalist who linked the ante-bellum reform movement

with post-Civil War Mugwumpery. The Association was also an offshoot of the

Massachusetts Board of Charities and retained a bias toward ad hoc and eclectic

social science-favoring investigations arising out of particular and pressing social

problems. The "scientific" work of the ASSA consisted largely in its meetings and

publications, which provided a forum for the discussion of social issues by men of

varied backgrounds and training. Its reform work comprised, for the most part,

efforts to improve Civil Service and to promote public investigatory commissions

as a means of social regulation. Professor Haskell argues that the decline of this

kind of social science was linked to an "explosive growth of interdependence" in the

second half of the nineteenth century, stemming from technological developments

and the ongoing transportation revolution that undermined "the sovereignty of

America's island communities." The resulting interdependence, he suggests, led the

major thinkers of the era into the perplexities of the "recession of causation." They

turned away from the study of men and even local groups as social agents, and

toward broader, more remote, and more general factors of social causation. This

"crisis in conventional causal attribution" among "men of insight," Professor

Haskell believes, undermined customary beliefs, disrupted the authority of the

traditional professions, and gave rise to academic sociology, that science of remote

causal attribution.

Book Reviews                                                        223

Possibly an aside addressed particularly to readers of this journal might not be

out of place at this point. Many of the most exciting works of American history

written over the past decades advance arguments that seem to beg for consideration

and appraisal by regional and local historians drawing upon the special erudition of

their vicinage. For example, Professor Robert H. Wiebe's notion, so important to

Professor Haskell's book-that America of the mid-nineteenth century was a

nation of "island communities" and that at the end of the century those

communities had lost much of their sovereignty, being overwhelmed by sweeping

social and economic changes-is one such argument that might be examined

closely. Does the metaphor of "island communities" overstate the separation of

mid-nineteenth century communities from their broader economic and social

surroundings? In what sense were Cincinnati or Ashtabula, Xenia, Youngstown,

and Zanesville (or even their components) ever "island communities," and in what

sense were they overwhelmed? How did the nature of local attachments change over

these years? The local and regional historian can help us all to more precise

judgments on these and similar issues; and that is clearly the kind of scholarly

cooperation which can be particularly invigorating.

It may seem odd to suggest of Professor Haskell's study, whose key concept is

increasing interdependence, that its lively history of the ASSA and the general

discussion which sandwiches that history are not necessarily dependent; that the

discussion of broad social trends and their connection to the history of the ASSA

are less persuasive than the history itself. The chief difficulty is his use of the concept

of interdependence. Professor Haskell defines it tightly but uses it loosely. At some

points it seems to mean little more than interconnection, but at others it merges into

the old-time metaphysical notion of all-embracing causality. Remarkably

reminiscent of Herbert Spencer (one of the important figures in this study),

Professor Haskell puts forward the notion of interdependence in a way that is

abstract, unidirectional, and that leaks intimations of ineluctability. Therefore it is

not surprising that he believes "a web of dependence shapes each individual's

behavior at every moment," or asserts somewhat more specifically that increasing

interdependence of the late nineteenth century devitalized everyone's "personal

milieu." Yet if one descends from these abstractions to the lives of particular men

and women at the end of the nineteenth century, then it appears that something

close to the opposite was true. For there is good reason to believe that growing

numbers of Americans at that time, even in "island communities," were given many

more choices for doing and belonging than ever before.

It is also striking how little contemporary evidence Professor Haskell presents for

the "intellectually wrenching experience" that he believes arose from the

"regression of causality" and that led to the creation of modern American

sociology. The American thinkers he does discuss seemed to have had little

difficulty in obviating such a regression to their satisfaction, if not to his. Moreover,

when someone like Albion Small took up the concept of interdependence directly,

he seemed to be more patently beholden to the organic metaphors of the German

academicians with whom he studied, and more intent upon finding "scientific"

language for his sense of Christian obligation than he was for giving expression to

an exceptional sensitivity to the transportation revolution, market developments,

and occupational specialization.

These reservations about the conceptual backdrop of this study should not

distract from the impressive achievement of the work. Professor Haskell has

unearthed one of the important missing links (the ASSA) that helps us to

understand, as we could not before, the evolution of American sociology out of the

224                                                      OHIO HISTORY

earlier American social science. His history of the American Social Science

Association is careful, thoughtful, and informative. Even his more sweeping

reflections, though they may be less convincing, are no less provocative. This is a

work that no serious scholar of late nineteenth century American history can

ignore.

University of California, Berkeley                       Samuel Haber

American Socialism and Black Americans, From the Age of Jackson to World War

II. By Philip S. Foner. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978. xiv + 462 p.; notes,

bibliography, index. $22.95.)

In this most recent work, Philip Foner examines the attitudes adopted by the

American Socialist party and its nineteenth century prodecessors towards the

nation's black population. In a subsequent volume, Foner plans to offer a similar

examination of the relations between the Communist party and American blacks.

In the preface to American Socialism and Black Americans, Foner takes

exception to historian David Shannon's observation about the Socialist party that

Negroes "were not important in the party, the party made no special effort to attract

the Negro members, the party was generally disinterested in if not hostile to the

efforts of Negroes to improve their conditions in American capitalist society."

Foner agrees that American socialists often did display the dominant racial

attitudes of the society they lived in, but argues: "Few issues were more widely

discussed in the party press than the Negro question, and . . . significant forces in

the Socialist party fought racism in the party's ranks, took an advanced position on

the Negro question and did not confine themselves merely to parroting the usual

line." Moreover "Socialist ideas and movements exercised an important influence

upon several generations of black intellectuals and writers."

The argument that Foner makes is not without its merits. Too many historians of

pre-First World War socialism have contented themselves with citing Victor

Berger's well known racist attitudes, or quoting the comment by Eugene Debs who,

despite his own belief in racial equality, declared that Socialists "have nothing

special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races."

Foner makes it abundantly clear that this was not the entire story. In the nineteenth

and increasingly in the twentieth century, a number of Socialists did come to believe

that there were national as well as class aspects to the oppression faced by American

blacks, and that it was a legitimate concern (and indeed a responsibility) for

American Socialists to work to oppose such special forms of oppression as

lynchings and Jim Crow laws. Foner offers the example of a white Pennsylvania

Socialist, Caroline Hollingsworth Pemberton, who took an active interest in the

plight of black Americans in the early years of this century. In a 1901 article in a

Socialist newspaper, she argued that unlike white laborers, who could shed the

symbols of their class should circumstances favor them, "the negro cannot shed his

skin. The white South not only adheres firmly to its traditional scorn of the laborer,

but enjoys the immense advantage of dealing with its laborer as a race rather than as

a class." Pemberton tried, with mixed success, to involve the Socialist Party in the

black struggle against lynching and the sharecropping system, and she insisted that

Socialists should set an example for white Americans by abandoning their own

racial prejudices. Foner also describes the political activities of a number of black

Book Reviews                                                       225

Socialists, including obscure figures like the Reverend George Washington

Woodbey as well as such famous figures as W.E.B. DuBois and A. Philip

Randolph. After the split in the Socialist movement in 1919, Foner seems to lose

interest in his subject, and his perfunctory narrative adds little to existing accounts

of the Socialist party's efforts to organize in Harlem and among the South's

sharecroppers during the Depression.

Despite its detail, American Socialism and Black Americans is not a persuasive

challenge to more conventional interpretations like Shannon's. Simply multiplying

instances where individual Socialists did recognize the special characteristics of

black oppression does not disprove the generalization that the Socialist party on

the whole was disinterested in the struggle against racism. The "Negro Question"

may have been mentioned more often in the Socialist press than commonly

believed, but the issue hardly aroused the interests of or divided Socialists the way

that debates over "direct action," industrial unionism, or even prohibition did.

As in his writings on the American labor movement, Foner approaches his

research with an abstract timeless model of how Marxists should ideally respond to

a given problem, then awards praise or criticism to the real historical actors he

encounters along the way, depending to what extent the things they say seem to live

up to the ideal. This approach leads Foner to many anachronistic judgments,

particularly in his discussion of nineteenth century Socialists, as he picks away at

their racial attitudes, theories, and terminology. And it often obscures more

interesting questions than it answers. For example, why did some Socialists

respond more sympathetically to black Americans than others? (In the case of

Caroline Pemberton, it probably had more to do with her Quaker ancestry than to

any superior capacity for Marxist analysis.) Foner's book provides useful detail but

few insights into the relations between Socialists and American blacks.

Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts                           Maurice Isserman

The Kirtland Economy Revisited: A Market Critique of Sectarian Economics. By

Marvin S. Hill, Keith Rooker, and Larry T. Wimmer. (Provo: Brigham Young

University Press, 1977. viii + 85p.; tables, illustrations, appendices,

bibliography, index. $4.95.)

This study delves into the vicissitudes of founding a bank for a religious group in

northern Ohio during the late 1830s. The expectations of the founders exceeded the

resources that could be commanded. The authors question the conclusions of some

previous writers concerning the failure of the Kirtland Safety Society Bank. Among

these are Fawn Brodie in No Man Knows My History, W. A. Lynn in The Story of

Mormonism, and J. H. Kennedy in The Early Days of Mormonism. These writers

question Joseph Smith's motives in the founding and handling of the bank's

resources. This work uses tables of statistics concerning the viability of the Kirtland

economy, from the time of the bank's beginning to its end. The local economy had

reached a peak slightly before the bank was started; then the decline took place

which dampened its prospects, then liquidated it as it did numerous other banks by

1837. So the Mormon-founded bank struggled vainly in the same economic net.

The authors say the depression of 1837 did not entirely cause the failure; at least

they do not emphasize it as a sole cause. Another difficulty the bank had to

surmount was the unwillingness of the Ohio legislature to grant a charter of

226                                                      OHIO HISTORY

incorporation, not because of anti-Mormonism but because the Locofocos

controlled the voting in that body.

There is a possibility that Joseph Smith hoped to provide the Mormon Church

with a strong economic base as its foundation. The authors do not emphasize this

possibility, probably because it was not emphasized at the time as it was later in the

Order of Enoch and in other Utah attempts in cooperation efforts assisted by the

Church. Brigham Young later pointed out disadvantages a religious leader would

meet in mundane pursuits (p. 41). The work illustrates the difficulty of a prophet

dealing with profit. The authors on page 4 sum up, with the help of their

tabulations, the point of the study: "Previous historical accounts of the Kirtland

economy have overlooked the fact that Smith provided his credits with assets, that

he was buying and selling land at market prices and that the economic reversals in

the Kirtland economy involved a change in economic conditions 'that reasonably

prudent economic men probably would not have anticipated.' "

Oxford, Ohio                                              W. J. McNiff

Almost Persuaded: American Physicians and Compulsory Health Insurance, 1912-

1920. By Ronald L. Numbers. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1978. xii + 158p.; notes, bibliography, index. $10.00.)

Traditional histories of the early reform movement for compulsory health

insurance in the United States deal with the interaction and conflicts of various

interest groups as if frozen in time. In this innovative work, Ronald L. Numbers, an

historian of science and medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, centers

his research "primarily on the changing attitudes of the medical profession, leaving

detailed analyses of labor, business, and political opinion to others" (p.xi). He

corrects the static view by placing the shifting views of prominent physicians and

national, state, and local medical organizations within the historical context of

Progressive reform activities. By detailing the medical profession's "brief flirtation"

(p. 110) with reform through research in such primary sources as the American

Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) papers, records of the American

Medical Association (AMA), reports of state social insurance commissions, and

journals of state and local medical societies, Numbers convincingly reworks the

historical picture of a staid, politically conservative medical profession.

With concise, well-documented prose, he depicts reformers' concerns with the

problem of sickness in an urban-industrial society, puts the German, British, and

American health insurance plans in comparative perspective, introduces the chief

reformers in the AALL and the AMA, and gives good brief biographies of

opponents. Drawing on the work of state and local investigatory bodies for

background, Numbers notes the extent of sickness among industrial workers, the

expansion of governmental activity in providing medical care, and the financial

interests of American doctors in the second decade of the twentieth century.

Through particular examination of insurance benefits and administrative

structures in Germany, Britain, and the AALL-proposed Standard Bill, he reveals

American confusion and ignorance about European plans as late as 1911. Numbers

rescues such reformers as Isaac M. Rubinow and John B. Andrews of the AALL,

Alexander Lambert and S. S. Goldwater of the AMA, and various state politicians

from historical limbo. This interpretation also carefully develops the growth of

Book Reviews                                                        227

opposition to compulsory health insurance plans among leaders in the commercial

insurance field, state medical organizations, and, most importantly, the divergent

county medical societies.

In chronicling the political battles in New York, Massachusetts, Wisconsin,

Illinois, and California from 1916 through 1920, Numbers follows the changing

opinions of physicians and their professional organizations from a "surprisingly

positive" (p. xi) first response in 1916 to the triumph of the anti-health insurance

faction with the 1920 AMA House of Delegates' resolution opposing reform

amounting to "Death By Hysteria" (Chapter 9). In 1916, reform leaders such as

Lambert in the AMA formed links with the AALL to seek practical compromises

for the profession as part of what seemed to be the inevitable victory of health

insurance bills in the state legislatures of the Northeast and Midwest. Yet, the

coming of the First World War in 1917 "unquestionably intensified the criticism

already developing and further encouraged intemperate rhetorical attacks, based

largely on the German origin of social insurance" (p. 75). By the time of the Red

Scare, many physicians had joined in the war and postwar "hysteria" to

opportunistically oppose health insurance on the grounds of monetary loss under a

contract system, foreboding experience under workmen's compensation laws, and

the recognition that reform legislation was not inevitable.

Due to his focus on the national arena and one interest group's changing response

to reform efforts, Numbers overemphasizes the role of the AALL after 1916. The

political battles occurred on the state level around the investigating commissions

such as in Ohio, amidst actual legislative debate as in New York, and, in the

California case, over the climactic defeat in November 1918 of a constitutional

amendment by a margin of two-to-one. In Chapter 7, Numbers stresses the negative

impact of World War I on reform plans then inconsistently downplays this factor in

the conclusion (p. 113). Yet the record of the state commissions (mistakenly citing

the 1917 Massachusetts commission as in favor-p. 99) shows that the war did not

really play such a central role in the later defeats: before 1919, two (not three)

favored health insurance, one opposed, and one was undecided; in 1919, three

favored, three opposed, and one was undecided. The war period's impact was more

equivocal than Numbers' argument indicates.

In centering on the medical profession's reactions, Numbers overlooks positive

interest group interaction at the state level among business, labor, insurance, and

medical leaders, though he does write in "A Note on Sources" that the best

historical accounts "tend to overlook events below the national level" (p. 115).

Despite his novel interpretation of the actions of American physicians in regard to

compulsory health insurance, Numbers-along with other historians-searches for

liberal successes and defeats. He and others neglect the essentially conservative

nature of the early health insurance movement, while overstating the liberal

elements in social insurance activists' ideas and behavior. Were they to examine the

social backgrounds of state health insurance commissioners, the political dynamics

of the commissions, and reforms in public health administration such as found in

the Ohio case, a different picture might well emerge.

In an "Epilogue," Numbers rejects previous theories that the conservative stance

of the AMA by 1920 arose out of either the abdication of responsibility by the

scientific and academic leaders of American medicine or a grass roots revolt of

general practitioners fearing a loss of income, occupational liberty, status, and the

closeness of the doctor-patient relationship. Almost Persuaded sets the stage for

further in-depth research of interest group activity in the early social insurance

movement. Numbers provides the first well-researched history of the changing

228                                                          OHIO HISTORY

response of an influential professional group that initially favored but later resisted

compulsory health insurance in the late Progressive years.

The Ohio State University                              Patrick D. Reagan

American Midwives: 1860 to the Present. By Judy Barrett Litoff. (Westport:

Greenwood Press, 1978. xi + 197p.; notes, bibliography, index. $15.95.)

"Midwifery has been the almost exclusive province of women throughout

recorded history," begins Litoff in her well-written study of the midwife's decline in

the United States. Rarely were men in the lying-in chamber before the eighteenth

century when the growth of "scientific" obstetrics and the development of

instrument deliveries increased the likelihood of physician-attended births.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the American midwife's proponents accused

physicians, primarily male, of the unnecessary use of drugs and instruments

("meddlesome midwifery") and described male birth attendants as an affront to

modesty; but developments in anesthesia, antisepsis, asepsis, and the use of

diagnostic instruments like stethoscopes and x-rays popularized the growing

specialty of obstetrics. By the end of the century, physician-attended births became

the norm, and though midwives as late as 1910 conducted at least as many births as

physicians, these women served mostly the poor and ethnic minorities.

Litoff focuses on the early twentieth century controversy over the midwife.

Physicians upset with the low status of obstetrics and worried about "overcrow-

ding" in the profession observed that obstetrics would never become a respected

medical specialty as long as ill-trained midwives practiced. They also feared that the

continued existence of midwives would limit the availability of "clinical material"

needed to upgrade obstetrical education. By 1910 public health statistics showed

extremely high rates of maternal and infant mortality, a situation opponents

blamed on unskilled midwives. The midwife's supporters cited comparative studies

that showed American midwives often had lower mortality rates than physicians;

they noted that European countries where midwives delivered a large proportion of

infants had mortality rates lower than the United States.

By 1930 only 15 percent of American births were midwife-attended. Litoff

discusses several factors influencing the midwife's decline. Opponents were well-

organized; midwives themselves had few organizations, and they were not

powerful. Even proponents of midwives believed in formal training and regulation,

but few institutions for midwifery education existed. In addition, various social

forces contributed to the demise of the midwife. Immigration restriction laws of the

1920s eliminated much of her clientele. By 1930, 80 percent of the midwives

practiced in the South. The number of hospital deliveries ("the American way")

grew. Women demanded time- and pain-saving procedures best practiced in a

hospital under physician care. The decreasing birthrate made birth seem less

"routine" and more a special event. By 1973, 99.3 percent of all births were

physician-attended hospital deliveries. Litoff brings her study to the present with a

brief history of the nurse-midwife and a discussion about current interest in lay-

midwifery and home-births.

Using the limited statistics available, Litoff demonstrates the midwife's

precipitous decline and provides a clear picture of the medical and professional

debate over midwifery in America. Drawing on the medical and lay literature of the

Book Reviews                                                        229

period, she analyzes the argumentation within the medical profession: certain

physicians worked totally to eliminate the midwife, others saw her as a "necessary

evil," and still others viewed her as a positive good. The book's concluding chapter

is a succinct summary of the topic. Unfortunately, certain participants stand mute.

One would like to know more about the women who became midwives. Similarly,

what of the parturient women: how much control did they have over the birthing

situation, and on what grounds does a woman choose between available types of

birth attendants? These are minor criticisms, however. Litoff has written a non-

polemical book, one that elucidates the many elements influencing the rise of a

medical specialty at the expense of a relatively inarticulate and unorganized group.

University of Wisconsin                                   Rima D. Apple

Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream. By G.S. Boritt. (Memphis:

Memphis State University Press, 1978. xxiv + 432p.; notes, appendix,

bibliography, index. $15.00.)

In Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, G. S. Boritt argues that

economics (read political economy) is the key to understanding Lincoln's vision for

American society. Boritt convincingly demonstrates that as a young Illinois state

legislator, a freshman Whig Congressman, and President of the United States,

Lincoln consistently supported those policies which enabled all men to receive "a

full, good, and ever increasing reward for their labors so that they might have the

opportunity to rise in life" (p. lx). Lincoln's commitment to a labor theory of value,

equal opportunity, and a rising standard of living, lay at the root of his support of a

national banking system, a protective tariff, liberalized land policies, legalization of

labor unions, internal improvements, a graduated tax policy, and the prohibition of

slavery in the territories. Lincoln wanted to provide all Americans, whether

entrepreneurs, laborers, farmers, or slaves, "an unfettered start, and a fair chance in

the race of life" (p. 275). For Lincoln, issues of civil liberty and constitutionalism

were, at best, secondary concerns-means to economic liberty and equality of

opportunity.

Boritt divides his book into two parts-the early Lincoln and the post-Kansas-

Nebraska Lincoln. Even so, Boritt does not seek to perpetuate the tendency of some

other Lincoln scholars to treat separately the earlier and later Lincolns. Rather, he

demonstrates that Lincoln's opposition to slavery after 1854 was a logical extension

of the "economic" ideas and values which he had adopted prior to 1854. The

practice of dividing Lincoln's career into two discrete and largely unrelated phases

has created several problems of interpretation. It has made the early Lincoln appear

as little more than a calculating opportunist. Lincoln, an unprincipled man with an

insatiable appetite for political office, changed his "principles" as it become

expedient. Prior to 1854, he championed Whig economic policies; after 1854, when

public opinion changed, he jettisoned his Whiggism and transformed himself into a

champion of the anti-slavery cause.

Another difficulty posed by the "divided Lincoln" interpretation is that it fails to

account for the greatness of the presidential Lincoln. Suddenly, in 1863 Lincoln, the

political hack, became the Great Emancipator. Boritt finds this image unconvinc-

ing. If Lincoln was great after 1863, the ingredients of that greatness must have

been present earlier. Further, the division of Lincoln's career into two distinct

230                                                       OHIO HISTORY

periods obscures why Lincoln viewed slavery an evil even as he retained certain

notions of Negro inferiority. One of Boritt's purposes is to show that a divided

Lincoln is artificial and ignores significant continuities. The result is a compelling

interpretation of Lincoln which recognizes his greatness, explains its background,

and reconciles Lincoln's ideas on slavery and race with his earlier economic

Whiggism. Boritt concludes that Lincoln's economic principles ultimately led

Lincoln to believe that slavery, more than anything else, stood in the way of the

realization of the American economic dream. Slavery allowed masters to confiscate

the product of their slaves' labor, it denied blacks the opportunity to better

themselves, and it inhibited the modernization of the southern economy. Boritt

insists that Lincoln's seemingly most moralistic position, opposition to slavery, was

but a part of an even loftier economic dream.

Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream has some minor problems.

The first half of the book is far more successful than the second half. In part, this is a

function of the strength of Boritt's argument. His thesis of an "economic" Lincoln is

so convincing that the anti-slavery Lincoln seems anti-climactic. Still, as Boritt

admits, Lincoln after 1854 did relegate economic policy to a secondary role. Boritt

goes to some pains to explain why Lincoln, given the new-found power of the

presidency and the exigencies of war, gave only casual attention to economic issues.

Boritt points out that Lincoln and Congress successfully enacted the old Whig

economic program, but nevertheless admits it was a piecemeal effort frequently

pushed through by Congress or members of Lincoln's cabinet. As president,

Lincoln personally gave surprisingly little attention to economic policy. Seemingly,

by 1861 Lincoln found his own economic dream much less infatuating, perhaps

even tawdry. All too quickly, Boritt passes over the possibility that either Lincoln

had begun to outgrow his economic dream or had become immobilized by ambiv-

alence. Boritt offers suggestive, but not entirely convincing, explanations.

A less substantive problem is Boritt's style. On the whole, he writes with clarity

and force, but he has a curious penchant for classical and literary allusions. For

instance, page 100 contains this sentence: "Certainly his [Lincoln's] political

effectiveness appears to have been enhanced thereby, somewhat in the manner of

Cato the Elder's 'Delenda est Carthago,' " which is translated at the bottom of the

page, "Carthage must be destroyed." At worst, such allusions are distracting and

pretentious. Still, there is irony in Boritt's genuine admiration of Lincoln's common

touch, and Boritt's own somewhat pretentious style.

Minor objections aside, Boritt has written a sophisticated and important book

which significantly enlarges our understanding of Lincoln, and in the process has

brought Lincoln scholarship in line with the mainstream of the historical

scholarship on the nineteenth century. No one with a serious interest in American

history can afford to ignore Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream.

Kenyon College                                          William B. Scott

Iron Road to the West: American Railroads in the 1850s. By John F. Stover (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1978. xii + 266p.; illustrations, tables, maps,

notes, bibliography, index. $14.95.)

As the title suggests, Iron Road to the West: American Railroads in the 1850s, is

an overview of the country's emerging rail net at mid-nineteenth century. Purdue

Book Reviews                                                       231

University Professor John F. Stover, a leading student of American railroading,

develops his study largely into a regional review of the growth of rail services. Thus

there are individual chapters on "Yankee Railroads," "The Railroads of Dixie,"

and the "Iron Roads in the West." Additional sections chronicle the iron horse's

ascendancy over the turnpike, canal, and steamboat; the advances in antebellum

rail technology; and an overview of the American rail network on the eve of the

Civil War.

Stover marshalls evidence effectively to support his belief that "no decade was

more important in the history of American railroads than the antebellum 1850s" (p.

xi). Perhaps the most telling testimony to the significance of this ten-year period

was that the outline of today's railroad map east of the Mississippi River became

apparent by 1860. Specifically, the rail net more than tripled in size, from 9,000 to

30,000 miles. And, according to Stover, the fact that expanding rails typically

linked the New England and Mid-Atlantic states with those of the Old Northwest

helps to clarify why the West allied itself with the North and not the South during

the era's bitter sectional struggles. As he writes, "The thousands of miles of new

railroad between the Hudson and Mississippi rivers resulted in a new east-west

trade axis which was replacing the earlier north-south trade of the Mississippi and

Ohio steamboats. This shift goes far in explaining the loyalty of the Old Northwest

to Lincoln and the Union during the Civil War" (pp. 219-220).

Iron Road to the West should appeal to the professional and lay reader. Railfans

especially will appreciate the material on locomotives and their three principal

builders: Thomas Rogers, Matthias Baldwin, and the Norris brothers. The volume

is well researched and generally well written. However, the narrative on regional

rail development, while essential, lacks vitality. While a surprisingly large number

of typos mar the work, a marvelous collection of illustrations enhance it. And, too,

a splendid set of tables and maps complement the text. Regretfully, Stover did not

explore fully growing demands for the standardization of railroad practices. And

he might have discussed the evolution of railroad architecture, particularly the

ubiquitous depot. Still, Iron Road to the West is a fine publication.

The University of Akron                                 H. Roger Grant

The Political Crisis of the 1850s. By Michael F. Holt (New York: John Wiley &

Sons, 1978. xix + 330p.; tables, bibliography, notes, index. $10.95.)

This book is part of a series which re-examines past periods of crisis in light of the

revived interest in political history which has emerged in recent years. Michael

Holt, author of related works on this subject, defines the political crisis of the 1850s

as the loss by the American party system of its earlier ability to contain sectional

differences between North and South. For almost thirty years before this time, the

two major parties had sustained political competition over a broad range of issues

which did not pit North against South. As long as each party possessed both

Northern and Southern adherents, national partisan loyalties transcended

sectional differences, thereby defusing any potential threat to the Union's

solidarity. By providing for the interests of North and South, a strong party system

held sectional differences within safe bounds from the 1820s through the 1840s.

In the ¹⁸⁵0s, the Second American Party System collapsed, as old partisan

232                                                       OHIO HISTORY

loyalties waned and political organizations reshaped along sectional lines. Many

historians traditionally have attributed this change to the intensification of

sectional differences over slavery since the late 1840s. Other historians have as-

cribed the realignments to current ethnocultural strain over such issues as pro-

hibition, anti-Catholicism, and nativism. Professor Holt considers both those

interpretations inadequate, contending instead that the breakdown of the old party

system in the fifties was the cause rather than the result of intensified sectionalism.

Although differences over slavery were significant, he regards it an oversimplifica-

tion to cite slavery issues alone as the political cause of disunion. He believes that

the explanation is more properly found in studying the dynamics of partisan

behavior.

Holt expounds his thesis by tracing party activity from 1820 through 1860. He

shows how Democrats differed with National Republicans, and later Whigs, over

economics and personalities, while managing to accommodate sectional

differences, even through the controversies of the late 1840s over the acquisition of

new western lands from Mexico. His attempted political synthesis of the

Jacksonian era may seem imperfect to specialists in those years, as certain

statements are left unqualified and/or unsubstantiated. It is also curious that while

analyzing every other presidential election from 1836 to 1860, he omits the

campaign of 1840, in which the conjunction of Northerners and Southerners to

create the national Whig party offers a significant example for his thesis.

Holt moves to stronger ground in dealing with his principal time period, from the

late 1840s onward. His most unique contribution is his portrayal of the political

consensus that developed in the early 1850s, when both major parties accepted the

Compromise of 1850 and their old economic differences were obliterated by a new

period of prosperity and constitutional revision in many states. The political

uncertainty caused by this consensus then moved politicians to divide on sectional

issues, not with the intent of weakening the Union but in order to revitalize their

parties. This strategy became damaging, however, as parties grew totally

sectionalized over the critical events of the late 1850s. The Republican party then

emerged as a new pro-Northern organization, while Northern and Southern

Democrats became divided. Within that polarization, secession and civil war

followed the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, as each side now saw in the

other's course a threat to its own republican ideals. In the long run, it was not simply

differences over slavery, but that issue's late absorption into partisan dynamics that

destroyed the party system as a bond of union.

The book includes several tables that employ numerical indexes as measures of

party differences, varying by particular economic issues, states, and years. There is

also an extensive bibliographical discussion. Holt's theory is thought-provoking

and provides new insight to his subject. Individual readers will be left to form their

own opinions of the theory that disruptive sectionalism was the effect rather than

the cause of partisan realignment in the 1850s.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania                           Sylvan H. Kesilman

George W. Norris: The Triumph of a Progressive, 1933-1944. By Richard Lowitt.

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. xiii + 493p.; notes, illustrations,

bibliographical essay, index. $20.00.)

Book Reviews                                                       233

Richard Lowitt has now finished his three-volume study of George Norris, a

study that has consumed two decades. The first volume began with Norris's birth in

Ohio in 1861 and traced his life there until he settled in a small town in Nebraska in

1885 as a young lawyer. In 1902 after a successful political career as county

prosecutor and district judge, Norris was elected to Congress. Quickly the young

Nebraskan established his life-long trademark-independence and a capacity to

accept and champion the progressive changes of American life. His leadership in

the overthrow of the oppressive leadership of Speaker Joseph Cannon made him

well known in Nebraska and the nation.

Lowitt's second volume begins with Norris's election to the Senate in 1912 and

details his support for the flood tide of Progressivism, and then his battles in the

1920s as a Republican dissident against presidents and anti-Progressives

everywhere. In those years the skill of his opposition and his quiet integrity would

make him a major political figure in American politics. In 1933, as the subtitle of

this volume indicates, Norris found his effective outsider role turned on its head. As

an ardent lover of the New Deal and personal friend of F.D.R., he was constantly

active at the center of the New Deal effort in the Senate. By the late 1930s, the

Nebraskan, famous as the father of TVA, had also established a reputation as one

of the nation's foremost liberals. William Allen White wrote in 1936: "In all this

land no one living has done so much as George Norris to change the old habits and

customs and set us moving along wise political paths and new ways of strength and

light" (p. 157). In 1936 because of his support for Roosevelt, he in good conscience

ran as an Independent and won handily his fifth term in a three-way race. Even in

the court fight Norris quietly stood beside the President. By 1938 Norris, one of the

lonely few who had voted against the World War I declaration, had moved from

isolationism to become a reluctant but effective voice for F.D.R.'s foreign policy.

This was too much for Nebraska, which in the late 1930s had slipped to the

Republican column. In 1942 the eighty-one year old Senator lost his bid fora sixth

term and, spurning all offers of New Deal employment, he lectured and wrote for

his causes until he died, August 28, 1944.

In this volume on Norris, Lowitt first wanted to examine Norris's role in the

founding of and decade-long history of TVA. Without doubt the several chapters

sprinkled through the book represent a significant contribution to TVA history.

Relying heavily on the large collection of Norris's letters and the Congressional

Record, Lowitt constructs a running history of TVA as seen by Norris. Historians

of the TVA, public power, and those generally interested in the question of public

rights vs. corporate America cannot overlook this volume. But Lowitt ambitiously

wanted his work on Norris to represent broadly a senatorial angle of view on the

entire New Deal period in all of its domestic and foreign aspects. There is some

success here as well. Due to the patient examination of every Senate session

between 1933 and 1942, little nuggets of insights about important New Deal

questions are everywhere in this volume. Unfortunately, Norris was first a

Republican minority Senator and then later an Independent, so despite his

seniority he chaired no important committee. Too often, except for TVA, he was

merely a cheerleader and follower, although an important and thoughtful one.

Perhaps his greatest contribution to important New Deal legislation lay in his

superb parliamentary skill, which he used frequently to save, or to make better,

New Deal legislation. Impressively, Norris the small-town mid-American,

frequently found himself to the left of F.D.R. and the New Deal. Finally, Lowitt

hoped to make more clear the impact of the New Deal on a single state, Nebraska,

where Norris, after a long struggle, helped to create a "little TVA." Lowitt, bound

234                                                     OHIO HISTORY

by his close following of Norris's papers and Senatorial work, is least successful

here. He gives a clear account of Nebraska's agricultural distress and Norris's

winning effort to create public power, but this is only a beginning for those who

would like to see in larger terms the New Deal's impact on Nebraska.

Norris's career in the 1920s and 1930s appears counter to some accepted

generalizations about American political life. Norris, noted by Washington

correspondents in the 1930s as the best and most effective Senator, spurned

partisanship and a dramatic style. Rather, as Lowitt writes, he used logic, command

of the facts, integrity, and quiet persuasion; and it often worked. Norris, the fully-

blown Progressive, kicked hard against the conservative trends of the 1920s. Norris,

the Progressive, moved easily and enthusiastically into the New Deal. Indeed,

Lowitt writes that "Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal brought fulfillment to

Norris's progressivism" (p. 475). Lowitt early in the book summarizes why Norris is

so important: "In his career," Lowitt writes, "was illustrated the transition of

middle-class liberalism from a nineteenth-century individualistic base concerned

with a limited state to a twentieth-century cooperative outlook involved with a

positive welfare state" (p. 173). Lowitt's superb three-volume political biography of

George Norris enlightens us all on this transition.

The College of Wooster                                James A. Hodges

Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. By William G. McLoughlin. (Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 1978. xv + 239p.; suggestions for further reading,

index. $12.50.)

The key to William McLoughlin's new book is his definition of awakenings as

revitalization movements. Such movements occur, he argues, when the dominant

myths, symbols, values, or ideology of a culture break down because of economic,

intellectual, or social change. Awakenings produce revisions in the ideology of the

culture, revitalizing it, which in turn revitalizes the culture as a whole. Revivals have

been a part of each of four awakenings in America, and all of our awakenings have

issued in reform.

Using this definition, McLoughlin suggests that "America was born in an

awakening" in England. The emergence of bourgeois capitalism in the sixteenth

century challenged an established world view. Puritanism evolved as a belief system

capable of sanctifying the new economic structure, and became the new consensus.

Indeed, Puritanism provided Anglo-America with a set of myths, symbols, and

values which have taken new form in each succeeding awakening and remain alive

today.

Historians are familiar with the first two American awakenings, both of which

were marked by widespread revivals. McLoughlin presents them as revitalization

movements. The Puritan world view could not accomodate eighteenth century

opportunities for individual advancement and economic prosperity, he argues. A

new belief system, which elevated the importance of the individual and challenged

the traditional hierarchy, emerged from the Great Awakening (1730-60).

Ultimately this new perspective led to the Revolution. However, it could not survive

changes wrought by the Enlightenment and republican politics. A Second Great

Awakening (1800-30) forged a fresh synthesis which could. Ironically, this new

consensus drove half of the nation to attack various social ills, including slavery,

Book Reviews                                                       235

while the other half sought purity in more personal matters. The new synthesis led

to another holy war in 1860.

Two other eras of cultural change constitute McLoughlin's third and fourth

awakenings. Neither the Prayer Meeting Revivals of 1857-8 nor the mass revivals

led by Dwight L. Moody qualify as awakenings, since they produced no significant

shifts in American culture. Billy Sunday can only be considered a leader in the third

awakening (1890-1920) because his revivals coincided with other movements which

led to cultural change. Whereas the revivalists of the first two awakenings had

helped forge new syntheses, however, Sunday was one of the final champions of a

passing culture. The new world view of the third awakening was shaped by social

scientists and liberal theologians who read their works. The old belief system was

challenged by science in 1890, and the new consensus drew from science as well as

religion. Nevertheless, it so revitalized the American people that they again went to

war for a holy cause in 1917.

McLoughlin believes that we are presently in the midst of the fourth awakening.

He once wrote that it began with Billy Graham's revivals in the 1950s, but has now

revised his analysis. The basic ideas which dominated most of this century were not

seriously challenged until the 1960s; then the challenge came from the civil rights

movement and the counter culture. A new evangelicalism has arisen, but so have a

plethora of other movements in which individual Americans have been "reborn."

Revivalism is a small part of this latest awakening, and McLoughlin concludes that

neo-evangelicalism is not likely to revitalize America. A new consensus, he

counsels, will take a full generation to emerge.

Some will argue with McLoughlin's scheme. Important claims are made for five

periods of our history, and little is said of other periods. Church historians have

seen the years between awakenings as times of religious decline; McLoughlin

implies that they were merely times of relative calm, when the dominant world view

functioned satisfactorily to explain events. Social historians have not always

chosen his periods of awakening as the times of deepest crisis. Political historians

may question whether awakenings led directly to three wars. This reviewer objects

that the late eighteenth century is neglected. Why treat the Revolution as the

product of an awakening rather than identifying it as a separate revitalization

movement? Were there not important shifts in the American world view between

1763 and 1789?

However, McLoughlin's concept of an awakening enables him to synthesize a

wide variety of works on the first and second great awakenings. Moreover, it

highlights the cultural significance of these two movements and may interest secular

historians in studying them further. What the concept contributes to our

understanding of the third awakening is less clear. Morton White and Robert

Wiebe have adequately described the same movement McLoughlin discusses in

different terms. Finally, it allows him to make sense out of the present, and even to

make some predictions concerning when a new consensus will emerge and what it

will look like.

McLoughlin describes this book as "an essay rather than a scholarly

monograph." Several other books by the same author are important for their

scholarship. This book is important because it suggests a new paradigm for

interpreting American religious and cultural history.

The Ohio State University                              Richard D. Shiels

236                                                       OHIO HISTORY

The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-70. By Don

Harrison Doyle. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. xiii + 289p.; notes,

maps, illustrations, appendix, tables, bibliographical essay, index. $12.50.)

Don Harrison Doyle's study of Jacksonville, Illinois, speaks to a much-debated

issue in recent historiography, the maintenance of community cohesion in the face

of rapid change. Unfortunately, the vigor of this debate has not been matched by its

clarity or precision, and Doyle's study forms no exception to this rule. The Social

Order of a Frontier Community suffers from serious conceptual and

methodological weaknesses, as well as faults in the handling of data. Some of its

problems derive from uncritical acceptance of the vague terms of the debate over

community cohesion; others are Doyle's alone.

The book consists of a series of descriptions of the forces in Jacksonville making

for chaos or community. On the side of chaos we find geographic and social

mobility; ethnic and regional identities; religious, political and moral com-

mitments. At the same time churches, political parties, voluntary associations, the

booster ethos, and nationalism pushed in varying degrees toward cohesion. Doyle's

fluent style brings alive the men and events behind these categories, portraying them

with an interest and affection not always found among academic historians. But his

inability to resolve the theoretical issues raised by his book means that it will be of

more interest to those who share his affection for Jacksonville than to analytically

oriented scholars.

Doyle's troubles begin with his dependent variable, community cohesion. No one

has yet devised a measure of cohesion for communities which fall somewhere on the

continuum between disintegration and conformity. Since his community, like most

others, neither disintegrated nor achieved total consensus, Doyle cannot make up

his mind whether Jacksonville can be described as cohesive. He tells us that he finds

plausible an interpretive framework which places conflict at the center of the

community-building process (p. 10); in a later aside, however, he rejects that

framework, suggesting instead that internal conflict in Jacksonville was controlled,

if not eliminated, by the suppression of hostile public rhetoric (p. 123). Presumably

we are to accept as his thesis the claim that Jacksonville's social order, because of

"its paradoxical combination of mobility and stability, voluntarism and collective

discipline," managed "to strike a workable compromise between the chaos of an

expansive capitalist society and the enduring human need for community" (p. 15).

The crucial adjective "workable" is not defined and so cannot be tested. Doyle's

thesis thus leaves unanswered the essential question of whether or not, or to what

degree, Jacksonville was a cohesive community.

The perilous logic necessitated by the inability to measure cohesion is exemplified

by Doyle's treatment of ethnicity. While granting that separate ethnic churches,

voluntary associations, and celebrations fragmented the community, Doyle claims

that these common forms of organization "betrayed a deeper level of community"

(p. 154). By this reasoning, the fact that in 1861 North and South similarly

organized armies to destroy each other betrayed a deeper level of community

beneath the differences over which they fought.

Even if Doyle had managed to measure cohesion, however, it is unlikely that a

research strategy limited to a single community could produce anything but the

most tenuous hypotheses to explain what had been found. Doyle has compounded

this problem by casting much of his data into forms which make it impossible to

compare his findings with those of other community studies. In measuring the

Book Reviews                                                        237

distribution of wealth, for example, he uniquely applies the Gini index of inequality

only to holders of real property rather than to the population theoretically capable

of holding property, thus seriously understating the extent of inequality as that

term is understood by other scholars. When Doyle deals with the most important

questions, his study group is neither the entire population, the adult population,

household heads or adult males, but the "non-dependent" population. This

includes all household and family heads, all gainfully employed persons, and all

males twenty years or older. Use of this category is a defensible strategy (although

Doyle does not defend it), but it need not preclude reporting one's findings on such

commonly investigated matters as mobility, occupation, wealth, and ethnicity in a

form which will facilitate rather than frustrate comparison.

When Doyle attempts to make analytical points, he too often builds his case upon

weak empirical grounds. A case in point concerns one of his most important

arguments: that voluntary associations played a significant dual role by promoting

community interests while boosting individual careers (pp. 178-93). The evidence

for the latter point is presented in Table 17, which shows that voluntary association

officers before and after 1860 increased the average dollar amount of their real

property holdings by more than the average dollar increase in real property

holdings of the total non-dependent population. Unfortunately for Doyle's

argument, Table 17 also shows that the voluntary association officers began in 1850

and 1860 with larger holdings. When the respective increases are converted to

percentages, it is clear that the holdings of the voluntary association officers

actually increased less rapidly than those of the total non-dependent population,

thus supporting the very opposite of Doyle's claim.

Although this book presents a lively account of some important aspects of

Jacksonville's past, it cannot be regarded as a significant contribution to the new

social history. Readers interested in a sophisticated exploration of the major issues

of historical community studies would be better advised to turn to Robert Doherty,

Society and Power: Five New England Towns (1977). Hopefully Doherty's

example rather than Doyle's will be the starting point for future studies of

Midwestern communities.

Huron College, London, Ontario                         Jack S. Blocker Jr.

Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. By Dena J.

Epstein. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. xix + 433p.; illustrations,

appendices, bibliography, index. $17.95.)

Until recently, most work on the history and the importance of early black folk

music in American life has been speculative in nature. Earlier researchers could find

little primary documentation for their beliefs about the centrality of the musical

experience in American slave life. However, the publication of works such as Eileen

Southern's The Music of Black Americans (1971) and Paul Oliver's Savannah

Syncopators (1970) opened new avenues for research. Now, with the publication of

the impressive results of Dena Epstein's twenty years of research, we can maintain

with even greater confidence than before that black secular and sacred music

thrived despite the dehumanizing effects of slavery.

This book furnishes us with a massive amount of primary source material on

black music before 1867. In her presentation Epstein relies heavily on accounts and

238                                                         OHIO HISTORY

descriptions of the music by travelers in the New World, slaves, slaveholders,

clergymen, and other residents of the American colonies. Some of the material will

be familiar to folklorists, historians, and other scholars, but most of it has not been

examined previously in a work such as this.

Epstein was faced with the problem of documenting the existence of black music

in the New World from the time of the slaves' earliest arrival in 1619 to roughly

around the time of the American Revolution. She explains that contemporary

descriptions from the mainland were both fragmentary and few in number.

However, she discovered numerous descriptions of African singing and dancing

from the West Indies that she felt were relevant for understanding black music on

the mainland. Epstein points out that until the Revolutionary War "Britain and

France considered all their colonies in the New World as part of the same colonial

structure" (p. xvi, 22), and that "contemporary descriptions of these colonies

intermixed them, making little distinction between the islands and the mainland"

(p. xvi). The abundance of reports of music and dancing from the West Indies, all of

which were consistent with the few accounts from the mainland, render it likely that

West African musical practices persisted on the mainland as well as on the islands

despite the former's smaller slave population. Throughout the book, especially in

the initial chapters, Epstein makes profitable use of the literature from the islands to

support her thesis.

In Part One, Epstein concentrates on reports of African music up to 1800. A

majority of the accounts from the colonies describe a dance known as La Calinda,

that was usually accompanied by an instrument called a banza (or banjo). She

believes that these reports conclusively confirm the frequently disputed claim that

the banjo was of African origin. In addition, she provides well-researched

discussions of the whites' attempts to outlaw drums, of the joyful musical activities

at funerals that so offended many Europeans, and of the gradual replacement of

certain aspects of African music with European musical elements. Epstein also

furnishes new information on various types of worksongs. On the whole, this

information tends to support the widely held belief that such songs were of African

origin. However, she is careful to point out that "it is still not possible to document a

specific worksong's origin in Africa and its persistence in the New World" (p. 69).

During the antebellum period, discussed in Part Two, descriptions of black

music performed on the mainland were plentiful. Epstein contends, on the basis of

further first-hand reports, that black secular singing and dancing persisted after

1800, even though many observers insisted that the slaves did not dance and sang

only hymns. She emphasizes that religious opposition to dancing was responsible

partly for the latter view. However, as she ably demonstrates, a rich and distinctive

form of black religious music developed along with the persisting secular forms.

Many of the "Negro spirituals" incorporated African elements that were present

in the earlier non-sacred music, including pentatonic or other nondiatonic scales,

unison singing, and bodily movement, such as the so-called religious "shout."

Although Epstein's book is almost entirely descriptive in nature, I do not believe

that this should be considered a defect. The almost complete lack of musical

transcriptions (at least until 1867) renders it very doubtful that interpretation or

analysis of existing documents could pretend to be anything but conjecture. As she

rightly points out about the transcriptions that did exist prior to 1867,

"conventional musical notation was inadequate to capture the distinctive features

of the music as it was performed, and the transcribers were struggling with a task

wholly beyond their abilities" (p. 347).

It is no exaggeration to say that Sinful Tunes and Spirituals is one of the most

Book Reviews                                                      239

well-researched histories of one of America's few indigenous musical forms. It is a

major contribution to our understanding of the development of a significant part of

Afro-American culture. Dena Epstein is to be thanked for producing the kind of

documentary study that has been needed for many years.

There are only a few typographical errors in the text. The excellent forty-page

bibliography is partially annotated with convenient page references provided for

the relevant section of each text.

University of Cincinnati                                   Eric Melvin

H. M. Daugherty and the Politics of Expediency. By James N. Giglio. (Kent: The

Kent State University Press, 1978. xii + 256p.; illustrations, notes, bibliography,

index. $15.00.)

Harry Micajah Daugherty was one of the more controversial and visible

politicians of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Yet historians know little

about him, except for the corruption associated with his tenure as Attorney General

of the United States. James N. Giglio's work, H. M. Daugherty and the Politics of

Expediency, gives a human dimension to Daugherty and details aspects of his life

hitherto neglected. It is not a new interpretation of the Harding era, nor does it take

fundamental issue with what historians have previously written about Daugherty.

Giglio has, however, illuminated Daugherty's life and career, most notably that

aspect of his life that relates to his long political career, and cogently concludes that

his life represented the politics of expediency. In the process Giglio also offers good

insight into Republican politics from the 1890s to the early 1920s.

Giglio's brief study is highly readable and well researched despite his inability to

obtain Daugherty's papers, which were apparently destroyed. A scholar will find

the work abundantly documented nonetheless, using the Harding Papers and a host

of manuscript collections of contemporary public figures; the twentieth century

politician will find it rich with political maneuvering and manipulation, since

Daugherty was a master at such activity. Although he had served in elective

capacity only a short time himself, Daugherty made his mark as a party organizer,

manager, and state factional leader. Throughout the work Giglio asserts that

despite his Machiavellian approach to politics, Daugherty was dedicated to the

success of his party as much as to his personal advancement. Above all, Daugherty

was a pragmatist who sacrificed ideology and principle. This quality, coupled with

an excessive competitive and combative nature, characterized his political life.

Accordingly, Giglio details Daugherty's indiscretions in Ohio politics around the

turn of the century, his involvement in the Morse case in 1911, his role in the

Columbus and Trust debacle in 1913, his continuous and frequently illicit lobbying

activities with the American Gas and Electric Company, the Western Union

Telegraph Company, and the Ohio State Telephone Company, as well as his abuse

of power when he served as President Harding's Attorney General.

Giglio's view of Harding follows the interpretations offered by other scholars

since the release of the Harding Papers: it is an interpretation that points to the

assertiveness of Harding and his positive contributions as a conciliator. The

dissimilar natures of the President and the Attorney General suggest that the

relationship between Harding and Daugherty was not always amicable. Indeed,

Giglio writes that Daugherty was important to Harding during the primary

240                                                       OHIO HISTORY

campaign and perhaps during the first year of the administration, after which

Harding was far more interested in the advice of Hughes and Hoover.

Daugherty sought the office "to vindicate a past which was constantly under

suspicion," and he determined to stay in office once he got it. Harding was obliging:

he appointed Daugherty as Attorney General, having promised it to him as early as

November, 1920, and defended that appointment until he died in August, 1923.

While it may have been a personal triumph for Daugherty, he was not successful as

an attorney general, even in the mind of President Harding who, although he

continued to defend him, sought Daugherty's advice less and less. President

Coolidge, under whom Daugherty served after Harding's death, did not seek his

advice at all.

Giglio's H. M. Daugherty and the Politics of Expediency is a most readable study

of an important twentieth century figure whose political life exemplified what

happens when the electorate so casually elect their public servants. He, his

President, and many around them lacked ideology and principle, and therefore

lacked the ability to lead the American people. The work is a valuable contribution

to the literature of twentieth century political history,  but perhaps more

importantly as a case study of the kind of politics that Americans ought to find

anathema to the democratic political process.

Youngstown State University                            George D. Beelen

The Delaware Indian Westward Migration: With the Texts of Two Manuscripts

(1821-22) Responding to General Lewis Cass's Inquiries About Lenape Culture

and Language. By C. A. Weslager. (Wallingford, Pa.: The Middle Atlantic Press,

1978. xiii + 266p.; illustrations, maps, references, index. $16.00.)

Students of native American history continue to remain in debt to C. A.

Weslager, because his excellent tribal history of The Delawares (1972) is now

complemented by the present publication. Weslager's mastery of the subject is

obvious as he constructs a tight synopsis of Delaware tribal experiences, correcting

interpretations where new data has become available, and gives the reader an

overview of the trek by the Delaware peoples from the eastern seaboard to

Oklahoma. Indeed, the tribal journeys may be followed more closely because of the

maps which have been provided in the publication.

The most significant contribution of Weslager's new book, however, is the

printing of the questions and answers distributed and collected in the 1820s by

Governor Lewis Cass of the Michigan Territory. The author's unequalled

knowledge has enabled him to reconstruct both the questions distributed and the

answers received by Cass wherever one or the other was missing. Because many of

Cass's Delaware informants were older persons whose memories reached back into

the eighteenth century, the information uncovered provides an enormous store of

cultural material. Among the subjects touched upon are government, war, and

peace; death, birth, marriage and family; tribal traditions and social relations;

medicine, astronomy, and mathematics; music and poetry; religion, manners and

customs; food, games, dances, and amusements; and hunting, dress, and personal

appearance.

Useful to the student of native American demography is the inclusion of 1977

population statistics enumerating present people of Delaware descent. Those

Book Reviews                                                        241

interested in current trends in demographic methodology relating to pre-

Columbian populations also will note with interest a passage in the first manuscript

in which the Delaware informant recounts the onset of a great epidemic concurrent

with the arrival of the Europeans.

Of considerable significance also are the word lists in the Delaware language

which the author has included. Because of Weslager's long acquaintance with the

Delaware tongue, he has noted differences in the two principal Delaware dialects

("U" and "M"), as well as in verb constructions and the evolution of terms

introduced from outside influences such as European languages.

While this publication in no way supplants Weslager's more complete tribal

history, it is an extremely useful synopsis. Indeed, the author and his publisher are

to be congratulated for avoiding the temptation to shorten the historical setting in

order to reduce costs. No price saving would have been sufficient to justify losing

the invaluable contextual material. Without the background material, the

manuscripts would lose much of their meaning. As it is thus presented, the book is

useful to both the specialist and the interested general reader. The former will be

grateful for the documentary information (as well as the handy corpus of general

information), and the latter will have no trouble appreciating both the readable

introductory chapters and the more specific materials.

With the publication of this volume, C. A. Weslager becomes the author of both

the best brief account and the best comprehensive treatment of the Delaware

peoples. No library collection of native American material should be without this

outstanding piece of work.

Marietta College                                 James H. O'Donnell, III

The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions 1775-1850. By

Malcolm J. Rohrbough. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. xiv + 444 p.;

tables, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $17.50.)

Malcolm J. Rohrbough, writing about the settlement of the region west of the

Appalachian Mountains, looks at its development in several ways. First, he defines

it chronologically, arguing that changes occurred in four time periods: 1775-1795;

1795-1815; 1815-1830; and 1830-1850. Second, he sees the settlement of the frontier

regions progressing geographically, from Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1770s and

1780s to the Old Northwest and the Old Southwest after the turn of the century, and

gradually into more remote regions such as Michigan, Florida, Arkansas, and

finally Wisconsin and Iowa. The pattern of movement, he feels, was linked to

specific events such as Indian cessions of land to the federal government,

speculation in land and the increased availability of credit, growing markets for

both staples and raw materials, and developments in international relations that

opened new land for settlement and in other ways affected the inhabitants of the

various sections.

The evolution of the frontier can also be traced through the arrival of certain

institutions that Rohrbough sees as going hand-in-hand with the progress of

settlement. The desire of pioneers for security created the need for military

protection. Once this had been achieved through the militia, and good harvests had

provided a measure of economic well-being, settlers turned their attention toward

the achievement of stability. This usually took two forms: formal government to

242                                                     0HIO HISTORY

preserve law and order and the creation of certain aids to economic progress. Of the

several levels and types of government, Rohrbough sees territorial and county units

as having been the most beneficial and influential in the lives of the settlers. Urban

centers, improved transportation facilities, and the means to carry on commerce

with other parts of the world made it possible for both farmers and townspeople to

prosper. Once these necessary institutions were flourishing, people usually, but

often only slowly, turned their minds to the establishment of desirable but less

necessary amenities, such as churches and schools.

Rohrbough points out that, even though the process described above began over

and over again as people moved westward, the efforts were usually less strenuous in

later decades. The process of trial and error in older areas often provided

indications of what techniques were most likely to succeed in the newer areas,

whether they involved clearing land or establishing a legal clientele. As urban areas

and established governmental units began to flourish, they often actually preceded

the agricultural settler. Improved methods of transportation came more quickly in

the 1830s and 1840s than they had in the 1790s, making it easier for the immigrants

to reach their destinations and, later, to ship goods to market than it had been for

their predecessors.

This book is well written and well organized. Rohrbough has made it easy to

follow his discussion through the use of introductory material in each section,

excellent maps, and tables. He has chosen to cite in his footnotes sources of three

major types to which he turned for specific material: manuscript collections;

newspapers; unpublished theses; dissertations, and other papers. While such

citations reveal a wealth of sources with which the reader may well be unfamiliar,

one wishes for at least a partial bibliography of the many secondary sources to

which the author had occasion to refer. The book is, unfortunately, marred by a

great many misspellings or printer's errors, which range from the merely annoying,

such as "florests" for "forests," to those that are actually misleading, as in the

repeated use of "country" where "county" was obviously intended.

Overall, Rohrbough's approach to the settlement of the trans-Appalachian

frontier provides a useful synthesis of what has become an almost unmanageable

amount of material. The book will be appreciated especially by those who do not

wish to spend a goodly portion of their careers exploring the growth and

development of America's early frontier.

Centennial History of the

Indiana General Assembly                           Rebecca A. Shepherd

Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America. By

David M. Katzman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. xi + 374p.;

illustrations, tables, appendix, notes, note on sources, index. $14.95.)

Any new discipline has hidden gaps which only become obvious when some work

goes a substantial way toward filling them. Certainly this is the case with the new

social history, and especially with its sub-field, women's history. David M.

Katzman's Seven Days A Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing

America, being the first recent scholarly book on this topic, is a major contribution

and is to be applauded. Nonetheless, it is but a first treatment and the need for

further research and analysis is obvious.

Book Reviews                                                       243

Previously unheard have been the voices of the domestics themselves. Now their

cries are audible: their tiredness and fatigue after an eleven hour day, their

humiliation and resentment at having to wear livery, as well as their loneliness and

isolation in the midst of another's crowded home. Especially poignant are the

laments of the culturally alienated live-in immigrant domestics, the sexually

exploited young, and the racially scorned Southern blacks. All shared a low status,

a personal loss of freedom, and a lack of better options.

Katzman does not stop with poignant quotes and anecdotes, however. He also

provides solid, often quantitative, data about the servant situation in different

times, in different cities and regions, and in different ethnic and racial groupings.

Recruiting, salaries, living quarters, and duties are all treated in some depth. In

addition to being a serious work in women's history, Seven Days A Week is also a

contribution to economic history, black history, family history, and Progressive

reform history.

Of especial interest is Katzman's presentation of the complex image of women in

the nineteenth century. True, as is known, white middle class women were seen as

fragile, physically weak, and often overwrought. But their servants were also

female, and thus, one might suppose, subject to the same ills. Such of course was not

the case. Clearly the concept, the "image of women," must be broadened to include

class as well as other variables.

Fascinating as well is Katzman's discussion of the debate over the development of

educational programs in domestic science. How best to professionalize the

occupation was a matter of great dispute, with some urging the education of

domestics, while others argued for the formal training of mistresses. "Reforms" of

each type were often supported by the Progressives, although there was great

resistance by both the housewives and the servants.

Although Katzman has made a real contribution, nonetheless the work has some

obvious deficiencies. The book, overly long given its substance, is often tedious and

repetitious. The same few quotes and examples reappear in many different

contexts. The text is often choppy, due in part to the inclusion of much quantitative

data in the body of the writing. Both his sources and tools can be criticized, though

Katzman is honest with the reader concerning most of these methodological

difficulties.

A more important problem, however, is that the theoretical implications of the

findings are but touched upon. What was the significance of occupation in the self-

image of nineteenth century American women? Did servant women truly choose

domestic service because it was feminine, even though most working women

considered it quite unacceptable? How could the American ideal of equality coexist

with the stereotype of the inferior servant and the "maternalistic" employer? Why

did the feminization of the occupation occur? What was the relationship between

skill and specialization, or rather the lack of both, to status?

Nevertheless, despite these minor deficiencies, Seven Days A Week deserves a

positive recommendation. The statistical appendices, the excellent notes (unfor-

tunately at the back), and the truly fine annotated bibliography are valuable. In his

substance Katsman conveys much of value, while still leaving enough room for

further embellishments. The book serves, as well, the additional vital function of

provoking thoughts about the present exploited domestic, the "cleaning lady." This

present-day domestic works most often without the security of the minimum wage,

social security, pension, or a paid vacation. The story of women exploiting women

has not only a long history, but also a present.

Marietta College                                  Michele Hilden Willard