Book Reviews
The McNamara Strategy and the Vietnam
War: Program Budgeting in the
Pentagon, 1960-1968. By Gregory Palmer. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978.
169p.; tables, notes, bibliography,
index. $15.95.)
Recently a research fellow at the
Institute of United States Studies at the
University of London, Gregory Palmer has
written an important critique of
rationalism in American strategy, and
especially in the McNamara Pentagon.
Published in Greenwood's Contributions
in Political Science series, and perhaps
for that arbitrary reason not on display
at the Organization of American Historians
convention or advertised in recent
historical periodicals, this book holds significant
interest not only for political scientists
but for historians of recent American
politics, foreign policy, military
affairs, and especially of the Vietnam involvement.
Palmer set out to "look at
intellectual origins of the McNamara strategy, show
how it came to dominate defense policy
after 1960, and reveal how it influenced the
escalation of the American military
intervention in Vietnam. In discussing those
intellectual origins he surveys the
influences of classical theorists such as Jomini,
Clausewitz, and Mahan; this discussion
forms the least satisfactory portion of the
work, and by all odds the least
important. The real strength and excitement of the
book lie in treatments of the
implantation of McNamara's methods in the defense
establishment and their effects in
policy and warfare.
Palmer argues that rationalism-typified
in the calculated choice between
alternatives-characterizes the American
strategic tradition. McNamara and his
associates in the 1960s gave traditional
rationalism a twist, making "the concept of
security a function in international
relations analagous to that of utility in
economics." This permitted the
fundamental calculations of national security
policy, admittedly imprecise in their
traditional use, to be approached with the logic
and methodology which, perhaps, has made
economics "the dismal science." For
with McNamara came the Planning,
Programming, and Budgeting System of
Charles Hitch, the systems analysis of
Alain Enthoven, cost-effectiveness, cost
efficiency, cost reduction, and
reorganization of defense programming to permit
output measurement usable for the other
analytic techniques.
According to Palmer, the results were
nearly catastrophic. For the methods and
measures of the new rationality isolated
military and strategic decisions from
essential political context. In a
well-reasoned argument, too intricate to summarize
in a brief review, Palmer suggests that
the McNamara strategy brought rigidity and
lack of choice rather than its announced
goal of flexibility in American strategic
calculus and, indeed, in military
operations. In turn, and on the basis of misleading
assumptions and models of decision, the
strategy's methods forced escalation.
This book offers unusual and valuable
insights into American strategic thought,
defense organization, and the effects of
their interplay in the Vietnam War. It has
minor flaws, to be sure, and it will not
compel agreement on all points. But it is as
close to essential reading as any book
yet to have come in the growing Vietnam War
literature.
Naval War College Thomas H.
Etzold
426 OHIO HISTORY
Fusang: The Chinese Who Built
America. By Stan Steiner. (New York:
Harper &
Row, Publishers, 1979. xii + 259 p.;
bibliography, index. $11.95.)
"Fusang is a book about the Chinese
who discovered America, who built
America, and who became America"
(p. x). So writes the author Steiner in the
prologue. Indeed the book consists of
three parts under these subtitles. The author
is apparently not a historian
disciplined in social sciences. Rather, he is a humanist
and a romantic writer who is on one hand
inspired by China's seafaring and
mercantile tradition and on the other
hand indignant at the way modern America
has treated the Chinese. A historian even
sympathetic to his cause, however, may
sometimes find his fantastic concoction
of history and fantasy unbearable. Despite
Steiner's assertion that the book tells
"the untold tales of hidden history" (p.xi), it
hardly goes beyond "shallow
journalism and narrow scholarship," contrary to his
own admonition, in "portraying the
epic feat of the Chinese" (p. 244).
In "Book One: The Chinese Who
Discovered America," the author states that "in
the fifth century, several Buddhist
missionaries may have landed on the shores of
America by mistakes" (p.3). He
quotes an account of a priest named Hui shen "on
the voyage to Fusang in 441 A.D. from
the forty first Book of Chuan, in the two
hunded and thirtieth volume of the Great
Chinese Encyclopedia, compiled by
court historians of the Liang emperors
from 502 to 556 A.D." (p.3). We do not
know what he means by the Great
Chinese Encyclopedia. It seems to be neither
Wen hsuan nor Nanshih, which has references to Fusang. To
the author, footnotes
and bibliography are not important, for
they are "the writer's way of telling the
reader how learned and erudite the
writer is . . . and therefore how scholarly the
writer is. . . ."(p. 239). If
these"several Buddhist missionaries" include Hui sheng,
not the author's Hui shen, he was sent
by the Empress dowager in 518 A.D. to bring
back from India the sacred books of
Buddhism. Although Fusang was known as a
place located east of China, often as
Japan and a paradisiacal place even farther in
the east, the author presents Fusang
more as real America than imagined. He
writes, "If the Chinese discovery
of America was a fantasy, it was a realistic fantasy"
(p.8). Steiner seems to be impatient
with the historian, such as C. P. Fitzgerald, who
makes distinctions "between the
full and authentic history and imaginary records of
an earlier age" (p. 17). However,
if the clues to the hidden history of the Chinese
discovery of America were "signs of
oceanic contact between the Stone Age tribes
of Asia and America" (p. 27) and
such Chinese references as to Fusang and the isle
of the immortals in the Eastern Sea,
there is only a mythopoeic significance to the
author's contention on the subject.
"Book Two: The Chinese Who Built
America" deals with the Chinese in early
America, and perhaps it is a better part
of the book. Steiner informs us that Antonio
Rodriguez who was one of the Spanish
founding fathers of Los Angeles was
Chinese (p. 79). His account of the
Spanish Chinos (the Chinese Spaniards) who
came to America via Manila Galleons of
Spain is fascinating. Still one may
question the validity of all of his
sources when he confides one of them as follows:
"There are tales told by the Mayo
and Yaqui, by the Hopis and Apaches, of their
'strangers.' There are documents that
tell of their comings and goings preserved in
high mountains of Tibet, which once
described to me by a Shinto priest from Japan
who said he had seen them. . ." (p.
90). The author writes that in 1788 an
adventurous crew of fifty to seventy
Chinese pioneers from Kwangtung province
came to the northwestern Pacific coast
of America, with an English sea captain,
John Meares (p. 93). But certainly it is
the author's fantasy when he states that "ever
since the fifth century, when the legend
of the land of Fusang had spread through
Book Reviews
427
the court of the Sung emperors, America
was dreamt of as the paradise of innocence
and abundance" (p. 96). Although
"no one knows, or will ever know how many
settlements and villages these Chinese
established in America," he argues that
"these pioneers from China and
merchants in China had a profound effect on the
future of American history" (p.
97). Nevertheless, according to the author, quoting
from "researchers of the Chinese
Historical Society of America," there is "abundant
evidence of sea explorations and trading
missions from China to America that
dated back to antiquity" (p. 101).
The reader is perhaps asked to find evidence in
between the lines and in the mind of the
author.
Steiner's account of the Chinese miners
and railroad men in the 1850s and 1860s
is more informative and substantial.
According to the census of 1870, Chinese
miners comprised 25 percent of all
miners in California and 61.2 percent in Oregon.
He writes "Much has been written of
the segregation and discrimination that
defaced their presence, and little of
their daring accomplishments in the shaping
and developing of the cities and
industries of the West" (p. 125). Certainly, our
school children should learn in history
class that the Chinese indeed built the
western half of the first
transcontinental railroad.
"Book Three: The Chinese Who Became
America" describes the humiliation and
discrimination of the Chinese-American.
Steiner lists a number of state and federal
legislative acts against the Chinese,
such as the Exclusion Act of 1882. He writes
movingly why Chinatown became both a
ghetto and a refuge for the Chinese-
American. "For generations the
white American had viewed the Chinese American
as foreigners and strangers. It was
easier to accept the pioneers from China as
invisible and passive sojourners than to
acknowledge them as founding fathers of
the country" (p. 222).
Although the book as a whole tends to be
repititious and more histrionic than
historical, it may serve the general
public for the cultivation of postitive feelings
toward the Chinese-American. Surely
there is no doubt that the Chinese-
Americans are and ought to be as much a
part of American history as other
ethnic groups. But the author goes one
step farther in his assertion that the Chinese
were the mainstream of American life as
discoverers and founding fathers. His
question as to why America has forgotten
this "fact" remains more rhetorical than
historical.
Bowling Green State University Fujiya Kawashima
Old Age in the New Land: The American
Experience Since 1790. By W. Andrew
Achenbaum. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1979. xii + 237p;
illustrations, tables, appendix, notes,
selected bibliography, index. $13.95.)
Historians have long avoided any
systematic analysis of the role of the aged in
American society and W. Andrew
Achenbaum's monograph is a laudable attempt
to remedy the situation by bringing the
elderly out of the shadows of neglect and
into the light of historical scrutiny.
Achenbaum's study is a well-written, carefully
researched history of old age in America
since 1790 that examines American
perceptions of the aging experience and
of the elderly's position in society.
Achenbaum argues that being old in
contemporary America is both similar to and
quite different from the experience of
old age in earlier times. He suggests that
Americans have always viewed old age as
a "distinct phase of the life cycle," and he
finds that the chronological boundaries
of old age have remained stable throughout
428 OHIO HISTORY
American history. Achenbaum sees two
other universals of growing old in America
including "marked variations"
within the aged population and the continuing
existence of ambiguous, ambivalent and
perhaps conflicting opinions about aging
and old age. Achenbaum concludes,
however, that despite some continuity in
American perceptions on aging the
history of old age in America has been a truly
dynamic one, shaped to a large extent by
the interaction of prevailing cultural
trends and structural patterns. Thus he
examines old age in the new land in light of
the divergence between the rhetoric and
realities of growing old in America. In
chapter four Achenbaum clearly demonstrates,
with the support of solid statistical
evidence, that the intellectual history
of aging in America prior to World War I was
not at all identical to the social
history of the aged. He suggests that ideas about the
worth and functions of the elderly had a
"life of their own" and did not merely
reflect demographic changes affecting
elderly men and women. Thus, according to
Achenbaum, the denigration of the
elderly developed independently of observable
changes in their status as a product of
intellectual trends and structural changes
occurring in the nation at large.
Achenbaum's continuing analysis of the dynamic
relationship between the rhetoric and
realities of growing old in America during the
post World War I era, the Social
Security years and the decades afterward, further
supports his argument that significant
shifts in American conceptions of the
elderly's status have not necessarily
been related to real changes in their
circumstances, nor have major
transformations in their actual status coincided with
key changes in ideas about their
circumstances.
While Achenbaum's volume provides a keen
analysis of the history of old age in
America, his monograph cannot totally
escape critical comment. For example,
although Achenbaum cautions that he
finds neither "sudden nor radical"
transformations in perceptions of old
age or the elderly's status during any one era,
he at times seems to suggest that key
changes and transformations in the history of
old age occurred within neat
chronological compartments. Achenbaum first
examines perceptions of old age and the
status of the elderly in the period dating
from 1790 to 1860, subdividing the era
for purposes of analysis into the years from
1790 to 1830 and then from 1830 to 1860.
He continues his study with an analysis of
the years from 1865 to 1914 (neglecting
the years from 1860 to 1865) and later
examines the years after World War I,
the Social Security era, and the decades
afterward. Although definite shifts in
larger cultural and economic trends occurring
during specific time periods clearly
affected the actual and perceived status of the
elderly, Achenbaum tends to emphasize
the changes in perceptions of old age
taking place at given points in time at
the expense of a closer examination of certain
American ideas about the elderly that
transcend specific eras in our history. I would
also suggest that although Mr. Achenbaum
decided not to examine colonial
perceptions of the role of the elderly
in society because of certain methodological
considerations, the author might have
provided a summary analysis, based on
preliminary research, of certain
dominant themes in the history of old age prior to
1790, perhaps as a reflection of old
world concepts and values. New attitudes
toward the elderly, or perceptions of
their status, did not arise suddenly in 1790 and
it would have been helpful if Achenbaum
had noted whether there were
continuities between the colonial
outlook on aging and the new nation's posture on
old age.
On another matter, Mr. Achenbaum
explains in his technical note on techniques
and procedures that his analysis of
American perceptions of older people in society
rests "primarily on evidence found
in popular and scientific periodicals, books for
the aged or about old age, dictionaries
and other reference works, and statutes and
miscellaneous public records."
Achenbaum, however, does not provide any
Book Reviews 429
background data on the authors of the
books on old age, the contributors to the
magazines and periodicals, or the
architects of public laws. Although Achenbaum
does suggest that in his analysis he did control for
the possible effect an author's age,
as well as sex or regional bias, might
have had on perceptions of the elderly, it would
have been valuable if he had examined
whether older commentators simply
mirrored popular conceptions about
growing old or if elderly people held different
views about the aging experience.
Achenbaum does comment that in the years after
World War I the elderly often
contributed fresh ideas and methods of coping with
the difficulties of old age, but he
remains silent, for the era dating from 1790 to 1914,
on the contribution of the elderly to
ideas and attitudes that were developing about
old age. Also, although it may be beyond
the scope of this monograph, Achenbaum
might have commented on possible
reactions of the elderly to attitudes toward and
perceptions of old age. One might
question whether older Americans have
attempted to repudiate the notion that
old age is synonymous with aberrant
behavior, intellectual decay, and death,
or if elderly people have been so influenced
by prevailing cultural norms and values
that they choose to modify their own
behavior and life style to fulfill
societal expectations, thus perpetuating negative
stereotypes of aging.
On balance, however, Achenbaum's volume
is a landmark study on old age that
will serve as the major springboard for
continued research and discussion on this
topic within the historical profession.
The Cuyahoga County Archives Judith G. Cetina
Black Separatism in the United
States. By Raymond L. Hall. (Hanover:
University
Press of New England, 1978. x + 306p.;
tables, appendix, bibliography, notes,
index. $15.00.)
The major goal of this study of
contemporary Black separatist groups in the
United States is to demonstrate that
Black separatism is a complex subject and one
that is too easily dismissed by many
Americans. Hall views Black separatist
ideology as a sub-category of Black
nationalism, and deals with separatism both
within and outside the United States. A
purist Black separatist goal is a separate
Black nation and total rejection of
integration as an acceptable ideology.
Hall identifies five types of Black separatist:
(1) the value suspended ideologist;
(2) the transcient exchanger; (3) the
progress-fixated member; (4) the vacillating
utopia seeker; and (5) the latent
revolutionary. He concentrates on five Black
organizations active in the period
1960-1972-The Nation of Islam, CORE, SNCC,
The Black Panther Party, and The
Republic of New Africa. He states his own view
on the subject early in the book (p.
12), indicating Black separatism ". . . is no
more than the black struggle for
justice, equality, and humanity against individual
and institutional racism, injustice, and
the historical and contemporary American
denial of a fair chance for dignified
black survival."
The book is divided into three
sections-Background, Contemporary Period,
and In Perspective-and the quality of
treatment varies substantially from section
to section. Section Two, the
Contemporary Period, is by far the strongest. Part
One, Background, is insightful in
treating Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois,
and Marcus Garvey but weak on the other
historical antecedents of Black
separatism. Section Three, In
Perspective, is largely personal commentary that
attempts to clarify ideological
differences between the separatist groups with only
430 OHIO HISTORY
moderate success. Washington's influence
on the contemporary groups is stated
and restated.
There are other problems in this study.
At many points Hall is repetitive,
jargonistic and hedgy. An example of
hedging can be seen in his definition of Black
separatism: ". .. black separatists
may be conceptualized, and perhaps defined, as
purposeful or unconscious agents for
change which propose and attempt to
implement political and sociocultural
arrangement for black people that may differ
from, and in some essential ways oppose,
those of the larger society" (p. 17). Most
people would find it hard to accept any
agent of change as "unconscious."
Very little is done in this study with
the response of the majority society to Black
separatism, which in some ways has been
as significant as the response of Blacks.
The bibliography for the volume lists
for the most part general secondary sources
which would be familiar to most readers.
In short, this volume is a long way from
being the definitive study of Black
Separatism in the United States. Hall does not
demonstrate conclusively that Black
separatism "is a complex subject," only that it
can be made complicated when
sociological jargon is imposed and the groups
studied molded to fit the categories.
University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse George E. Carter
Alloys and Automobiles: The Life of
Elwood Haynes. By Ralph D. Gray.
(Indianapolis: Indiana Historical
Society, 1979. xi + 243p.; illustrations, notes,
tables, note on sources, index. $9.00
paper.)
The publication of this book, the first
full-length biography of the automotive
pioneer, Elwood Haynes, is another sign
that the automobile industry is at long last
receiving the kind of attention from
historians that this subject deserves. Until
recently, this was a field dominated by
popularizers, whose work was generally of a
superficial character. With the
exception of the voluminous literature on Henry
Ford, which includes a few noteworthy
works, particularly the three-volume
biography by Allan Nevins and
associates, and the more general works of John B.
Rae, professional historians in the
United States had been strangely reluctant to
deal with a development whose impact on
all aspects of life in the twentieth century
far surpassed that of most other
subjects that these historians preferred to treat. But
in recent years, with the appearance of
serious studies of such topics as the origins of
the auto industry in Michigan, a
brilliant study of the early French auto industry by
James Laux of the University of
Cincinnati, the appearance of new biographies not
only of Henry Ford but of William C.
Durant and Ransom E. Olds, and, the most
hopeful sign of all, the number of
doctoral candidates who are working in this field,
this great subject is at last being
brought into proper focus.
Elwood Haynes is a name well-known to
students of automotive history because
of his role in the development of one of
America's first gasoline-powered
automobiles. Ralph D. Gray, professor of
history at Indiana University at
Indianapolis, of course devotes much
attention to this aspect of Haynes' career. The
vehicle developed by the Duryea brothers
in 1893 clearly preceded the Haynes
vehicle by nearly a year, but Gray
explains the grounds on which Haynes felt that
his work entitled him to call his
vehicle "the first complete, practical gasoline
machine built in America."
Unfortunately, the inadequate nature of the available
records makes it impossible for Gray to
entirely resolve the controversy over the
Book Reviews 431
relative importance of the contributions
made by Haynes and the Apperson
brothers in the development and
construction of this vehicle.
The real value of Gray's biography,
however, is his considerable success in
rescuing Haynes from his role as a minor
bit player in the drama of American
history and in re-establishing him as a
human being with a lifetime of varied
activities and achievements. Far more
important than whether Haynes was the first
or second American to design a
successful gasoline vehicle is the question of what
happened after that vehicle was tested
in Kokomo on July 4, 1894. Gray provides us
with the first detailed study of the
development of the joint Haynes-Apperson auto
manufacturing effort, the split into the
two separate Haynes and Apperson
companies (a split, it is pleasant to
learn, that did not have a detrimental effect on
the friendship between the former
partners), and the eventual failure of both
companies at about the same time in the
mid-twenties. The immediate causes of the
bankruptcy of the Haynes Automobile
Company are made clear enough in this
book, but Gray, from the titles that he
lists in his footnotes and some glaring, if
minor, errors that he makes in regard to
some early automotive developments, does
not seem to have taken enough time to
acquire background in the history of the
automotive industry in the United States
that would have enabled him to put the
Haynes-and Apperson-activities in their
proper perspective. Whereas Olds and
Ford and a number of their Michigan
automotive contemporaries saw at the outset
the importance to their success of
having a strong entry in the low-priced auto field,
Haynes and the Appersons, by sticking
with their original commitment to low-
volume production of automobiles in the
high-priced ranges, were doomed to be
driven out of business eventually, as
were all other American companies that had a
similar emphasis.
But Gray's real contribution is in
demonstrating that Haynes' automotive
activities were not his most important
activities. Haynes devoted full attention to
his auto interests only sporadically,
regarding these as of less importance than some
of his other interests. From the
mid-eighties to the start of the twentieth century,
Haynes was primarily involved with
natural gas developments in Indiana. He had
first become involved in these
developments because of the scientific training he had
received as a graduate of Worcester
Polytechnic Institute. From there he had gone
on to graduate work at Johns Hopkins
University, where his natural skills and
talents as a laboratory researcher and
experimenter had been further honed. These
interests led him to develop his own
private laboratory where he eventually became
involved in the development of new
alloys, in part an outgrowth of his desire to
improve some of the materials used in
his automobiles, which led to his discovery of
what he called "stellite" and
his pioneering work in the development of stainless
steel. These activities, as the author
suggests in his title, remain Haynes' most
valuable contributions.
Gray also does an excellent job of
filling in the other details of what turns out to
be a surprisingly full life-Haynes'
family life, his civic activities, his commitment to
his church, and his related strong
support of campaigns against smoking and
particularly in support of the
Prohibition campaign, including running as the
Prohibition party's candidate for United
States Senator from Indiana in 1916.
(Gray misses an opportunity, again, of
putting these activities in perspective by not
noting the similar anti-liquor and
anti-smoking activities of Haynes' automotive
contemporaries, such as Ford, Olds,
Durant, and Henry Leland.) All in all, Gray
has written an impressive piece of work
and a welcome addition to the list of
significant biographies of important
American business figures of modern times.
Eastern Michigan University George S. May
432 0HIO
HISTORY
The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein
Veblen and Modern Social Theory. By
John P.
Diggins. (New York: Seabury Press, 1978.
xiii + 257p.; notes, index. $14.95.)
Thorstein Veblen is an anomally in the
history of American social thought. His
work is internally contradictory and its
literal meaning elusive along the usual
political-existential spectrum. Such an
ambivalent assessment is contained in this
ambitious biography by John Diggins, who
approaches the Veblen enigma by way
of an exercise in "comparative
intellectual history." Diggins seeks to discover if the
body of Veblen's work establishes an
analytic standpoint independent of, yet as
powerful as, the political economy of
Karl Marx or the structural-functionalism of
Max Weber. Tha author's final verdict is
negative, but along the way Diggins
rightly credits Veblen with some
enduring insights and much singularly effective
social criticism.
The successful implementation of the
author's comparative approach rests on a
subtle understanding of Weber and Marx,
but serious students of both will find
inadequate several elements in Diggins'
own evaluation of their work. His critical
renditions of Marx's labor theory of
value and law of the falling rate of profit are
open to the charge that in the first
instance Diggins confused Marx with Adam
Smith and in the second with David
Ricardo. Diggins also exhumes the notion that
for Marx revolution was a function of
the increasing emiseration of the working
class: the author might better have left
this old misconception buried. Although
kinder to Weber, Diggins' claim that the
sociologist ignored or underplayed
capitalist avarice not only slights
Weber's attention to precisely this alleged
characteristic quality, but also
unfairly accords it an explanatory power equivalent
to Weber's powerful concept of
"worldly asceticism."
There are other elements in Veblen's
thought with which Diggins is clearly in
sympathy, but which remain
problematical. For example, the author applauds
Veblen's refusal to follow Marx and
Weber in certifying the historical inevitability
and rationalist legitimacy of the
capitalist world order, instead finding the system
one of hedonistic atavism, in a word, an
anthropological problem. But it is
questionable if Weber was so attached to
the notion of inevitability, or Marx to that
of capitalist rationality. Moreover, a
portrait of human history relying on the
category of instinct and its repression,
such as that posited by Veblen himself, is not
without its own metaphysic, equivalent
in some respects to Sigmund Freud's theory
of the unconscious.
Actually, Veblen's tragic history of the
workmanship instinct can only be treated
seriously as a feature of his larger
effort to recast the traditional work ethic in terms
appropriate to an age of mass collective
production. His spirited defense of
workmanship makes sense as part of the
systematically utilitarian calculus with
which Veblen criticizes the life
activity of the "leisure class," and thereby preserves
in the twentieth century a modern echo
of the nineteenth century popular ideology
of productive labor. Thus, in heralding
a new age of scientifically organized
production free of market
irrationalities, Veblen's engineering utopia converges
with a Marxist program of centralized
planning rooted in the institutions of
democratic discipline. His critique
forcasts a world capitalism without capitalists; a
proletariat that has mastered itself.
Then there are the ideas worth thinking
about regardless of how much they
contribute to Veblen's relative place in
the pantheon of social criticism. Diggins
notes that Veblen comes to understand
democracy as an ideology of mass
impotence, and that apart from any
coercive apparatus, the masses participate
actively in the process of their own
servitude and remain deeply commited to the
Book Reviews 433
culture, moral codes, and systems of
social mimesis that characterize the epoch.
Thus Veblen's thinking about mass
culture might encourage a reconceptualization
of what was conventionally passed for
"class consciousness." What Veblen calls
"emulation," the all-sided
race for all the invidious distinctions of wealth and status,
instead of generating conflict actually
works in the direction of social cohesion, and
as Tocqueville earlier observed,
represents a profoundly conservative praxis. And
this is true no matter how violent the
protests of those excluded from the
cornucopia. At bottom, the power of such
opposition is fueled by resentment, and it
dissipates once the protest movement has
leveled the immediately surrounding
social terrain.
Veblen wrote his Theory of the
Leisure Class in 1899, his Engineers and the Price
System twenty-two years later, thus neatly bracketing the era
of progressive reform
with his two most famous works. The
lasting impact of that period was at least
three-fold: it broke decisively with the
political economy of competitive capitalism;
it began to construct the essential
institutions that would define the new democracy
of mass production and mass consumption;
it extended the frontiers of
individualism, thereby opening a new
chapter in the history of mass culture and the
democratized psyche. Veblen's work can
be seen as a running commentary on these
developments, alternately applauding and
decrying their implications.
Diggins rightly praises this empirically
rooted analysis of modern business
practice, and Veblen's discussion of
credit inflation, administered prices, and the
incipient separation between ownership
and management in the large bureaucratic
firm all contain insights later absorbed
by the circle of reformist intellectuals and
politicians who came to shape the left
wing of Roosevelt's New Deal. And it is in
that arena that Veblen's thought is
inscribed permanently in American history, first
through the work of some of the most
politically influential members of the Taylor
Society, like Morris Cooke, then with
the influence of such institutional economists
as Richard T. Ely, Wesley Mitchell, and
John R. Commons, and finally through the
concrete legislative initiatives taken
by New Dealers Rexford Tugwell, Adolph
Berle, Henry Wallace, Thurmond Arnold
and Jerome Frank. Transposed into the
political language of Keynsian
underconsumptionism, Veblen's ideas finally had
their greatest impact in the 1930s, in
the process helping to erect the still unfinished
skeleton of a state capitalist order in
America.
Rutgers University Steven
Fraser
Science and Religion in America
1800-1860. By Herbert Hovenkamp.
(Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1978. xii + 273p.; bibliography,
notes, index. $16.00.)
Within the past two years a whole spate
of books has appeared arguing that
historians must turn to Scotland for a
deeper understanding of American religious
and political thought, a thesis that is
both overdue and overdone. Garry Wills
contends in the much heralded Inventing
America that Jefferson's Declaration of
Independence is inexplicable without an
awareness of the Scottish Enlightenment;
E. Brooks Holifield traces in The
Gentlemen Theologians the influence of Scottish
Realism on southern theology between
1795-1860; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, in
Protestants in an Age of Science, looks at the interfacing of common sense
philosophy and Baconianism in the
nineteenth century, concluding that Scottish
philosophy dominated Protestant thinking
in non-New England areas; and in
434 OHIO HISTORY
Philosophy and Scripture John Vander Stelt has examined the impact of the
common sense philosophy on the Princeton
formulation of the doctrine of
scriptural inerrancy and the emergence
of biblical fundamentalism. Hovenkamp's
book belongs to this resurgence of
interest in the Scottish Enlightenment.
Unfortunately, little is added that is
fresh and stimulating to the discussion.
Hovenkamp's book tells the story of a
wedding: the marriage that was effected
from 1800-60 between "orthodox
Protestantism" and "Baconian science." This
relationship yielded the offspring
called "natural theology." The union of empirical
science and Christian philosophy, however,
was a marriage not made in heaven,
and much of the book documents the
tensions, domestic quarrels, and
arrangements for divorce by 1860, when
religion and science went their separate
ways. Separate chapters are devoted to
each cause of divorce. New sciences like
geology arose which seemed inhospitable
to religion. Biblical accommodation to
geology entailed complex, recondite
interpretations which lay people could not
understand. This was the first
separation agreement between parties, as Protestants
tired of science throwing its weight
around and pushing aside biblical historicity
and chronology. Then positivism and
uniformitarianism amputated theological
language from the body of science.
Coleridge's rejection of "evidences" for
"experience" was communicated
through the influential Horace Bushnell, who
touted the futility of science to answer
ultimate questions of existence. Darwin's
rejection of the analogical method in
empirial studies, coupled with the Kantian
critique of the scientific method, caused
liberal Protestants to abandon interest in
natural theology and to turn instead to
the social sciences. Hovenkamp also
suggests two other reasons for the
divorce of evangelicalism and empiricism, one
perceptive "natural theology lost
its force simply because fewer people bothered
to ask the questions it was designed to
answer" (p. 49)-the other peculiar-"facts
and values are not easily mixed. When
religion becomes scientific, it ceases to be
religious" (p. x).
This book is not without intelligence
and discernment. Chapter 8 is a fascinating
and novel account of the way scientific
attacks on biblical credulity spurred travel to
the Holy Land in search of
"evidences" that would vindicate biblical authenticity.
Chapter 9 is a probing study of the only
quarrel Protestants won with their scientific
bedfellows the dispute with
polygenesists over the "unity of human origin." But
anyone approaching this study with the
expectation of finding a companion volume
to Bozeman will be disappointed. While
literarily more pleasing than Bozeman,
Hovenkamp is historically more
unsatisfying, lacking Bozeman's methodological
integrity and conceptual sophistication.
Further, strange assertions periodically
creep into the text (e.g.
"Evanglical Protestants found it very difficult to enter the
nineteenth century" [p. 20]), and
there is a penchant for exaggerated statements.
Most disturbing is the careless and
unsystematic use of religious sources. One
chapter draws its data from the ranks of
"evangelicals," while the next chapter
haphazardly shifts its discussion to
"orthodox Protestants," and then to "liberal
churches" with all the above
designations undefined. The miracles controversy is
analyzed almost solely in terms of Unitarian
disputants. It is as if Hovenkamp were
unable to make up his mind which
religious groups to study-and the two major
evangelical groups, Methodists and
Baptists, are woefully underrepresented,
rendering suspect any generalizations
about "evangelicals." Finally, his concluding
remarks hitching the emerging
evangelical defense of "absurd irrationalities" with
Kiergegaard's "leap of faith"
confirms what one began suspecting from the first: the
book seriously lacks comprehension into
what American religion and Christian
theology was about in the nineteenth
century.
Colgate-Rochester Divinity School Leonard I. Sweet
Book Reviews 435
The Hatfields and the McCoys. By Otis K. Rice. (Lexington: The University Press
of Kentucky, 1979. x + 142p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliographical note. $4.95.)
In 1927 a Dayton, Ohio woman questioned
whether it was safe for her to venture
into the mountains of Kentucky and West
Virginia. The person who reported this
fear said that behind the query lay
"long years of wild-eyed stories of family feuds
and neighborhood vendettas; of whispered
tales of bloodshed." The Hatfield-
McCoy feud was at least partly
responsible for the woman's outlook.
While bloodier mountain conflicts
existed and while some contained even more
exciting elements than did the
Hatfield-McCoy "troubles," it has been that
particular feud that has attracted the
nation's attention. The presence of an
interstate quarrel between the governors
of Kentucky and West Virginia may
explain this in part, as may the
publication in 1892 of a dime novel on the subject.
Or perhaps it is the fact that this was
one of the first family conflicts to receive
national press coverage. But for
whatever reason, the Hatfields of West Virginia
and the McCoys of Kentucky have become
the most studied of all feudists.
Despite this, accounts frequently are
error-filled. Works directed toward a mass
audience-movies, in particular-seem the
worst offenders. A study based on
careful research has long been needed.
Virgil Carrington Jones' book in 1948 was a
good start, but new material has been
uncovered in the thirty-plus years since its
publication. Therefore, Otis K. Rice's
examination of this confused period is a
welcome addition to feud literature. In
the book he bases his conclusions on careful
research, not supposition; on the facts
as can be discerned, not on the tales and
romance of the era. Professor Rice has
given his readers the best published account
of the history of this complex and
fascinating feud.
The story, even shorn of the legends
that have long surrounded it, remains a
dramatic and interesting one. Here stood
two patriarchs, sires of more than a dozen
children each, and their larger extended
families. Controversy growing out of Civil
War disputes in the almost anarchist
mountains created early problems not easily
forgotten. Postwar legal controversy
over the theft of a hog was not settled to one
clan's satisfaction. Distrust of lawful
procedures increased. Romantic conflicts
added to the "troubles."
Then an election-day dispute in 1882,
fueled by overindulgence in liquor, ended
in the death of one Hatfield. Family
vengeance resulted in the murders of three
young McCoys, tied to pawpaw bushes and
riddled with some fifty bullets. Revenge
killing followed revenge killing, with
the most spectacular coming on New Year's
Day, 1888, when nine armed men attacked
Randolph McCoy's home, burned it,
killed his daughter and son, and beat
his wife almost to death. Less than three weeks
later the so-called Battle of Grapevine
Creek resulted in more violence. After that,
bloodshed declined.
Attention directed toward the feud did
not wane, however, as two state governors
battled over jurisdiction of prisoners
and other legal matters. Reporters, a bit
belatedly, sent out stories about the
conflict and began terming any violence feud-
related. For another decade the
Hatfield-McCoy feud continued to be presented to
the nation. From this conflict many
mountain stereotypes arose.
All this Professor Rice presents well.
His analysis is careful and generally
convincing. Scholars interested in feuds
will find that his view is more favorable to
West Virginia and more critical of the
Kentucky governor than previous ones. He
also places much more emphasis on the
role of Perry Cline, an ambitious Kentucky
attorney and politician who, Rice
argues, infused into the controversy politics "of
the cheapest and most corrupt kind"
and thus prolonged the anger. The author
436 OHIO HISTORY
notes past exaggerated estimates of the
numbers of deaths one hundred--and
suggests that probably fewer than two
dozen killings can be directly attributed to
the feud.
In short, this is a careful revision of
previous accounts one well researched
(although the useful Governor's Papers
of the Kentucky Historical Society are not
cited), well written, and readable.
While the image of the bloodthirsty mountaineer
that this feud helped create may have
little basis in fact now (Kentucky ranked
thirty-sixth among the states in violent
crimes in 1975), the basis for creation of that
image still remains in need of study.
Professor Rice's book offers an excellent case
history of one of those strange patterns
of violence the family feud.
Kentucky Historical Society James C. Klotter
The Divided Left: American
Radicalism, 1900-1975. By Milton
Cantor. (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1978. viii + 248
p.; appendix, bibliography, index. $5.95
paper.)
In The Divided Left, Milton
Cantor contends that twentieth-century American
radicalism has been torn by a
fundamental conflict between its left and right wings.
The left has generally disdained the
electoral process and has sought immediate
revolutionary change. The right has
pursued a more moderate course by promoting
a series of social-democratic reforms.
In terms of the ultimate goals of socialism,
Canton judges that both strategies have
failed. The left, in an effort to preserve
ideological purity, invariably isolated
itself from the mainstream of American life.
The right, in pursuit of reform, forgot
the "'ultimate aim' of revolution and
socialism" and became indistinguishable
from the liberal left (p. 31).
Cantor sees this factionalism as the one
continuity in American radicalism that
can be traced from the beginning of the
century to the 1970s. He does not make
what might seem to be the logical
conclusion that the ultimate reason for the
failure of socialism in America was this
division. In Cantor's view, the adaptability
of American capitalism and the lack of
class consciousness among the workers
made the success of socialism very
unlikely. "Without seeking any holistic answer,"
Cantor writes, "it seems reasonably
obvious that American values and realities, and
the work ingclass perception of them,
frustrated an effective socialist movement" (p.
6).
Despite the fact that Cantor judges both
wings of the radical movement as
equally ineffective in bringing
socialism to America, his sympathies apparently lay
more with the left than with the right.
On the one hand, he describes the benefits of
the socialism offered in places such as
Milwaukee and Schenectady as "negligible"
(p. 29). On the other hand, he praises
Daniel DeLeon for his resistance to "the lure
of immediate demands" (p. 20) while
admitting that the inevitable result of such a
policy was that the DeLeonites became a
"party of ideological purity, increasingly
isolated and sectarian" (p. 22).
This seems unfair, for although immediate demands
may have subverted the ultimate goals of
socialism, they did provide genuine
improvements in the life of the
citizenry. The left, despite its romantic appeal,
offered the workers little or nothing of
any lasting benefit.
Cantor's attempt to blame the right for
most of the problems of the Socialist
party led him into one misstatement of
fact. He maintains that at the 1901 unity
convention, the right wing blocked the
inclusion of a farm program in the party's
platform. The new party was therefore
weakened, he argues, for it had little to offer
Book Reviews
437
the nation's farmers. In fact, although
ideological divisions on the issue were not as
clear-cut as Cantor seems to believe,
almost the exact opposite is true. Many of the
leaders of the right-for example, Victor
Berger-favored a farmer-labor party. It
was the left that insisted that the
farmers were employers and therefore capitalists
and should be excluded from the new
Socialist party.
This bias-as long as the reader is aware
of it-does not diminish the usefulness
of the book. Its main weakness is the
author's pretentious prose style. Cantor has a
predilection for using words whose
meanings only a professor would know;
"Isolationism became the gravamen
of the Party's complaint" (p. 130). This is
unfortunate, for as a synthesis of the
current scholarship on the subject, the book
can be expected to attract a readership
beyond the academic community. Cantor's
ponderous style may well discourage a
few readers.
The author includes a useful
bibliography which could have been expanded-
especially in view of the fact that the
book contains no footnotes.
Indiana Historical Society Errol Wayne Stevens
The Antislavery Movement in Kentucky.
By Lowell H. Harrison. (Lexington: The
University Press of Kentucky, 1979. viii
+ 127p.; notes, a note to readers. $4.95.)
State and regional studies of
antislavery, colonization, and slavery should be
valuable and fascinating resources for
the deeper overall understanding of these
crucial phenomena. When they are done
well they serve to illuminate the larger
context as well as to provide invaluable
information and insights by which
historical theory can be tested and, if
need be, modified. It is well known that
antislavery activities, however modest
and conservative, met with ever-
strengthening opposition in the deep
South states until, in the hysterical
environment that followed the Nat Turner
uprising in 1831, they were virtually
eliminated. In the border states,
however, sectionalism was insufficiently clear,
attitudes mixed, and the economics of
slavery far less decisive. As the polarization
of the North and South intensified over
issues involving slavery and states' rights,
the border states represented a sort of
political and social fulcrum, a balance upon
which the fate of the Union rested
precariously. Consequently the border states
provide a fascinating and critical
source for the study of a movement that attempted
to strike to the heart of the most
fundamental issue of the time: the paradox of
human bondage in a democratic society.
Of the several border states, Kentucky
is in some ways the most intriguing. It
fathered several men who achieved
national prominence in the antislavery
movement. The Ohio River, forming part
of its northern border, became both as
symbol and as fact an enormous lure to
those who wished freedom from slavery,
either for themselves or for others.
Both its politics and its religions were rich and
complex. The pressures placed upon both
these institutions by antislavery
sentiment should provide a fascinating
insight into the psyches and the activities of
those who responded publically.
Professor Harrison's little book, in
relation to all of this, is very largely a
disappointment. His stated purpose is to
". . trace the development of the
antislavery movement in Kentucky."
If the word "trace" is used to mean to provide
only the barest outline of major events
related to the subject, then he achieved his
purpose. Even the organization of the
book reduces its effectiveness. A constant
shifting back and forth in time as the
author pursues each of several major topics
438 0HIO HISTORY
tends to confuse one's sense of the
timely developments of various issues as they
relate to each other. Just to cite one
example, the first chapter attempts to present an
overview of slavery in Kentucky. In it
one is swept back and forth from the late
eighteenth century up into the 1860s,
back to the early 1800s, forward to the 1850s,
and so on. The second chapter deals with
the early years of the Institution. Had that
material been integrated in a more
cogent fashion with the outline in the first
chapter, the progression of slavery and
the development of opposition to it would
have become more clear to the reader.
This unsettling pattern continues throughout
the book.
Another troublesome aspect of the book
is its anecdotal approach. Brief
biographical sketches of several major
and some minor characters involved with
antislavery, such as Cassius Clay, James
Birney, Calvin Fairbank, and Delia
Webster, and a substantial number of
others, are woven into the text but little is
done to analyze the contribution of
these people to the movement as a whole. There
is little evidence presented that
Professor Harrison has made use of the insights of
critical biographies of some of these
people. And even more central to the problem
of the book, the rich theoretical works
regarding slavery, antislavery, and
colonization have not been incorporated
into the work as they might relate to
Kentucky. One of the few exceptions
might be his reference to Eugene Genovese's
Roll, Jordan, Roll, but even here little is done to test Genovese's ideas
against the
experience of slavery in Kentucky.
Technically the book is handsome, well
printed, and free from errors. The lack of
an index is disconcerting, and the
bibliographic notes at the end are superficial as
they touch the larger body of
scholarship on antislavery but are intriguing as they
deal with antislavery in Kentucky. These
latter, along with some of the fascinating
character sketches presented in the
book, whet the reader's appetite for a more
thorough, more analytical, more
convincing treatment of this important state.
Lake Erie College David
French
Vanguards & Followers: Youth in
the American Tradition. By Louis
Filler.
(Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979. viii + 252p.;
notes, illustrations, appendix,
bibliographical essay, index. $11.95
cloth; $6.95 paper.)
It was with great anticipation that I
began reading Professor Filler's latest work.
He is one of America's most
distinguished scholars, and anything he writes
automatically merits careful
consideration. On the whole, my anticipation was
fulfilled. Although not quite on a level
with his famous Crusade Against Slavery
(1960), this book, a study of youth
movements in American history, is very good
indeed.
Filler traces the assertiveness of youth
from Roger Williams on, citing such
noteworthy individuals as Nathaniel
Bacon, aged twenty-nine when he led his
famous revolt, Nathan Hale, twenty-one
at his execution, Alexander Hamilton,
barely nineteen when he threw himself
into political activity, and all the way down
to the 1970s.
America has always been a youth-mad
country. One would think that the worst
crime one could commit was to live
beyond thirty-five. Youth has always been
flattered. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the
patron saint of young people during the
1830s and 40s. Henry David Thoreau
became one in the twentieth century.
The emergence of youth as a separate
factor in American life Filler puts in the
Book Reviews
439
early twentieth century. He zeros in on
the Greenwich Village group during the
Progressive era. On the whole, his
account is a sad one of assertive people shooting
their mouths off about things that they
did not know quite so much about as they
thought they did, a characteristic that
has continued ever since. Had they known
more and thought more, they might not
have been quite so free with opinions about
social and economic organizations that
some of them later repudiated. Filler's
description of Max Eastman is applicable
to others as well: "Eastman's genuine
eloquence was limited by an overindulged
sense of self, a failing of many of his
comrades." Eastman later repudiated
his youthful socialism. Randolph Bourne and
John Reed did not live long enough to do
so. Whether they ever would have is
impossible to know. But there is a long
list of others who changed their opinions
after drawing attention to themselves.
For example, Lewis Corey, born Luigi Carlo
Fraina, whose goal it was to become the
"American Lenin." Corey eventually
became a strong anticommunist professor
of economics. Frank Tannenbaum
turned into a conservative Columbia
professor of Latin American history, while
James Wechsler and Richard Rovere, after
youthful dalliances with Marxism,
became liberal journalists (shall one
call them so?) for the New York Post and the
New Yorker, respectively.
Filler traces the movement into the New
Left and its clownish leadership, leaving
only one brief paragraph for
conservative youth as epitomized by William Buckley.
Regardless of the issues they espoused,
the various phases of the youth movement
were all characterized by free use of
alcohol, frequently deviant sex practices, and
drugs. Sooner or later it all got down
to those issues, which causes one to wonder if
these were not the motivating factors
all along. They spoke movingly of the
suffering of the working class or of
women, or of oppressed minorities, but they
never promulgated any viable programs.
Others, such as dull unimaginative labor
leaders and social workers, had to do
that.
Also running as a constant throughout
the youth movement is an incredible
narcissism. Randolph Bourne was not
alone in thinking that only youth could build
a better world. In reality they were
elitists, and naturally considered themselves the
elite. Only those who agreed with them
should rule. Yet they did everything in the
name of democracy, in order to make a
better world. They had contempt for the
masses and the average person. They were
self-indulgent and snobbish. The whole
movement was just a put-on, whether
1910 or 1968.
Filler has written a useful book that
deserves to be widely read.
Kent State University Harold
Schwartz
Worker City, Company Town: Iron and
Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and
Cohoes, New York, 1855-84. By Daniel J. Walkowitz. (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1978. xv + 292p.;
figures, tables, maps, appendix, notes,
bibliography, index. $14.00.)
The first volume in the promising new
series on The Working Class in American
History being published by the
University of Illinois Press, Daniel Walkowitz's
Worker City, Company Town is a painstaking study of the social bases of
nineteenth-century working-class protest
in the twin cities of Troy and Cohoes,
New York. Walkowitz ranges widely,
presenting valuable descriptions of the
economics and technology of iron and
cotton manufacturing, the backgrounds and
careers of leading employers and
representative workers and trade unionists,
440 OHIO HISTORY
employers' labor policies, local
political controversies, working-class family life,
ethnic, religious, and fraternal
institutions, and strikes. His unique study of
working-class standards of living is
especially welcome. In light of the differing
balance of power between labor and
capital in Troy and Cohoes, Walkowitz
characterizes the former as a
"worker city" and the latter as a "company town".
Three points of considerable importance
for historians of labor and nineteenth-
century America emerge from this
closely-argued text. The first is that well-
established working-class community life
was a precondition for labor protest.
Only after Irish immigrants put down roots
in Troy did a vigorous trade-union
movement emerge. French-Canadian
immigrants labored in Cohoes' giant
Harmony Mills for more than a decade
before finally taking on the company. When
they struck in 1880 and 1882, local
merchants and ethnic leaders combined with
trade unionists from Troy and New York
to provide sustenance. Walkowitz's
argument here flies in the face of
variants of modernization theory which consider
working-class protest a reaction to the
shock of introduction to industry.
"Adaptation and protest seem to be
in opposition," Walkowitz writes, "but they are
not mutually exclusive responses to
socioeconomic conditions; instead, they are
dialectically and inextricably linked
aspects of human behavior. . . . By adapting,
a group modifies to meet the
requirements of the changing social and political
environment, perhaps to accomodate to
their environment, but perhaps to change
it. The specific social context in which
the group finds itself is crucial" (p. 3).
Worker City, Company Town also corrects the impression, sometimes conveyed
by the work of Herbert Gutman, that
mid-nineteenth-century manufacturing towns
were comparatively static communities in
which amicable relations existed between
workers and local employers. Labor
relations were pacific in Cohoes, but only
because they were structured
unilaterally by management. Troy was the scene of
frequent labor conflict, despite or
perhaps because of the fact that it was, in the
words of National Labor Union president
William Sylvis, "the banner city of
America upon the trades union
sentiment" (p. 94). Industrial conditions, moreover,
were anything but stable: firms merged,
technologies were changed, depressions
followed prosperity. As Walkowitz
writes, "Industrial capitalism was a dynamic
process, continuously requiring cost
reductions (often involving wage decreases)
and production increases. ... Labor
organization and militance confronted
unremitting governmental and
entrepreneurial hostility during this era" (pp. 248,
257).
Finally, Walkowitz challenges the
explanation for the weakness of working-class
anticapitalism presented by Alan Dawley
in his provocative study of Lynn,
Massachusetts, Class and Community. Dawley's
argument that "the ballot box was
the coffin of class consciousness"
receives short shrift. Echoing older generations of
commentators, Walkowitz ascribes the
decline of working-class radicalism to the
influence of the Catholic church, upward
social mobility, and general tendencies in
American culture.
Hopefully, Walkowitz's dispute with
Dawley signals the beginning of a new
debate on working-class consciousness
and relations between radicalism and the
labor movement. It is premature to
speculate on the outcome of such discussion:
Dawley's community study challenges the
Commons-Perlman theory of the labor
movement; Walkowitz's largely seems to
uphold it. Ultimately, however, these
questions cannot be resolved by
community studies. It is becoming necessary to
grapple with theoretical issues and
questions of regional and national scope.
Wesleyan University Ronald W.
Schatz
Book Reviews
441
The Peace Ship: Henry Ford's Pacifist
Adventure in the First World War. By
Barbara S. Kraft. (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1978. xiv + 367p.;
illustrations, appendices, notes,
bibliography, index. $14.95.)
With the outbreak of World War I, the
illusion that humans had progressed to
the point where a major war was
impossible was quickly shattered, as was the classic
idea of progress itself. Widespread
opposition in the United States to our entry into
that conflict usually did not include an
active interest in ending the war itself. Yet as
a major neutral power we had a special
opportunity to attempt to mediate the
conflict. It was a small group of
pacifists who openly proposed mediation by neutral
powers, an idea first expressed publicly
by the Hungarian peace activist, Rosika
Schwimmer, in London in August, 1914.
The same idea was proposed in the form of
a conference for neutral mediation by
Julia Grace Wales, a young instructor at the
University of Wisconsin. To make such a
conference a reality was the mission of the
Peace Ship.
The venture would cost a lot of money,
and Henry Ford had plenty of that. He
had also expressed publicly his view
that the war was unnecessary and that
munitions profiteers had brought it
about. By a combination of coincidences, a few
dedicated pacifists were able to
approach Ford personally and persuade him to fund
the project. The Peace Ship was actually
the Oscar II, which Henry Ford chartered
to carry a strange mix of mediation
advocates, newsmen, and student observers to
Norway as the first stop in a campaign
to end the war through pressure from the
people.
The support and presence of Ford made
important news, though the reporters
mostly ridiculed the project. When Ford
asserted, at the time of sailing in early
December, 1915, that the boys would be
"out of the trenches by Christmas," it
provided grounds for even more ridicule.
It was a typical Ford statement. He
tended to view the war in a most
simplistic way and he was unpredictable in his shift
of position. While his presence on the
European-bound Peace Ship attracted
worldwide attention, his abandonment of
the project shortly after arriving in
Christiana, Norway led the press to play
down the later efforts of the informal
peacemakers.
From beginning to end the project was
poorly organized, with little agreement
among those who participated. For much of this, Barbara
Kraft blames Rosika
Schwimmer, who is presented as a
dedicated idealist with rigid opinions and
limited ability to lead others or even
to get along with them. Schwimmer engaged in
deception, intrigue, and complicated
power politics in order to dominate the
project, until finally the opposition of
some of the others led to her resignation.
But such poor leadership was only one of
several factors causing trouble. While
the peace people agreed that mediation
by neutral nations should end the war, they
could agree on little else. They got no
official cooperation from any of the warring
or the neutral nations. The press
pictured them as naive and misguided fools. And
Ford himself supported President
Wilson's preparedness program at the same time
that he was condemning militarism as a
cause of the war.
That the Peace Ship voyage led to the
creation of a Neutral Conference for
Continuous Mediation was a major
achievement in itself. No one else was seriously
proposing such a way to end the war.
With the passing of very little time the
expedition seemed to make more sense.
Even William Bullitt, who was on the Peace
Ship as a reporter and who spent weeks
ridiculing the mission, wrote in his diary the
night he left for the Versailles
conference: "Three years ago today exactly I sailed
from New York with another gentleman who
planned to bring eternal peace to the
442 OHIO HISTORY
world. I am sure that the Ford party was
a more wonderful experience than this will
ever be; and tonight I wonder if Wilson
will be much more successful than Ford." If
nothing else, the neutral conference
experiment kept alive the idea that war could be
ended through mediation, and for that
and other incidental results, Kraft rightly
gives it a positive evaluation.
The Peace Ship is based on a mass of unpublished source material and
interviews.
The scholarship is sound and the style
is very readable. It is unfortunate that the
footnotes are not numbered, but listed
only by page number. Nevertheless, this
book provides a case study of a peace
project with its human problems exposed as
well as its high ideals projected. It
adds an important dimension to the history of
the World War I peace movement.
Wilmington College
Larry Gara
FDR and the Press. By Graham J. White. (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1979. xiii + 186p.;
illustrations, tables, notes, bibliographical note, index.
$13.95.)
So much has appeared in print about
Franklin D. Roosevelt that it might be
expected that the topic is exhausted.
However, when Graham J. White wrote his
thesis in 1977 at the University of
Sydney, he wrote about Roosevelt. After revision,
that thesis surfaced under the
imprimature of the University of Chicago Press as
FDR and the Press. The work describes the dealings of Roosevelt with
newspaper
reporters, columnists, editors, and
owners. Further, White seeks to account for the
president's hostility to the various
groups in the newspaper business, a surprising
attitude because much of the press
tended to be benevolent towards Roosevelt.
White describes typical press
conferences with both reporters and editors. He
portrays the rapport which Roosevelt
established almost effortlessly. Then White
examines the assumption, based more on
Roosevelt's statements than on
evidence, that newspapermen were hostile
to Roosevelt and Roosevelt's programs.
By careful use of statistics, White
shows that generally no more newspapers were
hostile than were friendly, that many
editors and owners were cooperative toward
or helpful to Roosevelt, and that
probably Roosevelt knew it at the time.
Given the fair to lenient treatment
which he received from many newspapermen,
why did Roosevelt perceive hostility
when the evidence should have shown him
otherwise? White has an answer.
Roosevelt wanted to be another Thomas
Jefferson. To be such, Roosevelt
believed, he had to have opposition from the
Hamiltonian elite in his fight for
democracy. One agent of the Hamiltonians in
their fight with the Jeffersonians was
the press. Thus, despite evidence that a
significant number of newspapers
supported him or were objective about his
policies, Roosevelt needed to find
opposition to be the norm, not the exception.
Jefferson suffered attack by the press.
Roosevelt wanted to be another Jefferson;
therefore, the press must have attacked
him.
There were other factors in Roosevelt's
hostility to the press. For instance, he
believed himself virtually infallible,
and he believed that any disagreement with his
truth would confuse the American
democracy. The press had an obligation to
disseminate its truth. When the two
diverged, Roosevelt felt betrayed. But these
factors were less important than the
Jeffersonian pretensions of Roosevelt.
White offers an intriguing explanation
for the inconsistent behavior of
Roosevelt. However, his evidence appears
somewhat limited. Unlike the data
Book Reviews 443
provided to show Roosevelt's mastery of
the press and the reasonable treatment of
Roosevelt by that press, the major proof
of Roosevelt's Jeffersonianism seems to be
one speech and one book review by
Roosevelt during the 1920s. If more evidence
were provided, the theory might prove
more acceptable.
Although the work is a modified thesis, FDR
and the Press is well-written.
Readability and provocativeness are the
significant virtues of White's contribution
to the literature on Franklin D.
Roosevelt.
Oklahoma State University J. Herschel
Barnhill
The Search for Ancestors: A
Swedish-American Family Saga. By H.
Arnold
Barton. (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1979.
xi + 178p.; illustrations, problems and
sources, notes, index. $11.95.)
In this relatively brief, genial, and
unpretentious volume, H. Arnold Barton
shares the largess of his quest to
discover familial roots. Despite obvious
enthusiasm for the saga of his own
family, Barton avoids the temptation to
exaggerate the significance of his
findings. In addition to providing an account of
his own Swedish-American lineage, Barton
attempts two additional objectives: to
illustrate the methodology employed in
the writing of family history and to
illuminate the macrocosmic phenomena
that transformed Swedish peasants into
American homesteaders. Although a
paucity of comparative analysis proves an
impediment to the latter objective,
Barton provides sufficient data on the social,
economic, and cultural context to amply
differentiate The Search for Ancestors
from mere genealogy.
Despite scenes of primeval beauty,
Smoland, a province in southern Sweden,
provided little respite to those who
sought to wrest a living from this "Stone
Kingdon." Sven Svensson, Barton's
paternal great-grandfather, knew more success
than most of Smoland's independent
farmers. During the 1850s, Sven prospered
and planned a land reclamation project
and other innovations to increase the
productivity of his property. Debts
incurred while pursuing those improvements,
however, rendered Sven vulnerable to the
declining grain prices and rising interest
rates of the 1860s. The spector of
downward mobility, rather than actual poverty,
prompted the 1867 hegira of the Svensons
across the Atlantic:
if he stayed on his farm, he would not
only have to give up his ambitious plans for
improvement but would probably have to
sell much of his property to settle his
debts, thereby compromising the future
prospects in life of his eleven children. If,
meanwhile, he sold out altogether, he
could obtain the means to transport his
family to America and there acquire . .
. fertile land to make a fresh start ....
(p. 69).
Purchasing 640 acres of Iowa prairie,
situated within the geographic heart of a
burgeoning Swedish America, Sven
eventually molded this frontier land into a
prosperous farm. Although geographic
dispersion, anglicizing of names, and
eventually, intermarriage would erode
the "old world" inheritance, some of Sven's
descendants still practice Lutheranism
and speak Swedish fluently.
Barton integrates his family chronicle
with an account of the research strategems
he utilized, thus demonstrating history
" 'with the works showing' " (p. 149).
Readers desirous of investigating their
own familial pasts will find a plethora of
444 OHIO
HISTORY
practical advice within this volume.
Drawing upon his own experience, Barton
comments upon the potential, as well as
the limitations, of a plethora of varied
sources: state and national archives,
state and national censuses, oral information,
letters, diaries, photographs, church
registers, educational records, wills, litigation
proceedings, newspapers, property
transfers, tax assessments, scholarly reference
works, and birth, marriage and death
certificates. In regard to oral information, for
example, Barton, despite offering the
caveat that stories heard long ago often
contain misleading information, suggests
that "even scrambled information of this
kind can have its value, for it usually
contains its grain of truth, however well it may
be disguised" (p. 151). As for
public records, Barton judiciously warns that officials
often misspelled and abbreviated names,
necessitating imagination and
perseverance in the search for
ancestors.
While Barton clearly satisfies his
objectives, one sometimes wished he had
attempted a more ambitious work. An
absence of systematic commentary on his
American lineage beyond the second
generation delimits Barton's treatment of
patterns of persistence and change over
time. Moreover, a paucity of compelling
vignettes deprives The Search for
Ancestors of the power of such commercial works
as Roots. Nevertheless, although
specialists will discover few seminal findings in
this volume, laymen attempting to
research their own ancestry will find Barton a
knowledgeable and engaging guide.
State University of New York at
Oneonta William M. Simons
Thomas Hunt Morgan: The Man and His
Science. By Garland E. Allen.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1979. xvii + 447p.; notes, illustrations,
tables, appendices, bibliographical
essay, index. $25.00.)
Thomas Hunt Morgan's discoveries about
chromosomes, their structure and
significance, provided answers to
questions already raised in the early twentieth
century and paved the way for the
development of twentieth century genetics. This
biography of Morgan is well-written,
handles difficult topics in genetics well, is
based on solid, primary research, and,
as the author hopes, will no doubt stimulate
more interest in the history of genetics
and early twentieth century biology in
general.
Social historians will welcome it
because the author does "not believe that history
is made by great individuals" but
rather by "interacting forces" (preface x, xi). The
author specifically details the strong
influences of various institutional
developments on Morgan's work and on the
growth of genetics in general. The
cultural historian may be less
well-satisfied with the work, but will find the author's
discussion of Morgan's personal
philosophy and his discussion of the naturalist and
experimental tradition at the end of the
nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
centuries informative and useful. The
influence of interpersonal relationships
growing out of the scientific endeavors
of Morgan and his contemporaries on the
scientific development of the period is
given considerable attention and adds further
dimension to the work.
Tracing Morgan's early years, the author
shows Morgan's transformation from
the naturalist tradition stressing
structure to the experimentalist tradition stressing
function beginning while he was still a
graduate student at Johns Hopkins. His
transformation was completed in the last
decade of the century at Bryn Mawr where
he taught for thirteen years. German
materialistic physiology strongly influenced
Book Reviews
445
Morgan at this time, especially through
Jacques Loeb who was also a faculty
member at Bryn Mawr and Hans Driesch
whom he met at the Zoological Station in
Naples, Italy where Morgan spent the
year 1894. The Station, founded in 1872, had
become a mecca for biologists in Europe
and was clearly a strong influence on
Morgan and the direction and nature of
his work.
The experimentalist tradition was allied
to laboratory analysis and Morgan's
work notably avoids any tendency toward
speculation. That which could not be
supported by the laboratory was not to
be considered.
Morgan's influence on twentieth century
biology, medicine, and physiology and
on genetics in particular was vast.
Through his students and colleagues the work he
did has directly and indirectly
influenced research in these areas. Morgan, the
individual as well as the scientist, is
well-portrayed in this work. It should be read by
all historians interested in this period
and by all those who may be interested in
social movements like eugenics that were
influenced by the rise of modern genetics.
Howard Dittrick Museum of Historical
Medicine Patsy A. Gerstner
Frank Murphy: The New Deal Years. By Sidney Fine. (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1979. xi + 708p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
$42.00.)
Sidney Fine's excellent and
comprehensive study of Frank Murphy during the
1930s represents an interesting approach
to historical scholarship. Using a massive
amount of unpublished and published
source materials, including the papers of
Murphy and key family members, Fine has
written a series of monographs on
American, Philippine, Michigan, and New
Deal history which are integrated into a
lengthy biography. In so doing the
author has surpassed in narrative, analysis,
evaluation-one of the most thorough
aspects of the book-and documentation
such previous biographies as Richard D.
Lunt's The High Ministry of Government:
The Political Career of Frank Murphy (1965) and J. Woodford Howard's Mr.
Justice Murphy: A Political Biography
(1968). However, Fine's justification
is that
Murphy was a fascinating personality who
was compelled to deal with matters of
great significance in his varied public
career.
Fine presents detailed chapters which
focus on Murphy's successful tenure as
Governor-General of the Philippines
during 1933-1936, when the islands were in
transition from a colony to a
commonwealth, and his remarkable but controversial
single term as Michigan's Governor
during the turmoil-ridden years of 1937-1938.
As an ascetic bachelor, devout Catholic,
social justice advocate, and New Dealer,
Murphy brought a fine spirit of honesty,
efficiency, and liberal concern to both
posts. At the same time his personality,
charm, and talents allowed him to
emphasize higher principles of
progressive government and humane reform while
also accommodating conservative and
vested interests who opposed him. Briefly,
Murphy practiced the politics of
ideology instead of the politics of patronage. His
vigorous leadership usually included
soliciting and using expert advice, appointing
and supporting competent administrators,
and inspiring and persuading large
elements of public opinion-notably the
less affluent and the disadvantaged-to
back his mixture of idealism and
realism. At the same he remained a complex
person who enjoyed physical exercise,
horseback riding, the company of many
attractive ladies, and the personal
pleasures derived from a substantial income and
investments.
446 OHIO HISTORY
Murphy brought a "little New
Deal" and ideological politics to the Philippines
and to Michigan, and those were his
lasting accomplishments. In writing of the
complicated events and personalities,
however, Fine has gone to such length and
depth that only a scholarly specialist
can really appreciate his judicious use of
sources and his careful balance in
historical assessments. Murphy played crucial
roles in, say, mediating Michigan's 1937
sit-down strikes, leading its struggle
against the 1937-1938 recession, and
supervising its reorganization of health,
welfare, and education services. But
Murphy's activities seem diminished against
the massiveness of Fine's historical
backdrops. Also, the manuscript is overloaded
with quotes of one or a few words.
Nevertheless, interpretively the book is
persuasive. Sidney Fine illustrates
beyond doubt that Frank Murphy was a
rare kind of principled public servant
who despite his egotism and
idiosyncrasies-usually placed the public interest
above all others, even his own political
aspirations, which included the presidency.
Also, Fine provides useful
interpretations of federal-state cooperation during the
New Deal era, documents Murphy's
consistent support of human rights, fair
treatment for all persons, and organized
labor, and points that Murphy was a
liberal New Dealer as well as a fiscal
conservative. Indeed, Fine's accomplishment
makes the reader wonder how well Murphy
would have succeeded in the White
House.
Virginia Western Community College James E. Sargent
The John Hunt Memoirs: Early Years
ofthe Maumee Basin, 1812-1835. Edited
by
Richard J. Wright. (Maumee, Ohio: Maumee
Valley Historical Society, 1979.
viii + 94p.; illustrations, maps, notes.
$10.00 cloth; $7.75 paper.)
This work is not for the entertainment
or even the information of the average
reader. He will find it much too
difficult to follow as the Englishand spellingwould
have earned Mr. Hunt a curt dismissal
from any respectable course in Freshman
English. There is little by way of
organization apparent either. The work rather is a
published primary source not of book
length, really consisting of the recollections
of a pioneer in the Toledo area written
a significant period of time after the events
occurred, containing a thread of story
not woven into the fabric of history very well,
and marred by a sometimes faulty memory.
Doubtless the editor and publishers felt
that the publication of the memoirs
exactly as Hunt wrote them, misspellings,
scarcity of periods, atrocious grammar
and all, would help the scholar get a feel for
the man and his period. It does this
admirably.
The scholar doing research will love the
anecdotes and the personal glimpses of
famous or at least interesting people
who lived in the area around the western end of
Lake Erie and were active in those
campaigns of the War of 1812 which centered
around Detroit. He will also be rewarded
by Hunt's usually appreciative view of the
Indians who participated on both sides
in those campaigns, and his descriptions of
their relationships with Americans after
the war was over. This view will do
something to correct any idea that
Indians were always devils-or saints either, for
that matter.
Highest praise must go to the graduate
student who did the research which
produced very extensive footnotes citing
little known and hard to find sources
without which Mr. Hunt's narrative would
at times have become meaningless.
Book Reviews
447
There are 211 footnotes which illuminate
seventy-three pages of memoirs; every one
of the footnotes is essential.
The publication of these memoirs is a
favor to scholars and to those who have a
burning desire to better inform
themselves of this early Toledoan and of Ohio
frontier life. Extensive further editing
would be necessary to attract the less
interested general public.
Ohio Northern University Boyd M. Sobers
This Land of Ours: The Acquisition
and Disposition of the Public Domain.
Papers presented at an Indiana American
Revolution Bicentennial Symposium.
(Indianapolis: Indiana Historical
Society, 1978. x + 126p.; map, illustrations,
notes. $3.00 paper.)
From colonial times through the
nineteenth century, land was the most
important economic factor in American
history. Indeed, with the passage of the
Ordinance of 1785 the land business
became the federal government's major
economic concern. By the nineteenth
century, the federal government was deeply
involved in surveying, advertising, and
selling public lands. Over time, generous
federal land policies helped shape a
nation of freeholders and encouraged the
construction of the transcontinental
railroads. Since Frederick Jackson Turner
enunciated his provacative frontier
thesis in 1893, which contended the acquisition
of land was essential to the democratic
experience, the study of federal land policy
has been of great interest to many
historians.
This study, composed of five essays on
the perception, acquisition, and
disposition of the public lands, is the
product of the Third Indiana American
Bicentennial Symposium, held at Purdue
University on April 29-30, 1978. The first
essay on the "Perceptions and
Illustrations of the American Landscape in the Ohio
Valley and Midwest," by Hildegard
Binder Johnson, traces the routine American
view of the midwest through various
artistic works and concludes this region did
not inspire great works of art. Malcolm
J. Rohrbough's essay, "The Land Office
Business in Indiana, 1800-1840,"
argues that three forces shaped the land office
business-Sir William Blackstone's
doctrines on property, an agrarian philosophy
that emphasized land as a basic aspect
of the American economy and political
system, and the concept of the public
domain. Reginald Horseman contends in
"Changing Images of the Public
Domain: Historians and the Shaping of Midwest
Frontiers" that the historiography
of the public lands has passed through three
stages since the 1890s. Turner's thesis
characterized the first stage, but a second
school of interpretation appeared during
the 1930s, when scholars began criticizing
public land policies which permitted
rampant speculation at the expense of the
small farmer. The third phase of
historical interpretation developed in the mid-
1950s, when historians began focusing on
the economic impact of federal land
policy and became supportive of the
speculator's role in western development.
Dwight L. Smith's essay, "The Land
Cession Treaty: A Valid Instrument of
Transfer of Indian Title," is a
case study of land transfers to whites before the War
of 1812. Smith contends that although
the Indians did not understand the
significance of the land cession treaty,
it was the vehicle that bridged the gap
between the diverse cultures during the
land acquisition process. Paul W. Gates
maintains in "The Nationalizing
Influence of the Public Lands: Indiana" that
Hoosiers were at first resentful of the
federal government's ownership of the public
448 OHIO HISTORY
lands because that policy denied the
state substantial revenues from land sales and
taxes. When the public lands were gone,
however, Indiana along with the other
non-public land states demanded that all
states share the revenues generated from
public land sales elsewhere.
Although these essays primarily concern
Indiana, they will be useful for any one
seriously interested in the history of
the Old Northwest. In addition, this book will
be valuable for all students of public
land policy. One hopes that other historical
societies will hold similar forums for
the investigation of their region's history.
Ohio Historical Society R. Douglas
Hurt
Jews and Judaism in a Midwestern
Community: Columbus, Ohio, 1840-1975.
By Marc Lee Raphael. (Columbus, Ohio:
Ohio Historical Society, 1979. x +
483p.; illustrations, tables, appendix,
bibliography, index. $19.50.)
What Marc L. Raphael calls "the
process of embourgeoisement in America" is a
major theme-perhaps the major theme-of
his detailed and authoritative Jews
and Judaism in a Midwestern
Community. Professor Raphael's account
of
Columbus Jewry between 1840 and 1975
exhibits a sociological awareness as well as
expertise in historical reconstruction.
The book is fascinating for its sophisticated
blend of the statistical and the
anecdotal. While the quantitative dimensions of the
Columbus Jewish experience are lucidly
presented, matters of personality are also
allowed considerable vividness.
Professor Raphael wants to establish the patterns
of development in Columbus- the fact,
for instance that immigrant peddlers from
Central Europe were financed in
mid-nineteenth-century Columbus by "agents
(particularly eastern) and already
established brothers." He is equally interested in
conveying some notion of individual
color and vitality-he cites in translation
advertisements like the following from
the late 1840s and early 1850s: "German
Landsmen! Try us before you buy
somewhere else . . . Our motto is: Small profit
and quick turnover is better than big
profit and no customers"-"The undersigned
humbly informs his honorable
[German-speaking] countrymen, and the general
public, that he . . . can sell
[clothing] as inexpensively as any merchant in
Columbus on any occasion . . ."
The portrait which Professor Raphael
fashions in this book is not one that
historians and analysts of urban life in
the Midwest will in all likelihood find
particularly exotic. The unfolding of
the Jewish Community, its religious, social,
and philanthropic instrumentalities, in
central Ohio is also on the whole familiar
enough: first, during the mid-1800s the
creation by immigrants from German-
speaking Central Europe of "a
largely merchant society," with a pronounced,
somewhat distinctive concentration on
the garment industry; Columbus Jewry's
modes augmentation during the late 1800s
and early 1900s by numbers of
immigrants from Eastern Europe "the
invasion of a people with a lower standard
of living and an alien culture," a
people which, rather unlike "the established
middle-class, Americanized German
Jews," tended to explicit emphasis on "a
separate sense of identity within the
new American environment"; the effort by
Columbus Jewry, older German and newer
East European settlers alike, during the
first half of the twentieth century to
achieve a significant measure of communal
centralization, unification, and
definition, embracing "American recreational
forms" and moving "eagerly
into the general community" at the same time that
remarkable philanthropic values were
fostered "to build the edifices of a postwar
Book Reviews
449
community" which Jews of both
German and East European stock "would share
together"; finally, in the
generation following World War II, Jewish involvement in
"the hectic social mobility of
urban and suburban America," the consolidation of a
powerful, self-assured fund-raising
oligarchy, and focus on Israel as the issue most
potent in arousing and uniting the
Columbus Jewish community.
It is in the attention it pays
contemporary factors-the experience of the post-
World War I and post-World War II
generations-that Professor Raphael's effort
deserves special notice and applause,
this even though, as he says, he has
"consciously refrained from writing
about living persons-especially those in
positions of leadership-and from
narrating the history of communal agencies,
organizations, and religious
institutions in the [post-World War II] decades." The
limitations he has imposed on himself
have not prevented Professor Raphael from
offering a richly documented, cogent
delineation of Midwestern Jews who have
"shaped their community to reflect
Jewish acculturation to [urban] America even
as they built and pursued Jewish
ethnicity." The collectivity to emerge from these
pages is, for all of its profound
embourgeoisement, one characterized by a vigorous
and elegant complexity. Even crime and
sports have not lacked for representation
among Columbus Jews.
Jews and Judaism in a Midwestern
Community is not flawless-for example,
Professor Raphael has regrettably little
to say about theological (as distinct from
religio-ethic) concerns but the book is
genuinely a distinguished contribution to
the fields of local history, ethnic
history, and Jewish history in the context of
American life.
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of
Religion Stanley F.Chyet