Book Reviews
The Cautious Diplomat: Charles E. Bohlen and the Soviet Union, 1929-1969.
By T. Michael Ruddy. (Kent: The Kent
State University Press, 1986. xii +
219p.; notes, bibliography, index.
$27.00.)
In this first book, T. Michael Ruddy
gives us both a useful sketch of the
career of one of the most important
American foreign service officials of the
middle third of the twentieth century
and a sense of the Cold War as he saw it.
A product of the Ivy League
establishment, Charles Bohlen was among the
first generation of trained Soviet
specialists produced by the State Department.
(His most famous contemporary, George F.
Kennan, was a lifelong friend and
occasional intellectual antagonist.) His
attitude toward the USSR was that of a
pragmatic centrist who envisioned Soviet
policy as determined by a blend of
ideology and self-interest. He never
abandoned his hope that patient diplomacy
could produce some degree of accommodation between the
two powers,
struggling with varying degrees of
success against soft-minded optimists at one
extreme and hard-line Cold Warriors at
the other.
Quickly establishing himself as a highly
esteemed foreign service figure, he
was instrumental in the diplomatic
education of Averell Harriman, then a close
friend of Harry Hopkins and unofficial
liaison between the White House and
the State Department during World War
II. In the Truman era, he was deeply
involved in the formulation and
implementation of the containment doctrine.
Eisenhower's personal choice as
ambassador to the Soviet Union despite the
misgivings of John Foster Dulles and the
open opposition of Senator Joe
McCarthy, he spent four years in Moscow,
followed by a two-year "exile" as
ambassador to the Philippines, before
returning to Washington. Under the brief
tenure of the Republican Christian
Herter and the eight-year term of Dean
Rusk, he became an increasingly
important and widely admired diplomat,
spending five years as ambassador to
France and a year as Undersecretary of
State before his retirement in 1969.
More a doer and less a thinker than
Kennan, he accepted the foreign service
officer's role as a subordinate who
worked within broad policies determined at
higher levels. Consequently, Ruddy is at
times troubled by his subject's
"caution" in pressing his
personal opinions upon his superiors and by what
seems to be his occasional trimming, as
when he softened his strongly negative
feelings toward the Dulles-Eisenhower
liberation policy. The author finds
Bohlen's influence on the shaping of
American foreign policy difficult to
evaluate, but concludes that as a
diplomat he was a professional's professional.
Professor Ruddy's portrayal of Bohlen is
not as lively as that delivered by
Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson in their
recent book The Wise Men (1986),
nor does it possess substantially more
depth. Bohlen's own autobiography,
Witness to History (1963), provides a fuller and highly readable account
of his
career. Nonetheless, the author's
conclusions are sound, if unexceptional and
not terribly revealing. This is a solid
introduction to the life of one of the
makers of modern American diplomacy.
Ohio University Alonzo L.
Hamby
Book Reviews
73
Soldiers West: Biographies from the
Military Frontier. Edited by Paul
Andrew
Hutton. Introduction by Robert M. Utley.
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1987. xiii + 276p.; maps,
illustrations, notes, index. $19.95 cloth;
$9.95 paper.)
The fascination of the frontier army has
permeated all of modern American
society, from the heroic images of the
cavalry brought to the screen by the likes
of John Wayne to the thousands of
visitors to the Little Bighorn Battlefield
each year. Soldiers West represents
a significant attempt to probe much deeper
than these images, to discover the
essence of the military officers who
commanded on the trans-Mississippi frontier
of the nineteenth century. The
fourteen biographies in this collection
emphasize the wide diversity of men
who served first as combat officers, but
also as scientists, writers, explorers,
engineers, or administrators depending
upon their talents and interests. Each
made a unique contribution, which has
been ably captured in these biograph-
ical sketches.
The introductory essay, "The
Frontier and the American Military Experi-
ence," a revision of Robert M.
Utley's Harmon Memorial Lecture at the
United States Air Force Academy in 1976,
remains a challenging analysis of
the centrality of the army's experience
on the frontier more than a decade later.
Following this overview, Soldiers
West contains excellent biographical sketch-
es of army officers on the nineteenth
century frontier. All of the essays are
well-researched and invitingly written,
but three sketches in particular caught
my fancy, either because they opened
quite different territory from the
standard or because they concerned
individuals who were appealing in a
unique way.
The first of these is Jerome 0.
Steffen's discussion of the career of William
Clark. Clark, of course, was a volunteer
soldier who is the finest example of
the Army's interest in trans-Mississippi
West exploration. But, Steffen also
contends that Clark should be remembered
as a transitional figure between
volunteer officers of the
cis-Mississippi frontier such as William Henry
Harrison and Andrew Jackson, who were
basically politicians, and the career
soldiers who became the Army's mainstays
in the later West.
The second essay concerns George A.
Custer. Brian W. Dippie, the author
of this essay, begins by asking why he
has been so popular. In examining the
Custer legend Dippie notes that the
Battle of Little Bighorn, with its images of
heroism in the face of overwhelming
odds, brought to Custer the lasting fame
that success could never have achieved.
Finally, Joseph C. Porter offers an
exciting and unique portrait of John G.
Bourke. Although Bourke never reached a
rank higher than captain, he was an
outstanding example of the army officer
as ethnologist. Throughout the
postbellum period he served in a variety
of capacities in the army, but in every
case he turned his attention to studying Indian
culture. Porter argues persua-
sively that his many scholarly studies
were even more important than his more
well-known writings on the Indian
wars-An Apache Campaign (1886) and On
the Border with Crook (1891).
Soldier's West is an important, worthwhile book that offers something
for
everyone. Like any work of this type it can be
criticized for its choices of
individuals for inclusion. I would have
very much enjoyed seeing the likes of
such figures as John C. Fremont, Stephen
Watts Kearney, or Philip St. George
Cook, all of whom were prominent in the army's frontier
experience. But to
74 OHIO HISTORY
chastise too much on this account would
be quibbling. Overall, the book is a
satisfying and representative collection
of army officers who made an imprint
on the frontier that became part of the
United States. It will be of interest to
scholar and buff alike.
Military Airlift Command Roger D. Launius
Scott Air Force Base
The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier
Epilogue to the American Revolution. By
Thomas P. Slaughter. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986. 291p.;
notes, index. $19.95.)
Thomas P. Slaughter sets a number of
goals for his study of the Whiskey
Rebellion of 1792. He aims to provide an
understanding of the causes and
consequences of the ongoing regional
confrontation that culminated in the
Whiskey Rebellion, to focus on and
explain the rebellion as a "climatic event
in the process of political and social
change that provoked and sustained the
War for Independence" (p. 4), to
explain the interrelationship between ideas
and action, rhetoric and reality, and to
analyze the host of contexts that shaped
conflict within American society from
1780 to 1800. Moreover, he proposes to
do all this by juxtaposing, and to an
extent, interweaving literary, narrative
strategies with "social science
history" methodologies (p. 7), thus avoiding the
increasingly esoteric nature of much
"scientific" history. To reach a broader
audience, Slaughter contends that
historians writing the "new" narrative
history "must approximate to the
best of our abilities the storytelling talents of
previous eras, and . . . wed literary
strategies to the analytical requirements of
the modern historical profession"
(p. 7). The Whiskey Rebellion is a tentative
model for such history.
To achieve his goals Slaughter divides
his book into three major parts,
"Context,"
"Chronology," and "Consequence." In Part I, he analyzes
ideological, regional, national and
international perspectives, issues, and
events that produced long term East-West
conflict in the United States,
culminating in the Whiskey Rebellion.
Frontier defense, revolutionary ideals of
freedom and liberty, desire for and fear
of frontier autonomy, navigation of the
Mississippi, and schemes of Britain,
France and Spain in North America,
established interrelated contexts of
interest and ideology that placed enormous
strains on the Union. Finally, Slaughter
poses the basic thesis, developed
throughout the book, that the issues of
taxation by and equitable representa-
tion in the new federal government
carried over from the revolutionary era as
fundamental causes of conflict.
Part II, "Chronology," extends
the thesis of continuity/conflict over the
issues of taxation and representation.
Slaughter narrows his focus to a detailed
narrative of domestic events from 1791
to 1794 that exacerbated the split
between East and West, federal
government and frontier regions, and pro-
duced violent opposition to the Whiskey
Excise Tax of 1791. Yet he continu-
ally refers to the contexts established
in Part I, adducing evidence for the
persistent influence of national and
international affairs, particularly the course
of the revolution in France, war in
Europe, the rise of "democratic societies"
in the United States, and schemes for
the establishment of autonomous
Book Reviews
75
republics in the West countered by the
hardening determination of George
Washington and Alexander Hamilton to
crush a movement perceived as fatal
to the very existence of the United
States.
International war, class, ethnic,
geographic and ideological enmity, bitterly
contested domestic politics, eruptions
all along the frontier, led inexorably to
a showdown. A peaceful solution proved
impossible primarily because there
was no inter-regionally integrated
economy, no national ideology, and thus no
basis for a spirit of compromise. Other
historians, notably Melvin Yazawa in
From Colonies to Commonwealth:
Familial Ideology and the Beginnings of the
American Republic (1985), have observed the tremendous stress and anxiety
attendant upon the shift from a social
and political paradigm of affectionate
authority to one emphasizing personal
independence and autonomy in the
revolutionary and post-revolutionary
years. Part II of The Whiskey Rebellion
convincingly describes one of the
consequences of the normative shift from an
ideology of order and authority to one
of independence and autonomy.
Part III, "Consequence," is
something of a letdown in terms of drama
(surely still a basic aspect of
"narrative" history), although it is a logical-
perhaps the only logical-way to end the
story. The "Watermelon Army" is
assembled (with much difficulty), it
marches into Western Pennsylvania (in an
often haphazard and ludicrous fashion),
some rebels are captured and a few
brought to trial. Hapless citizens are
terrorized, and the "rebellion" collapses.
No Bunker Hill, no Lexington and
Concord, no Battle of New Orleans: the
story ends, if not with a whimper,
certainly not a bang.
As a contribution to our understanding
of the complexity and interrelated
nature of forces shaping the painful,
often violent early years of the nation, The
Whiskey Rebellion is an important, pathbreaking study. The scholarship is
wide ranging and impeccable, the
narrative clear and understandable to anyone
who has a good grasp of the English
language and a college survey course's
worth of knowledge of early American
history. Visions of a wide popular
audience (How wide? Who are these hoped
for readers?) perhaps should be
tempered by a realistic assessment of
the reading (or non-reading) habits of the
American public.
The Ohio State University Paul C. Bowers
The Transplanted: A History of
Immigrants in Urban America. By John
Bodnar. (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1985. xxi + 294p.; illus-
trations, appendix, notes, selected
bibliography, index. $27.50.)
In the past ten years, John Bodnar has
emerged as one of the premier
students of the ethnic history of
industrial society. His studies of Slavic
workers in the early twentieth century
and his co-authored book Lives of Their
Own, a comparative study of blacks, Poles, and Italians in
Pittsburgh between
1900 and 1930, have immeasurably
enriched our knowledge of how immigrant
newcomers altered American industrial
society and were simultaneously
transformed by it. Regrettably, The
Transplanted, which should represent a
culmination of Bodnar's work in ethnic
history, falls far short of the quality of
his previous scholarship.
That is not to say that there is not
considerable value in the book. The
country-by-country canvassing of the
causes of immigration in Chapter I is
76 OHIO HISTORY
perhaps the most thorough survey of its
kind available. The chapters on
immigrant churches, and the sections on
folk life, education, and politics, also
are very good. The bibliography, though
it oddly omits a few outstanding
studies, is superb-there is simply
nothing else like it available.
Unfortunately, The Transplanted also
has a number of weaknesses. The
book conveys the impression of hasty
construction: confusing or incomplete
arguments, poor writing, and lack of
clarity at crucial points. Social class terms
like "the very poor" are never
defined. After a while, I stopped counting
awkward or grammatically incorrect
sentences; the author's use of phrases like
"amounts of immigrants" is
more comical than edifying. Surprisingly, given
Bodnar's previous work, the chapter on
immigrants, unions, and radicals is the
most confusing and convoluted in the
entire book. One of the strangest aspects
of a study based on such voluminous
research is Bodnar's occasional tendency
to discuss significant historical
theories without mentioning, in either the text
or the notes, the authors most
responsible for them. In several instances,
Herbert Gutman's theories about preindustrial
behavior among immigrants are
discussed, but the reader would never
know that Gutman was the main source
of these ideas. Oscar Handlin is
similarly neglected, even though the book's
title is an obvious play on The
Uprooted. Handlin's classic work is simply
ignored, as though it did not exist.
There are also points made in the text that
obviously derive from the works of
Philip Taylor, Carolyn Golab, and others,
but Bodnar fails to even mention them in
the notes.
The predominant theme of The
Transplanted is the interaction between
immigrant culture and the demands of a
maturing industrial capitalism. Bodnar
is aware that this was a worldwide
phenomenon, not just an American one, and
his study provides a valuable
comparative perspective. But it does not provide
an effective theoretical synthesis of
the literature on the history of immigration
to urban America.
Temple University Kenneth L.
Kusmer
Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux.
By Gary Clayton Anderson. (St. Paul:
Minnesota Historical Society Press,
1986. 259p.; illustrations, maps, appen-
dices, reference notes, bibliography,
index. $19.95 cloth; $10.95 paper.)
In this ethno-biography of the
Mdewakanton Sioux leader of the mid-
nineteenth century, Gary Anderson deals
with the age old "stereotype"
problem of "what was" versus
"what is perceived" about Indians and Indian
leaders. Little Crow has always been
looked upon as the militant spokesperson
and war chief of the eastern Minnesota-based
Sioux in the bloody uprising of
late 1862 known as the "Dakota
War." Anderson spends more than three
fourths of his biography dealing with
Little Crow as a leader who brokered his
strong beliefs and the white issues into
an up and down relationship of
white-red negotiations best described as
accommodation.
Little Crow has come through history as
a militant leader against the United
States' policy of assimilation. Anderson
reveals the efforts of this leader over
two decades as spokesman for a diverse
group of people, as a politician who
kept a balance between the
traditionalist and the assimilated groups of
Mdewakanton Sioux, and as a
compassionate head of an extended family
almost as diverse as the entire Mdewakanton.
The author stresses Little
Book Reviews
77
Crow's role as a power broker who
parlayed the interest of his people and the
desires of the United States government
back and forth to bring about the best
results for his people for two decades
as an alternative to outright conflict. That
they were able to retain their identity
and remain in the Minnesota River Valley
as long as they did is a direct result
of Little Crow's negotiations.
The book is an excellent example of what
can be done with an inter-ethnic
study. The importance of understanding
the culture of the people involved is
stressed in the narrative as well as in
the appendix. It is evident that the
religious and social aspects of the
Siouian life-style were as much a part of this
struggle as the political and economic
aspects. The author's attempts to remain
unbiased are noble, but periodically one
feels the red people are considered as
a "most favored nation."
The author from time to time might confuse
the reader as he intermixes the
jargon, unique to this group of Sioux, with typical
military jargon: i.e., soldiers
meaning a militant group of Dakotas in
the same context of soldiers of the
United States Army or Minnesota Militia.
Overall this is an excellent narrative,
logically organized, fully footnoted,
indexed, with good illustrations and maps,
an adequate bibliography, and an
excellent genealogy appendix.
The Defiance College Randall L. Buchman
Transcendentalism and the Western
Messenger: A History of the Magazine
and Its Contributors, 1835-1841. By Robert D. Habich. (Cranbury, New
Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1985. 208p.; illustrations,
notes, bibliographic essay, index.
$27.50.)
Habich argues convincingly that the Western
Messenger was an important
and successful periodical, despite its
short period of publication from 1835 to
1841. Success in such endeavors as
publishing a magazine that aspires to
advance religion, morality and
literature is always relative, and as Habich
points out, compared to contemporary
publications such as the Dial, the
Messenger had a robust life, an illustrious group of
contributors, and fair
success in achieving its purposes of
promoting religion and in calling attention
to Western writers. However, its more
significant success was in redefining its
sectarian and regional interests to
promote open inquiry.
In tracing the history of the Messenger
(published in Cincinnati and
Louisville) and its editors and
contributors, Habich has produced a study that
sketches religious and intellectual
developments in the Ohio valley and the
biographies of several transplanted
Easterners who saw the West as a fertile
place for religious cultivation as well
as a detailed chronicle of one nineteenth-
century publication. Especially good as
a summary of the religious ferment in
the Midwest is Habich's chapter on the
Ohio Valley in 1835, a concise,
interpretative account of the unsettled
environment into which the founders of
the Messenger, Eastern educated
ministers, attempted to introduce their
Unitarian sympathies.
Sectarian concerns were important
throughout the Messenger's history, as
Habich indicates, and complicated its
efforts to find an audience. Ephraim
Peabody and James Freeman Clarke, the
first editors, listed as one of their
intents "to explain and defend the
misunderstood and denounced principles of
Unitarianism," but after Peabody
soon withdrew from editorial duties the
78 OHIO HISTORY
magazine dulled its sectarian edge and
began to reflect Clarke's interest in
German writers and to develop a
Transcendental quality that disturbed some
Unitarian readers without attracting
more liberal readers. The ideological
concerns and debates-the Emersonian
challenge to Unitarianism, the slavery
quandary-that made the Messenger an
exciting publication also increased its
vulnerability. Under Clarke's editorship
the magazine was lively and contro-
versial, especially in its defense of
radicals such as Emerson and Bronson
Alcott, but it became more and more
distanced from Eastern Unitarianism,
adding to chronic financial problems.
After Clarke gave up the editorship in
1839, the magazine had drifted so far
from its sectarian origins that the new
editors considered severing all ties with organized
Unitarianism.
Habich neatly outlines these twists and
turns in the magazine's editorial
management and relates the Messenger's
fortunes to the careers of its
minister-editors. The men associated
with the Messenger, Habich asserts, did
not view the venture as a failure, but
continued to be attracted to periodical
publication. Those who returned to the
East, notably Clarke, Christopher
Pearse Cranch and William Henry
Channing, were intellectually and emotion-
ally influenced by their Western
experience. One of the book's strengths is its
smooth interweaving of biographical
information about Peabody, Clarke,
Channing and others with the history of
the magazine.
In appraising the role of the Western
Messenger in the Transcendental
controversy, Habich argues that the
reputation of the Messenger as a Tran-
scendental magazine, and the inference
that championing Transcendental ideas
led to the magazine's demise, misstates
the point. Although some important
New England Transcendental writers
(Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Theodore
Parker, Jones Very) were published in
the Messenger, overall the publication
represented a broad spectrum of opinion
and the editors themselves, excepting
Clarke, were characteristically
skeptical, as one of them said, about "all that
German philosophy." And while the
magazine was an outlet for them, the New
England writers lent little support to
the struggling publication. Still, Habich
does find an important connection
between the Messenger and the new school
of thought in their shared spirit of
inquiry. The Western Messenger may be
accurately labeled a Transcendental
magazine, he concludes, not because it
published a certain group of writers but
because it promoted that individual
truth-seeking should not be bound by
doctrine.
Informative about intellectual
controversy in the 1830s and '40s, detailed in
its account of the Messenger and
its editors, temperate and balanced in its
conclusions, Habich's book has much to
recommend it.
Otterbein College James R.
Bailey
Friedrich A. Sorge's Labor Movement
in the United States: A History of the
American Working Class from 1890 to
1896. Translated by Kai Schoenhals.
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987. xiii +
196p.; index. $29.95.)
This brief volume represents an extended
addendum to the much longer
work, also published in translation by
Greenwood Press in 1977, which was
written by the German emigre Marxist
Friedrich Sorge on the American labor
movement from colonial times to 1890.
Ably translated by Kai Schoenhals, this
Book Reviews
79
second book focuses on the years 1890 to
1896, which saw some of the most
dramatic events that shaped the modern American labor
movement. These
included the Pullman railroad strike of
1894, to which Sorge devotes three
chapters, the rise and fall of the People's Party, and
the critical election of 1896
which saw William McKinley exploit
nativist sentiment among white immi-
grant workers to establish the political
hegemony of the Republican Party until
1912.
Sorge was a veteran immigrant socialist
who had been secretary of the
American sections of the First
International in the 1870s, and who was initially
persuaded by Friedrich Engels to prepare
the material which appears in both of
these two books in the form of articles
for the theoretical organ of the German
Social Democratic party, Die Zeit. As
a result, Sorge's sources consisted
largely of journalistic comment drawn
from the contemporary press, not
scholarly research. This has the
advantage of providing lively accounts not
only of the Pullman strike, but of other
conflicts such as the Buffalo
Switchmen's strike (1892), as well as of
the activities both of the declining
Knights of Labor and the rising A.F. of
L. But it has the disadvantage of
including-for the benefit of the
original German readers-some tedious and
unnecessary elementary factual
information, as in Sorge's account of the
purpose and functioning of the nominating
conventions for the Republican,
Democratic and People's parties.
Although comprehensible from the point of
view of the orthodox German Marxist
tradition from which Sorge came, his
exclusive focus on the workplace, and
his dismissive attitude towards any
working class politics that sought
alliances with middle class reformers, seems
equally outdated to the modern social
historian. Thus while remaining critical,
as Engels had been before him, of
German-American Socialists who refused to
learn English, or to make contact with
native American reformers, Sorge
nevertheless dismisses trade union
efforts to form a political alliance with the
Populists in 1894 as
"infantile" (p.88). This narrow-minded orthodoxy is a far
cry from the counter-cultural interpretation
of Populism recently attempted by
authors such as Lawrence Goodwyn. There
are also few facts in Sorge's book
that the well-read modern labor
historian will find unfamiliar. All in all, its main
interest lies in what it says about the
views of German Marxists concerning
how American workers in the late
nineteenth century ought to have behaved,
rather than in how they actually did.
University of California, Los
Angeles John H. M. Laslett
Rural Worlds Lost: The American South
1920-1960. By Jack Temple Kirby.
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1987. xix + 390p.; notes,
illustrations, essay on sources, index.
$16.95 paper; $40.00 cloth.)
In the recent film Trip to Bountiful,
the late distinguished actress Geraldine
Page portrayed Mama Watts whose
obsession in the early 1950s was to escape
from her son and daughter-in-law's
Houston apartment of the New South and
return to the Texas farm her parents had
founded and where she and her
husband had lived and worked. But in the
end of the film after she had managed
the feat, she, and her son belatedly so,
poignantly discover that the farm and
the culture that surrounded it had gone
and what was left was only to gracefully
80 OHIO HISTORY
adjust to the new. This too is the main
story of this important, immensely
scholarly book which manages to catch in
interesting and readable ways the
rural worlds of the American South that
have gone with the wind and the
emergence of the industrializing and
urbanizing Sun Belt replete with modern-
ization and "agribusiness"
rather than farming.
Kirby in the first part of the book in
very clear ways distinguishes the
different agricultural Souths that
existed in the 1920s, ranging from the old
black and white plantation South of row
crops to the ravaged Appalachian
farms to the grain-dairy-livestock upper
South to the Deep South fruit and
vegetable regions. He takes every
opportunity throughout the book to compare
and contrast the South's experiences
with the national one. In three straight-
forward chapters he forcefully and
authoritatively chronicles the technical
structural changes that rolled, most deeply
in the 1930s and 1940s, through the
southern agricultural economies creating
different farming that had immense
impact on the majority rural southern
population. Part two contains the heart
of the book, four chapters on rural southern cultures
and their changing nature
as modernization reshaped in a few decades the
agricultural environment that
had bounded their worlds. The first of
these chapters delineates the changing
nature of owner and tenant structures in
the various agricultural Souths, while
the second chapter digs deeply into
southern family life. In many ways this is
the most interesting and lively chapter
in the book because of the sense of
rapidity of change by the 1940s. But
this reader was also charmed by the third
of the four chapters, one that began
with an interesting history of the southern
mule and digressed to moonshine,
southern penology, social science interven-
tions, and ended with a brief encounter
with southern music. The last chapter
of the heartland four is maybe the most
original. In this discussion of race
relations in the southern country, Kirby
emphasizes not striking generalization
but ambiguous complexity, which gives
more insight to our own troubled racial
times. The two major chapters of part
three are model essays on migration in
the South from rural to urban and
migration outside the region. They are both
important summary additions to the
literature and deserve to be widely read.
A short epilogue outlines the continuing
impact of mechanization on recent
southern agriculture and leaves the
reader with the troubling image of new
southern rural poor.
In 1984, Gilbert Fite published Cotton
Fields No More: Southern Agricul-
ture, 1865-1880 and a year later Peter Daniel came out with Breaking
the Land:
The Transformation of Cotton,
Tobacco, and Rice Culture Since 1880. Now
Kirby, a professor of History at Miami
University, has given scholars and,
more importantly, general readers, what
is arguably the best of an impressive
trilogy. Clearly, Kirby's work is a
major summary contribution to our
understanding of the twentieth century
South, undertaking, as it does, one of
the key changes of our lifetime. Kirby
in his preface wanted to strike a blow for
reperiodization of southern history by
pushing the New South idea from
concentration on earlier dates to the
1940s and 1950s. He has done so in grand
style, but more touching is his
suggestion that, as in the Trip to Bountiful, all
was not ugly and mean in the lost rural
world of the the South of the 1920s and
1930s despite its exploitation and
poverty.
The College of Wooster James A. Hodges
Book Reviews
81
The Indiana Way: A State History. By James H. Madison. (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986. xvii + 361p.;
illustrations, tables, maps,
figures, appendixes, notes, guide to
further reading, index. $20.00.)
State histories tend to be of two kinds.
One is the familiar multivolume,
chronologically organized account with
each volume written by a different
scholar. Comprehensiveness and rich detail
are the strengths of such efforts.
The other is the one-volume overview.
Its brevity requires a selection of
topics, broad generalizations and,
frequently, much interpretation.
James Madison's The Indiana Way is
a good example of the latter approach.
This book attempts to give the general
reader the essence of Indiana's history
and character, and to do it in brief
scope. Madison has solid credentials for this
task. His earlier work, Indiana
through Tradition and Change: A History of the
Hoosier State and Its People, 1920-1945, plus his work as editor of the Indiana
Magazine of History, prepared him to write this one-volume account.
What is a Hoosier? That is nearly
everybody's first question, and Madison
has no definition to put public
curiosity to rest. Though he can't define a single
Hoosier, he can and he does describe the
characteristics of Hoosiers en masse.
"More so than perhaps any other
state," he writes, "Indiana's population was
native born, white, and Protestant and
lived in small towns and on farms" (p.
168). It is these qualities, perhaps,
that make the Indiana story appear
somewhat bland in contrast with those of
many other states, even its neighbor
Ohio where a variety of strong, enduring
population components plus rural-
urban, agricultural-industrial splits
gave variety from early statehood.
It's not that Indiana lacks drama. This
book, however, does not capture it.
Generalizations are buttressed by little
if any supporting detail. On the few
occasions where Madison fleshes out his
story with illustration or anecdote-
for example, a fascinating insight into
the Ku Klux Klan and its Grand Dragon,
D. C. Stephenson-the reader sees what
might have been.
Madison tries to show the significance
of Indiana's traditions, of "the
continuity of the state's history even
as change occurred." He succeeds in
doing this by organizing the materials
into four major chronological periods
within each of which recurring themes
are examined. Thus if one wants to trace
the evolution of Indiana politics, he
can address the appropriate subsections in
each chronological period and find a
coherent story within a story. And politics
is where Hoosiers shine. Their
inordinate interest has been reflected in an
extraordinary level of voter
participation-from 95.1 percent in 1896 to 59.9
percent in 1984. Rural and small-town
interests consistently dominated the
state's political life to a greater
extent than they did in neighboring states of the
Old Northwest.
This book is no panegyric. Madison has
attempted to "see the whole of
Indiana in contexts other than praise or
condemnation," and when the Hoosier
State has fallen short, as it has from
time to time in support of public education
or in its treatment of black residents,
he has addressed the issue candidly.
Agonizing choices must be made by the
author of a one-volume state history.
It is unfair to criticize Madison for
making those he did, but every informed
reader will regret the omission of
favorite subjects. This reviewer, for instance,
was hoping for more depth in the early
statehood period, in the coverage of the
state's human and natural resources,
Indians, the Civil War, and the 1930s
Depression. But by the time the author
satisfied these wishes, and those of
other readers, he would be back to
writing a multivolume history and defeating
his purpose in writing this book.
82 OHIO HISTORY
This volume is cleanly written and well
edited. Although several special
maps are included, none is a clear
general map of the state, and the most recent
dates from the 1880s. Population and voter statistics
are included in an
Appendix. The author's notes and
"Guide to further reading" contain useful
bibliographical information.
University of Akron George W. Knepper
Lighting The Way...The Woman's City
Club of Cincinnati 1915-1965. By
Andrea Tuttle Kornbluh. (Cincinnati:
Woman's City Club, 1986. vi + 122p.;
illustrations, notes, chronology, index.
$15.00.)
This official, institutional history of
the Cincinnati Woman's Club adds to
growing interest in female political
activism in the post-suffrage era. Armed
with the rationale of "municipal
housekeeping," Cincinnati's civic reformers
and professional women established their
organization in the belief that their
shared domestic values qualified them to
extend their unique expertise to their
community as it encountered the
continuing challenges of urban growth. Like
WCC's in other cities and local Leagues
of Women Voters, Kornbluh
chronicles a gender-specific, issue-oriented
association, devoted to public
educational forums that would create
popular consensus and political action.
Kornbluh focuses on four areas of WCC
activity over one half century:
city-then metropolitan-planning;
municipal government and public school
reform; race relations; peace and
disarmament issues. Within each topical
category, she describes how urban
sprawl, political intransigence, racism, and
militarism, respectively, overwhelmed
enlightened, good intentions. Chastised
reformers constantly lowered their
sights and revised their programs. By the
early 1960s, faith in centralized,
regional planning gave way to proposals for
neighborhood renewal, housing for the
aged and for those displaced by
slum-clearance projects. Nonpartisan
lobbying failed to address the role of
women in political structures. Women's
record as elected officials-especially
getting elected in the first
place-compounded political disappointments.
WCC race relation programs may seem
superficial and hypocritical, but they
were pioneers when they began to
confront racial poverty and discrimination
in 1927. WCC members could pressure USO
officials to allow black hostesses
at Union Terminal during WWII at the
same time their own ranks were
purposefully lily white. Still, these
women braved the taunts of red-baiting city
officials who tried to discredit WCC
attacks on racially-motivated police
harassment. Commitment to racial justice
could not be sustained within their
own ranks, however, as a separate club
of young women disbanded altogether
in opposition to the policies of the
older group. Then the Civil Rights
Movement left the well-meaning older
women behind. Pacifism, internation-
alism, and disarmament ran a similar
course. The second world war over-
whelmed their efforts to promote
international cooperation, and renewed
efforts were dashed by cold-war politics
and hot war in Korea. Support for a
strengthened United Nations gave way to
personal education through cultural
and foreign exchange visits.
Qualitative changes that reflected more
narrow perspectives were matched
by quantitative changes in membership.
Although Kornbluh concludes that
Book Reviews
83
after half a century the WCC was a large
and diverse group of women, her
evidence tucked away in a chronology and a social
profile of club presidents
indicates otherwise. Twenty-nine
presidents-while not exact mirrors of
members-were well-educated, prosperous,
married women engaged in many
community voluntary activities. Only two
of the top leaders were Jewish; one
was Catholic. More telling is the withering
of the membership rolls. Over 1250
women numbered themselves founders. The
rolls doubled by 1921, but within
two years shrunk to the original size.
By the 1930s, membership stabilized
around 500! And the clash with their
younger co-group indicates the inability to
reinvigorate the ranks. In the end,
Kornbluh tells the story of a remarkable but
aging and diminishing group of women who
endured over their life course.
A telling metaphor for the reduced size
and lowered sights of the WCC is
buried in an early chapter. At the end
of the 1950s, the WCC found its own
clubhouse and the historic neighborhood
in which it was located earmarked for
demolition to make way for an
expressway. In conjunction with other civic
organizations, the WCC was able to
salvage part of the area, but their building
and other sections disappeared-testimony
to the conflicts cities and their
citizens encountered in defining shape
and use of urban space. At the same
time, the WCC held an institute for its
members called "One Woman-Two
Lives." The implication that
women's responsibilities to family and to
community were distinct and possibly at
odds was far from the original
assumption of municipal housekeeping.
The women who in 1916 were at home
in their city now faced a gulf between their homes and their city.
How and why
that occurred is addressed too briefly
by Kornbluh. Hopefully she will tackle
this dilemma at greater length, for here
reside clues to the riddle of what
happened to the women's movements after
the mid-twenties despite pockets of
the persistent female activism she
describes so well.
Case Western Reserve University Lois Scharf
Charles Grandison Finney, 1792-1875:
Revivalist and Reformer. By Keith J.
Hardman. (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1987. xvii + 521p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography,
index. $45.00.)
This book is, and for a long time
probably will continue to be, the standard
work on Charles Grandison Finney.
Hardman skillfully weaves together the
story of the revivalist's life within
the context of those religious and reform
movements which characterize life in the
United States during the "National
Period." He notes, as many have
before him, the close proximity of revivalism
and social reform during the first half
of the nineteenth century. Of special
value is his careful dissection of
theological issues which whirled around
Finney to the end of his life. Also
noteworthy is Hardman's well-researched
detailing of problems and personalities
related to the Old School/New School
schism in Presbyterianism.
The picture of Finney drawn from
Hardman's pages is that of the represen-
tative revivalist and religious reformer
in an era of national growth, individu-
alism, and "the rise of the common
man." Finney becomes to theology and the
American church what Andrew Jackson is
to American politics (although
Hardman does recognize that the image
and reality surrounding Jackson are
84 OHIO HISTORY
two different things). Over all, Finney
is painted sympathetically and with
appreciation. But the warts are there
too.
Ohio History readers will be particularly interested in Finney's
Ohio years
and, particularly, his role in the
development of Oberlin College.
In addition to its being
well-researched, this is an exceptionally well-written
biography. The footnotes are copious
and, on occasion, even good reading.
The bibliography, divided into primary
and secondary sources, should please
those who wish to dig further into
Finney and his times.
Findlay College Richard
Kern
Letters of Delegates to Congress,
1774-1789. Volume 12: February
1-May 31,
1779. Edited by Paul H. Smith. (Washington, D.C.: Library of
Congress,
1985. xxix + 595p.; editorial method and
apparatus, acknowledgments,
chronology of Congress, list of
delegates to Congress, illustrations, notes,
index. $18.00.)
Much of what reviewers have said about
one or more of the previous
volumes in this distinguished series is
clearly applicable to this twelfth volume
as well: namely, that it is well-edited,
reasonably priced, printed in a most
attractive and readable format, eminently serviceable
to professional biogra-
phers and historians, destined to become a standard
reference work, and highly
revelatory of both the more narrowly
political and more broadly human sides
of early American history-in short, just
that sort of scholarly "commemora-
tion" of our "Bicentennial
Era" that is most welcome indeed.
Perhaps what might be worth stressing at
this point is that this volume, like
the series as a whole, can also have the
salutary effect of serving as a corrective
to some of our more mindless, if
somewhat understandable, tendencies toward
patriotic exaggeration and a consequent
distortion of the truth about our own
past. That cast of characters that
strides through these nearly six hundred
pages does not always seem to be part
and parcel of that peerless Revolution-
ary generation so long celebrated by our
myths and legends. To be sure, there
are examples here of highmindedness,
dedication, and resourcefulness-even
numerous examples of these and other
human traits deemed desirable then and
now. Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut
agrees to serve, for instance, even
though he is obviously still grieving
over the loss of a son. But if there is not
a little self-sacrifice in evidence
here, there is also much calculation of
self-interest. In a letter to George
Washington, John Jay comments percep-
tively on this interplay of human
strength and weakness in the Revolutionary
period: "Seasons of general Heat,
Tumult and Fermentation favor the Produc-
tion & Growth of some great Virtues,
and of many great and little Vices. Which
will predominate, is a Question which
Events not yet produced, nor now to be
discerned, can alone determine" (p.
363).
Page after page of the book under review
documents Jay's point about the
presence of things other than pure
virtue. Bitter controversies and even
outright feuds break out among the
delegates, with that feud between Henry
Laurens of South Carolina and Meriwether
Smith of Virginia being only one of
the most well-known and rancorous. Like
many of his colleagues, John Lovell
of Massachusetts calculates the monetary
costs of serving in Congress. He
knows all too well of the high living
expenses in Philadelphia, and he complains
Book Reviews
85
about the need to run up sizable
personable debts while serving the public
interest. Similarly, Virginia's William
Fleming, noting that he is living as
frugally as possible but that his
expenses are still running £25 per week ahead
of his meager wages, asks that he not be
renominated. Others are as concerned
about the high costs to one's
reputation. Citing bitter personal experience,
Richard Henry Lee, who will also shortly
resign, laments that the man in public
service inevitably finds himself beset
by numerous enemies and is eventually
just worn down by it all. In addition, there are, as he
notes, the seemingly
endless sacrifices one's family is
called upon to make. Frederick Frelinghuysen
of New Jersey, not yet twenty-six years
old, admits that he feels completely
out of place in Congress and woefully
inadequate to the monumental tasks at
hand. As is his wont, Samuel Adams frets
anew about public virtue-or, better
put, what he senses is the appalling
lack thereof. To some, patriotism seems to
be virtually nonexistent among one's
fellow delegates; and the individual
states, like the delegates that
represent them, often seem to be preoccupied,
though perhaps at times necessarily,
with taking care of themselves. Maryland
refuses to accede to the ratification of
the Articles of Confederation, most of
Georgia is in the enemy's hands, and a
British incursion into Virginia in May
of 1779 does an estimated £2,000,000
worth of damage. What to do? What to
do?
What these hundreds of pages in Volume
12 would seem most to suggest,
then, is that serving in this Congress
at this perilous time in history was not
much fun, which may in part explain why
so many men who were elected
delegates simply did not bother to show
up. Although Georgia chose seven
men to represent her during the
time-frame covered by this volume, only one
actually attended and he for only about
ten weeks. Rates of nonattendance
were very high for states far removed
from Philadelphia (such as New
Hampshire and South Carolina), but they
were also considerable for such
nearby places as New Jersey. And the
turnover rate in the Virginia delegation
was very great as well. Many did not want
to serve, and some of these in fact
did not serve.
Later on, these four months in 1779
might be hailed as a part of a preeminent
age of virtue and patriotism, but at the
time they seemed much more like a
period of deep distress, with troubled
human beings, like the nation they were
trying to create, somehow muddling
through. This volume rescues this colorful
cast of troubled characters from that
mausoleum of nationalistic self-
congratulation in which we long ago
entombed them and lets them live
again-lets them live again in the only
way that flesh-and-blood human beings
from out of our past ever really can: by
revealing to us that array of strengths
and weaknesses that we ourselves can so
readily and even sympathetically
relate to.
Marquette University Robert P. Hay
Labor Leaders in America. Edited by Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine.
(Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 1987. xvi + 396p.; illustrations,
bibliographic notes, index. $14.95
paper; $34.95 cloth.)
Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine have
edited a volume that will prove
indispensable to students of American
labor history. Labor Leaders in
86 OHIO HISTORY
America is: 1) a valuable reference work, giving the essential
names, dates, and
places for each of the fifteen leaders
whose lives are considered in the volume;
2) a sampling of some of the best work
recently done or still-in-progress by our
leading labor historians; and 3) taken
as a whole, a useful synthesis of
American labor history from the 1850s to
the present.
Biography, which has always been the
most popular form of historical
writing among non-academic readers,
seems of late to be regaining respect-
ability among historians. A collection
like this probably could not have
appeared five or ten years ago. It would
have seemed like a historiographical
anachronism, cutting against the grain
of the "new labor history," which was
less interested in leaders than in the
lives of those being led, less interested in
institutions than in culture. But as
Nick Salvatore proved in his biography of
Eugene Debs (a greatly condensed version
of which appears in this volume),
the lives of "great men" can
also reveal much about the times and communi-
ties from which they sprang. In
Salvatore's treatment of Debs' gradual and
complicated conversion to socialism, we
can see reflected the experience of a
generation of Americans whose working
lives and political and ethical assump-
tions were thrown into flux by the
emergence of large-scale industrial capital-
ism. Relatively few American workers
chose to follow Debs' path, but in the
last years of the 19th century and the
first years of the new century many
experienced the same sense of being cut
off from the comfortable verities of
their youth. "At the core of
[Debs'] thought," Salvatore writes, "was a
commitment to the idea of the
independent citizen living within a community
of relative equals." This
republican ideology could have conservative impli-
cations, with its stress on social
harmony and "manly" independence; but it
could also lead in very different
directions, as Debs' later career was to prove.
In the chapter devoted to Amalgamated
Clothing Worker founder Sidney
Hillman, Steve Fraser skillfully blends
social and political history to reveal the
secret of Hillman's success in taming
and channeling the energies of the
politically volatile immigrant garment
workers. Hillman's "special organiza-
tional genius" lay in his ability
to "achieve an alliance between the informal
traditions of workers' control from
below and the rationalized, bureaucratic
procedures of comanagement from
above.... Traditional sentiments empha-
sizing the preservation of old world
familial and communal values were
reformulated to encourage and emphasize
economic self-interest, contractual
obligation, industrial equity, and
purchasing power." The revolutionary beliefs
of the ACW's founding generation of
militants steadily but imperceptibly gave
way to the pragmatic social unionism of
the New Deal era, in the same way and
at about the same pace as the immigrant
rank and filers in the union began to
feel themselves assimilated into
American society.
Other chapters in the book consider the
lives and careers of William Sylvis,
Terence Powderly, Samuel Gompers,
"Big Bill" Haywood, William Green,
Rose Schneiderman, John L. Lewis, Philip
Murray, A. Philip Randolph,
Walter Reuther, Jimmy Hoffa, George
Meany, and Cesar Chavez. This is a
diverse group, but the editors see a
common theme emerging from their
lives-a diminishing of social vision
among those who achieved the greatest
power and influence (Gompers, Hillman,
Reuther)-and a concomitant broad-
ening of social vision among those
destined to wield the least influence but
possess the greatest insights into the
changing character of American economy
and society (Sylvis, Debs, Haywood). To
survive and triumph, labor leaders
had to accept an "oligarchical
imperative" at work within their own move-
Book Reviews
87
ment, and had to learn to live and work
with forces outside the labor
movement, in business, government and
politics.
A collection of this sort will
inevitably inspire complaints along the line of
"why wasn't my favorite labor
leader included?" So, here goes: why isn't
there a chapter devoted to P. J.
McGuire, founder of the Brotherhood of
Carpenters and Joiners, and one of the
most dynamic, interesting and tragic
leaders of American labor? Having gotten
that off my chest, let me reiterate:
Labor Leaders in America is a splendid piece of work.
Mount Holyoke College Maurice Isserman
Freedom's Despots: The Critique of
Abolition. By Robert J. Loewenberg.
(Durham, North Carolina: Carolina
Academic Press, 1986. xiii + 173p.;
notes, index. $19.95.)
This is in many ways an important work,
and was so recognized by the
Earhart Foundation of Ann Arbor,
Michigan, which aided its preparation with
a "generous fellowship" in
1978-80. Its value lies in facing readers with
propositions which may at first seem
bizarre to some, but then follows through
in ways which require systematic study.
Loewenberg might at a glance seem to
be defending slavery against abolition.
It does not seem so to him. If anything,
he is defending liberty against
despotism, but this is in the long run, since the
results of the antebellum reform drive
could not be immediately seen, except
in theory.
The major protagonist here is none other
than George Fitzhugh, the Virginia
controversialist whose Cannibals All!
or, Slaves without Masters (1857)
questioned the premises of antislavery
and was willing to apply its conclu-
sion-in practice, enslavement-to white
people as well as blacks. Again,
Loewenberg does not so much identify
himself with Fitzhugh as build on
Fitzhugh's theory to discern just where
freedom lies.
From time to time he does appear to
commit himself, certainly in his title,
but also in such a statement as has
"leading abolitionist Stephen Pearl
Andrews and Horace Greeley, for example,
. . . openly socialistic while others
were socialists either covertly or
unconsciously"(p. 33). Such partisans, the
author goes on to say,
"catalogued" the evils of the North, such as capitalism,
for which the antidote was slavery.
Whose opinion? The answer is not evident.
It might help if one knew more about the
author's Institute for Advanced
Strategic Political Studies, apparently
at Arizona State University where he is
a professor.
It appears he does identify himself with
Abraham Lincoln, whose major
concern was law, as opposed to the
"higher law" which in effect permitted the
lawless actions of abolitionists, who
helped rob slaveholders of their slave
property. In the person of William Lloyd
Garrison on July 4, 1854, they burned
the Constitution of the United States
itself before a gathering at Framingham,
Massachusetts. The occasion was a
protest against the return to slavery under
the Fugitive Slave Law of the runaway
Anthony Burns. Garrison held high the
burning paper and cried: "So perish
all compromises with tyranny! And let all
the people say, Amen!"-an old
Puritan phrase. On that occasion the awed
spectators echoed his "Amen!"
Thoreau was a speaker at that assembly.
88 OHIO HISTORY
Lincoln's separation from slavery, when
it was within the law, lay in his
honoring compromise and expedience.
These promoted a more tolerable mode
of existence for those averse to slavery
in a country which needed law, yet
where thousands of miles of open terrain
made anarchy, or at least non-
conformity, all but feasible. This was
true for the followers of Robert Owen,
John Humphrey Noyes's "free love"
faithful, the Mormons, and others.
Basic to Loewenberg's work must be his
sources and use of them, for those
weighing its validity. He covers a wide
range, from Aristotle and Plato to
selected recent scholars. With abstracts
from their thinking or research he
develops his or Fitzhugh's case.
"The abolitionist" defied the law, which
included the rights of slave-holders. He
defied it in the interests of a "higher
law." Had Loewenberg noted that
"higher law" looked different to William H.
Seward and to Thoreau, not to mention
John Brown and the fugitive slaves
themselves, he would have had to
interrupt his line of argument. Left open, it
showed him abolitionism leading to tight
social structures of conformistic
thinking and action in which he could
read socialism-explicitly in the Owens,
implicitly not only among the apparently
individualistic Garrisonians, but also
in Fitzhugh himself, socialism there
being identified with class dominating over
slaves.
These matters become misty in Freedom's
Despots, since it distinguished
"history" from political
philosophy, showing no aptitude of any kind for
history proper. To follow the book we
must interest ourselves in "antimonic
pathology," Fitzhugh's
"scientific" analysis of opposed philosophies-self-
ishness versus benevolence, government
versus anti-government, and so
on-which require a mean among
"pathologies." Fitzhugh aspired to locate a
common denominator, to be the scientist
among contenders, each with half a
truth. In fact, Fitzhugh does have some
place among the "fathers" of
American sociology. Since he is rarely
quoted, today or yesterday, it may help
to have a sample of his thinking:
The people of the North and of Europe
are pro-slavery men in the abstract; those of the
South are theoretical abolitionists.
This state of opinions is readily accounted for. The
people in free society feel the evils of
universal liberty and free competition . . . The
citizens of the South, who have seen
none of the evils of liberty and competition, but just
enough of those agencies to operate as
healthful stimulants to energy . . . believe free
competition to be an unmixed good (p.
54).
In making his generalizations, neither
Fitzhugh nor his author are required to
cope with the contrasts between John C.
Calhoun and Hinton R. Helper, or
any other of a score of observers of the
slavery-antislavery scene who come to
mind. Indeed it is here that it makes a
difference whether the reader is coping
with Fitzhugh or Loewenberg, as to
whether this is an academic "exercise" or
a case for slavery, such as indubitably
Fitzhugh sought. He was, after all, the
author of Slavery Justified (1850)
and What Shall Be Done with the Free
Negroes? (1850). It is Loewenberg's decision to entitle a chapter
"Malevolent
Socialism: Abolitionist Absolution or
Free Love," and to commit an entire
chapter to the Marquis de Sade, though
his influence on the antebellum scene
in America was nil. Loewenberg sees de
Sade as "above all a political writer
and theorist even though he is
remembered largely"--may we say, "entire-
ly?"-"as a pornographer."
It is evident to the most casual student
of the mighty subject of abolition that
"free love" votaries were a
minute fragment of the population which made the
Book Reviews
89
Civil War, and no more than showed what
democracy was willing to tolerate.
Any glance at the experimental sector of
society will show a small group of
extreme Owenites, the Noyes followers,
and others, and show them as exotic
and evocative, rather than as central to critical
developments. It will also show
Shakers, Rappites, and still others who
were uninterested in "free love," and
Mormons who were uninterested in blacks.
And it will show abolitionists in
visible and effective numbers whose
austere lives, conventional family life, and
contempt for such stimulants as liquor
cause some academics to scorn them
precisely because of it. To attend to
Stephen Pearl Andrews' theory and
practice, as Loewenberg does, helps to
round our understanding of the
reform-antislavery syndrome. To cite
Andrews as a leading abolitionist is to
falsify the record.
Fitzhugh thought that abolitionists were
the "true defenders of slavery,"
and Loewenberg does not protest against
this grotesque judgement. It shows
how far theory can separate itself from
reality that he does not so much as
mention the late Professor Harvey Wish
of Case Western Reserve University.
Yet Wish's George Fitzhugh (1943)
was and is the one scholarly book on the
subject, and so carefully researched and
done as to have disarmed in academe
the most ardent partisans of the Lost
Cause of its time. What do they study at
Loewenberg's Institute for Advanced Strategic
Political Studies? Yet this in
not truly surprising in a time like ours
which has been kind to academics who
treat abolition, despite its 150 years
of scholarly documents and debates as
needing something "new," the
old no longer serving a wholly new time with its
own premises and definitions.
It is not possible here to follow
through on all posited views, either by
Fitzhugh or Loewenberg. And yet it would
be too bad to have them welcomed
or rejected on merely partisan grounds.
Carlyle did indeed express pro-slavery
opinions, but did he also, as claimed,
say or do anything which placed him with
socialists? How did the abolitionists
(not their pro-slavery opponents) launch
attacks on the family as an institution?
By now it should be no surprise that
Loewenberg sums up his ruminations in
phrases which echo Orwell, such as
"weakness is strength in the moral
world."
Fitzhugh an abolitionist, abolitionist
pro-slavery. As previously stated,
Freedom's Despots is clearly useful, since it helps us determine where we
are
with respect to our history and human
experience. No one can be expected to
read everything, even in one field, and
our slavery-antislavery era is a sea over
which we must find our way to legitimate
harbors. With so many diverse and
unrelated witnesses about, and so much
that needs valid modernization, we
can do worse than follow Lincoln in his
belief that we must trust the people:
"In whom else can we put our
trust?"
Ovid, Michigan Louis Filler
Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace.
By Edward N. Luttwak. (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press. 1987. xii + 283p.; appen-
dices, works cited, notes, index.
$20.00.)
With this book Edward Luttwak clearly
establishes himself, if he has not
already done so, as one of the country's
foremost experts on military strategy.
90 OHIO HISTORY
Luttwak is the thinking man's
strategist, as he offers the reader a fascinating
scheme of thought which borrows heavily
from Hegelian dialectics and
Clausewitz's notion of
"friction." In the bargain he demolishes a number of
shibboleths about strategy, past and
present.
The book's overriding theme is the
paradox of strategy: "The entire realm of
strategy is pervaded by a paradoxical
logic of its own, standing against the
ordinary linear logic by which we live
in all other spheres of life." Luttwak's
rule of paradox leads to some
thought-provoking conclusions about past wars
and discomforting ones about future
contests. In World War II, Rommel's very
successes prove to be his undoing
because of the Allied reaction they incite,
and the Allied bombing of Germany's
industry results, paradoxically, in an
increase in German war production. And
for those who think that an emphasis
on conventional weaponry would obviate
the use of nuclear weaponry in a
possible shootout between NATO and the
Soviets in Western Europe,
Luttwak provides a damper: a substantial
increase in nonnuclear forces by one
side would in fact encourage the other
side to resort to nuclear weapons.
A single review cannot do justice to
Luttwak's Strategy. It is a highly
sophisticated work filled with nuances
piled on subtleties, extremely well
written with but a few lapses into
military bafflejargon, and is a steal at $20.00.
Highly recommended for readers with a
working knowledge of the intricasies
of military strategy, the book will,
however, mystify those who prefer their
military fare straight and simple.
Ohio Historical Society Robert L. Daugherty