Book Reviews
Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker. Edited by Margaret
Connell Szasz. (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1994. xii + 386p.; il-
lustrations, maps, notes, bibliography,
index. $45.00.)
Frontier history has been redefined
within the last fifteen years. Between Indian
and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker
is a reflection both of emerging
interests
and shifting perspectives within the
field. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner de-
scribed the American frontier as the
westward moving line at which Europeans en-
countered the continent's vast, untamed
wilderness. Turner's frontier thesis was
widely accepted and, although modified
somewhat after the historian's death in
1932, it remained the standard
interpretation until only recently.
In 1981 frontier historians Howard Lamar
and Leonard Thompson proposed that
instead of a line of encounter, the
frontier was in reality a zone of interaction, a
cultural middle ground where peoples
came together for a variety of economic,
diplomatic, military and personal
activities. Other historians such as Francis
Jennings and Colin Calloway combined
Lamar and Thompson's understanding
with an appreciation of the
multicultural composition of the frontier and, in
Jennings case, the emergence of a New
Left-inspired Native American history.
Most recently, Michael McConnell and
Richard White have provided focused ac-
counts of the Ohio frontier showing it
to be a region of widespread, reciprocal cul-
tural exchange, cultural
interdependence, and mutual, pragmatic cultural adapta-
tion.
The role of cultural "brokers"
or "intermediaries," persons accepted by both
European and native societies, was
critical to this process of cultural exchange.
Always bilingual and usually related by
birth or marriage to both Indians and
whites, cultural brokers were the
specialized medium that facilitated contact be-
tween both groups throughout the
frontier period. Simon Girty, the infamous
Tory renegade, was perhaps Ohio's most
well-known cultural broker. Girty was
not alone, however, and his role was
shared by many others including Girty's
British Indian Department colleagues
Matthew Elliott and Alexander McKee,
William Wells, a white youth captured by
the Indians who fought against St. Clair
in November 1791 and with Anthony Wayne
in 1794, John Slover, another re-
turned captive who acted as guide and
interpreter for William Crawford and later
narrated Henry Brackinridge's classic
account of the American commander's death
at the hands of his Indian captors, and
Abraham Kuhn, an Indian trader and
Loyalist who took his wife from among
the Wyandots living at Upper Sandusky
and became known as "Chief
Coon," a respected political advisor to the tribe.
The cultural broker's place within
frontier society is the subject of this well-
chosen and informative collection of
essays edited by Margaret Connell Szasz,
professor of American Indian history at
the University of New Mexico. "Cultural
borders emerge wherever cultures
encounter each other," writes Szasz. "For cul-
tural brokers, these borders become
pathways that link peoples rather than barri-
ers that separate them." Because of
their importance, cultural intermediaries have
been part of the frontier experience for
nearly five centuries. "Often, they walked
through a network of interconnections
where they alone brought some understand-
ing among disparate peoples" (pp.
1, 6).
188 OHIO HISTORY
Among the fourteen brokers examined in
this volume, students of Ohio's his-
tory may be most familiar with Andrew
Montour, a translator and diplomatic en-
voy active in western Pennsylvania and
Ohio during the mid-eighteenth century,
and William Clark, a junior officer
under Anthony Wayne at Fallen Timbers who
served as superintendent of Indian
affairs from 1822 until 1838. Readers will also
find a varied collection of other
intermediaries ranging from those in the American
Southwest during the early seventeenth
century to twentieth century reformers and
anthropologists. Skilled writing
throughout combines with the collection's am-
bitious scope to produce a volume of
solid worth.
Much as James A. Clifton accomplished in
his 1989 offering, Being and
Becoming Indian: Biographical Studies
of North American Frontiers, Szasz has
expanded the definition and increased
our understanding of this little-studied layer
of frontier society. Both volumes
suggest the need for book-length examinations
of cultural brokers and their
activities. Although the book's $45.00 cost seems
excessive, this work should be read by
every student of the Ohio frontier.
Ohio Historical Society Larry L.
Nelson
Bonds of Iron: Master and Slave at
Buffalo Forge. By Charles B. Dew. (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.
xviii + 429p.; illustrations, notes,
bibliography, index. $27.50.)
Professor Dew focuses on industrial
slavery in a single ironwork operation at
Buffalo Forge, Rockbridge County,
Virginia, that was owned by William Weaver
and his partner Thomas Mayburry, a
Philadelphia merchant whose father and
grandfather had been prominent
Pennsylvania ironmasters. Weaver's past experi-
ence as an entrepreneur was as an
operator of a textile factory and as a marble quar-
rier in his home state of Pennsylvania. Bonds
of Iron is made more significant
because of Dew's study, Ironmaker to
the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and
the Tredegar Iron Works (1966), which received the Fletcher Pratt Award.
The Pennsylvania transplants were an
unlikely pair of slave owners. Mayburry
viewed slavery in any country as "a
great evil" (p. 23), and Weaver was a descen-
dent of Alexander Mack, founder of the
Dunkers who were fiercely antislavery.
Weaver bought out Mayburry in 1836 and
as a lonely widower, he operated the
ironworks with the help of a series of
younger relatives who replaced each other in
turn. Weaver owned more than 20,000
acres of land scattered across three coun-
ties. He was the largest slave holder in
Rockbridge County and owned close to
seventy slaves in 1858, with more than
sixty hired slave hands. The iron works
was a self-sufficient enterprise with a
complete operation of farmland, mills, wag-
onage and charcoal facilities.
When Mayburry and Weaver ended their
partnership, they divided up the princi-
pal slave family. The destruction of the
family unit was bitterly resented for gen-
erations, and Weaver learned the hard
way to mix incentive, reward and respect for
the integrity of family relations with
discipline when he was faced with runaways,
slowdowns and other forms of passive
resistance.
Weaver's overwork system added to the
quality of his operation and gave his
slaves a certain independence in a world
of their own with their own special pur-
chasing power that was a result of the
overwork system. To a degree the pace was
set by the slaves themselves. His slaves
gained a sense of pride and accomplish-
Book Reviews 189
ment that gave them protection against
the dehumanizing aspects of chattel slav-
ery.
After Weaver retired, Daniel Brady,
Weaver's nephew-in-law, continued the sys-
tem and refined it. Like Weaver, Brady
was totally dependent on the slave artisans
for forge production which led to a
minimal use of coercion and a maximum use of
incentive.
Dew skillfully depicts the changes that
came to Buffalo Forge and the hope that
grew in the slave cabins with the coming
of the Civil War and the final freedom
from slavery. He pieces his documents
together in a jigsaw fashion and moves
from a broad-based vision of his project
to an outstanding in-depth study of
Buffalo Forge. The author's core
material was the Weaver-Brady Papers in the
Alderman Library. Refinement was added
by the James D. Davidson Papers-
Weaver's lawyer-in the Wisconsin
Historical Society. Intimate details of the
world of the slaves were added by the
Brady's "Home Journals" containing day-by-
day records of the work done by the
slave force, Weaver's "House Book" contain-
ing records of the house servants, and
the Freedmen's Bureau Marriage Registers.
Finally Dew made use of oral history
recounted by the descendent of one of the
slave families.
Professor Dew's major contribution is
his tracing of the transcendent impor-
tance of the family in the lives of the
slaves that will extend far beyond a study of
Buffalo Forge. Together with Roderick
McDonald's The Economy and Material
Culture of Slaves (1993), Dew's Bonds of Iron throws fresh new
light on the inti-
mate details of the lives of slaves.
Dew's study will be a welcome addition to the
library of southern history.
Morehead State University Victor B.
Howard
Charles Sumner and the Conscience of
the North. By Frederick J. Blue.
(Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan
Davidson, Inc., 1994. xii + 232p.; illus-
trations, bibliographical essay, index.
$11.95. paper.)
Americans remember Charles Sumner as an
antislavery politician who in 1856
was brutally assaulted on the floor of
the United States Senate. Sumner is also
widely recalled as the Senate's major
Radical Republican leader during the Civil
War and Reconstruction. Frederick J.
Blue provides commendable treatment of
these topics and many others in his
biography of Sumner, one of several brief bi-
ographies recently published as part of
Harlan Davidson's American Biographical
Series.
In concise and effective prose, Blue
traces Sumner's life from his early days in
Boston to his death in 1874. Born into a
respectable but undistinguished family,
Sumner graduated from Harvard College in
1830. Thereafter, while pursuing a le-
gal career, he became involved in moral
reform, especially the antislavery move-
ment. Although Sumner thought of himself
primarily as an intellectual, by the
mid-1840s the issue of slavery expansion
into the West drew him into politics.
As Blue demonstrates, that issue led
Sumner to become a major figure in the defin-
ing political events of his time. He was
a founder of the Free Soil and Republican
parties. Elected to the Senate in 1851,
he drew southern ire as that body's most
forceful verbal opponent of
slave-holding interests. The injuries he suffered in the
1856 attack forced Sumner into
retirement until late 1859. But, as the Civil War
began, he reemerged as an early advocate
of emancipation as a northern war aim.
190 OHIO HISTORY
During Reconstruction, he fiercely
resisted the racist policies of President Andrew
Johnson and advocated federal protection
for the rights of the freed people.
In its brevity and lack of citations,
Blue's biography is designed to appeal to
professors seeking supplementary
readings for American history surveys. It is,
therefore, a bit presumptuous to compare
it to David Donald's expansive study of
Sumner, the first volume of which
appeared in 1960 and the second in 1970. But,
for students of nineteenth-century
America, such comparison is unavoidable, and
the different perspectives of Donald and
Blue's studies suggest how the writing of
American history and the nation itself
have changed since the 1960s.
Donald wrote under the influence of the
Revisionist School of Civil War histo-
rians. That school ignored the suffering
of blacks in bondage and maintained that
slavery was not a serious issue until
abolitionists and other irresponsible fanatics
exaggerated its significance. In
Donald's formulation, Sumner and others like him
were monsters instigating a bloody civil
war to satisfy their own psychological
needs and political ambitions. Blue,
writing with an awareness that slavery and
racial oppression were problems with
which the United States had to deal in order
to survive as a nation evolving toward
democracy, portrays Sumner sympatheti-
cally as an individual struggling with
the most vital issue of his time.
In addition, Blue provides a long-needed
treatment of Sumner-who technically
was not an abolitionist-as a cultural
bridge between the moral values of antebel-
lum reform and a Republican party that historians
frequently describe as the prod-
uct of exclusively political, economic,
and ethnocultural forces. It is by under-
standing the centrality of the slavery
issue in American politics from the 1840s
through the 1860s that Blue achieves a
successful portrait of Sumner as a represen-
tative of a northern conscience.
This is not to say that Blue portrays an
individual without faults. Blue depicts
Sumner as vain, self-righteous, and
unable to refrain from turning political dis-
agreements into personal confrontations.
Like other biographers before him,
Blue notes how Sumner's difficulty in
dealing with other people frustrated his need
for friendship. Nor is the biography
itself without flaws. Blue provides no satis-
fying explanation for Sumner's
commitment to reform and the cause of human
rights. But, overall, this is a fine
little biography of an important American fig-
ure, and one might hope that Blue will
undertake another, more definitive, study of
Sumner.
South Carolina State University Stanley Harrold
What They Fought For, 1861-1865. By James M. McPherson. (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1994.
xv + 88p.; notes, index. $16.95.)
Recent years have seen an increasing amount
of research on the common soldier
in the American Civil War. In 1943 and
1952, Bell I. Wiley wrote well-known
books about the wartime experiences of
Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, and today
historians are concentrating on
discovering these individuals' motivation for the
fighting they did. Gerald Linderman and
Reid Mitchell have already written impor-
tant studies on this topic, and now
James McPherson presents this slim book of
lectures leading to a full monograph on
the subject.
As is usual for McPherson's
publications, this book is well-researched, well-ar-
gued, and well-written. McPherson
concludes that the major motivation for sol-
diers on both sides of the battle line
was clear to them: they were fighting for lib-
Book Reviews 191
erty and republicanism Both Union and
Confederate soldiers believed that they
were protectors of the legacy of 1776,
but they interpreted this legacy in different
ways. Confederates believed they were
fighting against a tyrannical government
in Washington that would take away the
liberties Americans had gained in 1776.
Unionists fought to protect the liberty
and republicanism that the Founding
Fathers established in 1776 and that
they believed successful secession would de-
stroy.
Not surprisingly, lurking in and around
soldier motivations was the issue of
slavery. Southerners saw no
contradiction in believing that they were fighting for
liberty by trying to preserve the
institution of slavery. As McPherson states it,
Confederates unflinchingly believed in a
"Herrenvolk democracy-the equality of
all who belonged to the master
race" (p. 52).
Northern soldiers were hardly civil
libertarians when it came to black people.
Only a few said they were fighting to
end slavery, although quickly they came to
see the intimate connection between
preservation of the Union and the emancipa-
tion of black slaves. Union soldier
opinion "moved by fits and starts toward an
eventual majority in favor of abolishing
slavery as the only way to win the war
and preserve the Union" (p. 57).
"By the summer of 1862, antislavery principle
and pragmatism fused into a growing
commitment to emancipation as both a
means and an end of Union victory"
(p. 59). And as the northern attitude toward
slave property changed, so too did it
change toward property destruction in gen-
eral. The good work of black Union
soldiers, disgust at Copperheadism, and the
realization that emancipation really hurt
the Confederate war effort carried the day.
When Lincoln ran in 1864 on a platform
which included an end-to-slavery amend-
ment, 80 percent of the soldiers voted
for him.
McPherson's final conclusion, though
hardly original, may impact the most on
modem readers. He notes that once the
war was over and the veterans joined other
Americans in trying to reunite the
nation, "many of them reached a tacit consen-
sus, which some voiced openly:
Confederate soldiers had not fought for slavery;
Union soldiers had not fought for its
abolition. It had been a tragic war of broth-
ers whose issues were best forgotten in
the interests of family reconciliation. In
the popular romanticization of the Civil
War, the issue of slavery became almost
as invisible as black Union veterans at
a reunion encampment. Somehow the
Civil War became a heroic contest, a
sort of grand, if deadly, football game with-
out ideological cause or purpose"
(p. 68).
The continued belief in the present day
that the Civil War soldiers were some-
how insulated from the slavery debate
means that books like McPherson's must
continue to be written. They show the
historical inaccuracy of such myth, and
challenge late twentieth century people
to face up to the central fact of the great
domestic crisis in American history.
Mississippi State University John F. Marszalek
A Surgeon's Civil War: The Letters
& Diary of Daniel M. Holt, M.D. Edited
by
James M. Greiner, Janet L. Coryell, and
James R. Smither. (Kent, Ohio: The
Kent State University Press, 1994. xvi +
289p.; illustrations, notes, bibliogra-
phy, index. $28.00.)
Letters and diaries of surgeons are a
scarce commodity in the manuscript collec-
tions of the Civil War. The paucity of these
materials may help create a wide audi-
192 OHIO HISTORY
ence for Surgeon Holt's accounts, but
readers will be richly rewarded for their ef-
forts. This is a very valuable and very
readable resource for amateur and profes-
sional Civil War historians.
Dr. David M. Holt was a forty-two years
old practicing physician in Newport,
Herkimer County, New York, when he was
commissioned assistant surgeon in the
121st New York Volunteers in August
1862. His observations on military, politi-
cal and human affairs represent a mature
viewpoint, expressed candidly and clearly.
Holt was a well-educated and articulate
observer of the day-to-day actions of his
regiment as part of the Army of the
Potomac's Sixth Corps in the eastern theater
of war. The 121st New York was engaged
at Crampton's Gap before Antietam, at
Fredericksburg, Salem Church, the Mine
Run campaign, the Wilderness,
Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg,
the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign
and Appomattox. Holt saw service through
the 1864 Shenandoah Valley cam-
paign, survived General Burnside's
"Mud March" in December 1862, and in May
1863 was captured by the Confederates
while searching the battlefield for one of
his hospital workers. He was freed by
General Robert E. Lee himself when Lee dis-
covered Holt was a fellow Mason.
While the 121st New York was recruited
by Colonel Richard Franchot, a con-
gressman from New York, Colonel Franchot
resigned after two month's service
and was replaced by Colonel Emory Upton.
Upton served as Holt's regimental and
brigade commander until Holt resigned
from the service in October 1864 for rea-
sons of ill health. Under Upton's
leadership the 121st became an effective fight-
ing unit.
Holt describes very clearly the
vicissitudes of an assistant regimental surgeon,
including the problems in obtaining
medical supplies, coping with a drunken and
incompetent regimental surgeon, and the
meddling of line officers in the medical
department. While Holt enjoyed many of
Surgeon General Hammond's reforms,
including improved evacuation procedures
for the wounded, improved sanitation in
hospitals and camps and improved
procedures for obtaining supplies, his graphic
descriptions of the treatment for the
sick and wounded illustrate that additional re-
forms were needed.
Surgeon Holt's letters and diary reflect
the conditions of the common soldier.
Since Holt visited soldiers sick in
quarters daily, his observations about living
conditions have validity. On 4 July 1864
at a location south of Petersburg, Hold
reported, "Our men did get
mad and swear some I must confess, when they had to
put this unsightly stinking hole into
decent shape. ... I wonder a real mutiny
does not sometimes break out among our
boys, when they are so often compelled
to work as they do for the benefit of
someone else."
From May until October 1864, Holt kept a
diary. During much of this period
Holt was the only surgeon on duty with
his regiment. The diary entries for this pe-
riod supplement Holt's letters written
to his wife from September 1862 to October
1864.
Holt's letters include his opinions of
Union generals and other officers in the
Army of the Potomac as well as
observations about Confederate leaders. He ex-
presses strong views on emancipation and
other black issues. Holt was unsympa-
thetic with the "Peace
Democrats" and believed that the Union should continue to
prosecute the war to a successful
conclusion.
The trio of editors of this volume are
to be commended for their excellent ar-
rangement of this material. The careful
use of footnotes to define words or elabo-
rate on Holt's statements makes this
book very useful as a reference, but these
notes at the foot of the page do not
detract from the readability of the text. In addi-
Book Reviews 193
tion to footnotes, explanatory notes to
place the letters in context are located in
the text preceding the letters. The
letters and diary entries themselves retain
Holt's idiosyncrasies in spelling and
style.
Civil War scholars and anyone seeking a
better understanding of conditions in
the eastern theater of the Civil War
will want to add this book to their library.
The Ohio State University Robert W. McCormick
Massacre in Shansi. By Nat Brandt. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
1994.
xxii + 336p.; maps, illustrations,
notes, appendix, bibliography, index.
$29.95.)
No mission field so captivated the
hearts and minds of American Christians as
did China at the turn of the twentieth
century. Millions of "heathens," as the mis-
sionaries referred to the Chinese,
waited to be saved for Jesus Christ. It was an im-
age that pushed hundreds of young
American seminarians to seek their calling in
the Orient. For many the fulfillment of
that dream came at great personal sacrifice.
No sacrifice was greater than that made
by the so-called "Oberlin Band" of
Protestant missionaries who worked in
the northern Chinese province of Shansi
in the summer of 1900. "We are
treated with much contempt and great indifference
by the people," wrote one of those
missionaries, "and from a human point of
view, the work seems hopeless. But the
work is the Lord's and not our own." By
the end of that summer, thirteen Oberlin
College missionaries, five of their chil-
dren, and hundreds of their Chinese
converts, would die for their faith.
The story of that tragic slaughter-and
that of thousands of other Catholic and
Protestant missionaries-is told vividly
in this new book by Nat Brandt.
Massacre in Shansi is a powerful case study of both the triumph and the
eventual
tragedy of American mission activity. It
is a story that speaks across the decades
to anyone who seeks to better understand
that mystery of evangelization. It is a
powerful book that will haunt all but
the most callous reader.
Brandt traces the roots of the Shansi
tragedy to an earlier era-the decades of
European and American interference in
Chinese affairs. Beginning in the middle
of the nineteenth century, the Western
powers seized control of large parts of the
Chinese empire and humiliated the Manchu
dynasty. These foreigners, or "foreign
devils" as the Chinese referred to
westerners, were blamed for all of the ills of the
empire. The missionaries, notes Brandt,
"did not seem to realize that they were
the carriers and spreaders of Western
ideas and mores and might be caught in the
middle when the collision came."
The negative image of these missionaries
was compounded by their ignorance
of Chinese culture. "The truth was
that dreams, desires, and determination aside,"
writes Brandt, "none of the Oberlin
band who came to China was ever prepared for
the reality of living and working
there." Efforts to teach the Bible were met with
quizzical stares. The Chinese "had
never heard of prophets, had no idea where
Biblical lands were, and thought that
certain practices, such as the washing of feet,
strange." The missionaries made
matters worse by their rigid criticism of Chinese
beliefs and practices which alienated
the literati, the people with power and influ-
ence in China.
As Brandt tells it, China was a
"volcano" ready to blow by the summer of 1900.
A drought that spring had put the people
on edge; thousands of peasants, farmers
and artisans faced starvation. Who was
to blame? Most Chinese blamed the out-
194 OHIO HISTORY
siders. "Every slight or imagined
wrong," notes Brandt, "became another reason
for despising the foreigner."
Led by the I Ho Chuan, called
"Boxers" in the West, the Chinese began to attack
all Westerners. "Sha, sha,"
cried the Boxers. "Kill, kill." The foreign quarters in
Peking and Tientsin came under siege,
where a young Herbert Hoover and his wife
Lou manned the barricades. Distant,
unprotected mission communities in Shansi
and other provinces were decimated. The
details of the massacre are gruesome,
even by contemporary standards.
The Boxer Rebellion faded as quickly as
it arose. Western troops drove the
rebels from the field by the end of
August and rescued the surviving foreign na-
tionals. More important, the martyrdom
of the Oberlin Band did not change the
American mission mentality toward China.
"If anything," notes Brandt, "it fired
enthusiasm to serve in China." By
1917, the number of Protestant missionaries
in China had grown to more than 6,000
and the number of Chinese Christians to
600,000. Oberlin College contributed 28
men and women to the cause in the years
after the tragedy.
Massacre in Shansi is an important reminder of the mixed blessings of
Christian mission activities over the
past five hundred years. To be sure, the word
of God reached hundreds of millions; but
so also, thousands died in spreading that
word. Beginning with the Spanish and French
priests who worked among the na-
tives of North America and stretching to
the present-day American missionaries in
Rwanda and other Third World countries,
the cultural conflict over evangelization
has never ended. Nat Brandt vividly
recounts the price of that conflict in a far-off
place at a very special time. For that
reflection we are eternally grateful.
Hoover Presidential Library Timothy Walch
Into the Old Northwest: Journeys with
Charles H. Titus, 1841-1846. Edited by
George P. Clark. (East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press, 1994. ix +
184p.; illustrations, notes,
appendices, bibliography, index. $27.95.)
This collection of excerpts from the
retrospective journals of Charles H. Titus
recounts the early life of an itinerant
Methodist preacher from Maine. Titus was
not an exceptional man and his
accomplishments were modest. He was born in
1819 and raised in Kennebec County
within the comfortable circumstances of a
yeoman farmer. He received a tolerable
education at the district school and, en-
couraged by his father, continued at the
local academy, paying the tuition from
earnings as a schoolteacher. At age 17,
he came under the spell of revivalist
preaching at a Methodist camp meeting. In
a classic account of a conversion ex-
perience, Titus related the emotional
agony and spiritual rebirth common to those
who have had their lives moved by the
realization of their sinful state. He then
committed himself to the life of an
gospel minister.
His travels into the Midwest began in
1841, when he accompanied a family
friend to Indiana. There Titus attended
Indiana Asbury University (now DePauw)
and taught school for several years. He
made at least one extended journey into
northern Michigan and Wisconsin before
he returned home in 1843. Titus then
pursued the life of an itinerant in
Maine and Rhode Island, raised a family, and be-
came an honored member of the Masons. He
died in Boston in 1878.
These seven excerpts from Titus's
journal, retrospectively written in 1845,
cover the formative period of his life.
George P. Clark has done an admirable job
Book Reviews 195
in editing the manuscript and providing
useful notes and references. The first two
chapters, taken from Titus's prefatory
"short history of my former life," recount
his upbringing in Maine and his pivotal
conversion experience. The remaining
five chapters taken from the
"Journal" proper constitute a narrative of travel, pri-
marily reflections on his journey to
Sault Ste. Marie in 1843. The latter are lively
accounts, full of wonderful observation
and detail, but also a self-conscious humor
and wit that seem at times contrived.
Titus's preconversion "former
life" and the world he depicted in his postconver-
sion account of travel into the Michigan
wilderness also make a most curious jux-
taposition. His journey might have been
interpreted as a kind of baptism, from
which Titus would have emerged from
nature refreshed and cleansed of his sins by a
pristine world. Titus was certainly
seduced by travel into the wilderness, as his
romantic waxing over the natural beauty
of the Michigan landscape, rivers, and
forests indicate. Yet in this nearly
idyllic setting, Titus found nearly all hu-
mankind wanting and the wilderness more
debauched and immoral than any settled
place in the East.
Great Lakes fishmen's huts were
"filthy & disgusting in the extreme," a mother
"good for nothing but raising
children," and the children "mangy." The French
population was worse, being
"generally indolent, & extremely ignorant." The
Chippewa he encountered were dressed in
"scanty" and "abominably filthy"
clothes; the children begged whiskey for
their mother so that she might celebrate
July 4th in a drunken manner "like
many of her white neighbors." The natives
were in short "an indolent, filthy
miserable set" whose potential for becoming
Christian and civilized was slight.
Titus even mocked the naive and
misplaced efforts of earnest young Oberlin
graduates who had come to the wilderness
on a missionary errand-a task he might
logically have considered for himself.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Titus
did not find recreation in the
wilderness nor was he inspired to remain there to fol-
low his calling. Instead, he retreated
back to the familiarity of his Maine home,
where presumably he carried out his
life's work secure from the seductive corrup-
tion of the West.
Eastern Connecticut Sate University Emil Pocock
The Birth of NASA: The Diary of T.
Keith Glennan. Edited by J.D. Hunley.
(Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics
and Space Administration, 1993.
xxxii + 389p.; illustrations, notes,
biographical appendix, index. $24.00.)
Students of government involvement in
science and technology owe a debt to
J.D. Hunley and Roger Launius of the
NASA History Office for providing this edi-
tion of an important document that
offers genuine insight into the early years of
the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration. As T. Keith Glennan explains
in his preface, he began keeping "a
hand-written diary of sorts" shortly after his
appointment as the first Administrator
of NASA on 19 August 1958, "but soon
found that my time was all too limited
for that task." During a visit home to
Cleveland in the winter of 1959,
however, he discovered this his four children had
become interested in their father's role
in government. Determined to provide
them with a record of his activity, he
began dictating a summary of the day's
events into a tape recorder each
evening.
196 OHIO HISTORY
The edited transcript of those tapes,
covering Glennan's final year as NASA
Administrator-January 1, 1960, to
January 19, 1961-forms the core of this
book. The diary itself is supplemented
by a biographical essay on Glennan pre-
pared by Roger Launius, chief of the
NASA History Office, and two additional es-
says in which Glennan describes NASA's
early years, and offers his thoughts on
the development of the space program
after his return to the presidency of Case
Western Reserve University.
The Birth of NASA provides a straightforward and fascinating account of
the ex-
perience of a high-level manager in the
Eisenhower administration. Glennan of-
fers his impressions of Congressional
leaders, from Representative Albert
Thomas, who controlled NASA's purse
strings in the House and insisted that his
Texas district benefit from the space
program, to Senators John Stennis ("a fine
gentleman"), Lyndon Johnson ("I
question seriously whether he would make a
very good President even though I think
he is a better man than Kennedy"), and
Stuart Symington ("A man who is a
positive menace on the national scene").
Arranging for large numbers of
Congressmen to have their pictures taken with a
Tiros satellite, providing employment
for the friends of influential
Representatives and Senators, and
insuring that the ever-popular Wernher von
Braun would make appearances in the
appropriate Congressional districts were all
part of the NASA Administrator's job.
As the first architect of the nation's
civilian space effort, Glennan was forced to
grapple with the inter-service rivalries
that plagued the early history of the space
age. He describes General John B.
Medaris, head of the Army Ballistic Missile
Agency, as "a martinet, addicted to
spit and polish, never without a swagger stick,
and determined to beat the Air
Force." The Air Force, on the other hand, takes
"credit for practically all of the
recent launches" and "never loses an opportunity
to put its propaganda before the people
who can help it."
Glennan filled his days with meetings
and conferences. The administrator con-
stantly shuttled between the White House
and Capital Hill. An endless procession
of aerospace industry executives,
anxious to become NASA contractors, trooped
through his office. The managers,
scientists, engineers and other NASA staff
members who played key roles in shaping
the history of the space age competed
for his attention and support.
The diary provides an insider's view of
the great events in which Glennan
played a role. The U-2 crisis unfolds in
these pages, in so far as a father could pre-
sent the matter to his children without
violating security. The administrator wres-
tles with a variety of critical issues,
ranging from the early history of the Saturn
rocket program to the creation of a
rational applications satellite effort and the
developing tug-of-war between the needs
of space scientists and the proponents of
a manned space program that would
capture public attention and compete with the
Russians.
The diary also illuminates the character
and personality of its author. T. Keith
Glennan is a husband who has celebrated
over 350 monthly wedding anniversaries
with his wife Ruth; a father who teaches
his daughter Sally to drive in the
Pentagon parking lot and celebrates the
birth of his first grandchild; and an educa-
tor who maintains close contact with old
colleagues at the Case Institute of
Technology, to which he will return
following government service.
The Birth of NASA serves as a useful commentary and guide to the inner
work-
ings of government in the postwar years.
It sheds important light on the early
history of the American space program
and will be of interest and value to histori-
Book Reviews 197
ans of American politics, science, and
technology. Beyond its obvious value as a
reference, it holds the readers interest
from the first page to the last.
National Air and Space Museum, Tom D. Crouch
Smithsonian Institution
They Had a Dream: The Story of
African-American Astronauts. By J.
Alfred
Phelps. (Novato, California: Presidio
Press, 1994. xx + 291p.; illustrations,
notes, selected bibliography, index.
$24.95.)
"Aim high," astronaut Guion S.
Bluford counseled African-American youths in
J. Alfred Phelps, They Had a Dream:
The Story of African/American Astronauts.
The book, the reader is advised in the
forward (also by Bluford), "chronicles the
successes as well as the failures of
those African Americans who have aspired to
fly into space" (p. ix). The reader
should expect no more than that. Each chapter
constitutes a narrative account of the
life and the experience of each of the eight
African Americans-seven men and one
woman-who were selected for or flew
into space. It also includes an extended
account of the Challenger disaster of 1986
since one of the astronauts who perished
was an African American.
The accounts are laudatory but stop
short of hero-worship. Especially compli-
mentary is the chapter on Ronald McNair,
the African American who died in the
Challenger explosion. Born on a cotton
plantation in South Carolina, McNair
seemed to be a genuinely likable
individual. A gifted scholar, athlete and musi-
cian, he still had to work very hard to
compensate for the inadequacies of a segre-
gated southern education in order to
obtain a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT). Similar
if less laudable portraits of the remaining
astronauts can be found in the remaining
chapters.
If this book was written, as the
epilogue implies, to inspire young African
Americans to similar levels of
achievement, it misses the mark. It is too technical
and too dense for a young audience. This
book will be most appreciated by a gen-
eral audience, primarily one interested
in African-American "firsts" or in African-
American "achievers." Even
such a sympathetic reader might be irritated by the
military jargon, and by the number of
acronyms which must be repeatedly recalled.
The academic will be disappointed
because the author does not place the astro-
nauts' experiences in any historical
context. One is not certain what is to be
learned from reading about these African
American pioneers. The epilogue was
obviously a belated but unsuccessful
attempt to remedy this defect. It suggested
that there are two broad
"lessons" to be derived from the stories. The first is that
black parents play a pivotal role in the
success of their children. The second les-
son is that success comes from
perseverance in the face of obstacles and is possi-
ble despite racial discrimination.
There are other conclusions which the
author overlooks but which provide evi-
dence for the academic who seeks to
bring meaning to the African-American expe-
rience. First, almost none of the
astronauts were from genuinely impoverished
backgrounds. In fact, almost all were
the children of the black, educated middle
class, whether northern or southern.
Though McNair was born on a cotton planta-
tion, his mother taught in the black
schools. The children of the poor do not seem
to make it to the space program. Second,
the segregated world in which many of
the astronauts grew up sometimes
protected and inspired them. It reinforces the
conclusion that, for many
African-American children, racial segregation was not
198 OHIO HISTORY
necessarily a bad thing. While it does
not always make compelling reading, both
the generalist and the academic may in
the end find this book worthwhile.
Cleveland State University Joyce Thomas
And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert
Parris Moses and Civil Rights in
Mississippi. By Eric R. Burner. (New York: New York University
Press, 1994.
xii + 294p.; illustrations, notes, index.
$24.95.)
Robert Parris Moses was one of the most
influential leaders of the civil rights
movement. Quiet and overly private,
Moses conducted his human rights campaign
in a way that rapidly made him a
legendary figure. However, he was never really
comfortable in this role. So, in late
1964, Moses dropped his surname "Moses"
because "he had become fed up with
the media's viewing him as a leader" (p. 205).
Despite the importance of Moses in one
of the most important social upheavals
in American history, his life, and
philosophy, has received only cursory treat-
ment. Eric R. Burner's book fills this
void.
In And Gently He Shall Lead Them, the
author sets out to reveal the "elusive"
Bob Moses, his moral philosophy and his
ideological and political views.
Burner's aim is to provide a unique
picture of the public person without invading
"the private Bob Moses" (p.
7).
Robert Parris Moses spent most of his
childhood in Harlem, New York. From
there he moved upstate to attend
Hamilton College. At Hamilton, Burner shows
how Moses, based on Quaker pacifist
beliefs and on the political philosophy of
Albert Camus, formed his early views on
leadership.
In early 1960, stimulated by the student
led sit-in campaign in Greensboro,
North Carolina, Moses gradually took an
interest in the plight of African-
American student activists. In hope of
becoming involved in this movement, he
traveled to Atlanta and joined the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC). Urged by veteran civil rights
activist Ella Baker, Moses joined the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC). He made this decision,
Burner asserts, because he found SNCC,
"more compatible with his . . . political
philosophy" (p. 23).
As a member of SNCC, Moses spent almost
three years in Mississippi trying to
awaken the state's African-American
citizens to their moral and legal rights.
Burner notes that Moses, from 1961 to
1963, again based on the writings of
Albert Camus, tried to register African
American Mississippians. His goal was to
develop an indigenous leadership group
of African American citizens by awaken-
ing "black Southerners to . . .
[the] consciousness of their power" (p. 96).
However, this tactic, the philosophy of
Moses, and the entire mission of SNCC,
rapidly changed.
Sparked by the constant violent
atmosphere of Mississippi, the ineptness of
the Department of Justice to protect
SNCC workers and also by what he perceived
to be the failure of the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to win any
major support at the Democratic
Convention of 1964, Moses began to distance
himself from SNCC. Moses finally left
the organization, as Burner concludes, be-
cause of his internal conflict between
morality and politics, between purity and
pragmatism, that left him disenchanted
with the traditional American Left that
could "talk only of coalitions and
leaders from the top" (p. 205).
Book Reviews 199
Pressured by the Vietnam draft, which he
opposed, Moses fled to Canada in
1966 and three years later departed for
Africa. There he spent a decade teaching
English and mathematics in Tanzania. In
1977, under President Carter's amnesty
program, Moses returned to the United
States, and in 1982 he received a five-year
grant from the MacArthur Foundation to
teach mathematics to the inner-city youth
of Boston.
And Gently He Shall Lead Them contains occasional repetitions, and the rela-
tionship between Moses and the other
"militant" members of the SNCC should
have received more attention. In
general, however, Burner's riveting account of
the career of Robert Parris Moses
represents a valuable addition to the current lit-
erature on the civil rights movement.
Northern Kentucky University Eric R. Jackson
Crow Dog's Case: American Indian
Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and United States
Law in the Nineteenth Century. By Sidney L. Harring. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994. xiii + 301p.;
illustrations, notes, index. $54.95.)
When Crow Dog shot Spotted Tail in
August of 1881, his tribal council settled
the case by requiring him to pay $600,
eight horses, and a blanket to the chiefs
widow. In collusion with the Bureau of
Indian Affairs, which had been looking for
just such a case, the U.S. Attorney
secured an indictment for murder against Crow
Dog in federal district court. The Supreme
Court reversed his conviction on the
ground that the Rosebud Sioux had the
right to try their own in the absence of any
explicit grant of jurisdiction to the
United States. Appealing to Congress against
this uncivilized substitution of
"bloody revenge," which no one had taken, for due
process of criminal law, the BIA finally
succeeded in persuading Congress to pass
the Major Crimes Act in 1885,
establishing federal jurisdiction over seven major
crimes committed by Indians upon Indians
in Indian country. The very next year,
in U.S. v. Kagama, the court
upheld the 1885 law, enunciating for the first time
the "plenary power" of
Congress to legislate for its dependent Indian wards. The
doctrine prepared the way for Lone
Wolf v. Hitchcock, which in effect permitted
Congress to take Indian lands for
allotment or sale without tribal consent.
Harring demonstrates that the Major
Crimes Act fit neatly with the establish-
ment of Indian police appointed by reservation
agents, the creation by the BIA of
courts and a code of Indian offenses,
and the Dawes Severalty Act as part of a com-
prehensive pattern of attacks on tribal
sovereignty and self-government orches-
trated in the 1870s and 1880s by the BIA
and self-styled reformers of the Indian
Rights Association. The result was to
undermine existing, workable systems of
law tribes had managed to establish for
themselves, at some cost to the peace and
order of reservation society.
Tribal law as Harring envisions it was
not in fact a law of blood revenge, but a
system for avoiding revenge by
painstaking negotiation for alternative compen-
sation to the victims, designed not to
punish but to restore balance and harmony
to the community. He successfully
supports that argument with reference to the
practices of Plains tribes; but his
description of Creek and Klingit behavior calls
the benevolence of the system into
question. Probably Harring is correct in de-
scribing 19th century Creek law as a
dual system, combining traditional law ad-
ministered in village councils with
enacted law modeled on Anglo-American prac-
tice. But the Creeks did punish people.
U.S. authorities in Alaska intervened eth-
200 OHIO HISTORY
nocentrically to prevent the Klingit
from executing witches; but one might sup-
pose that execution was a punitive
practice.
A particularly interesting feature of
Harring's analysis is his demonstration of
the ways in which state courts and
military and BIA authorities undermined, in
practice, federal and Supreme Court
decisions-notably Worcester and Standing
Bear v. Crook-that appeared to support tribal sovereignty and
self-determina-
tion. Despite these decisions, state
legislatures and courts often governed
Indians, and military authorities
confined tribes to reservations and arrested indi-
viduals on what amounted to administrative
whim.
Occasional errors disturb the tenor of
this analysis. Harring refers repeatedly to
the Sioux "treaty" of 1877,
though he is well aware that Congress abolished
treaty-making in 1871. He explains that
the Poncas lost their land as a result of
collusion between federal officials and
local whites to sell it; actually, the U.S.
mistakenly included the Poncas' lands in
a treaty grant to the Sioux. Misspelled
names and erroneous dates occasionally
emerge. This monograph remains
nonetheless a far-reaching and
fascinating analysis of the substitution of federal
for tribal law as a tool of
assimilationist policy.
University of Rochester Mary
Young
"Come, Blackrobe": De Smet
and the Indian Tragedy. By John J.
Killoren, S.J.
(Norman: The University of Oklahoma
Press, 1994. xv + 448p.; illustrations,
notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)
In the book, "Come,
Blackrobe": De Smet and the Indian Tragedy, John J.
Killoren, S.J., attempts to interpret the
story of American aggression toward the
native tribes from the years following
the American Revolution through the
1870s. The story is intertwined with the
life of Peter John De Smet, a Jesuit mis-
sionary who spent much of his life
trying to convert tribes in the trans-
Mississippi West to Christianity.
Killoren evaluates De Smet's work in laudatory
language and portrays him as the
"dedicated activist" for Indian rights. By con-
trast, other whites involved in the
story-political and military leaders, business
men, fur traders, Oregon Trail
immigrants-are characterized to a large degree as
dishonest. Their interest in the West is
described in terms of "hungry for money"
and "greedy for land," both of
which come to them at the expense of the Indian
tribes.
Although Killoren has compiled an
extensive bibliography, which he used to
the research this history, he seems to
have an ax to grind. His religious back-
ground and career at the St. Stephens
Indian Mission on Wyoming's Wind River
Reservation may have led him down the
path of Christian demagoguery, espe-
cially considering his impartial
treatment of all white interests in the West. No
one disputes that capitalist motives in
the fur trade were detrimental to the Indian
tribes and that agrarian and mining
expansion displaced Native Americans every-
where. But are we to believe that the
missionaries, Catholic and Protestant alike,
did not have ulterior motives? They were
in the West competing for converts with
their various interpretations of the
teachings of Jesus Christ, which also disrupted
the Indians' way of life. With each new
convert, another piece of cultural identity
disappeared as resistance to American
expansion was broken down.
De Smet began his work with the Pacific
Northwest Flathead nation and envi-
sioned converting 200,000 Indians to
Christianity, thereby paving the way for
Book Reviews 201
what he believed to be their eventual
peaceful assimilation into American culture.
Throughout the book, Killoren presents
evidence that forces greater than De Smet
wrecked this dream-too little time, lack
of funding and manpower, no control
over the frontier, and racism. Killoren
suggests that if American expansion had
been a slower process, if more resources
had been made available to attend to the
Christian needs of the tribes, if more
competent Indian agents and an effective
policing power had been in place in the
West, and if greater concern had been ex-
pressed for the welfare of the Native
Americans, De Smet's work might have been
successful. But therein lies the rub.
Killoren portrays the demise of the Native
American way of life as a tragedy. Would
not the demise of an existing spiritual
fabric also spell tragedy?
Problems of interpretations aside,
Killoren's attempt at writing history also
provides true historians with a valuable
lesson. We know, for example, that we do
not have to make up the past, nor is it
wise to try to do so. The evidence is before
us, and we must present it as factual
information. Killoren, however, has a strange
habit of putting De Smet in places that
he might not have been just so he can de-
scribe a setting or a mood. For example,
when describing St. Louis, Killoren
takes De Smet for a walk and a buggy
ride through the city and fictitiously places
him in prominent residences and business
and cultural establishments. The author
does this so he can introduce people who
are important to the story. There are
other ways to accomplish this purpose;
historians do not have to rely on fiction
or imagination. The past itself is a
fascinating story.
For those who wish to perpetuate the
myth that all Americans, except mission-
aries like De Smet, purposely worked to
wrest control of the West from the
Indians' hands, this is a book they
should read. For those who are more interested
in understanding the past in all its
complexity, there are better books on the
shelves. Killoren should have written a
biography. De Smet's story is signifi-
cant, but it should not be presented
behind the guise of Killoren's seeming need to
describe Native Americans as victims of
a tragedy.
Ohio Historical Society J.D.
Britton
The American Railroad Freight Car. By John H. White, Jr. (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993. xi + 644
p.; illustrations, notes, tables, bib-
liography, appendices, index. $125.00)
Traditional railroad histories have
predominantly focused on corporate devel-
opment and mergers, the motive power
used by various lines, and occasionally the
more famous passenger trains and their
equipment. Mundane, utilitarian freight
cars have been the most overlooked
aspect of railroad history, despite the pivotal
role they have played not only in the
development of American railroads, but also
in the expansion and economic growth of
the entire nation. The primary mission
of this monumental reference work is
"to explain the principal types of freight
cars used on American railroads from
1830 to about 1910. The materials and con-
struction techniques employed are
important secondary themes." Chapters present
a breakdown of cars by type of service,
and the author has made a conscious at-
tempt to present a broad regional
coverage, including nearly all major trunk lines.
Tariffs, rates, railroad operations,
working conditions, freight car interchange,
communications, scheduling, signals,
etc., are thoroughly outlined in Chapter 1
202 OHIO HISTORY
as a framework for the fuller discussion
of freight cars that follows, but are not the
principal focus of this book.
From their beginnings as something of a
curiosity in 1830, railroads by 1860
had grown to the point that they
dominated the inland commerce of the United
States. The affordable mass
transportation of goods, particularly of bulk cargoes
such as coal and grain, facilitated
western settlement and the development of
cities. Unglamorous, functionally
designed freight cars, despite their central role,
have not until now been well documented.
Scant records of the earliest cars have
survived, but the first American freight
cars, open 4-wheel gondolas, were closely
modeled after British examples. Harsher
operating conditions on American roads,
including more severe winters, a greater
risk of fire from cinders and sparks, and
more flimsily built tracks, soon led to
the development of enclosed box cars and a
shift from rigid 4-wheel frames to
8-wheel double truck cars by 1840.
For the following twenty years, changes
in car design were less rapid. Few
roads were more than 100-200 miles long,
and fairly standard, simply designed
10-ton capacity cars that never left
their home roads were adequate for the rail-
roads' needs. However, a growing network
of railroads following the Civil War,
interchange of freight cars among the
various lines which necesitated greater dura-
bility, and the economies to be realized
by the development of larger cars of
lighter weight all contributed to a
reappraisal of freight car designs in the post-
Civil War era.
Chapters three through six, the bulk of
this work, provide in-depth coverage of
general merchandise cars, cars for food,
cars for bulk cargoes, and cars for special
shipments in the last 30 years of the
nineteenth century. The final two chapters
explore the specifics of freight car
technology (trucks, sub-assemblies, couplers
and draft gear, brakes) and bring the
era of wooden cars to a close with the rapid
adoption of all-metal pressed steel
cars. The major trends in this period were
growth in car capacity from 10 tons to
50 tons, and increasing use of metal in car
construction. The basic form of boxcars
as standard general service cars was
largely determined by 1870, but White
provides detailed review of variations in
size, weight, framing, wood versus metal
bolsters, truss rods, roofs, and types of
lumber. Early refrigerator cars were in
use by the 1850s and eventually supplanted
stock cars for long-distance
transportion of meat and other foodstuffs. Bulk car-
goes, especially coal, form a
significant and favored portion of railroad freight;
unlike perishables and passengers, they
are generally unaffected by weather, de-
lays, or even accidents. As early as the
1840s, several roads were using iron-body
coal cars, although most 19th century
hoppers continued to be built of wood.
Composite construction became
increasingly common through time, and the year
1890 is generally taken to mark the
onset of the steel car era. Wooden cars had
reached a practical size limit, and as a
greater variety of steel stock sizes and
shapes became available, steel's greater
potential for durability and economies in
scale through ever larger metal cars
produced a revolution in car design. From the
first 200 production model all-steel
cars in 1897, pressed steel and steel frame cars
quickly dominated the freight car
market; the Pennsylvania Railroad owned
10,000 by 1902, and had 87,000 on its
roster by late 1908.
This massive volume by a preeminent
historian in his field will surely stand as
the definitive work on the early history
and development of Americam railroad
freight cars and technology. Coverage of
its topic is as detailed and exhaustive as
the often scanty historical
documentation will permit. A very minor point, but
inclusion in the biographical sketches
appendix of Ohio's Willard Pennock, who
played a notable role in early steel car
design, would be desirable; however, a
Book Reviews
203
number of significant Ohio railroads and
developments are encompassed within
the broad coverage of this highly
recommended landmark study.
Ohio Historical Society Jeffrey D.
Brown
Dividing Lines: Canals, Railroads and
Urban Rivalry in Ohio's Hocking Valley,
1825-1875. By David H. Mould. (Dayton, Ohio: Wright State
University
Press, 1994. xi + 306p.; illustrations,
notes, bibliography, index. $51.00.)
Transportation networks. Scholars frequently use these two words in conjunc-
tion with one another. Still, far too
often, studies of canals and railroads provide a
narrowly focused study of construction,
operation, and management that exhibits
scarcely the breadth of a canal towpath
or a railroad grade. Dividing Lines, a revi-
sion of David Mould's dissertation,
provides a much broader analysis by examin-
ing canal and railroad development in
the context of urban rivalry. Ohio's
Hocking River Valley has never been a
crucial artery of commerce in the same vein
as the Hudson River or the Erie Canal.
Nevertheless, canals and railroads encour-
aged the development of agricultural and
mineral resources in the region, allowing
farmers, manufacturers, and merchants
easier access to markets in Ohio and the
East.
Between 1826, when Lancaster merchants
financed the construction of a branch
to reach the state-financed Ohio Canal,
and 1843, when the state-supported
Hocking Canal reached its terminus in
Athens, towns in the Hocking River valley
eagerly sought the canal's economic
benefits. These benefits proved something
of a disappointment, and were soon
replaced by criticism that the state was
"wasting" too much money on
the canal and, at the same time, doing too little to
maintain it. The Hocking Canal did give
producers in the valley easier access to
the East via Lake Erie and the Erie
Canal, but did not eliminate dependence on ei-
ther flatboats or the Ohio-Mississippi
River trade network via New Orleans.
A boom in railroad promotion in the
region after the early 1850s gradually suc-
ceeded in shifting trade away from New
Orleans and toward eastern cities. This re-
orientation created considerable rivalry
between New York, Philadelphia, and
Baltimore, as merchants in those cities
attempted to control the Ohio trade and
guarantee rail links to the West. At
the same time, railroad construction stimu-
lated local rivalries, as towns sought a
place along the main line. State and local
governments influenced railroad routes,
yet failed to develop a rational transporta-
tion policy for the region. As a result
of this limited foresight, many railroads,
such as the ill-fated Marietta and Cincinnati,
suffered serious financial difficulties.
A later railroad, the Columbus and
Hocking Valley, enjoyed greater success and
contributed significantly to the
economic development of the Hocking River val-
ley by raising property values,
encouraging the exploitation of coal and other
mineral resources, and facilitating the
importation of manufactured goods.
Mould's detailed analysis of railroad
development in the region perhaps places too
much emphasis on the corporate
machinations of railroad promoters and execu-
tives, rather than on the efforts of
local communities to control railroad develop-
ment.
Mould also examines the depiction of
railroads in the popular culture of the
Hocking region. This chapter, while
providing an undeniably interesting view of
the local impact of national cultural
trends, does not mesh well with the rest of the
book. Although popular attitudes toward
railroads varied, they nevertheless fol-
204 OHIO HISTORY
lowed reasonably standard patterns
throughout the United States-symbols of
progress, of national unity, or of
corporate greed. This uniformity undoubtedly
subsumed the local urban rivalries that
Mould so aptly analyzes in the remainder of
his work. Finally, direct quotations,
while often enlightening, are frequently
overused-Mould's own words are
convincing enough. These criticism are minor,
however, and do not modify the fact that
Mould has written a fascinating account
that should not be neglected by those
with an interest in transportation, urban de-
velopment, or the history of
southeastern Ohio.
Northern State University Albert J.
Churella
The Papers of Henry Bouquet. Volume VI: Selected Documents, November 1761-
July 1765, with a Catalog of Bouquet
Papers from November 1761 to June 1767.
Edited by Louis M. Waddell. (Harrisburg:
The Pennsylvania Historical and
Museum Commission, 1994. xxvi + 898p.;
notes, bibliography, maps, illustra-
tions, document catalogue, index.
$55.00.)
Colonel Henry Bouquet was one of the
most important British military figures
active along the Ohio frontier in the
days before the American Revolution.
Volume six of The Papers of Henry
Bouquet, compiled under the able direction of
Louis M. Waddell, senior editor with the
Division of History, Pennsylvania
Historical and Museum Commission, marks
the final installment in a twenty-year
project to publish the military
commander's personal and professional correspon-
dence. Researchers will find it to be an
indispensable source of information con-
cerning Great Britain's imperial
interests in Ohio during the early frontier era.
Born at Rolle in the Canton of Berne,
Switzerland, in 1719, Bouquet gained his
first military experience in 1738,
serving in a Swiss regiment fighting for the
Netherlands. During the War of the
Austrian Succession he served with distinction
in Italy fighting both the French and
the Spanish. At the outbreak of the Seven
Years War, Bouquet's reputation as a
capable and energetic officer and his fluency
in German (a valuable asset for one
expected to recruit along the Pennsylvanian
frontier) led him to be appointed a
lieutenant colonel in the Royal American
Regiment, a newly formed corps who would
form the heart of Great Britain's regu-
lar forces in North America. In 1758
Bouquet served as General John Forbes' sec-
ond-in-command during the senior
officer's successful advance against Fort
Duquesne, the French fortress
controlling the forks of the Ohio River. Later that
year, he assumed command of the British
force and supervised the construction of
Fort Pitt on the site of the destroyed
French fortification.
Bouquet's most famous victory took place
during Pontiac's Rebellion. In
August of 1763 troops commanded by the
lieutenant colonel defeated a mixed force
of Ohio Valley tribes at Bushy Run, some
twelve miles east of Fort Pitt. The
Indian defeat blunted, but did not end,
native violence along the Pennsylvania
border, and in 1764, Bouquet mounted a
second expedition against the Ohio na-
tions. Meeting with tribal delegations
at the forks of the Muskinghum in
October, the British commander awed his
enemies, repatriated American prisoners,
and imposed a peace upon the region that
was sustained until the outbreak of
Dunmore's War in 1774.
This final volume of the Bouquet
Papers is a fitting conclusion to an undertak-
ing extending back for over fifty
years. From 1940 through 1943, the
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum
Commission published typewritten tran-
Book Reviews 205
scripts of Bouquet papers found in the
British Museum. In the early 1970s, the
historical society decided to publish a
more inclusive, scholastically rigorous col-
lection of documents pertaining to the
British commander's role along the
Pennsylvania frontier. The institution
issued the first volume of the new series in
1974 and within ten years had published
volumes two through five. Although the
1986 death of Dr. Donald Kent, the
project's director, postponed completion of
the series, scholars will find that this
new volume displays the same high standard
of quality insisted upon by Kent during
his tenure and which is evinced in the pre-
ceding offerings.
Volume six concerns itself with
Bouquet's career from November 1761 to July
2nd, 1765, the time of his last known
writing. Within its pages historians may
trace virtually every aspect of his many
activities including military matters,
Indian diplomacy, civil affairs, land
speculation and settlement, and the supervi-
sion of the fur trade. In sum, this
volume provides an extraordinarily revealing
record of Great Britain's attempt to
establish suzerainty over its newly won empire
in the Great Lakes region.
Unlike previous volumes within the
series, volume six includes only selected
documents. The unpublished manuscripts
are listed in a catalogue of Bouquet pa-
pers from November 1761 to June 1767
found at the end of the volume. The full
text of these documents will be made
available to scholars in a microfiche supple-
ment currently in preparation.
Lavish, insightful annotation, a
comprehensive index, and an extensive
chronology of the events surrounding
Bouquet's activities make this volume both
easy to use and a joy to read. Waddell
is to be congratulated for producing an out-
standing contribution to the study of
the Ohio frontier.
Ohio Historical Society Larry L.
Nelson
1794: America, Its Army, and the
Birth of the Nation. By Dave R.
Palmer.
(Novato, California: Presidio Press,
1994. xiv + 290p.; notes, suggested read-
ing. $24.95.)
Dave R. Palmer, Lieutenant General,
United State Army (Ret.), represents the
best of the soldier-scholar tradition
in America. He graduated from the United
States Military Academy at West Point in
1956 and recently ended an army career
of thirty-five years with a five-year
tour as superintendent of his alma mater.
Besides holding many active-duty posts
in the United States, Vietnam, and
Europe, he also studied military history
at Duke University under John Richard
Alden, I. B. Holley, Jr., Harold T.
Parker, and Theodore Ropp. He has authored a
distinguished list of studies in
military history and theory over the years, and his
achievements, both as a soldier and a
scholar, are impressive.
In this work, Palmer tries to answer the
question of why a "deep-almost vis-
ceral-antipathy" persists in
America, particularly among academic intellectuals,
toward the military, despite "the
great weight of evidence showing that soldiers in
our society may actually be less
inclined to employ force than are civilian lead-
ers," and "that the record of
the U.S. armed forces is on unshakable adherence to
the principle of subordination to civil
authority." In an attempt to answer the
question, he was drawn in his reading
and reflection back to the early years of the
republic, where he discovered that
"the core elements of America's military struc-
ture," including ongoing suspicion
by intellectuals, were formed by 1794 (pp. xii-
206 OHIO HISTORY
xiii). Central to that formation were
philosophical discussions about colonial
quarrels with Great Britain; the writing
of the Constitution of 1787; precedent-set-
ting experiences in the first decade of
the country's independence; and, finally, the
interplay of individual personalities
with these forces. Palmer discusses
Continental Army discontent in the last
years of the War for American
Independence, noting that mutinies among
privates and insubordination among
some officers fueled Old Whig fears of
"standing armies." He surveys weaknesses
in the military establishment of the
Confederation period and the at least theoreti-
cal redressing of these weaknesses in the
Constitution of 1787. He is at his best
in describing military events (Indian
wars, foreign problems relating to military
issues, the Whiskey Rebellion) and
colorful characters (George Washington,
Henry Knox, Josiah Harmar, Charles
Scott, Arthur St. Clair, Anthony Wayne,
James Wilkinson) involved in those
events that led by 1794 to the institutional-
ization of the military along lines
still discernible two hundred years later.
Palmer makes no claim to having done
original research, pointing out that he is
attempting a "synthesis and
analysis," based upon other scholars' contributions
(p. xi). In a short bibliographical
essay, he lists the works that he relied upon and
gives particular credit-justifiably
so-to Richard H. Kohn's Eagle and Sword:
The Federalists and the Creation of
the Military Establishment in America, 1783-
1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975), which he says is
"verging on becoming a
classic" (p. 289). Although some of
his descriptions and characterizations are
open to interpretation (perhaps because
he relied too much on Kohn, good as that
scholar is), his analysis is plausible
and certainly not weakened in its broad con-
clusions. He should, however, have added
an index. Palmer's extended meditation
upon the formative years of the American
military tradition is a fine addition to
the literature of the period. His
perspective as a soldier-scholar ought to be in-
structive to those in the academy who
are blindly antimilitary, although one seri-
ously doubts that reason or evidence will
ever change some minds.
Berea College Paul David Nelson
Double Lives: Spies and Writers in
the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the
West. By Stephen Koch. (New York: The Free Press, 1994. x + 419p.;
illustra-
tions, a note on the archives, notes,
bibliography, index. $24.95.)
And the beat goes on. In what promises
to be a never-ending war between con-
servatives and liberals for control of
the past, the 1930s in this case, yet another
jouster has taken up the cudgels,
Stephen Koch, a self-professed anti-Communist
liberal. That Double Lives will
establish Koch's credentials as an anti-Communist
is guaranteed; that it will do the same
for his liberalism is doubtful.
Koch's primary story, that of liberals
in the thirties who made asses of them-
selves by persisting to paint Stalin's
Soviet Union as a combination workers'
state-anti-fascist bastion, is not a new
one, having been told elsewhere in such
works as David Caute's The Fellow
Travellers. Nor is Koch's focus on Willi
Munzenberg as a prime mover of said
asses all that original, as such worthies as
Arthur Koestler and Anthony Cave Brown
and Charles B. MacDonald, in their On a
Field of Red: The Communist
International and the Coming of World War II, have
given him his due. What is novel is that
a liberal professor, albeit an anti-
Communist one, would tell his tale with
such scorched-earth prose that one might
Book Reviews 207
expect from, say, Richard Pipes or Paul
Johnson. (Koch, in fact, cites Johnson,
an unabashed conservative, frequently,
surely an oddity for a liberal.)
From Andre Gide, Andre Malraux, and
Romain Rolland, on to John Dos Passos,
Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, and
Dorothy Parker-Koch savages them all,
maintaining that they were more
pro-Stalin than anti-fascist. Or, as Koch con-
stantly has it, "anti-fascist."
The use of quotation marks to signal the reader that a
group or person is anything but that
which they maintain (an energetic reader
might try counting the number of times
Koch uses "anti-fascist" and "anti-fas-
cism") has always been a standard
ploy of both Left and Right. Arthur Koestler,
one of Koch's more reliable sources, in
fact once pointed out that one Joe Stalin
was the "uncontested master"
of this technique (see Richard Crossman, ed., The
God That Failed, p. 47), a fact apparently lost on Koch.
In questioning these liberals' sincerity
instead of simply labeling them mis-
guided, or even stupid, Koch ignores how
Hitler's Nazi Germany and Stalin's
Soviet Union presented themselves to the
world at large in the thirties. Hitler and
the Nazis hid little and left little to
the imagination; the Night of the Long Knives
and Kristallnacht were Nazism on
display. Stalin, on the other hand, cunningly
dazzled Western liberals with a
skillfully conducted Potemkin village-like public
relations machine that led them-and they
were ready and willing to be led-to be-
lieve that the workers' paradise, or
something approaching it, and the brother-
hood of man were near at hand. Martin
Malia, certainly no starry-eyed liberal,
makes somewhat the same point in his
recent The Soviet Tragedy: A History of
Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 when he notes that Soviet socialism had more in-
ternational appeal than German fascism
because it successfully propagandized
much of the world into believing that
its message was directed to all mankind
(rather than just Aryans), that such
Enlightenment ideals as reason and egalitarian
democracy were part of the Soviet
system. Liberals who should have known better
bit on this higher hogwash out of
conviction, however misguided, rather than just
because they were duped by Willi
Munzenberg and his lieutenants.
What really stands out, and what is most
controversial, in Double Lives is
Koch's version of what he calls
"the Dimitrov conspiracy." As most historians
have it, soon after Hitler came to power
in February 1933 the Reichstag building
burned to the ground. Hitler and the
Nazis responded by shrewdly using the fire as
a pretext to rid Germany of its
Communists. Among those arrested were three
Bulgarian Communists, led by Georgi
Dimitrov, and one German Communist who
were put on trial in Leipzig. Dimitrov,
according to the standard version, defi-
antly stood up to his accusers and was
acquitted, to the applause of the world's Left
in general and Moscow in particular. But
Koch's version, which friendly reviewer
Ronald Radosh, writing in the National
Review, says "seems preposterous on the
face of it," is that the entire
process of arrest, trial, and acquittal was a charade
concocted by Hitler and Stalin. And if
Dimitrov seemed brave, he had good rea-
son: he knew ahead of time that he would
be acquitted. The trial had been rigged.
For what reasons? Hitler used the trial
to discredit the SA, which Munzenberg and
others had accused of starting the fire,
prior to eliminating it, while Stalin
emerged as the leader of an
"anti-fascist" crusade. In any event, Koch says, "Six
years before the Nazi-Soviet Pact [1939]
. . . the dictators were already secretly
waltzing together, in full
collaboration" (p. 57).
Not surprisingly, such views attracted
the ire of other historians. Maurice
Isserman, reviewing Double Lives for
The New York Times Book Review, and
David Caute, doing the same for The
New Republic, both feel that Koch's
"Dimitrov conspiracy," along
with a number of his other views, rests on virtually
208 OHIO HISTORY
no evidence. Koch, replying to
Isserman's review, says that the Dimitrov con-
spiracy has been confirmed by such
historians as Alaksandr Nekrich and Mikhail
Heller, who maintain in their Utopia
in Power that "The documents of the German
Foreign Ministry, captured by the Allies
at the end of World War II and published
in London during the 1950s, show that
secret negotiations between Stalin's
agents and the Hitler Government began
as early as 1933." Supporting Koch,
Ronald Radosh, noting that the
conspiracy was not preposterous after all, cites
Robert Tucker's fine Stalin in Power:
The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 as
proof because Tucker points out that
Stalin early on sought a "diplomacy accord"
with Hitler, and that, such
collaboration helped abet the Nazi victory. Here both
Koch and Radosh's arguments if not
beside the point are neither to the point. At
issue is not whether Hitler and Stalin
collaborated, if not in the "full
collaboration" that Koch sees.
After all, historians other than Tucker-Robert
Conquest, Walter Laqueur, and Alan
Bullock come to mind-have pointed this out.
At issue is whether they collaborated in
a Dimitrov conspiracy, and on this point
both Koch and Radosh beat around the
bush. The reader should note that Nekrich
and Heller mention secret negotiations
between Hitler and Stalin, but say nothing
about said conspiracy. Radosh makes
matters worse by bringing Tucker into the
act. Tucker, as Radosh notes, does
mention sinister collaboration between the
two tyrants, but he says absolutely
nothing about a Dimitrov conspiracy. In fact,
Tucker, on page 339 of his Stalin in
Power, flatly contradicts Koch and Radosh by
saying: "Arrested by the Nazis and
put on trial in Leipzig as one of the alleged
culprits, Dimitrov courageously defied
the Nazi court's charges and gained
international fame." It would seem
that, at best, Koch and Radosh believe in
evidence by inference.
While on sources, Koch's reliance on
Babette Gross, Willi Munzenberg's
widow, raises additional questions.
Interviewed by Koch for a week in 1989,
Babette would seem a peerless source.
But then again, she was looking back at
events that occurred, in some cases,
over sixty years ago. Speaking of the Sacco-
Vanzetti case, Babette told Koch,
simply, that is was "Munzenberg's idea" (p. 31).
Yet, as Caute points out, Babette's 1967
biography, Munzenberg, does not even
mention a Munzenberg involvement with
the case. Other than what might have
been a faulty memory, Babette in any
case never suffered from an obsession with
the truth. As Brown and MacDonald point
out on page 473 of their On a Field of
Red, Babette was "a woman with propagandistic skills to
complement those of her
husband." That she had kicked the
habit by 1989 is at least open to question.
There is more than a whiff of polemics
and conspiracy theory to Double Lives.
Virtually everyone involved functions
not as an individual with a free, indepen-
dent will but as a member (or dupe) or
apparatchik of some manipulated group, cir-
cle, or apparat carrying out
someone's-usually Willi Munzenberg and his min-
ions-hidden agenda. Once Willi gained
control of the "anti-fascist" movement
and Hitler and Stalin entered into
"full" collaboration in 1933, everything that
followed was to a great extent
predetermined. A real problem with this interpreta-
tion is that its reductionism and
determinism tend to remind the reader of the rea-
soning and locked-in logic of the very
"ism" that Koch so obviously despises.
One might reply to this type of history
by quoting H.A.L. Fisher's lament in the
preface to his History of Europe (see
Anthony Burgess, Rites of Spring: The Great
War and the Birth of the Modern Age, p. 388): "Men wiser and more learned than I
have discerned in history a plot, a
rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These har-
monies are concealed from me. I can see
only one emergency following upon an-
other as wave follows upon wave."
Amen.
Book Reviews 209
Finally, Koch does not help his cause by
including the following in a book so
full of absolutes and certitudes:
"It is said, may have been, It is a reasonable
guess, He seems to have, He must have
been, It is possible, It is close to certain,
Another source may have been, probably,
My guess, It is quite possible, She does
not seem, She may have been, almost
certainly, so-called, seems to have, isn't it
possible, seemed to, might have, may
very well have been, It may be assumed, in
all probability, was almost certainly,
quite possibly, It seems likely, I think it
very possible, It was quite possible, As
best I can determine, It appears that," and
so on. All of which suggest that perhaps
Koch leans too heavily on the conjec-
tural in much of his work.
Double Lives is without doubt a controversial, even provocative
read. As such,
it should lead inquiring readers to
further investigation of what happened in the
ideological battleground that was the
1930s.
Ohio Historical Society Robert L.
Daugherty
Citizen Worker: The Experience of
Workers in the United States with Democracy
and the Free Market during the
Nineteenth Century. By David
Montgomery.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993. x + 189p.; notes, bibliogra-
phy, index. $21.95.)
David Montgomery's Citizen Worker consists
of three essays, portions of
which he previously presented as the
Tanner Lecturers on Human Values at
Brasenose College, Oxford, in April and
May of 1991. Montgomery's central ar-
gument addresses the relations between
the expansion of the franchise, the emer-
gence of a national economy based on
free labor and the ability of working people
to politically influence these
developments. Montgomery argues that the ability
of average citizens to exercise
influence on the political process "was jeopardized
by an emerging economic system propelled
by the quest for private profits within
the parameters set by market
forces." Montgomery maintains that as property
qualifications for the franchise were
lowered or dropped and the electorate ex-
panded, "the less capacity elected
officials seemed to have to shape the basic con-
tours of social life" (p. 2).
Citizen Worker contributes to the current debates on labor, the law
and the state.
Montgomery's main argument is with
Christopher Tomlins. According to
Tomlins, Montgomery says,
master-and-servant law was introduced in American
courts in the colonial period by legal
commentators. Montgomery, on the other
hand, asserts that the doctrine of
master and servant was "reduced by popular
struggles, only to rise again by
mid-century in new forms" (p. 27). He shows that
it was "the triumph of wage labor
as a national system codified in the doctrine of
freedom of contract, [that] precipitated
a new debate over how to deal with workers
who did not work" (p. 86). With the
end of slavery and expansion of free wage la-
bor "the principle of employment at
will was now supplemented by laws requiring
the free worker to have some
employer" (p. 88). Freedom of contract was supple-
mented by a web of political and legal
coercion, consisting of police, armed
forces, private administration of poor
relief, the judiciary and the legal profes-
sion, and urban real estate markets,
which favored large landowners. Together,
they imposed limits on the political and
economic freedom of wage workers.
Montgomery's emphasis on the role of the
state in regulating social and labor
relations leads him to an argument with
Steven Skowronek. Where Showronek
210 OHIO HISTORY
sees party politics taking precedent
over a state apparatus, which, he says, was in
decline by the 1870s, Montgomery asserts
that "the coercive capacity of govern-
ment grew steadily throughout the
century even as the authority it exercised was
narrowed in scope." He agrees with
Skowronek that political parties functioned as
transmission belts for translating
popular sentiment into governmental policy,
but emphasizes the coercive capacities
of the political process. Montgomery says
that "the discourse through which
parties formulated and disseminated their pro-
posals . . . also imposed effective
restraints on the expression and even the con-
tent of working people's aspirations and
opinions" (p. 117).
The book is not without some flaws. For
example, a more attentive editor may
have caught that Montgomery twice used a
quote by Ray Gunn stating that by
1840 in New York state "'the
economy was effectively insulated from democratic
control'" (pp. 2, 59). Although the
quote captures well a central assertion of
Montgomery's, it is not necessary to use
it in two instances. Notwithstanding,
Citizen Worker is an important contribution to American labor history
that no
student or scholar in the field will
want to miss.
University of Cincinnati Thomas
Winter
Race and the City: Work, Community,
and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820-1970.
Edited by Henry Louis Taylor, Jr.
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
xxvi + 308p.; notes, illustrations, name
index, subject index. $44.95.)
Race and the City grew out of a conference on Cincinnati African-American
his-
tory organized by the book's editor,
Henry Taylor. The conference was part of
Cincinnati's 1988 bicentennial
celebration; the book is the third volume in the
University of Illinois Press series,
Greater Cincinnati Bicentennial History
Series.
The eleven essays are organized
chronologically and cover a range of topics.
Nevertheless, five core articles focus
on changing structural conditions that Afro-
Cincinnatians confronted over the 150
year period. The remaining articles on the
1841 race riot, "Black Leadership
in Antebellum Cincinnati," and 20th century
housing reform, social work, race
relations committees and the Urban League offer
valuable insights on specific aspects of
the black experience.
By tracing African-American history
within the city-building process in his in-
troduction and two other essays, Taylor
helps establish the context for understand-
ing the black experience in Cincinnati.
He argues effectively that different stages
of urban development differentially
affected the city's black population. He also
locates Cincinnati historically and
spatially as "part of the borderland, a border
city in a border state" (p. xiii).
This produced, especially in the antebellum years,
a city with "a dual personality, a
schizophrenic, northern and southern personality
occupying the same urban body" (p.
xiv).
Focusing on "The Black Residential
Experience and Community Formation in
Antebellum Cincinnati," Taylor and
Vicky Dula demonstrate that antebellum black
Cincinnati constructed a community
despite dispersed residential patterns; this
community formed around several
residential and institutional clusters. Nancy
Bertaux ("Structural Economic
Change and Occupational Decline among Black
Workers in Nineteenth-Century
Cincinnati") finds that continuing employment
discrimination blocked access to new
industrial jobs. In another important essay,
Taylor traces the growing residential
segregation produced by the new industrial
Book Reviews 211
city. By the "decades of the 1920s
and 1930s, residential segregation increased
dramatically" producing a
"ghetto-slum" in the West End (p. 178). After World
War II, as Charles
Casey-Leininger finds, a "Second Ghetto" emerged in Avondale.
This new site emerged as industry,
highway construction, and redevelopment en-
croached on the West End.
Within this large structure, the
remaining essays help flesh out the black
Cincinnati experience. Two focus
explicitly on the antebellum period. James
Horton's and Stacy Flaherty's careful
analysis of leaders and the larger black
community demonstrates that while
"leaders were distinct from most of the city's
blacks" in terms of occupation,
literacy, age and skin color, they also shared much
in common (p. 88). In their essay on
"John Mercer Langston and the Cincinnati
Riot of 1841," William and Aimee
Lee Cheek provide the book's best description
of the black community's organizational
structure.
Four essays discuss 20th century
organizations that dealt with race relations.
Robert Fairbanks shows how housing
reform often worked against the interests of
African-American residents, while Andrea
Kornbluh, Robert Burnham and Nin
Mjagkij respectively trace the
activities and roles of the Negro Civic Welfare
Committee (1919-49); the Mayor's
Friendly Relations Committee (1943-49); and
the Cincinnati Urban League (1948-63).
As with many such collections, the
essays vary in quality and import. Despite a
strong introduction these essays remain
disparate; few speak to each other or to
the central concept of Cincinnati as a
border city. Moreover, the discussion of
changing residential patterns lacks a
broader, comparative framework that could
contrast border city Cincinnati against
patterns emerging in old and new South
cities or northern industrial centers.
Few essays attempt "history from the bottom
up"; ordinary Afro-Cincinnatians
are seldom actors here while many key institu-
tions of black Cincinnati remain
unexamined. Nevertheless, this is an important
book; its essays on structural change,
residence patterns and ghetto formation rep-
resent significant additions to the
literature on black urban history.
Cleveland State University James Borchert
Democratic Miners: Work and Labor
Relations in the Anthracite Coal Industry,
1875-1925. By Perry K. Blatz. (Albany: State University of New
York Press,
1994. xv + 368p.;
illustrations, notes, index. $19.95 paper.)
Democratic Miners impressively surveys workers' struggles in the three
"hard
coal" mining fields of eastern
Pennsylvania from the Gilded Age through the
Progressive era. Perry Blatz places the
watershed 1902 strike of 150,000 an-
thracite miners, settled after President
Theodore Roosevelt threatened to militarize
the mines, within a context of fifty
years of rank-and-file militancy. He shows
that miners, in their disputes with coal
operators and union leaders, experienced
democracy as they could not in other
aspects of their lives.
Mine worker militancy, Blatz reveals,
stemmed from the "capriciousness and
complexity" (p. 9) of anthracite
mining. Chronic underemployment, low wages,
dangerous conditions, a chaotic wage and
occupational structure, and employer
dishonesty bred insecurity and anger in
mine workers. In some years, collieries
might operate fewer than 200 days. Less
than a third of the employees were
"miners," many of whom bid for
a coal "chamber" and then subcontracted other
workers. One in five employees was under
sixteen and increasingly many came
212 OHIO HISTORY
from southeastern Europe. Only a few
workers were paid by the day; most were
paid by the unstandardized coal car or
by the inflated "miner's ton." Firms docked
workers for cars considered underloaded
or for tonnage considered too poor in qual-
ity. The floating pay scale, tied to the
price of coal, had no floor and dragged
wages even lower during depressions. The
miners' outrage at the injustice and in-
security of the anthracite work regime,
Blatz argues, "constituted nothing less that
the essential democratic impulse towered
unionization" (p. 99).
Blatz credits a mix of rank-and-file
militancy and shrewd union leadership with
building an anthracite union at the turn
of the century. Once organized throughout
the anthracite region, miners finally
demonstrated the unity necessary for effec-
tive bargaining. At the seam mine, the
union capitalized on rank-and-file mili-
tancy to enroll members and to pressure
operators for recognition. As protests
grew after 1897, says Blatz, the
workers' struggle against colliery management
and the union's fight against coal
operators united in a symbiotic relationship in
the industry-wide strike of 1900.
Nevertheless, Blatz suggests the
conservative plans of union leaders seeking
recognition from employers often clashed
with miners' desires to carve out a more
democratic workplace. Workers voted to
strike in 1902, ignoring the cautionary
advice of UMWA chief John Mitchell.
Later, as union leaders pursued recognition
during a period of "twilight
bargaining" (p. 171), workers, more concerned with
changing the day-to-day work process,
simply stopped paying dues. Improved
economic conditions helped union negotiators
win contract gains in 1912, which
revitalized membership and paved the way
for the eight-hour day, but rank-and-file
insurgency continued to grow, especially
after 1917.
Blatz provides insight on the democratic
ferment in unions. In many ways the
Locals and Districts fell short of
democracy; for example, immigrant candidates to
token elected positions. However,
viewing democracy as a process rather than a
result, Blatz argues that the UMWA
provided workers with a medium through
which to exercise their "democratic
yearnings" (p. 131) in strike votes and the
growing insurgency movement. "Like
no other institution," he concludes, indus-
trial unions "put an intensely
democratic experience within the reach of America's
workers" (p. 264).
Democratic Miners will be valuable not only for the labor historian, but
for
anyone interested in the coal industry,
labor relations, or the democratic process.
Skillfully employing corporate archival
material, union sources, and local news-
papers, Blatz draws a compelling picture
of militant miners, conservative union
leaders, and intransigent employers.
Blatz is weakest in his treatment of the state:
only passing mention is made of
Washington's role during World War I, provid-
ing no context for the UMWA's 1919 call
to nationalize the mines. Still,
Democratic Miners suggests the value of studies of rank-and-file
militancy in
other key industries. Other scholars may
choose to pay closer attention to the in-
fluence of community and culture on the
expression of worker dissatisfaction, but
all will be inspired by Blatz's story of
the anthracite miners' relentless pursuit of
industrial justice.
The Ohio State University Eric
Karolak
Once a Legend: "Red Mike"
Edson of the Marine Raiders. By Jon T.
Hoffman.
(Novato, California: Presidio Press,
1994. xvi + 434p.; maps, illustrations, es-
say on sources, index. $24.95.)
Book Reviews
213
Merritt "Red Mike" Edson was
truly "once a legend," and for good reason. His
story, as recounted by Jon T. Hoffman, a
Marine himself, is that of a Marine's
Marine, a seemingly fearless fighter and
leader of men who, while winning a
Medal of Honor for himself at
Guadalcanal, perhaps as much as any one man
helped establish the parallel legend of
the modem Marine Corps.
Weighing only 140 pounds, Edson bore
little physical resemblance to
Hollywood's version of a fighting
Marine. (Interestingly, the same was true of
the Army's Audie Murphy.) What he lacked
in weight, however, he more than
made up for with toughness, stamina, and
an iron will that made him a man to lean
on in combat, be it on Coco River
patrols in Nicaragua, or on Tulagi, Guadalcanal,
Tarawa, and Tinian in World War II
battling the Japanese. Edson was virtually
fearless, not only with his own life but
with that of his men as well, a trait which
led some of them to brand him "Mad
Merritt the Morgue Master." This willing-
ness to risk death, perhaps even to seek
it, might provide at least a partial expla-
nation for Edson's later suicide.
Hoffman's account of Edson's life
touches all bases, professional and personal,
up to his death in 1955. Edson's
exploits in World War II are well known, espe-
cially those on Guadalcanal for which he
and the 1st Marine Division became fa-
mous. While Edson contributed much to
the entire battle, he was awarded the
Medal of Honor primarily for his role in
defending what would become known as
"Edson's Ridge," or as some
Marines had it, "Bloody Ridge." Hoffman covers it
well, particularly Edson's leadership qualities
and tactical contributions.
Less well known are Edson's postwar
activities, such as his, and the Corps,'
opposition to the War Department's plan
to unify America's armed forces, a plan
which Marines felt would rob the Corps
of its role in the national defense struc-
ture. And somewhat surprising to those
schooled in military stereotypes, Edson
also opposed unification on the ground
that the War Department plan would give
the military too much power, and that,
if adopted, it would lead inevitably to mili-
tarism and dictatorship. "It will
impose upon this country a strong military clique
which will surely change our foreign
policy from one of defense to aggression-
and will dominate our domestic policies
as well.... It will mean the adoption of
the same system which ruined Germany and
Japan and is now in force in Russia"
(p. 342). Strong language, indeed, from
a military hero.
Finally, Hoffman goes into some detail
about Edson's unhappy marriage.
Military marriages always have built-in
problems, such as lengthy periods apart,
but Edson aggravated an already shaky
relationship with his constant infidelities.
(Hoffman suggests that Edson
"seemed to practice fidelity of a sort by maintaining
only one love at a time.") Edson's
awareness of how badly he had treated his wife,
Ethel, who probably merited a medal of
honor of her own, and of how he had ne-
glected his entire family, probably
helped push him toward suicide.
Once a Legend is a good read, as the saying goes. This reviewer's
only real crit-
icism is that Hoffman provides no
footnotes or endnotes, substituting in their
place an imprecise essay on sources.
Ohio Historical Society Robert L.
Daugherty
A Union Soldier Returns South: The
Civil War Letters and Diary of Alfred C.
Willett, 113th Ohio Volunteer
Infantry. Edited by Charles E.
Willett. (Johnson
City, Tennessee: The Overmountain Press,
1994. xvi + 117p.; illustrations,
appendices, index. $14.95.)
214 OHIO HISTORY
In a wave of publications of Civil War
letters and diaries unsurpassed since the
Reconstruction years, students of the
nation's defining moment have been treated
to available "I was there"
accounts by participants of the conflict. Three decades
ago the centennial of the war spurred
interest in primary-source readings, but noth-
ing in memory has thrown the door open
like Ken Burns's spectacular PBS series,
"The Civil War." Reenactors
drill and camp as never before and many find roles in
the unabated filming of miniseries of
which Ted Turner's "Gettysburg" is only the
most recent installment. Whether or not
Disney will build its theme park in
Northern Virginia or elsewhere to
capitalize on the desire for a kind of secondhand
"primary" experience will soon
be seen.
The best of the most current releases of
soldier's letters are highly readable,
"lots-of-letters" compilations
that have been adequately footnoted, include com-
prehensive analytical introductions
which place actors and acts into historical
perspective, and have been subjected to
the criticisms of press readers-generally
professional Civil War historians-before
publication. Several of the best exam-
ples include Fallen Leaves: The Civil
War Letters of Major Henry Livermore
Abbott (Kent, 1991), On the Altar of Freedom: Corporal
James Henry Gooding
(Amherst, 1991), In the Hands of
Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain and the
American Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1992), and A Surgeon's Civil War: The
Letters
& Diary of Daniel M. Holt, M.D.. (Kent, 1994).
Charles Willett's A Union Soldier
Returns South brings to press twenty-five let-
ters that his great-grandfather Alfred
C. Willett wrote to sweetheart Sophie Snider
and two letters that he wrote to his
sister Ellen during the war. The editor also in-
cluded the brief entries Alfred made in
his 1864-65 diary.
In 1846, four-year-old Alfred immigrated
with his family from Oxfordshire,
England, to New York. After his parents
divorced and his mother took the children
west to Illinois, Alfred somehow ended
up in Lafayette, Ohio, where he met his fu-
ture wife Sophie Snider. He worked as a
farm laborer until joining the 113th Ohio
Infantry in 1862.
Mary Ann Litton's introduction to the
letters tells us little else about Alfred, her
great-great-grandfather, because of a
paucity of information on her subject. She
chose not to examine the contours of
society, business, education, and religion in
Lafayette or put Alfred's service into
historical context. Neither editor Willett nor
Litton used explanatory footnotes to
explain the letters or to document their work.
Additionally, Litton's use of "must
have," "surely," "probably," "must have,"
and
"must have" in five
consecutive sentences on page xv raises doubt as to what re-
ally happened.
Willett saw action mostly in Tennessee
and Georgia, fighting at Chickamauga
and in Sherman's push through Atlanta to
Savannah. His letters express his belief
in duty and desire to put down the
"wicked Rebelion" (p. 44). There are only snip-
pets about camp life and even less
detail concerning the various battles. Beyond
the briefest mentions of Sherman, Bragg,
Rosecrans, his friend John Simpson,
"two niggurs boys" (p. 26),
and a few others, Willett does not write about his su-
periors, compatriots, or strangers in
meaningful ways. His comments that "we get
the planters cows and milk them,"
"I dont fell lonesone near as much as you do,"
"the Rebels very often shoot
through our tents here," and "I don't like Niggars"
(pp. 26, 39, 74, 100) provide useful
insights into various aspects of the soldiers,
the war, and those left at home.
However, because Willett did not expand on his
meanings, because there are too few of
these interesting passages, and because he
is a plodding writer, this book lacks
appeal for a general audience.
Book Reviews 215
Even the book's title is misleading as
not one of the letters concerns a return to
the South. Willett did move South with
his wife Sophie in 1895, but that was
forty years after the war and there is
no surviving evidence for his motives. This
collection of letters and the editorial
apparatus simply does not tell a story. If the
collection has importance it will be
with specialists writing on Civil War sol-
diers, Sherman, or Ohio units, who might
welcome the access to these letters, not
for any new understanding of the war,
but for the availability of a primary source.
Of course, research archives and
libraries in Ohio will want to include the book in
their collections.
John Carroll University Russell
Duncan
The Battle of the Wilderness, May
5-6, 1864. By Gordon C. Rhea. (Baton
Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1994.
xvii + 512p.; illustrations, notes, ap-
pendix, bibliography, index. $34.95.)
In the past decade historians such as
Stephen Sears, Peter Cozzens, and John
Hennessy have produced definitive
accounts of a number of Civil War battles.
George C. Rhea's work on the Battle of
the Wilderness should be included in this
group. Rhea's prose is clear, his
narrative lucid and dramatic, his re-creation of
battlefield maneuvers precise, and his
conclusions fair and revealing. Further, his
account is comprehensive and detailed,
and Rhea balances the views of the high
command with those of ordinary soldiers.
Though the Army of the Potomac was
actually under the command of Major
General George Meade, the campaign that
began in May 1864 was billed as the
first clash between Lieutenant General
Ulysses S. Grant and Lieutenant General
Robert E. Lee. Rhea fully recognizes the
political significance of this encounter.
Grant's plan was to maneuver Lee out of
his defensive works along the Rapidan
River and force him to fight in open
country, where the Union Army could exploit
its advantage in numbers and artillery.
Instead, the two armies met in the
Wilderness, a region of dense timber
that favored the defense. But Rhea does not
credit Lee for this occurrence,
asserting that Lee was actually slow to respond to
the initial Union advance. Rather, he
blames Grant and Meade for their decision to
halt the Union army in the Wilderness on
the evening of May 4 rather than push-
ing through into open country.
Despite the unexpected encounter with
Confederate troops, Meade attempted to
execute Grant's aggressive designs. On
May 5, both wings of the Union army
launched a series of determined but
ultimately futile assaults on both the
Confederate right and left. The
following morning Major General Winfield S.
Hancock's Second Corps and an enlarged
division surprised Confederate forces un-
der Major General A. P. Hill and drove
them back with considerable loss. But the
timely arrival of fresh troops under
Major General James Longstreet blunted the
Union attack, and shortly thereafter
Longstreet fell on Hancock's left flank and
severely damaged his corps. All
subsequent Union attacks failed, and the resulting
stalemate and the large Union losses
wrecked Grant's initial design and tarnished
his image. Even so, Grant proved flexible
and determined, and he simply shifted
his advance to a new axis. Further, the
Army of Northern Virginia also suffered
severe casualties that drained its
offensive capabilities.
Rhea is refreshingly frank regarding the
merits of the commanders on both
sides. He scores Grant and Meade for
forcing Union commandeers to attack prema-
216 OHIO HISTORY
turely on May 5, an impatience that led
to piecemeal assaults and wasted the Union
advantage in numbers. But Rhea also
rejects the image of the Union commander as
a butcher who relied on attrition alone,
and praises Grant's strategy and skill in
maneuver. On the other side, Rhea gives
Lee, Hill, Longstreet, and Major General
Richard S. Ewell high marks for
exploiting Union weaknesses and carrying out a
tenacious defense, but he also
criticizes Lee and Hill for failing to reorganize Hill's
defenses on the night of May 5, a
failure that nearly resulted in disaster.
Rhea concludes that two factors
particularly determined the outcome of this bat-
tle. The first was the terrain, which
limited vision to a few yards, impeded move-
ment, and disoriented men and officers
alike. The second was the relative organi-
zational strengths of the two armies.
While the Army of Northern Virginia was
innovative and highly responsive to Lee's
commands, the Army of the Potomac
appears sluggish, cautious, and
inflexible. Rhea attributes these weaknesses to
the uncertain command relationship
between Grant and Meade, the excessive size
of the Union corps, and a passive
mindset instilled in the McClellan era.
Rhea neglects fully to place this battle
in its strategic context, and he is too op-
timistic about the possibility of
decisive results if Union plans had been carried
out. Nonetheless, Rhea's account is a
sterling example of the new Civil War bat-
tle history. It is solid and
entertaining, and will appeal to professional and ama-
teur historians alike.
Columbus, Ohio Noel Fisher
The North Fights the Civil War: The
Home Front. By J. Matthew Gallman.
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1994. xi + 211p.;
notes on sources, index.
$22.50.)
Aimed at a non-specialist audience, this
book offers a generally good summary
of the modern secondary literature of
its topic. Not surprisingly in view of his
own original research on Philadelphia,
the author draws a number of his more ef-
fective specific examples from the
Quaker City. Despite his book's sectionally
limited title, it makes a number of
effective comparisons with the Southern home-
front. (Though in balancing the two
combatants the author omits Richard
Current's recent contention that as much
as ten percent of the Confederacy's white
males of military age fought for the
Union.) (Lincoln's Loyalists, 1992.)
Moreover, this volume on the homefront
also very briefly recounts the war's mili-
tary operations. While perhaps helpful
to an understanding of homefront devel-
opments, these military references are inevitably
sometimes incomplete and/or er-
roneous, as in the assertion concerning
the battle of Antietam, "The next morning
the Confederate troops slipped
away" (p. 42). In a book so short, it might have
been wiser to have devoted the space to
additional development of the principal
themes.
Among these themes is an oft-stated
argument (and there is some repetitious-
ness) that the events of the homefront
mostly had their roots in antebellum devel-
opments and hence represented
continuity. (Thus he shows how wartime northern
philanthropy was based on the prewar
"benevolent empire" of organized reforms.)
With respect to the controversy
concerning the impact of the war of northern in-
dustrialization, Gallman argues that the
effect if any was to slow growth in some
areas. He makes the interesting argument
that wartime materiel demands stimu-
Book Reviews 217
lated less growth than in later wars
because so much of what was needed simply re-
placed civilian purchases of the same
types of goods.
Gallman also contends throughout that
both North and South continued to be
congeries of localities with strong
loyalties which both governments sought to
marshal for war purposes. He makes the
now common argument that the South be-
cause of its physical weaknesses often
outdid the North in centralizing tendencies
while the victor was not compelled to
change so much. Still, in presenting such
an event as the Lincoln funeral as being
similar to the mourning for earlier heroes
the author reduces the significance of
what was arguably the first truly national
media event systematically orchestrated
by the victorious central government.
Except for a few references to Ohio
politicians, there is little about the buckeye
state. Aside from local pride, this is
unfortunate because it omits a significant ex-
ception to the book's claim that women
served in the ranks of philanthropic
groups while (white) men continued to
act as officers. The Soldiers' Aid Society of
Northern Ohio was female-run and was the
main force behind the successful
Cleveland Sanitary Fair which is also
not mentioned. Still there is an attempt to
deal with issues concerning women
including their involvement in the several ri-
ots in both North and South.
Altogether this is a thought-provoking
short study. It demonstrates the often
contradictory impulses toward localism
and centralism and toward private and pub-
lic efforts. It devotes specific
attention to issues of race and gender. Its publisher
probably hopes that it will find a
market as supplementary reading for college
students. Since it has a fair amount of
human interest, it should also be appealing
to general readers.
Kent State University Frank L.
Byrne
Making the Corn Belt: A Geographical
History of Middle-Western Agriculture.
By John C. Hudson. (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994. ix +
254p.; illustrations, notes, index.
$35.00.)
The terms corn belt and Middle West have
been synonymous in the American
mind for a long time. During the
nineteenth century the Ohio River valley became
the hearth of the corn belt, although
the boundaries changed later due to twentieth-
century developments in the hybrid seed
industry that enabled farmers to extend its
northern reaches and center-pivot
irrigation that permitted corn production on the
Great Plains. Specifically, the
combination of corn, hog, and cattle production
that has characterized Midwestern
agriculture and the corn belt emerged from the
Scioto and Miami river valleys in Ohio,
the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, the
Nashville Basin of Tennessee, and the
Pennyroyal Plateau along the Kentucky and
Tennessee border.
The Virginians who settled in the Scioto
Valley near Chillicothe, such as the
Renick family, essentially established
the eastern edge of the corn belt during the
early nineteenth century with their
practice of feeding corn to cattle in confined
lots. These early Ohio livestock men
borrowed this feeding practice from stock
farmers along the South Branch of the
Potomac River in present-day West
Virginia, and the feed-lot technique
spread throughout the Midwest during the late
nineteenth century where adequate
precipitation and the growing season permitted
the production of corn. Settlers who
moved across the Midwest from the corn
belt's heart brought their southern
agricultural practices with them, particularly
218 OHIO HISTORY
the fattening of hogs on corn and, in
Missouri, the use of slave labor. At first, the
Ohio River gave corn belt farmers access
to distant markets, although railroads
later redirected their corn, cattle, and
hogs north to Chicago and encouraged agri-
cultural specialization.
By the late twentieth century, the
trucking industry had changed the regional
marketing patterns for cattle, once
again, and grocery store chains and restaurants
revolutionized the marketing of meat
even more by purchasing "boxed beef," that
is, beef custom cut and delivered in
refrigerated trucks directly from the slaughter
houses, thereby eliminating butchers as
middle men. At the same time, techno-
logical changes in harvesting machinery
and expansion of foreign markets en-
abled the extensive production of
soybeans to complement the corn crop. Today,
Midwestern farms are characterized by a
house, machine shed, and grain bins. The
barns, chicken coops, and dairy cows of
the past are gone. If farmers keep live-
stock, they are invariably hogs or beef
cattle which they raise for sale to regional
meat packers or to the major feed lots
for fattening. Corn belt agriculture has been
streamlined, with efficiency the keyword
for success.
John C. Hudson, professor of geography
at Northwestern University, has writ-
ten an excellent survey of the
agricultural history of the Midwest since the early
nineteenth century. Hudson discusses
land use by the Native American, settlement
patterns, corn breeding, transportation
and marketing developments, and con-
sumer demands, all of which have
affected the history of the Midwest. The only
major flaw of this book, though no fault
of the author, is that the maps have been
screened by the publisher, a technical
mistake that makes them difficult to read.
While his story will not be new to
agricultural historians, and although his
sources could have been more extensive,
Hudson's synthesis of the Midwest's ge-
ography and agricultural history should
be essential reading for anyone interested
in the history of the Midwest or
American agriculture.
Iowa State University R. Douglas
Hurt
The Emergence of the African-American
Artist Robert S. Duncanson, 1821-1872.
By Joseph D. Ketner. (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1993. x +
235p.; illustrations, color plates,
catalog of artworks, notes, bibliography, in-
dex, index of illustrations. $27.50
paper; $39.95 cloth.)
Widely acclaimed in mid-nineteenth
century America as the "best landscape
painter in the West," Robert S.
Duncanson was the first African American artist to
achieve international recognition.
During his thirty-year career he played a cen-
tral role in the art world by linking
the American identity to the native landscape
paintings as established in the Hudson
River School, by contributing to the
African American artists movement into
the mainstream art world in the United
States, and by contributing decisively
to the founding of the native landscape
school in Canada. Unfortunately after
his death, Duncanson fell into obscurity for
almost a century.
Ketner's thoroughly-researched and
lucidly-written biography of Robert S.
Duncanson fills a long-standing and
important gap in art history and African
American history, and this work
certainly rescues this important figure from ob-
scurity. This volume is a rich tapestry
of history, art, and biographical material
that offers tremendous insight into the
making of this artist and his outstanding
career. Ketner's account begins with an
introduction that provides an overview of
Book Reviews
219
Duncanson's life, achievements and
contributions as well as a brief review of the
scholarship on Duncanson up to the
publication of his book. The remaining nine
chapters examine and analyze Duncanson's
artistic career from its inception in the
1840s through his rise to national and
international acclaim in the 1850s and
1860s and his artistic transformation to
his tragic death in 1872.
Ketner artfully delineates the artist's
and his family's settlement in Monroe,
Michigan, in the 1830s, Duncanson's
early years as an apprenticed house painter,
sign painter, carpenter, and glazier and
his decision in 1840 to move to
Cincinnati, Ohio, to begin his career as
an artist. It is in Cincinnati, then "the
cultural center of the United States
west of the Appalachian Mountains," that
Duncanson launched and established his
career.
Settling in Mt. Healthy, home of a small
thriving black community and a part
of Cincinnati known for its strong
abolitionist sentiments, Duncanson found
moral and financial support, during his
early years and throughout his career, from
white and black abolitionists. A
self-taught artist, he painted portraits, decorated
houses, and produced a panorama, while
establishing himself as a landscape artist.
Drawing upon the examples of William
Sonntag, another well-known landscape
artist of the day, Duncanson soon
surpassed his mentor in his artistic achieve-
ments. In 1848, with the completion of Cliff
Mines, Lake Superior, commis-
sioned by abolitionist clergyman Charles
Avery, Duncanson emerged as the "most
significant African American artist of
his generation and one of the primary Ohio
Valley landscape painters" (p. 33).
In 1853, after completing the Belmont Murals
and the commissioned Uncle Tom's
Cabin, his only explicit painting with a black
subject, Robert Duncanson completed a
nine-month "grand tour" of Europe that
took him to England, France, and Italy.
Greatly encouraged and inspired by this
trip, Duncanson returned to Cincinnati
and ultimately resumed his painting of
scenes of the Ohio River Valley
landscapes. The years between 1856 and 1861
brought him even greater recognition. In
1861 Duncanson painted his most ambi-
tious work, Land of the Lotus Eaters,
which is now part of the collection of the
King of Sweden.
During the Civil War years Duncanson
participated in the Cincinnati Sketch
Club and went on one of his many
sketching tours before going into self-imposed
exile in Canada, Scotland, and England.
During these years of exile Duncanson
fostered the founding of the landscape
school of Canada, socialized with Lord and
Lady Tennyson and other European
aristocracy, and gained even greater interna-
tional renown for his landscape
paintings.
In 1867, he again returned to Cincinnati
and began, according to Ketner, the fi-
nal phase of his career which marked a
positive transformation in Duncanson's vi-
sion of landscape painting. In December
1872, this transformation was cut short
by Duncanson's tragic death,
precipitated by dementia. It is ironic that his illness
can be linked to lead poisoning-traced
to lead found in artists' pigments. Ketner
indicates that Duncanson was especially
vulnerable to the toxic effects of the
pigments because he was African American
and because he was a house painter.
House painters were exposed to massive
quantities of lead white pigment during
that time. Moreover, Ketner explains
that Duncanson, as an artist, continued to
be exposed to toxic levels of lead as he
continued to grind his colors and prepare
his grounds for his canvases.
Ketner has produced an in-depth study of
Robert S. Duncanson's remarkable life
and artistic achievements. He makes an
excellent case for counting him among
the most important landscape artists in
the United States and as a crucial figure
marking the emergence of the African
American artist, while enhancing
220 OHIO HISTORY
Cincinnati's reputation as a city of
long-standing cultural tradition. Pluses to the
book are the excellent color
photographic reproductions of the Duncanson's
work. Historians and artists will find
this a valuable book.
Wright State University Barbara L.
Green
The Pursuit of Public Power:
Political Culture in Ohio, 1787-1861. Edited
by
Jeffrey P. Brown and Andrew R. L.
Cayton. (Kent: The Kent State University
Press, 1994. xxvii + 246p.; tables,
maps, notes, bibliographic essay, index.
$22.00 paper.)
The Pursuit of Public Power is a collection of twelve essays on the emergence
of political culture in Ohio, from the
establishment of the Northwest Territory to
the beginning of the American Civil War.
In keeping with the thrust of political
history over the last two decades, this
work treats politics in the round. The au-
thors go beyond standard accounts of
political parties and the outcome of elec-
tions, though these central subjects are
not ignored. The editors tell us that "In
the broadest sense, politics is about
power--how certain people acquire it, how
they maintain it, how they exercise it,
and how other people take it away from
them" (p. vii). Yet that
definition, however accurate, is too narrow for the editors'
purposes. Their concern is with
political culture, "the values, customs, assump-
tions, and behaviors of early-nineteenth-century
European males" that dwelt
within the state of Ohio. Explaining
these cultural traits involves inquiries into a
broad range of subjects. Interest
centers on the role of political parties in accom-
modating competing social and economic
interests, the symbolism and substance
of political rhetoric, the dynamics of
group voting behavior, and the various con-
figurations of ethnicity, economic
status, religion, and geographical considera-
tions that largely explain these
phenomena. Moreover, the issues that caused
party realignments and crises of
conscious for Ohioans must also be taken into ac-
count. The debate over internal
improvements, banking, rivalries between politi-
cal figures and between communities
pursuing public power, territorial expansion,
slavery, the Mexican War, and the crises
of Union also influenced political loyal-
ties in antebellum Ohio. It is the
concern with both the deep structure of political
communities, ideology, and the impress
of events that defines the best and most
recent political history. This work is
to be cited among their number.
The editors of this book are well suited
to their task. Jeffrey P. Brown is
Associate Professor of History and Associate
Dean of Arts and Sciences at New
Mexico University. He has published
several essays and articles about political
developments in early Ohio since earning
his Ph.D. from the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1979.
This work has appeared in Ohio History,
the Northwest Ohio Quarterly, The Old
Northwest, and the Journal of the Early
Republic. His co-editor, Andrew R. L. Cayton, is Professor of
History at Miami
University, Oxford, Ohio. Since
receiving his Ph.D. from Brown University in
1981, Cayton has authored The
Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the
Ohio Country, 1780-1825 (1986), co-authored The Midwest and the Nation:
Rethinking the History of an American
Region (1990) with Peter S. Onuf, and
next brought forward his Frontier
Indiana, 1700-1850: A History (1994). Besides
this body of work, Cayton has
contributed articles to the Journal of American
History, Ohio History, the William and Mary Quarterly, and the Journal
of the
Early Republic. Brown and Cayton provide context and continuity for the
essays
Book Reviews 221
comprising the Pursuit of Public
Power through their introduction and biblio-
graphic essay, with each contributing
chapters of their own. Brown's "The
Political Culture of Early Ohio"
and Cayton's "'Language Gives Way to Feelings':
Rhetoric, Republicanism, and Religion in
Jeffersonian Ohio" forming the first
and third essays respectively.
The other contributors to this volume
offer equally authoritative assessments
of antebellum political developments.
The collection of essays covers the major
topics and many of the key figures in
Ohio's early political history. The devel-
opment of political parties after the
split of the Jeffersonian Republicans in the
mid-1820s, the Whig-Democratic contests
of the '30s and '40s, and the third-
party movements that gave rise to the
Republican Party in 1854 receive attention
within the compass of much broader
essays. Timothy J. Shannon examines the
transformation of land speculation in
the Ohio Country between 1787 and 1820,
Emil Pocock defines election practices
from 1798 to 1825, and Daniel Feller con-
tributes an account of the Steubenville
politico, Benjamin Tappan. Other essays
include Nicole Etcheson's discussion of
the influence of Upland Southerners on
Midwestern political culture; Donald J.
Ratcliffe's analysis of the market revolu-
tion and party alignments, 1828 to 1840;
Stephen E. Maizlish's assessment of
sectional politics in Ohio; Frederick J.
Blue and Robert McCormick's treatment of
the reform efforts of Norton Strange
Townsend; Vernon L. Volpe's interpretation
of John C. Fremont's 1856 victory in
Ohio and the origins of Republican domi-
nance; and Kenneth J. Winkle's inquiry
into the theory and practice of nineteenth-
century suffrage. Many of these names
will be familiar to students of Ohio his-
tory. These works individually and
collectively have defined the field of Ohio's
political history since the 1970s.
Another virtue of this work is the
extent to which the various authors synthe-
size the work of earlier generations of
Ohio historians. The rich historiography
in the field of Ohio political history
reflects the royal roads built by the authors'
predecessors. Readers familiar with the
earlier work of Randolph Downes,
William T. Utter, Frances P.
Weisenberger, and Eugene Roseboom will readily
recognize the authors' debts to this
generation of scholars, and be equally appre-
ciative of how this historiographical
tradition has been further enriched by the ap-
pearance of this work. The Pursuit of
Public Power advances the study of Ohio pol-
itics by bringing together the major
problems, issues, and concerns of scholars
who have worked in the field since the
1960s. The ideals and themes of classical
republicanism, for example, have
provided the current generation of political his-
torians with opportunities to ask new
questions of old sources, and to craft new in-
terpretive paradigms for explicating
Ohio's territorial and statehood periods.
Similarly, interest in the impact of the
market revolution and the values of com-
mercial capitalism have greatly expanded
our understanding of Midwestern cul-
ture. The bibliographic essay by the
editors delineates these changing trends in
scholarship, while the citations and
explanatory notes identify sources and sec-
ondary accounts grouped at the end of
the work. The placement of notes at the
end of the work is in keeping with the editorial
practice of the Kent State
University Press, but is not entirely
user-friendly to readers. The value of the doc-
umentation found there, however, is well
worth the inconvenience.
Brown and Cayton's Pursuit of Public
Power is an excellent work that will be
cited as authority for decades to come.
It is a worthy successor to the older politi-
cal history which it in large measure
supplants, although the older narrative histo-
ries still have virtue. These essays
thoroughly explore the national dimensions of
regional and local developments in the
Midwest and Ohio, explaining Ohio's na-
222 OHIO HISTORY
tional prominence in political affairs
through the state's rapid demographic and
economic transformation between 1803 and
1860. Migration into Ohio steadily
rose decade by decade until the 1830s,
when it began to decline. The influence of
that migration, however, continued for
years to come. In 1850, 40 percent of
Ohioans were still not native to the
state. Brown and Cayton see this demo-
graphic turnover as fundamental to
understanding the realities of Ohio's early po-
litical history. Ohio's diverse and
rapidly changing population resulted in a het-
erogeneous culture that defies any
assumptions of uniformity. Ohio was "a con-
glomeration of relatively distinct local
societies" (p. ix) throughout the first half
of the nineteenth century. The manner in
which political parties and individual
figures negotiated differences between
those local societies defined the pursuit of
public power in Ohio in the first half
of the nineteenth century. This characteris-
tic of Ohio politics made it difficult
for one group or community to become domi-
nant, made Ohio politicians consummate
practitioners of the art of compromise,
and made Ohio a proving ground for
national leaders. The essays found in the
Pursuit of Public Power make these essential characteristics all the more
apparent.
Eastern Illinois University Terry A. Barnhart
Churchill and Roosevelt at War: The
War They Fought and the Peace They Hoped
to Make. By Keith Sainsbury. (New York: New York University
Press, 1994,
xii + 223p.; appendices, notes,
bibliography, index. $24.95.)
In the darkest days of World War II, out
of the necessity of survival and the need
to end isolationism, Winston Churchill
and Franklin Delano Roosevelt joined to-
gether in a unique partnership. This
partnership's primary objective was defeat of
Nazi Germany. Sainsbury eloquently
emphasizes that the scope of historical
scholarship dealing with the
Churchill-Roosevelt relationship is so vast that it
lends itself to constant re-examinations
and, in turn, provides the "possibility of
finding new perspectives" (page ix)
as well as new interpretations. Yet, Sainsbury
warns us about the fallibility of
existing sources as well as newly discovered
sources. Also the perceptions and
interpretations of those individuals who were
directly or indirectly involved in this
relationship have to be questioned with re-
spect to their fallibility as well. For
any source to be incorporated within the con-
text of historical scholarship,
Sainsbury recognizes that certain criteria must be
attained. Sainsbury's interpretation of
the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship was
regarded by him to be "a work of
discussion rather than detailed scholarship" (p.
xi). While Allied propaganda has
portrayed the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship
as "a harmonious and easy-going
relationship" (p. 160), Sainsbury concentrates
his efforts to dispelling the myths and
legends that surround this relationship, and
with this task in mind, Sainsbury
provides both historians as well as the general
reader with a comprehensive study of the
Churchill-Roosevelt relationship from
its beginning to its conclusion.
Although representing opposite ends of
the ideology spectrum, both of these
leaders share some form of commonality.
At the beginning of this relationship,
strategy was the domain of the British,
but as American involvement increased the
strategy became the domain of the
Americans. In his comprehensive study of the
Churchill-Roosevelt relationship,
Sainsbury investigates the impact of the shift
in strategy development. No relationship
remains static and in an effort to com-
prehend what affected this relationship,
Sainsbury evaluates the impact of
Book Reviews
223
Roosevelt's relationship with Stalin and
Chiang Kai-Shek as well as Roosevelt's
emphasis for a new world order. Certain
fundamental disagreements about military
strategy and future political
settlements came to the forefront seriously undermin-
ing this tenable relationship. Sainsbury highlights that certain Roosevelt
Administration officials with their own
agenda succeeded in undermining
Churchill's influence by planting the
seeds of distrust in Roosevelt's mind.
Sainsbury emphasizes that Churchill's
insistence upon changing the priority of
military strategy towards the
Mediterranean and the Balkans helped undermine
Churchill's influence and aided in
allowing those seeds of distrust to find fertile
soil.
Ideological differences in the
interpretation of the establishment of a new world
order would seriously impact the
continuity of the Churchill-Roosevelt relation-
ship. Using documented evidence,
Sainsbury focuses his study on the impact of
Roosevelt's efforts to establish a
relationship with Stalin while humiliating
Churchill. Sainsbury incorporates
Churchill's response to these humiliating acts.
Roosevelt believed the Soviet Union
would become the next superpower replacing
Great Britain. Sainsbury pointedly
stresses that the Churchill-Roosevelt relation-
ship suffered greatly, but Roosevelt
should not take all of the blame. Sainsbury's
analysis highlights that Churchill
wanted to re-establish the status quo in Europe
after the defeat of Nazi Germany. With
this objective in mind, Churchill not only
allied himself with Charles DeGaulle,
but called for the rebuilding of Germany
against strong objections from
Roosevelt. Sainsbury also turns his attention to
what was occurring in the Far East,
especially alliances with Chiang Kai-Shek and
China's future role within Roosevelt's
new world order. By this time if Churchill
disagreed, Roosevelt felt that Churchill's
underlying motivation was the re-estab-
lishment of colonial power.
Clearly, Sainsbury's comprehensive study
of the Churchill-Roosevelt relation-
ship with all of its complexity provides
us with a better understanding of interna-
tional relations. By examining the
dynamics of the Churchill-Roosevelt relation-
ship, Sainsbury provides us with a
better insight into what exactly occurred and
how those developments not only affected
the war effort, but international rela-
tions for the next fifty years. By
encapsulating this relationship in one compre-
hensive study, Sainsbury's effort
encourages more discussion in the area of the
Churchill-Roosevelt relationship.
University of Guelph Edward C.
Snowden
Home to Work: Motherhood and the
politics of industrial homework in the United
States. By Eileen Boris. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994. xviii
+ 383p.; illustrations, tables, notes,
index of cases, index. $59.95.)
One of my oldest daughter's favorite
photographs shows her in an infant swing
by my desk, where I sit, simultaneously
watching over her and earning money by
typing. I had been a homeworker, I
discovered in Eileen Boris's Home to Work.
Although my demographic profile was
somewhat atypical of homeworkers, my
need to earn money and care for my child
at the same time was not. Nor was my
dilemma: which was I--mother or worker?
I never did figure that out. Boris's am-
bitious study of homeworkers and
industrial homework helps to explain my confu-
sion.
224 OHIO HISTORY
The dichotomy between home and work,
mother and worker, Boris argues, is the
creation of a gender ideology which
designates child-care in the home as women's
primary job and paid labor in the
workplace as men's. Employers of homework-
ers, and often homeworkers themselves,
defended homework because it permitted
women to do their real job. Trade
unionists and reformers often opposed home-
work because it impaired women's
maternal role and damaged the family. Public
policy makers, persuaded now by one
side, now by the other, took for granted this
gendered bifurcation of roles and
spaces.
Much of Home to Work is framed in
the language of literary criticism currently
in vogue, focusing on
"discourses" about homework: a fascinating example is the
Reagan administration's use of feminist
rhetoric on behalf of deregulating wom-
en's work in the home. Boris's analysis
of language is less compelling, however,
than the narrative of the ongoing
struggle between the opponents and defenders of
homework to use the state for their own
ends.
Boris begins this narrative in the 1870s
when reformers sought to regulate the
homework of Bohemian cigar makers in the
tenements of New York City and takes
the story throughout the 1980s when the
sweated trades were revived by an influx
of Asian and Hispanic immigrants and the
rejuvenated laissez-faire of the Reagan
administration. Along the way Boris
discusses the development of relevant indus-
tries such as cigar making and garment
making; the passage-and patchy imple-
mentation--of state and federal
legislation; and the significant work of women re-
formers from the national and local
Consumers Leagues and the U.S. Women's
Bureau.
Especially valuable are Boris's
descriptions of the homeworkers, illuminated by
the photographs of Jacob Riis, Lewis
Hine, and others. Using their own words in
surveys compiled during the Depression
by the U.S. Women's Bureau and else-
where, Boris effectively recreates
"the worlds of the homeworker." Makers of
cigars, buttons, baby bonnets, jewelry,
artificial flowers, underwear, soldiers' uni-
forms, and lace were vastly undercounted
by government officials and often vastly
different from one another. Italian
homeworkers had large families and few other
job opportunities. Southern Appalachian women often enjoyed
tufting bed-
spreads, perhaps because it was like
quilting. African-American women worked at
home to escape the supervision of whites
and were less likely than immigrant
women to have their children working
alongside them. Today's clerical home-
workers and telecommuters are often
middle-class and well-educated.
Homeworkers' exploitation by employers,
however, has been shared, like these
women's need to combine work and home.
Enormously inclusive and massively
documented, Home to Work provides stun-
ning evidence of its author's central
argument: that work and home are not sepa-
rate spheres, but intimately connected.
Women worked at home to support their
families, but their meager pay
maintained their subordination to male heads of
households. At the same time, women's
work at home lowered men's wages in the
workplace and hampered organizing efforts
by trade unions. Boris concludes that
policy makers must recognize these
intimate connections so that the needs of all
workers can be addressed with equity.
John Carroll University Marian
Morton