Book Reviews
The Best Intentions: The Triumph and
Failure of the Great Society Under Kennedy,
Johnson and Nixon. By Irwin Unger. (New York: Doubleday, 1996. 399p.;
notes, index. $27.95.)
Guns or Butter: The Presidency of
Lyndon Johnson. By Irving Bernstein.
(New
York: The Oxford University Press, 1996.
x + 606p.; illustrations, notes, in-
dex. $35.00.)
Irwin Unger's The Best of Intentions and
Irving Bernstein's Guns or Butter offer
timely accounts of the Johnson years,
tracing the ideas, programs, and agencies
that have become a rallying point for
current conservative attacks. Unger and
Bernstein move easily through the major
features of the Great Society, detailing
the origins of the War on Poverty, the
Economic Opportunity Act, Medicare, the
1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting
Rights Act, federal aid to education, the
Housing and Urban Development Act, Model
Cities, various environmental bills,
the National Endowments for the Arts and
Humanities, and other important re-
forms initiated by Johnson before
Vietnam unraveled his presidency. While
Unger's work is narrower in scope than
Bernstein's, neither book suffers from
brevity. Both authors provide thorough,
if not daunting, accounts of the Johnson
years.
The narratives of both books are
straightforward and easy to follow. Unger of-
fers richer analyses and interpretations
than Bernstein, and his critique of the War
on Poverty is more thorough and
convincing. Bernstein implies that LBJ's anti-
poverty programs were destined to fail
because the President diverted needed funds
to the war. Johnson was "oblivious
to the risk of imposing the cost of the war on
an economy close to full employment . .
. Johnson could never get himself . . . to
admit that Vietnam was a real war"
(pp. 377-78). The choice between guns and
butter, Bernstein concludes, "was
the key to the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson's
presidency. . ." (p. 527). Unger,
however, argues more persuasively that many an-
tipoverty programs such as the Community
Action program and the Job Corps
were mismanaged and poorly administered
to begin with. These and other pro-
grams, he writes, "were exemplary;
their means and execution were flawed" (p.
350). While both Unger and Bernstein
show vividly how the Great Society often
failed to achieve its goals, they
generally admire its reform spirit. "However im-
perfect the results," Unger writes,
"theirs was the best of intentions" (p. 366).
Bernstein devotes greater attention to
the Vietnam War than Unger. He is par-
ticularly effective in detailing LBJ's
effort to conceal the war's escalation, and he
is correct in criticizing the
President's failure to communicate the goals of the war
to the public. Both authors concur that,
with growing opposition to the war, even
LBJ's most modest proposals met
resistance. Unger shows that by early 1967,
Johnson was "distracted and
depleted," his staff discouraged, and ideas "largely
drained" (p. 244). Urban riots were
misinterpreted by conservatives and liberals
alike as proof of the Great Society's
failure. Unger is more mindful than Bernstein
of historical context. He extends the
discussion beyond the Johnson years and
evaluates Richard Nixon's New
Federalism. He successfully discredits historian
Joan Hoff's attempt to redefine Nixon as
a covert progressive, arguing that she
had seriously misinterpreted Nixon's
flirtation with 1960s liberalism. Great
Society programs survived despite
Nixon's efforts, not because of them.
Book Reviews 203
There are some problems with both books.
As a legislative history, The Best of
Intentions is thorough and informative. But the book generally
lacks human
drama. The reader does not gain much
appreciation for the personalities of the
leaders, or the people who devised the
programs. Nevertheless, Unger's criticisms
are fair and his analysis is
consistently balanced. He does not hesitate to detail
the shortcomings of the Great Society.
He correctly points out JFK's limited ac-
complishments, as well as the
ineffectiveness and frequent ineptness of New
Frontier programs.
Bernstein provides cogent profiles of
the political players. But much of the in-
formation is derivative and familiar to
students of the Johnson presidency. His
sources in several sections are
selective and sometimes outdated. He contends that
Johnson, while serving as Kennedy's vice
president, "declined to help on legisla-
tion" (p. 11). Oral histories and
documents at the JFK and LBJ libraries show
more clearly that no one in the Kennedy
administration seriously wanted
Johnson's help. Bernstein's chapter on
the 1964 presidential election and LBJ's
decision to remove Robert Kennedy from
vice-presidential contention neglects
new documentation and overlooks recent
scholarship. He is particularly prone to
draw upon observations by Kennedy
loyalists who were unsympathetic to
Johnson. And he accepts at face value
Doris Kearns's questionable analysis of
Johnson's personality. Surprisingly,
neither Unger nor Bernstein utilize recently
released telephone conversations that
Johnson secretly tape-recorded during the
months following JFK's assassination.
Such material would have enriched the
reader's understanding of Johnson's
desire to exploit Kennedy's memory to secure
passage of pending legislation. The
recordings also show the degree to which the
War on Poverty was grounded in Johnson's
fear of being criticized by liberals be-
fore the 1964 election.
Bernstein poorly conceals his affection
for John and Robert Kennedy, whom he
often refers to as "Jack" and
"Bobby." While highlighting Johnson's bitterness
toward Robert Kennedy, Bernstein
neglects to add into his equation RFK's contri-
bution to the hostile relationship. When
addressing Johnson's escalation of the
war, Bernstein downplays the roles of
Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. He
makes long leaps to credit JFK for
laying the foundation for Johnson's legislative
success in 1964 and 1965. At one point,
he entertains the notion that "had
Kennedy lived, there is no doubt that
all [of JFK's most important pending legis-
lation] would have been passed by
1965" (p. 530). He may be correct, but such an
assertion cannot be proven, and it
reflects Bernstein's tendency to rely on convic-
tion as evidence.
The Best of Intentions and Guns or Butter are worthy additions to the
existing
Johnson literature. Both Unger and
Bernstein deserve credit for writing legisla-
tive histories that are readable and
interesting. Neither author
rehabilitates
Johnson's reputation. But the two books
suggest a trend among presidential
scholars willing to credit Johnson for
trying to improve the lives of those people
who are today victims of neglect and
targets of resentment.
University of Texas, Pan American Paul R. Henggeler
Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry That
Shaped Postwar America. By Christopher
Matthews. (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1996. 377p.; illustrations, notes,
index. $25.00.)
204 OHIO HISTORY
The author of Kennedy & Nixon, Christopher
Matthews, is the Washington
Bureau Chief for the San Francisco
Examiner and a frequent participant in televi-
sion talk shows. His study emphasizes
the parallels between the two men in their
early years in politics, in the
presidential campaign of 1960, and in Nixon's con-
tinued obsession with the Kennedy
"mystique" after 1960.
Matthews argues that Nixon and Kennedy
liked one another in the early days of
their relationship, and during Nixon's
campaign for the Senate against Helen
Gahagan Douglas in 1950 John Kennedy
personally delivered his father's $1,000
contribution to Nixon's campaign.
According to Matthews, Kennedy explained
that the contribution expressed
admiration for Nixon as well as opposition to the
liberal Democrat Douglas. The friendly
relationship of the 1950s was quickly de-
stroyed by the presidential campaign of
1960. Matthews suggests that the bitter
experience of that very close defeat led
Nixon to conclude that the dirty tricks
which he believed had been used by the
Kennedy campaign, plus his conviction
that the Kennedy forces had stolen the
election from him in Chicago and Texas,
justified the illegal and "no holds
barred" tactics which led to the Watergate
Scandal and Nixon's disgrace.
The bitterness of the 1960 defeat,
according to Matthews, left Nixon with an
obsession with the Kennedy family which
persisted throughout the rest of his life.
The assassination of John Kennedy in
1963 ended the parallel between him and
Nixon, but in Matthews' view Nixon
simply transferred his paradoxical awe and
hatred of the Kennedys from John to
Robert Kennedy and then, after Robert's
death in 1968, to Teddy Kennedy.
Matthews cites as his authority several of the
aides around Nixon who attest to his
obsession with the Kennedys and, during the
Watergate Scandal, to Nixon's conviction
that Teddy Kennedy was the driving
force behind the investigations.
Those who seek a rigorous and scholarly
examination of Kennedy or Nixon or
both should look elsewhere. By and large
this is a story that has been told many
times before. Some generalizations are
essentially speculative, especially those
that deal with public opinion, and most
scholars will find the style of documenta-
tion unacceptable. The text is sprinkled
generously with intriguing quotations,
but quick and precise identification of
their sources is frustrating and very difficult.
On the other hand, it should be pointed
out that this style of documentation is ap-
parently now used by some publishers.
(See for example the highly acclaimed The
Fifties by David Halberstram.) The endnotes include only a few
scattered citations
to major documentary collections such as
the Richard M. Nixon Library and
Birthplace and the John F. Kennedy
Library. The most interesting and useful
sources are the author's interviews of
many of the major figures who knew and/or
worked with the two, as well as the published
memoirs and oral histories of per-
sons close to Kennedy and Nixon.
In view of the long list of books about
John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon
which have appeared in recent years,
there is reason to ask why there should be
another. The author offers no answer to
this question, but apparently the book's
contribution is that it features both
Kennedy and Nixon, and it presents useful in-
formation from the personal interviews
by the author of participants in the careers
of Kennedy and Nixon. Furthermore, it is
well written and an easy and pleasant
read. Perhaps it can be recommended on
those grounds.
Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale Howard W. Allen
Book Reviews 205
God's Government Begun: The Society
for Universal Inquiry and Reform, 1842-
1846. By Thomas D. Hamm. (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995.
xxv + 312p.; appendix, bibliography,
notes, index. $39.95.)
The 1840s were yeasty years for America.
Antislavery, antiwar, and anti-alco-
hol movements abounded. The women's
rights movement was accelerating. In
order to promote the true religion of
Jesus and the apostles, churches divided, and
new denominations sprang up. The belief
that it is possible to perfect American
society led to the development of a
number of utopian movements. Some of these
movements were religious, some were
secular, and some were a combination of the
two. Almost all were transient.
One of the many transients was The
Society for Universal Inquiry and Reform.
As detailed by the author, the roots of
the Society were to be found in the Hicksite
Quaker movement and antislavery
evangelical Protestantism. In the early 1840s,
individuals representing a more radical
fringe of both groups founded eight perfec-
tionistic communities in order to
promote collectively the aims of the Society.
The communities were located at
Skaneateles, New York; Marlborough, Prairie
Home, and Highland Home, Ohio; and Union
Home, West Grove (Fraternal Home),
Kristeen, and Grand Prairie in Indiana.
Most lasted a year or two. All had disap-
peared by 1846.
The utopian aims of the Society were
clearly set forth by one of the founders of
the Society, who, in 1844, wrote that
the community emphasis was "the embodi-
ment of all good and the consummation of
all Reform" (p. 103). The communities
established by Society members
"would live according to the demands of God's
government" (p. 103). God's
government, in this case, included a dedication to a
philosophy of nonresistance and an
elevation of the principles of "Natural Law"
(as interpreted by societal members).
"Competitive economics" (capitalism, more
or less) was rejected. An emphasis on
women's rights (at least by mid-nineteenth
century standards), the virtues of a
vegetarian diet, and educational reform were
other constant themes in the
communities.
In matters religious the Society was not
in total agreement. While most mem-
bers reflected a more extreme Hicksite
Quaker approach, there was a sprinkling of
infidels in some of the communities. But
whatever the religious belief, or lack of
it, there was a clear consensus that the
"sectarian" Christian Church in America
was powerfully corrupt, and, along with
the state, in need of reform and restora-
tion. When restoration of state and
church did occur, the religious-minded within
the Society agreed that God's millennium
would undoubtedly come.
The communities created by the Society
for Universal Reform movement failed
quickly. A lack of capital, debts, and
conflicts within the leadership and member-
ship are given as reasons. One also
senses that the inability of the members of
the Society to accommodate successfully
their human limitations to their perfec-
tionistic ideology guaranteed the
failure of their visionary communities.
The book is well written and deserves
its place in the "Religion in North
America" series. Over sixty pages
of notes and bibliography give strong support
to the text and attest to the author's
immersion in the subject matter. Given the
geographical detail in the book, a map
showing the location of the communities
would help the more casual reader.
University of Findlay Richard
Kern
206 OHIO HISTORY
The Papers of Andrew Johnson. Volume 12: February-August 1867. Edited by
Paul H. Bergeron. (Knoxville: The
University of Tennessee Press, 1995. xxviii
+ 558p.; illustrations, notes,
appendices, index. $49.50.)
Volume twelve of Andrew Johnson's papers
contains a wealth of important ma-
terial related to the escalating
political war between the President and the legisla-
tive branch during the early months of
1867. After most ex-Confederate states
took Johnson's advice and rejected the
Fourteenth Amendment, Congress placed
them under a system of military rule.
Congress, at the same time, limited the
President's power to remove officers in
the executive branch, circumscribed his
role as commander in chief, refused to
confirm most of his appointees, overrode
his vetoes, and ignored his protests,
while the House Judiciary Committee zeal-
ously pursued the option of impeaching
him. Yet, Johnson refused to be cowed
and would not capitulate. In August, he
removed two controversial generals in
charge of Southern districts and
suspended Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, in the
face of conflicting cabinet advice and
Ulysses S. Grant's objections.
During these months, Johnson also had to
endure less grave but, nonetheless,
irritating circumstances and incidents,
while enjoying only a few victories.
Informants in Louisiana and Tennessee
apprised him regularly of mounting prob-
lems involving politics, patronage, and
corruption. An individual threatened the
President's life, insisting that he
"free [John A.] Surratt or leave the country ... or
you will suffer one of the most shameful
deaths. Beware" (p. 354). Moreover, the
President was still being hounded by
job-seekers, one of whom wrote, "I have
been pleading ... for nearly ... Two
Years. Your term is fast passing away....
Why not make me Minister to Mexico
..." (p. 406). Even the White House heat-
ing system collapsed and had to be
rebuilt before winter. On the other hand, dur-
ing this same period, Russia agreed to
sell Alaska to America, and the Democrats
won the governorship and three of four
House seats in Connecticut. Johnson also
managed to make successful visits to
North Carolina, New England, and Maryland.
These documents also reveal much about
Johnson's character and intelligence.
Although he remained a racist, he still
contributed some of his own land and
money to support black education and
religion in the South. In an interview, the
President also railed, at length,
against Northern financial aristocrats, who con-
tinued, in his opinion, to exploit the
common people. Moreover, Johnson
showed that he was a man of strong
political convictions. He loathed Congress'
Reconstruction laws, but agreed to obey
almost all of them because he truly
revered the Constitution, as he
interpreted it, and was convinced that, sooner or
later, the people's wisdom would
vindicate his view. The President's veto mes-
sages and interviews contain cogent arguments
for his political positions and a
passionate defense of his actions and
the rights of the office he occupied. In the
end, however, he protected the
presidency more effectively than he guarded him-
self.
Editor Paul Bergeron and his staff have,
once again, managed to glean the most
crucial, interesting, and
representative materials from a huge stockpile.
Bergeron's introduction provides an
excellent overview, and the index is ex-
tremely helpful. However, it is the
book's notes that aid the reader most. The in-
telligence and effort reflected in those
notes are remarkable. Consider, for exam-
ple, a note that corrects a "March
3[0], '67" date on a letter from Francis P. Blair,
Jr., concerning the Senate's rejection
of him as Minister to Austria. The re-
searcher concludes that,
Book Reviews 207
Based on internal evidence, Blair
misdated the letter, for he was not nominated until March 25
and was rejected on the 28th. We have
suggested March 30 as the probable date, reasoning
that Blair inadvertently omitted the
second numeral in the date. The 30th fell on a Saturday, a
more likely day for conducting business
than Sunday the 31st (p. 194).
Those who study the Reconstruction era
are fortunate that this essential collection
is in the hands of such talented and
dedicated scholars and editors.
South Dakota School of Mines and
Technology Gerald W. Wolff
James Buchanan and the Political
Crisis of the 1850s. Edited by Michael
J.
Birkner. (Selinsgrove, New Jersey:
Susquehanna University Press, 1996.
215p.; illustrations, notes, selective
bibliography, index. $29.50.)
This book seeks to reexamine the
presidency of James Buchanan, on the
premise that, despite volumes of writing
about the decade of the 1850s, little ad-
dresses Buchanan's administration. The
essays, written by prominent scholars,
examine such issues as his relationship
with the press, his views and actions re-
garding filibustering in the Caribbean,
a comparison of Buchanan and Abraham
Lincoln, and his role in the Election of
1860.
From the opening essay on the politics
of Millard Fillmore's unsuccessful run
for the presidency in 1856, setting the
stage for Buchanan's presidency, Buchanan
functioned in terms of earlier
Jacksonian politics. A politician with five decades
of experience, Buchanan did not adapt
well to the challenges of the 1850s. He
faced political and sectional crises
that had passed beyond the compromises of the
preceding decades. And while Buchanan
sought to maintain the Union as a form of
compromise, he could be incredibly
shortsighted on the details of that process. He
snubbed Stephen Douglas, an extremely
prominent and powerful Northern
Democrat, while at the same time filling
his Cabinet with men whose opinions
harmonized with his own, many of whom
were Southerners or had Southern lean-
ings. He also threw wholehearted support
to the extremely unpopular proslavery
LeCompton Constitution. The growth of an
increasingly independent media, con-
cerned more about circulation and
"truth" than the dubious patronage of the party
press system, did not help Buchanan,
either.
The essay most favorable to Buchanan
examines his actions regarding foreign
policy in the Caribbean-specifically,
the attempts by American filibusterers to
conquer parts of Central America. In
direct contrast to the general opinion that
Buchanan acted as a tool of the
slave-holding South, Robert E. May demonstrates
that Buchanan utilized the neutrality
laws and the United States Navy to try to curb
the actions of these filibusterers.
Indeed, it was only "Buchanan's strict legalism
[which] caused him to blend
anti-filibustering instructions with strictures. . . [to]
take care to avoid interference with
ships and persons engaged in legitimate trade.
.. " (p. 138). These strictures
often diluted the power of officials to take measures
against suspected filibusterers. In all,
however, Professor May suggests that,
rather than being a blind supporter of
the South, Buchanan's anti-filibustering en-
deavors actually cost him support in
that region.
The book concludes with an edited
transcript of a panel discussion on the
Buchanan presidency, held at Franklin
and Marshall College in September 1991.
The panelists, leading historians of the
1850s, engaged one another in lively de-
bate, and ended by attempting to sum up
briefly his presidency.
208 OHIO HISTORY
Most historians agree that James
Buchanan was not a great president. Nearly
always he is found at the bottom of
presidential rankings. This book examines
particular aspects of his
administration, seeking to determine whether or not the
low rankings are deserved. The general
opinion, expressed in these well-re-
searched and well-documented essays,
leans toward the conclusion that Buchanan
may have been wrongly vilified, but not
by much. None of the authors prove will-
ing to suggest that Buchanan has been
unfairly criticized, particularly in the case
of foreign policy. James Buchanan is as
much a victim of his times as of his own
personality. James Buchanan and the
Political Crisis of the 1850s calls for a fur-
ther examination of his relatively
understudied presidency.
Northern Kentucky University Tim Herrmann
A History of the Confederate Navy. By Raimondo Luraghi. Translated by Paolo E.
Coletta. (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval
Institute Press, 1996. xx + 514p.; illus-
trations, notes, bibliography, index.
$39.95.)
Everyone familiar with the Civil War
knows that the Confederate army per-
formed valiantly, almost overcoming the
great odds that it faced against Union
forces. However, the southern navy has
generally received little credit for its role
in prolonging the conflict and giving
the Confederacy a chance to secure its inde-
pendence. One of the main reasons for
this neglect lies in the documentary evi-
dence remaining from the Confederate
government. Naval department records were
almost completely destroyed during and
after the evacuation of Richmond in 1865
although the army's records fared
better. After years of painstaking research in the
United States and Europe, Raimondo
Luraghi constructed the first true history of
the Confederate navy. Originally
published in his native Italian in 1993, now
translated into English, his
pathbreaking work makes a vital contribution to our
understanding of the Civil War.
Luraghi refutes the belief that the
Confederate navy failed because it did not
break the Union blockade. On the
contrary, he concludes that the southern navy
largely succeeded despite the
overwhelming advantage held by its opponent.
Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory,
who remained at his post until after
Appomattox, deserved a large share of
the credit for creating a successful navy.
First, the Confederacy had to literally
build a navy from scratch, as it began the
war with only a handful of obsolete
ships and few experienced sailors. Unlike the
army, which skimmed the bulk of the
talent of the prewar military, the southern
navy lured few officers away from the
Union. The Confederate industrial plant at
the beginning of the war was almost
completely inadequate for constructing ships.
Circumstances forced southerners to be
much more creative; what they lacked in
numbers, the Confederate navy hoped to
make up in technology. It developed ri-
fled guns at a faster pace than its
northern rivals, allowing ships to do more dam-
age with fewer pieces. Despite the
limited industrial capability of the South,
Mallory and his staff succeeded in
developing and building ironclad ships within
the Confederacy. The southern navy also
became the first in history to use under-
water mines extensively (known as
torpedoes then), which did much damage to the
Union fleet at minimal cost, and even
experimented with submarine warfare.
While some ventures, especially efforts
to build ships in Britain and France, fared
poorly, Luraghi contends that the
Confederate navy contributed substantially to
the development of modern naval warfare.
Book Reviews 209
The navy accomplished
more important goals than breaking the blockade.
After many successful
Union invasions by sea early in the war, the southern navy
effectively defended
the coast after 1862; subsequent captures of Southern ports
came by land. The
legendary Alabama led the potent Confederate campaign
against Union commerce
on the high seas. On the Mississippi, the Confederates
succeeded in stalling
the Union drive to cut the South in two until mid-1863, giv-
ing their side more
opportunities to win the war. While the navy suffered some re-
verses, Luraghi
concludes that it deserves a greater share of credit for the difficul-
ties the Union had in
winning the war.
Luraghi's impressive
research, carefully documented in notes and in an invalu-
able bibliography of
primary sources, ably supports his argument. For the most
part, his style,
preserved by a readable translation, succeeds as well as his con-
tents. On occasion his
analytic approach loses track of chronology, confusing
the reader; once he
confounds himself when he refers to a commodore born in 1799
as sixty-three years
old in 1861 (p. 104). Such flaws, however, by no means de-
tract from the importance
of A History of the Confederate Navy. This book will
certainly inspire
debate, yet it will be difficult to disprove Luraghi's conclusions.
University of Kentucky Christopher
M. Paine
General John Buford: A
Military Biography. By Edward Longacre.
(Conshococken, Pa.:
Combined Books Inc., 1995. 312 p.; illustrations, maps,
notes, bibliography,
index. $24.95.)
This readable, if
uncritical and idiosyncratically documented, biography was
written by a long-time
student of Civil War battlefields who served as historical
adviser to Sam Elliot,
the actor who played John Buford in the film Gettysburg.
Buford was born in
Woodford County, Kentucky, on March 4, 1826. In 1838, his
family moved to Rock
Island, Illinois. He entered the United States Military
Academy at West Point
in 1844 and was graduated and commissioned into the First
United Stated Dragoons
in 1848. During the 1850s he served as a quartermaster
and a commissary
officer and participated in the 1855 campaign against the Sioux
chief, Little Thunder.
He chased renegades in Kansas and organized logistical sup-
port for the campaign
against the Mormons in 1858. In April 1861, recently
promoted to captain,
he was stationed at Camp Floyd, Utah, with the Second
Dragoons.
Buford was a War
Democrat, but being southern-born and without important
connections, the best
job he could find in the fall of 1861 was as an assistant in-
spector general. He
was a lowly major in the Spring of 1862 when John Pope
found a brigade of
cavalry for him and promoted him to brigadier general. Buford
served Pope until the
latter was dismissed after Second Manassas. He became chief
of cavalry on George
McClellan's staff just before Antietam. He worked for
Ambrose Burnside
through the Fredericksburg campaign, but it was not until Joe
Hooker took command of
the Army of the Potomac that he got another field com-
mand. Hooker
reorganized the cavalry into an independent corps under George
Stoneman who gave
Buford the reserve brigade. Hooker relieved Stoneman after
Chancellorsville and
gave command to Alfred Pleasonton. It was as the comman-
der of the First
Division of Pleasonton's cavalry corps under Hooker's successor,
George Meade, that
Buford rode his war horse, Grey Eagle, toward his rendezvous
with history.
210 OHIO HISTORY
During the evening of June 30, Buford's
division encamped around Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania. Early the next morning,
July 1, 1863, Colonel William Gamble's
brigade met advancing elements of Henry
Heth's division of A.P. Hill's Corps on
the Chambersburg Pike, about two miles
to the west. The Federal troops, armed
with Sharps carbines, deployed
dismounted along McPherson's Ridge, bisecting
the road, and opened fire on the
advancing rebel infantry. Buford and his men held
the line until they were reinforced by
advancing elements of John Reynold's First
Corps. Although Buford's division took
little part in the battle after the first day,
it did lead the unsuccessful pursuit
which ended with Lee's escape across the
Potomac at Falling Waters on 15 July,
1863. [The Sharps carbine was not a
"repeater" as alleged on page
212, but the 5th and 6th Michigan Cavalry, serving
with George Custer in Judson
Kilpatrick's division, did carry Spencer repeaters.]
The botched aftermath of Gettysburg
followed by another two months of indeci-
sive fighting drained Buford's vitality.
In late October 1863, he contracted ty-
phoid fever. President Abraham Lincoln,
who admired Buford, persuaded Secretary
of War Edwin M. Stanton to approve a
rare deathbed promotion to Major General.
When he died on December 16, 1863, in
Washington, D.C., at the age of 37, he
had not reached his full potential. He
was an able soldier and a good division
commander, but whether, as the author
asserts, he would have become as creative
and innovative as Phil Sheridan or James
Wilson remained to be seen. Buford was
buried on December 22, 1863, at West Point.
University of Cincinnati Daniel R.
Beaver
Designing the Earth: The Human
Impulse to Shape Nature. By David
Bourdon.
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995.
240p.; illustrations selected bibliog-
raphy, index. $45.00.)
In Designing the Earth, David
Bourdon attempts to present an encyclopedic ex-
ploration of the human impulse to shape
nature. It is a beautifully produced and
gorgeously illustrated ramble across
more than a dozen centuries and five conti-
nents, but it fails in its pretensions
to be a synthesis of anthropology and art his-
tory.
The scope of the work is limited
principally to a consideration of prehistoric,
historic and modern "forms
structured out of earth or carved from living stone" (p.
32). By "living stone" Bourdon
means "a mass of stone that exists in its original
geological setting" (p. 7).
The book is organized around six broad
categories of earthwork function: shel-
ter, commerce, defense, tombs, sacred
places, and land art. There are some prob-
lems with this classification. For
example, a given earthwork could be considered
under more than one category. However,
it is a useful way to organize a complex
subject. It also allows Bourdon to
present some surprising juxtapositions.
Terraced agricultural fields in the
Philippines (p. 52) and Peru (pp. 64-65) resem-
ble twentieth century copper mines in
Arizona (p. 78) and Utah (p. 79). An
Islamic necropolis of domed mud-brick
structures in Egypt (pp. 138-39) is remi-
niscent of the cluster of Hopewellian
burial mounds at Mound City, near
Chillicothe (p. 145). Bourdon shows how
the work of some modern architects and
artists has been inspired by prehistoric
monuments. For example, artist Michael
Heizer (not coincidentally the son of
prominent archaeologist Robert Heizer)
sculpted a series of gigantic earthen
animal effigies along the Illinois River in
Book Reviews 211
Ottawa, Illinois (p. 228). These
included a Serpent Mound 2,070 feet long-more
than 800 feet longer than Ohio's most
famous prehistoric mound.
Bourdon is not an archaeologist; the
jacket liner identifies him as an "author
and critic." Nevertheless, the text
is mostly solid and refreshingly free of silli-
ness. In spite of considering such rich
fodder for pseudoscience as pyramids and
the ground drawings on the Peruvian
plains of Nazca, there are no references to
Atlantis, ancient astronauts, or
pre-Viking contacts between the Old and New
Worlds. Indeed, with regard to the much
exaggerated similarities between Old and
New World pyramids, Bourdon writes:
"The appearance of pyramidal forms in dif-
ferent cultures may be due primarily to
commonplace engineering solutions, dis-
covered through trial and error. There
are not so many ways, after all, to build a
high earthen structure without angling
the walls inward to prevent collapse (p.
158)."
Ohio's prehistoric earthworks are
featured-though not as prominently as those
of us who work in Ohio might wish.
Bourdon illustrates Newark's Octagon State
Memorial (p. 143), Mound City (now
referred to as Hopewell Culture National
Historical Park) (p. 145), and Serpent
Mound (p. 182), and other sites are dis-
cussed in the text.
Unfortunately, there are numerous
factual inaccuracies and one or two outra-
geously glaring mistakes in this book.
Bourdon errs in stating that the small
platform mounds within Newark's octagon
are burial mounds (p. 144) and in
claiming that "Hopewell cultural
traits spread westward" from Ohio to Illinois.
Actually, the Hopewell culture appeared
in Illinois about a century before it was
known in Ohio.
One of Bourdon's most egregious errors
is his claim that the Aztec's so-called
"floating gardens," or chinampas,
were literally floating rafts covered with soil
and plantings (pp. 59-60). The chinampas
were swamps reclaimed by mounding-
up soil and rotting vegetation into
enormously fertile garden plots surrounded by a
network of canals. The gardens may have
appeared to float, but they were planted
on artificially built islands-not rafts.
I was surprised by these occasional
lapses in an otherwise fairly solid summary
of world prehistory, until I happened
across a few instances of disturbingly close
copying from Stuart Fiedel's Prehistory
of the Americas (Cambridge University
Press). As an example, here are two
passages, one from Fiedel and the other from
Bourdon:
Defense against rainy-season floods was
also provided by the dike that had been built across a
narrow neck of Lake Texcoco; the dike
also prevented the salty waters of the eastern lake
from polluting its western third, which
the Aztecs had filled with fresh water, piped in by their
aqueduct (Fiedel, p. 303).
Montezuma's dike, built across a narrow
neck of Lake Texcoco, not only provided defense
against rainy-season floods but also
prevented the saltier waters of the eastern part of the lake
from polluting its western third, which
the Aztecs had filled with fresh water piped in from
Chapultepec by their aqueduct (Bourdon,
p. 59).
Bourdon does cite Fiedel in a footnote
at the end of the paragraph containing this
passage, but that is insufficient
acknowledgment for this sophomoric handling of
source material. Having found a few
instances of this sort of thing, one rather
suspects there are more and that this
explains how an author can go from passages
reflecting sound scholarship to
misstatements of breath-taking innocence.
On the whole, Designing the Earth is
a disappointment. It is a rather superficial
212 OHIO
HISTORY
and idiosyncratic catalog of
earth-moving by various peoples from a variety of
times and places. One will come away
awed by the achievements of these earth-
shapers, but will likely be a bit
bewildered about how it is all supposed to fit to-
gether. Bourdon has assembled a
wonderful array of images of some truly monu-
mental earthworks, but he provides no
synthesis. Worse, he is an untrustworthy
guide to their history and meaning.
Ohio Historical Society Bradley T.
Lepper
Endangered Dreams: The Great
Depression in California. By Kevin
Starr. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xii
+ 402p.; illustrations, notes, biblio-
graphic essay, index. $35.00.)
With Endangered Dreams, Kevin
Starr carries through the end of the 1930s a
chronicle of California history begun
and advanced in three previous volumes:
Americans and the California Dream (1973); Inventing the Dream (1985); and
Material Dreams (1990). Starr writes with a passion only mildly
restrained, with a
strong narrative bent, and with frequent
vividness of language, infusing the sto-
ries he tells with a sense of recovered
drama and large significance. Offstage as
this drama unfolds, the patterns of
national history mutter their presence. On
stage, California defines the action and
asserts a right to bathe provocatively in
the spotlight.
More that half of Endangered Dreams deals
with labor issues and the politics
that accompanied them. Two background chapters cover
nineteenth-century
California radicalism and the IWW. Starr
then wades vigorously into the agricul-
tural and cannery strikes of the 1930s,
the organization of the San Francisco wa-
terfront and the general strike of 1934,
Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California
gubernatorial campaign, and the patterns
of political and economic reaction such
activism evoked. From early in its
history, Starr suggests, California developed
"a predilection for extremes of
language and behavior in labor strife" (p. ix) that
prepared its denizens by the 1930s for
"a Left/Right battle of national impor-
tance" (p. 27). Using this
framework of extremes, Starr interprets California's la-
bor conflicts as "fascist/Communist
drama" (p. 105); he quotes Bruce Bliven to
compare the Townsend movement with the
rise of Mussolini and Hitler (p. 137);
and he declares boldly that in 1934
"Fascism had arrived in the Imperial" Valley
(p. 159). Some readers will find this
language too highly colored. Alert to the
uses of "red scare" tactics in
the struggles he describes, Starr seems far less aware
of "brown scare" distortions
that created ideological caricatures of an opposite
kind. Only belatedly does he note that
suggestions of fascism must be "carefully
qualified" (p. 193).
In another section of the book, Starr
pays particular heed to patterns of migra-
tion and their relation to California
politics in the 1930s. The large numbers of
migrants arriving in the 1920s, he
suggests, had brought their working skills and
nest eggs to find rapid integration into
a prosperous state. Those arriving in the
thirties, actually fewer in number, were
dominantly the "displaced and dispos-
sessed" (p. 224), and their arrival
coincided with an exodus of Mexican farm work-
ers whose places they often took.
Migration in the face of depression presented
both the challenges of relief efforts
and a setting for some of the most impressive
documentary work of the period.
Starr's most lyrical enthusiasm is
reserved for public works projects completed
Book Reviews 213
or begun in the 1930s, especially
Boulder/Hoover Dam, Shasta Dam and the
Central Valley Project, and the Golden
Gate Bridge. These and other major pro-
jects "continue to haunt"
California, Starr asserts, through their demonstration
that beyond controversy there could be
"shared identity and unified public action"
(p. 276). Indeed, the Golden Gate Bridge
stands as a transcendent miracle embody-
ing "Platonic perfection" (p.
337), and Hoover Dam rises "like a Bach fugue mate-
rialized in concrete" (p. 295).
Yes, Governor James Rolph might seem paradoxi-
cally to stand as both red-baiter and
public works progressive, and Hoover Dam
might also be understood as a
"subtle triumph of the industrial Right" (p. 300),
adding complexity to Starr's exposition.
But complexity interferes little with his
enthusiasm or his conviction that public
works in the 1930s helped to "complete"
California.
Starr's interests are clearly limited:
readers will find barely a mention of the
film industry in the 1930s, for example,
or more than a taste of California's cul-
tural life. Endangered Dreams offers
a chronicle of California's public develop-
ment that assumes a record of (ultimate)
progress. And for Starr the story takes its
character from its most exuberant
colors, not its muted hues.
University of Puget Sound Terry A.
Cooney
George F. Kennan and the Origins of
Containment 1944-1946: The Kennan-
Lukacs Correspondence. By George F. Kennan and John Lukacs. (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1997. 85p.;
bibliography, index. $19.95 cloth;
$9.95 paper.)
Let it be stated at the outset that this
nifty little book has little to offer in the
way of originality to those familiar
with the influence George F. Kennan brought
to Soviet-American relations during this
century. Barely eight-five pages in
length and consisting of six letters
exchanged between Kennan and John Lukacs,
two intellectual heavyweights, it
rehashes briefly views that Kennan has
expressed extensively in numerous other
publications, along with Lukacs'
reaction to said views.
Both Kennan and Lukacs are real
politickers, advocates of a foreign policy
based more on considerations of power
than ideals. As such, and as revealed in
these letters, they, with one major
exception, tend to agree on how the United
States dealt with, or should have dealt
with, Stalin's Soviet Union during World
War II, the exception being Roosevelt's
de facto political alliance with the
Soviets during the war. Briefly put,
Kennan feels (and felt so at the time) that the
U.S. should certainly have provided
military support to a country that, after all,
"carried at least 80 percent of the
enormous burden of defeating Hitler on the
ground" (p. 72). But, as he
cautioned early in a June 1941 letter to State
Department colleague Loy Henderson,
written just two days after Germany attacked
Russia, we should avoid "anything
which might identify us politically or
ideologically with the Russian war
effort" (p. 41). Lukacs disagrees, saying that
since it was obvious that only
full-fledged Russian participation would enable the
Allies to defeat Hitler, even the
suggestion of American reluctance to a political
alliance might have prompted the
ever-suspicious Stalin to curtail his efforts.
Who can say which was correct?
Other than this one issue, Kennan and
Lukacs, as said, are in harmony. Both
take strong issue with
"revisionists" who hold that our hasty and impulsive
214 OHIO HISTORY
postwar reactions against the Soviet
Union made us equally culpable for the
outbreak of the Cold War; in fact, they
say, the U.S. should have responded earlier.
Both also downgrade the role of ideology
in the confrontation, feeling than an
enlarged powerful Russia rather than
international Communism was the primary
threat to America. Kennan goes so far as
to state (pp. 67-68) that the Russians
themselves probably had not taken
Marxist ideology seriously since the great
purges of the 1930s, simply paying it
lip service (their fig leaf of respectability,
Kennan has written elsewhere) to
disguise what were actually aggressive
nationalist power grabs to enlarge their
sphere of influence. The American
obsession with ideology led primarily to
two less than salutary developments in
the United States: various domestic
troglodytes managed to poison the political
climate by equating anti-Communism with
patriotism; and seeing international
Communism as an all-powerful monolith
bent on taking over the world led to a
simplistic, erroneous diagnosis of the
global situation, with one result being
America's ill-advised and tragic
military plunge into the morass of Southeast
Asian politics.
Although brief, the book is a convenient
introduction to the profound
ruminations of two outstanding scholars
who have made major contributions to
the study of international relations. It
is also a reminder of how well Kennan
stacks up against his critics.
Ohio Historical Society Robert L.
Daugherty
Arthur J. Goldberg: New Deal Liberal.
By David L. Stebenne. (New York:
Oxford
University Press, 1996. viii + 539p.;
illustrations, notes, index. $45.00.)
David Stebenne has written an important
study of the "postwar order." Despite
the title, however, it is not a
biography of Arthur Goldberg. Of the book's 382
pages of text only about 75 deal
directly with Goldberg and his life and these only
cursorily-hardly more than one would
expect to find in the Dictionary of
American Biography. Instead, Arthur Goldberg is Stebenne's vehicle
to address
the postwar American labor movement and
what Stebenne, much too frequently,
calls either the "postwar
order" or the "postwar New Deal," the successors to the
New Deal. That is, the old political
trilogy of the decline of liberalism, the rise of
conservatism, and the failure of
radicalism-or why history has not fulfilled left-
ists' dreams. The main characters in the
"postwar order" include Harry Truman,
Arthur Goldberg, Dean Rusk, Dwight
Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Earl Warren,
Robert Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. The
list itself suggests the problems with
Stebenne's story. The cast is simply too
inclusive and ideologically mixed to rep-
resent a coherent political culture,
i.e., a "postwar New Deal" or a "postwar order."
Still, Stebenne has written a solidly
researched, intelligently argued, and valu-
able account of the postwar labor
movement and the causes of its decline. Arthur
Goldberg is the most authoritative and convincing account of the
subject yet writ-
ten, and anyone interested should begin
with Stebenne. Led by Arthur Goldberg
and other New Deal labor leaders,
according to Stebenne, postwar labor tied the
movement's fortunes to Keynsian economic
policy and Cold War anticommunism
which together undergirded the American
welfare state. Shifting attention away
from locals and shop floors, labor
leaders courted the prevailing powers in
Washington, including Democratic and
Republican presidents and leaders of both
parties in the House and Senate.
Book Reviews 215
In return for continued support of the
gains that labor had secured during the
Depression and World War II,
AFL-CIO labor leaders purged their unions of politi-
cal radicals, weathering the
conservative reaction to the New Deal. Guided by
Goldberg, labor became a major player in
the "postwar order," prospering under
Democratic administrations and holding
its own under Republicans. Opting for
negotiation over confrontation and bread
and butter over managerial participa-
tion, AFL-CIO unions secured high wages
for their members, valuable fringe bene-
fits, and job security. Paradoxically,
they also created an alienated and politically
conservative rank and file. In the
1960s, when labor leaders tried to act on com-
plaints of racial and gender
discrimination within the labor movement, their
largely male and white membership
rebelled, first voting for George Wallace and
later Ronald Reagan, helping to unravel
the "postwar New Deal."
Stebenne treats Goldberg and other
"postwar New Dealers" fairly and sympathet-
ically, yet, critically. He describes
how the New Deal had revolutionized American
politics, concentrating decision making
in Washington. To participate in the
"postwar New Deal" labor
leaders centralized their union, moved their headquarters
to Washington, and rooted out political
radicals. Stebenne suggests that it might
have been otherwise. Had union leaders
stayed close to their membership, paid at-
tention to conditions on shop floors,
and militantly organized other workers, in-
cluding blacks and women, after World
War II the labor movement might have
grown and become more democratized
rather than stagnant and bureaucratized.
Organized labor paid a high price for
its membership in the "postwar order." Had
labor remained true to its radical
vision, history might have been different.
Stebenne's story might have had a happy
ending.
Probably not. The resurgence of Europe
and Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, not
to mention the "open shops" of
the American South, confronted organized labor
with unprecedented competition. The
recent emergence of the East Asian rim,
India, and Latin America have only
intensified the pressure on skilled American
labor. A beneficiary of the New Deal,
for fifty years World War II and the Cold War
sheltered American labor from market
pressures. Government highway and de-
fense contracts with their "union
shop," "union-scale," "union made," and "cost-
plus" contracts heavily subsidized
organized labor. Despite the resentment of
rank and file unionists towards
"welfare mothers and cheaters," unionized labor
was one of the welfare state's primary
clients, financed by an escalating income
tax and ballooning federal deficits, all
justified by the Cold War. But given the
long-term structural changes in the
international economy, such efforts were fu-
tile-little more than fingers in a New
Deal dike that could no longer withstand the
sea of economic change.
American labor unions fell victim to
historical forces that were neither under-
stood nor controlled. Stebenne's picture
of a "postwar order" is largely mythical.
In the two decades following World War
II the leaders of the "postwar New Deal"
were confused and often in disarray,
hardly knowing what to do from one moment
to the next. They confronted a world out
of control. Only inertia, the ruthless bru-
tality of lingering colonial empires,
and a nuclear standoff between the United
States and the Soviet Union held intact
what I.F. Stone appropriately called the
"Haunted Fifties." At best,
Stebenne's much ballyhooed "postwar order" was an il-
lusion, a wishful thought. America's
postwar power brokers were emperors with-
out clothes, in today's teenage
lingo-"clueless."
Stebenne's Arthur Goldberg demonstrates
that political history remains inter-
esting and important, but it is less the
story of missed opportunity than a tragic
account of human conceit. Arthur
Goldberg worked to make his world more hu-
216 OHIO HISTORY
mane. Measured by his
own hopes, he failed abysmally. Still, he accomplished
more than most, as
did the postwar labor movement, as did the "postwar New
Deal," as did
the "postwar order." We should do as well and hope that our efforts
are recounted by as
fair and capable an historian as David Stebenne. Whatever
one's interpretive
inclinations, this is a book worth reading.
Kenyon College William
B. Scott
Without Whose Aid:
Nursing and the Cleveland Clinic. By Diane Ewart
Grabowski.
(Cleveland: The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, 1996. xvii +310p;
illustrations, notes,
photograph credits, index. $29.95)
After service in
World War I as senior officers with the Lakeside Unit, Drs.
Crile, Bunts and
Lower returned to Cleveland with plans to establish a medical fa-
cility that would
provide doctors' office care and hospital care under one roof. The
Cleveland Clinic was
officially opened in 1921, and in 1924 the Cleveland Clinic
Hospital was opened.
Many of the Lakeside Unit nurses followed Dr. Crile, for
whom they had great
respect, and applied for employment with his new medical fa-
cility. Dr. Crile was
quick to accept their applications, as he had developed great
respect for and
confidence in their abilities during their wartime effort. The his-
tory of their devoted
service to the Cleveland Clinic is told in this timely publica-
tion.
As the Cleveland
Clinic marks its 75th anniversary, and the city of Cleveland
celebrates its
bicentennial, Diane Grabowski and members of the Nursing History
Book Task Force have
concentrated on nursing as a key element in the history of
the Cleveland
Clinic. Previous historical accounts
have often focused on the
founding physicians
and their colleagues. Although the Cleveland Clinic has tra-
ditionally been
physician-run, the nursing staff has played a major role in provid-
ing direct patient
care.
Without Whose Aid effectively illustrates the progression from nursing as
a po-
sition solely
dedicated to providing care at the bedside, to one that includes re-
search, writing for
publications, and continuing education, as well as direct pa-
tient care. The
development of the Nursing Education Department was a means of
promoting advancement
in the field through educational programs
offered to all
Cleveland Clinic
nursing personnel. The nursing field began to broaden and de-
partments became more
specialized, resulting in duties traditionally performed by
physicians being
taken on by the nursing staff. It may surprise readers to learn
that until 1958
physicians, not nurses, started a patient's IV therapy. Although
she/he may have been
capable, the nurse was only responsible for monitoring the
apparatus and seeing
to the comfort of the patient. On a more technological scale,
nurses' of the 1990s
are experiencing perhaps one of the greatest advances in the
profession and many
welcome the chance to participate in the use of new ad-
vancements in
technology. Others say it has simply added responsibilities to an
already overwhelming
position because they must now order and maintain these
new items and learn
how to use them in order to instruct the physicians.
Despite changes, the
nurses within the Cleveland Clinic hold fast to the goals
identified by the
Division of Nursing in the 1980s: (1) "To provide patients and
family or significant
others with professional nursing care."; (2) "To provide all
Division of Nursing
employees with opportunities for on-going education, both
personal and
professional."; (3) "To participate in nursing research thereby con-
Book Reviews 217
tributing to the body of nursing
knowledge."; (4) "To act as a resource to the
community-at-large on health issues
requiring nursing input." Though
officially
stated during the last half of the
century, these goals have been known to nurses
since the early days of Dr. George W.
Crile and his surgical team.
By using primary documentation from the
holdings of many of Cleveland's
finest historical institutions and conducting
personal interviews with Cleveland
Clinic nurses, Grabowski has produced a
captivating history. She includes pho-
tographs showing nurses in action as
well as portraits of nurses mentioned in the
text. Also included are short
informational sidebars that add contextual details.
This is a publication that does not
glorify the field of nursing, but tells a straight
forward tale of blood, sweat, and very
often, tears. A patient quoted by the author
sums its up best: "What an
incredible job being a nurse. You must have every-
thing: knowledge, timeless energy, great
expertise, perfect poise, professional-
ism, and empathy galore."
Cleveland Medical Library
Association Jennifer
L. Kane
The Dictionary of Cleveland
Biography. Compiled and edited by
David D. Van
Tassel and John J. Grabowski.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
xiv + 545p.; index. $75.00.)
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland
History. Compiled and edited by David
D. Van
Tassel and John J. Grabowski. (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1996.
xxvii + 1165p.; illustrations, subject
guide, index. $59.95.)
Pending anniversaries of public events
frequently provide the motivation for
retrospective projects. Such was the
case with the Encyclopedia of Cleveland
History, first published in 1987 and reviewed in the
Winter/Spring 1988 issue of
Ohio History. That massive undertaking was enthusiastically received
but was
also followed by a renewed interest in
the local history of the city. All the new re-
search engendered by the first volume
naturally suggested a second edition. The
bicentennial of Cleveland's founding in
1996 provided the perfect opportunity for
focusing these efforts.
So how does one add substantial material
to a volume already bending book-
shelves at more than a thousand pages
and crammed into eye-straining 7-point
type? The obvious answer is to divide it
into two volumes, but instead of creating
an equal pair, editors Van Tassel and
Grabowski chose to separate the biographies
out for a Dictionary of Cleveland
Biography. According to introductory material
in both new volumes, this provided room
for 400 new Encyclopedia articles and
well over 700 new biographies. Because
they incorporate and update the original
articles, the new volumes effectively
supplant the premier edition.
Some of the added articles to the Encyclopedia
are ones that I suspect the editors
would have liked to include in the first
edition, such as that on the 1920 Sly and
Fanner murder case. Others, including
the lengthy treatment of "Soccer," are a re-
flection of a wider societal interest in
a topic than was true only a decade ago. Still
others, like the expert discussion of
the "Iron and Steel Industry" by technological
historian Carol Poh Miller, are
inclusions that were somehow omitted from the
initial volume. The addition of a
"Bicentennial Timeline" provides a useful and
concise summary of the city's history,
although it is somewhat reminiscent of
W.G. Rose's sesquicentennial volume, Cleveland:
The Making of a City.
As with the original book, the new Dictionary
is limited only to deceased indi-
218 OHIO HISTORY
viduals. The lives of the city's mayors
who happen to still be living are included,
again as at first, under the headings of
"Mayoral Administration of . . ." within the
Encyclopedia. But Frank Lausche's death in 1990 made possible the
addition of
his biography to the Dictionary.
The editors can take justifiable pride
in their efforts to be inclusive where previ-
ous histories had often been
purposefully restrictive at best and eulogistic at
worst. Essays on "Immigration and
Migration" and sixteen separate foreign
groups, for example, cover the extensive
ethnic heritage of the city. Social and
political organizations important to
these groups are also included in the new
book.
The majority of local histories created
in the late nineteenth century are today
denigrated because the funding was
frequently provided by the subjects of their cel-
ebratory biographical articles. In that
context, it should be observed that the ac-
knowledgments for the new edition
include fourteen donations given in memory of
Richard F. Outcalt and his wife.
Outcalt's architectural firm, Outcalt and Geunther,
is featured in a new, and generally
complimentary, article for this edition. In fair-
ness to the editors, it should be noted
that they resisted the temptation to prepare
an article on Outcalt himself for the Dictionary,
even though the fact that he was
deceased met their first criterion. But
it illustrates some of the challenges in fi-
nancing and producing a modern history
of the city.
Enlarging the type size in the new
volume by several points is applauded, as are
the new maps and tables illustrating
things like Congressional districts through
time. The halftone illustrations
incorporated in the new Encyclopedia also add an
important dimension. Some curious
idiosyncrasies in alphabetizing abbreviated
and punctuated words are the only things
to mar what are otherwise excellent pro-
ductions. All in all, the Encyclopedia
and Dictionary are essential to anyone in-
terested in the history of this vitally
important city.
Ohio Historical Society David A.
Simmons
The Miami Indians of Indiana: A
Persistent People, 1654-1994. By
Stewart
Rafert. (Indianapolis: The Indiana
Historical Society, 1996. xxvii + 358p.; il-
lustrations, notes, appendices,
important dates, bibliography, index. $29.95.)
The role played by the Miami Indians of
Indiana in the battles for control of the
Old Northwest in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries is well documented.
Thus, the first three chapters of
Stewart Rafert's excellent history of the Miami,
although well written and perceptive,
contain no surprises and offer no new in-
sights. But when the author turns his
attention to the period after Jacksonian
Indian "removal," he tells a
remarkable story of a people's stubborn efforts to
maintain their identity and integrity in
the face of overwhelming odds that is any-
thing but familiar to readers who
generally assume that the history of tribal life in
the midwest ends with the trail of
tears.
Rafert has not only devoted his
professional career to the study of Miami com-
munities in Indiana, but he has also
been employed by the tribe and played a sig-
nificant role in the preparation of
documentation essential to efforts to achieve
federal recognition. His intimate
involvement in the tribe's current political bat-
tles have enabled Rafert to gain access
to a wide range of materials both written
and oral not generally available to
historians. He notes that "the Miami memory
of the past is pungent, detailed and
often humorous in its details of human foibles.
Book Reviews 219
There is also a strong element of anger
in memories of injustices, pride in sur-
vival, and a warm sense of security
within a loving community that tries to take
care of its own" (p. xiv). Rafert
has been faithful to his informants and he has
made judicious use of their testimony.
While his commitments are quite obvious,
particularly in the last section of the
book, he does not allow his sympathy for the
Miami to distract him from the task of
providing an authoritative and balanced ac-
count of their history. The result is an
admirable work.
It is difficult in a brief review to
convey the complexity and the irony of Miami
history. After Mad Anthony Wayne's
victory at Fallen Timbers in 1794, the
Miami and other tribes faced recurrent
and irresistible pressure to cede land to
whites. Between 1803 and 1809, the Miami
yielded the southern third of Indiana
to territorial Governor William Henry
Harrison, and in 1818, two years after
Indiana gained statehood, relinquished
their claims to most of central Indiana as
well. Additional cessions in 1826, 1828,
1834 and 1840 left the Miami with only
a few limited holdings in the state.
Land hungry whites anticipated that under
Andrew Jackson's removal program the
Miami and other native American groups
would all be shipped out, but certain
privileged Miami leaders succeeded in negoti-
ating exceptions that enabled them to
remain in the state. As they were rejoined
over the years by Miamis dissatisfied
with conditions in Kansas and later
Oklahoma, the Indiana Miami came to
outnumber the recognized tribe in the west.
In 1867, the attorney general of the
United States ruled that a treaty signed by the
eastern Miami in 1854 gave them status
as a recognized tribe. In 1897, however,
an assistant attorney general
arbitrarily revoked their tribal status.
Much of
Rafert's study deals with the tribe's
unsuccessful efforts to regain that status, and
he offers a persuasive argument
demonstrating that the eastern Miami have been
held to a standard not required of other
recent candidates for federal recognition.
The most valuable sections of his book,
however, analyze the persistence of a
sense of Miami identity and the
affirmation of their cultural heritage in the face of
hostile public policies, both state and
federal, that have aided and abetted their
dispossession and impoverishment.
Although they have lost even their former
reservation lands and their language,
the Indiana Miami find renewal both in a
strong sense of their traditions and in
a growing sense of kinship with other
Native American communities. It is a
story that is not without its sorrows, but it
is also both moving and inspiring.
Rafert tells it well.
The University of Toledo Alfred A.
Cave
The Emerging Midwest: Upland
Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old
Northwest, 1787-1861. By
Nicole Etcheson. (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1996. xiii + 205p.;
notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.)
Just like sectionalism itself, books
about the subject show no sign of fading
away. The latest attempt to understand
sectional tensions in the Middle West is
this small volume by Nicole Etcheson
which focuses on the political rhetoric of
Upland Southerners in Ohio, Indiana, and
Illinois from the beginnings of settle-
ment until the eve of the Civil War.
Etcheson's account, which is drawn largely
from standard sources and relies heavily
on newspapers-especially letters to edi-
tors-is possibly more valuable because
of the questions it raises than for the an-
swers it provides.
220 OHIO HISTORY
Etcheson's concept of an Upland South is
based on the premise that the upland
yeoman farmer, whose land was less
suited to plantation agriculture, differed from
the lowland planter because their
respective environments caused them to ap-
proach questions of politics, race, and
social organization differently.
Stereotypes of the two cultures have
always been easy to draw. Historians have du-
tifully passed along caricatures of the
plain-spoken backwoodsman versus the
pseudo-refined planter aristocrat (with
the "shrewd, enterprising Yankee" thrown
in for good measure). Thus, Etcheson
devotes an entire chapter to what she terms
the "manliness" issue, of
supposed importance to Upland Southerners, who pre-
ferred bravery and physical prowess to
rhetorical flourish (Abraham Lincoln is the
archetypal Upland Southerner).
Etcheson took her notion of an Upland
South largely from the work of cultural
geographers, perhaps not considering
that they had invented the idea for a dis-
tinctly different purpose. Rather than a
static model of political regionalism, the
Upland South model of cultural geography
describes a dynamic process of human
migration and cultural diffusion whereby
a certain material culture trait-complex
was spread from southeastern
Pennsylvania through the Appalachians, eventually
fanning out into the Piedmont on the
east and the Low plateaus of Kentucky and
Tennessee on the west. The model's
first, and clearest, expression was given by
the late Fred Kniffen who interpreted
the Upland South as a diffusion-created re-
gion of log-housing styles.
The assumption that a single political
culture was transmitted through this same
system is not merely unwarranted; it is
also clearly wrong. From the Shenandoah
Valley southward, Upland Southerners
held a mixed lot of political philosophies,
some emanating from the
planter-influenced mode of Tidewater Virginia, others
from southeastern Pennsylvania. Some
Upland Southerners envisioned farming
on a grand scale, and they took lands in
the Bluegrass, Nashville Basin, and
Virginia Military District. Others, in
contrast, really were backwoodsmen who
stayed high in the hills-but their
attitudes toward slavery or national banking
were not molded exclusively by that
experience.
Until they were divided by the slavery
issue, northern and southern Whigs had
much in common as did the northern and
southern Democrats. Sectional voting
emerged in response to the Civil War,
not as a precursor to it, as Etcheson and
others suggest. The next step is to
acknowledge that "Upland Southern" had noth-
ing to do with political parties in the
Middle West prior to the Civil War. Neither
was it a predictor of attitudes toward
the fugitive slave law, the Kansas-Nebraska
question, or subsidies for internal
improvements.
The observation that Stephen A. Douglas,
a Vermonter, and Abraham Lincoln, a
Kentuckian, were not on the correct
sides of the slavery extension issue that their
regions of origin would predict is made
only if one assumes that Upland South can
be equated with a political
philosophy. Illinois's
"Egypt" (extreme southern
counties) was overwhelmingly proslavery
in a constitutional election held in
1824 while the Sangamon country around
Springfield was an antislavery
stronghold, yet the two were equally
Upland Southern in terms of population ori-
gins. Regional background thus seems to
hold little ability to predict political at-
titudes in the antebellum Middle West.
Whatever the sources of variability, they
cannot be traced back to a common set of
Eastern (or Southern) roots, because
there simply is no single origin.
These observations do not negate the
value of Etcheson's contribution but
rather suggest that the matter of
Southern influence in the Middle West is more
complex than the Upland South model can
accommodate. In fact, Etcheson's work
Book Reviews 221
shows us how little we know about the
roots of Middle Western culture and how de-
tailed the scale of our analyses might
have to be in order to find theses influences.
Her book is essential reading for anyone
who would travel this path.
Northwestern University John C.
Hudson
The Ohio Frontier: An Anthology of
Early Writings. Edited by Emily
Foster.
(Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky,
1996. xiii + 229p.; illustra-
tions, maps, bibliography, index.
$29.95.)
Cynics contend we see history through
our prejudices. More informed analysts
assert only that interpretation depends
upon selection of evidence. Indeed, no
clearer demonstration of editorial
choice's power over historical documents can
emerge than Emily Foster's The Ohio
Frontier. In contrast to earlier documentary
collections like those of Reuben Gold
Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg,
Foster's assemblage of letters, memoirs,
and journals projects less a heroic
pageant of wilderness taming and more
the complexities, gains, and losses of a
major cultural shift. As a result her
book displays in compelling fashion how
Native American dispossession and
environmental transformation rightly figure
in early Ohio's history as "major
defining theme[s]" (p. xi).
Foster's volume, part of the Ohio River
Valley Series from the University Press
of Kentucky, represents the interactions
of land and culture by presenting the mul-
tiple voices and visions of the region's
inhabitants. The first source excerpted,
explorer Christopher Gist's 1750-51
journal, takes up the series' braided pattern
by simultaneously describing Indian
weaknesses and the land's bounty, both sub-
jects of interest to his eastern
employers. A white contemporary, the captive
James Smith, might write here of Wyandot
philosophy's finer points, but Foster's
other documents testify to the
well-wrought impasse which Indians, missionaries,
and traders labored long and hard to
achieve. By 1774, an eastern official's letter
to the Shawnee eloquently, and
accurately, predicts that process's implacable cul-
mination. The rapacious Virginians, he
warns, are as numerous as "Leaves upon
the Trees," and despite any losses
the Indians inflict, the whites from beyond the
river "will at last wear you out
and destroy you. . ." (p. 41). Spurred on by devel-
opers' visions like that of Thomas
Pownall's contemporaneous "official descrip-
tion," which saw Ohio as fodder for
business and empire, the Virginians came
northwest and underwrote their presence
with the sword. To document the brutality
of the ensuing war, Foster publishes
several bloody accounts, including Henry
Wilson's understated but chilling
testimony on George Rogers Clark's 1780 cam-
paign against the Shawnee.
After the American Revolution less
violent but equally consequential forces re-
shaped Ohio. Settlements sprouted in the
Western Reserve, Quakers and Germans
spilled westward from Pennsylvania, and
cities grew where Indian communities
had once stood. The recollections of
early nineteenth century businessmen like
John Melish view remaining Native
Americans as "wretchedly poor" figures
somewhat removed from white men's reality,
and the Reverend James Findlay con-
siders them "helpless, forlorn, and
dependent" (pp. 71, 153). Yet Indian and
European separation had not always been
so absolute. As Jonathan Alder's mem-
oir attests, early Ohioans like him
could, with difficulty, move between racial and
cultural lines. Hardening attitudes
shredded such connections, as well as Ohio's
aboriginal environment. English traveler
Francis Bailey here laments the sacri-
222 OHIO HISTORY
fice of great trees for the capture of
hiding raccoons, and Clevelander Isham
Morgan wistfully recalls the long-gone
flocks of pigeons which darkened the
skies of his youth.
In western Ohio of the 1830s, midwife
Livvat Boke endured hardships which re-
call an earlier century. But that era's
Cincinnati presaged a brighter future, despite
its streets full of swine. The timeless
trials of William Wells Brown, an escaped
slave from Kentucky traversing Ohio,
however, foreshadowed a national reckon-
ing over slavery. Foster concludes with
the Xenia Torch-light's altogether inade-
quate 1843 comment on the departure of
Ohio's last Indian group for the West.
The paper notes the parting with mere
"melancholy interest" (p. 214), a self-in-
dulgent romanticism typical of that
century's regard for the vanquished. As such,
the paper's attitude was far too simple
a response to the passing of an epoch every
bit as dynamic, brutal, and profound as
Foster's well-chosen documents indicate.
The voices she summons from the past
tell their own intensely particular tales.
But in concert they speak the mind of a
culture as dimly aware of its acts as our
own.
Kentucky Historical Society James Russell Harris