Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Montrie, Chad

168 Reviews 
Kenneth Warren, Kzste, Wealth, and Alienation: Growth and Decline in the 
Connellsville Coke Industry (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001). 
Covering thirty miles north and south of the small town of Connellsville, 
Pennsylvania, and straddling the Youghiogheny River, the Connellsville coke 
district was at one time the leading supplier of metallurgical coke to U.S. iron 
furnaces and steel mills. During World War I, when it saw peak production lev- 
els, the district produced 47 percent of America's metallurgical coke. 
Thereafter, however, the local coke industry underwent a rapid decline. By the 
1920s, technological advances had made the district's beehive ovens obsolete, 
new "retort" ovens allowed for the use of lesser quality coal from the reserves 
of southern Appalachian coalfields, steel mills began to manufacture their own 
coke to utilize the byproducts, and most of the local seams were worked out. 
In Waste, Wealth, and Alienation, Kenneth Warren traces the rise of the 
Connellsville coke district to a position of preeminence and its rapid fall to rel- 
ative economic inconsequence. An Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College at Oxford 
University as well as the author of works on Henry Clay Frick and the U.S. 
Steel Corporation, Warren presents this story of industrial expansion and con- 
traction with the style and grace of an experienced historian. His book makes 
short work of the complex collision of various historical factors - the natural 
mineral endowment of southwestern Pennsylvania, the waxing and waning of 
demand for pig iron, the influx of southern and eastern European immigrants, 
technological development, and the personal interests and prejudices of a select 
number of captains of industry. It also makes a convincing argument. 
According to Warren, the mining of coal and production of coke in the 
Connellsville district made certain individuals, companies, and communities 
quite wealthy. But mineral extraction and processing also had many negative 
consequences - social, economic, and environmental - for the vast majority of 
district residents. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as coke 
production increased, the industry promoted social disruption and alienation as 
well as despoliation of the physical environment. Starting in the 1920s, with the 
industry in decline, the area's economy collapsed and workers left in droves. 
The dual foIlies of overexploitation of exhaustible resources and reliance on a 
narrow economic base only became clear, if they became clear, when it was too 
late. 
Warren supports his multiple claims on a solid base of primary sources, 
many of which he was already familiar with from earlier research. He relies 
most heavily on the business papers of H.C. Frick (to which he had unprece- 
dented access), the extensive archives of the U.S. Steel Corporation, and the 
papers of Andrew Carnegie. Warren also makes reference to trade journals, 
local newspapers, and nineteenth-century geological surveys. Secondary 
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resources, on the other hand are conspicuous by their absence in citations. 
Perhaps this is due partly to the lack of a literature specifically focused on the 
Connellsville district. The only other studies of note on the subject are John 
Enman's 1962 dissertation, "The Connellsville Coke Region," and the Historic 
American Engineering Survey of 1995, although even these are missing from 
the endnotes. 
As a comprehensive history of the Connellsville coke industry, Waste, 
Wealth, and Alienation covers a wide range of topics and themes. It starts with 
a basic introduction to coke production, followed by a history of the industry's 
evolution in the nineteenth century. The Connellsville area, Warren explains, 
was particularly well suited to supply the nation and world with metallurgical 
coke because it was underlain by a seam of high-grade coal. At first, miners 
worked outcroppings of this coal on hillsides and along eroded stream banks, 
but later they opened slope and shaft mines. With comparative ease -the thick 
seam of soft coal required neither powder nor machinery - miners brought the 
mineral above ground and it was heated out of direct contact with air (first in 
piles and later in beehive ovens). The heating drove off volatiles and left a car- 
bon residue; the coke that was used as fuel for smelting iron in blast furnaces. 
Although most American blast furnaces used charcoal up to the mid-nine- 
teenth century, declining wood resources and the expansion of rail networks 
through the trans-Appalachian region encouraged greater reliance on coke. 
Subsequently, by the 1880s coke had become the most abundant furnace fuel. 
With the increase in use, however, the number of new entrants to the industry 
also grew and capacity began to outstrip demand. In response, large operators 
made two attempts to restrict output and reduce wages. Yet by the end of 1887, 
the second of two syndicates was in shambles, undermined by nonparticipating 
smaller firms and the direct acquisition and expansion of oven capacity by iron 
producers. Production then increased to unprecedented levels while prices 
remained low, touching off a wave of mergers. As a result of these mergers, 
H.C. Frick, who had entered the coke industry in 1871 and joined Andrew 
Carnegie in an association of steel and coke interests in the early 1880s, 
acquired effective control of two-thirds of the district's coal and ovens. 
In Chapter 3, Warren moves on to examine the conflict between labour and 
management in the Connellsville district. Isolated in small communities and 
tied to an industry constantly expanding and contracting, he explains, workers 
in the area faced a degree of exploitation equal to or exceeding that of prole- 
tarians in manufacturing. By the 1880s, an increasing number of them were 
also immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, with lower expectations 
and difficulty communicating in English. Yet workers did manage to organize, 
first under the Knights of Labor and the Miners and Laborcrs' Amalgamated 
Association and, after its founding in 1890, as part of the United Mine Workers 
170 Reviews 
of America. Their efforts culminated in a bitter but unsuccessful strike in 189 1, 
which Warren argues was comparable in its violence and larger significance to 
the Homestead fight a year later, as well as another failed strike in 1894. 
In the chapters following his discussion of class conflict, Warren outlines 
the expansion of the Connellsville district, the development of new coke-mak- 
ing technology, and the beginnings of the Connellsville industry's collapse. 
First, he surveys the opening of mines and construction of ovens in the Lower 
Connellsville district, to the west of the district proper, in response to a surge 
in pig iron production. By the second decade of the twentieth century, this new 
area began to surpass the older centre in terms of the number of coke works and 
output. After World War I, however, both declined rapidly. Just before the war, 
many coke producers and users were starting to switch to byproduct coke man- 
ufacture, which relied on "retort" ovens rather than beehive ovens, allowed for 
the use of poorer coals, and captured the byproducts of processing. The new 
technology, Warren points out, led to a shift of mining westward beyond the 
Monongahela River and south into West Virginia and Virginia. It also prompt- 
ed the movement of ovens out of the coalfields and closer to mills. Although 
coal reserves were already severely diminished in the Connellsville area, these 
new developments dealt fatal blows to the district's coke industry. 
Chapter 6 of the book, inserted in the midst of the discussion about the 
development of new technology and the district's decline, details the physical 
and social implications of beehive coke manufacture. Warren argues that work- 
ing and living conditions in the scattered settlements of the Connellsville-area 
were "hard and bleak," characterized by low wages and long hours as well as 
payment in company scrip and high prices at company stores. Housing was 
generally inadequate and there was a lack of basic public institutions. In addi- 
tion, air pollution caused by the coke ovens was often bad enough to kill off 
local vegetation and run out the remaining farmers. When the district's coke 
industry declined, after years of production in wasteful beehive ovens, air qual- 
ity improved. But as the area's economy deteriorated living conditions became 
even worse, and this forced a heavy out-migration. 
Warren's book is, indeed, the comprehensive history of the Connellsville 
coke district that he set out to write. It is primarily a business history in terms 
of scope and emphasis. Yet the book's main argument addresses various sub- 
jects and themes - labour unions and strikes, worker alienation, environmental 
degradation, and the like - that would normally fall within the domain of other 
fields. Warren has also written a cautionary tale, one that warns against pro- 
posals for private control of natural resources and "free market" solutions as 
means of promoting conservation and dealing with pollution. Private owner- 
ship and unregulated capitalism, he makes clear, were the sources of many 
problems in the Connellsville area, including wasteful use of coal and dirty air. 
Reviews 171 
In these and other ways, Waste, Wealth, and Alienation is not only a good his- 
torical interpretation but also one with modem-day, social relevance. 
Chad Montrie 
University of Massachusetts, Lowell 
Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds., Hungry for 
Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (New 
York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). 
In the opening overview of the book, the editors quote Marx, who states in 
Capital (V. 3, Ch. 6, sec. 3): 
The moral of the tale is that the capitalist system runs count- 
er to a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture is 
incompatible with the capitalist system (even if the latter pro- 
motes technical development in agriculture) and needs either 
small farmers working for themselves or the control of the 
associated producers. 
Hungry,for Profit provides a sweeping picture of the irrationality of capitalist 
agriculture. It is indicative that the editors draw attention to Marx's analysis of 
agriculture under nineteenth century capitalism. There is a central logic to the 
organization of the volume that links historical and contemporary enclosures 
and dispossessions of farmers as well as resistance movements of the past and 
present. The attention to historical context is one of the great strengths of the 
volume as a whole as well as many of the individual contributions. 
Two opening chapters together provide an overarching historical frame- 
work setting the tone for the entire volume. Ellen Meiksins Wood exposes the 
ideological nature of the notion of the natural evolution of capitalism by exam- 
ining the emergence of its unique systemic imperative to compete to maximize 
profit and capital accumulation. She traces how this compulsion and the sys- 
tem it feeds first appeared in the English countryside. She asserts that if agrar- 
ian capitalism had not emerged in England, because the conditions did not exist 
elsewhere, capitalism probably would never have come into existence. Land 
was more concentrated than elsewhere in Europe, with a large proportion of 
tenants paying economic rents, rates determined by market conditions rather 
than custom or law. Would-be tenants had to compete in a market for leases. 
Failure to maximize output would result in dispossession because of inability 


Kenneth Warren — Waste, Wealth, and Alienation: Growth and Decline in the Connellsville Coke Industry

Gardiner, Judith Kegan

160 Reviews 
This was punishment for potential disloyalty rather than pacifism in many cases, 
although in others internment came about because of that oxymoron, state intel- 
ligence, resulting in injustices being done. In prison, it appears that idolisation 
of Mosley acted as substitute for fascist activity: women fascists in Holloway 
held a tea dance for OM's 44th birthday in 1940. Outside of prison other fascists 
used charitable efforts for the prisoners as a surrogate for political activity. At 
this point, fascist women's supporting role to the mainly male detainees was 
confirmed. Militant fascist women collected comforts for the fascist troops. 
In her conclusion, Gottlieb rightly argues that fascist women were 
"autonomous historical agents." Mosley agreed when he declared that "without 
the women I could not have got quarter of the way" (267). But of course, he did 
not get very far. The Labour Party by the end of the 1930s had a female mem- 
bership of hundreds of thousands and the Conservative Party had more than a 
million. Some discussion of fascist failure related to other parties' success might 
have been called for in the conclusion. This might have been more historically 
appropriate than the attempt to link the Spice Girls and Camille Paglia into the 
tradition of feminine activism that Gottlieb explores in the rest of the book. 
But that is not the finish of this book. It continues with a very useful "Who's 
who in the history of women and fascism in Britain." It acts to give us some 
insight into the day-to-day activities of fascist women (and men). Hence Mrs LT 
Cotton, member of the BUF and interned during the war is described as attend- 
ing a fascist meeting addressed by her husband in Branscombe, Devon. In 
response to the rough reception her husband received, Mrs Cotton "struck a 
member of the audience in the face." The "Who's who" also reveals the variety 
of ideas within fascism. Mrs Dudley Ward was an anti-Semite and animal lover, 
publishing a condemnatory book linking the two entitled Jewish Kosher (1944). 
Details are also provided of the huge variety of activities in which fascist women 
took part, from the organisation of fascist Etes, running branches, conducting 
sticker campaigns, cutting telephone cables and seducing sailors for reasons of 
espionage in wartime. There about 260 women and 30 men described in this sec- 
tion, a notable feat, and it adds generally to the usefulness of this impressively 
researched and clearly structured book. Gottlieb offers a distinctive interpreta- 
tion and adds significantly to the existing historiography on British fascism. 
Paul Ward 
University of Huddersfield, UK. 
Ellen Messer-Davidow, Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to 
Academic Discourse (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002). 
Although Disciplining Feminism: From SocialActivism to Academic Discourse 
Reviews 161 
is a book well worth reading in full, its title thesis, the story of how "a bold ven- 
ture launched thirty years ago to transform academic and social institutions was 
itself transformed by them" (l), is not the most interesting thing in it. Ellen 
Messer-Davidow tells several interlinked stories about social movements, the 
academy, and the reasons for conservative success and progressive failure in the 
United States over the past thirty years. Using a Foucauldian approach to the 
productive workings of power, she analyzes the forces that structured academic 
feminism. Her goal is to "synthesize what has been sundered - self-structure 
and social structure, intellectualization and institutionalization" (13). She 
believes "all social formations are discursively constituted" and that institution- 
alized discourses "consist of a welter of practices fueled by resources and 
ordered by rules" that can be deciphered and changed (1 3). Her methods for this 
deciphering include textual analysis, personal memoir, interviews, and ethno- 
graphic observation of organizations from both the Left and Right. 
One story she tells is the meteoric success and rapid institutionalization of 
academic women's studies within the university. In contrast to the usual narrative, 
Messer-Davidow argues that Women's Studies in the academy was not the cumu- 
lative growth of three decades but rather that it emerged rapidly in the aftermath 
of 1968, led by veterans of the New Left, civil rights, and antiwar movements. She 
sees 197 1 as a "pivotal" moment; before then, "academic women could not see the 
workings of the institutional-disciplinary order" (1 8). By 1975 academic women 
understood that their disciplines were male-gendered, male-dominated, and alien- 
ating to women, and they responded by reconstituting themselves as feminists, 
generating new knowledges, and so reshaping their disciplines and the academic 
system. The greatest success story was the formation of academic Women's 
Studies as a field that demanded and received recognition and resources from U.S. 
universities. The unifying "intellectual core" of Women's Studies was "women's 
oppression" (154), and the hallmark of early Women's Studies was its formation 
as a "hybrid" that could "breach the divide between theory and practice" (90). 
Once begun, the institutionalization of Women's Studies escalated dramatically: 
from four college and university programs in 1970 to over 630 in the mid- 1990s, 
plus tens of thousands of courses taught, and a network of feminist research cen- 
ters, national professional associations, journals, and publications. 
This success was predicated on serendipitous conditions, among which were 
a bountihl economy, a large expansion in university budgets and enrollments, and 
prior successes of Left movements in mobilizing supporters and in provoking 
established institutions to gestures of compromise and containment. Having 
learned skills of political education and community organizing, young progressive 
women returned to academia ready to push for change. According to Messer- 
Davidow, "what the 1960s movements shared was not the same political agenda 
but a paradigm for making change through structure, action, and education" that 
could be transferred to academic feminist studies (93). The essential lesson, 
162 Reviews 
Messer-Davidow emphasizes, is the need for an "articulated infrastructure" that 
connects grassroots activists and local initiatives vertically with national organi- 
zations and horizontally with other groups who have comparable aims (94). Her 
model is the U.S. civil rights movement, which demonstrated that "to make social- 
structural change it would have to deploy five strategies: catalyzing local activism 
through community education and organizer training, orchestrating direct action. 
. . to pressure the elites, providing services to the people through parallel organi- 
zations. . ., working the channels of official politics to change laws and policies, 
and insinuating movement issues and projects into mainstream arenas" (94). 
Academic feminist studies followed a similar course in its rapid institutionaliza- 
tion, developing experts and constituencies while transforming university struc- 
tures and disciplines. Unfortunately, she contends, conservatives bested progres- 
sives at this articulated organizing, and now control the United States. 
The changes that feminism wrought in popular and academic thought have 
been profound. Foremost is the-concept of gender itself, understood not as a bio- 
logical division between males and females but as an elaborate network of social 
constructions. Feminist scholars, Messer-Davidow notes, "operationalized gen- 
der" in many ways, "as stereotypes, cognitive scheme, and structures of con- 
sciousness; as social roles and status, relations among women and men, the social 
organization of activities, the effects of systems of (re)production; as personality 
traits, psychic structures, and identity performances; and as media images, cultur- 
al ideologies, and the semiotics of the body" (178). Contrary to some critiques, 
Messer-Davidow stresses that American academic feminist thought from the 
beginning grappled with the effects of the observer and with interdependent sys- 
tems of inequality, including "race," ethnicity, class, and sexuality, as well as gen- 
der. 
As Women's Studies was institutionalized in U.S. universities, it also achieved 
some success in reaching out to broader constituencies. One positive example 
Messer-Davidow cites is Goddard College, an experimental institution dedicated 
to connecting campus learning with the larger community. From Goddard came 
the Our Bodies, Ourselves collective, which provided the women's health move- 
ment with widely accessible information about women's bodies in the 1970s, and 
from it also came the educators who popularized the idea of distinctive women's 
"ways of knowing" so popular in the 1980s (126). A recent progressive success 
story is Rutgers University's New Jersey Project. Supported by the government of 
New Jersey, in the 1980s and 1990s it coordinated efforts to integrate the new fem- 
inist scholarship on gender, race, class, and sexuality into academic cunicula 
across the state. And a continuing story of feminist mainstreaming is that of fic- 
tion by women of color, published in alternative presses until its audience grew 
large enough to attract established publishers. 
A main strength of Disciplining Feminism is its case histories, both institu- 
tional and individual. Messer-Davidow retells the story of Evelyn Fox Keller, for 
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example, to show "the anomaly of a woman in physics" in the late 1950s and early 
1960s along with parallel tales of women in other academic disciplines who were 
similarly alienated (2 1). She persuasively describes the interlocking material prac- 
tices through which academic disciplinary norms were consolidated, followed by 
the forging of new feminist knowledges. One fascinating case history is her own, 
as she goes from nineteen-year-old wife to single mother after a difficult divorce, 
to graduate student activist. to tenured English professor. Like her, I joined 
demonstrations at the 1968 Modem Language Association convention, but I was 
not an insider to the spontaneous negotiations she records between some New Let? 
academics and the convention administrators, which led to the founding of the 
MLA Commission on the Status of Women and its Women's Caucus. 
If the Modern Language Association did respond to radical demands, while 
Women's Studies Programs, feminist presses, and academic feminism flourished 
throughout the 1970s, her next story undercuts these successes as conservative 
forces regroup and triumph. For her the election of U.S. President Ronald Reagan 
in 1980 marks "the beginning of the end" (217); she starts researchng rightwing 
groups in 1987. She finds that they learned from the successful techniques of the 
Left for mass mobilization and the development of institutions, but they are far 
better funded, better connected, and more efficient as they dismantle the modest 
progressive gains of the 1970s. Conservative judges, for example, make "group 
discrimination disappear," not by improving conditions for members of historical- 
ly disenfranchised groups but rather by nullifying groups in favor of abstract indi- 
viduals who deserve, and already have, an equal playing field, even if some play- 
ers wear cleats while others play barefoot (1 75). She adroitly skewers the logic of 
these judicial decisions and ruefully admires conservative effectiveness in institu- 
tionalizing their inegalitarian agenda. Well-articulated and coordinated, conserva- 
tive groups target vulnerable populations, use legal challenges before favorable 
judges to legislate their views, and splinter women by funding pseudo-feminists of 
their own. As an observer of institutions rather than just a reader of texts, Messer- 
Davidow watches as conservatives use college summer programs to train white 
youngsters into believing the abstract "laws" of free enterprise and into discount- 
ing their empathy for the poor and people of color. After one of these conserva- 
tive summer programs, she sees the students affirmed in their old identities but 
newly slulled as organizers, "radiating purposefulness" as they lobby for the 
rightwing agenda (236). By describing her infiltration of conservative organiza- 
tions, she gives us a foretaste of her next book on the tactics of the Right. 
The third story Messer-Davidow tells is her title story, and it's the one I find 
most equivocal. It is framed as a story of failure, sometimes tragic, sometimes 
pathetic. For her, academic feminism began as a wing of a vibrant, radical, egal- 
itarian social movement, but it failed to transform the academy or larger society 
and instead became changed by that which it had sought to change. Some of her 
arguments are familiar. Academic language became abstruse and elitist, "inac- 
164 Reviews 
cessible to community feminists," a charge to which her own prose is sometimes 
subject (161). Certainly she concurs with the postmodernist belief that social real- 
ity is discursively constructed and she declares "theory7' the unifying content of 
academic Women's Studies, even as its abstraction alienates community women. 
She also agrees with both the Right and many on the Left concerning the baleful 
effects of identity politics and its "grievance modality" (191). Academic feminists 
became dogmatic, divisive, and doctrinaire, she complains. 
Feminists believed, she says, that more women in academia "would remedy 
sex-patterned education, employment, and knowledge. But it didn't" (78). 
Universities remained nearly as white and middle class in the 1990s as decades 
earlier, while institutionalized "recursive racism7' demanded more service from 
faculty of color than from whites, then judged them harshly for failing to meet 
ever-rising standards of scholarly productivity (194). Furthermore, although all 
Women's Studies programs claim social change as a goal and many sponsor stu- 
dent internships in feminist organizations, Messer-Davidow judges that they have 
not achieved much. The transformations that feminist studies "promised in theo- 
ry did not pan out in practice," not because they were suppressed but rather 
because academic routine "exhausted our energies, narrowed our vision, and iso- 
lated us" (165). 
Messer-Davidow demonstrates that as feminism became Women's Studies in 
the academy, it conformed to academic rules and structures. However, I'm less 
inclined than she is to view the decline of organized feminism as due to flaws 
internal to academic feminism. There were indeed internal dissensions w i t h  
feminist movements of the 1970s, as chronicled, for example, in Susan 
Brownmiller's In Our Time: Memoirs of a Revolution (1999), which pays little 
attention to academic feminism in comparison to feminist organizations and pub- 
lishing. More than Messer-Davidow, I see feminist fragmentation as heled by 
external forces, although it is true that feminists then were not successhl in coun- 
tering these forces. So I saw the Chicago Women's Liberation Union destroyed in 
the mid- 1970s less by internal factions than by its inability to counter a provoca- 
tively divisive group who accused the majority of racism. I'm also skeptical about 
blaming academic feminism for the failure of progressive movements more gen- 
erally. Academic feminism sought to change universities and did dramatically 
increasing the number of women faculty, helping establish more student-centered 
pedagogy, and developing curricula both theoretically sophisticated and cornrnit- 
ted to social change. It did not eradicate sexism or capitalism or stop the erosion 
of public support for U.S. universities. In reactionary times from the 1980s to the 
present, academic feminists have continued to disseminate socially critical, 
antiracist, and often anti-imperialist perspectives on the struggle for genderjustice. 
Part of my difference from Messer-Davidow here may spring from our differing 
locations and experiences, as feminist standpoint theory would predict: I still 
teach in the Gender and Women's Studies Program I helped found in 1975, a pro- 
Reviews 165 
gram that has maintained a materialist feminist commitment to social change. 
Mostly, however, 1 think Messer-Davidow's disillusion with academic feminism 
arises from smashed idealism, from a too-sanguine, utopian sense of what was 
possible in the 1970s. 
"What went wrong for progressives in the academy," Messer-Davidow asks, 
and answers that, "we also made ourselves vulnerable by internalizing to academ- 
ic discourses what we set out to analyze and change in society" (287). Here I ques- 
tion who is included in her "we." There were never very many of us socialist fem- 
inists, and never a majority of women identifying openly as feminists among stu- 
dents and faculty. The academic feminist "we" condemned for elitist theory, nar- 
cissistic self-reflection, and careerist opportunism was not comprised of the same 
people who had been earlier been activists, although there was some overlap. 
Most of the old activists I know are still active, often in university politics or local 
civic campaigns, though Messer-Davidow is quite right in pointing to the over- 
work, burnout, job insecurity, and lack of resources hampering academic activism, 
all conditions brought about by the successful right wing delegitimation of public 
higher education and hence by falling academic budgets. Now conservatives 
undercut tenured radicals not only by disseminating reactionary ideology but also 
by attaclung tenure, by cutting funding to universities, and so by having college- 
level teaching increasingly performed by overburdened underpaid adjuncts rather 
than secure faculty, 
It is not surprising that the Right has more resources to maintain its power 
than the Left does to disrupt it. They are better at disrupting themselves through 
crises in capital and the vicissitudes of empire, although it remains sadly the case 
that there does not yet exist in the United States a Left strong or ready enough to 
mobilize opposition to conservative hegemony. As anticorporate and peace coali- 
tions build, Messer-Davidow's advice about articulating and consolidating a pro- 
gressive movement will remain perceptive and timely. 
She says, "the nation will get what its funders pay for" (238). I doubt many 
Marxists will be surprised at this conclusion. "As a feminist scholar and activist," 
she confides, "I am appalled by conservatism's vision of society, alarmed by its 
successes, and worried" that they "will sweep democracy away"; furthermore, 
"academic feminism's liberationist projects" will falter unless feminists can over- 
come this menace (2 19). Her helphl suggestions for what must be done might be 
summarized as "always articulate": she believes the Lefi should retool its local 
and national organizations in order to "build the cross-structure infrastructure we 
need" for a more progressive h r e  (288). 
Judith Kegan Gardiner 
Professor of English and Gender & Women's Studies 
University of Illinois 


Ellen Messer-Davidow — Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse

De Barros, Juanita

Reviews 167 
as opposed to setting them apart as somehow unique from all others. "Native 
girls usually came into conflict with the law for much the same reasons as other 
girls did" (1 5 1). Aboriginal girls may have been repeatedly put at one end of a 
behavioural continuum, but it was, all the same, a continuum as opposed to a 
dichotomy. As Sangster explains in respect to the book as a whole, "protection 
was always differentially applied according to class, and it could become racial- 
ized paternalism directed at Native girls" (3). 
Girl Trouble is interesting for its methodology as well as its content. 
Sangster's approach is meticulous, imaginative, and thought provoking. Girl 
Trouble provides an excellent example of careful yet innovative meaning mak- 
ing. The actual data Sangster uses is fairly prosaic, but by interspersing clear 
tables and figures and personal accounts she both holds her audience and under- 
lines her points. In explaining the workings of the courts, for instance, usually 
not the most exciting of tasks, she interweaves individual experiences to make 
the law, quite literally, come alive in terms of its function and uses. The sections 
on girls' range of responses to their circumstances are particularly remarkable. 
Sangster aims throughout the book at what she terms "a delicate balance" 
between "regulation and resistance, structure and agency" (5). Girl Trouble 
demonstrates firmly and convincingly that history need not be dull. 
Girl Trouble is also important for its activist approach. Sangster is con- 
cerned not just with making history come alive but with making it relevant to 
the present day. Particularly in her first and last chapters, she interweaves past 
assumptions and practices with those of today, emphasizing how we still create 
boundaries for our children to suit ourselves. She draws several times on news- 
paper accounts to demonstrate that notions from half a century and more ago 
have not disappeared from view. The downside is, of course, that in a few years, 
when the book will still be relevant for its historical analysis, sections referring 
explicitly to the year 2000 will also be in the past tense. This minor limitation 
does not prevent Girl Trouble from being an excellent model for all of us who 
are convinced that the stories of yesterday also belong to today and tomorrow. 
Jean Barman 
University of British Columbia 
Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave 
Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 
In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois described the "Priest or Medicine- 
man" as the "healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter 
of the sorrowing, [and] the supernatural avenger of wrong."' Healing, comfort- 
ing, and avenging are just a few of the roles that Sharla Fett, in Working Cures: 
168 Reviews 
Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations, sees slave health 
workers as playing in Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. She tells 
the story of black healers, both those who worked in the slave hospitals as mid- 
wives and nurses and those "conjurers" who used otherworldly methods to diag- 
nose and heal sickness. Fett has written a cultural and political analysis of health 
and medical practice in the southern United States, one that situates U.S. prac- 
tices within the larger African diaspora. She builds on the work of medical his- 
torians - such as Todd Savitt and Kenneth Kiple - who have done much of the 
ground-work on illness and mortality among southern slave populations. She 
also draws on historians and anthropologists, such as Michael Gomez and Wyatt 
MacGaffey, who have enriched our understanding African diasporic cultural 
practices. This is more than a history of slave medicine; it is, as Fett writes, a 
"political history that bears upon our larger understanding of the very institution 
of slavery" ( 199). 
In her introduction, Fett signals her emphasis on racial power relations. She 
begins by reminding readers about the decades-long Tuskegee study on the 
effects of untreated syphilis in black men and characterizes this as an example 
of "scientific and medical injustice" which, along with such twentieth-century 
practices as eugenics and enforced sterilization, comprised part of the "legac[y] 
of slavery and racism" (1, 2). This medical inheritance included the enforced 
examination of enslaved Africans before shipment to the Americas and their 
medical abuse and torture on the plantations, and it belies the paternalistic myth 
of southern slavery. Medicine, Fett argues, was used to "discipline and torture" 
(I). White doctors and planters tended to sick and injured slaves and treated 
them with standard remedies such as purgatives and emetics, but, as Fett shows, 
some used these to punish as well. Doctors, thus, were key planter allies, help- 
ing maintain plantation discipline by meting out punishment and assessing slave 
complaints of illness, a common way enslaved African Americans resisted slav- 
ery. Medical mistreatment also extended to enslaved and free blacks subjected 
to risky experimental medical procedures that white doctors would not have 
inflicted on white patients. Even death could not protect slaves; African 
American bodies were autopsied and used for medical school demonstrations, 
which enslaved blacks saw as a cultural and spiritual affront, "an unholy theft 
from the dead" (156). 
This book does not portray enslaved African Americans only as "victims of 
medical malice" (2) or interpret "health" solely from a white/Euro-American 
perspective. White planters and doctors saw blacks as chattel and their health in 
monetary terms. Enslaved African Americans, on the other hand, viewed health 
more broadly: relationships among humans and spirits determined emotional 
and physical health. Healing was consequently a "collective enterprise," calling 
upon the living, the dead, and the spirits (56). The practice of "conjuration," as 
Fett argues, illustrates this understanding of health and healing. Conjurers, or 
Reviews 169 
root doctors, diagnosed sickness and proffered remedies but also attempted to 
solve problems internal to the community of the enslaved, which could manifest 
themselves as physical illness. One of the best sections of the book is Fett's 
analysis of "conjure narratives," tales of sickness and social conflict that high- 
lighted the ability of conjurers to diagnose and cure a range of physical and 
social ills. In their efforts to divine the cause of illness, conjurers often pointed 
to a "conjure packet" (102). Drawing on the work of African anthropologists, 
she tries to show the similarity between these African American "conjure pack- 
ets" and Kongo medical/magical practices. This discussion and her examination 
of "sacred plants" and African American herbalism illustrate Fett's attempt to 
place African American practices within a black Atlantic context. She admits 
that "evidence of direct African retentions" was more apparent in Cuba, Brazil, 
and Haiti but argues that black American medical practices "rested on a notion 
of a spiritually enlivened landscape drawn from both African cosmologies and 
African American theology" (78) 
Fett maintains that the gendered nature of plantation life meant that slave 
women played an important role in the expansion of African American herbal 
knowledge and indeed were often the primary health workers in the plantation 
hospitals and in the slave quarters. They acquired medical skills through a life- 
time of work on the estates, as mothers and caregivers to their families and the 
wider community, tasks demanded by slave owners but also performed out of 
affection. Although they carried out much of the health work needed on the 
plantations, slave women were represented as unskilled and callous. The "con- 
tradictory characterization of enslaved nurses as capable and ignorant, reliable 
and deceptive," Fett contends, "reflected planters' fears concerning their inabil- 
ity to control slave women's work" (140). Their duties gave them opportunity to 
undermine plantation discipline. Enslaved nurses could, for example, adminis- 
ter poison or help other slaves feign illness and thereby avoid work (194). 
Although on one level such actions can seem banal, they represented the larger 
struggle between enslaved blacks and white slave owners over the control of 
black bodies and black labour. Feigning illness was just one of the many ways 
that enslaved African Americans fought "against a relentless assault on their 
humanity" (193). 
Although the subject of struggle is central to this book, its examination of 
the subtle and complex interculturation that was part of southern medical prac- 
tice is as important. In the early years of conquest and settlement, Africans, 
Europeans, and Amerindians borrowed each others' medicines. Even as the 
slave system became more entrenched over time, blacks and whites continued to 
exchange remedies, displaying a kind of medical pragmatism that contradicted 
the dominant racial ideology. The exigencies of plantation life facilitated such 
exchanges, particularly among women, as enslaved women and female slave- 
holders at times worked together nursing the sick. 
170 Reviews 
One of the book's many strengths is its ability to move back and forth 
between different medical worlds, that of white doctors (and planters, as lay 
practitioners) and enslaved African Americans, each drawing on different tradi- 
tions informed by the American environment. The well-established Euro- 
American medical infrastructure - medical schools, hospitals, and journals - 
produced such documentary sources as doctors' letters and medical case studies 
which provide a window on white medical ideas and practices. These are sup- 
plemented by plantation records, including slave owners' diaries and correspon- 
dence, and plantation reports. The picture of African American healing is craft- 
ed from a careful reading of diverse sources: Fett has used slave narratives, 
interviews with former slaves, and physical remains, such as medicine bowls 
and "conjure packets". She acknowledges that post-emancipation sources, most 
prominently the interviews with former slaves, are problematic but defends 
them as "an invaluable source for studies of African American life under slav- 
ery" (209, n.68). Working Cures does more than look at black healers and heal- 
ing practices, it examines a southern medical culture produced by the meeting 
of African and European medical traditions and practiced by white Euro- 
Americans and enslaved African Americans, a "medical history in which human 
interactions, not diseases or treatments, occupy center stage" (10). 
Juanita De Barros 
Western Michigan University 
' W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich: Fawcett 
Publications, Inc., 1953; 1968), 144. 
Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, 
Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 
2002). 
This splendid volume of essays traces the relationship of art, science, and com- 
merce in early modern Europe, posing important challenges to received wisdom 
about the Scientific Revolution and the history of collecting practices. As Smith 
and Findlen suggest in their introductory essay, the historical relationship 
between science and commerce has received rather less scholarly attention than 
that of science and art. While the intersection of visual representation and sci- 
entific practice remains a major theme of many of these essays, the incorpora- 
tion of questions about commerce adds a significant and exciting new dimension 
to the history of early modem science. 
Smith and Findlen note that their emphasis on the centrality of commerce 
in early modem scientific practice introduces a different cast of characters and a 


Sharla Fett — Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations

Jones, William P.

Black Workers, Organized Labor, and the Struggle for Civil Rights

Harter, John Henry

J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff — Class and its Others; J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff — Re/presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism

Taylor, Jeffery

216 Reviews 
Bradford James Rennie, The United Farmers and Farm Women of Alberta, 
1909- 1921 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 
Since the 1924 publication of Louis Aubrey Wood's A History of Farmers' 
Movements in Canada, scholars have been fascinated by the history of 
Canadian agrarian revolt. Bradford James Rennie's analysis of the development 
of the United Farmers and Farm Women of Alberta (UFAIUFWA) is the most 
recent addition to this large body of literature. Rennie's contribution is note- 
worthy because it is the only book-length study of a provincial agrarian organ- 
ization and for its explicit application of Lawrence Goodwyn's concept of 
movement culture to Canadian farm protest. 
In Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America and the abridged 
The Populist Moment in America, Lawrence Goodwyn analysed the rise and 
decline of the American Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party through the 
lens of culture. He argued that the Populist movement of the late nineteenth 
century was a mass democratic mobilization in which a "movement culture" 
nurtured and sustained oppositional institutions and ideologies that constituted 
the movement. Following Goodwyn, Rennie argues that the UFAIUFWA went 
through three stages of movement development. The first was the formation of 
the movement from 1879 to 1909 in which farmers questioned existing eco- 
nomic and political structures and began to develop a nascent movement cul- 
ture through a number of pre-UFAIUFWA organizations. The second move- 
ment-building phase extended from the UFA/UFWA's formation in 1909 
through 1918, and included the development of a solid membership base, the 
establishment of a women's section, and the construction of a movement cul- 
ture that fostered collective self-respect and produced mass commitment. And 
the third and final phase - the politicizing of the movement - began in 1919 
and extended through the organization's success in the 192 1 provincial and fed- 
eral elections. 
Rennie constructs his narrative by alternating between chronological and 
thematic chapters. Individual chapters outline the periods from 1879-1909, 
1909- 19 13, 19 14- 19 18, and 19 19-1921, while others explore rural economy 
and the movement, creating and defining community, cooperation and educa- 
tion in the movement, and the philosophy of the post-war UFAfUFWA. The 
author does an excellent job of crafting his argument and marshalling his evi- 
dence. He makes a convincing case that the UFAIUFWA was a grassroots, dem- 
ocratic movement through which Alberta farmers sought to gain a measure of 
economic and political control from the elites who controlled so many aspects 
of their lives. And he is successful at delineating the liberal and radical ideolo- 
gies that uneasily cohabited in the movement. 
While the general contours of Rennie's argument are sound, key elements 
of it are unconvincing. The notion of a movement culture, for example, is a 
Reviews 217 
powerful metaphor that can make sense of much of the UFAIUFWA's history, 
but it obscures the fundamental issue of farmers' class location and it underes- 
timates the significance of the dialectical interplay of dominant and subordi- 
nate ideologies in the creation of farmers' identities and consciousness. 
To be fair, Rennie does provide a sensitive and sophisticated analysis of 
Alberta farmers' economic position, arguing that the Alberta farm economy 
was more diverse than that of its prairie counterparts and that Alberta farmers 
relied on a mix of domestic subsistence, agricultural commodity production, 
and wage labour to survive. Having done this, however, he does not probe the 
difficult and contradictory class position of farmers. He does argue that 
because farmers could be agriculturalists, businessmen, and wage earners at 
different times or simultaneously, "barriers between social classes in rural areas 
were slow to emerge" (75). But he also argues that farmers were "like other 
business people" in that they believed increased efficiency could boost their 
"profits" (170). While Rennie seems to reject C.B. Macpherson's concept of 
simple commodity production as being too simplistic to understand rural 
Alberta reality, he never articulates his own alternative theory. Yet, he claims 
that "farmers' commitment to democracy was developed by their class experi- 
ence" (9). But what was that class experience? We are never really told, though 
we are left with the sense that early-twentieth-century Alberta farmers were pri- 
marily "businessmen" who occasionally participated in wage labour. But what 
does this mean? What is the significance of a mass, democratic mobilization of 
"businessmen," some of whom subscribed to an explicit socialist analysis? 
While Macpherson's classical Marxist categories are too crude a tool to under- 
stand a peripheral society such as Alberta in its settlement period it surely 
remains the case that farmers' class position resides somewhere between or 
apart from the bourgeoisie (including the petit bozivgeoisie) and the proletariat. 
And the concept of movement culture, while useful in describing mass mobi- 
lization~, does not help us sort out this issue. 
Lacking a clear sense of farmers' class position and relying solely on the 
concept of movement culture to order his analysis, the author lapses into a form 
of subjective essentialism in his discussion of ideological formation in the 
UFAJUFWA. According to Rennie, Alberta farmers used various cultural 
resources available in the broader society (including education "supported by 
corporations and the state" [161]) as part of their efforts to form, build, and 
mobilize a movement and reform society. He seems to suggest that farmers 
were socially autonomous agents who could choose freely which cultural 
resources to use in their crusade against corporate hegemony, and that these 
resources were ideologically neutral and easily integrated into the movement's 
arsenal regardless of their source. But if post-structuralist, post-modem cri- 
tiques of modernist social theory have taught us anything over the past twenty 
years, it is that ideologies and discourses are contested terrain framed by the 
218 Reviews 
power relations that define them. Dominant discourses are constantly interpel- 
lating subordinate subjects and reshaping their identities and the ideologies of 
subordinate organizations. And while subordinate subjects or organizations 
may consciously take up dominant discourses for their own purposes, their out- 
look and identity may be changed unwittingly in the process. UFNUFWA 
members, then, may have used a variety of resources to build their movement 
and bolster their sense of resistance, but the dialectical interplay of ideologies 
in hierarchical societies suggests this was not a neutral process. 
These theoretical disagreements aside, Rennie's book is a welcome addi- 
tion to agrarian and Western Canadian historiography. It is the best analysis 
available of the rise and development of a Canadian farm organization. 
Jeffery Taylor 
Athabasca University 
Anne Lopes and Gary Roth, Men's Feminism: August Bebel and the German 
Socialist Movement (New York: Humanity Books, 2000). 
August Bebel's book Woman and Socialism (1 879) should be read by everyone 
dealing with women's, feminist, or gender history. One of the most reprinted 
(53 times by Bebel's death in 1913) and translated books of the late 191h and 
early 20th centuries, the study informs about the condition of and possibilities 
for women in Europe with special emphasis upon Germany. Before and after 
World War I, this book inspired many women and men to join movements of 
protest and to agitate for reforms. Today, despite many courses on the history 
of women and feminism, the book seems forgotten. Anne Lopes and Gary Roth 
provide a basis for its rescue from obscurity with Men's Feminism. Their impor- 
tant study finds "socialist men proved to be more consistent feminists than 
bourgeois women ... the socialist movement in Germany drew attention to fem- 
inist issues, like suffrage and sexual harassment, decades before bourgeois 
feminist groups were willing to follow suit." (3 1) 
Lopes and Roth challenge many of the historians' conventions as they 
illustrate the "historiographical switching" - I would add forgetting - of lead 
roles. They show that the initiation of action on female equality by proletarian 
movements has been forgotten and attribution for such roles given to middle 
class reformers. This can be exemplified by the emphasis upon J.S. Mill as 
opposed to Bebel. The former did not touch upon people's work world and thus 
could not explore, as Bebel did, such crucial issues as harassment, prostitution, 


Bradford James Rennie — The United Farmers and Farm Women of Alberta, 1909-1921

Worcester, Kent

Cultural Politics Then and Now

Ewald, Alec C.

Reviews 107 
Thomas Goebel, A Government by the People: Direct Democracy in America, 
1890-1940 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 
For direct democracy, this is the best of times and the worst of times. On one 
hand, U.S. ballots featured many more initiatives and referenda during the 1990s 
than in any other decade; Americans across the country cast advisory or binding 
votes on almost five hundred legislative matters great and small, social and eco- 
nomic, controversial and obscure. Clearly, many advocates believe that their 
elected representatives are corrupt, fatally unresponsive, or both, and that put- 
ting a question straight to the voters is therefore the best way to make good pol- 
icy. But scholars increasingly condemn the initiative and referendum. David 
Broder's Democracy Derailed (2000), John Haskell's Direct Democracy or 
Representative Government? (2001), Larry Sabato, Howard Ernst, and Bruce 
Larson's edited collection Dangerous Democracy? (2001), and Richard J. Ellis' 
Democratic Delusions (2002) all argue, to paraphrase the old lapel button 
attacking the Moral Majority, that direct democracy is neither - not the direct 
connection with voters' preferences it purports to be, and not more democratic, 
either in procedure or substance, than lawmaking by elected representatives. 
Thomas Goebel's A Government by the People: Direct Democracy in 
America, 1890-1940 adds a vital historical dimension to this collective critique. 
Like other students of direct democracy, Goebel concludes that its devices are 
no panacea for the political and economic ills of the U.S. Goebel takes particu- 
lar pains to demonstrate to the left that well-funded corporate interests have 
thoroughly taken over the initiative, referendum, and recall. But where others 
tend to focus on the present and to describe the conservative capture of ballot- 
question politics as a recent development - depicting California's tax-slashing 
Proposition 13 of 1978 as a turning point, for example - Goebel shows that the 
right-wing exploitation of direct democracy began almost a century ago. As one 
frustrated reformer lamented in 191 5, "the referendum is the weapon of conser- 
vatism" (143). 
Goebel's convincing demonstration that "virtually none of the problems 
[with direct democracy] most discussed today are in any way new" (193) may 
be his most impressive contribution to the present-day debate over the strengths 
and weaknesses of ballot measures. But it is by no means all he aims to do in A 
Government by the People, a slim, ambitious, and largely successful book. 
Indeed, his primary goal is to show that the true roots of the American direct 
democracy movement lie in the anti-monopoly and anti-trust politics of the nine- 
teenth century. Second, Goebel interprets direct democracy's early-twentieth- 
century expansion in the United States as "both a social movement and a tacti- 
cal choice" (6), attending to regional and local variations, interest-group politics, 
and essential institutional characteristics of American government. Finally, he 
shows that direct democracy was dogged from the start by the problems that 
108 Reviews 
concern critics of the devices today: the dominance of professional signature- 
gatherers, consultants, and advertisers; the power of misleading and flagrantly 
propagandistic language; and the overwhelming need for huge sums of money. 
Ultimately, Goebel's is a cautionary tale - and a severe one, at that - for any 
modern-day progressives who still believe that ballot questions are the best way 
to slice through the stifling grip the two conservative parties hold on American 
electoral and lawmaking processes. 
In the first few chapters of A Government by the People, Goebel makes his 
case for the anti-monopoly roots of the direct democracy movement and 
explains the spread of the devices in American states to 1920. Goebel traces 
anti-monopoly thought in American politics to the Founding era - as he writes, 
Populism was "the culmination of a long reform tradition and of a specific mode 
of economic analysis that reach[ed] back to the beginnings of the American 
republic" (20). That tradition was "populist republicanism," defined here as the 
"belief that state-sponsored privileges and monopolies led to economic inequal- 
ity" (18). Massive inequities in wealth and power, in this view, were not the 
inevitable results of heartless industrial capitalism, but of state action - in par- 
ticular, laws passed by corrupt legislatures. So while farmer cooperatives and 
trade unions focused their energies on the economic sphere, many Populists 
worked for change in the political arena, seeking to limit or do away with the 
special privileges of corporations, monopolistic land grants, and "protective leg- 
islation" of all sorts. 
But reformers were stymied by state legislatures. Charles Francis Adams 
voiced a common view when he wrote that "probably no representative bodies 
were ever more thoroughly venal, more shamelessly corrupt, or more hopeless- 
ly beyond the reach of public opinion" than were many late-nineteenth-century 
state legislatures (26-27). By the 1890s, the increasing use of popular votes to 
ratify new state constitutions and their amendments had acquainted many 
Americans with the notion that some vital political questions must be subject to 
voters' direct approval. So when reformers caught wind of the use of referen- 
dum and initiative in Switzerland - largely through the writings of James W. 
Sullivan, a former printer, union activist, and Henry George supporter - many 
seized on the devices as a way to wrest political power "from a handful of 
pirates, gamblers, and corporation attorneys," as one Populist editor put it (34). 
Goebel next turns to constitutional and theoretical disputes over direct 
democracy's place in American politics. Students of law and political thought 
may find this the most interesting section of the book: Goebel shows that dis- 
putes over the referendum, initiative, and recall brought a sharp, practical scruti- 
ny to the meaning of terms such as democracy, republican government, and "the 
people." Some reformers attacked the Constitution itself as an instrument of 
class rule, but most claimed that direct democracy was filly in the evolving spir- 
it of the document. Opponents raised the specter of "majority tyranny," and 
Reviews 109 
argued that direct democracy laws violated the Constitution's guarantee of a 
"Republican Form of Government" in each state, but appellate courts allowed 
the reforms to stand. 
Direct democracy spread unevenly across the United States in the first 
decades of the twentieth century. In the West, Goebel shows that structural fea- 
tures - weak parties, ticket-splitting voters, strong interest groups, and a more 
open political agenda - joined antimonopoly sentiment as factors favoring 
reform. In the South, however, racism largely thwarted reform. White 
Democrats had already instituted numerous devices to keep blacks out of poli- 
tics, and feared that any change would threaten their control. As one North 
Carolina woman worried in a letter to reformer Judson King, "if the Initiative 
and Referendum should be passed, will the colored people and foreigners con- 
trol our country?" (96). Virginian Woodrow Wilson contended that direct 
democracy - "a special question, so far as the South is concerned" - was not 
needed in the region because "actual, genuine representative government" 
already existed there (128). Reformers fared somewhat better in the northeast - 
Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Massachusetts adopted some form of the initiative, 
referendum, and recall between 1908 and 1918 - but stronger parties and less 
fluid relationships between interest groups limited progress. 
By 1912, the movement had peaked. Two changes explain why reform 
stalled: first, anti-monopoly populist republicanism lost its coherence as an eco- 
nomic theory and political program, and second, the increasingly partisan nature 
of disputes over direct democracy doomed the movement. Both explanations 
are paradoxical, and both are linked to the decline of Populism and the rise of 
Progressivism. As the economy became more nationalized and federal regula- 
tion of interstate commerce expanded, the activities of trusts and big corpora- 
tions became an even more central political topic. At the same time, however, 
corporate power was increasingly understood to have economic rather than 
political causes, and therefore "the goal of regulation slowly replaced political 
reforms as the focus of anticorporate crusaders" (1 16). On the political front, 
meanwhile, support for direct democracy became "a weapon in factional infight- 
ing" (120) among some Progressive leaders. Politicians such as Theodore 
Roosevelt and Wilson - both of whom had earlier opposed direct democracy - 
now offered support, albeit in an uneven and somewhat tepid fashion. But that 
support compromised reformers' ability to build the broad, nonpartisan coali- 
tions that had been crucial to earlier successes. 
Serious differences divided many Progressives and direct-democracy 
reformers. Goebel argues that direct democracy formed an "integral part of the 
Progressive movement" (6), but here he shows that early Progressive authors had 
only contempt for the reforms. Herbert Croly emphasized state-building, effi- 
ciency, and centralized executive responsibility in i%e Promise of American 
Life; Walter Weyl wanted legislators to be trustees, not the mere delegates direct 
110 Reviews 
democracy would convert them into - "repeaters of popular deliverances," "par- 
rot-like political phonographs," as Weyl wrote in 1912 (122). Croly later sup- 
ported an Oregon reform that enhanced both executive power and direct legisla- 
tion, but still held that the initiative and referendum were "agencies of minority 
rule" which "fail absolutely" to strengthen enlightened collective action (124). 
Politicians from Robert La Follette to Roosevelt and Wilson only belatedly 
endorsed the measures, and Goebel strongly implies that their stances were more 
tactical than principled. In the end, H.L. Mencken's famous epitaph for Teddy 
Roosevelt's philosophy - "He didn't believe in democracy; he believed simply 
in government" - may best capture the tension between direct-democracy 
reformers and leading Progressives. Goebel could have devoted more space to 
the transition from Populist to Progressive direct democracy; readers who want 
closer scrutiny of that transition should read the fine chapter by Bruce E. Cain 
and Kenneth P. Miller in Sabato, Emst, and Larson's Dangerous Democracy?. 
Cain and Miller argue persuasively that Populists and Progressives had funda- 
mentally different motives in pursuing direct democracy, and contend that the 
Populist conception has prevailed. 
Goebel concludes his narrative with a brief history of direct democracy 
from 1920 to World War 11. This is particularly illuminating and colorful mate- 
rial. Groups which had successfully supported reform failed to make adequate 
use of it from the start - single-taxers, anti-saloon advocates, and labor all met 
defeat or only limited success on the ballots. Meanwhile, former opponents - 
business groups and others who saw the initiative, referendum, and recall as "the 
bastard triplets," in the words of one Santa Barbara attorney -were better organ- 
ized and had more money, and employed the devices more effectively (143). 
Goebel demonstrates that direct democracy was from the beginning dominated 
by "permanent well-organized interests," as one frustrated reformer wrote in 
193 1 ; ballot questions were the very "bulwark of conservatism," another lament- 
ed (153). "All radical measures were defeated," concluded a comprehensive 
1930 study of direct legislation in California, and direct democracy effected "no 
profound alteration in the composition, methods, or objective of the ruling 
elite," as political scientists VO. Key and Winston Crouch wrote in 1939 (148, 
154). 
Goebel goes further, however. In a chapter entitled "Inventing Modem 
Politics," he shows that many of the most important (and most unpleasant) ele- 
ments of twenty-first century politics were anticipated by California's first 
direct-democracy campaigns. Phenomenally expensive elections, the promi- 
nence of political consultants, advertisers, and other professional image-makers, 
and heavy reliance on public-opinion polls - all trace their roots not to the rise 
of television, but to early direct-democracy struggles in the Golden State. 
Through the 1920s, big utilities used huge amounts of money, flagrantly propa- 
gandistic mailings, and fake-grassroots organizations - known today as "astro- 
Reviews 1 1  1 
turf" groups - to defeat plans for public development and ownership of water 
and power facilities. A Henry George-inspired single-tax plan was crushed by 
a 5-1 margin on the ballot in 1936, after a campaign that the victorious realtors 
said was won by "well directed publicity, cartoons, speeches, radio presenta- 
tions, personal calls, [and] questionnaires" (170). Faced in the same year with 
a proposal to tax chain stores, a business strategist wrote that "a job of mass sell- 
ing is to be done," and he and his allies proceeded to outspend reformers 15 to 
1 to defeat the measure (172). Launching an antiunion initiative in 1938, busi- 
ness groups determined through extensive polling that California voters' "vague 
prejudices must be crystallized into effective and affirmative action on the ini- 
tiative,'' and used what one of their own consultants called "artfully disguised 
and beautifully-sugarcoated propaganda" (176, 175). Their measure failed, 
however, demonstrating that while money is usually enough to defeat an initia- 
tive, cash alone is rarely sufficient to pass one. 
Along with his regionally-organized, institutionally-sensitive analysis of the 
movement's uneven growth, this explanation of direct democracy's role in the 
creation of modem political tactics is one of the most fascinating sections of A 
Government by the People. Goebel has scrutinized dozens of manuscript col- 
lections and newspaper archives as well as hundreds of secondary sources, and 
delivers a comprehensive yet concise picture of the formative early years of 
direct democracy in the U.S. 
Goebel tells the reader at the outset that he will emphasize the economic, 
anti-monopoly dimension of direct democracy's origins (4). If this means he 
wants to prove that antimonopoly sentiment dominated direct democracy's rise, 
he falls short. This is not at all a bad thing, however. For as Goebel's story 
becomes more complex and interesting, the reader becomes less convinced that 
the drive to abolish monopolies motivated most reformers. To be sure, he suc- 
cessfully demonstrates a broad and deep connection between economic discon- 
tent and the rise of the initiative and referendum. This is not an entirely new 
contribution to our understanding of the topic - other authors, including Broder 
and Ellis, come to the same judgment - but Goebel has made the case particu- 
larly well. In describing the diverse, often-delicate coalitions that drove reform, 
he tells a tale of preachers, prohibitionists, and farmers as well as union men and 
single-taxers; shopkeepers, socialists, and wealthy benefactors all hoped to 
effect change through direct democracy. At times leaders had to keep quiet the 
support of drys or suffragettes in order to hold their fragile movements together 
(77, 78), and some important reformers, such as William U'Ren in Oregon and 
minister Herbert Bigelow in Ohio, kept their "economic program in the back- 
ground," lest it frighten away those with different goals (101). Another leader 
argued that direct legislation was "not an integral part of any economic theory 
or scheme" (129). If many citizens and legislators who supported reform were 
ignorant of - even opposed to - antimonopolist goals, there could not have been 
112 Reviews 
a straight-line connection between the two. Goebel paints a fine picture of a 
complex and sometimes conflicted movement, but in so doing seems to modify 
his thesis, illustrating that the movement arose from economic protest, but 
developed only because of a much broader set of purposes. 
In terms of political thought, Goebel fails to analyze the rise of direct 
democracy fully in the context of a declining faith in popular sovereignty and 
universal suffrage around the turn of the century, well-documented by authors 
such as Eric Foner, Alexander Keyssar, and Rogers M. Smith. As Foner 
observed in The Story ofAmerican Freedom (1998), "[almong elite thinkers, a 
retreat from the previous consensus in favor of manhood suffrage was among the 
most remarkable developments of the late nineteenth century." (1 19). Indeed, 
the late nineteenth century saw "a recrudescence of antidemocratic theorizing 
on the question of who was entitled to vote," as Morgan Kousser argued in The 
Shaping of Southern Politics (1974) (250-251). That retreat was confined nei- 
ther to racists nor to Southerners. Goebel does not ignore such thought - indeed, 
he scatters pungent illustrations throughout the book (5 1, 57, 60, 92, l l l ,  128- 
129, 149). But while he notes that many direct-democracy advocates shared "an 
abiding skepticism in the competence of voters" (122), Goebel does not inte- 
grate such views into his core analysis of the movement's character and goals. 
Moreover, in a crucial early passage Goebel argues that reformers believed that 
"the people" were a "force of rectitude and honesty" who "would never act 
against their own interests" (26). Later, he writes of Walter Lippmann's disdain 
for the ability of "the people" to direct policy as if such views reflected a novel 
''shift in public and academic opinion" (134), but by 1922 a full generation of 
American elites had been familiar with such views. This retreat does not square 
with the central American political narrative of ceaseless democratization, and 
students of American thought and political development need a better under- 
standing of how it shaped various political reforms of the era. 
A Government by the People will prove useful for students of Populism, 
Progressivism, economic reform, and American political development. Liberal 
advocates and progressive reformers today, meanwhile, should not lose sleep if 
their own direct democracy campaigns - for public campaign financing, say, or 
against big-box development - rely on rich donors or employ the occasional 
misleading euphemism. Such is the beast; no "golden age" of popular reform is 
dishonored by such strategies. On the whole, though, Goebel's sobering mes- 
sage to the American left is that, as a tool to diminish the political influence of 
wealth and corporate power, direct legislation failed a long time ago. 
Alec C. Ewald 
University of Massachusetts-Amherst 


Thomas Goebel — A Government by the People: Direct Democracy in America, 1890-1940

Eick, Gretchen Cassel

134 Reviews 
Yet this does not mean that dependency theorists argue that conflict grows from 
a power imbalance. Barbieri concludes that instead of power imbalances result- 
ing in greater conflict between states, states with symmetric ties were in fact 
more likely to experience conflict. In the end, while Barbieri has made a signif- 
icant contribution to the field, she is willing to admit that while her findings are 
useful, questions still remain, and more research is needed to understand the 
exact nature of the interaction between trade and conflict. It is a noble admission 
from a scholar who has provided a spirited insight into this complex and impor- 
tant field. 
Z%e Liberal Illusion is not without its shortcomings, however. Although it 
is very dense, the book is, in fact, rather short, running to only 137 pages of text. 
There are sections in the book which provide some excellent analysis on how the 
Great Powers related to each other in terms of conflict and trade over the last 
century: The reader would appreciate more of this insight. Moreover, although 
it is brief, the book devotes considerable detail to explaining the nuances of 
Barbieri's methodology. While important, readers would likely have traded the 
extensive equations for more examples that actually address real world relation- 
ships and conflict. As a result, the books reads like a dissertation (it was), which, 
while brilliant, could have been expanded and refined somewhat. It also might 
be appreciated more by political theorists than historians, who will find the rig- 
orous methodology and extensive data somewhat removed from historical 
events. 
Nonetheless, the book provides a dynamic contribution to an important dis- 
course that has far reaching implications. In the light of recent debates over the 
utility of bodies such as the World Trade Organization, or the nascent Free Trade 
Area of the Americas, Barbieri forces the reader to reconsider fundamental 
assumptions about the very nature of trade and conflict in our world. While 
Barbieri does not necessarily disprove Secretary Hull's dictum that "If good 
can't cross borders, armies will," she has certainly cast doubt on what so many 
have held as conventional wisdom. This is the essence of good scholarship. 
Dimitry Anastahs 
Michigan State University 
Jennifer A. Delton, Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the 
Transformation of the Democratic Party (Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press, 2002). 
Minnesota produced an array of leaders in the civil rights movement including 
Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP; Clarence Mitchell, Jr., lobbyist 
for the NAACP; Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban 
Reviews 135 
League; and Hubert Humphrey, who as mayor of Minneapolis gave the speech 
at the 1948 Democratic National Convention credited with aligning the party 
with civil rights and prompting southern democrats to walk out and form their 
own Dixiecrat Party. Yet Minnesota was an unlikely place to produce national 
civil rights leaders. Its black population was small, fewer than ten thousand peo- 
ple (0.9%) in 1940, and its traditional divisions were between the various 
European natives that made up half of its population as late as 1930. "[Alnti- 
Semitism and anti-Catholicism were rampant" as was unwillingness to hire 
African Americans or allow them to join unions (49). Nevertheless, between 
1938 and 1948 the state's political apparatus changed dramatically, producing 
for the first time a senator from the Democratic party - Humphrey - and a con- 
sensus within that party that African Americans were to be included and their 
inclusion to be promoted nationally. Delton's book explores the local and state 
politics behind those changes and concludes that Humphrey and the liberal 
Democratic Party that he helped shape used civil rights as a way to recast FDR's 
Democratic Party into the party of Democratic Liberalism. In that decade 
Minnesota's minuscule Democratic Party would merge with the Farmer Labor 
Party, wean its members from their openness to communists, and build a party 
that supported the New Deal's expanded role of the federal government and 
replaced bossism with "interest group pluralism" even while it espoused anti- 
communism. 
The Republican Party had dominated Minnesota politics until 1930 when 
voters elected the Farmer Labor Party's first governor, the charismatic 
Norwegian Floyd Bjornesterne Olson. Olson was a radical. He made a Popular 
Front alliance with the Communist party and called for a change in the eco- 
nomic system that had produced the worst depression in U.S. history. Upon his 
sudden death in 1936, voters elected another radical Farmer Labor governor, 
Elmer Benson. But by 1938, Republicans again controlled the governorship 
with Harold Stassen at their helm. 
Meanwhile, at the University of Minnesota, a group of professors and grad- 
uate students was developing an alternative to both the isolationist, peace radi- 
cals of the Farmer Labor Party and to the conservative, rural-based Republicans. 
Their alternative would be the new Democratic Party of Minnesota, formed in 
1944 by a merger of Farmer Labor Party and the state's Democratic Party. 
Following the merger the intellectual elites leading the party weeded the Farmer 
Labor Party membership to isolate its more radical members and exclude any 
communists. Hubert Humphrey, Orville Freeman, Max Kampelman, Arthur 
Nafialin, Eugene McCarthy, and later Walter Mondale all belonged to the group 
that wrought this revolution. 
Delton's thesis is that the University of Minnesota liberals - led eventually 
by Hubert Humphrey who earned his B.A. there in 1939 and returned in 194 1 
to pursue a Ph.D. in political science - embraced civil rights as a way l) to court 
136 Reviews 
the progressive Farmer Labor Party, 2) to demonstrate to Minnesota's small 
black community that their interests could be served within the Democratic 
party, and 3) to separate Minnesota's and the nation's Democrats from the south- 
ern racist, segregationist Democrats who controlled Congressional committee 
leadership positions. 
Delton writes well, documents extensively, and tells a story that starts a new 
thread in the scholarly study of the contest of political ideas in the immediate 
post-World War I1 period within one key state. As Liberal Democrats replaced 
the radicals of the Farmer Labor Party and became the other major party in 
Minnesota politics, the political center shifted to the Right in Minnesota since 
the Farmer Labor Party had been one of the state's two major parties from 1930- 
1944. The center also would shift nationally as these same Liberal Democrats 
accepted Henry Wallace's endorsement of their senatorial candidate, Hubert 
Humphrey, but rejected Wallace for president. One consequence was the elec- 
tion of Harry Truman. Truman continued as president but, thanks to 
Humphrey's persuasive civil rights speech at the Democratic National 
Committee meeting in 1948, with a civil rights platform plank that he never 
wanted. Truman also acquired the support of Liberal Democrats for his anti- 
communist interventionist foreign policy. The newly powerful Democrats in the 
state of Minnesota had brought about a realignment of politics at the state and 
national level aided by the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a relation- 
ship Delton examines in some detail. 
Making Minnesota Liberal is a fascinating, well written book that combines 
a state study and analysis of the contending ideas behind the 1944-48 political 
real~gnment hat is its centerpiece. Especially useful to civil rights scholars is 
her material on Cecil Newman, the publisher of the black newspaper 
Minneapolis Spokesman, who was determined that blacks would function as an 
interest group that shifted its support according to which elected officials truly 
served their interests; no party should be sure of their support. (Parenthetically, 
what happened to Newman in the following two decades? Was he a part of the 
Young Turks movement within the national NAACP that tried to oust Roy 
Wilkins for abandoning that organization's nonpartisanship by endorsing 
Lyndon Johnson for president?) Delton traces the interrelationships between 
individuals in leadership in Minnesota and the development and modification of 
the ideas that would shape American politics for more than a quarter century. 
Her discussion of the tactics used by the ADA to weed out radicals and com- 
munists is particularly interesting. 
Delton's suggestion that students and professors carried a grand design for 
liberalism into Minnesota politics seems in places overstated and conspiratorial. 
She seems to begrudge Humphrey the strong support given him by African 
Americans and paints with a broad brush that obscures differences between lib- 
eral Democrats over peace and civil rights. Surely Minnesota Democrats were 
Reviews 137 
not all anti-communist hawks? Yet her analysis is generally strong and she 
admirably develops her "pieces of evidence." Some errors intrude on an other- 
wise provocative and very useful work: 1 10,000 not 70,000 Japanese Americans 
were interned by the War Relocation Authority and Nixon's "southern strategy" 
was his reelection strategy, not his strategy in 1968. Walter Mondale was not a 
key player in the compromise presented to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic 
Party in 1964, although Joseph Rauh of the ADA was. Why is there no discus- 
sion of Israel as a factor in the ADA or Minnesota politics in 1948? The book 
would be stronger if it ended after the eighth chapter and lefi out the Epilogue 
that attempts to carry the story from 1948 to 1968. The author also periodical- 
ly uses the first person, which produced in this reader an urge to get out the old 
red pencil! However, these inadequacies are minimal beside the book's impor- 
tant exploration of the relationships and ideas that account for America's steady 
movement to the Right since, Delton argues, 1948. Keep writing, Professor 
DeIton! 
Gretchen Cassel Eick, 
Friends University 
Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working Class 
Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1956 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 
2002). 
Becky Nicolaides' history of South Gate, a working-class suburb bordering Los 
Angeles on the southeast, opens with the powerful image of its residents stand- 
ing guard over their homes, "some on roofiops, others on porches, some bran- 
dishing weapons7' as one of the worst urban riots of the 1960s is raging across 
the railroad tracks in Watts. The book traces the journey of these white residents 
from suburban homesteaders, primarily concerned by issues of economic sur- 
vival, to their transformation into the more conventional post-World War I1 sub- 
urbanites, concerned by race above all. Given the tremendous transformation 
that the suburb underwent since its first lot was sold in 1920, and the thorough- 
ness of the book's reach -- it examines every aspect of the residents' lives from 
work to consumption and worship - it is an ambitious goal which is, on the 
whole, successfully met. 
The book's first part on the interwar period is the most original. The fas- 
cinating story of working-class families building their homes themselves in 
order to get access to the advantages of suburban living has been told elsewhere 
- one is reminded, for instance, of Richard Hams's Unplanned Suburbs - but 
Nicolaides weaves together economic, cultural, social and political strands to 
provide a complex picture of a suburban community not only dominated by a 


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Jennifer A. Delton — Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party

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