Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Dworkin, Dennis

Gregory Elliot — Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History; John Higgins — Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism

Arnold, Andrew B.

128 Left History 8.1 
Parker is aiming at a career in psychiatry, he becomes much involved in the 
most controversial questions surrounding Czolgosz: is he sane or insane? is he 
really an anarchist? were there others involved? Ultimately, Parker is permitted 
to conduct several interviews with a willing Czolgosz, which permits Coleman 
to investigate these questions, ultimately and wisely avoiding easy answers. 
The narrative itself is a pleasant one, carrying the reader along quickly and 
easily. One shares Parker's perceptions not only of Czolgosz, but of the prison 
in general, daily life in Auburn, and turn-of-the-century American life in gen- 
eral. While definitely middle-class, Parker, as a student, is not wealthy, and 
therefore frequents a working-class bar, which lets Coleman portray the "other 
side" of the community. Likewise, Parker's romance with his mentor's head- 
strong daughter, Lucy, permits the author to bring in issues of women's rights 
and late Victorian morality. At the end, of course, the questions of capital pun- 
ishment and of the electric chair also make their appearance. 
The author is interested in questions of social justice, and of the nature, 
controversiality, and role of anarchism at the time. By making his protagonist 
both inquisitive and open-minded, Coleman is able to explore these issues in an 
impartial way, to the reader's advantage. 
It is difficult to tell how much actual research went into this book. The 
author seems well-informed on the central and peripheral questions he deals 
with in the narrative, but the bibliographic note is extremely brief. Notably 
missing is any reference to A. Wesley Johns' 1970 book, The Man Who Shot 
McKinley, probably the leading secondary source. (If the reader wants to look 
at the book American Assassins, which Coleman does list, its author's name is 
misspelled there: it is James W. Clarke, with an "e.") 
Overall, it is a successful book. For the general reader, it is an "easy r ead  
that also provides a good historical background to an important time and 
important events. For the professional historian, the book's value is somewhat 
less clear, but it is informative in a general way, and reminds one of issues that 
are not entirely in the past. 
John M. Allswang 
California State University, Los Angeles 
Robert McIntosh, Boys in the Pits: Child Labour in Coal Mines (Montreal & 
Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000). 
The boys in the pits both impressed and dismayed American journalist Stephen 
Crane in his 1894 visit to a Pennsylvania coal mine. They "swore long oaths with 
skill," he reported, and while their boss thought he controlled them, Crane was 
Left History 8.1 129 
somewhat thrilled to show that he did not. Crane described the choking dust, 
hard work, and low pay, and with scathing irony, "they are very ambitious," the 
hopeful aspirations of the pit boys to someday follow their fathers down into the 
mines as full-fledged miners. Crane's story reflected something of a Progressive 
consensus. The men in the scribbling class, it seems, were unable to describe the 
boys in the pits without using the term "imp" to convey otherworldly devilish- 
ness along with scrawny size and small prospects. These wan rascals appeared 
often in muckraking journals and government reports as both sources of disor- 
der and victims of greed, industrialism, and parental indifference.' 
Yet the tension between this vision of children in the coalfields as disrup- 
tive imps and as pathetic waifs has remained largely unexplored by scholars. 
More: they have received little focused scholarly attention at all. How many 
boys really worked in the pits? What happened to them? What was their role in 
the battle for union recognition? What was their role as children? In the system 
of the industry? With the publication of Robert McIntosh's new book centered 
on children in the mines, these blind spots in previous scholarly work seem now 
to have been egregious. This was, after all, an industry that long depended upon 
a social system of recruitment and apprenticeship. Unlike other occupations that 
by 1900 faced an aggressive program of deskilling and mechanization that 
destroyed informal community traditions of recruitment, apprenticeship, and 
control, these aspects to coal mining remained largely intact in many coal towns. 
In other words, even into the twentieth century, the future of the coal mining 
industry depended on drawing the children of coal miners into the life of the 
mine. It is here that McIntosh wisely places his focal point. 
Indeed, the richest parts of this book are those that put the boys of the title 
at the center, those chapters that put aside the author's admirable mastery of 
global, business, and technological aspects of coal mining in favour of taking 
seriously the question of why boys made the decision to go to work. McIntosh's 
historical treatment of how boys in the mining towns became boys in the pits is 
comprehensive and exemplary. Reasons for entering the mines changed accord- 
ing to time and place, he shows, and are relevant for understanding the history 
of working-class families in the industrial revolution. Here he points out the cru- 
cial, basic point that different regions handled the creation of 111-fledged work- 
ers from children in different ways. 
Historians take note: we can no longer loosely suggest that coal miners sim- 
ply imported their work practices from the British Isles. No. McIntosh shows 
how coal miner work practices and work culture soon became Canadian, or 
more accurately, how they were soon adapted to the particular workplaces and 
work cultures of different mining towns and regions. As McIntosh describes it, 
in some places, a formal, state-sponsored system of certification merged with 
the older method of passing on knowledge through immersion in the mines, and 
progress fiom trapper boy, to driver, to miner. He also points out the impact of 
130 Lefi History 8.1 
certification on school attendance. Where certification was enforced, coal min- 
ers were far more interested in sending their children to school so they would 
have enough book knowledge to pass the tests (63-4). In other words, 
McIntosh's command of his sources allows him to admirably complicate the 
question of why children went down into the pits - and in so doing, to deepen 
our understanding of larger subjects such as coal mining and the Progressive 
reaction to industrialization. Children went down in the pits not because they 
were forced to do so, but because in the context of the time the decision made 
good sense. They went down for different reasons in different places and at dif- 
ferent times. Generally speaking, they went down because they were paid in sta- 
tus and in money. 
This book complicates its argument as it progresses. For example, in his 
Introduction and first chapter, McIntosh suggests that Progressive writers failed 
to recognize the role of children in ensuring the livelihoods of their families - or 
to recognize the high value children themselves put on that role. Reformers, he 
argues, mistakenly attempted to impose middle-class ideals on working-class 
realities. They looked with distaste upon the saucy impishness with which pit 
boys rejected the boring, demeaning discipline of the schoolroom for the attrac- 
tions of work. Far from harmless interference, attempts to force children from 
work to school posed a dangerous threat to working-class families. For workers 
(and farmers), after all, children were an essential part of the family workforce. 
The brief period between the time children became productive workers and the 
time that they reached adulthood served a vital purpose. It allowed families to 
develop the surplus that might allow them to weather accidents, economic lean 
times, and old age. 
Taking his argument to its logical conclusion, McIntosh suggests that work- 
ing-class and farmer parents saw their children (of necessity) as adults, only 
smaller. The distance between Progressive and working-class views of child- 
hood is an important observation that McIntosh makes well. Yet he also seems 
(perhaps deliberately) to overdraw this dichotomy in his early chapters: "were 
labouring children capable contributors both to industry and to strained and vul- 
nerable working-class budgets," he asks, "or innocent victims of grasping 
employers and parents?" (5) 
But by his final chapter, McIntosh's view of the role of children in working- 
class survival strategies becomes far more historically subtle, far more deeply 
grounded in the formidable pile of evidence that he has sifted. By the end of the 
book it becomes clear that working-class parents recognized childhood as con- 
ferring special status on children - even as they relied on their money-making 
abilities. Employers created special categories for children, even as they exploit- 
ed them. Indeed at the close of his book, McIntosh describes in detail the ways 
in which coal miner parents eased the way for their children. If they were but the 
littlest adults, the biggest adults in their lives paid close attention to that mere 
Left History 8.1 13 1 
fact of their physical size. This was basic. Hundred-pound children after all 
could do less work than two-hundred pound men. But McIntosh also shows that 
parents made allowances for childish emotional immaturity and fears as well. A 
sort of seasoning or toughening to the wet, cold, dark, hard work of the mine was 
- after all - part of the point of starting miners in the trade as youngsters. At the 
start of his book, McIntosh takes at face value declarations that this process was 
relatively swift. "As a Nova Scotian miner explained in 189 1, 'there are no chil- 
dren working in the mine. They may be children when they go in at ten or twelve 
years of age, but a fortnight or so thoroughly works that out of them"' (5). By 
the end, his thesis established, he is more ready to acknowledge the length and 
tenuousness of that seasoning process - to acknowledge the more immutable, 
less historical facts of childhood. ("'As trade unionist J. Morrison explained in 
1906, 'To help the boy is our bounden duty"' (157). Other examples of adult 
solicitude for boys abound). 
Parents also recognized the significance of childhood work experience and 
schooling on the future prospects of their progeny in this era. In other words, in 
the body of the book, McIntosh begins to acknowledge that turn of the century 
reformers had a point - one rooted in more than condescension toward family 
labour, community-regulated apprenticeship systems, and the inherent disorder- 
liness of the boys of the pits when they became the boys of the street corners. In 
this new era of large-scale industrial labour, the mobility of children following 
their parents on the farm, small shop, or mine was more likely to be mobility 
downward than upward. 
McIntosh makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of coal 
mining, but also of generational shifts in work. In the process, he uses the fruit- 
ful perspective of boys in the pits to develop a comprehensive view of the com- 
plexities of coal mining. McIntosh illuminates the ways in which all aspects of 
the colliery interacted - with a changing backdrop of technology, state regula- 
tions, and the labour market. In other words, he does not use the refreshing new- 
ness of his perspective to avoid doing his homework. This is a diligent book. 
McIntosh's addiction to the passive tense, especially in the early chapters makes 
for heavy going at times. Perhaps this is the grammatical cost of comprehen- 
siveness. In any case, he has written a professional book, thought-provolung, 
deeply researched, and well worth the attention of professional historians or any- 
one interested in the working-class history or the history of the mines. 
Andrew B. Arnold 
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania 
1 Stephen Crane, "In the Depths of a Coal Mine,'' McClure S Magazine, (August, 
1894). 


Robert McIntosh — Boys in the Pits: Child Labour in Coal Mines

Kennedy, Sean

134 Left History 8.1 
workplace, but otherwise his analysis does not stray beyond Canadian borders. 
The demands of increasingly mobile capital and the pressures on domestic gov- 
ernments, however, increasingly come from abroad, and Vogt's prescriptive 
analysis of property and democracy needs to address the phenomenon of glo- 
bilization, its dangers and its possibilities. 
Although Vogt suggests a potentially attractive vision of enhanced proper- 
ty rights, the analysis is too fleeting to satisfy the specialist, and not engaging 
enough to capture a larger imagination. This is too bad because Vogt's efforts 
to reclaim the idea of property and to put it to work for those whose claims have 
not been accorded such privileged protection is long overdue. 
Douglas C. Harris 
York University 
Michael Torigian, Every Factory a Fortress: The French Labor Movement in the 
Age of Ford and Hitler (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999). 
Following the 1936 electoral victory of the Popular Front coalition, the 
French Third Republic faced the biggest wave of labour unrest in its history, 
with over 1.8 million workers on strike during June of that year alone. Given 
the heady atmosphere extant in the wake of an historic left-wing triumph, one 
might think that Marceau Pivert, leader of the pro-revolutionary faction of 
the French Socialist Party, captured the spirit of the time when he entitled one 
of his newspaper editorials "Everything Is Possible." But in fact, the situation 
was far less straightforward. L1Humanit&, the organ of the French Communist 
Party (PCF), immediately countered that "Everything Is Not Possible." This 
encapsulated the new, "pragmatic" approach the party had adopted as a lead- 
ing architect of the Popular Front, in stark contrast to its hardline revolution- 
ary stance of only a few years earlier. Moreover, even Pivert's concrete 
demands were more limited than his rhetoric implied, concentrating upon 
wage increases and the election of workers' delegates.' 
Insofar as the working class was concerned, then, there was a sharp con- 
trast between the tremendous expectations aroused by the Popular Front, and 
the limited changes wrought by the government of the Socialist leader Leon 
Blum. To be sure, the Matignon Accords - hurriedly signed so as to end the 
strike wave - ushered in the 40-hour work week and significant wage increas- 
es for some. But by 1938, most historians of contemporary France agree, they 
had been undermined by continuing economic problems, a growing pressure 
to increase armaments output, a vigorous (an4 many would add, vindictive) 
employer counter-offensive, and bitter political conflict. 
Left History 8.1 135 
It is this last factor which most interests Michael Torigian in his study of 
the Paris metal industry during the era of the Popular Front. Asserting that 
"the labor movement is inherently non-political, serving as a vehicle neither 
for a party nor an ideology" (X), he contends that the most effective unions 
are those which follow an English or German model. Those organizations 
worked to establish an enduring presence in the factories, and engaged in 
party politics only in support of such goals. In France, conversely, unions 
faced a strong state, and were weak in the factory. This made the Parisian 
mttallos and many other workers more inclined to engage in "politics" rather 
than unionism, with ultimately deleterious results. 
Torigian begins his account by emphasizing the structural changes which 
took place in the metal industry during the interwar period. Hitherto France 
had been characterized by gradual industrial growth and the persistence of a 
sizeable rural sector, but with the advent of World War I a shift towards more 
"American-style" methods took place. By the end of the 1920s, the "Fordist- 
Taylorist mode of production"(9) had been widely introduced. For the work- 
ing class, the social consequences included a narrowing of their defined 
tasks, and a growing sense of anomie in the midst of what Torigian deems a 
superficial mass culture. The union movement could provide few alternatives 
to this new order. It was "political" in orientation, and sharply divided 
between the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) and the Communist- 
dominated General Confederation of Unitary Labour (CGTU). While the lat- 
ter did establish a presence among Parisian metal workers, it could only offer 
"a proletarian counter-society [which] was ... less an alternative to liberal 
society than a mass or democratized version of it" (25). 
The ideological character, and thus in Torigian's view the long-term inef- 
ficacy, of French unionism was further enhanced by the crisis of the Third 
Republic during the 1930s. In fairness, the onset of the Great Depression was 
initially accompanied by greater attention on the part of the Communists to 
shopfloor issues. But the 6 February, 1934, riots, during which a bevy of 
mostly ultra-nationalist groups had marched on the Chamber of Deputies, 
quickly sidetracked this trend. Confronted with pressure from their militants 
to cooperate with other groups against the domestic far right, as well as 
Soviet desires to see France become an ally in containing Nazi Germany, the 
PCF and CGTU worked towards building the Popular Front coalition with the 
Socialists and the centrist Radical party. Indeed, the two wings of the labour 
movement reunified under the banner of the CGT in 1936, though the 
restructured organization would experience serious internal tensions. 
Though the fusion was the result of political pressures, Torigian con- 
cedes that in general the rise of the Popular Front greatly boosted worker con- 
fidence, and "had also made the daily problems of the shop floor - the bread- 
and-butter issues of industry - matters of general political concern" (92). 
136 Left History 8.1 
Nevertheless, in the second half of the book he emphasizes that the coalition 
was always beset by deep fissures, implying that since many of its constituent 
elements were not focussed upon instilling a union-based consciousness in 
the workers, its achievements were doomed to be ephemeral. Thus, while the 
strike wave which began in 1936 was accompanied by a massive growth in 
CGT membership, and did pose challenges to the social structure, most of the 
new supporters were "slaves of political ritual," with little inclination to fol- 
low "experienced union leadersW(l20). Yet although the Communists had cap- 
italized upon the situation to extend their support base, by appealing to the 
tradition of Jacobin Republicanism, Torigian concludes that the expansion 
was less the result of their machinations than the conformist mass society in 
which the workers lived. 
That was not the perception of contemporaries such as the Syndicats ten- 
dency within the CGT, which criticized the Communists for "colonizing" the 
unions, and for their subservience to Moscow's strategy for confronting 
Nazism, which they believed entailed the risk of war. Thus, as early as the fall 
of 1936 the organization was divided into three factions, with the centrists led 
by Lion Jouhaux unsuccessfully seeking to bridge the gap between the 
Communists and the Syndicats group. Neither a faltering economy, nor an 
increasingly powerful counter-offensive by the employers, served to reinvig- 
orate pro-unity impulses. Furthermore, since the unions' victories were so 
closely tied to the political constellation obtaining in 1936, any reconfigura- 
tion could, and soon did, lead to an erosion of those gains. Once Blum's 
administration retreated from some of its reforms, and then gave way to more 
conservative governments, the rnhallos found themselves increasingly on the 
defensive. Tens of thousands quit; those who remained suspected that their 
own leaders had subordinated the interests of workers to foreign policy con- 
cerns and governmental stability. 
Torigian provides a detailed reconstruction of the disheartening, and 
sometimes overlooked, labour struggles which ensued, culminating in the 
attempted one-day general strike of 30 November, 1938, when the metal 
workers and their colleagues were "thoroughly outmatched" (170) by the 
government of ~doua rd  Daladier. Thereafter, he argues, demoralization con- 
tinued into the drble de guerre of 1939-40. The economic recovery which 
began in 1938, and the somewhat larger pay packets which resulted, made the 
situation only slightly more bearable. Political fractiousness within the union 
movement also continued, reaching its peak in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet 
Pact of August 1939, which was followed by a dramatic shift in the official 
position of the Communists against the war effort, and thereafter their expul- 
sion from the CGT. In Torigian's view, the connection between such distract- 
ing conflicts and the catastrophic defeat of 1940 is clear: "This half decade 
of violent contention - with its sitdown strikes and vengeful lock-outs, mass 
Left History 8.1 137 
demonstrations and street murders - undermined whatever community of 
sentiment and self-sacrifice had previously defined the nation" ( l  90). 
Such assertions have been challenged; recent scholarship has pointed to 
a growing determination, by 1939, on the part of the French public to resist 
the Nazis.2 Torigian concedes that by the spring of 1940, the country's aircraft 
and tank production had begun to overtake that of Germany. While this may 
seem to be a relatively minor point to make about a book dealing primarily 
with unions during the pre-war decade, the author's views on this matter are 
indicative of the very high standards he has set for French society, especially 
the labour movement. Few would dispute his contentions about the Popular 
Front's profound shortcomings, and his characterization of the union move- 
ment as politicized is sound. But the question of the extent to which union- 
ism can and should be divorced from "formal" politics is a complex one. 
Of course, Torigian does not argue that the union leaders should have dis- 
engaged themselves altogether. Rather, his concern is that they were imbri- 
cated in party manoeuvring to the extent that they rendered their members 
highly vulnerable to the vagaries of day-to-day politics. Yet under the cir- 
cumstances, calls for non-political unionism could seem risky. Elements of 
the far right, such as Lieutenant-Colonel Franqois de La Rocque's Parti Social 
Franqais (PSF), sought to appeal to workers by calling for the establishment 
of "non-political7' unions - but within the framework of an authoritarian cor- 
poratist state. As the author points out, such movements eagerly capitalized 
upon any problems the left-wing unions encountered. 
More generally, it is crucial to remember that the stakes in the 1930s 
were very high. The PSF alone had approximately one million members, and 
the French left had plenty of other enemies. The threat of a right-wing 
takeover between 1934 and 1936 was real to many, and time was of the 
essence. Given the relatively weak levels of union consciousness which 
Torigian himself highlights, it is perhaps unsurprising that appeals to defend 
the Republic, invoked on past occasions, were re-deployed to build a coali- 
tion in a time of urgent crisis. As the author points out, the Republican tradi- 
tion was ambivalent as far as workers were concerned. Yet it was sufficiently 
pliable to build a broad-based (albeit fragile) movement, even though the 
Communist leadership can certainly be accused of a degree of cynicism in 
their appropriation of it. 
As my dissent from some of its conclusions suggests, this is a stimulat- 
ing work, which raises important questions about the character and strategy 
of the interwar French labour movement. It is also written with verve; 
Torigian does a commendable job of reconstituting the perplexing socio- 
political context in which the m$tallos operated. The activities of the various 
union tendencies and left-wing political parties, but also the employers, the 
state, and the right, are smoothly integrated into a fast-paced analytical nar- 
138 Left History 8.1 
rative. In sum, this is a solid contribution to the political history of the French 
labour movement, one which readers both familiar with and new to the sub- 
ject will find engaging. 
Sean Kennedy 
University of New Brunswick 
1 Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934- 
1938 (Cambridge, 1988), 85, 95-96. 
2 For a succinct argument to this effect, see William D. Irvine, "Domestic 
Politics and the Fall of France in 1940," in Joel Blatt, ed., The French Defeat 
of 1940: Reassessments (Providence, 1998), 85-99; for an account highlight- 
ing an ambivalent public mood of solemnity coupled with determination, see 
Robert J. Young, France and the Origins of the Second World War (New York, 
1996), 113-129. 
Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American 
Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 
I imagine I am not alone in having grown up with the definitions of anar- 
chy memorably advanced by Johnny Rotten (aka John Lydon) and the Sex 
Pistols in their trenchant cultural analysis of 1977, "Anarchy in the U.K." 
Between repetitions of the chorus ("I wanna be anarchy"), RottenILydon 
snarls two phrases that encapsulate a common understanding of anarchy: 
"Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it," and "I give a wrong 
time, stop a traffic line." We might nominate these the personal and polit- 
ical faces of contemporary commonsense anarchy. While the former artic- 
ulates a drive toward untrammeled self-gratification, the latter implies a 
repertoire of strategies for interrupting business as usual and preventing 
the hostile corporate takeover of the lifeworld (the line continues "your 
future dream is a shopping scheme"). The lines certainly capture an anar- 
chy richer than is often imagined in more academic accounts. They pre- 
serve an understanding of anarchy as tricksterish, libidinal, humorous and 
creative as well as angry and potentially destructive. 
One of the most useful and impressive things about Allan Antliff's 
fine study of anarchism in American politics, culture, and art between 
1908 and 1920 is the success with which it conveys precisely the multiple 
and creative aspects of anarchism condensed and recirculated by Johnny 
Rotten. By this, I do not mean simply to say that Antliff recovers the 


Michael Torigian — Every Factory a Fortress: The French Labor Movement in the Age of Ford and Hitler

Contributors 
Brian D. Page received his Master of Arts in History from the University of 
Memphis and is a Ph.D. student at The Ohio State University. His publications 
include, "'Stand by the Flag': Nationalism and African-American Celebrations 
of the Fourth of July in Memphis, 1866-1887" in Tennessee Historical 
Quarterly 58 (Winter 1999). He was the research assistant for an edited book, 
forthcoming, by Kenneth W. Goings, entitled, "Give Me Memphis, Tennessee: " 
African Americans Speak About Memphis, Tennessee. He is currently studying 
the contradictory relationship between race and modernity in Memphis, tenta- 
tively entitled, "Modern Rebels: Race Versus the Memphis Street Railway 
Company, 1 890- 1920." 
Kwabena 0. Akurang-Parry, a poet and historian, graduated from York 
University in Toronto in 1999 with a Ph.D. in African History. He has held 
teaching posts at York University and Tulane University. He is currently 
Assistant Professor of African and World History at the Department of History 
and Philosophy, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. He 
specializes in colonial and contemporary Africa, with a research focus on the 
social and exonomic history of Ghana. Apart from numerous book chapters on 
African history, his work has appeared in Slavery and Abolition, African 
Economic History, History in Africa, The International Journal of African 
Historical Studies, Ufahuam, Okike, Ghana Studies, Refuge, and Cultural 
Studies. 
Ronald Paul is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of 
Goteborg, Sweden. His most recent books include The Other Ha@ British 
Working-Class Stories (1 994), Unruly Nations: a People 5 History of Britain 
(1996) and Dissonant Voices: Literature and Society in Britain from Chaucer to 
the Present Day (1999). 
David Renton is a historian and political activist. He is employed as an educa- 
tion officer by the Trades Union Congress in London, and is a member of the 
editorial boards of Labour Net UK, the London Socialist Historians' Group and 
Revolutionary History. For the past two years, he has been working on a book- 
length history of Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. There are 
more details of his research at http://www.dkrenton.co.uk 


Contributors

Paul, Ronald

"A Culture of the People": Politics and Working-Class Literature in Left Review, 1934-38

Hoganson, Kristin

Reviews 141 
analysis and documentation that has come to define professional historical 
practice. 
After reading Smith's account, however, it becomes difficult even to 
formulate such criticisms without an uncomfortable awareness of all that is at 
stake in disagreements over "professional standards," and of the ways in which 
the profession continues to be shaped by the gender of its history. Smith has 
drawn our attention to the ways in which historical praxis has been structured 
by hierarchies and dichotomies: between "low" and "high," amateur and 
professional, bodies and texts, feminine and masculine. The play of modern 
historical debate - whether over theory, method, content, or audience - is 
always located within these hierarchies and dichotomies. At the same time, it 
remains difficult to see how we should evaluate our own locations within these 
structures. Smith herself does not fully resolve this. She refuses, for example, 
to endorse a model which would valorize the "mature" female professional 
over the "immature" amateur. Yet she clearly writes as a professional historian: 
a chapter which deals, among other things, with the fetishization of the 
footnote, itself contains over one hundred detailed notes. This is an unsettling 
account of the history of our profession, one which raises as many questions 
as it sets out to answer. The questions it raises remain crucial, however, not 
only to history's past but also to its future. 
Joy Dixon 
University of British Columbia 
Philip M. Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris 
Commune (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 
In keeping with the globalizing trends of the late twentieth century, U.S. 
historians are increasingly peering beyond the nation's borders, trying to 
situate the United States in a wider international context. Comparative, 
transnational, borderlands, and imperial studies are all manifestations of this 
wider project. In his elegantly written and very engaging study of the Paris 
commune, Philip M. Katz contributes to the internationalizing endeavor by 
showing the extent to which the tumultuous events in Paris in the spring of 
187 1 impinged on Americans' consciousness. Even as he argues that American 
conceptions of the Commune had less to do with events in France than with 
events at home, Katz reminds us of the importance of the world beyond U.S. 
borders in helping to shape U.S. political culture in the post-Civil War period. 
Although the bulk of the book covers Americans' reactions to the 
Commune, Katz begins with a chapter on General Gustave Paul Cluseret, a 
French soldier and adventurer who served in the Union Army and then became 
the War Minister of the Commune. Exceptional though he was, Cluseret helps 
142 Left History 7.1 
make the point that there were ideological as well as human connections 
between the two conflicts; that even before Americans scrutinized the Paris 
Commune, Communards had reflected on (an4 in a few cases, participated in) 
the American Civil War. Katz follows Cluseret's changing political principles 
to highlight three themes that linked the Commune to the recent American war: 
republicanism, centralization, and the emancipation of labour. Like the 
American observers who fill the bulk of the book, Cluseret compared the two 
conflicts on these counts. The tendency to search for, and often find, parallels 
between the two events suggests that historians have not been the only ones to 
cast the mid-nineteenth century as an age of democratic civil wars, but that 
many people at the time also had a sense of living in such an age. 
In considering the reverberations of the Commune on Americans, Katz 
starts with the expatriate American community in Paris and then, after an 
illuminating section on the dissemination of news, shifts his gaze to those who 
commented on the Commune from across the Atlantic. Having just fought a 
civil war of their own, Americans had plenty of recent experiences to bring to 
bear on their interpretations of the French struggle. But as it became a central 
reference point in American political culture, the Commune in turn affected 
understandings of postbellum politics. The strength of this book lies in its 
rhetorical analysis. Katz makes no grand causal claims, but he convincingly 
shows that the Commune became a "cultural event of national scope in the 
United States" (83). 
Not surprisingly, whether in Paris or Peoria (or, given Katz's leaning 
toward nationally-distributed middle-class publications, it might be more apt to 
say whether in New York or Boston), observers disagreed on the meaning of 
the Commune. Some equated it with the Confederacy, regarding both as truly 
republican uprisings and as protests against a strong, centralized government. 
Others construed it as a warning against enfranchising black men or, from a 
very different perspective, as a radical effort to undercut capitalism. Walt 
Whitman lauded it as an exercise in popular sovereignty; Herman Melville 
regarded it as the unfortunate outgrowth of materialism and license. The 
Reverend Henry Ward Beecher attributed it to irreligion, best put to rest by 
evangelical Protestantism. William James exclaimed: "the gallant Gauls are 
shooting at each other again!" and then blamed the Catholic church (152). 
Boston Brahmin Charles Eliot Norton equated the uprising with U.S. efforts to 
depose spoilsmen; less sanguine men of his class apprehensively viewed it as 
a harbinger of class warfare in the United States. Euro-American writers 
compared "Red" Communards to "Red Indians." Anti-suffragists found 
similarities between the pitroleuses who set Paris afire and Susan B. Anthony. 
And medlocre playwrights downplayed the politics of the Commune, simply 
adopting it as a thrilling setting for melodramatic plots. 
As these examples suggest, the Commune served as a kind of Rorschach 
test for post-Civil War Americans. Besides amplifying anxieties and 
Reviews 143 
encapsulating aspirations, it symbolized developments in U.S. political culture 
that may have been hard to articulate without an outside reference point. If not 
a keyword in U.S. political discourse, the Commune was certainly a key 
concept, judged by the frequency with which it was invoked. In the course of 
his research, Katz managed to dig up references to the Commune in poems, 
memoirs, novels, plays, letters, speeches, articles, and sermons. Searching for 
responses to the Commune apparently was like searching for hay in a haystack, 
with one startling exception. Workers, a group one might suspect would be 
eager to use the Commune as a rallying cry, rarely mentioned it at all. 
The Commune appears to have served the forces of reaction in the United 
States better than the forces of reform, but that conclusion may stem, in part, 
from Katz's tendency to pay more attention to those who feared disorder than 
those who advocated social change. Workers remain on the periphery of the 
narrative until 1877, the year of the Great Strike. By then, argues Katz, the 
Commune had come to seem too radical and un-American to win a central role 
in U.S. workers' protests. Conservative critics did not hesitate to equate the 
Commune and the strikes, going so far as to call for French-style repression 
and to attribute the upheaval to foreign agitators, but workers proved reluctant 
to draw comparable parallels between the two movements. 
It is not clear, however, how bourgeois Americans seized the lead in 
defining the meaning of the Commune, for Katz provides some evidence for its 
resonances among working-class Americans. He observes that "reenactments 
of the Paris Commune in the form of plays and tableaux vivants . . . became 
part of the radical subculture of the labor movement, especially among 
German Americans" (83), and he describes a remarkable New York parade to 
commemorate the movement. Organized by "native-born radicals" and 
members of the European-based International, it featured an African-American 
honour guard; the Skidmore Light Guard (a black militia unit); French and 
Cuban political refugees; veterans of the Garibaldi Guard; French, German, 
Swiss, and Bohemian sections of the International; reformers such as Victoria 
Woodhull and Theodore Tilton; Irish nationalists; and many ordinary members 
of the working class. Katz alludes to a newspaper report of an "unusually large 
crowd of spectators" (164), but rather than follow up on what this event may 
have meant to working-class participants and onlookers, he turns his attention 
to "nervous bourgeois observers" (164). In a similar vein, after mentioning that 
Communards who came to the United States held public meetings, addressed 
workers' rallies, and gave interviews to the press, Katz concludes: "the larger 
community did take notice, but not very much" (163). By the "lager 
community," Katz seems to mean the middle-class and wealthy Americans who 
are so prominent in his account. He does not elaborate on what these events 
meant to workers, something that calls for a more thorough consideration. 
Even if the Commune seemed too suspect to figure large in workers' 
protest rhetoric, it nonetheless may have fired their imaginations. But Katz 
144 Left History 7.1 
does not pursue the extent to which the French example shaped worlang-class 
militants' sense of the possible. Katz does acknowledge that foreign-born 
workers, most notably, those active in the International and in the 
Workingmen's Party of the United States, were more likely than native-born 
workers to join with middle-class reformers to embrace the Commune. Given 
that few of those foreign-born workers had actually participated in the 
Commune, why did the struggle resonate more with them? What does the 
disparity between native-born and foreign-born workers tell us about the 
dynamics of international awareness? In this account, it is primarily foreign- 
born workers and the bourgeoisie who demonstrate a sense of living in an age 
of civil wars. Native-born working people seem bounded by a more local, less 
expansive sense of their times. 
Despite leaving questions about the implications of the Commune for 
working-class Americans, From Appomattox to Montmartre is well worth 
reading. It takes a significant step toward de-exceptionalizing U.S. history, both 
by situating it in an international context and by addressing just how 
exceptional nineteenth-century Americans (especially bourgeois Americans) 
considered themselves. Using the Commune as his reference point, Katz 
tackles the difficult problem of periodizing exceptionalist sensibilities. His 
conclusion? In the early 1860s, Americans liked to imagine themselves as 
being on a convergent path with the rest of the world, for they considered 
republicanism the ultimate destination. But after the Civil War, and especially 
after the Commune, they were increasingly dismayed at the thought that the 
U.S. and Europe might be converging. "Instead of exporting self-government, 
free labor, and liberty, the United States seemed to be importing ignorance, 
class warfare, and tyranny" (192). The Commune, in sum, appears to have 
contributed to the appeal of an exceptionalist outlook. 
Beyond his specific claim that the Commune occupied an important role 
in American thought in the 1870s, Katz makes a larger point: that the 
international setting is of great relevance to U.S. history. He builds such a 
convincing case for Americans' captivation with the Commune that his book 
serves as an admonition to U.S. historians to pay more attention to the 
reverberations of foreign events. 
Kristin Hoganson 
University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana 
Craig Heron, ed., The Workers 'Revolt in Canada, 191 7-1925 (Toronto: 
University of Toronto Press, 1998). 
The Workers' Revolt in Canada 19 17- 1925, edited by Craig Heron, is a long- 
awaited study of Canadian labour history in the late teens and early twenties, a 


Philip M. Katz — From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune

Hancock, Scott

Reviews 227 
of a donut, these structures often go unrecognised. Red-Hot and Righteous is a 
tasty treat, but it leaves the reader hungry for more sustenance in its analysis. 
James Opp 
Carleton University 
Christopher Waldrep, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the 
American South, 181 7-1880 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois 
Press, 1998). 
Christopher Waldrep delivers an intriguing study of southern whites' tense 
dance with multiple partners of race, class, and the law in Vicksburg, 
Mississippi. By the end of the Reconstruction era, race trampled all over the 
law and managed to push class nearly off the floor. 
During the antebellum era, Warren County whites typically controlled 
slaves either outside the legal system or in the lower courts, where justice was 
informal and determined more by public opinion than formal legal process. 
This fit within southern white legal culture that tolerated dueling and 
occasional mob action to uphold community standards. When Warren County 
officials began interpreting the law as a tool for promoting and protecting the 
public good - a nationwide trend by the 1830s - some unsupervised slaves 
who seemed to threaten public order did begin appearing in the higher courts. 
But because jurists and lawyers were beholden to an ideology of the law as 
impartial, autonomous, and immutable, the formal procedure of the higher 
courts sometimes benefited slave defendants. Not only did this imperil 
slaveowners' previously autonomous control of their slaves on the plantation, 
it also reinforced whites' perception of the law as an inefficient tool for 
managing the black population. 
After the severe disruptions caused by the Civil War, Vicksburg whites, 
spurred in part by white women's calls for protection from menacing black 
men, began to unify across class and ethnic lines. In the midst of a crime wave 
after the war, whites, who exaggerated black men's criminality and minimized 
white banditry, became more convinced of the law's inability to manage blacks. 
Even the Governor called for extralegal "patrols" to maintain order. Whites 
also believed that the law abetted misrule: it enabled black men to serve on 
grand juries and step into other positions of power. The specter of black men 
wielding power became a catalyst for white solidarity, and in 1873 white 
dissatisfaction targeted the newly elected black sheriff. Warren County whites 
- rich and poor, Republican and Democrat, Irish and native-born, southerners 
and northerners - came together in the face of black rule to harass, brutalize, 
and murder dozens of freedpeople, forcing the sheriff's resignation. Southern 
whites had concluded that their vision of order required lethal disorder. 
228 Left History 7.1 
Warren County whites did not abandon the law entirely. They 
reconstructed an informal law, backed by a regular pattern of disorder, that 
would govern race relations well into the twentieth century. But Waldrep, 
perhaps in order to avoid lengthening an otherwise tight monograph, does not 
address how the formal law still applied to whites. This is an important point 
that could have clarified his argument and heightened its import. Waldrep, 
arguing that the law was not simply a tool of the elite, opens by situating his 
work against Genovese's seminal work on the hegemony of the law. Waldrep 
reveals the law's dependence on public choices and opinion. When the white 
public -not just the elite - saw the law as not just ineffective but as usurping 
their vision of social order, which placed all blacks at the bottom, whites acted 
outside the law and successfully reestablished that social order. Ostensibly, this 
had the radical potential of unmasking the ideology that the law was impartial, 
thus opening the door for further disruption of the rule of law. But Warren 
County whites did not challenge the legal system other than its ability to 
manage race relations. The legal system presumably remained the same for 
whites. One question that Waldrep's study raises, but he does not deal with, is 
how and why whites managed to maintain the fictions of the law's impartiality, 
autonomy, and immutability when it applied to white society after they had 
destroyed those fictions as the law applied African Americans. Or did they 
sustain those fictions at all? If not, many other questions need to be answered. 
In short, Roots of Disorder raises important questions, ones that Waldrep or 
other scholars will hopefully answer. 
Another caveat to this study is that the title claims too much: this is a study 
that narrowly focuses on Warren County's legal culture. Southern whites in 
other areas may have formed distinctly different legal cultures; South 
Carolinians had a relatively low rate of lynching despite a black majority - 
though homicide is not the only effective form of disorder. But Waldrep at 
times implies that Warren County may be representative for the entire South 
without sufficient support. 
But despite these reservations, The Roots of Disorder makes a significant 
contribution. As any good monograph should during this time of growing 
specialization, Waldrep's insightful research connects to several important 
fields and is therefore useful for scholars of race relations, racial violence, the 
construction of whiteness, the Reconstruction era, and legal historians 
studying the law and questions of how the law sustains its authority. 
Scott Hancock 
University of North Alabama 


Christopher Waldrep — Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817-1880

Williman, Daniel

Reviews 131 
how successful/unsuccessful were Aboriginal organizations in convincing their 
numbers that opposing free-trade was in the interests of all Aboriginals? 
Similarly, how did women's groups sustain interest among women in anti-free 
trade mobilization? 
Despite these minor shortcomings, Beyond Conventional Wisdom is a 
welcome addition to the fields of both political economy and social movement 
theory. In particular, Ayres demonstrates the need to connect the "macro" 
concerns of political economists with the "micro" concerns of social movement 
theorists. Although the activists' efforts failed in the long run to halt the free- 
trade deal, Ayres makes a compelling case for viewing these mobilization efforts 
as part of a much broader process of increased citizen engagement occasioned 
by the Canadian public's growing disenchantment with the status quo. As he 
notes, "at the very least the precedent has been set for extraparliamentary actors 
to take the initiative away from elites on issues of crucial concern to the public" 
(144). 
Michael Orsini 
Carleton University 
See Lorna Weir, "The Limitations of New Social Movement Analysis," Studies in 
Political Economy, 40, (Spring 1993). One attempt to apply the political-process 
approach to the study of new social movements can be found in Hanspeter Kriesi, 
Ruud Koopmans, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Marco G. Giugni, New Social 
Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis (Minneapolis 1995). 
Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University 
Press, 1998). 
After an Introduction which explains the assemblage to follow, seven essays are 
gathered in three sections: under "Sounds of Silence" are "Gothic Ornament and 
Sartorial Peasants," "English America: Worth Dying For?'and "Bede's Blush: 
Postcards from Bali, Bombay, Palo Alto"; "Works of Mourning" includes "The 
Devil's Anal Eye: Inquisitorial Optics and Ethnographic Authority" and 
"Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible"; and "Virtual Loops" 
comprises "Humanist History and the Haunting of Virtual Technologies: 
Problems of Memory and Rememoration" and "Stranded Histories: Allegories 
of Artificial Life." 
By those titles the field of study of the collection can be recognized, and it is 
not history, but rather a very contemporary brand of cultural poetics. At the date 
of publication Kathleen Biddick was Associate Professor of History and 
Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame. Her 
previous monograph was The Other Economy: Pastoral Husbandry on a 
Medieval Estate (1989) based on her PhD dissertation (Toronto, 1982). That title 
132 Left History 7.2 
does not appear in the bibliography of the present book: Biddick dropped her 
previous line of work early in the '90's when she realized that her explorations of 
the category "medieval English peasant" merely reenacted imperialist 
propaganda (58-6 1). Between the associate and the full professorship usually 
lies a second published book, and to create this one Biddick mounted three 
previously published essays (the last three listed above) with four new ones in a 
conceptual tableau, the "Shock" of her title, to make a monograph, in the course 
of which she shows what a clever, engaged and successful teacher she is (80-82) 
and how much more worthy of academic resources she is (in the persona of a 
Chicana feminist theorist) than are professors of dead languages, paleography 
and theology (96-101). 
Kathleen Biddick is an alert, wide-ranging cultural observer, quick at 
understanding and expert at revealing the relations and analogies which she has 
discovered. I thoroughly enjoyed each of her streams of association, both 
meandering and braided, and she has alerted me to the strings of bygone political 
agendas which wind through secondary historical literature. She must be a 
splendid teacher, and she surely deserves the full professorship which in fact she 
has received. 
The Shock, the trauma which Biddick bids medieval studies to work 
through in honest mourning rather than in melancholic elegy (I hope I got that 
right) was the birth of the discipline in the second half of the 1 9th century as a 
"scientific" claimant to the documentary, literary, architectural and other period 
matter previously treated by emotional amateurs whom the new arrogant 
"fathers" designated "medievalists" and exiled from the academy. Biddick 
names few of the "fathers," only Gaston Paris, Bishop Stubbs, Viollet-le-Duc 
and J.-P. Migne (her alienation from whom she dramatizes by giving his name an 
unwarranted grave accent). She gives one kxample of trauma in the discipline's 
parturition, and here it is: in 1866 Bishop Stubbs was appointed Regius 
Professor of Modem History at Oxford to replace Sidney Smith, who had 
resigned that chair on account of the controversy in which he had advocated the 
prosecution of Edward John Eyre, the brutal governor of Jamaica. And so Stubbs 
is for Biddick the embodiment of racist imperialism, and his refusal to teach 
beyond the early 17th century was a politic silence for which he was well paid in 
ecclesiastical promotions. 1 must admit that this is an original sin which I as a 
medieval historian have never felt the need of purging. 
There is a running squabble in medieval cultural history between those who 
favor the careful acquisition of data by sophisticated archaeology and textual 
study and the partisans of sophisticated theory. The sanest professionals of both 
tendencies recognize that history needs both reliable data (including text) and 
theoretical structure (including a progressive ethics). Biddick is confident that 
her theoretical constructions are robust enough to issue in cultural truth using 
the most diverse, unexpected and untested data. Piclang up the 15th-century 
Malleus Malejicarum she offers this passage: "They [witches] could bring it [the 
Reviews 133 
world] to utter confusion7'; then she uses the phrase "utter confusion7' as a 
drumbeat (108-127) damning the mentality of the inquisitors as if in their own 
words. But the idea of "confusion" is missing from the Latin text: "quia sic 
perimere possent totum mundum." This means "That in this way they can 
destroy the whole world." The translation is that of Montague Summers (1928), 
a fragile base for any cultural argument. I wonderthat Biddick reproduces dead- 
language text at all, since she values it so cheap and must rely on such a blind 
guide for its meaning. 
Any alert reader of Left History may suppose that this reviewer refuses the 
lessons of The Shock of Medievalism because I am an old-fashioned male 
academic, trained in an old fashion of medieval studies and recoiling 
defensively from the self-confident claim of the intellectual cathedra by a more 
recent comer, a woman who conjures with different names. It is true that my 
Toronto PhD is almost a decade senior to Biddick's, and I have never suffered the 
sort of traumatic professional conversion that compelled me to repudiate my 
first research. But the contemptuous stereotype of a privileged, smug, 
reactionary academic sinner doesn't apply. When Bonnie G. Smith in The 
Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (1998; reviewed in 
Left History 7.1) lectures me even more severely on professional ethics, even 
using a critical vocabulary which she has to teach me as she goes along, I 
understand the argument, take the medicine and expect to be a more alert and 
more useful historian for it. The great difference is that Smith does not, and 
Biddick does, commit the fundamental category fault of locating "trauma," 
"mourning," "re-enactment" and other psychological facts and acts in an 
ethereal, timeless noosphere. Such categories make sense in the analysis of 
human individuals and, to a degree, in real human cultural groups. Translated to 
an abstract sphere of the poeticist's creation they may persuade other poeticist 
critics, but "historians are mostly absent as contributors to critical literature on 
the state of medieval studies" (4) and the reason is plain: historians labour with 
the articulation of causes in a temporally mapped world of human beings, and 
they can't perceive the causal push in the world of abstract poetics. 
Daniel Williman 
State University of New York, Binghamton 
Dana Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined 
Fraternity of White Men (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998). 
Dana Nelson's National Manhood traces ideals of citizenship in the United 
States chronologically through the early national and the antebellum periods 
(1 780s- 1850s). Nelson, a Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, is 
also known for the often-cited The Word in Black and White: Reading Race in 
American Literature, 1638-1867 (Oxford University Press, 1992). 


Kathleen Biddick — The Shock of Medievalism

McGuinness, Aims

166 Left History 7.2 
persuasive, Dollinger reminds us that the personal sacrifices of the average 
people who led the labour fight are stories worth telling. 
Dimitry Anastakis 
York University 
Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics 
Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: 
Yale University Press, 1998). 
Knstin Hoganson's study of gender and U.S. imperial politics ranks among the 
most important contributions to the recent wave of scholarship on U.S. empire in 
the Caribbean and the Pacific. Over the past century, historians have debated the 
motivations behind the burst of expansionist projects that emanated from the 
United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Until recently, however, 
scholars of "1 898" have treated the issue of gender as a marginal concern, if they 
have addressed it at all. In this provocative study, Hoganson sets out to show how 
gender politics played a pivotal role in the formation of U.S. policy and political 
culture at the turn of the century. 
Hoganson seeks to redefine the parameters of a historical debate that long 
revolved around the question of whether U.S. intervention in 1898 was driven by 
"rational" or "irrational" motivations. She rejects these categories and proposes 
instead to explain how putatively "irrational" preoccupations regarding the 
preservation of "American manhood" became central to the geopolitical 
strategies of U.S. officials in the late 1890s.' The book begins with an 
interpretation ofthe rise ofthe "jingoes," who played a critical role in advocating 
U.S. intervention in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and other domains of 
Spanish empire in the Pacific. The jingoes included Civil War veterans, 
journalists, and military strategists such as Alfred Thayer Mahan, who gained 
fame in the 1890s as author of The In$uence o f l e a  Power upon History. United 
by sex (nearly all jingoes were men), this loose coalition shared a belief that the 
strength of the republic depended on its masculine character, and that war and 
other strenuous activities were essential for the cultivation of manly virtues. 
Influenced by Social Darwinism, this concept of manhood was also closely 
bound up with beliefs in the superiority of whites over other racial groups. 
Hoganson's analysis of the advent of the jingoes focuses on the debate 
surrounding the arbitration treaty signed by the United States and Great Britain 
in 1897. She attributes the failure of the treaty in the U.S. Senate to increasing 
concern among many men regarding the growing influence of women in 
electoral politics. Opponents of arbitration raised alarms about the feminization 
of the republic and pointed to the prominence of women among the 
arbitrationists to bolster their case against the treaty. She then considers how the 
Reviews 167 
debate over arbitration influenced the controversy surrounding U.S. intervention 
in Cuba in 1898. Despite the jingoes' enthusiastic advocacy for war, 
considerable reluctance to intervene existed in the United States until the 
sinking of the US.S. Maine in the port of Havana. Hoganson elucidates how 
concepts of male honour shaped the responses of interventionists and anti- 
interventionists to the widespread perception that Spain was to blame for the 
ship's destruction. Jingoes benefited from the widely shared notion that the 
preservation of national/masculine honour required retribution for the alleged 
treachery of the Spanish. Ratherthan face questions regarding his party's and his 
own manliness, the initially hesitant President McKinley ultimately chose war. 
Hoganson goes beyond the now-familiar story of how Theodore Roosevelt 
and other white men sought to capitalize on their war-time adventures in Cuba, 
discussing how white women from the United States also sought to reap benefits 
from their participation in the war effort. Her analysis of the controversy 
surrounding the U.S. Senate's decision to honour Clara Barton illustrates the 
limits to women's claims in the arena of electoral politics in the aftermath of the 
war. African American men also found themselves largely excluded from the 
vision of martial citizenship that prevailed in the dominant U.S. political culture, 
which privileged white men as the ultimate exemplars of military valour. 
Similarly racialized and gendered notions of citizenship played a critical 
role in U.S. intervention in the Philippines. As with the earlier controversy over 
the arbitration treaty with Great Britain, jingoes derided their opponents as 
unmanly and pointed to the presence of women and older men among the ranks 
of the so-called "antis" as evidence of their alleged weakness. But as Hoganson 
shows, opponents of empire proved more successful in exploiting contemporary 
gender anxieties as the occupation of the Philippines dragged on. Critics of U.S. 
expansion in the tropics cited the effects of disease on soldiers' health as well as 
atrocities committed by U.S. troops as evidence that intervention in the 
Philippines was leading to the degeneration of otherwise decent white boys from 
the United States. These fears of degeneration, according to Hoganson, 
contributed to the decline of the "militant strain of the imperialist impulse" in 
the first decade of the twentieth century. 
Hoganson's study makes an important contribution to the research agenda 
set out by Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease in the introduction to their edited 
collection of essays entitled Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993). 
Kaplan and Pease called for scholars to pay closer attention to the role of empire 
in U.S. history and to the role of culture in U.S. imperial projects. Hoganson's 
book succeeds admirably in this sense, skillfully linlung "domestic" issues such 
as women's suffrage to the course of U.S. foreign policy. In doing so, she builds 
on other recent scholarship on gender and imperialism in the late nineteenth 
century, including works by Amy Kaplan, Gail Bederman, and E. Anthony 
R o t ~ n d o . ~  
While path-brealung in many respects, Hoganson's work reproduces what 
Louis A. PCrez has identified as a long-standing tendency among U.S. historians 
168 Left History 7.2 
of 1898 to ignore archival sources and historiography produced outside their 
own c o ~ n t r y . ~  In Hoganson's defense, her book is principally about political 
culture in the United States. Yet the paucity of references to Cuban and Filipino 
archival sources and historiography make it difficult for her to give an entirely 
convincing account for transformations in U.S. political discourse in the 
aftermath of intervention. Hoganson notes that after U.S. troops landed in Cuba, 
U.S. officials and journalists increasingly portrayed Cubans in racialized terms 
that questioned the rebels' capacity to govern themselves. She explains this 
change primarily in terms of the workings of U.S. political discourse, arguing 
that "martial theories of citizenship worked in tandem with racial and class 
assumptions to justify U.S. control over Cuba an4 indeed, other former Spanish 
colonies acquired in the war" (132). This observation is no doubt accurate. But 
once U.S. troops were on the ground, officials from the United States could no 
longer act as if Cubans and Filipinos were mere abstractions of their imperial 
imaginations. A fuller accounting of transformations in U.S. political discourse 
following intervention would have also considered relations on the ground 
between the forces of occupation and actual Cubans, as well as tensions within 
the rebel army itself, particularly over the question of race. Such an investigation 
would in turn have required an engagement with the voluminous writings that 
Cubans themselves have produced on that subject over the past century4 
Other works published on or near the one hundredth anniversary of 1898 
provide a closer look at what Mary Louise Pratt (borrowing from Fernando 
Ortiz) has identified as the "transcultural" aspects of the imperial en~ounter .~ In 
a contribution to Close Encounters ofEmpire, a recent collection of articles on 
the cultural history of US.-Latin American relations, Gilbert Joseph calls for an 
international history that goes beyond the study of diplomats and other members 
of the governing elite to consider the broader range of interaction between the 
peoples of the United States and other societies, including issues such as 
organized labour, medicine, and the visual a r k 6  Working in this vein, Eileen J. 
Suarez's recent study of sexuality and race in Puerto Rico examines how U.S. 
attempts to reform the institution of marriage on the island were themselves 
shaped by Puerto Rican women and men who were the targets of those reforms. 
Men and women from the United States were not the only veterans to make 
citizenship claims based on military service in Cuba. Similar arguments were 
advanced by Afro-Cuban veterans of the Cuban insurgency, as Ada Ferrer and 
Rebecca J. Scott have discussed in their respective contributions to a recent 
special issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review. 
Taken as a whole, Hoganson's book and these other important contributions 
to the historiography of "1 898" point toward an exciting direction in scholarship 
on U.S. empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific, one that moves beyond the 
dichotomy of "home" and "abroad to reveal the larger dynamics of imperial 
struggles over gender, race, and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth 
Reviews 169 
century. For scholars of international relations, Hoganson's work will remain 
both an inspiration and a model for understanding the importance of gender 
politics in U.S. expansion. 
Aims McGuinness 
University of  Michigan. 
1 For important recent reflections on this historiography, see Charles Bergquist, Labor 
and the Course ofAmerican Democracy (London 1996) and Walter LaFeber's preface to 
the most recent edition of his 1963 classic, The New Empire: An Interpretation of 
Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca 1998). 
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in 
the United States, 1880-191 7 (Chicago 1994),Amy Kaplan, "Black and Blue on San Juan 
Hill," in Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham 1993), 2 19-36, and E. Anthony 
Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinityfrom the Revolution to the 
Modern Era (New York 1993). 
Louis A. PCrez, Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and 
Historiography (Chapel Hill 1998), X. In works such as Cuba Between Empires, 1878- 
1902 (Pittsburgh 1983) and On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture 
(Chapel Hill 1999), PCrez has set the standard for studies of U.S. involvement in Cuba 
that fully consider both Spanish-language and English-language sources and 
scholarship. For a bibliographical essay that reviews recent contributions to the 
voluminous Spanish-language scholarship on turn-of-the-century Cuba, see Antonio 
Santamaria Garcia and Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, "La historia social de Cuba, 
1868-1914. Aportaciones recientes y perspectivas," Historia Social 33 (1999), 133-1 58. 
On questions of race and inclusion in Cuban independence struggles, see Ada Ferrer, 
Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill 1999) and Aline 
Helg, Our Rightfulshare: TheAfo-Cuban Strugglefor Equality, 1886-1912 (Chapel Hill 
1995). 
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London 1992), 
6. For a call for scholars of empire to consider metropole and colony within the same 
frame of analysis, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, "Between Metropole and 
Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda," in Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions ofEmpire: 
Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Stanford 1997). 
Gilbert M. Joseph, "Close Encounters: Toward a New Cultural History of U.S.-Latin 
American Relations," in Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. 
Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of US.-Latin 
American Relations (Durham 1998). 
Ada Ferrer, "Rustic Men, Civilized Nation: Race, Culture, and Contention on the Eve of 
Cuban Independence," HispanicAmerican Historical Review, 78 (November 1998), 663- 
686, and Rebecca Scott, "Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Cuba: A View from the Sugar 
District of Cienfuegos, 1886- 1909," Hispanic' American Historical Review, 78 
(November 1998), 687-728. Recent works on the United States in the Philippines that 
pursue a more interactive approach include Vicente Rafael, "Colonial Domesticity: 
White Women and United States Rule in the Philippines," American Literature, 67 
(December 1995), 639-66, and Paul Kramer, "The Pragmatic Empire: U.S. Anthropology 
and Colonial Politics in the Occupied Philippines, 1898- 19 16," Ph,D. Thesis, Princeton 
University, 1998. 


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