The Annals of Iowa

Review of: Lincoln in the Illinois Legislature, by Ron J. Keller

Winkle, Kenneth J.

Book Reviews and Notices      89 
[in Utah] are not even aware that people live here, thrive here, raise 
families here” (134–35). Esplin concludes the book by observing that the 
restoration of Nauvoo is “an American story” that offers important les-
sons on faith tourism, contested space, and commemoration (148). 
 The book’s great strength is Esplin’s ability to consistently situate 
his research within the broader scholarship of tourism and heritage 
studies, cultural studies (especially work focused on memory and com-
memoration), and the American Midwest. By doing so, the author 
demonstrates that the history of the Mormon faith is indeed uniquely 
American in its orientation. That history, like our national history, is 
messy at times, and Esplin does not minimize or gloss over those times. 
The book occasionally bogs down with minute details regarding prop-
erty acquisition or church leaders’ correspondence. Ultimately, how-
ever, Esplin provides a valuable text that would be of particular use to 
scholars interested in America’s religious history, historic preservation 
in the Midwest, and the constantly contested nature of cultural memory.  
 
 
Lincoln in the Illinois Legislature, by Ron J. Keller. The Concise Lincoln 
Library. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. xi, 160 pp. 
Map, illustrations, notes, index. $24.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Kenneth J. Winkle is Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of American 
History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of Young 
Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln (2001). 
In Lincoln in the Illinois Legislature, Ron J. Keller identifies the four terms 
that Abraham Lincoln served in the Illinois legislature from 1834 to 1842 
as an oft-forgotten but formative period. Although born in Kentucky 
and destined for greatness—and an untimely death—while serving as 
president in Washington, D.C., Abraham Lincoln spent most of his life 
in the Midwest. As he grew up and came of age in the invigorating at-
mosphere of the American heartland, Lincoln imbibed the rural and 
small-town virtues that he later came to personify. In 1834, at age 25, he 
was a newcomer to central Illinois: poor, uneducated, and still uncer-
tain of his trajectory in life. Settling in New Salem, a small pioneer vil-
lage near Springfield, Lincoln seized the opportunity to prove himself 
to his new neighbors, who found in him an earnest if rough-hewn rep-
resentative of their own values. Helping him to improve himself, they 
supported his pursuit of a political career with near unanimity. In short, 
Lincoln won his first elective office on the strength of his personal rep-
utation for honesty, hard work, common sense, self-improvement, and 
community spirit.  
90      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Keller aptly portrays the foundation of Lincoln’s earliest political in-
clinations as economic in nature. Representing Sangamon County in the 
lower house of the Illinois General Assembly, Lincoln advocated an ac-
tive state government that would assist in the advancement of the west-
ern frontier region by supporting public education, establishing sound 
banks that would provide secure credit, and funding internal improve-
ments such as roads, canals, and railroads. These economic initiatives 
drew him to the new Whig Party’s “American System.” Lincoln soon 
became the Whig floor leader in the Illinois House and later declared 
that he was “always a Whig in politics.” Despite his party’s perpetual 
minority status in Illinois, Lincoln grew adept at forging alliances, com-
promising, and mastering parliamentary procedure to get things done. 
As a member of the legislature’s “Long Nine,” he proved instrumental 
in securing the passage of an internal improvements program, estab-
lishing the Bank of Illinois, and relocating the state capital from Van-
dalia to Springfield—a more central location that was also the seat of 
Lincoln’s home county, Sangamon. After a devastating depression, the 
Panic of 1839, left the Illinois economy in tatters, the Whig economic 
program collapsed under a debt that the state could not repay until 
1881. Lincoln temporarily retired from politics after completing his 
fourth term in 1842. But at age 33, he left as one of the “elder statesmen” 
of his beloved Whig Party.  
 Lincoln in the Illinois Legislature is a welcome reconsideration of Lin-
coln’s legislative career. It provides a fresh perspective on those eight 
momentous years in the future president’s early life. While assessing 
Lincoln’s legislative record as “less than stellar” (ix), Keller views glim-
mers of Lincoln’s later opposition to slavery as pivotal and considers the 
long-term impact of Lincoln’s legislative service on his personal, profes-
sional, and political growth as overwhelmingly positive. Lincoln’s ad-
mission to the Illinois bar midway through his legislative career in 1837 
and his subsequent move to Springfield to practice law—and to marry 
well—epitomize the dramatic self-improvement that Lincoln garnered 
as a lasting personal and professional legacy of his legislative service. 
Overall, Keller carefully recounts Lincoln’s crucial transformation into a 
shrewd and effective political leader during his legislative career, the 
host of influential friends and political allies that he accrued, his growing 
eloquence as he honed his rhetorical skills, his ambition to attain ever 
greater public distinction, and above all his immersion into the uniquely 
American political principles that he would later define and defend as 
president. 
 


English

Lincoln in the Illinois Legislature

Review of: The Civilian Conservation Corps in Wisconsin: Nature’s Army at Work, by Jerry Apps

Conard, Rebecca

The Civilian Conservation Corps in Wisconsin: Nature's Army at Work

Review of: Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Paul Hendrickso

Naegele, Daniel

Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright

Review of: The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, Thavolia Glymp

Cutter, Barbara

The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation

Neu, Jonathan D.

"Produce Patriots As Well As Scholars": GAR Educational Reform and the Establishment of Mason City's Memorial University

Review of: A Life on the Middle West’s Never-Ending Frontier, by Willard L. “Sandy” Boyd

Hevel, Michael S.

A Life on the Middle West's Never-Ending Frontier

Review of: Transplanters on the Grasslands and the Fruits of Chain Migration, by Brian W. Beltman

Anderson, Douglas Firth

Book Reviews and Notices      199 
leader’s insistence on Sicangus being utilized to perform teamster work 
on the reservations. By helping to provide a path to economic inde-
pendence, Clow asserts, Spotted Tail helped to shape positive opinions 
of his community while developing meaningful opportunities for em-
ployment. Clow also examines Spotted Tail’s educational legacy, show-
ing how Spotted Tail lost the faith of his community by first pushing to 
send Sicangu children to Carlisle Indian School before deciding to pull 
his own children out after visiting the school.  
 Although Iowa is absent from the story of this more westerly 
Lakota leader, the work is of interest to readers concerned with the his-
tory of the Hawkeye State because it provides a window into the out-
comes possible when indigenous leadership was willing to seek a path 
of mutual adaptation. Wabasha, whose village was located near the 
Mississippi River in extreme northeastern Iowa, was one such leader 
who sought via diplomacy to preserve sovereignty and autonomy for 
his people while remaining open to cooperation with the American 
government. In contrast, the Wahpekute leader Inkpaduta chose the 
other extreme, a path that led to the end of the Dakota presence in Iowa 
following his band’s attack on the newly formed settlement of Spirit 
Lake in March 1857.  Wabasha sought to form an adaptive compact with 
the United States, but that removed him from his lands in northeastern 
Iowa during the onset of the reservation system. The modern reader 
will never know how different the history of Iowa’s indigenous peoples 
would have been if a leader like the Spotted Tail depicted by Clow had 
been able to shape outcomes during the onset of the reservation era. 
 Clow’s portrait of Spotted Tail is textured and provides meaningful 
insights into the Sicangu Lakota leader’s complexities. Future scholars 
may seek to better incorporate a more representative source base that 
includes greater attention to winter counts, oral tradition, and more 
contemporary theoretical constructs focused on indigenous peoples 
within borderlands.  
 
 
Transplanters on the Grasslands and the Fruits of Chain Migration, by Brian 
W. Beltman. Ishpeming, MI: BookVenture Publishing, 2019. xxxi, 365 
pp. Maps, tables, notes, index. $16.99 paperback. 
Reviewer Douglas Firth Anderson is professor emeritus of history at 
Northwestern College (Iowa), coauthor of Orange City (2014), and coeditor 
of the faculty research open-access annual Northwestern Review. 
Iowa is often seen as a flyover state, yet aspects of its culture besides 
politics (the Iowa caucuses) and leisure (RAGBRAI) do sometimes gain 
attention outside the state. In November 2017 the New Yorker ran a report 
200      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
by Larissa MacFarquhar on Orange City: “Where the Small-Town 
American Dream Lives On.” More recently, as part of a wide-ranging 
historiographical essay in the Middle West Review on midwestern iden-
tity, Jon Lauck urged scholars to “capture the nuances of German Min-
nesota, Dutch Iowa, Norwegian South Dakota, and Yankee Michigan.” 
 A nuanced analysis of the formative years of Dutch Iowa, including 
Orange City and Pella, as well as Dutch South Dakota, is at the heart of 
Brian W. Beltman’s new book. Beltman is not new to the subject. His 
book is a reframing and extension of his previous articles—including 
three in the Annals of Iowa—and a condensing of his book Dutch Farmer 
in the Missouri Valley: The Life and Letters of Ulbe Eringa, 1866–1950 (1996). 
It amounts to a summa of Beltman’s immigration and settlement schol-
arship. As such, it is an important addition to the quantitative, socio-
cultural, and intellectual history tradition of Beltman’s acknowledged 
mentors: Allan G. Bogue, Paul K. Conkin, and Robert P. Swierenga. 
That the book is self-published reflects the author’s persistence in his 
retirement to making a substantive contribution to scholarship despite 
not having had a career as a historian. 
 The book’s title, which, despite its length, does not specify Dutch 
Iowa and South Dakota, does suggest Beltman’s central argument: 
From the mid-nineteenth into the early twentieth century, in a carefully 
planned process, Dutch Reformed immigrants collectively transplanted 
“kith and kin” to the midwestern prairie grasslands of Marion and Sioux 
Counties in Iowa and Douglas, Charles Mix, and Bon Homme Counties 
in South Dakota. This series of chain migrations, contiguous “neighbor-
hood” settlement, and endogamous marriage established rural and 
small-town communities of sociocultural “Dutchness” that persist to-
day and are most readily visible in regional institutions such as North-
western College, Central College, Reformed and Christian Reformed 
congregations, and tulip festivals. 
 The author draws on immigration, census, and land records and 
provides supportive tables and maps of Dutch settlement in the speci-
fied counties in Iowa and South Dakota. Proceeding chronologically in 
part one, he traces the careful transplanting of Dutch Calvinist families 
first to Marion County and Pella in the 1840s and 1850s, then to Sioux 
County and Orange City in the 1870s. Most of the Iowa Dutch supported 
the Union cause during the Civil War, but Beltman documents how a 
minority, in part because of memories of war and conscription in the 
Netherlands, in part because of fear of what losses the war could bring 
to their families, made a temporary trek to Oregon. Most returned to 
Iowa after the war. In the 1880s further transplanting from Orange City 
reached into southeast South Dakota. 
Book Reviews and Notices      201 
 Beltman’s approach is solidly quantitative, but he carefully incor-
porates individual and family accounts along the way. Further, in part 
two, he focuses on selected individuals and connects their experiences 
to the larger sociohistorical processes he discusses. First, he analyzes 
E. J. G. Bloemendaal (Sioux County, Iowa), then he turns to Ulbe and 
Maaike Eringa (Bon Homme County, South Dakota). 
 Self-publishing brings its own editing challenges. The book cover is 
a pen-and-ink sketch of a farmscape, but, without any title or attribution, 
it seems tenuously tied to the topic. Some of the maps are a bit blurry 
and hard to read, and attributions are scarce. There are no illustrations, 
either of individuals or buildings or towns discussed. Beltman ties his 
material to larger discussions of immigration, migration, ethnicity, and 
region. Nevertheless, his discussions at times can seem perfunctory or 
dated, such as “market and community” and region. Regarding region, 
he is more keyed to connecting his material to the West than to the 
burgeoning discussion of the Midwest. 
 The book’s weaknesses are minor, however. Beltman’s writing is 
clear. His analysis is carefully stated and balanced. He blends quantita-
tive material and personal accounts effectively. He describes in detail 
how and why Dutch American colonies in Iowa and South Dakota 
were made and persist: “Ethnic persistence is strongly linked to ethnic 
territoriality” (342). To the same point, Sioux County colonist E. J. G. 
Bloemendaal was more colorful in his 1911 memoir: “America is a good 
land! . . . [Still,] the more Hollanders come, the better I like it, and the 
better they fare, the more pleased I will be” (288). This is now the best 
book with which to begin to understand the midwestern Dutch experi-
ence west of the Mississippi River. 
 
 
Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great Plains, 
edited by Lori Ann Lahlum and Molly P. Rozum. Pierre: South Dakota 
Historical Society Press, 2019. xii, 410 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, index. 
$34.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Pam Stek earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Iowa. 
Her dissertation was titled “Immigrant Women’s Political Activism in Iowa, 
Minnesota, and Wisconsin, 1880–1920.” 
The essays in Equality at the Ballot Box analyze the politics of woman 
suffrage in the Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming territories and the four 
states admitted from those territories. In the Northern Great Plains, the 
debate over women’s rights intersected with westward expansion, 
settler colonialism, and changing ideas of citizenship and nationhood. 
Strategies employed by suffragists and their opponents reflected and 


Transplanters on the Grasslands and the Fruits of Chain Migration

Review of: A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, by David O. Dowling

Charis-Carlson, Jeff

Book Reviews and Notices      111 
hybridized corn, Soviet collective farms could produce enough food for 
their people (something that had virtually never been accomplished 
throughout the history of Soviet Russia), and begin to challenge the 
agricultural superiority the United States has enjoyed since the end of 
World War II. The unlikely diplomacy between the two men who were 
described as rough around the edges was seemingly easier to accom-
plish than all of the state dinners, cabinet level meetings, and Washing-
ton insider networking events Khrushchev was treated to on his trip. 
The lack of emphasis on this part of the trip is a little disconcerting, 
knowing how much it meant to both men. 
 That said, for a readership that is not well acquainted with this part 
of the Cold War, Nelson and Schoenbachler have woven together an 
impressive narrative. They have introduced the people involved with 
the historic visit, their influences, and their desired outcomes. Readers 
will experience the clash between a true believer in the superiority of 
Marxist ideology and the bedrock figures of American capitalism. The 
authors have done well to shed light on a complex period in history in 
such a way that anyone could pick up the book, enjoy the story, and 
learn about a time during the Cold War when warheads were laid down 
in favor of toasting glasses and ears of corn. 
 
 
A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 
by David O. Dowling. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 
2019. xi, 420 pp. Timeline, illustrations, notes, index. $35 hardcover. 
Reviewer Jeff Charis-Carlson is a freelance writer based in Iowa. He is an 
adjunct instructor for the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass 
Communication, a former reporter for the Des Moines Register, and a former 
editorial writer for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. 
“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think universities stifle writers,” Flannery 
O’Connor said during an interview in 1960. “My opinion is that they 
don’t stifle enough of them.” O’Connor offered that quip (which is cast 
in bronze on Iowa City’s Literary Walk) more than a dozen years after 
she graduated from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. 
But the sentiment she expressed also deftly summarizes the Darwinian 
purpose behind the intensive critique sessions that her mentor, Paul 
Engle, envisioned for the MFA program he directed from 1941 to 1965.  
 How different writers react to those stifling Workshop sessions—
those “volatile cocktail(s) of ego and competition” (2)—provides the 
through line for David Dowling’s comprehensive history of the pro-
gram, A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ 
Workshop. In this 420-page, heavily endnoted book, Dowling traces the 
112      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
long but hard-to-see shadow that Engle continues to cast on the most 
highly ranked graduate creative writing program in the United States. 
Dowling demonstrates how it was largely because of Engle’s entre-
preneurial energy (and his willingness to take money from nearly any 
source) that Iowa is now as well known for world-renowned writing as 
it is for regular visits from presidential hopefuls. 
 Past histories of the 83-year-old Workshop largely have been inside 
affairs, resulting in either quasi-hagiographical memoirs or critical de-
nunciations of the Workshop method. The program’s reputation stands 
to benefit either way. Writers and poets who thrive under the stress, 
like novelist T. C. Boyle and war memoirist Anthony Swofford, are 
hailed as success stories; those who rebel and denounce the blood-letting, 
like poet W. D. Snodgrass and poet/novelist Sandra Cisneros, are still 
hailed for finding their voice in opposition to the Workshop. 
 But there has been a growing area of scholarship (from Mark 
McGurl, Eric Bennett, and others) that situates the Workshop within the 
evolution of cultural production in the postwar era. Dowling, an asso-
ciate professor of journalism at the University of Iowa, has extensive 
experience writing about the ways nineteenth-century authors learned 
to navigate shifting literary marketplaces. In Engle’s long legacy, he saw 
an opportunity to link the intense professionalization of authorship in 
the mid–twentieth century with the mass cultural market forces of the 
present day. 
 Dowling argues that the Cedar Rapids–born Engle worked to bring 
talented young writers to the heart of the Midwest and disabuse them 
of the romantic notion that they just need to wait patiently to be discov-
ered. Instead, he used the public university setting to expose them to the 
“savagery” they eventually would experience from literary agents, pub-
lishers, and critics. The resulting Workshop (always capitalized) began 
attracting award-winning writers to serve as faculty and saw graduates 
begin to claim their own Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and 
poet laureateships.  
 Rather than compose a straightforward chronological history of the 
Workshop’s expansion as an institution, Dowling provides 15 “critical 
biographies” of students and faculty members identified with the 
Workshop’s history. The list stretches from O’Connor in the 1940s to 
Ayana Mathis, whose The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2012) gained a national 
following after it was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club 2.0. The 
book also explores how Engle’s successors—George Starbuck (1966–
1969), Jack Leggett (1970–1987), and Frank Conroy (1987–2005)—
continued to build on the pedagogical (and patriarchal) foundation that 
he laid. It is only with the 2006 hiring of novelist Lan Samantha Chang 
Book Reviews and Notices      113 
as director that alumni begin to see “a sea change in the gender and 
ethnic politics of the program” (343). 
 Along the way, Dowling discusses a roughly equal number of poets 
and fiction writers—summarizing some well-known anecdotes from 
Workshop lore (such as the 1954 fistfight between future Pulitzer Prize–
winning poets Philip Levine and John Berryman), providing thorough 
research on some lesser-known alumni (including poet Robert Shelley 
and novelist Marguerite Young), and giving a disturbing yet nuanced 
account of the misogyny, sexual predation, and hyper-masculinity that 
permeated Workshop culture for generations. The central chapters on 
the 1970s experiences of Cisneros, Joy Harjo, and Rita Dove are among 
the most compelling in the book. 
 Not all the anecdotes shared in A Delicate Aggression illustrate 
Dowling’s main thesis, and reviewers have been critical of when the 
book’s large-scale focus narrows to the minutiae of individual episodes. 
But Dowling demonstrates how the contradictions raised by Engle’s 
creative and market-driven visions remain as applicable for the Work-
shop in the twenty-first century as they were when Engle inter-
rupted class to proudly announce that he had secured funding for an 
“Iowa Natural Gas Fellowship in Creative Writing” (63). 
 
 
Visions of the Tallgrass: Prairie Photographs by Harvey Payne, photographs 
by Harvey Payne, essays by James P. Ronda. Charles M. Russell Center 
Series on Art and Photography of the American West 33. Norman: Uni-
versity of Oklahoma Press, 2018. xv, 162 pp. Color photographs, map, 
notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer Rebecca Conard is professor of history emeritus at Middle Ten-
nessee State University. She is the author of Places of Quiet Beauty: Parks, 
Preserves, and Environmentalism (1997). 
Visions of the Tallgrass is a paean to the great prairie that once covered 
central North America, more particularly the 45,000 acres protected by 
The Nature Conservancy as the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie 
Preserve near Pawhuska, Oklahoma, formerly the Barnard tract of the 
Chapman-Barnard Ranch established by Texas oilmen James A. Chapman 
and Horace G. Barnard. More than a hundred captivating photographs 
by nature photographer Harvey Payne, a native Oklahoman, are situ-
ated in a set of discursive essays by noted western historian James P. 
Ronda, a self-described “child of the Chicago suburbs” and trans-
planted academic (14). The skillfully interwoven text and images reflect 
an enduring friendship that began in 1990, when Payne was serving as 
the preserve’s first director and Ronda arrived at the University of Tulsa 
as the first holder of the Barnard Chair in Western American History. 


A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers' Workshop

Romeo, Sharon

Criminal Seduction and Women's Citizenship in Iowa, 1865-1879

Review of: Prohibition, The Constitution, and States’ Rights, by Sean Beienburg

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