The Annals of Iowa

Bergman, Marvin

Editor's Perspective

Review of: Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great Plains, edited by Lori Ann Lahlum and Molly P. Rozum

Stek, Pam

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 
202      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
influenced conceptions of European immigrants, American Indians, 
and rural communities. As the authors in this anthology argue, a study 
of the Northern Great Plains suffrage movement sheds light on evolving 
ideas about democracy and national belonging in the late nineteenth 
and early twentieth centuries.  
 The volume contains three thematic sections. The chapters in part 
one provide overviews of the suffrage debates in each of the four states. 
Jennifer Helton argues that the commitment to woman suffrage in Wy-
oming, the first state in the nation to grant women full voting rights, 
must be considered in the context of Reconstruction-Era politics and 
Radical Republicans’ vision for expanding westward the doctrine of 
equality. In contrast, as Barbara Handy-Marchello points out, North 
Dakota Republican Party bosses resisted woman suffrage in order to 
maintain the loyalty of German-Russian voters and to ensure legislative 
support for the powerful railway lobby; that opposition was a key factor 
in North Dakota women’s inability to gain full voting rights until the 
passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Jennifer J. Hill focuses on the 
work of three prominent Montana women whose personal influence 
and years of suffrage activism came to fruition in 1914 when Montana 
enfranchised women. In Paula M. Nelson’s analysis of the many set-
backs endured by South Dakota suffragists, she highlights the influence 
of anti-suffrage organizations whose efforts helped delay the passage 
of woman suffrage in the state until 1918.  
 Part two contains four case studies that help illuminate the regional 
women’s rights movement: the role of South Dakota’s school suffrage 
laws in normalizing women’s political participation; the impact of local 
and national suffragists’ differing views of ethnic minority support for 
women’s rights in South Dakota; the ways South Dakota’s referenda for 
woman suffrage and American Indian voting rights revealed racialized 
and gendered conceptions of citizenship and property; and suffragists’ 
at times frustrating  and unexpectedly drawn-out campaigns to ratify 
the Nineteenth Amendment in the Northern Great Plains states, the site 
of some of the suffrage movement’s earliest and most visible successes.  
 The chapters in part three focus on the lives and contributions of 
prominent suffragists: North Dakotans Cora Smith Eaton and Kate Selby 
Wilder and Blackfeet activists Helen Piotopowaka Clarke and Virginia 
Billedeaux. Smith Eaton and Wilder leveraged their organizational con- 
nections to advance their suffrage activism while Clarke’s and Bille-
deaux’s support for woman suffrage emerged from a broader agenda 
of civil and political rights for American Indians. 
 Interspersed between the three main sections are several short “Suf-
frage Snapshots” that highlight prominent local suffragists and probe 
Book Reviews and Notices      203 
other elements of the regional movement’s development, such as activ-
ists’ use of automobiles in suffrage campaigns, the intertwined support 
for temperance and woman suffrage in Norwegian American commu-
nities, and woman suffrage content in German-language newspapers. 
 Equality at the Ballot Box represents a valuable contribution to 
woman suffrage scholarship. The essays included provide a thorough 
account of suffrage activists’ successes and failures in the region and 
present compelling analyses of the forces that helped or hindered suf-
fragists’ efforts. Especially welcome are chapters that address the per-
spectives of ethnic communities and of American Indian women. How-
ever, as the editors note, additional research on the political activism of 
American Indian women and women of color is needed to provide an 
even more complete picture of women’s concerns and strategies in the 
Northern Great Plains. Also, although the collection includes research on 
European immigrants, the perspective of immigrant women is missing. 
Several of the contributing authors note that many immigrant men op-
posed women’s enfranchisement, but the essays fail to consider how im-
migrant women responded to debates over women’s political equality. 
 This volume also offers important comparisons to the women’s 
rights movement in other parts of the nation. The states of the Northern 
Great Plains shared a number of social and economic characteristics 
with other midwestern states: primarily rural populations, local econo-
mies dependent on agriculture and the connections railroads provided 
to distant urban markets, and relatively large numbers of European im-
migrant settlers. Given these similarities, the essays in this work suggest 
additional areas of research and points of reference that could shed fur-
ther light on the suffrage movement in the Midwest. Equality at the Ballot 
Box provides a compelling history of woman suffrage in the Northern 
Great Plains and enhances our understanding of how the politics of 
woman suffrage influenced regional and national conceptions of de-
mocracy and citizenship.  
 
 
A Life on the Middle West’s Never-Ending Frontier, by Willard L. “Sandy” 
Boyd. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019. xix, 362 pp. Illustra-
tions, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 hardcover.  
Reviewer Michael S. Hevel is associate professor of higher education at the 
University of Arkansas. His research and writing focus on student life at 
colleges and universities, including an article in the Annals of Iowa in 2011 
on the role of literary societies in early Iowa higher education. 
“I was one of the few World War II veterans who experienced the prom-
ised land of California but opted to return to the heartland to live my 


English

Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great Plains

Review of: Spotted Tail: Warrior and Statesman, by Richmond L. Clow

Mason, Kevin

198      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Spotted Tail: Warrior and Statesman, by Richmond L. Clow. Pierre: South 
Dakota Historical Society Press, 2019. xiii, 390 pp. Maps, illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Kevin Mason is instructor of history at Waldorf University. He is 
working on a Ph.D. dissertation at Iowa State University on environmental 
change and hardship in northern Iowa prior to the 1857 attack by Inkpaduta 
and the Wahpekute on Spirit Lake. 
Richard L. Clow’s new book on Spotted Tail concentrates on the role of 
the Sicangu Lakota leader during a time of conflict and change during 
the mid-nineteenth century. In a chronologically ordered biography, 
Clow portrays Spotted Tail as a peacemaker focused on mutual adapta-
tion between the Lakota and the United States. The work draws primarily 
on governmental documents and newspapers, the latter of which Clow 
suggests have been underutilized in past histories of the Sicangu leader. 
The text departs from the past work of George E. Hyde, Spotted Tail’s 
primary scholarly chronicler to date, to move beyond portraying the 
Sicangu leader as one bent on “peaceful coexistence” to an interpretation 
of Spotted Tail as a forward-thinking figure whose ideas on economy, 
education, and social order helped to ease the Lakotas’ transition in a 
time of rapid change. Clow’s central argument focuses on Spotted Tail’s 
vision for the future of the Lakota during a time of turbulence.  
 Clow’s work provides a plethora of anecdotes to document how 
Spotted Tail’s influence emerged and then changed over time. The text 
abounds with examples of the adaptive position the leader often took 
when working within the context of Lakota-American relations. Spotted 
Tail’s military career helped position him to become a spokesman for 
the Sicangu, a position he held from the mid-1860s onward. Clow traces 
the ascension of Spotted Tail’s influence within the Sicangu before his 
first significant diplomatic test during and after the Fort Laramie Treaty 
of 1866. Clow illustrates the evolving role of the leader as he helped to 
maintain strict adherence to the provisions of the treaty within his band 
after the signing. Spotted Tail advocated Sicangu and Lakota control 
over the lands they occupied. While depicting a forward-thinking 
leader who saw that adherence to American policy was the only way to 
maintain any measure of indigenous autonomy, Clow suggests that the 
period from 1864 to 1871 saw Spotted Tail perfect his diplomatic skills, 
adapting lessons in give and take learned on the battlefield to the arena 
of negotiations with the American government. A prime example is the 
leader’s consistent bargaining for favorable reservation and hunting 
lands that would curtail American influence while allowing the Sicangu 
the potential to maintain many aspects of traditional life. Clow also de-
picts Spotted Tail’s vision for the future through his assessment of the 
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 


Spotted Tail: Warrior and Statesman

Back Matter

Review of: Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule, by Nick Yablon

Filene, Benjamin

104      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
tional revision. By 1932, a wave of popular pressure—combined with 
the Hoover Administration’s enactment of harsh federal penalties for 
violators of an increasingly inept enforcement regime, the infiltration of 
prohibition into partisan politics, and the impact of the depression—led 
to the collapse of state enforcement laws in the Northeast. State conven-
tions, usually elected by popular vote, sped the ratification of the 
Twenty-first Amendment, ending national Prohibition. According to 
Beienburg, constitutionally conscious antiprohibitionists found a way 
to assert states’ rights and popular will within a legal framework. He 
hopes their actions will become a model for contemporary movements 
harnessing popular constitutionalism. 
 Beienburg’s reconstruction of state-level efforts to balance states’ 
rights and national authority will influence future Prohibition research. 
The sharp constitutional focus and present-mindedness of Beienburg’s 
study may prove less satisfying to historians. Beienburg examined state 
legislative journals and newspapers to construct his complicated time-
line of legislative debates, but they could be more clearly rendered. 
Minimal social and political context frames the analysis of debates. Bei-
enburg largely overlooks deficiencies in state enforcement that some-
times predated legislative discussions. The Great Depression probably 
was more central to Prohibition’s collapse than Beienburg admits. De-
spite the referenda, popular voices are distant. Legal historians and con-
stitutional scholars have much to gain from Beienburg’s study. Prohibi-
tion historians will consult it, but with care. 
 
 
Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule, by Nick 
Yablon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 407 pp. Illustra-
tions, notes, index. $45 hardcover. 
Reviewer Benjamin Filene is chief curator at the North Carolina Museum of 
History. In 1995 he curated Time Capsules: History Goes Underground, an exhi-
bition at the Outagamie County Historical Society in Appleton, Wisconsin. 
Cultural history can help us glimpse how people from the past saw 
their world. In Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time 
Capsule, Nick Yablon achieves this goal in a way that would likely ap-
peal to the eccentric, earnest assemblage of hoarders, hucksters, and vi-
sionaries he profiles: he takes seriously the messages they aspired to 
send to the future, the forces that shaped those aspirations, and their 
efforts—sometimes successful, sometimes spectacularly short-circuited 
—to transmit material-culture missives forward in time. In doing so, 
Yablon takes readers on a wild ride that offers new insights into how 
Book Reviews and Notices      105 
late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans understood histori-
cal memory and their own ephemeral place in history. 
 The premise behind Yablon’s undertaking is that a time capsule is 
a uniquely interesting historical source. Historians, he writes, have tra-
ditionally prized “involuntary sources”—traces of the past that have 
“inadvertently survived” (8). Time capsules, though, were created ex-
plicitly for historians. Such intentionality can invite skepticism. Yablon 
deliciously quotes William James: “It used to be enough for a genera-
tion to make raw history. Now we must half-cook it for the future his-
torian, and soon we shall have to compose it for him in advance. What 
an easy time he’ll have in the year 2000 simply unsealing & transcribing 
a finished work!” For Yablon, though, there is nothing simple about the 
challenge. He methodically, imaginatively, exhaustively shows that 
these messages from the past offer historians a window into the values 
and blindnesses of Americans struggling to make sense of their times. 
 Yablon’s first historiographical intervention is to broaden the defi-
nition and chronological range of his subject. The term time capsule was 
famously coined by Westinghouse for the missile-shaped, 800-pound 
cylinder it lowered into an “Immortal Well” at the 1939 World’s Fair (to 
be opened in 6939 A.D.). Yablon, though, traces to the 1870s the effort 
to make “intentional deposits” with specified dates for opening, citing 
“more than thirty” such examples (2–4). With these predecessors in 
mind, he prefers the broader term time vessel. Most of Remembrance of 
Things Present focuses on unpacking meaning from these antecedents: 
the “Century Safe” that magazine publisher Anna Deihm assembled for 
the 1876 Centennial Exposition; the “P.O. Box to the Future” that H. D. 
Cogswell embedded in a monumental fountain in San Francisco; the 
“centurial vessels” assembled around 1900 in Kansas City, Detroit, and 
Colorado Springs and at Harvard and Mount Holyoke; and an elabo-
rate effort by the Modern Historic Records Association in New York 
(1911–1914).  
 At a glance, these projects may seem worthy of being buried in foot-
notes, but Yablon connects them to an astonishing array of people, 
events, and movements—eugenics, women’s rights, Christian socialism, 
dystopian fiction—and such wondrous inventions as cellulose acetate 
(which enabled microform books) and concrete (which promised eter-
nal solidity). Yablon traces each of these tendrils carefully, offering 
deeply researched mini-histories along the way and contextualizing 
with insights from philosophers, cultural theorists, and sci-fi futurists. 
The result is impressive, but sometimes leaves the reader struggling to 
see a bigger picture beyond the fact that time vessels were very much 
in and of their world.  
106      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 The book feels more grounded, though, when Yablon considers his 
material through the frame of posteritism, a term coined by Colorado 
Springs vessel-creator Louis Ehrich to suggest (in Yablon’s words) “a 
sense of duty to posterity.” Posteritism neatly conveys a recognition of 
one’s place in a flow of time from past to present to future. All of Yablon’s 
quirky characters share that awareness acutely and wrestle with its im-
plications in ways ambitious and, often, painful.  
 These all-so-human dynamics give Remembrance of Things Present 
its energy and relevance today. Such opportunities for contemporary 
connection make puzzling Yablon’s dismissal of the 1939 World’s Fair 
capsule as “corporate and technocratic appropriation” (236). He con-
vincingly shows that public relations and product placement shaped 
that capsule’s contents, but, by denigrating such projects as inauthentic, 
Yablon implies that the earlier efforts he chronicles were somehow 
more pure. Saying that time capsules show “diminishing potential” 
after 1940, he ends his story just at the moment when the capsules 
captured popular imagination (20). The hundreds and thousands of 
“underground history” efforts deposited since 1939 get treated as spin-
offs of the “corporate variant,” addressed just in an epilogue (297). 
 The fine-grained determination with which Yablon digs into the 
earlier time vessels and his relative lack of interest in later time capsules 
may make Remembrance of Things Present less compelling to casual read-
ers. But the depth of his research, the fearlessness with which he pur-
sues leads, and the heft of the questions he asks along the way offer 
historians rare opportunities to dissect history making in motion. “Half-
cooked history,” Yablon shows, need not mean half-baked and, in fact, 
provides rich and sustaining insights. 
 
 
The Civilian Conservation Corps in Wisconsin: Nature’s Army at Work, by 
Jerry Apps. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2019. xii, 211 
pp. Map, illustrations, sidebars, notes, index. $18.95 paperback. 
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). 
Jerry Apps, who has published more than 35 books on rural life in Wis-
consin, has written an engaging book that delves into the experiences 
and accomplishments of Wisconsin “boys”—teenagers and twenty-
somethings—who enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) 
during the Great Depression. Although most of those who served in the 
CCC are no longer with us, public interest remains high in this success-
ful federal program to provide productive work, job training, and some 


Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule

Review of: The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a 'Lost White Race', by Jason Colavit

Wise, Mary

The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a 'Lost White Race'

Review of: The Rural Schools of Madison County: A Vanishing Heritage, by Ronald Howel

Yoder, Franklin

The Rural Schools of Madison County: A Vanishing Heritage

Review of: German Americans on the Middle Border: From Antislavery to Reconciliation, 1830–1877, by Zachary Stuart Garrison

Dewitt, Petra

296      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Moulton approaches the subject in a fast-paced and engaging style 
that she honed through years of newspaper reporting. Her interest in 
the handcarts grew in part out of her husband having handcart pioneer 
ancestors and from her own long-standing interest in overland emigra-
tion. The book is at its best when she draws upon her strengths, includ-
ing her own expertise regarding the trail and trail narratives, and allows 
individuals to speak for themselves and tell their own stories. In allow-
ing these voices to be heard, Moulton presents themes long associated 
with the handcart story—faith, devotion, sacrifice, heartache, tragedy 
and triumph. These themes are at the heart of why thousands of Latter-
day Saints each year push and pull handcarts in multi-day reenact-
ments known as the “trek.” 
 
 
German Americans on the Middle Border: From Antislavery to Reconciliation, 
1830–1877, by Zachary Stuart Garrison. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illi-
nois University Press, 2020. xiii, 232 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. 
$30.00 paperback.  
Reviewer Petra DeWitt is an assistant professor of history at the Missouri 
University of Science and Technology. She is the author of Degrees of Alle-
giance: Harassment and Loyalty in Missouri's German-American Community 
during World War I (2012). 
German Americans on the Middle Border takes a geographic approach to 
evaluate the place of German immigrants during the American Civil 
War and Reconstruction. Zachary Stuart Garrison focuses primarily on 
German immigrants who settled on what he calls the Middle Border, 
the area along the Ohio River, from its confluence with the Mississippi 
River northward to the Mississippi’s confluence with the Missouri River. 
This natural line in the midwestern landscape divided freedom from 
slavery and represented the intersection of northern, southern, and 
western political ideologies.  
Taking this spatial view allows Garrison to update the traditional 
historiography of German immigrants’ inherent opposition to slavery 
due to their beliefs in civil liberties and their European experiences. The 
author sees a more complex picture and convincingly argues that not 
all German Americans held abolitionist views. Instead, the passage of 
the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 and its threat to the survival of the 
United States inspired German immigrants to overcome their own ide-
ological differences and briefly unite in opposition to slavery as an in-
stitution that not only limited individual freedoms but also restricted 
the advancement of society as a whole. When the Civil War broke out, 

298      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
who made Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin their home. Did Germans 
in Iowa not as eagerly participate in the discourse over slavery as their 
neighbors in Missouri? Did they not as willingly fight for the Union be-
cause they did not live in close proximity to the South? Did Germans in 
Iowa experience ethnic unity as Radical Republicans during the Civil 
War? Did they too revert to various interest groups at the end of Recon-
struction? Historians should conduct such an important comparative 
study and find answers to these questions because discovery of differ-
ences in ideology would not only underline Garrison’s argument but 
also substantiate the argument that German Americans were more di-
vided than united as an ethnic group despite American perceptions to 
the opposite.  
 
 
Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil 
War Prisons, by Evan Kutzler. Civil War America Series. Chapel Hill, 
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xii, 195 pp. Illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Patrick G. Bass is professor of history at Morningside College in 
Iowa. He specializes in European involvement with the U.S. Civil War. 
Author Evan Kutzler has performed exhaustive research to put together 
his contribution to the relatively new field of the history of senses in his 
Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil 
War Prisons. The book is, in fact, organized by these senses, as the author 
systematically pursues and then recounts prisoner perceptions of sight, 
smell, touch, hearing, and taste, in that order, during their captivity. In-
deed, he pursues even greater specificity, as each chapter emphasizes 
but one or two aspects of the sense involved. For example, both sight 
and smell are explored by the limits of those senses (sight at night, and 
as anosmia takes over); then Kutzler explains touch through the ubiq-
uity of lice, and the prisoners’ battle against the pests, and hearing 
through both noise and silence (even noting the impacts of the absence 
of some sounds, such as church bells). The chapter on taste focuses on 
food as a key prisoner preoccupation and the search for wholesome food 
as key to survival—efforts, usually in vain, to avoid the scourges of pris-
ons, diarrhea and dysentery. 
This work is another addition to the recent renaissance in studies of 
Civil War prisons and prisoners of war. Unlike other works in this field, 
however, Kutzler’s aim is to organize and record the subjective responses 
of both Union and Confederate prisoners of war to their sensory environ-
ment. His aim focuses on the subjective past as noted by individuals, 


German Americans on the Middle Border: From Antislavery to Reconciliation, 1830-1877

László, Szabolcs

The Shock of Seeing the Freedom of American Life: The Iowa International Writing Program as Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War

Review of: Age of Fear: Othering and American Identity during World WarI, by Zachary Smith

Gaul, Anita Talsma

100      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
man America. Historians have been working on German interactions 
with Native Americans, assimilation and whiteness, ongoing transna-
tional ties, women’s organizing, and tensions among neighbors during 
World War I, but these do not feature in the book. Careful coverage 
takes the place of innovative interpretation. This trade-off is perhaps to 
be expected in a book for a general audience, but it stands as an oppor-
tunity missed.  
 Specifically, failing to include the latest historical research hampers 
comparison between German Americans and other immigrants, one of 
the authors’ goals. The introduction likens nineteenth-century Germans to 
Spanish-speakers today and maintains that anti-German sentiment was 
not “unlike the divisive situation with regard to present-day immigrants 
and refugees” (3). Readers would have been better equipped to assess 
such claims if the book had acknowledged the advantages Germans en-
joyed. It goes unmentioned that German immigrants were moving onto 
land from which Sauk, Meskwaki, and other Algonquian-speakers had 
been expelled a few decades earlier. The immigrants’ whiteness gave 
them access to the ballot, as the authors note, and also economic oppor-
tunities and cultural capital. They arrived with resources that helped 
them do “well for themselves” (61) and “fit in well” (62). The authors of-
ten relegate discussion of the relative status of Germans to endnotes. Ger-
mans in Illinois would be even more valuable if it had better integrated 
explanations of inequality into its narrative and analytical structure.  
 
 
Age of Fear: Othering and American Identity during World War I, by Zachary 
Smith. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. xi, 233 pp. 
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Anita Talsma Gaul is history instructor at Minnesota West 
Community & Technical College. She is the author of The Women of 
Southwest Minnesota and the Great War (2018). 
Zachary Smith argues that the belligerency and anti-Germanism dis-
played during the years of American involvement in World War I were 
ultimately fueled by white Americans’ internal fears about the “security 
and stability of their national and ethnic identity” (2). White, Anglo-
Saxons (i.e., “Americans”) felt that their identity was under threat from 
within and without. From within, urbanization, industrialization, and 
modernization were weakening Anglo-Saxon masculinity and strength. 
From without, the influx of foreigners and immigrants was slowing, 
even reversing, Anglo-Saxon cultural advancement.  
 Smith begins by establishing these preexistent fears of a weakening 
Anglo-Saxon race. Elites worried that a “perceived decline in Anglo-
Book Reviews and Notices      101 
Saxon male strength and mental fortitude was due to an overabun-
dance of civilization, which . . . had feminized American society and its 
politics” (18). Americans began redirecting these racial anxieties onto 
the German enemy during the years of neutrality, 1914–1917. Smith out-
lines in chapter two how in this period Americans went from a gener-
ally positive prewar understanding of German Americans as people of 
desirable traits capable of assimilation to seeing them as an Other that 
willfully chose not to assimilate. In chapter 3 Smith details how Ameri-
can entry into the war completed the demonization of German Ameri-
cans, who were now seen as an enemy intent on destroying America 
and the American way of life. 
 In chapter four Smith explores how Americans’ othering of Euro-
pean Germans differed from the othering of German Americans at home. 
Americans viewed European Germans as a Teutonic race that had de-
generated into evil, brutal barbarians. The United States must fight and 
defeat this barbarian horde at all costs, lest it ultimately be subjected to 
German conquest. Such a conquest would mean the end of its demo-
cratic institutions, which would be replaced by German autocratic rule. 
In chapter five Smith deepens the understanding of the Othering of the 
German enemy by exploring the religious component of this process. 
American Protestants believed that Germans’ racial degeneration had 
prompted religious degeneration as well. Germans had been duped 
into following a false god, whether militarism or the Devil himself. 
Americans now viewed it as their Christian duty to eliminate the evil 
threat that a sinful German autocracy posed to American democracy 
and Christianity as a whole. 
 Overall, this is a thoughtful, well-written piece of scholarship. 
Smith’s elegant and succinct synopsis of the Great War in his introduc-
tion is one of the best I’ve ever read. Likewise, his discussion in chapter 
three of Southern fears that Germans were inciting black uprisings was 
also particularly strong. I also appreciated Smith’s incorporation of the 
religious element of the anti-Germanism displayed during the war 
years. He did, however, focus exclusively on Protestant views. Catholic 
voices were completely absent in this chapter, which left me wondering 
if American Catholics held these same views of Germans during the 
war. Although pre– and post-millennialism are generally Protestant un-
derstandings of the end times, even a brief consideration of Catholic 
perceptions would have been helpful. 
 I also question some of the hasty conclusions drawn by the author. 
In chapter one Smith argues that Americans were concerned about the 
declining masculinity of the Anglo-Saxon race, but he does not clearly 
demonstrate that these fears extended to the security and stability of the 
102      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
race as a whole. Similarly, after citing just two examples of midwestern 
schools banning the teaching of German, Smith claims that fear of the 
German imperial government’s infiltration into the American public 
school system was widespread throughout the Midwest (80). 
 This claim opens the door for more localized research. Smith’s work 
provides a broad view of the fears and insecurities fueling wartime anti-
Germanism. Yet does this hold true, for example, for the average Iowa 
farmer at the time? Did he worry about the weakening manhood of the 
Anglo-Saxon race? And what about states like Minnesota, a state with 
one of the highest percentages of German Americans in the nation? Are 
these fears and insecurities at play in a region where so many claimed 
German heritage? Smith’s contribution to the discussion is a valuable 
one—and one that will likely prompt additional questions and studies. 
 Smith states in his introduction that he hopes “readers can see a bit 
of their own time in the pages that follow” (15). In fact, the similarities 
between the war years and the present were clear and impossible to ig-
nore. It was hardly necessary for the author to point out in the epilogue 
that “Americans’ perception of the foreign Other as an agent of anti-dem-
ocratic conspiracy and a threat to their way of life has not changed signif-
icantly since the Great War” (179). Sadly, for all that has changed in 100 
years, the book is a sobering reminder of lessons we have not yet learned. 
 
 
Prohibition, The Constitution, and States’ Rights, by Sean Beienburg. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. xi, 322 pp. Table, maps, notes, 
index. $105 hardcover, $35 paperback. 
Reviewer Thomas R. Pegram is professor of history at Loyola University 
Maryland. He is the author of Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry 
America, 1800–1933 (1998). 
Sean Beienburg is a political scientist and constitutional scholar with an 
interest in reviving federalist assertiveness by states against centralized 
national authority. He sees the Prohibition era as an especially fruitful 
instance of what he calls extrajudicial constitutional interpretation. During 
Prohibition, meaningful constitutional debates moved beyond the 
courts and took place between wet and dry elected officials in state gov-
ernments. Legislative attempts between 1918 and 1933 to protect state 
freedoms under the U.S. Constitution form the core of Prohibition: The 
Constitution, and States’ Rights. 
 Beienburg establishes that a broadly shared constitutional outlook 
framed the debate over the Eighteenth Amendment. Aside from a few 
nationalists and nullificationists, wets and drys alike professed a belief 
in constitutional federalism. Prohibitionists stressed the necessity of a 


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