The Annals of Iowa

Review of: Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps, by Amy Murrell Taylor

Salafia, Matthew

196      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps, 
by Amy Murrell Taylor. Civil War America Series. Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 2018. xv, 349 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, 
bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover, $27.99 ebook. 
Reviewer Matthew Salafia is assistant professor of practice and director of 
the University Honors Program at North Dakota State University. He is the 
author of Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River (2013). 
War is often an abstraction in history. Many historians have focused on 
the causes of wars and their aftermath, leaving the war itself to military 
historians. In the past decade, that trend has changed. It is no longer 
enough to say that the Civil War destroyed slavery in the United States. 
We now ask, how? At the highest political level, historians have carefully 
unpacked the development of Abraham Lincoln’s thinking and his move 
toward a policy of emancipation. On the ground, we have learned that 
soldiers in both blue and grey uniforms were fighting about the future of 
slavery in the country long before Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proc-
lamation. In addition, historians have long argued that enslaved African 
Americans provided critical human power for the Union Army, working 
as laborers and enlisting as soldiers. But before they joined the Union war 
machine, they first had to escape from their plantations. And they did so 
in droves. The flight of the enslaved destroyed the South’s plantation 
complex and transformed the Union Army into a liberating force. 
 But even this, Amy Murrell Taylor would contend, is an abstraction. 
In Embattled Freedom, Taylor unravels the tangled process of emancipation 
during the Civil War. Slave refugee camps, Taylor argues, were the places 
where freedom moved from abstraction to a lived reality. Crossing Union 
lines was an “act of faith” (9), Taylor claims, because the future of the 
refugees depended on the capricious interpretation of the phrase military 
necessity. The presence of refugees forced military leaders to enact federal 
policies and to create their own ad hoc solutions; the justification always 
followed “the fluid, inconsistent and contradictory logic” of military ne-
cessity (12). At times, that meant building refugee towns and providing 
food and clothing; at other times it meant confiscating food and goods 
from the refugees or removing them from their newly built homes. 
Refugees, therefore, had to align their needs with shifting military policy. 
By taking readers inside the camps, Taylor convincingly shows that 
slave refugee camps played a pivotal role in emancipation because they 
were the places where policy was enacted in the lives of individuals. 
 Taylor’s narrative is not strictly linear because, as she argues, eman-
cipation was not a linear process. She uses three microhistorical chapters 
to structure her narrative. Vignettes of the Whitehursts, Eliza Bogan, 
and Gabriel Burdett allow Taylor to personalize her narrative. But these 
Book Reviews and Notices      197 
chapters also highlight one of her central arguments: context had a sig-
nificant effect on the experience of refugees. The Whitehursts worked 
toward emancipation in the familiar eastern theater in Virginia, Bogan 
was embroiled in combat as a refugee along the Mississippi River, and 
Burdett sought spiritual liberation in the border state of Kentucky. 
 After each microhistory, Taylor explains the path to freedom en-
acted in the different locations. In Virginia slave refugees worked. The 
Whitehursts opened a store, selling goods to soldiers and refugees alike. 
But the Union Army raided their store and confiscated the structure for 
military use. Along the Mississippi River, refugee men and women fought 
for their freedom. The Union Army confiscated plantations as they 
invaded the South. Eliza Bogan was placed on these plantations as an 
occupier. She worked the land, but the resources came back to the 
Union Army. Her husband served in a company of refugees who de-
fended the occupied plantation from Confederate guerrilla fighters. This 
policy proved untenable. As the Union Army moved, women could be 
left behind or uprooted and expected to follow the army. Finally, eman-
cipation was most peculiar in border states, where slavery remained 
legal until after the war. In that context, Gabriel Burdett worked as a 
minister and made the invisible church visible. He still had to align his 
message with that of white Christians, but he could openly embrace 
religion as a liberating force. 
 Taylor also offers five thematic chapters in which readers might find 
information most directly relevant to midwestern history. These five 
chapters cover shelter, removal, hunger, clothing, and loss. Well-meaning 
Northern missionaries sought to prepare refugees for freedom by en-
acting freedom in material ways. For example, Northerners believed that 
freedom carried certain sartorial expectations. They sought to move ref-
ugees out of their “rags” and into respectable clothing. At each turn, 
refugees negotiated their own understanding of material freedom. 
Refugee women retained their headdresses and resisted “slave cloth” for 
their clothing. The negotiation process between Northern humanitarians 
and refugees is fascinating and eloquently explained by Taylor. 
 Taylor ends her narrative with loss. At the end of the war the Union 
Army dismantled and destroyed refugee camps. “It was a tangible loss 
of something concrete, something they believed they already possessed 
and even improved” (216). President Andrew Johnson granted am-
nesty to former planters and restored their land, leaving many refugees 
dispossessed. Refugees had to struggle to obtain land or to rent land 
from the restored planters. In many ways, the old order was restored. 
But the refugees had wrought freedom from the war through their 
actions in the refugee camps. Yet, as Taylor argues, the refugee camps 
were just the beginning of the emancipation process. 


English

Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps

Review of: In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during the American Civil War, by Benjamin L. Mille

Wesley, Timothy

194      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
descendants of the community’s founders. No historian of any margin-
alized group could quibble with such painstaking research, and it is a 
testament to Cox’s commitment to her historical subjects that she tells 
their story in such artistic and heartfelt prose. It is this insistence upon 
portraying the most positive aspects of the lives of these black pioneers, 
however, that occasionally comes across as hyperbolic. For instance, in 
the last few sentences of the book, Cox writes that the black pioneers 
“rose up to trample tyranny and to bring the blessings of liberty and 
equality along the length and breadth of the land” (200). It is likely that 
the black settlers themselves felt this way, especially because records 
such as speeches, diaries, letters, sermons, and especially black political 
convention records use this exalted language. Given the rancor and 
hostility of white racism and white supremacy everywhere in America, 
however, it would seem that black Americans did not actually trample 
tyranny, but instead constantly dreamt of doing so. 
 
 
In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during 
the American Civil War, by Benjamin L. Miller. Modern War Studies. 
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. xi, 256 pp. Illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Timothy Wesley is associate professor of history at Austin Peay 
State University. He is the author The Politics of Faith during the Civil War 
(2013). 
Benjamin Miller’s impressive In God’s Presence is first and foremost a 
spatial study of religious life “under the gun.” Evaluating the wartime 
interactions between spiritual captains and the men to whom they min-
istered based largely on the physical settings in which such interactions 
occurred allows Miller to make clear the vitally malleable nature of 
“religious space.” But it is not solely in highlighting the differences be-
tween the understood religious realm, what the author calls the “sacred 
space” of churches and religious ceremonies, and the newly contested 
but still “profane” spaces of the camp, battlefield, and hospital that 
makes Miller’s effort significant. To the contrary, for while the author 
documents in detail the wartime clergy’s efforts to sacralize the numer-
ous environments through which they were compelled to lead their 
beleaguered flock, arguably more memorable in Miller’s offering is 
simply the constancy of the shepherds themselves.  
 Most of the men who served in America’s Civil War armies were 
religious to one extent or another. Their spirituality had been forged in 
an antebellum world of separate public and sacred spheres, the latter’s 
static spaces adding meaning to their faith and providing the context 
Book Reviews and Notices      195 
for its expression. But with war, chaplains and missionaries recognized 
the need to construct a new religious world out of the horrific landscape 
in which they found themselves. With the willing consent of the fearful 
soldiers they served, they were successful. In chapters focusing on the 
various locales in which such dynamism unfolded, such as camps, battle-
fields, hospitals, and prisons, Miller details the clergy’s ability to adapt 
their roles and the ceremonies they privileged in fulfilling their ecclesi-
astical duties and creating a religious community among the soldiers. 
These religious captains emerge from all of this world building as more 
than mere facilitators, moreover. Admittedly augmented by their pre-
war societal status, the devotedness of chaplains and missionaries car-
ried determinative influence among anxious men in both blue and gray. 
As Miller asserts, no matter where they served, “wartime clergy gener-
ated religious meaning merely by their presence” (3).  
 Employing a wealth of quotes from soldiers and displaying a firm 
grasp of the historiography of Civil War chaplains, Miller adds to our 
scholarly understanding of the role played by wartime clergy of various 
ilk, especially those who ministered while in harm’s way. If the author’s 
emphasis on the space in which religious exchanges were performed 
can occasionally seem strained in its “externalization” of such inti-
mately personal events as a soldier’s death and the ministrations of-
fered thereto, in the end his dichotomizing concept of religious space in 
the Civil War yields real explanatory value. And the author’s original 
and insightful argument that chaplains and missionaries fomented a 
type of civil religion during the war in their work in prisons and hos-
pitals warrants a book-length study all its own. Finally, Iowans will 
no doubt be particularly interested in Miller’s use of several accounts 
penned by sons of the Hawkeye State, including soldiers in the Fifth 
Iowa Volunteer Infantry, the Fifth Iowa Cavalry Regiment, and the 22nd 
Iowa Infantry.   
 The study of Civil War religion began in earnest with the examina-
tion of the religiosity of soldiers and the chaplains who ministered to 
them, but ironically little attention has been paid then or since to the 
actual methodologies used by clerics to fulfill their mandates outside of 
the camp. With In God’s Presence, Benjamin Miller goes a long way 
toward remedying that deficiency in our understanding, casting his 
scholarly gaze upon the camp, for sure, but also outward onto the bat-
tlefield and then beyond the mêlée to the wartime hospital and soldiers’ 
prison. In so doing, he offers a neatly constructed and innovative con-
tribution to the emerging literature on religion and the American Civil 
War, one that students of American religious history and Civil War his-
tory alike should certainly read. 


In God's Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during the American Civil War

Review of: Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886–1916, by Harvey Markowitz

Knock, Michael

Book Reviews and Notices      411 
Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886–1916, 
by Harvey Markowitz. The Civilization of the American Indian 277. 
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. xvi, 303 pp. Map, illus-
trations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Michael Knock is associate professor of history at Clarke Univer-
sity in Dubuque. His Ph.D. dissertation (University of Notre Dame, 1996) 
was “ ‘Alone with Sitting Bull’s People’: The Dakota Indian Mission of the 
Congregational Church, 1870–1937.” 
Christian conversion is a tough subject for historians to tackle, especially 
in regard to the American West. On the one hand, the missionaries, 
priests, and sisters sent out by Protestant and Catholic mission organi-
zations lived lives of sacrifice and denial in their sincere effort to “do 
what they thought was right” for the Native peoples of America. On the 
other hand, those efforts were usually unwelcome among peoples with 
deep spiritual beliefs of their own. For historians, it can be tough to bal-
ance both sides of that story. 
 That is the challenge taken on by scholar Harvey Markowitz in Con-
verting the Rosebud. The book—although a mere 234 pages of text—tries 
to be many things, including a history of government policy toward 
Native peoples during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a 
study of the tensions between Protestants and Catholics in the mission 
field, a history of the priests and sisters who founded the St. Francis 
Indian Mission on the Rosebud Reservation, and an analysis of the re-
ception those efforts received among the Lakota. 
 Because the study relies heavily on the diaries of the Jesuit priests 
who founded St. Francis in 1886, the day-to-day struggles of those men 
and the sisters who accompanied them form the center of Markowitz’s 
book. Readers are introduced to the fierce rivalries between the mis-
sionaries of St. Francis and Protestants also working to convert Native 
peoples in the Dakotas. Markowitz skillfully ties Catholic suspicions 
concerning the federal government’s preference for Protestant mission-
aries to the Kulturkampf in Bismarck’s Germany. Some of the priests 
who experienced the efforts of the “Iron Chancellor” to build German 
nationalism by attacking the Catholic church came to the United States 
and feared a similar effort by the U.S. government to promote Prot-
estant missionization among Native peoples on the Rosebud Reserva-
tion at the expense of Roman Catholics. 
 It is more difficult, however, to get at the reactions of the Lakota to 
the efforts of the Catholic missionaries. In his conclusion, Markowitz 
remarks that those reactions varied from person to person. Some sought 
to use the work of the mission as a means to gain access to greater 
economic, political, and social power. Others, he notes, “welcomed the 
412      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
opportunity to gain access to the sacred powers flowing from Catholic 
observances and paraphernalia” (232) while still seeking to maintain 
traditional beliefs. Markowitz argues that the priests and sisters at St. 
Francis were unwittingly responsible for this by using traditional La-
kota words like wakan to explain Catholic theology: “The missionaries’ 
recourse to Lakota theological vocabulary for their instructions and 
homilies thus, ironically, served to reinforce the presuppositions of tra-
ditional Lakota religious thought” (204).  
 A similar challenge comes in trying to illuminate the feelings of the 
Lakota students enrolled at St. Francis. Markowitz does what he can 
with the material he has, inferring the reactions of students from the 
words of the officials at St. Francis as well as from major events in the 
life of the mission. The most significant of those events was the fire on 
January 20, 1916, that ultimately led to the closing of St. Francis. Officials 
determined that the fire was started by students who had “been put in 
a bad mood because they had been punished for talking Indian and 
insubordination” (229). Shocked at the lengths to which the students 
would go to protest their punishment, the school historian remarked, 
“By this occasion the Indians showed that they were far from being civ-
ilized as yet.” She might well have admitted that the fire was also a clear 
example of the tensions between the goals of the missionaries and those 
of the Lakota.  
 
 
Standing Up to Colonial Power: The Lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender 
Cloud, by Renya K. Ramirez. New Visions in Native American and In-
digenous Studies Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. 
xiv, 288 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Sean J. Flynn is professor of history at Dakota Wesleyan Univer-
sity. He is the author of Without Reservation: Benjamin Reifel and American 
Indian Acculturation (2018). 
By situating the lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender Cloud within 
a framework that incorporates textual analysis, settler colonial theory, 
and Native feminist methods, Renya K. Ramirez seeks to explain how 
two American Indian activists merged traditional and modern identities 
to integrate into white society without surrendering the cause of tribal 
sovereignty. Ramirez regards herself as singularly well suited to tell the 
Clouds’ story because, as their granddaughter, she can write a “family-
tribal history from an Indigenous and gendered lens” that “outside 
researchers” are lacking. After a curious assertion of Native families’ 
“right to privacy” and a notice to researchers to consult Native families 
“to determine what information can be written about,” Ramirez de- 


Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886-1916

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 78 no. 4 Fall 2019

Review of: Standing Up to Colonial Power: The Lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender Cloud, by Renya K. Ramirez

Flynn, Sean J.

412      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
opportunity to gain access to the sacred powers flowing from Catholic 
observances and paraphernalia” (232) while still seeking to maintain 
traditional beliefs. Markowitz argues that the priests and sisters at St. 
Francis were unwittingly responsible for this by using traditional La-
kota words like wakan to explain Catholic theology: “The missionaries’ 
recourse to Lakota theological vocabulary for their instructions and 
homilies thus, ironically, served to reinforce the presuppositions of tra-
ditional Lakota religious thought” (204).  
 A similar challenge comes in trying to illuminate the feelings of the 
Lakota students enrolled at St. Francis. Markowitz does what he can 
with the material he has, inferring the reactions of students from the 
words of the officials at St. Francis as well as from major events in the 
life of the mission. The most significant of those events was the fire on 
January 20, 1916, that ultimately led to the closing of St. Francis. Officials 
determined that the fire was started by students who had “been put in 
a bad mood because they had been punished for talking Indian and 
insubordination” (229). Shocked at the lengths to which the students 
would go to protest their punishment, the school historian remarked, 
“By this occasion the Indians showed that they were far from being civ-
ilized as yet.” She might well have admitted that the fire was also a clear 
example of the tensions between the goals of the missionaries and those 
of the Lakota.  
 
 
Standing Up to Colonial Power: The Lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender 
Cloud, by Renya K. Ramirez. New Visions in Native American and In-
digenous Studies Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. 
xiv, 288 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Sean J. Flynn is professor of history at Dakota Wesleyan Univer-
sity. He is the author of Without Reservation: Benjamin Reifel and American 
Indian Acculturation (2018). 
By situating the lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender Cloud within 
a framework that incorporates textual analysis, settler colonial theory, 
and Native feminist methods, Renya K. Ramirez seeks to explain how 
two American Indian activists merged traditional and modern identities 
to integrate into white society without surrendering the cause of tribal 
sovereignty. Ramirez regards herself as singularly well suited to tell the 
Clouds’ story because, as their granddaughter, she can write a “family-
tribal history from an Indigenous and gendered lens” that “outside 
researchers” are lacking. After a curious assertion of Native families’ 
“right to privacy” and a notice to researchers to consult Native families 
“to determine what information can be written about,” Ramirez de- 
Book Reviews and Notices      413 
clares that “Indigenous peoples demand the incorporation of our own 
needs, insights, and research agendas into the development and publica-
tion of any study, including family-tribal history” (16). Unfortunately, 
the product of Ramirez’s agenda is an unconvincing dual biography 
that is short on biography and long on anthropological analysis, to the 
detriment of readers who wish to learn more about the lives of Henry 
and Elizabeth Cloud.  
 The book’s early chapters examine the Clouds’ upbringing, the 
Yale-educated Henry’s leadership of the Society of American Indians, 
and the couple’s roles at the American Indian Institute. In their youth, 
Ramirez argues, the Clouds were introduced to traditions that forged 
their “Native identities” and equipped them with the “white-centric 
camouflage,” “doubleness,” and “masking” skills necessary to enter the 
professional world and “protect themselves” from “colonial assump-
tions” (15, 97, 53). Although Henry referred to himself as “Roe Cloud,” 
Ramirez does not include Roe when referencing her grandfather be-
cause Henry’s “informal adoption” by Walter and Mary Roe “was ulti-
mately a colonial relationship” (17). Henry and Elizabeth were drawn 
to one another by their devotion to the most fundamental of “colonial” 
institutions, Christianity. Ramirez, however, shares her “strong sense 
of discomfort” (67) with Henry’s evangelization efforts and at one point 
describes Elizabeth’s attitude toward some Native traditions as “dis-
turbing” (92).  
 The author highlights Henry’s contribution to the writing of the 
Meriam Report and his tenure as superintendent of the Haskell Institute. 
Ramirez alleges that, because of his criticisms of the Indian Reorganiza-
tion Act (IRA), Henry was demoted to superintendent of the Umatilla 
Reservation in Oregon. Yet Henry campaigned for the IRA—a monu-
mental step toward tribal sovereignty—and was the first member of the 
Winnebago tribe to vote for its adoption. The author underscores Eliz-
abeth’s advocacy work and her selection as American Mother of the Year 
but does not refrain from writing that her “attire included stunning 
dresses and stylish hats that concealed her subversive Ojibwe warrior 
woman identity” (228).  
 Ramirez cherry-picks documents to demonstrate the Clouds’ “in-
digeniz[ing]” of their “colonial training” (79). Time and again, ad nau-
seam and unpersuasively, she emphasizes that a single word, punctua-
tion mark, benign comment, or quote is incontrovertible evidence of a 
“subversive . . . strategy of doubleness speech” (79). This technique and 
the dearth of evidence for some of her claims will not impress students 
of American history.  
414      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Ultimately, Ramirez’s commentary leaves readers with two-dimen-
sional impressions of the Clouds. They shape-shift from victims to sub-
versives but are seldom presented as self-assured individuals who con-
trolled their destinies and were at peace with their choices. Standing Up 
to Colonial Power will not supplant Joel Pfister’s The Yale Indian: The 
Education of Henry Roe Cloud. On the other hand, Ramirez’s study may 
remind midwestern biographers of the pitfalls of present-mindedness 
and its tendency to distort historical subjects. For while Ramirez makes 
clear that she is “standing up to colonial power,” readers will feel less 
certain that her grandparents shared her passion.  
 
 
St. Louis and the Great War, by S. Patrick Allie. St. Louis: Missouri His-
torical Society Press, 2018. 191 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography. $35 
paperback. 
Reviewer Mark D. Van Ells is professor of history at Queensborough Com-
munity College of the City University of New York. He is the author of 
America and World War I: A Traveler’s Guide (2014). 
The recent World War I centennial inspired numerous commemora-
tions across America and the world. In St. Louis the Soldiers Memorial 
Military Museum developed an exhibition about the war years in that 
city. It also produced a companion book for the exhibit: St. Louis and the 
Great War by curator S. Patrick Allie.  
 St. Louis and the Great War encompasses the entirety of the American 
wartime experience, but from a midwestern perspective. Included are the 
origins of U.S. involvement, the Mexican border troubles, the fighting, 
the home front, and the postwar world. It is primarily a pictorial work, 
with striking color images of wartime artifacts ranging from political 
buttons to machine guns. Manuscripts and photographs are also fea-
tured. The text is brief but clearly written and generally accurate, 
although there are some interpretive issues, such as referring to Mexican 
revolutionaries by the simplistic and inflammatory term bandits (14). 
Adding a personal dimension are vignettes of individual St. Louisans, 
such as that of Dr. Esther Leonard, one of just seven female physicians 
to work for the army overseas. Allie goes beyond tales of heroism and 
patriotism to explore the darker aspects of the war, such as the ethnic 
and racial violence that was prevalent on the home front.  
 St. Louis and the Great War offers a broad and informative look at 
how one major midwestern city experienced “the war to end all wars.” 
As the museum exhibit does, artifacts and manuscripts tell the story in 
this book. It is a visual treat. 
 


Standing Up to Colonial Power: The Lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender Cloud

Review of: Color Coded: Party Politics in the American West, 1950–2016, by Walter Nugent

Haala, Cory

322      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 If the records were available, I would have appreciated more dis-
cussion of Dr. Jefferson or other nonwhite contemporaries who were 
part of the anti-abortion movement. Additionally, on occasion, Hauge-
berg’s examples, though relevant and supportive, do not always align 
or coincide with the specific moment she’s speaking about. These are 
minor points that do not distract from the fact that Haugeberg has 
procuced a fascinating study of the early roots of the pro-life movement 
that should be read by anyone with an interest in women’s history, or 
who wants to trace the genealogy of the modern pro-life movement. 
 
 
Color Coded: Party Politics in the American West, 1950–2016, by Walter 
Nugent. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. x, 374 pp. Illus-
trations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Cory Haala is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Marquette Univer-
sity. He is working on a dissertation on midwestern liberalism in the age of 
Reagan. 
If the 2016 elections shattered understandings of modern American 
political history, the 2018 midterms exacerbated the difficulty of piecing 
it back together. Yet, to University of Notre Dame professor emeritus 
Walter Nugent, over a half-century of elections necessitates a narrative 
characterizing the politics of the American West. 
 Using the U.S. Census definition of the West, plus the plains states 
from the Dakotas to Texas, Nugent surveys the political changes of 
America’s western half since 1950 and groups each state into one of five 
categories: states turning Republican, such as Texas; “reliably red” Great 
Plains states; swing states Montana, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, and 
New Mexico; states becoming Democratic, such as Oregon and Califor-
nia; and thoroughly Democratic states (Hawaii and Washington). The 
result is a wealth of resources for scholars of western politics, including 
an appendix listing more than 5,000 electoral results for governorships, 
U.S. Senate seats, congressional races, and electoral votes. (State legisla-
tive control could have been given longer shrift, at least in similar tables 
in the appendix. For an example, see Michael J. Dubin, Party Affiliations 
in the State Legislatures: A Year by Year Summary, 1796–2006 [2007].) 
 Nugent argues that two primary developments underlie these mod-
ern classifications. First, energetic party building by men like Okla-
homa’s Harvey Bellmon and South Dakota’s George McGovern shifted 
power balances in one-party states. Second, incumbency and “the 
friendly drawing of district lines” reinforced political hierarchies in 
deep-red Texas and bright-blue California through processes like gerry-
mandering (255). Demographic shifts turned states like Colorado and 
Book Reviews and Notices      323 
Arizona politically “purple,” Nugent argues, but the interior West is far 
from fully Democratic, a process completed in California and Oregon 
through entrenched identity liberalism and environmentalism in cities 
like San Francisco and Portland. Consequently, Nugent dismisses 
the notion that Texas—characterized by law-and-order conservatism, 
Reaganism, and “the spread of the Religious Right and its coalescence 
politically with the GOP”—will, as Democrats hope, “revert to blue or 
even purple any time soon” (64). 
 Nugent reaffirms the rural-urban divide in American politics. To 
explain Donald Trump’s 2016 victory through that lens, he notes that 
“the Rustbelt ‘misbehaved.’ . . . The West, however, did not” (259). 
Color-coding, Nugent argues, explains the political divergence of Cali-
fornia and Texas through fundamental differences between identity lib-
eralism and limited-government conservatism. More could be done to 
identify interests reinforcing this dichotomy, particularly big donors 
astroturfing Tea Party groups or extractive industries dominating 
resource-rich states. This also belies recent political developments: 
The elites of Phoenix’s Chamber of Commerce portended Barry Gold-
water’s rise, leading to attacks on unions and the New Deal, but they 
did not represent the “Religious Right or social issues conservatism” 
(132–33). The post-1975 convergence of business interests, activists from 
the Sagebrush Rebellion, and nativists like Joe Arpaio, though, are under-
explained. And suburbs and women are lost in the shuffle. 
 As such, Color Coded falters in the wake of the 2018 elections. 
Nugent bemoans how even “good treatments of ‘political culture’ avoid 
treating elections, parties, personalities, events, issues, organizations” 
(6). How, then, to understand a new generation of politicians, particu-
larly female and Native, like Deb Haaland of New Mexico or Sharice 
Davids of Kansas? While “Hispanics were becoming an ever-larger share 
of [Texas’s] population,” race is not a final determinant for Nugent, ex-
cept in already blue states like California, where “increase[s] in minority 
populations . . . have trended more and more strongly Democratic” (61, 
229). But contemporary Native activism against pipelines and against 
disenfranchisement in North Dakota demonstrates how political history 
cannot just narrate party building and elections but must ask deeper 
questions of who is voting, who is mobilized, and who is excluded. 
 Scholars of the Midwest will note that the Farm Crisis of the 1980s 
goes unmentioned. The resultant Senate victories of Tom Daschle and 
Kent Conrad in the Dakotas, consequently, are left unexplained. North 
Dakota is “conservative” and not “purple,” yet elected Democratic-
Nonpartisan League officials like Conrad, Heidi Heitkamp, Byron Dor-
gan, and Bud Sinner break with Nugent’s heuristic; Nebraska Democrat 
324      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Bob Kerrey’s liberalism is aberrational. If plains states are “conservative” 
until proven otherwise, future studies might explore when and why 
voters abandoned those predilections. 
 Spurring such criticism is undoubtedly Nugent’s intent. He admits 
that characterizing “the West” is challenging; like the Midwest, it “lacks 
the political unity of New England or the South” (7). But Color Coded 
implies that electoral oscillations should be studied to explain how, for 
30 years, Iowa’s senators were a progressive Democrat and a conserva-
tive Republican. Color-coding is a start, but political history requires 
focus on the voters themselves. As Nugent implores, “Historians and 
political scientists please note. There is plenty of good work yet to be 
done” (6). 


Color Coded: Party Politics in the American West, 1950-2016

Review of: Finding a New Midwestern History, edited by Jon K. Lauck, Gleaves Whitney, and Joseph Hogan

Barnett, William C.

295 
Book Reviews and Notices 
Finding a New Midwestern History, edited by Jon K. Lauck, Gleaves Whit-
ney, and Joseph Hogan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. 
xxiii, 365 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, graphs, notes, index. $55 hard-
cover. 
Reviewer William C. Barnett is associate professor of history at North Cen-
tral College, Naperville, Illinois. His teaching and research interests are in-
terdisciplinary, revolving around questions of place, region, and changing 
human interactions with nature. 
This engaging collection of essays examines midwestern history from a 
wide variety of perspectives, offering valuable insights into the region. 
The volume’s opening message is that the Midwest has been neglected 
by scholars in recent decades, so these authors are examining the region 
more deeply to correct that oversight. The three editors—Jon Lauck, 
Gleaves Whitney, and Joseph Hogan—have played a significant role in 
reinvigorating midwestern history through their scholarship and work 
organizing an annual conference at Grand Valley State University in 
Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Midwestern History Association con-
vened for the fifth time in 2019, but this volume’s essays originated as 
presentations at the first Midwestern History Conference in 2015, and a 
sense of being at the start of a promising endeavor gives energy to the 
book.  
 The editors assembled 21 chapters by scholars trained in history, 
geography, English, and American studies in a collective effort to eval-
uate the state of midwestern history. Multiple essays express excite-
ment that researchers have gathered to define the Midwest by identify-
ing patterns from their areas of expertise. Many of these scholars are 
full professors and professors emeriti, and their impressive lists of pub-
lications show the group’s considerable expertise. Numerous contribu-
tors identify as midwesterners, with quite a few mentioning their mid-
western childhoods, and many have degrees from Big Ten universities. 
The volume offers overviews of an array of topics, including agricul-
ture, cities, immigration, rivers, the Civil War, music, art, and sports. 
Particularly strong essays include Susan Gray’s examination of Native 
Americans and their “discursive removal” (56) from the Midwest, Jef-
frey Hegelson’s study of African American migrations, and Jon Butler’s 
analysis of the region’s religious tensions.  
296      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 The editors made efforts to provide breadth in assessing the region, 
but certain topics inevitably emerge as interests shared by multiple au-
thors. As a group, these scholars are more concerned with small towns 
than with urban centers, although Chicago appears frequently. The 
main chronological emphasis is on the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, with a sense that the region’s importance declined after 
World War II. Intellectual history is a particular focus, as multiple con-
tributors seek to understand the development of the idea of the Mid-
west as a self-conscious region. Investigations of significant American 
thinkers’ views of the region go back to the Founding Fathers, with 
Gleaves Whitney’s analysis of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, 
and John Adams and their visions for the Old Northwest. Similarly, 
Michael Steiner’s chapter examines the influential roles of Frank Lloyd 
Wright, Hamlin Garland, and Frederick Jackson Turner in first present-
ing the Midwest to the nation as a distinct region. Readers interested in 
Sinclair Lewis, Grant Wood, and Garrison Keillor will also find reward-
ing insights into their expressions of midwestern identity.  
 The editors seek to “aid the process of giving voice to a forgotten 
region and of reconnecting to an earlier and once strong tradition of 
midwestern historical and literary regionalism” (xxii). This book ad-
vances those worthwhile goals in a characteristically midwestern man-
ner, with a combination of modesty and booster spirit. While the prom-
ise of a new midwestern history is intriguing, the project is in its early 
stages and does not yet have the bold ideas of new western historians 
like Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, and William Cronon. In 
the final chapter, J. L. Anderson analyzes the role of conformity and 
boosterism in the region since 1945, noting that although the region is 
increasingly diverse, “a mostly white, midwestern, middle-class iden-
tity” is presented to the world (330). The contrast between the Midwest’s 
increasing racial and ethnic diversity and the homogeneity of a regional 
image shaped by white men creates some challenges for efforts to rein-
vigorate midwestern history.  
 The editors say that this book is “designed to move us toward a new 
and more robust field of midwestern history” (xii), and it does provide 
valuable examinations of the Midwest’s history and identity. However, 
future efforts will be strengthened if more women, people of color, and 
graduate students are part of the project. It would be exciting to see 
interpretation of writers like Jane Smiley, Toni Morrison, Marilynne 
Robinson, and Sandra Cisneros alongside the region’s iconic male au-
thors. Similarly, scholars might weave recent historical figures like Betty 
Friedan, Malcolm X, Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the 
Obamas, perhaps with links to Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells, into their 
Book Reviews and Notices      297 
midwestern histories. Future works could help us understand the Mid-
west’s post-1945 transformations due to deindustrialization, suburban-
ization, white flight, global immigration, and other forces. Susan Gray 
calls Native American history in the region a “map in motion” and 
broadens this idea, stating, “So, too, is the history of the Midwest as a 
region” (56). This volume’s introduction and 21 essays demonstrate that 
the Midwest is a fascinating region in motion, both in its rich history 
and in its evolving identity, which provides a useful road map for fu-
ture scholarship. 
 
 
Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America, by J. L. Anderson. 
Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019. xiii, 285 pp. Tables, 
maps, illustrations, notes, index. $99.99 hardcover, $34.99 paperback. 
Reviewer Wilson J. Warren is professor and chair of the Department of His-
tory at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. His most recent book 
is Meat Makes People Powerful: A Global History of the Modern Era (2018). 
The field of human-animal studies is a rapidly growing area of histori-
cal inquiry. Capitalist Pigs is an important contribution to this literature. 
J. L. Anderson’s focus on pigs is especially salient in terms of the human-
animal connection since Americans and many others around the globe 
have continuously reshaped the animal to suit their changing needs. 
Anderson argues that this changing relationship especially illuminates 
the dynamics of power in economics and human dominion over animals. 
Conveyed in clear prose enhanced by well-chosen tables, maps, illus-
trations, and an enticing title, the book is valuable for scholars and ac-
cessible to a broad audience. 
 Capitalist Pigs examines the entirety of American history with chap-
ters that delve into production, consumption, marketing, and scientific 
and state intervention in the hog’s transformation into food and other 
products. Although comprehensive in scope, the book focuses espe-
cially on pre–twentieth-century developments when free-range hus-
bandry characterized hog production, especially in the South but also 
in northern rural and urban locations. Lard-type hogs were dominant 
early on because their meat could be readily processed and preserved 
and because lard was essential in American cooking practices. They 
were also relatively low-maintenance animals. Well into the nineteenth 
century, hogs foraged for food and then were rounded up in fall for 
either subsistence or marketing. Hogs also roamed American cities, 
especially through the mid-nineteenth century. Although no longer al-
lowed to forage in cities during the twentieth century, pigs nevertheless 
served as convenient waste recyclers. Anderson points out, “By 1940 


Finding a New Midwestern History

Holtan, Neal Ross

"To Control Their Fertility--And Thus Their Lives": The Birth Control Movement in Twentieth-Century Iowa

Review of: "Cultivating Citizens: The Regional Work of Art in the New Deal Era," by Lauren Kroiz

Robertson, Breanne

Book Reviews and Notices      103 
 Decline began immediately. The original Newton line proved un-
profitable and was abandoned. The “automobile craze” was in full 
swing by 1907, and competition from cars, trucks, and buses cut into 
profits (43). Government-funded road-building projects and injurious 
regulations pushed the FDDM&S to take dire measures, including 
operating its own bus service. The Great Depression thrust it back into 
receivership as its bonds fell from $24 in 1930 to 25¢ in 1932 (89). World 
War II papered over the cracks. The FDDM&S turned a profit in 1944 
and 1945, but by 1955 passenger service had ended and, after it was 
purchased by a New York syndicate, diesel equipment replaced elec-
tricity on the now freight-only system. In 1968 the Chicago & North 
Western bought the FDDM&S and, viewing it as a competitor, slowly 
extinguished it until, in 1983, the FDDM&S vanished except for an ex-
tant and vibrant preservation line, the Boone & Scenic Valley Railroad. 
 For historians of transportation and for anyone interested in Iowa 
history this book is a mine of useful information and insight. The 
growth of Iowa interurbans, beginning in 1894 with the Tama & Toledo, 
is explained where appropriate, as are the multiple problems railroad-
ing faced after World War II. A final chapter summarizes freight and 
passenger operations followed by an equipment roster and a section of 
color plates. One glaring weakness is the author’s evident dislike of pol-
itics, which appears only as a bête noire constraining capitalists or en-
couraging other modes of transportation. Regardless, this is a detailed 
and enjoyable book marked by excellent and plentiful illustrations. 
 
 
Cultivating Citizens: The Regional Work of Art in the New Deal Era, by 
Lauren Kroiz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. xvi, 292 pp. 
Illustrations (many in color), notes, bibliography, index. $65 hardcover. 
Reviewer Breanne Robertson is an art historian with the Marine Corps His-
tory Division. She has published two articles in the Annals of Iowa (2011 and 
2015) about New Deal murals. 
Art historian H. W. Janson’s postwar pronouncement that American Re-
gionalism constituted “bad art” has left an indelible mark on the schol-
arly trajectory of American art history. The influential critic and author 
of the best-selling History of Art textbook, first published in 1962, deemed 
Regionalist painting deficient in both a social and a technical sense. 
By associating Regionalist landscapes with those of Nazi realism and by 
omitting the American movement from his textbook, Jansen condemned 
his former university colleague Grant Wood and other Regionalist art-
ists to cultural obscurity for nearly half a century. Lauren Kroiz’s Culti-
vating Citizens represents the latest scholarly contribution to a growing 
104      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
literature that seeks to restore the New Deal–era prominence of Region-
alism’s “big three”: Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart 
Curry. Rather than arguing for the redemptive aesthetic merits or social 
history embedded in their art, as others have done, Kroiz directs our 
attention to the artists’ pedagogical philosophies, both in the classroom 
and in their artistic practice, to illuminate the educational work and in-
stitutional agency of Regionalist painters at a time when the relationship 
between culture and democracy was under public debate. 
 The book is divided into three sections, each centered on specific 
local disagreements about arts education as navigated by Wood, Benton, 
and Curry. Part one provides an account of Wood’s teaching career in 
Iowa from his experimental summer art colony at Stone City to his 
fraught academic appointment at the University of Iowa, where he 
worked briefly alongside Janson. The departmental marriage of studio 
art and art history established an academic model for postwar MFA 
programs, yet it also elicited fierce debates over who possessed the 
authority to judge contemporary art. Whereas Wood adhered to an ap-
prenticeship model of teaching that emphasized technical precision and 
local sales as markers of success, his colleagues entrusted international 
professionals to evaluate contemporary painting and attempted to dis-
credit Wood (and the entire project of Regionalist painting) with allega-
tions of unethical artistic practice, such as a derivative reliance on photo-
graphs. Part two further unpacks the personal, political, and pedagogical 
motivations driving public disagreements by considering Benton’s 
homophobic remarks about Paul Gardner, the director of the Nelson 
Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum in Kansas City, in relation to the 
museum’s pioneering volunteer docent program. Here Kroiz offers 
keen insight and nuance on an ugly incident in the artist’s biography, 
one that ultimately cost Benton his job at the Kansas City Art Institute. 
Careful not to excuse his homophobia, Kroiz frames Benton’s slur as a 
response to the perceived usurpation by the museum of his outreach 
and teaching of Missouri citizens. Less acrimonious but no less im-
portant was John Steuart Curry’s tenure as the nation’s first artist-in-
residence at the University of Wisconsin from 1936 to his death in 1946, 
which is recounted in part three. Highlighting the artist’s fruitful col-
laboration with rural sociologists, Kroiz recasts Curry’s aesthetic foibles 
as a “pedagogy of amateurism” that strengthened an antifascist agenda, 
based on the tradition of the Danish Folk School, to make art education 
more appealing and accessible to farmers across the state. 
 Cultivating Citizens is a richly illustrated and enlightening account 
of the institutions and educational theories that shaped the public per-
sonae of Wood, Benton, and Curry. As a history of ideas rather than an 
Book Reviews and Notices      105 
analysis of objects, the book poses numerous questions that inflect the 
conversation around regional art with critical nuance: What role does 
arts education play in American society? Who gets to make art? What 
are its proper subjects, audiences, and purposes? Kroiz adds consid-
erably to our understanding of Regionalism by integrating the educa-
tional theories and teaching activities of Wood, Benton, and Curry with 
their visual production. In addition, she convincingly argues that the 
distinctive pedagogies of Regionalism’s most prominent practitioners 
developed in response to the shifting institutional terrain of the 1930s 
and 1940s. The public debates around art education emerged alongside 
several pioneering programs, namely the first joint studio art and art 
history department at University of Iowa, the first volunteer docent 
program at the Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, and the first 
artist-in-residence program at the University of Wisconsin. In the pro-
cess, Kroiz deftly constructs an enlarged cultural landscape through the 
intellectual histories of artists, curators, professors, and other profes-
sional associates with whom these artists engaged.  
 The challenge, for some readers, comes with the conclusion of the 
book, in which the author asserts that the historical debates of the 1930s 
and 1940s offer lessons for art educators working in the current political 
climate. Kroiz has done substantial reading and thinking about peda-
gogical theory and the purpose of higher education in the present; how-
ever, her musings belie the pedagogical purpose of her project. A sud-
den density of prose that is also thick with theoretical references departs 
sharply in tone from the preceding chapters and suggests that the book 
is directed primarily at fellow academics and not lay readers, after all. 
The author’s politics, which champion a progressive role for the hu-
manities in the preservation of democracy, may alienate readers of a 
conservative bent as well. Even so, Cultivating Citizens is a welcome con-
tribution for its thoughtful and thought-provoking reconsideration of 
American Regionalism. 
 
 
The Catholic Church in Southwest Iowa, by Steven M. Avella. Collegeville, 
MN: Liturgical Press, 2018. xxvi, 433 pp. Maps, tables, illustrations, 
notes, index. $24.95 hardcover, $14.99 Kindle edition. 
Reviewer Michael J. Pfeifer is professor of history at the John Jay College of 
Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New 
York. He is finishing a book on the social history of Catholicism across 
American regions for New York University Press. 
Near the beginning of his fine history of the Roman Catholic Diocese of 
Des Moines, Steven M. Avella, a historian and priest who teaches at 


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Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886-1916

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Cultivating Citizens: The Regional Work of Art in the New Deal Era

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 78 no. 1 Winter 2019

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