The Annals of Iowa

Review of: Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory, by Cynthia Culver Prescott

Maher, Daniel R.

Book Reviews and Notices      415 
Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory, by Cynthia Cul-
ver Prescott. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. xvi, 389 pp. 
Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Daniel R. Maher is associate professor of anthropology and sociol-
ogy at the University of Arkansas–Fort Smith. The author of Mythic Frontiers: 
Remembering, Forgetting and Profiting with Cultural Heritage Tourism (2016), 
he is working on a book tentatively titled Mythic Pioneers: From Wilderness 
to Wilder and Back. 
Pioneer Mother Monuments is a sweeping analysis of 200 monuments 
erected in the United States over the span of 125 years. Cynthia Culver 
Prescott adroitly exploits an exhaustive number of sources to construct 
not only a story of each individual monument, but also an overall anal-
ysis of the collective narrative that these monuments convey. She does 
so by closely examining multiple perspectives on monuments: from ar-
tistic perspective to newspaper accounts; from widespread acceptance 
of the monuments to full-out rejection and defacement of others. Culver 
Prescott demonstrates that while these monuments have some over-
arching common narratives, they were not monolithically received by the 
American public at the time of their erection nor over the course of dec-
ades as public opinion, demographics, and political ideologies changed.  
 Pioneer Mother Monuments contextualizes early pioneer monuments 
within the Turnerian frontier narrative that motivated their creation and 
erection. Culver Prescott shows “how popular memory that was formed 
by Turner’s valorization of the frontier shaped pioneer commemoration 
throughout the twentieth century, and how late twentieth-century chal-
lenges to Turner’s framework influenced public memory of westward 
expansion and its place in American national identity” (6). 
 Overall, the book is organized by thematic time frames. Monu-
ments erected from 1890 to 1920 had a narrative decidedly bent toward 
reinforcing the benefits of white civilization brought with the felt com-
pletion of Manifest Destiny. From 1920 to 1940 pioneer motherhood was 
emphasized with iconic imagery of bibles, rifles, and sunbonnets to 
combat gender anxieties fueled by Jazz Age indiscretions and woman 
suffrage. The period from 1940 to 1975 saw imagery in pioneer monu-
ments transform to reflect modernity and nuclear family imagery. A sep-
arate chapter on Mormon monuments examines their transformation 
between 1890 and 1980, showing that “commemorating the Mormon 
migration has been one way for Latter-day Saints to negotiate the com-
peting demands for exceptionalism and assimilation that have helped 
shape Mormon culture for the last 150 years” (134).  
 The bicentennial of the United States and the 1992 commemoration 
of the Columbian Exchange served as flash points for pioneer commem-
orations. The period between 1970 and 1999 saw 54 pioneer monuments 
416      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
erected, with half of those in the five interior states of Utah, Kansas, 
Montana, Wyoming, and Oklahoma (ten were concentrated in north 
central Oklahoma). Between 1975 and 1995 monuments took on a more 
overt politicized nature by articulating various perspectives within the 
“culture wars.” Rural towns such as Ponca City and Enid, Oklahoma, 
responded quite differently than Portland, Oregon, for example. 
 The last few chapters take a broader view of what these monuments 
mean today. Culver Prescott examines the role these monuments played 
in cultural heritage tourism from 1980 to 2005 as suburbs took the lead 
in fabricating pioneer history out of thin air in order to give the other-
wise contrived suburban atmosphere a historically authentic ethos with 
the hope of drawing tourist dollars. The final chapter focuses on the 
limits of inclusivity contained in these pioneer memories. The author 
pointedly notes, “Considering who cannot cast their ancestors as iconic 
American pioneers reveals the limits of inclusivity in the new millen-
nium” (268). 
 Throughout Pioneer Mother Monuments, Culver Prescott shows how 
the trajectory from Turner’s frontier thesis to a combination of New 
Western history within academia and the multiculturalism of the 1990s 
shaped and transformed how communities perceived and received 
these pioneer monuments. The pioneer space, the pioneer imagery, has 
been and continues to be a rich playground from which local commu-
nities project ideas of their pasts and their futures while ransacking his-
tory with impunity.  
 The book features 16 color plates, with an additional 50 illustrations 
and 7 maps. A web page (pioneermonuments.net) complements the 
book, providing photographs, maps, and additional information for 
each monument. The web-page map allows users to scroll through time 
and watch where and when each of the monuments populated the 
American cultural landscape, notably including Karl Gerhardt’s pio-
neer statuary group located on the grounds of the Iowa State Capitol in 
Des Moines. The pioneer monument project also has an informative 
presence on Facebook at www.facebook.com/PioneerMonument.  
 Pioneer Mother Monuments makes an important contribution to the 
fields of cultural heritage tourism, memory, museums, and representa-
tion. The story of pioneer monuments is ultimately the story of race, of 
gender, of power, and the intersection of the three. Culver Prescott nav-
igates the intertwined variables adeptly and astutely. Scholars inter-
ested in frontier and pioneer narratives will want to secure this thought-
ful book for their research, and casual readers curious about contempo-
rary monument controversies will find the careful explanation of these 
monuments enlightening.  


English

Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory

Review of: The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies, by Peter S. Carmichael

Elder III, Donald C.

Book Reviews and Notices      405 
their weapons; in particular, he examines the story of William Vermil-
ion of the 36th Iowa Regiment, who purchased a bulletproof vest and 
wrote a detailed letter to his wife about the experience. Hess points out 
that Vermilion was concerned about the possibility of death but hid his 
purchase from the rest of his comrades for fear of being labeled a cow-
ard. “The boys here don’t know it,” Vermilion pointed out, stating that 
“I consider it my duty to protect myself in every manner possible” (110).  
 Sarah Jones Weicksel explores the material culture of “refugee re-
lief,” examining the African American community of Mitchelville, South 
Carolina, home of the first self-sustained black community in the 
United States. Weicksel argues for textual, photographic, and archaeo-
logical research at refugee camps to better understand the lived experi-
ence of slave refugees during the Civil War. Finally, Peter Carmichael’s 
essay examines the collection of war relics in the aftermath of the Appo-
mattox surrender, pointing out that “the craving for the material objects 
of war became a preoccupation during the last weeks of the Confeder-
acy’s existence, when both sides were grasping for things to help them 
remember the past as they transitioned to a future without war” (201).  
 War Matters is best suited for students and public historians work-
ing at Civil War historic sites throughout the country. For the former—
to whom the book is dedicated—this useful volume serves as an effec-
tive introduction to the idea that physical objects have just as much to 
say about the Civil War as does a letter, diary, or official government 
paper. For the latter, the book’s various case studies can serve as a use-
ful guide for analyzing historical artifacts at museums, battlefields, 
and other historic sites that interpret Civil War history. Ultimately, War 
Matters pushes readers beyond the idea that relics are just “things” col-
lected by Civil War enthusiasts and are instead meaningful artifacts that 
speak to the history of the American Civil War.  
 
 
The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived 
in Civil War Armies, by Peter S. Carmichael. The Littlefield History of 
the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 
408 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Donald C. Elder III is professor of history at Eastern New Mexico 
University. He is the editor of Love Amid the Turmoil: The Civil War Letters of 
William and Mary Vermilion (2003) and A Damned Iowa Greyhound: The Civil 
War Letters of William Henry Harrison Clayton (1998). 
The term sound bite did not enter into common usage until the 1970s, 
but long before that Civil War historians had mastered the technique of 
using highly selective quotes to support their assertions about the conflict. 
406      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Quite often examining scores, or even hundreds, of firsthand accounts 
written by Civil War soldiers, authors would hone in on one sentence 
found in them to support their conclusions, disregarding what came 
before or after that single statement. This usually resulted in treatments 
of the Civil War that had great breadth, but little depth, regarding the 
rank and file. 
 Peter S. Carmichael, director of the Civil War Institute at Gettys-
burg College, has adopted a much different approach in The War for the 
Common Soldier. Rather than consider a wide range of primary sources, 
he has chosen instead to look at the letters and memoirs left by only a 
very small sampling of Civil War soldiers. He believes that this narrow 
focus has allowed him to place the experiences of Civil War soldiers 
into context in a way that studies based on larger samples simply can-
not. Employing an intense investigatory technique known as deep fo-
cus, he has sought to gain a better understanding of how Civil War sol-
diers internally processed certain key aspects of their military service, 
and in doing so kept their sanity in a world gone mad.  
 As Carmichael states in his introduction, he wanted to explore how, 
rather than what, Union and Confederate soldiers thought. Ultimately, 
he found that Civil War soldiers had to develop a pragmatic approach 
to army life. Whether experiencing the horrors of battle at Gettysburg 
or enduring the monotonous routine of camp life, soldiers on both sides 
sought to explain in their accounts how they had maintained their sense 
of self regardless of the situation they found themselves in. Even those 
individuals in the book who decided to desert, for example, rational-
ized their actions as being in keeping with the core values that they had 
brought with them when they entered military service. The logic they 
employed is occasionally tortuous but is nonetheless present at all times. 
 When selecting the individuals who would become the basis for his 
book, Carmichael chose to include both Union and Confederate soldiers. 
To make his work more representative, Carmichael used the accounts 
of soldiers who came from different economic classes and lived in a 
variety of regions. Some of his subjects survived the war; others died 
from various causes during the conflict. Finally, Carmichael considered 
accounts of both officers and enlisted men. Utilizing stories of a diverse 
set of individuals thus gives Carmichael’s book a sense that it speaks to 
universal, rather than case-specific, wartime experiences. 
 In most instances, Carmichael finds striking similarities between 
the ways the soldiers from both sides reacted to military life. Indeed, 
the Union and Confederate soldiers Carmichael examines spoke of sub-
jects ranging from Divine Providence to courage and cowardice in terms 
virtually indistinguishable from one another. The only real exception to 
Book Reviews and Notices      407 
this rule comes when Carmichael discusses how the two sides reacted 
to defeat. In their letters home, Union soldiers displayed an ability to 
acknowledge their military failures while maintaining their belief that 
their cause would eventually prevail. Confederates, on the other hand, 
rarely admitted to a defeat, no matter how significant a setback they 
had experienced. Moreover, while Union soldiers could usually give 
their enemy grudging praise for their fighting prowess, up to the end 
of the war Confederates usually disparaged the martial skills of the Fed-
erals. Carmichael suggests that this may have stemmed from Southern 
white males having to preserve a sense of superiority over others that 
allowed them to justify their subjugation of people of color. 
 The War for the Common Soldier is a thought-provoking work, but it 
will undoubtedly fail to impress every Civil War enthusiast. Some, for 
example, will feel that any book that tells the story of only 20 Civil War 
soldiers cannot serve as a valid interpretation of “the common soldier.” 
Others—especially those who feel that Civil War historians often over-
look the vital contribution to the eventual Union victory played by Fed-
eral forces operating west of the Appalachians—may find fault with 
Carmichael’s choice to look only at soldiers who fought in the Eastern 
theater. Finally, even though by the end of the conflict the Army of the 
Potomac included thousands of immigrants and African Americans, 
none of their stories appear in The War for the Common Soldier. Still, Car-
michael deserves high marks for producing a thought-provoking book 
on the mental machinations of combatants caught up in our nation’s 
bloodiest conflict. One can only hope that similar in-depth analyses of 
those groups not included in his book will soon appear. 
  
 
Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist, by Angelica Shirley 
Carpenter. Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2018. xiv, 
284 pp. Maps, illustrations, family tree, notes, bibliography, appendix. 
$19.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Sara Egge is Claude D. Pottinger Professor of History at Centre 
College. She is the author of Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 
1870–1920 (2018). 
According to Angelica Shirley Carpenter, Matilda Joslyn Gage ought 
to have a marble bust in the U.S. Capitol alongside those of Susan B. 
Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. That trio worked diligently for 
woman suffrage, yet Anthony and Stanton receive praise as the primary 
national leaders of the nineteenth century. Yet, as Carpenter reveals, 
Gage was a principal figure whose work and legacy her so-called 
friends actively wrote out of history. Carpenter tackles the curious 


The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies

Review of: When Republicans Were Progressive, by Dave Durenberger,  with Lori Sturdevant

Schneider, Gregory L.

422      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
name for himself as a liberal journalist,” and by the early 1950s em-
barked on a political career (28). He thrice received the Democratic gu-
bernatorial nomination—losing badly in 1952 but capturing 48 percent 
in both 1954 and 1956 (the best showing for a Democrat since 1932). 
When McCarthy’s death triggered a special Senate election, Proxmire 
ran and easily won. He had only one tough race—in 1964, when LBJ’s 
coattails probably saved him—for the remainder of his career. 
 In his early Senate career, Proxmire was an outspoken liberal Dem-
ocrat who distinguished himself supporting civil rights. He criticized 
Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson as insufficiently aggressive on civil 
rights and faulted Minority Leader Everett Dirksen’s efforts to get 
around the Supreme Court’s one-person/one-vote decisions. Although 
he initially supported the Vietnam War, this “senator of substance” 
(189) soon used his chairmanship of the Joint Economic Committee to 
challenge Pentagon spending. 
 As the 1970s progressed, however, Proxmire’s budget concerns led 
him to challenge first the foreign aid program and then wasteful do-
mestic spending, often putting him “at odds with his own party” (247). 
That effort, Kasparek contends, helped to establish Proxmire’s legacy, 
culminating in his famous Golden Fleece awards and his principled 
willingness to confront pork-barrel projects promoted by either party. 
 This is an admiring biography. Kasparek acknowledges but down-
plays the contradiction between Proxmire’s budget priorities and his 
championing of federal dairy supports. The book might have engaged 
more extensively with the question of what makes an effective senator—
a case could be made, for instance, that Gaylord Nelson was the more 
effective of the longtime Wisconsin duo. But these are quibbles about 
what will likely remain the definitive study of Proxmire’s life and career. 
 
 
When Republicans Were Progressive, by Dave Durenberger, with Lori 
Sturdevant. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2018. xx, 279 pp. 
Illustrations, notes, index. $19.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Gregory L. Schneider is professor of history at Emporia State 
University. He has written four books on the history of conservatism.  
Where have all the progressive (moderate) Republicans gone? It is a 
question former U.S. Senator Dave Durenberger attempts to address in 
his memoir/history of the Minnesota Independent Republican Party 
from its development in the 1930s to the end of Durenberger’s tenure as 
a senator in 1994. He has produced a very good analysis of Minnesota 
politics in this era but one that lacks the historical analysis to explain 
why progressivism is dead within the GOP. 
Book Reviews and Notices      423 
 What is a progressive Republican? Durenberger focuses on the 
centrist Republicans who worked to promote solutions, cooperate with 
Democrats to legislate for the common good, and solve problems for 
their constituents. Mostly, progressive Republicans were a product of 
the postwar era, the age of consensus on the Cold War and on the view 
of government as a public good. In the Midwest, progressive Republi-
cans included Bob Dole, Robert Ray, Gerald Ford, and many others. 
 The term progressive, rather than moderate, comes from a specific 
Minnesota context. As the Democratic Party in Minnesota is known as 
the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (or DFL), the Republican Party was 
known as the Independent Republican Party. Durenberger sees Harold 
Stassen’s election to the governor’s office in 1938, and the model of pro-
gressivism he supplied to successors, as the basis for the development 
of the more activist-oriented Republican Party at the state level. Such 
progressives favored government action but were fiscally conservative, 
not socially conservative. They favored spending on public education, 
expanded higher education in the state, and were moderates on the 
question of civil rights. Minnesota had a heavy Lutheran population, 
and its concerns about social justice, as well as the Catholic church’s 
position on those issues (Durenberger is a Catholic), played a role in the 
more moderate politics of the postwar era. 
 Durenberger himself was an attorney and political aide and did not 
seek election until he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1978 (and won). That year, 
in states like Iowa, New Right political figures won Senate elections, tax 
cuts were beginning to become fodder for the activists on the conserva-
tive side of the aisle, and social issues, such as abortion, were beginning 
to play significant roles in Republican politics. Durenberger would sup-
port Ronald Reagan, whom he correctly sees as a pragmatic conservative, 
but he did not support the changing climate in Minnesota politics when 
evangelicals and the religious Right became more active in the GOP. 
 Durenberger’s book is also a memoir of his political accomplish-
ments on health care, on which he became an expert. He served on the 
Senate Intelligence Committee during the Iran-Contra scandal. He 
praises the cooperative spirit of the Senate and the goodwill from Dem-
ocrats like Ted Kennedy, with whom he had a close friendship. 
 What changed this? The same thing that always changes a political 
party’s focus: issues and constituencies change. Durenberger, however, 
blames the confrontational politics of Newt Gingrich, the 24-hour news 
cycle, and the polarization that came with it. He blames the conserva-
tive movement within the Republican Party for hardening the discourse 
and recommends some solutions, including better civic education. 
Durenberger is a Never Trumper who wound up supporting Hillary 
Clinton in 2016. 
424      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 One can lament, as Durenberger does, the decline of civility in pol-
itics. But his book does not adequately address the historical reasons for 
that change. Durenberger has axes to grind against conservatism, it 
seems, and wants to reclaim the mantle of progressivism for the GOP. 
But that label is now lost to the Left, and it is unlikely that the politics 
of consensus and cooperation will be returning anytime soon.  
 
 
Radicals in the Heartland: The 1960s Student Protest Movement at the Uni-
versity of Illinois, by Michael V. Metz. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: 
University of Illinois Press, 2019. xix, 269 pp. Timeline, map, illustra-
tions, notes, bibliography, index. $110 hardcover, $26.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Robbie Lieberman is professor of American Studies and chair of 
the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at Kennesaw State University. She 
is the author of Prairie Power:  Voices of 1960s Midwestern Student Protest (2004). 
Many Americans still think of the 1960s student movement as some-
thing that happened only at elite schools on the coasts and in the upper 
Midwest: Berkeley, Columbia, Ann Arbor, Madison. Michael Metz’s 
Radicals in the Heartland is a welcome addition to the literature, which 
needs more accounts of activism in the Midwest. Metz tells the important 
and little-known story of the movement at the University of Illinois at 
Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), in which he participated, and he tells it 
well. At the same time, his journalistic approach—“how and why, 
where and when this unlikely movement happened”—ignores historio-
graphical trends and debates, and he misses opportunities to highlight 
the book’s contributions to the voluminous literature on 1960s protest. 
 Metz tells a chronological story, 1960–1970, in a number of short 
chapters. He seems unaware of the concept of “the long sixties” that 
many scholars now take as their starting point. Instead, we get a rise- and-
fall arc, taking us back to the “declension” narrative of 1960s protest. That 
narrative, like Metz’s book, draws heavily on contemporary coverage of 
events and the accounts of (some) movement veterans to tell a story of 
how idealism and nonviolence gave way to frustration and senseless 
violence. Scholars have forcefully challenged this framework, not least 
because it privileges the perspective of white male leaders, with women 
and people of color appearing mainly as the movement starts to fragment 
and turn to more confrontational tactics. Perhaps inadvertently, then, 
Radicals in the Heartland continues the challenge to scholars to develop a 
more inclusive and integrated narrative of the student movement.  
 The Cold War context is critical for understanding the roots of sixties 
activism, and Metz wisely begins with the impact of anticommunism 
on the university’s flagship campus. The University of Illinois had the 


When Republicans Were Progressive

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 78 no. 3 Summer 2019

Review of: In Essentials, Unity: An Economic History of the Grange Movement, by Jenny Bourne

Summerhill, Thomas

Book Reviews and Notices      309 
In Essentials, Unity: An Economic History of the Grange Movement, by 
Jenny Bourne. New Approaches to Midwestern Studies. Athens: Ohio 
University Press, 2017. xv, 138 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, graphs, 
charts, notes, bibliography, index. $26.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Thomas Summerhill is associate professor of history at Michigan 
State University. He is the author of Harvest of Dissent: Agrarianism in Nine-
teenth-Century New York (2005). 
In In Essentials, Unity, Jenny Bourne sets out to establish the founda-
tional role of the Grange—or Patrons of Husbandry—in the history of 
U.S. reform organizations stretching from the post–Civil War years to 
the Occupy movement. She argues that the connection between the 
Grange and contemporary economic protests is a shared conviction that 
American capitalism should distribute benefits widely. Focusing her 
attention on Minnesota and to a lesser extent Iowa and surrounding 
states, Bourne locates this fight for economic justice squarely in the Mid-
west. 
 Bourne begins her study by demonstrating that the Grange, 
founded by Oliver H. Kelley in Washington, D.C., in 1867, grew in 
direct response to the declining fortunes of American farmers in the 
wake of the Civil War. A nonpartisan, secret organization, the Grange 
preached self-improvement, education, and government regulation of 
corporations that served the public good (railroads, utilities, grain ele-
vators) as the way to preserve farming in America. Bourne explains that 
the Grange aimed primarily at preserving the competitive advantage of 
farmers in the evolving marketplace of the late nineteenth century. It 
advocated government regulation of railroad freight rates, the income tax, 
cooperative purchasing and marketing, and other economic reforms. 
She demonstrates that its perception that agriculture was falling behind 
other economic sectors in terms of return on investment was, in fact, 
accurate. Interestingly, the Grange thrived in counties served by rail-
roads and therefore the most enmeshed in the market economy. Mid-
western states like Iowa became centers of Grange activity. 
 Bourne notes that after a spike in Grange membership in the after-
math of the depression of 1873, the organization waned nationally. The 
reason for this, she contends, is that many of the Grange’s economic cri-
tiques were naïve. For example, Grange members believed fervently 
that railroads, grain elevator operators, bankers, and merchants over-
charged for services or set discriminatory rates that hurt small opera-
tors. Yet after experimenting with government regulation of common 
carriers, or cooperatives, or even the manufacturing of farm imple-
ments, farmers learned that such middlemen provided essential ser-
vices that were difficult to replicate on their own. The Grange shifted its 
310      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
emphasis toward education and mutual support, helping midwestern 
farmers accommodate rather than fundamentally alter the market econ-
omy. She sees in the misnamed Granger Laws of the Midwest in the 
1870s not a radical agrarian agenda finding voice in statutes, but rather 
the beginnings of what would later become specialized commodity 
groups aiming to secure market share in the twentieth century. After 
the 1880s—and very much tracking with the nation’s economics—the 
Grange waned, revivified in the 1920s, and then eclipsed in the 1950s as 
farm populations fell. 
 In Essentials, Unity has several nice touches that make it appealing 
to a general audience. Bourne balances her scholarly analysis with a 
case study of the Minnehaha Grange in Minnesota. Her narrative of its 
history over many decades enables her to show the critical role the 
Grange played in rural community building in the Midwest. Her clear 
and concise treatment of how local Granges interacted with state and 
national bodies demonstrates the critical role they played in defining 
rural life in America well into the twentieth century. 
 Bourne’s disciplined focus on the Grange, which enables her to 
write a modest-length book, prevents her from engaging with wider 
scholarly debates about agrarian activism or rural family life in the late 
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She does not elaborate on the 
relationship between the Grange and the Farmer’s Alliance, the People’s 
Party, the Farm-Labor Party, or the National Farmers’ Union. Each of 
those had reformist or radical agendas, and the Midwest was a hotbed 
of agrarian political revolt. Bourne leaves open the question of whether 
those groups drew on different constituencies, yet for specialists this is 
a vital question when assessing the significance of the Grange. Bourne 
also does not invoke the work of social historians who examine the 
unique features of northern farm households in this period. Strong evi-
dence exists that farm families embraced a set of gender relations that 
reflected a more equitable sharing of authority between men and women 
that translated into the public sphere. As midwestern farm women took 
such a prominent role in the agrarian politics of the late nineteenth cen-
tury, it would be nice to see Bourne explore the extent to which the 
Grange helped advance that activism. 
 In Essentials, Unity is a well-written, compact history of the Grange 
that provides an excellent starting point for understanding the organi-
zation’s importance in midwestern rural life for over a century. 
 
 
All in One Room: A History of Country Schools in Johnson County, Iowa, by 
Franklin L. Yoder. Coralville, IA: Johnson County Historical Society, 


In Essentials, Unity: An Economic History of the Grange Movement

Review of: Lincoln’s Mercenaries: Economic Motivation among Union Soldiers during the Civil War, by William Marve

300      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
given the scope of his study, but this is Indian history, with its own mile-
stones, rather than those of the invading whites.  
 By the author’s own admission, this is a work of synthesis rather 
than original research, but what a synthesis! Conventional history rubs 
elbows with “The Ceremonial Landscape of the Newark Earthworks 
and the Raccoon Creek Valley.” The bibliography alone is worth the 
purchase price. If I had a complaint, which I really do not, it would be 
that perhaps Nichols has tried to do too much: events, nations, individ-
uals, and numbers relentlessly confront the reader. I have an advanced 
degree in the subject and I often found myself having to come up for 
air. I offer this only as a warning to the casual reader. Peoples of the Inland 
Sea offers a comprehensive, succinct analysis of a vast and complex topic. 
Nichols has done a great service for teachers and students alike. This 
will be the standard short survey for many years to come.  
 
 
Lincoln’s Mercenaries: Economic Motivation among Union Soldiers during 
the Civil War, by William Marvel. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions 
of the American Civil War Series. Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2018. 
xviii, 329 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $48 hard-
cover. 
Reviewer Donald C. Elder III is professor of history at Eastern New Mexico 
University. He is the editor of Love Amid the Turmoil: The Civil War Letters of 
William and Mary Vermilion (2003) and A Damned Iowa Greyhound: The Civil 
War Letters of William Henry Harrison Clayton (1998). 
After reading Lincoln’s Mercenaries, students of the Civil War may have 
to reconsider their conclusions regarding the primary reason why indi-
viduals from Northern states decided to enlist in the military. Author 
William Marvel challenges the widely held notion that individuals who 
volunteered for service in the Union Army did so largely for patriotic 
reasons. He argues instead that economic considerations played a far 
larger role than historians have realized or acknowledged. His well-
crafted monograph should cause anyone interested in the motivation of 
Union Civil War volunteers to reexamine long-held assumptions. 
 Marvel begins by examining the historiography relating to enlist-
ment, noting that many authors discount evidence of volunteers enter-
ing military service for financial reasons; they choose instead to focus 
on other considerations, usually patriotism or mere wanderlust. Since 
these authors could only do rudimentary statistical computations based 
on the census of 1860 to inform their analyses, many of them discounted 
such evidence, instead using memoirs or regimental histories as the 
Book Reviews and Notices      301 
basis for their conclusions. But the creation of the University of Minne-
sota’s Integrated Public Use Microdata Series allowed Marvel to calcu-
late the median wealth of volunteers from 94 companies representing 
every Northern state, giving him the ability to determine what sector of 
the American economy provided the greatest number of those enlistees. 
With few exceptions, he determined that the lower socioeconomic por-
tion of the Northern population provided a disproportionally high num-
ber of volunteers—or, as he puts it, “The percentage of poorer soldiers 
stood impressively high” across both time and distance. 
 To support his thesis, Marvel examines the state of the American 
economy as the American Civil War began in 1861. Dealt a severe blow 
by the Panic of 1857, the financial vitality of the Northern states suffered 
a further setback when Southern states started to secede from the Union 
in 1860. From the industrial cities of the Northeast to the farmlands of 
the Midwest, the marginally employed elements of the Northern pop-
ulace found their economic livelihood threatened. Given the level of 
distress, it seems logical to Marvel to assume that poor young men in 
Northern states would have had a keen desire to secure a regular source 
of pay through enlistment.  
 Clearly, the economic malaise in 1861 could in large measure ex-
plain why the majority of the young men who volunteered at the start 
of the war did so, but most of the 75,000 individuals who came forward 
enlisted in regiments that would serve only 90 days. The vast majority 
of the individuals who fought for the Union would therefore volunteer 
at a later date and for longer durations. Thus, Marvel felt compelled to 
consider whether the later volunteers had an economic status similar to 
that of the first wave of enlistees. Dividing the war into seven distinct 
phases of enlistment in the Union Army, Marvel suggests that the 
poorer elements of the Northern populace continued to be overrepre-
sented in the military. The only exception to this rule came whenever 
the Lincoln administration authorized the creation of 100-day regiments. 
A majority of the members of those units, which rarely saw combat, 
often came from more affluent circumstances. Economic necessity as a 
motivating factor therefore appears to ring true throughout the entire 
course of the Civil War, rather than just during the economic lull that 
existed at the start of the conflict. 
 Anyone interested in the Civil War would enjoy reading this book, 
but individuals with a connection to the state of Iowa will find Lincoln’s 
Mercenaries particularly engaging. Because the Hawkeye State had the 
second-lowest median wealth in 1860, Marvel frequently uses Iowa as 
an example to illustrate his thesis regarding economic motivation dur-
302      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
ing the conflict. For example, he argues that the narrow range of aver-
age income levels for three-year enlistees from Iowa reflects the poor 
economic state of affairs there much more than it does a greater desire 
of the more affluent Iowans to enlist than in other Northern states. In 
addition to analyzing the statistical data for Iowa, Marvel also includes 
passages from the diaries, letters, and memoirs of quite a few individu-
als from the state who served in the Union Army. Lincoln’s Mercenaries 
would thus appeal to many Annals of Iowa readers. 
 “It’s a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight” is a phrase that many 
associate with the Union cause during the American Civil War. Quite a 
few historians, if they accept the statement’s validity at all, believe that 
it could only apply to the period of time after the Lincoln administration 
created a conscription system in 1863 that allowed for a monetary com-
mutation. William Marvel, however, has forcefully argued that the 
phrase holds true for the entirety of the conflict. Based on meticulous 
research, Lincoln’s Mercenaries has changed forever the paradigm re-
garding Union motivation, and will undoubtedly lead others to exam-
ine his thesis on an even larger scale in the near future.  
   
 
“The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known”: The North’s Union 
Leagues and the American Civil War, by Paul Taylor. Civil War in the 
North Series. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2018. xiv, 322 pp. 
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45 hardcover.  
Reviewer Wallace Hettle is professor of history at the University of North-
ern Iowa. He is the author of Stonewall Jackson: A Civil War Hero in History 
and Memory (2011) and The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace 
and War (2001). 
In this concise yet ambitious book Paul Taylor examines the Civil War 
Union Leagues in the North. Pro-Republican Union Leagues in the South 
during Reconstruction have received ample scholarly treatment. Those 
organizations, however, had their roots in the North during the Civil 
War. 
 Although the Union Leagues have received relatively little schol-
arly attention, the author fits their story into a growing literature on 
loyalty and patriotism on the Union home front. It is no mystery why the 
Confederacy persisted at the ballot box and on the battlefield: Confed-
erates could not imagine a world without slavery. In 1861 Confederate 
Vice-President Alexander Stephens famously called slavery the “corner-
stone” of their society. While division among white Southerners existed, 
Confederate unity can be readily grasped. 


Lincoln's Mercenaries: Economic Motivation among Union Soldiers during the Civil War

Review of: "Creating the Big Ten: Courage, Corruption, and Commercialization," by Winton U. Solberg

Baker, S Zebulon

226      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Creating the Big Ten: Courage, Corruption, and Commercialization, by Win-
ton U. Solberg. Urbana, Springfield, and Chicago: University of Illinois 
Press, 2018. xii, 302 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 
$99 hardcover, $29.95 paperback.  
Reviewer S Zebulon Baker is director of the University Honors Program 
at Miami University in Ohio. He received the State Historical Society of 
Iowa’s 2014 Throne-Aldrich Award for his article, “ ‘This affair is about 
something bigger than John Bright’: Iowans Confront the Jim Crow South, 
1946–1951,” in the Annals of Iowa (2013). 
Winton U. Solberg’s Creating the Big Ten explores the founding and 
first half-century of the Big Ten Conference, one of the Midwest’s most 
enduring cultural institutions. The Big Ten’s origin story, as an associ-
ation of the Midwest’s top universities that “held the promise of im-
posing order on intercollegiate football in the Midwest” (17), has been 
told by sportswriters and historians alike, most notably Robin Lester, 
Brian Ingrassia, and, especially, Murray Sperber. But unlike many of 
these commentators, Solberg does not use his study to simply critique 
the current state of college sports. As he sees corruption and commer-
cial demands overtaking the conference in the twenty-first century, 
Solberg turns to the Big Ten’s past to understand how its present state 
—a multibillion-dollar, 14-institution enterprise expediently stretched 
from the Northern Plains to the Mid-Atlantic for the sake of TV ratings 
—has become “a strange perversion of the true spirit of university life” 
(241). To understand this competitive and commercial juggernaut, he 
soberly surveys how the Big Ten evolved in its first five decades from 
“a pioneer in institutional cooperation in the control of intercollegiate 
athletics” (15) to “the premier intercollegiate athletic conference in the 
nation” (62) by the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s, where he 
sees the seeds of its current corrupted condition being sown. 
 Solberg devotes the first third of the book to studying how the Big 
Ten “reduced disorder to order in collegiate football” in the first quarter-
century after its founding in 1895 by implementing a strong system of 
faculty governance and committing to the amateur athletic code (74). 
Yet the twin challenges of the two decades between the world wars— 
commercialization and professionalization of football—threatened to 
plunge the conference back into disorder, a crisis that provides the 
focus of the balance of the book. Football was ascendant after World 
War I, especially as the public imagination fired the “Golden Age of 
Sports” in the 1920s. Solberg expertly charts how “the Big Ten guardi-
ans of amateur athletics” (89) struggled mightily in this atmosphere to 
prevent their association from succumbing to the allure of professional 
sports. Red Grange’s decision to sign a professional contract with the 
Book Reviews and Notices      227 
Chicago Bears in 1925 once his playing days at the University of Illinois 
were over “marked the beginning of a new era in Big Ten football” 
(132), pitting the game as it was played by college amateurs against 
the febrile appeal of paid professionals. In that environment, Big Ten 
members were helpless before the commercial demands on the sport, 
which were now driving decisions in their league on everything from 
recruiting athletes to scheduling games. Faculty control of athletics in 
that age of commercialized sports was, in Solberg’s judgment, “a sham” 
(198). 
 No event proved the point more than the Big Ten’s dismissal, and 
subsequent reinstatement, of the University of Iowa in 1929, which re-
ceives a full chapter treatment. Iowa’s athletics program was accused 
of a constellation of bad behaviors: excessive alumni involvement, dis-
honest recruiting practices, slush fund payments to athletes. Iowa vio-
lated league rules, to be sure, but its truest offense was running afoul 
of the conference’s power brokers, namely University of Chicago head 
football coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, who, Solberg observes, “did not 
understand the harsh realities of intercollegiate athletics” (188). It was 
a reality being remade by administrators and faculty leaders at Iowa 
and other members, who “were all complicit in promoting and de-
fending corruption” and pushing the conference away from its found-
ing notions of amateurism (198). “With delinquency so widespread,” 
he argues, “the Big Ten was weakened and damaged” (198). Iowa’s 
censure proved “epochal” not only “because it imputed bad faith, 
double dealing, and athletic dishonesty to the highest educational 
institution of a great state whose citizens naturally look to that institu-
tion for good faith, square dealing, and high ideals” (172). It was also, 
Solberg contends, a harbinger of the conference’s twenty-first–century 
future. “Football had become less a game than a business, run for rev-
enue, not for education,” he laments of the Big Ten’s current competi-
tive landscape. “Moreover, football was played increasingly by men 
who were neither entirely amateur nor entirely hired. And football 
coaching was given by men whose preponderant interest was holding 
their lucrative jobs at whatever cost” (238). As “corruption became 
widespread, and intercollegiate athletics became commercialized” (241), 
Solberg closes his book, not with any solutions for fixing the Big Ten, 
but with a mournful, backward glance to the “worthy standard” of the 
conference’s founding principles (239).  
 
 


Creating the Big Ten: Courage, Corruption, and Commercialization

Review of: "Illinois History: A Reader," edited by Mark Hubbard

Monroe, Dan

214      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Illinois History: A Reader, edited by Mark Hubbard. Common Threads 
Series. Urbana, Springfield, and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 
2018. 304 pp. Map, illustrations, notes. $25 paperback. 
Reviewer Dan Monroe is associate professor of history and chair of the 
Department of History and Political Science at Millikin University. He is 
the author of At Home with Illinois’ Governors: A Social History of the Illinois 
Executive Mansion (2002). 
The bicentennial of Illinois statehood in 2018 prompted Mark Hubbard 
and the University of Illinois Press to collect 14 essays on the history of 
the state. These pieces previously appeared in the Journal of the Illinois 
State Historical Society, for which Hubbard, professor of history at East-
ern Illinois University, is the editor-in-chief. The essays are organized 
chronologically by topic from the territorial period to the present with 
a unifying theme of “relationships of power and their historical di-
mensions,” and the political conflicts such relationships produced. The 
authors represented in the collection are talented historians whose 
names will be familiar to students of American and Illinois history: 
Paul Finkelman, Bob Sampson, Reginald Horsman, and Roger Biles, 
among others. The resulting collection is strong and offers readers ex-
cellent treatments of important historical episodes. 
 All of the articles are valuable, but several are particularly notable. 
The distinguished scholar of Illinois history Robert Sutton describes 
Edward Coles’s battle against an effort that might well have made 
Illinois a slave state only a few years after it entered the Union as a 
free state. Coles is unfortunately a little-known figure, but as governor 
of Illinois he helped prevent a constitutional convention the leading 
object of which was to alter the state constitution to allow slavery. 
Thanks in part to Coles’s leadership, the statewide referendum calling 
for the convention was decisively defeated in 1824. Coles’s political 
career did not survive his antislavery sentiments. Sutton’s article helps, 
along with recent biographies, to rescue Coles from an undeserved 
obscurity. 
 If Sutton’s article on Edward Coles leaves the reader feeling positive 
regarding Illinois and race, Paul Finkelman’s contribution on slavery 
and Illinois quickly diminishes any sense of triumphalism. Finkelman 
points out that Illinois was a remarkably antiblack state even by ante-
bellum standards. Slavery, officially prohibited, existed nonetheless 
during the territorial phase and after statehood in 1818. Free black 
Americans were discouraged from settling in Illinois via laws that lim-
ited black civil rights and tried to deter black immigration into the 
state. The state’s 1848 constitution required the passage of laws to 
restrict black immigration, and the Illinois legislature obliged in 1853. 
Book Reviews and Notices      215 
Finkelman provides important historical context on the political 
milieu in which Abraham Lincoln operated. Lincoln spoke out against 
slavery, calling it morally wrong, and he said that African Americans 
were included in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, its natural rights affirmation. His statements seem all the 
more remarkable given the antiblack sentiment of his own state. 
 Finally, Bob Sampson’s work is included twice in the collection, a 
reflection of his stellar if unsung scholarship on Illinois. In his piece on 
the Charleston riots of 1864, Sampson explains the conditions that pro-
duced the violence in Charleston, Illinois, violence that clearly reflected 
strong Democratic opposition to Lincoln administration policies, such 
as emancipation, and to the ongoing war in general. When Democrats 
from Coles and Edgar Counties fired on Union troops, they were, 
Sampson suggests, acting on a “logic of rebellion,” responding to what 
they perceived as acts of repression on the part of the Lincoln ad-
ministration, acts that, in their view, warranted an extreme reaction. 
Sampson builds on the work of Jean Harvey Baker and others and 
enhances our understanding of Illinois Democrats. 
 The collection features compelling articles on twentieth-century 
events and figures as well; indeed, no substantive period in the state’s 
history is neglected. Anthologies and collections are notorious for in-
coherence and for the uneven quality of the assembled pieces. Mark 
Hubbard has succeeded in organizing a collection that is thematically 
coherent, informative, and interesting. Any scholar of Illinois history 
would profit from reading this fine work. 
 
 
A Brief History of Nebraska, by Ronald C. Naugle. Lincoln: History Ne-
braska, 2018. v, 143 pp. Illustrations, map, index. $14.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Mark R. Scherer is professor of history at the University of Ne-
braska–Omaha. His research and writing have focused on Nebraska and 
Great Plains legal and political history. 
As its title suggests, A Brief History of Nebraska is an abridged version of 
Ronald C. Naugle’s familiar and highly respected History of Nebraska. 
That volume, coauthored with John J. Montag and James C. Olson, is 
now in its fourth edition and has become the leading narrative text in 
Nebraska history, long serving specialists, students, and general readers 
as an essential starting point for exploring the state’s rich and complex 
past. With this extremely condensed abridgement, Naugle obviously 
seeks to reach a much more casual readership, one that—regrettably 
but probably accurately—reflects the shortened attention spans of so 
many readers in the Instagram/Twitter world we now inhabit.  


Illinois History: A Reader

Review of: "Swift as an Arrow: The Story of Thomas Benoist, Pioneer American Aviator," by Melody Davis and Gary R. Liming

Bednarek, Janet R

Book Reviews and Notices      225 
no Roosevelt, he felt obligated to endorse Hoover’s reelection despite 
knowing that he would not win. 
 Delgadillo’s epilogue notes how Hoover tried to use a 1950 speech 
to portray White as a conservative. White’s long political career pro-
vides plenty of fodder for agreement and disagreement for readers on 
all points of the political spectrum. Delgadillo’s balanced account avoids 
passing an overall judgment on White’s politics and provides an ac-
cessible reminder of a bygone political tradition—one worthy of addi-
tional research. 
 
 
Swift as an Arrow: The Story of Thomas Benoist, Pioneer American Aviator, 
by Melody Davis and Gary R. Liming. Chesterfield, MO: Mindwings 
Press, 2017. vi, 306 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. $26.95 
paperback. 
Reviewer Janet R. Bednarek is professor of history at the University of 
Dayton. She is the author of Dreams of Flight: A History of General Aviation 
(2003) and America’s Airports: A History of Municipal Airports in the United 
States, 1918–1947 (2001). 
Thomas Benoist was one of numerous young men, many from the 
Midwest, enthralled with the new technology of the airplane and de-
termined to make it his life’s work. Unlike most, Benoist actually found 
a way to make something of a living as an aircraft builder, parts sup-
plier, and exhibition pilot/manager. Authors Melody Davis and Gary R. 
Liming trace the history of Benoist’s company from its origins in 1909 
in St. Louis, Missouri, to its end following the founder’s untimely death 
in 1917 in Sandusky, Ohio. Benoist is perhaps most remembered for his 
role in establishing the first passenger-carrying airline in the United 
States, which operated for about three months between St. Petersburg 
and Tampa, Florida, in 1914. 
 This work would appeal mostly to those interested in the very early 
years of the aircraft industry in the Midwest. Benoist’s story could 
offer some broader context to demonstrate just how wide open aviation 
was in its pioneering years. One early history of aviation in Iowa, for 
example, names a dozen or more young men who also sought to find 
fame and fortune in the pioneering years of aviation.  
 Swift as an Arrow also shows how midwestern cities, such as St. 
Louis and Sandusky, figured prominently in early aviation history. It 
could have benefited from a larger comparative context—for example, 
comparing Benoist (born in Missouri in 1874) with Glenn Martin (born 
in Iowa in 1886), both of whom started in aviation at roughly the same 
time, yet with vastly different levels of success. 


Swift as an Arrow: The Story of Thomas Benoist, Pioneer American Aviator

Review of: "Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America," by Nathaniel Frank

Hommerding, Christopher

Book Reviews and Notices      113 
those interested in the practice of place, a deeper understanding of how 
to “figure out where I am” and what it means to “inhabit” a place in 
addition to the chronicles of Root’s attentive hikes, engaging as they are, 
would have been welcome. 
 
 
Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America, 
by Nathaniel Frank. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2017. xii, 441 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $35.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Christopher Hommerding is an independent scholar. His article, 
“ ‘As Gay as Any Gypsy Caravan’: Grant Wood and the Queer Pastoral at 
the Stone City Art Colony” appeared in the Annals of Iowa (2015). 
Nathaniel Frank’s Awakening adds an interesting perspective to the 
growing body of work on the gay marriage movement in the United 
States. Frank sets out to tell the story of the fight for marriage equality 
from within the LGBTQ movement, arguing that “divisions within what 
we now call the LGBTQ movement shaped the quest for same-sex mar-
riage as much as, if not more than, clashes with social conservatives” (2). 
Using organizational documents, activist interviews, and personal rec-
ollections, Frank shows how intramovement politics shaped the speed, 
trajectory, and overall strategy of the fight for marriage equality. 
 In the first part of the text, Frank examines the broader sweep of 
twentieth-century LGBTQ history, showing how, in the 1970s and 
1980s, battles over sodomy laws and protections for people living with 
HIV and AIDS meant that the LGBTQ movement, which was largely 
not interested in marriage, began to shift from a negative view of the 
state to a positive one—that is, from a desire to push the government 
out of LGBTQ lives to a request for protection, aid, and recognition from 
government entities. This, Frank suggests, established a legal infra-
structure for the movement, including the formation of national LGBTQ 
organizations like Lambda Legal (1973), the Human Rights Campaign 
Fund (1980, later the Human Rights Campaign), and the Gay Rights 
Litigators’ Roundtable (1985).  
 The Roundtable is of particular interest to Frank, as its collection of 
lawyers represent for him the nucleus of what became the marriage 
equality movement. The remainder of the book explores the interplay 
between these lawyers and individuals he refers to as “accidental activ-
ists”—those who, starting with Hawaii in 1991, took legal action against 
the advice of movement lawyers and/or otherwise pressured the Round-
table and other organizations into action. In contrast to accidental activists, 
who often filed federal cases or advocated for immediate change, the 
Roundtable was skeptical of prioritizing the fight for marriage equality 
114      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
and generally advocated an incremental approach. Shaped by federal-
level defeats in the 1980s and fear of conservative backlash, the Round-
table’s “brick-by-brick” strategy eschewed federal cases and worked, 
instead, to slowly and deliberately bring gay marriage to key states. For 
Frank, the push-and-pull between movement lawyers and accidental 
activists was the key dynamic that “awakened” the LGBTQ movement, 
convincing movement leaders of the importance of prioritizing marriage.  
 Readers interested in Iowa’s role in these dynamics might be disap-
pointed to find that the events surrounding the 2009 Iowa Supreme Court 
case that brought same-sex marriage to the state garners only two of 368 
pages. This brief treatment is likely because Iowa was not a state where 
accidental activists forced the hand of the movement lawyers. Instead, 
Iowa was hand-picked in 2005 by Roundtable lawyers with the goal of 
sending “a powerful message that marriage equality could be embraced 
in the heartland” (210). The state was chosen as the midwestern vanguard 
because it leaned left and, at the time, had a solidly Democrat-controlled 
legislature that would prevent an immediate conservative backlash and 
a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.  
 Frank’s perspective adds to the growing literature on the marriage 
equality movement, but his extremely narrow definition of “the move-
ment” is troubling. By limiting his definition of the movement to a small 
group of well-funded, professionally run organizations, Frank erases a 
large swath of the broader LGBTQ movement. As a result, we primarily 
see and hear the voices of privileged, coastal, white, and lesbian and gay 
activists—the “L” and the “G.” Bisexual and transgender individuals 
are largely absent from the text, as are people of color, except where 
Frank problematically conflates the marriage equality movement and 
the African American civil rights movement. Indeed, one of the great 
shortcomings of the book is its lack of analysis of race and class. Addi-
tionally, Frank omits a very vocal segment of the broader movement: 
those who thought that focusing so heavily on marriage was a mistake. 
He praises, for example, the work of pro-marriage gay conservatives 
like Andrew Sullivan but ignores LGBTQ individuals like Michelangelo 
Signorile and Michael Warner who were in direct, and very public, de-
bate with Sullivan.  
 Readers looking for a triumphalist narrative of the marriage equality 
movement will thoroughly enjoy this book. Those in search of insight 
into the political and legal machinations of the marriage movement will 
find plenty of value in the unique perspective Frank offers. However, 
those looking for a truly movement-wide history, fully addressing why 
marriage became the privileged campaign, will be left frustrated by this 
otherwise intriguing book.  


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