The Annals of Iowa

Back Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 78 no. 2 Spring 2019

Review of: "Great Plains Literature," by Linda Ray Pratt

Rozum, Molly P

Book Reviews and Notices      229 
determination of Waterloo’s community and basketball leaders more 
notable in hindsight. They concocted scheme after scheme to maintain 
a toehold in pro basketball that outlasted franchises in larger cities, 
such as Chicago or St. Louis. 
 To be sure, the Hawks were not a routine sell-out, but Harwood 
ably demonstrates that financial destitution did not cause their demise, 
as it did so many other clubs (and leagues) of the era. Instead, the 
NBA commissioner in 1950 bluntly declared cities like Waterloo unde-
sirable and summarily ousted the Hawks. That hostile maneuver tipped 
the scales against Waterloo, despite its relative financial stability, and 
still stings Danny Steiber. One of the few people left who witnessed 
the Hawks play, the elderly Steiber ruefully believes that “Waterloo 
could have been the Green Bay of basketball, if they had been able to 
play a second and third year in the NBA” (181). Without a permanent 
league to call their own, the Hawks folded in the fall of 1951. 
 Ball Hawks crisply captures Waterloo’s resolve to assert itself in the 
postwar era via professional basketball. Current and future sports 
writers should look upon Harwood’s text as an excellent template 
chronicling the role that smaller communities play in the development 
of professional sports—past and present. That Harwood ably imbues 
this sports story with all the humanity it is due makes reading it all the 
more enjoyable.  
 
 
Great Plains Literature, by Linda Ray Pratt. Discover the Great Plains 
Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. xi, 168 pp. Illustra-
tions, map, appendix, bibliography, index. $14.95 paperback.  
Reviewer Molly P. Rozum is Ronald R. Nelson Chair of Great Plains and 
South Dakota History and associate professor at the University of South 
Dakota. She is the author of Grasslands Grown: Sense of Place and Regional 
Identity on North America’s Canadian Prairies and American Plains, 1870–1950 
(forthcoming). 
In Great Plains Literature Linda Ray Pratt surveys historical and con-
temporary regional authors with depth and complexity. A joy to read, 
Pratt’s study offers scholarly insight while maintaining popular acces-
sibility. The study is one in a series of thematic introductions to the 
region as conceptualized by the Center for Great Plains Studies, join-
ing volumes focused on geology, bison, Indians, and politics. Pratt 
selected literary works driven by the history and culture of, not merely 
set on, the Great Plains. Each chapter focuses on several thoughtfully 
selected authors who explore particular topics: First People, the Great 
230      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Depression, city living, and home. Nebraskan Willa Cather and Nor-
wegian immigrant Ole Edvart Rölvaag receive chapters of their own. 
 Emerging after 200 years of American literary tradition, plains 
authors, Pratt argues, wrote “free from the thematic inheritance that 
had preoccupied much nineteenth-century literature” (9), that is, the 
U.S. Revolution, slavery, and the Civil War. The region’s literary tradi-
tion is especially important for understanding the nation’s westward 
expansion and the new wave of European immigrants destined to 
“redefine national identity” (42). Pratt succeeds, remarkably for such a 
slim volume, both at the task of regional interpretation and at placing 
the value of this literature nationally. 
 Generational experience weaves through the entire study. Röl-
vaag’s Giants in the Earth trilogy (1927) explores the plains environment 
through multigenerational Irish Catholic and Norwegian Lutheran 
immigrants to South Dakota and “illustrates how the immigrant be-
comes an American” (45). Ojibwe author Louis Erdrich’s The Plague of 
Doves (2008), set in North Dakota, shows the existence down the gen-
erations of a historical “burden” among “interlacing bloodlines” (139) 
of settler society and Native Americans “that makes forgiveness diffi-
cult and forgetting impossible” (137). Lois Phillips Hudson’s The Bones 
of Plenty (1962) suggests the generational tension emerging in the 1930s 
out of the timing of land acquisition as two related North Dakota 
families confront drought, depression, and the nation’s trade and fi-
nancial services infrastructure. Pratt argues that, with the Great Plains 
economy “wholly reliant on agriculture,” the Great Depression had a 
singular effect on the Great Plains “that separates it from the rest of 
the nation” (101); yet the region does literary service expressing in a 
visual metaphor the devastation felt across the nation. The inclusion of 
Mari Sandoz’s Capital City (1939) demonstrates Pratt’s care in selection. 
In the book, set in the 1930s, Sandoz depicts a “dark anger” (101) in 
the culture of intolerance (anti-Semitism, red-baiting, nativism, racism, 
and Fascist sentiments) and class divisions evident in post-pioneer 
generations. 
 Historians and literary critics have a long tradition of defining the 
Great Plains region environmentally, disregarding national borders. 
Pratt sprinkles references to Canadian literature throughout the study, 
but, with the exception of Margaret Laurence’s novels set in Manitoba, 
such observations remain only reminders of a contributory Canadian 
tradition. Pratt accepts too readily the idea that Canadians forged more 
peaceful, “less destructive” relations with indigenous peoples than the 
United States did (3, 32). Shifting to political boundaries to define the 
U.S. section of the plains, Pratt declares that “Minnesota, Iowa, and 
Book Reviews and Notices      231 
Missouri are not the Great Plains” (5). Strict environmental definitions 
(and a map from the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains) might be causes to 
exclude Minnesota and Iowa. The inclusion of Meridel Le Sueur’s The 
Girl (1978), set in Minneapolis-St. Paul, however, suggests the integral 
cultural connections between the plains and Minnesota that belie 
political boundaries. Indeed, the larger grasslands of North America 
connect western Minnesota and Iowa to Great Plains states and most 
of the themes discussed. Iowans will find that many of Pratt’s inter-
pretations resonate with their state’s history and well-known Iowa 
authors. 
 
 
Great Plains Politics, by Peter J. Longo. Discover the Great Plains Series. 
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. xvii, 127 pp. Illustrations, 
map, bibliography, notes, index. $14.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Karl Brooks, now deputy director of the New Mexico Adminis-
trative Office of the Courts, is former associate professor of history at the 
University of Kansas and former Heartland Regional Administrator of the 
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 
Peter J. Longo views political action on the Great Plains as a praise-
worthy form of local activism. His six brief biographies portray politi-
cal actors: three represented their states in Congress; one served in a 
legislature; one held elective office in a tribal government; and one 
dedicated his activities to his community. The subjects remind us that 
the Great Plains, though today predominantly white, have since the 
mid-nineteenth century been home to African Americans and were 
always home to Native peoples. As many plains communities become 
increasingly Hispanic in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, 
Longo’s book helps situate racial and ethnic tensions within the re-
gion’s political culture. 
 Iowans will look in vain for discussion of its state politics or history. 
The map charting the Great Plains traces its eastern boundary along 
the Missouri River (xiv). Longo’s biographies remain firmly situated 
west of Iowa, although longtime Nebraska Republican Representative 
Virginia Smith grew up a Hawkeye before crossing the river for col-
lege in Lincoln. Despite this frame, Longo’s analysis of plains political 
culture offers suggestions for understanding Iowa’s durable issues of 
rural depopulation and commodity agriculture’s pervasive effects on 
political thought and action.  
 Longo argues that plains political culture offers a basically healthy 
structure for political action. Its thousands of smaller communities are 
really the places where political conflict and action enable people to 


English

Great Plains Literature

Broeg, Cormac

Killing Butler's Bloodhounds: An Act of Political Violence by Iowa Soldiers in Reconstruction South Carolina

Thompson Hajdik, Anna

The Surf Ballroom: Rock & Roll, 1950s Nostalgia, and Cultural Memory in Clear Lake

Ching, Barbara

Transplanted--Edward Hopper in Cedar Rapids, Grant Wood in New York City: A Review Essay

Review of: "The Crusade for Forgotten Souls: Reforming Minnesota's Mental Institutions, 1946-1954," by Susan Bartlett Foote

Simonsen, Jane

Book Reviews and Notices      107 
The diocese’s urban centers of Des Moines and Council Bluffs are well 
treated, as are rural areas, including the Catholic enclave of Shelby 
County and the challenges of Catholic ministry in Methodist-dominated, 
Ku Klux Klan–ridden southern counties (such as Wayne) in the 1920s. 
Avella offers superb attention to the significant roles played by women 
religious—women who were members of Catholic religious orders—in 
the history of Catholicism in the region. Avella also notes the important 
role of ethnic Catholicism in southwest Iowa in the late nineteenth and 
early twentieth centuries, including ministry to Irish, German, and Italian 
Catholics into the 1910s and the recruitment of clergy from Ireland into 
the 1930s, but his analysis of ethnicity feels thinner here than in his mag-
isterial history of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, In the Richness of the 
Earth (2002). Certainly, however, transnational ethnic Catholicism played 
a lesser role in southwest Iowa than it did in Wisconsin or even in east-
ern Iowa. 
 In his epilogue, Avella surveys recent shifts in the religious land-
scape in Iowa and in the United States and crucially notes the challenge 
posed by “the legacy of clerical sexual abuse. . . . How earlier bishops 
received these painful revelations and what they did they with them 
was not available in the archival sources at present. The pain suffered 
by the victims of this abuse and the early ethic of official silence and 
disbelief are a blot on the history of Des Moines Catholicism as they are 
of the universal church today” (361–62). This is a vital acknowledgment 
and one manifestation of Avella’s thoughtful approach in this highly 
effective analytical history of the Catholic church in southwest Iowa.  
  
 
The Crusade for Forgotten Souls: Reforming Minnesota’s Mental Institutions, 
1946–1954, by Susan Bartlett Foote. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 2018. xxii, 304 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $22.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Jane Simonsen is professor of history and gender studies at Au-
gustana College, Rock Island, Illinois. She is the author of “ ‘This Large 
Household’: Architecture and Civic Identity at the Iowa Hospital for the 
Insane” (Annals of Iowa, 2010). 
While states currently wrestle with questions about the availability and 
adequacy of mental health care, The Crusade for Forgotten Souls recalls the 
intricacies of garnering support for an ever present but often invisible 
group. The movement to reform Minnesota state institutions for the 
care of those with mental illnesses originated within the institutions 
themselves, was galvanized by support from reform-minded Unitarians, 
and ultimately gained the support of the governor, only to founder amid 
shifting political currents. Many histories of mental health spotlight 
108      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
individual institutions or trace national trends; this state-level study com-
bines attention to particular hospitals with changing political attitudes 
toward mental health, anchoring them to a cast of fleshed-out characters. 
 The focus is Minnesota at midcentury, but the book begins with the 
nineteenth-century origins of Norwegian American mental health worker 
Engla Schey. Schey’s father was a freethinking immigrant farmer whose 
iconoclasm and ultimate mental collapse formed the bedrock of his 
daughter’s activism. Schey was drawn to social services work, ultimately 
becoming an aide at the Anoka State Hospital in 1939. Witnessing de-
humanizing treatment of patients, Schey raised her concerns with the 
Minnesota Unitarian Conference (MUC) at a moment when hospital 
conditions were gaining national attention, in part due to conscientious 
objectors assigned to mental institutions. Supported by pastor Arthur 
Foote and MUC committee member Genevieve Steefel, Schey even-
tually gained the ear of newly elected Republican Governor Luther 
Youngdahl. By 1950, a coalition of reform groups sought to influence 
the governor’s council to enact sweeping policy changes that would 
train hospital staff, create new programming for patients, and build a 
comprehensive plan for the ongoing care of Minnesotans. By the early 
1950s, however, fiscal conservatives’ unwillingness to approve appro-
priations, combined with Youngdahl’s departure to serve as a federal 
judge, ended the movement’s vigorous march.  
 Minnesotans’ activism on behalf of patients was interwoven with 
state and national politics. Youngdahl was chosen to run by the former 
governor, Harold Stassen, who sought to uphold a “New Republican 
Liberalism” that balanced increased support for social services with 
anti-isolationism (114). Mental health reform, Foote makes clear, rises 
and falls with the political tides. Yet meticulous research into the lives 
of Schey, Foote, and Steefel—among other compelling characters in this 
drama—positions the experiences and determination of individual 
activists as the engines behind such movements. Drawing on sources 
such as Schey’s diary, Arthur Foote’s letters, and interviews with activ-
ists and their descendants, Foote shows coalition-builders using their 
voices to illuminate conditions at hospitals. Indeed, Foote’s research be-
gan with her discovery of her former father-in-law Arthur Foote’s papers; 
she also tracked down boxes of Schey’s letters and journals, still in the 
possession of a niece. As a result, Schey, a would-be writer and low-
ranking hospital aide, emerges as a fascinating figure in this movement. 
 Compellingly written, the book nonetheless sometimes sacrifices 
historical specificity for narrative style, as dates and the particulars of 
perspective may be lost in evidence drawn from letters, oral histories, 
diary entries, and recollections created at different times. A complex 
Book Reviews and Notices      109 
web of interconnected organizations, agencies, councils, and politicians 
is balanced by attention to individual actors, and Foote also gives voice 
and life to some of the patients themselves via Schey’s recollections. The 
book suggests a need for other such state-level studies, particularly 
those that focus on the latter half of the twentieth century. Iowa also 
created a series of state institutions for the care of mentally ill patients 
through the latter half of the nineteenth century; as in Minnesota, the 
twentieth century brought critiques of conditions at these institutions 
to public attention even as treatment shifted from physical to pharma-
ceutical methods.  
 Foote provides a valuable history of grassroots organizing and a 
unique focus on a religious institution’s progressive political action. 
One lesson of this crusade is that social movements can fall prey to po-
litical and economic shifts; decades after these events, “the fundamental 
right to comprehensive mental health care in the United States still has 
not been achieved” (241). Nevertheless, the strategic alliances between 
individuals, churches, and mental health organizations provide a blue-
print for enacting social change that has, Foote points out, created the 
momentum that would eventually result in organizations such as the 
National Alliance on Mental Illness, state-level mental health initiatives, 
and mental health coverage in the 2010 Affordable Care Act. In an era 
of decidedly divisive politics, the vision of coalitions that amplify indi-
vidual voices to the level of policy change is compelling indeed.  
 
 
Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America, by Matthew Roth. Lawrence: Uni-
versity Press of Kansas, 2018. xi, 356 pp. Tables, graphs, illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 hardcover, $24.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Rachel Steely is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Harvard University. 
She is working on a dissertation that maps the emergence and diffusion of soy 
as a global commodity. 
During its history as an American crop, the soybean has often been a 
disappointment. Promoters advocated soybean cultivation for agricul-
tural improvement schemes that were not widely implemented; inno-
vators misjudged soy as a viable meat, coffee, and milk substitute; and 
social reformers used soy as a key nutritional substrate in utopian com-
munities that ultimately fell apart. Despite numerous setbacks, soybean 
plants now occupy more acres of American farmland than any other 
crop. Matthew Roth’s Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America is an in-
formative account of the introduction and spread of the soybean in the 
United States that explains how one of twentieth-century American ag-
riculture’s most persistent failures was also one of its greatest successes.  


The Crusade for Forgotten Souls: Reforming Minnesota's Mental Institutions, 1946-1954

Review of: "The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West," by by Jennifer Graber

Knock, Michael

96      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West, 
by Jennifer Graber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xxii, 288 pp. 
Illustrations, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Michael Knock is associate professor of history at Clarke Univer-
sity in Dubuque, Iowa. 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.” 
According to Jennifer Graber, religion played a key role in the dispos-
session of American Indians. Protestant and Catholic efforts to convert 
the native peoples of the American West to their respective faiths went 
hand-in-hand with the movement to take their lands and transform 
them into small independent farmers. That part of Graber’s story is not 
surprising to anyone familiar with President Grant’s so-called Peace 
Policy and other events in the nineteenth-century history of the Ameri-
can West. What is interesting, however, is her contention that native 
peoples also used spirituality to survive, sometimes by clinging to tra-
ditional beliefs and sometimes by showing a remarkable flexibility in 
their willingness to adapt those beliefs to a changing world.  
 Graber’s focus is on the Kiowa of the southern Great Plains. The 
history of the Kiowa is one of regular adaptation. Before migrating 
south, she argues, the Kiowa adopted the Sun Dance from the Crow. 
They later began to practice some elements of Christianity while con-
tinuing to celebrate the Sun Dance and other ceremonies critical to their 
identity as a people. As Graber writes, “Ritual practices that engaged 
sacred power played a crucial role in that persistence. Kiowas came to 
churches, peyote meetings, and Feather Dance circles. They drew near 
to the gods of Indian Country. They asked to be sustained within, if not 
delivered from, an increasingly perilous situation” (201).  
 To tell the Kiowas’ story, Graber focuses on the nineteenth century, 
beginning her story in 1803 and ending it in 1903. That structure allows 
her to describe the Kiowas’ first encounter with white Americans fol-
lowing the Louisiana Purchase and to end with allotment. In between, 
the world of the Kiowa was completely transformed by events includ-
ing the Red River War, the aforementioned Peace Policy, Richard Henry 
Pratt’s attempt to “kill the Indian and save the man” at his Carlisle In-
dian School, and the Ghost Dance movement. 
 Of particular interest to students of Iowa and the Midwest may be 
the story of an Iowa Quaker named Lawrie Tatum. Tatum arrived in 
Kiowa country in May 1869 after being appointed reservation agent. 
In that capacity, Tatum was also an agent of civilization and Christian-
ization. Graber reports that the young Quaker often grew frustrated by 
the Kiowas’ insistence that they continue to celebrate the Sun Dance and 
Book Reviews and Notices      97 
to raid other tribes. In response, Tatum sometimes withheld rations, 
including sugar. In a letter to his Quaker superiors in 1870, he declared, 
“I did it to punish them and . . . I believe it had a very salutary effect 
upon them. They have not appeared to be nearer conquered since I have 
been here than they did on that day” (89).  
 Graber skillfully uses a variety of sources, including Kiowa calendar 
drawings and shield art, enabling her to reveal Kiowa hopes and fears. 
Those sources also reveal the process of assimilation and cultural sur-
vival. For example, toward the end of her story, Graber analyzes a fas-
cinating letter written to a Kiowa student at the Carlisle Indian School 
from his family on the reservation. The letter used a combination of 
symbols and drawings to deliver news of Christianity’s presence on the 
reservation, the local peyote society, and pieces of family news (199–200).  
 Overall, The Gods of Indian Country is a welcome addition to the schol-
arship on American Indian spirituality as well the history of nineteenth-
century U.S. Indian policy on the southern plains.  
  
 
Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation, 
by Thomas Biolsi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. xxii, 
340 pp. Maps, graphs, tables, illustrations, notes, index. $30.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Harvey Markowitz is associate professor of anthropology at 
Washington and Lee University. He is the author of Converting the Rosebud: 
Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886–1916 (2018). 
During the past three decades, a sizeable portion of anthropologist-
ethnohistorian Thomas Biolsi’s scholarship has focused on political, 
economic, and jurisdictional issues affecting the Pine Ridge and Rose-
bud Lakota Reservations of South Dakota. In Organizing the Lakota (1993), 
Biolsi analyzed why the Oglala and Sicangu Lakotas of those reserva-
tions ultimately voted to formalize their political life under the Indian 
Reorganization Act of 1934 and how that decision further politically fac-
tionalized their populations and diminished their tribes’ power over res-
ervation affairs. In Deadliest Enemies (2001), he demonstrated the various 
ways federal courts have systematically posed the interests of Rosebud 
Indian against those of non-Indians in neighboring counties, thus exac-
erbating racial tensions between the two groups.  
 In his latest effort, Power and Progress on the Prairie, Biolsi again 
returns to the Rosebud Reservation and its surrounding South Dakota 
counties to explore how federal officials, local bureaucrats, and social 
experts collaborated on programs of directed change that they believed 
would improve the lives of the state’s Indians and non-Indians and the 
often destructive consequences of those initiatives. As he explains in his 


The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West

Review of: "The Journey West: The Mormon Pioneer Journals of Horace K. Whitney with Insights by Helen Mar Kimball Whitney," edited by Richard E. Bennett

Winslow, Brady G

Book Reviews and Notices      89 
The Journey West: The Mormon Pioneer Journals of Horace K. Whitney with 
Insights by Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, edited by Richard E. Bennett. 
Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt 
Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 2018. xlv, 442 pp. Maps, illustrations 
(many in color), notes, glossary, index. $34.99 hardcover. 
Reviewer Brady G. Winslow is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Texas Chris-
tian University. He is working on a dissertation that examines the receptivity 
to Mormonism in the upper Mississippi River valley from 1830 to 1860. 
In early February 1846 Horace Kimball Whitney and Helen Mar Kimball, 
members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were mar-
ried in Nauvoo, Illinois. The next day, the young couple joined the first 
group of their coreligionists to cross the Mississippi River into Iowa 
Territory on their journey toward the Great Basin. Over the next several 
years, the Whitneys and many of their Mormon counterparts traversed 
Iowa, encamped for a time just west of the Missouri River in Nebraska 
Territory, and made their way to the Salt Lake Valley. Once there, the 
Latter-day Saints went about establishing a settlement. Some, including 
Horace, returned to Nebraska to assist those who remained. The Journey 
West, a documentary transcription of six of Horace’s journals, chronicles 
one man’s experiences on the Mormon Trail and in the Salt Lake Valley 
from February 15, 1846, to October 30, 1847. Interspersed throughout are 
selections from Helen’s reminiscences that add understanding to the 
entries of her husband. 
 The Journey West joins a long list of published nineteenth-century 
overland trail accounts, Mormon and otherwise. An important contri-
bution of the volume is in its male and female perspectives as well as its 
contemporary and reflective outlooks. While Helen’s recollections lack 
the immediacy of her husband’s record, her words complement those 
of Horace by offering a retrospective viewpoint. Readers interested in 
the history of Iowa and the Midwest will be attracted to the Whitneys’ 
descriptions of the Mormons’ trek through Iowa and their time spent in 
and traveling across Nebraska. 
 
 
Sixteenth President-in-Waiting: Abraham Lincoln and the Springfield Dis-
patches of Henry Villard, 1860–1861, edited by Michael Burlingame. Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018. ix, 407 pp. Appendix, 
notes, index. $45.50 hardcover. 
Reviewer Bryon Andreasen is a historian at the Church History Museum 
in Salt Lake City, Utah, and former research historian at the Abraham Lin-
coln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois. He is the author of Looking 
for Lincoln in Illinois: Lincoln’s Springfield (2015). 


The Journey West: The Mormon Pioneer Journals of Horace K. Whitney with Insights by Helen Mar Kimball Whitney

Review of: "Great Plains Politics," by Peter J. Longo

Brooks, Karl

Book Reviews and Notices      231 
Missouri are not the Great Plains” (5). Strict environmental definitions 
(and a map from the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains) might be causes to 
exclude Minnesota and Iowa. The inclusion of Meridel Le Sueur’s The 
Girl (1978), set in Minneapolis-St. Paul, however, suggests the integral 
cultural connections between the plains and Minnesota that belie 
political boundaries. Indeed, the larger grasslands of North America 
connect western Minnesota and Iowa to Great Plains states and most 
of the themes discussed. Iowans will find that many of Pratt’s inter-
pretations resonate with their state’s history and well-known Iowa 
authors. 
 
 
Great Plains Politics, by Peter J. Longo. Discover the Great Plains Series. 
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. xvii, 127 pp. Illustrations, 
map, bibliography, notes, index. $14.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Karl Brooks, now deputy director of the New Mexico Adminis-
trative Office of the Courts, is former associate professor of history at the 
University of Kansas and former Heartland Regional Administrator of the 
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 
Peter J. Longo views political action on the Great Plains as a praise-
worthy form of local activism. His six brief biographies portray politi-
cal actors: three represented their states in Congress; one served in a 
legislature; one held elective office in a tribal government; and one 
dedicated his activities to his community. The subjects remind us that 
the Great Plains, though today predominantly white, have since the 
mid-nineteenth century been home to African Americans and were 
always home to Native peoples. As many plains communities become 
increasingly Hispanic in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, 
Longo’s book helps situate racial and ethnic tensions within the re-
gion’s political culture. 
 Iowans will look in vain for discussion of its state politics or history. 
The map charting the Great Plains traces its eastern boundary along 
the Missouri River (xiv). Longo’s biographies remain firmly situated 
west of Iowa, although longtime Nebraska Republican Representative 
Virginia Smith grew up a Hawkeye before crossing the river for col-
lege in Lincoln. Despite this frame, Longo’s analysis of plains political 
culture offers suggestions for understanding Iowa’s durable issues of 
rural depopulation and commodity agriculture’s pervasive effects on 
political thought and action.  
 Longo argues that plains political culture offers a basically healthy 
structure for political action. Its thousands of smaller communities are 
really the places where political conflict and action enable people to 
232      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
work out their differences. He portrays a local political scene full of co-
operative opportunities, where the challenges of living engage nearly 
everyone with an opinion. Like many studies of midwestern politics, 
Great Plains Politics assumes the centrality of locality and minimizes 
class tensions that emerge and intensify in declining population areas. 
 Longo chooses to analyze Plains political culture as an expression 
of “virtues and values.” His biographies present their subjects engaging 
in political action as a way of seeking to express personal values in 
communities that believe their unique places nurture a distinct set of 
virtues.  
 Chief among the virtues is plains people’s intimate understanding 
of the land and its crops. Longo’s assessment of the impact of food on 
plains politics reminds more than it illuminates. Despite his interest in 
how his subjects engage with food, Longo could have better devel-
oped his analysis of the ways people making a living on and from the 
land continuously reshape plains “virtues and values” (97). Although 
most of his subjects were politically active in our lifetime, Longo rarely 
digs into how agriculture’s transformation after the 1970s—farm and 
ranch consolidation, high rates of leveraged capitalization, extensive 
irrigation investment—deepened rural class divisions and accelerated 
depopulation. 
  Great Plains Politics, by concentrating on local places, diminishes 
the larger influences of landscape, climate, and the geo-economics of 
agriculture, the most global American industry, on communities. 
“Food, its preparation and consumption,” Longo notes, “connects 
people” (99). Yet those connections have long extended far beyond 
the plains, making treatments of Kansas Senator Bob Dole and South 
Dakota Senator George McGovern among Longo’s best efforts to con-
sider how land and economic use shapes the people, not vice versa.  
 The Great Plains region is more intimately defined by agriculture, 
capital, and global markets than any other American region. Longo’s 
book invites further reading about how global pressures determined 
what political conflicts were deemed “important” and what the con-
tending forces considered “good” political outcomes. The book’s use 
of “food” as an analytical lens mostly restates its emphasis on com-
munity and connection, not division and conflict. The latter drive po-
litical action: Great Plains Politics raises, but does not deeply consider, 
why people differed about who should own food production, who 
should benefit from its manufacture and export, and how the wealth 
(and poverty) created by agriculture challenges the benign image of 
cohesive, united communities. 
Book Reviews and Notices      233 
 Great Plains Politics can be read as another midwestern “resistance” 
narrative. Longo defends plains people and their ways against the 
sneers of those claiming to be their cultural betters. This traditional 
stance will be appreciated by many readers, especially those who be-
lieve their “cohesive communities” should defend special, but threat-
ened, midwestern virtues. 
 
 
The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion 
and the Future of American Politics, by Dan Kaufman. New York: W. W. 
Norton, 2018. 319 pp. Notes, index. $26.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Colin Gordon is the F. Wendell Miller Professor of History at 
the University of Iowa. He is the author, most recently, of Citizen Brown: 
Race, Democracy and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs (forthcoming). 
In 2010 the Republican Party captured the “trifecta” of state power in 
Wisconsin, winning the state senate, the state house, and the gover-
nor’s mansion by wide margins. In short order, Scott Walker’s Repub-
licans pressed through “Act 10,” a sweeping attack on the collective 
bargaining rights of public sector workers. Versions of that playbook 
had been employed in conservative bastions such as Kansas and North 
Carolina for years, but Wisconsin marked a turning point. There, the 
right—both the Wisconsin Republicans and the network of national 
groups behind them—had successfully flipped a state with a long pro-
gressive tradition. Fighting Bob La Follette’s “laboratory of democracy” 
was now home to a political experiment of a very different kind. 
 This juxtaposition—between Wisconsin’s progressive past and the 
eight-year tenure of Scott Walker—is the central theme of Dan Kauf-
man’s Fall of Wisconsin. Kaufman is a Madison-raised, New York–based 
journalist who covered these events for The New Yorker and other out-
lets. His account relies heavily on anecdotes, observations, and character 
sketches that stand in for larger patterns or problems. Randy Bryce 
(the ironworker who ran unsuccessfully for Paul Ryan’s open seat in 
2018) embodies the confrontation between Walker and organized labor. 
Aldo Leopold and Gaylord Nelson are the foils for Walker’s environ-
mental policies. And State Representative Chris Taylor is our guide to 
the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in “tee-
ing up” Walker’s legislative agenda. 
 But these journalistic devices are also the book’s undoing. The 
blow-by-blow account (from Walker’s election, to the passage of Bill 10, 
to the recall elections of 2011 and 2012) seems—by 2018—pretty familiar 
ground. The stark contrast between the state’s progressive past and its 
conservative present is, I think, a misleadingly nostalgic reading of 


Great Plains Politics

Review of: "Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians," by Mary Stockwell

Stabler, Scott L

218      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Anderson shows that Renville was a complex man who attempted to 
navigate a tragic period of upheaval and strife. However, it is important 
to note that many Dakota at the time—and since—have criticized Da-
kota like Renville for their close ties with traders like Brown, the United 
States military, the scouts, and government officials. Anderson neglects 
to cite historians who differ in their interpretations of so-called “friendly 
Indians.” Some scholars, for instance, have called those who sided with 
the government and government policies “traitors” to their people. It 
is important to acknowledge—as Anderson has done in his other work 
—the negative and lasting legacy of conquest, settler colonialism, and 
government assimilationist programs, even if Renville tried to do 
what he thought was best for his people. 
 Finally, while Anderson can be commended for finding numerous 
written sources that give a complete account of the major events of 
Renville’s life, by the end of the biography his personality remains 
elusive. I never felt like I could hear Renville’s voice explaining why 
he made the choices he did and how others reacted to those choices. 
Despite these caveats of interpretation and presentation, Anderson’s 
biography of Gabriel Renville sheds light on a man who lived through 
a tragic period in Dakota history. Renville often made contradictory 
and controversial choices that he hoped would ensure his, and his 
people’s, survival. Those choices reverberate into the present day.  
 
 
Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians, by Mary 
Stockwell. The World of Ulysses S. Grant Series. Carbondale: Southern 
Illinois University Press, 2018. 256 pp. Maps, illustrations, appendixes, 
notes, bibliography, index. $34.50 hardcover. 
Reviewer Scott L. Stabler is professor of history at Grand Valley State 
University in Allendale, Michigan. He is the author of “Ulysses S. Grant 
and the ‘Indian Problem’” (Journal of Illinois History, 2003). 
The process of revamping Ulysses S. Grant’s reputation has been on-
going for a few decades, but has just reached the mainstream historical 
audience. After the popular tomes by Ronald C. White (799 pages) and 
Ron Chernow (1,104 pages) and another more historical approach to 
Grant’s presidency by Charles Calhoun (720 pages), Mary Stockwell’s 
256-page work on President U.S. Grant’s Indian policy is more manage-
able and more focused. Because no one has so thoroughly addressed 
Grant’s Indian policy, Stockwell’s work is vital for a complete picture 
of Grant. She covers a complex topic with a narrative that flows well 
and clarifies the story of postbellum Indian policy.  
Book Reviews and Notices      219 
 Stockwell approaches the topic chronologically from the per-
spective of Grant and the federal government and its employees, not 
Native Americans. She begins with Grant’s family heritage of Indian 
interactions on the East Coast and in the Midwest. Chapters two and 
three provide background on Indian wars and Grant’s comrade Ely 
Parker (Seneca). As Grant’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Parker 
was the first non-white major official in the country’s history. Stock-
well then describes Parker and Grant’s plan to address the massive mi-
gration of whites west of the Mississippi River and the Native people 
they would engage and disrupt. Chapter four deals with the initiation 
of Grant’s Indian policy, especially the addition of the Board of Indian 
Commissioners to oversee the Office of Indian Affairs’ supply pro-
curement practices. Chapter five details Ely Parker’s travails from a 
congressional investigation brought on by the board. Parker, though 
found innocent, resigned as commissioner out of frustration and lack 
of support from Grant. Chapter six delves deeper into Grant’s carrot-
and-stick approach to the Indians in the West while supporting fur-
ther white settlement. Chapters seven and eight deal with the wars 
brought on by white settler encroachment from Montana to California 
to Texas. Ultimately, Grant’s initiative to create well-run reservations 
that enticed American Indians onto them worked moderately well, but 
when failure occurred, war forced Native Americans onto government-
run entities often placed in the middle of nowhere.  
 Interrupted Odyssey has two basic premises, neither of which is a 
significant historiographical contribution. First, according to Stockwell, 
those who believe that Grant had a coherent Indian policy that reflected 
his attitudes and policies toward the freedpeople of the South are mis-
led. She argues that Grant grew disgruntled trying to pacify and assimi-
late Native Americans and took a harder line toward them later in his 
presidency. Second, Grant’s use of missionaries as reservation agents 
was not his first choice; rather, he sought to use soldiers first, but Con-
gress banned them due to the lost patronage. Only then did Grant 
decide to again circumvent political patronage by allowing Christian 
denominations to choose church members to run reservations.  
 There are some quibbles. First, Grant’s desire to end the treaty 
system was not motivated by his wish to prevent tribes from obtaining 
ammunition, as Stockwell implies. Instead, Grant signed the bill so that 
he could use executive orders giving him flexibility in dealing with 
tribes and Congress. Stockwell’s use of government and primary sources 
is excellent, but the secondary sources she employs fail to give Native 
Americans any agency. For example, for the Modoc War she cites one 
2014 source but also one from 1971 and another from as far back as 1914 
220      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
when at least two of the four more recent works, published within the 
last three years, give some Modoc perspective. Finally, it is often diffi-
cult to tell when Stockwell is speaking for herself or paraphrasing some-
one else. For example, “It might take a generation or two, but by the 
end of the century the Navajo would look and act exactly like most 
Americans” (61); and “Grant instead would intervene on behalf of the 
Indians to save them” (63). After discussing Parker’s marriage to a 
white woman, Stockwell writes, “At some point in the future, the two 
peoples, white and red, would become one through intermarriage” 
(66). Such examples occur throughout the book, creating a thread of 
Eurocentrism or sloppy attribution. 
 Overall, Stockwell tries to walk the line between a new historiog-
raphy and a popular history of a major historical figure. She does well 
in the latter, offering a balanced portrayal of Grant and his dilemmas 
over the unsolvable “Indian problem.” But the historiography raises a 
problem. Stockwell follows C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa’s argument in 
Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the 
Civil War (2012) that Indians and the country would have fared far 
better if Ely Parker had not been forced out of his position as commis-
sioner. That is far too simplistic. The historiographical point that’s 
missing is how Grant brought his total war mentality to the West. His 
strategy in the Civil War sacrificed lives to end the war quickly, thus 
saving lives in the long run. He similarly brought the sword to bear on 
Indians off the reservation to potentially save their lives by putting 
them on well-run government agencies. His strategy established res-
ervations all over the West, and Native Americans have kept them in 
existence and significant. Although reservations are not ideal places 
for many reasons, few American Indians want them to end. That is the 
significance of Grant’s Indian policy that has been lost on historians 
and leaves a new avenue for future research.  
 
 
Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920, by Sara Egge. 
Iowa and the Midwest Experience Series. Iowa City: University of 
Iowa Press, 2018. xi, 233 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, 
index. $85 paperback. 
Reviewer Pam Stek recently received her Ph.D. in history from the Uni-
versity of Iowa. Her dissertation was titled “Immigrant Women’s Political 
Activism in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, 1880–1920.”  
In Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920, Sara Egge 
argues convincingly that midwestern suffragists’ struggles to gain the 
vote are best viewed through the frame of their spirited and deter-


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