The Annals of Iowa

Review of: "Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation," by Thomas Biolsi

Markowitz, Harvey

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 
98      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
introduction, his object is not to describe the formal policies or congres-
sional laws that went into the construction of the programs but to ex-
amine their origins and agendas as examples of “governmentality,” a 
neologism coined by the late French philosopher and political historian 
Michel Foucault that refers to the often subtle and unobtrusive ways 
those in power attempt to mold the consciousness and actions of people 
to solve problems that the leaders deem of local or national concern.  
 Biolsi has organized his book as a series of case studies. In chapter 
one he discusses the way the government reduced the Rosebud Lako-
tas’ lands in order to make them available to non-Indian settlers. He 
places both processes within the contexts of the democratic values of 
white homesteading and Indian allotment. In chapter two he examines 
the strategies of governmentality that were deployed in order to re-engi-
neer Indians into modern citizens and transform white farmers into good 
businessmen. The next case study illustrates how the governmental 
processes associated with the New Deal in South Dakota illustrate that 
“liberalism with its impulse not to govern too much has been histori-
cally accompanied by a process of reform guarding against governing 
too little” (129). The following chapter contrasts New Deal reformers’ 
views of policies needed to confront the Great Depression and drought 
with those of white and Indian South Dakotans they sought to convert 
into “New Deal subjects.” Chapter five details how, during the Cold 
War, the relatively sparsely inhabited region of western South Dakota 
was economically and socially devalued in order to make it a suitable 
site for ICBM silos, thus drawing potential Soviet nuclear attacks away 
from the country’s more densely populated and valued areas. In his 
final chapter, Biolsi discusses the legal-political apparatuses designed 
to protect the voting rights of racial minorities and the recognition of 
treaty rights and tribal sovereignty and how they came into conflict dur-
ing the process of organizing Todd County on the Rosebud Reservation.  
 The essays in Power and Progress on the Prairie are not easy reading. 
Each is densely packed with historical details that the author employs 
to meticulously build his case. Although the cases are specific to South 
Dakota, the book’s theoretical framework and its lessons make it im-
portant reading for Iowans and all citizens of the nation’s heartland 
who will be able to discern the workings of governmentality in their 
own states and lives.  
 
 
Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal 
at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, by Robert B. Mitchell. Roseville, MN: 
Edinborough Press, 2018. xi, 214 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography. 
$22.95 paperback. 


English

Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation

Review of: Deadwood’s Al Swearingen: Manifest Evil in the Gem Theatre, by Jerry L. Bryant and Barbara Fifer

Lindell, Terrence J.

Deadwood's Al Swearingen: Manifest Evil in the Gem Theatre

Review of: Without Reservation: Benjamin Reifel and American Indian Acculturation, by Sean J. Flynn

Zimmer, Eric Steven

312      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
mon characteristics of country schools. He also glosses over widespread 
conflict over the first round of consolidation by simply reporting that 
Cosgrove voters in 1920 created the county’s first consolidated school. 
 Nostalgia flavors many of the oral-history quotations; former stu-
dents reflected, “You knew everyone and their families, and you felt 
very safe and secure” (79) and “we created our own fun” (92). The book’s 
overall tone, however, is more balanced. Acknowledging “female stu-
dents who talked of male teachers who touched them in inappropriate 
ways” (90) and humor in recitations and skits that “came at the expense 
of negative stereotypes” (112), Yoder heeds his own caution that “we 
can easily romanticize rural schools and in the process, overlook their 
shortcomings” (154). All in One Room captures both strengths and short-
comings of country schools in Johnson County over more than a century. 
 
 
Without Reservation: Benjamin Reifel and American Indian Acculturation, by 
Sean J. Flynn. Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2018. 
ix, 281 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer Eric Steven Zimmer is a research fellow at the Center for Ameri-
can Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS) in the Pine Ridge Res-
ervation. He won the American Society for Environmental History’s 2017 
Rachel Carson Prize for Best Dissertation for his work “Red Earth Nation: 
Environment and Sovereignty in Modern Meskwaki History.”  
In Without Reservation, Sean J. Flynn offers a robust biography of Benja-
min Reifel, who was born in the Rosebud Indian Reservation. One of 
history’s most distinguished South Dakotans, Reifel spent years at the 
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and served briefly as its commissioner 
toward the end of his career. Along the way, Reifel completed a doctor-
ate at Harvard and became the first Lakota to represent South Dakota 
in Congress. Flynn dives deeply into secondary literature and the hold-
ings at several archives—including Reifel’s papers and interviews he 
gave—to uncover Reifel’s development as a person, a civil servant, a 
politician, and a policymaker. 
 As a BIA agent, Reifel helped many midwestern tribes—including 
the Meskwaki Nation in Iowa—draft their constitutions in the 1930s. 
A decade later, he represented the BIA in North Dakota while the U.S. 
government decided to dam the Missouri River. That proved to be one 
of the most controversial periods of Reifel’s career. The Missouri River 
project flooded most of the best land in the Fort Berthold Reservation 
and nearly destroyed an indigenous agricultural economy that had 
thrived for at least a thousand years. Relying in part on Reifel’s advice, 
as Flynn writes, the tribal council rejected a land swap proposed by the 
Book Reviews and Notices      313 
federal government during the initial compensation negotiations. In-
stead, tribal leaders held out for a better cash offer that ended up being 
grossly inadequate. Other periods of Reifel’s career were less destructive. 
In Congress, Reifel was a leading voice on Indian affairs, secured critical 
support for South Dakota’s farm economy, and helped bring a federal 
data center to Sioux Falls, where it continues to provide a healthy num-
ber of federal jobs.  
 Flynn distills Reifel’s core philosophy on Native issues: he was 
“committed to [the] integration” of Native Americans into the main-
stream of American society. “Reifel,” Flynn writes, “envisaged a world 
without reservations, or at least without the poverty-oppressed reser-
vations that characterize Indian life on the northern plains” (6). Reifel’s 
life experience shaped his thinking. He continued to speak Lakota 
throughout his life and endeavored to stay connected to the people and 
customs of his community. Yet Reifel struggled against suggestions that 
he had “betrayed his race” by supporting integration and building a life 
in the non-Native world (2).  
 From a writerly perspective, I appreciate Without Reservation’s titu-
lar double entendre and understand why Flynn leans on that theme 
throughout the book. It succinctly captures Reifel’s unrelenting sense of 
duty as well as his approach to the challenging policy environment of 
his time. And Flynn articulates a nuanced view of the relationship 
between Reifel’s thoughts and actions. When it came to controversial 
policies like termination, Flynn writes, Reifel was “uncomfortable with 
[their] pace and scope” even as he “supported the gradual loosening 
of federal-tribal ties” (129). Reifel opposed outright termination but 
supported relocation programs that incentivized Native people to leave 
their reservations for American cities. Indeed, Reifel believed more 
strongly in encouraging “American Indians to exhibit greater initiative 
and self-reliance” than in any single policy—especially those he viewed 
as destructive (1).  
 Specialists and general readers will enjoy Without Reservation, and 
it is sure to inspire robust conversations about regional history and the 
possibilities for the future of Indian Country. Yet readers should ap-
proach Flynn’s title and the theme it represents with caution. After all, 
the last time the United States pursued a world “without reservations,” 
termination proved an unmitigated disaster. Dozens of terminated 
tribes suffered immensely, spending decades restoring their political 
status, land, and resources. Many never fully recovered their land and 
resources. Today, certain political forces are threatening the trust re- 
sponsibility and longstanding pillars of Indian law. With history as our 
guide, Termination 2.0 would almost certainly be a disaster for Native 
314      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
America. We should all be wary of romanticizing a world “without res-
ervations,” lest we forget the terrible consequences of an era, not so long 
ago, when that dangerous rhetoric became reality.  
 
 
Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision 
for Racial Advancement, by D’Weston Haywood. Chapel Hill: University 
of North Carolina Press, 2018. x, 340 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. 
$34.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Brian Hallstoos is associate professor of history at the University 
of Dubuque. His research and writing have focused on African American 
music, drama, and sports in the Midwest. 
On the cover of D’Weston Haywood’s Let Us Make Men appears a photo-
graph of three carefully groomed, impeccably attired young black men 
absorbed in reading. The image hints at the connections the author makes 
among print media, masculinity, and race leadership but belies his rig-
orous attention to seven central figures—Robert Abbott, W. E. B. Du Bois, 
Marcus Garvey, John Sengstacke, Robert F. Williams, Elijah Muhammad, 
and Malcolm X—who address these connections through the black press 
(that is, newspapers produced by and for African Americans). Relying 
heavily on recently digitized (thus easily searched) newspapers and 
four archival collections, Haywood argues that these black publishers 
addressed moments of racial crisis and change “in masculine terms, a 
lens they applied in their papers and intended to appeal to readers’ own 
gendered subjectivities in hopes that readers would embrace a proper 
black manhood for the benefit of the race” (6). 
 The five chapters trace the rise and decline of the mainstream black 
press and its related shift from crusading for African American civil 
rights to adopting a more cautious role as chroniclers of others’ efforts 
toward such progressive ends. In chapter one the author addresses the 
role Robert Abbott and W. E. B. Du Bois played in shaping black leader-
ship and masculinity through their highly influential newspapers dur-
ing the mass migration of African Americans from the rural South to 
northern cities around World War I. Abbott’s Chicago Defender receives 
greater attention than Du Bois’s The Crisis in demonstrating that “news-
papers could be effective tools in shaping black people’s social move-
ments and gender ideologies, as well as effective tools in helping black 
men assert a public voice and manly racial leadership” (56). The second 
chapter focuses on Marcus Garvey and his radical newspaper, Negro 
World, which capitalized on a flourishing, postwar black consciousness 
that gave rise to the Harlem Renaissance. In particular, Haywood ex-
amines how the black press first elevated and later condemned Garvey 


Without Reservation: Benjamin Reifel and American Indian Acculturation

Review of: "The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics," by Dan Kaufman

Gordon, Colin

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 
234      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
that history: this, after all, is the state that gave us Joe McCarthy as 
well as Bob La Follete, that featured some of the nastiest labor disputes 
of the twentieth century as well as some of the earliest innovations in 
labor and social welfare law.  
 And what we have learned since 2010—about the role of ALEC 
and its offshoots in state politics and about the political and cultural 
and economic foundations of Walker’s support—is not well integrated 
into Kaufman’s account. He does a capable job of tracing the influence 
of ALEC, but does so as if he is unraveling a conspiracy (he claims that 
ALEC “was almost unheard of before Walker’s election” [121]) and 
not recounting a pattern of political influence that—even in 2010—was 
pretty well documented. Kaufman largely ignores the work of Alex 
Hertel-Fernandez, Nancy MacLean, the Center for Media and Democ-
racy, and Wisconsin’s progressive state think tank, the Center on Wis-
consin Strategy in tracing—and resisting—ALEC’s pernicious presence. 
 Kaufman’s largest blind spot, however, is race. Wisconsin (and 
much of the upper Midwest) has nurtured the nation’s largest racial 
disparities on everything from incarceration to school suspension. 
Milwaukee, the font of Walker’s political career, is one of the nation’s 
most segregated metropolitan settings. The works of Arlie Rothschild, 
Kathy Cramer, and others have underscored how the “politics of re-
sentment” that swept Walker—and a few years later Donald Trump—
to power are deeply imbued with racial animus. And yet, for Kauf-
man, this barely registers. The characters (and caricatures) in this story 
—aside from a brief discussion of Native treaty rights—are all white. 
 I admired Kaufman’s reporting on these events as they unfolded, 
but the book version adds little—and seems, in 2018, even a little stale 
and dated. Earlier works by Andrew Kersten (The Battle for Wisconsin) 
and John Nichols (Uprising) provide a richer account of the events of 
2011–2014 in and around Madison; more recent work—by Kathy 
Cramer, Amy Goldstein, and others—does a better job of not just ex-
plaining why Walker won but why so many of the citizens of Wiscon-
sin voted for him—in 2010, in the recall election of 2011, in 2014, and 
again in 2018.  
 
 


The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics

Review of: "The Making of Pioneer Wisconsin: Voices of Early Settlers," by Michael E. Stevens

Duerkes, Wayne

208      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
this account but instead sold his two journals to a Philadelphia pub-
lisher. During the early 1820s, Professor Benjamin Silliman acquired 
one volume, which remained in his papers at Yale. The second volume 
came to light in 2012 and is now held by the DeGolyer Library at South-
ern Methodist University. Some misgivings about its authenticity exist 
because of Maley’s frequent errors concerning distances and travel times. 
The editor suggests that these mistakes occurred because, unlike 
government explorers, he had only incomplete travel notes. He praises 
the author for giving “a rare blue-collar view of the frontier,” some-
thing others rarely did (xvi). 
 The book is well done, but its excellent maps would have been more 
useful if they had marked Maley’s travels more clearly. Also, the table 
of contents needs some identifying terms, not just dates for each section. 
 
 
The Making of Pioneer Wisconsin: Voices of Early Settlers, by Michael E. 
Stevens. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018. xviii, 173 
pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $18.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Wayne Duerkes is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Iowa State 
University. He is working on a dissertation on community and market 
creation in the antebellum rural Midwest. 
In his latest publication, Michael E. Stevens, Wisconsin State Historian 
Emeritus, provides “an opportunity to meet, if only briefly, people from 
the past” (163). To accomplish that, Stevens compiles an assortment of 
primary source documents written by early Wisconsin pioneers up to 
the 1850s. The diversity of the 52 introduced sources is represented by 
excerpts from travel guides, personal correspondence, letters printed in 
newspapers, petitions, and memorials. He categorizes the documents 
into three main thematic groupings: migration, adaptation, and com-
munity creation. These groupings chronologically follow the general 
emigration pattern of new settlers to the region, although there is slight, 
unavoidable overlap. In the end, he seeks to demonstrate the resolve 
and mettle most of these pioneers displayed, laying the foundation for 
the Wisconsin character.  
 Stevens highlights a cross section of Wisconsin pioneers both de-
mographically and thematically. There are sources written by a member 
of the Ho-Chunk tribe, free blacks, and white men and women, with a 
special focus on German and Norwegian immigrants. In the documents, 
the authors describe travel to their new homeland, environmental 
conditions, sickness, loneliness, assimilation, temperance, abolitionism, 
and the western stereotype of lawlessness. But the stalwart pioneers 
also allude to visions of the potential and opportunity of settling in 
Book Reviews and Notices      209 
pioneer Wisconsin. By bringing the settlers’ own words into print, 
Stevens offers readers a glimpse of the trials and tribulations as well as 
the hopes and dreams of early settlers in the nineteenth-century Mid-
west. In doing so, he addresses a much broader audience than just 
those interested in the Badger State. Very few of the documents should 
be viewed as unique to events in Wisconsin. In fact, without the author’s 
brief commentary to guide the reader, most documents echo emotions, 
sentiments, and experiences common to pioneers across the Midwest 
during the era. 
 The representativeness is one of the book’s two main strengths. 
The second is the bringing of these documents to a broader audience. 
Any exposure given to pioneers’ voices to commemorate their achieve-
ments and to help readers develop a clearer picture of who they were 
and what stock they came from is welcome. This also highlights a po-
tential pitfall for historians who publish such works— letting the doc-
uments tell too much of the story without the guidance of a specialist. 
Stevens offers very brief introductory statements that are more bio-
graphical than analytical. Some of the documents needed a bit more 
editing to keep them focused on the thematic point the editor is trying 
to highlight, and most lack any analysis to develop the editor’s in-
tended goal of identifying early Wisconsin identity. An expanded 
bibliography, beyond the 16 mentions of the state historical magazine, 
would have helped readers delve deeper into this useful and insight-
ful contribution to midwestern history.  
 
 
Lincoln and the Natural Environment, by James Tackach. Concise Lincoln 
Library. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. vii, 149 pp. 
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Patricia Ann Owens is an independent scholar in Lawrence-
ville, Illinois. Her research and writing have focused on Abraham Lincoln. 
Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois once urged his colleagues “to get 
right with Lincoln.” It seems that this has become a mantra not only for 
politicians of both political parties but also for historians and other 
scholars. Lincoln left no diary and few personal letters, but that has not 
stopped the endless research into every aspect of his life and times. 
There has even been a book published about Lincoln and his dog, Fido. 
 Southern Illinois University Press’s Concise Lincoln Library series 
offers an array of topics that reflect the interest in everything about 
Lincoln, including Lincoln and the military, Lincoln and the Thirteenth 
Amendment, Lincoln and the immigrant, and Lincoln as hero. This 
volume in the series is presented as a groundbreaking environmental 


The Making of Pioneer Wisconsin: Voices of Early Settlers

Review of: "The Catholic Church in Southwest Iowa," by Steven M. Avella

Pfeifer, Michael J

Book Reviews and Notices      105 
analysis of objects, the book poses numerous questions that inflect the 
conversation around regional art with critical nuance: What role does 
arts education play in American society? Who gets to make art? What 
are its proper subjects, audiences, and purposes? Kroiz adds consid-
erably to our understanding of Regionalism by integrating the educa-
tional theories and teaching activities of Wood, Benton, and Curry with 
their visual production. In addition, she convincingly argues that the 
distinctive pedagogies of Regionalism’s most prominent practitioners 
developed in response to the shifting institutional terrain of the 1930s 
and 1940s. The public debates around art education emerged alongside 
several pioneering programs, namely the first joint studio art and art 
history department at University of Iowa, the first volunteer docent 
program at the Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, and the first 
artist-in-residence program at the University of Wisconsin. In the pro-
cess, Kroiz deftly constructs an enlarged cultural landscape through the 
intellectual histories of artists, curators, professors, and other profes-
sional associates with whom these artists engaged.  
 The challenge, for some readers, comes with the conclusion of the 
book, in which the author asserts that the historical debates of the 1930s 
and 1940s offer lessons for art educators working in the current political 
climate. Kroiz has done substantial reading and thinking about peda-
gogical theory and the purpose of higher education in the present; how-
ever, her musings belie the pedagogical purpose of her project. A sud-
den density of prose that is also thick with theoretical references departs 
sharply in tone from the preceding chapters and suggests that the book 
is directed primarily at fellow academics and not lay readers, after all. 
The author’s politics, which champion a progressive role for the hu-
manities in the preservation of democracy, may alienate readers of a 
conservative bent as well. Even so, Cultivating Citizens is a welcome con-
tribution for its thoughtful and thought-provoking reconsideration of 
American Regionalism. 
 
 
The Catholic Church in Southwest Iowa, by Steven M. Avella. Collegeville, 
MN: Liturgical Press, 2018. xxvi, 433 pp. Maps, tables, illustrations, 
notes, index. $24.95 hardcover, $14.99 Kindle edition. 
Reviewer Michael J. Pfeifer is professor of history at the John Jay College of 
Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New 
York. He is finishing a book on the social history of Catholicism across 
American regions for New York University Press. 
Near the beginning of his fine history of the Roman Catholic Diocese of 
Des Moines, Steven M. Avella, a historian and priest who teaches at 
106      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Marquette University, notes that Catholics have always been a distinct 
minority in southwest Iowa. Examining statistics regarding population 
and religious affiliation, Avella finds that “Catholics were never more 
than 14 percent of the total population. Where people did claim a reli-
gious affiliation, they were predominantly Methodists, Baptists, Lu-
therans, and occasionally Mormons” (xvi). Indeed, southwest Iowa is 
the least Catholic portion of Iowa. The Des Moines diocese was the last 
Iowa diocese to be created (1911), after the dioceses of Dubuque (1837), 
Davenport (1881), and Sioux City (1902), an order of diocesan formation 
that represents not only settlement patterns but also the preponderance 
of Catholics in the eastern and northern portions of the state. Yet Avella, 
the author of a number of books on Catholicism in the Midwest and 
West, has transcended the comparative dearth of Catholics in the state’s 
southwest quadrant to offer a compelling, richly analytical history of 
Catholic institutions in Des Moines, in its suburbs, and in rural areas to 
the south and west of Iowa’s capital. 
 Avella is particularly adept at reconstructing high church politics, 
notably the personalities and administrative styles of bishops and their 
interactions with clergy and with the Vatican, along with the political ma-
neuvering involved in their appointments and their key decisions while 
holding the office of bishop. His portrayals of the life and times of Bishops 
Austin Dowling (1912–1919), Thomas Drumm (1919–1933), and Maurice 
Dingman (1968–1986) are particularly striking. Indeed, the book seems to 
reach its high point in several chapters on the Dingman years, a pivotal 
era coinciding with the dramatic ecclesiological reforms of Vatican II and 
the social shifts of urban renewal in the 1960s and ’70s and the Farm Crisis 
of the 1980s as well as shrinking numbers of clergy and an increase in the 
Catholic population (particularly in the Des Moines metropolitan era). 
Avella offers a thoughtful, balanced portrayal of Dingman as a “people’s 
bishop” who felt compelled to speak out in favor of the Equal Rights 
Amendment and in support of farmers ravaged by shifts in the agricul-
tural economy and against nuclear proliferation, but also as a sometimes 
overly deliberative administrator who frustrated clergy who worked 
under him. Dingman’s years as bishop also coincided with Pope John 
Paul II’s October 4, 1979, visit to St. Patrick’s Church, Irish Settlement 
(one of the oldest parishes in the Des Moines diocese), and to Living 
History Farms, an event that drew a crowd estimated at nearly 340,000. 
Avella effectively reconstructs the papal visit as a key moment in the 
history of Catholicism in Iowa and the Midwest.  
 Avella nicely balances attention to church politics with the devel-
opment, growth, and sometimes eventual closing of Catholic institu-
tions such as parish churches, schools, hospitals, and retreat centers. 
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 


The Catholic Church in Southwest Iowa

Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela

A Special and Terrible Irony: Hunger on Iowa's Farms during the Agricultural Crisis of the 1980s

Review of: Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions along the Mississippi, by Jacob F. Lee

Morrissey, Robert Michael

394      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
After the famine, for example, Irish-born farm men and women who 
arrived from the East had made several stops before permanently set-
tling in midwestern states. Most had acquired American farming skills 
and accumulated a cash reserve to purchase land and support them-
selves until they could raise crops for livestock and sale. Walch’s study 
encourages us to ask whether this trend applied to Iowa as it did to 
Minnesota and Nebraska. Moreover, did the clergy primarily encour-
age immigrants from the eastern cities to settle in Iowa? Or did they 
seek those who arrived directly from Ireland? Why did the bishops 
forgo attempts at organized colonization after the famine? Was it a mat-
ter of insufficient land, money, or interest? Who came to Iowa in terms 
of gender and age? 
 Walch’s study encourages us to ask other questions. He notes that 
Irish women immigrants were opportunists, not victims. They had the 
physical and mental strength to leave Ireland forever and create a new 
life. Who were they? In the absence of letters and diaries, what can cen-
sus records tell us about them? The Sisters of Mercy made a major con-
tribution to health care, and the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin 
Mary operated a parish school in Dubuque. What can we learn about 
their work in terms of medical care and curriculum? Moreover, since 
the Irish primarily lived in Iowa’s cities, did they come to dominate city 
services and government? 
 Although never the predominant immigrant group in Iowa, the 
Irish, like others, saw Iowa as a place to begin anew. Their footprint 
remains on the state’s history from Loras College in Dubuque and St. 
Ambrose University in Davenport to abandoned railroad trestles and 
heritage farms. Walch’s brief survey of the Irish in Iowa is intended for 
the state’s history enthusiasts and readers of Irish heritage. The subject 
awaits other scholars to provide details and qualifications. 
 
 
Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions along 
the Mississippi, by Jacob F. Lee. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of 
Harvard University Press, 2019. 360 pp. 11 photos, 4 maps, notes, index. 
$39.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Robert Michael Morrissey is associate professor of history at the 
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Empire by Col-
laboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country (2015). 
Masters of the Middle Waters is a major contribution to the colonial and 
indigenous history of Iowa and the Midwest generally. The title is an 
adaptation of an ethnonym, Ni-u-kon-ska, by which Osage people once 
knew themselves, and which translated to “Children of the Middle 
Book Reviews and Notices      395 
Waters” (9). The premise of Lee’s book is that power in the Midwest 
rested on control of important waterways, in particular the Mississippi, 
Illinois, and Wabash Rivers. Indigenous groups—including especially 
the Illinois, Chickasaw, and Osage nations—as well as would-be Euro-
pean and eventually American imperialists built and maintained power 
in this region often by controlling important “choke points” on these 
rivers (9, 91, etc.). In a certain sense, this framework echoes W. J. Eccles’s 
long-ago insight about how New France was a “river empire.” But 
where Eccles centered on (and, Lee’s book leaves no doubt, exaggerated 
the significance of) the French, the most powerful actors in this book are 
Native people. Like Michael McDonnell’s recent Masters of Empire, which 
showed how the Odawa achieved critical imperial power by controlling 
the straights of Michilimackinac, Lee’s book tells a Native-centered story 
about how indigenous people controlled territory and built power on the 
riverways of the mid-continent, forcing Europeans to play by their rules 
or fail. 
 The “rules” by which indigenous people created and maintained 
their power, and to which Europeans had to adapt, were the rules of 
kinship and family. Lee’s great thematic innovation in this book is to 
see early midwestern history through the lens of kinship-based social 
networks, complex webs of relationships that were often much more 
important than strictly economic or military alliances, and in fact were 
the basis of them. In a brilliant analysis, Lee shows how Indians and 
Europeans relied on kinship as the most stable and mutually compre-
hensible space for building relationships. Through marriage, adoption, 
and other forms of fictive and real kinship, indigenous and European 
people created the truly important institutions of empire, the bedrock 
of political, economic, and military power.  
 The book opens with a tour-de-force of historical reconstruction 
of “ancient history” in the Mississippi Valley. Following in the path of 
Juliana Barr, Robbie Ethridge, and others, Lee begins his book by inte-
grating precolonial indigenous history (once problematically known as 
“pre-history”) into the main drama of the creation of Native power in 
the early Midwest. The resulting chapter, “In Cahokia’s Wake,” synthe-
sizes a dazzling array of archaeological and ethnohistorical literature on 
the indigenous past of nearly the entire upper Mississippi watershed. 
To this reader, the chapter is the most impressive example of its kind in 
all recent early American scholarship, a signal achievement especially 
given the extraordinary complexity of the post-Cahokia archaeological 
record in the Midwest. Suggesting that the roots of indigenous kinship-
based social networks were planted in this distant past, Lee emphasizes 
“the well-ordered social and political world” (47) that emerged in the 
Midwest after the fall of Cahokia, and that shaped all that was to come.  
396      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 French people arrived in this world in the late 1600s, but they 
hardly transformed it to any “imperial” purpose. Cross-cultural con-
versions happened in both directions, but most of the power continued 
to rest in long-standing indigenous kinship networks, particularly out-
side of tiny European beachheads like Kaskaskia. As Lee shows in an-
other one of the book’s impressively innovative chapters, French ambi-
tions to mediate between the Chickasaw, Illinois, and Miami—let alone 
to project imperial power outright—failed. Except in certain individual 
and short-term cases, French officials remained outside of these indige-
nous networks, which limited their power. When British officials and 
merchants tried to establish a foothold in the region, as did the Phila-
delphia-based merchant George Morgan, who arrived in the Illinois 
Country in the 1760s, they, too, largely failed to gain access to social net-
works that controlled trade in the midcontinent. More successful, as Lee 
shows in a chapter that might be of the most interest to readers of early 
Iowa history, were the kinship networks established by Osages and eth-
nically French families like the Chouteaus in Spanish-controlled upper 
Louisiana. In the final chapter, Lee narrates how American empire 
worked in what had become the region’s familiar patterns, gaining 
crucial control over riverways by extending kinship networks between 
prominent Anglo elites and Francophone upper Louisiana families, 
who now used their influence to help dispossess the indigenous peo-
ples with whom they had previously built their power.  
 This book takes its place among the best recent works in a recent 
outpouring of scholarship on early midwestern history. Lee’s original 
argument is backed by superb research, and his narrative style is en-
gaging. Those interested in the indigenous and colonial history of the 
Mississippi Valley will find this book indispensable.  
 
 
How the West Was Drawn: Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the 
Trans-Mississippi West, by David Bernstein. Borderlands and Trans-
cultural Studies Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. xvii, 
303 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $65 hardcover. 
Reviewer Rebekah M. K. Mergenthal is associate professor of history at 
Pacific Lutheran University. Her research explores the accommodations 
and exclusions among the variety of racial and ethnic groups in the lower 
Missouri River valley during the first half of the nineteenth century. 
In How the West Was Drawn, David Bernstein argues that “Indians were 
central to the cartographic creation of the trans-Mississippi United States” 
during the nineteenth century and thus must be put “squarely into stories 
of American state building” (3, 11). Building on insights from previous 
works of the “new Indian history,” including those of Kathleen DuVal, 


Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions along the Mississippi

Kimber, Marian Wilson

Musical Iowana: Iowa Women's Clubs and the Promotion of Iowa Composers

Review of: St. Louis and the Great War, by S. Patrick Allie

Van Ells, Mark D.

414      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Ultimately, Ramirez’s commentary leaves readers with two-dimen-
sional impressions of the Clouds. They shape-shift from victims to sub-
versives but are seldom presented as self-assured individuals who con-
trolled their destinies and were at peace with their choices. Standing Up 
to Colonial Power will not supplant Joel Pfister’s The Yale Indian: The 
Education of Henry Roe Cloud. On the other hand, Ramirez’s study may 
remind midwestern biographers of the pitfalls of present-mindedness 
and its tendency to distort historical subjects. For while Ramirez makes 
clear that she is “standing up to colonial power,” readers will feel less 
certain that her grandparents shared her passion.  
 
 
St. Louis and the Great War, by S. Patrick Allie. St. Louis: Missouri His-
torical Society Press, 2018. 191 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography. $35 
paperback. 
Reviewer Mark D. Van Ells is professor of history at Queensborough Com-
munity College of the City University of New York. He is the author of 
America and World War I: A Traveler’s Guide (2014). 
The recent World War I centennial inspired numerous commemora-
tions across America and the world. In St. Louis the Soldiers Memorial 
Military Museum developed an exhibition about the war years in that 
city. It also produced a companion book for the exhibit: St. Louis and the 
Great War by curator S. Patrick Allie.  
 St. Louis and the Great War encompasses the entirety of the American 
wartime experience, but from a midwestern perspective. Included are the 
origins of U.S. involvement, the Mexican border troubles, the fighting, 
the home front, and the postwar world. It is primarily a pictorial work, 
with striking color images of wartime artifacts ranging from political 
buttons to machine guns. Manuscripts and photographs are also fea-
tured. The text is brief but clearly written and generally accurate, 
although there are some interpretive issues, such as referring to Mexican 
revolutionaries by the simplistic and inflammatory term bandits (14). 
Adding a personal dimension are vignettes of individual St. Louisans, 
such as that of Dr. Esther Leonard, one of just seven female physicians 
to work for the army overseas. Allie goes beyond tales of heroism and 
patriotism to explore the darker aspects of the war, such as the ethnic 
and racial violence that was prevalent on the home front.  
 St. Louis and the Great War offers a broad and informative look at 
how one major midwestern city experienced “the war to end all wars.” 
As the museum exhibit does, artifacts and manuscripts tell the story in 
this book. It is a visual treat. 
 


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