The Annals of Iowa

Review of: "Conserving the Dust Bowl: The New Deal's Prairie States Forestry Project," by Sarah Thomas Karle and David Karle

Conard, Rebecca

98      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Conserving the Dust Bowl: The New Deal’s Prairie States Forestry Project, by 
Sarah Thomas Karle and David Karle. Reading the American Land-
scape Series. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. xi, 
160 pp. Maps, illustrations, tables, photo essay, notes, bibliography, in-
dex. $35.00 hardcover, pdf, and ebook. 
Reviewer Rebecca Conard is professor of history emeritus at Middle Ten-
nessee State University. Her books include Places of Quiet Beauty: Parks, Pre-
serves, and Environmentalism (1997). 
Conserving the Dust Bowl provides a succinct history of one of President 
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signature New Deal projects—the shelterbelt 
project to curb wind erosion on the Great Plains. The Prairie States For-
estry Project (PSFP), its official title, was an ambitious federal response 
to catastrophic drought and monstrous dust storms that brought agri-
culture to its knees in this region in the 1930s. Between 1935 and 1942, 
more than 200 million trees were planted, more or less strategically, in 
a corridor stretching from the Canadian border through eastern North 
and South Dakota, eastern and central Nebraska, central Kansas, central 
and western Oklahoma, and into the Texas panhandle.  
 In their first two chapters, the authors, drawing on the scholarship 
of Wilmon Droze, Donald Worster, and others, provide a good over-
view of nineteenth-century federal land policies and laws that enabled 
the development of agriculture in the ecologically fragile Great Plains 
and—once it became clear that rain would not, in fact, simply follow the 
plow—the two basic approaches devised to change the plains climate: 
rainmaking schemes and planting trees. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s triumph 
in the 1932 presidential election was a boon to the latter. FDR, who once 
self-identified as a tree farmer, threw the weight of his office behind soil 
conservation and forestry as instruments of resource stewardship (chap. 
3). Chapter 4 delves into the policy and politics of implementing the shel-
terbelt idea, which Roosevelt launched with an executive order in July 
1934, with funding to come from work relief appropriations. His execu-
tive order touched off a debate that had foresters arguing its scientific 
merits and politicians questioning whether the federal government 
should be spending emergency funds on a long-term project designed 
to help farmers in a sparsely settled part of the country. Ultimately, the 
project went forward, administered by the U.S. Forest Service until it 
was transferred to the Soil Conservation Service in 1942. For seven years, 
the Roosevelt Administration kept the project going with annual infu-
sions of work relief funds, ultimately totaling less than $14 million and 
coming mainly through the Works Progress Administration (chap. 6). 
This signature New Deal project, “never fully endorsed by Congress” 
(97) and initially projected to cost $75 million, was thus implemented 
on a shoestring budget.  
Book Reviews and Notices      99 
 What the authors do not adequately explain is how a project that 
came to be associated almost exclusively, in historical memory, with the 
venerated Civilian Conservation Corps, popularly known as “Roose-
velt’s Tree Army,” was, in reality, a very complicated undertaking. Brief 
passages devoted to funding, land tenure, management, and workers 
reveal that the PSFP employed a variety of specialists and workers, in-
cluding women, and relied on cooperative agreements with farmers to 
achieve what would have been impossible had the federal government 
tried to repurchase the land: establish “nearly 19,000 miles of dis-
connected shelterbelts on 33,000 separate farms” (141). The PSFP thus 
forged an important pathway into what we now call public-private 
partnerships, one that ultimately left farmers in control of the shelter-
belt’s long-term sustainability.  
 Deeper inquiry into how the PSFP worked on the ground would 
have been helpful, and would have been warranted considering the au-
thors’ purpose, which is finally revealed only in a concluding chapter 
devoted to the project’s legacy. In a nutshell, despite inconsistent and 
often competing agricultural policies that swing from promoting maxi-
mum production to encouraging resource conservation, plus wide-
spread use of irrigation technology that is slowly draining the Ogallala 
Aquifer, the PSFP, the authors argue, “represents a balance among 
long-term planning, far-reaching national policies, and a willingness to 
reconsider core values at the local level regarding the federal govern-
ment’s involvement on private land” (134). They see a “striking parallel” 
(139) between the looming effects of climate change on agriculture and 
the federal government’s response to the devastating environmental 
and economic effects of the great drought of the 1930s, positing that the 
PSFP is a cogent case study for climate adaptation. Although the authors 
might have developed their argument more coherently, Conserving the 
Dust Bowl is worth a look by those who continue the noble effort of culti-
vating a land ethic in the agricultural sector. A good bibliography awaits 
anyone who wants to dig deeper. 
 
 
From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and 
Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965, by Jon K. Lauck. Iowa and the Mid-
west Experience Series. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. xii, 
246 pp. Notes, index. $27.50 paperback. 
Reviewer C. Elizabeth Raymond holds the Grace A. Griffen Chair in His-
tory at the University of Nevada, Reno. She has written extensively about 
a sense of place in the Midwest and West. 
Midwesterners weary of eastern intellectual condescension, or of hear-
ing the charms of their subtle landscape casually dismissed as “flyover 


English

Conserving the Dust Bowl: The New Deal's Prairie States Forestry Project

Review of: "J. C. Penney: The Man, the Store, and American Agriculture," by David Del-bert Kruger

Friedricks, William

92      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
J. C. Penney: The Man, the Store, and American Agriculture, by David Del-
bert Kruger. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. xiv, 346 pp. 
Maps, illustrations, notes, index. $29.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer William Friedricks is professor of history and director of the Iowa 
History Center at Simpson College. He is the author of A Great State Fair: 
The Blue Ribbon Foundation and the Revival of the Iowa State Fair (2017); editor 
of the University of Iowa Press’s Iowa and the Midwest Experience book 
series; and author of biographies of Iowa businessmen F. M. Hubbell, John 
Ruan, and Bill Knapp. 
Business journalists have spilled a lot of ink about the demise of depart-
ment store J. C. Penney amid the retail revolution led by Amazon. In 
the wake of this negative news comes J. C. Penney: The Man, The Store, 
and American Agriculture, an interesting biography of the company 
founder. Readers should not judge the book by its title, however. Au-
thor David Delbert Kruger, an agricultural research and instruction 
librarian at the University of Wyoming, focuses primarily on Penney’s 
ties to, and then involvement in, agriculture; those seeking a detailed 
business biography of Penney the merchandiser and the store bearing 
his name will need to look elsewhere. 
 Penney was born into a large family in rural Missouri in the late 
nineteenth century. Tough agricultural times meant a hardscrabble ex-
istence on the Penney farm. Besides farming, Penney’s father also vol-
unteered as a Baptist pastor, and the young Penney was imbued from 
an early age with a mixture of Christian morality and the Protestant 
work ethic, emphasizing hard work, independence, frugality, and treat-
ing others fairly. 
 The adolescent embraced agrarian life but did not envision a future 
in farming. Penney’s father agreed, and seeing his son’s aptitude for 
sales and marketing, he arranged a job for him with a local merchant. 
After learning the basics of retailing, Penney headed to the American 
West in 1897. There he joined Thomas Callahan in Colorado in his 
Golden Rule chain store operation. With a business based on low mark-
ups, repeat business, and his core value of fair treatment of suppliers 
and consumers, Callahan found a ready market for his retail formula in 
small mining towns and agricultural communities in the region. Calla-
han taught Penney about mass merchandising and the idea of growing 
through employee partnerships. Penney rose rapidly and was soon of-
fered a generous deal. In 1902 he became the managing partner of the 
new Golden Rule store in Kemmerer, Wyoming. Under Penney’s savvy 
leadership, it was immediately successful. By 1904 he was overseeing 
three Golden Rule stores; three years later, he bought his partners out. 
Book Reviews and Notices      93 
 Penney expanded rapidly, employing the partnership strategy. By 
1913 there were 48 stores in eight western states. That year, the opera-
tion was renamed J. C. Penney and changed from a partnership to a 
corporation. Growth continued as the company went nationwide and 
eventually moved into larger cities and suburbs, but for years its bread 
and butter remained Main Street storefronts serving small rural com-
munities. There were nearly 70 J. C. Penney stores in Iowa as of 1933. 
 Curiously, it was shortly after Penney moved to New York City, 
where the firm’s corporate headquarters had been relocated, that his 
interest in agriculture was reignited. He purchased a large farm in 
Dutchess County, New York, but had no intention of being a gentleman 
farmer. He knew the difficulties faced by American farmers and now 
had the opportunity to better their situation. He bought the farm with 
his Golden Rule principle of “doing unto others” in mind and estab-
lished a Guernsey dairy cattle operation in an effort to improve the 
breed and help farmers generally. The effort was a success and became 
“a living blueprint of [his] future projects” (36).  
 Penney later returned to Missouri, buying his family’s former farm 
and others, where he started a purebred Aberdeen Angus beef herd and 
horse and mule business. But by far his most ambitious agricultural 
effort infused by his Golden Rule philosophy was Penney Farms, a 
120,000-acre model community he established in northeast Florida in 
the 1920s. There he planned to use the partnership strategy he had em-
ployed so successfully in building his department store. After going 
through a rigorous application process, selected farmers and their fam-
ilies were provided with a home on 20 acres rent-free for one year. They 
could gradually accrue an interest in the farm by raising crops and 
eventually purchase their own land. Besides carving out the town and 
building the infrastructure, Penney also established an agricultural 
research institute there to educate farmers. Unfortunately, he suffered 
major losses during the Great Depression and was forced to sell off most 
of the land making up the farms. However, many of the farmers who 
bought into the experimental community stayed, and Penney Farms re-
mains an incorporated town today. 
 As the foregoing suggests, this book offers a different perspective 
on mass merchandising mogul J. C. Penney. It is not a comprehensive 
biography, but those interested in learning about Penney’s abiding ties 
to American agriculture will want to read it. 
 
 


J. C. Penney: The Man, the Store, and American Agriculture

Review of: "Retired, Rehabbed, Reborn: The Adaptive Reuse of America’s Derelict Religious Buildings and Schools," by Robert A. Simons, Gary DeWine, and Larry Ledebur, with Laura A. Wertheimer

Mohr, Paula

112      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
supplements personal interviews and anecdotes with data to bolster his 
arguments throughout.  
 In the book’s stronger second half, Pennell breaks down the various 
challenges facing midwestern wineries. He identifies the usual suspects 
and market forces at work in all four of his target states. These include 
the three-tiered distribution system, labor issues, money/investment 
difficulties, problems at harvest or during production, quality control, 
and that one great big obstacle to success—reputation. At a time when 
affordable wines from the world’s leading regions are available, how 
do majority first- and second-generation grape growers/vintners dis-
tinguish themselves and make ends meet? For Pennell, it is the people 
and their dedication to the product and their patrons that will deter-
mine the future. There is a boom underway, but major challenges loom 
and Pennell is not naïve about this. 
 The diversity Pennell encountered at wineries in his target states 
suggests that the industry is bigger and more complex than one might 
assume. And this is without including the state of Michigan, which is 
arguably the biggest player in the region. Also, although Pennell does 
mention the work of university extension services, it would have been 
appropriate to include something about Elmer Swenson (formerly at 
the University of Minnesota), whom many recognize as the person re-
sponsible for hybridizing grapes able to both withstand midwestern 
winters and make good table wine. This and the majority of any other 
quibbles are minor. Ultimately, Pennell’s book presents a nuanced look 
at the industry. It is sure to interest professional and casual readers 
alike.  
 
 
Retired, Rehabbed, Reborn: The Adaptive Reuse of America’s Derelict Reli-
gious Buildings and Schools, by Robert A. Simons, Gary DeWine, and 
Larry Ledebur, with Laura A. Wertheimer. The Sacred Landmarks Se-
ries. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press in cooperation with Cleve-
land State University’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, 2017. 
ix, 382 pp. Maps, tables, charts, illustrations, notes, glossary, index. 
$45.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Paula Mohr is an architectural historian for the State Historical 
Society of Iowa. 
In the mid-1990s, the conversion of St. John the Baptist Church in Pitts-
burgh, Pennsylvania, into a microbrewery and restaurant was both 
praised and condemned (the beer is made where the altar was located). 
Historians and theologians held up that project and others like it as 
evidence of the commodification of “the sacred” in the postmodern era. 
Book Reviews and Notices      113 
(See, for example, Paula Kane’s article, “Is That a Beer Vat Under the 
Baldochino?”) For those of us who work in historic preservation, 
however, the potential loss of some of our most monumental and archi-
tecturally rich buildings in the wake of profound shifts in American 
religious life is also significant. Changing worship patterns and demo-
graphics as well as church scandals that strain budgets have led to hun-
dreds of buildings becoming vacant or being demolished each year. 
In the midst of this period of decline, the number of congregations in 
the United States actually rose in the last two decades of the twentieth 
century. Unfortunately, that does not necessarily mean good news for 
our old buildings. New congregations build new facilities and in other 
cases convert secular buildings into worship space, leaving old build-
ings empty and needing a new purpose. 
 Retired, Rehabbed, Reborn is intended to provide a road map for the 
conversion of these vacant historic buildings into new uses. Written pri-
marily for an audience of developers, architects, public officials, and 
building managers, the book defines the problem, explains how to as-
sess the feasibility of a project, and provides case examples. The primary 
authors are academics at Cleveland State University joined by an urban 
planner. Selected chapters are written by other design practitioners. 
While the focus is on religious buildings, the book also includes discus-
sion of the adaptive use of historic schools, likewise accompanied by 
case studies. 
 Historians and preservationists will find value in the authors’ chron-
icling of trends in Americans’ spiritual life that have led to this preser-
vation crisis. The real contribution of the book, however, is its pragmatic 
advice on how to determine the feasibility of a project, conduct market 
analysis, leverage financial incentives, and navigate the approval pro-
cess. A glossary of financial, development, and governmental terms and 
acronyms is a handy reference. The level of detail in the book is impres-
sive; a few examples are a checklist for holding a community meeting, 
sample pro formas, and a lengthy “developer’s toolbox” of financial 
sources.  
 The case studies are detailed as well. The authors note that they 
present projects of varying financial and preservation success. The con-
version of the Duetsche Evangelical Reform Church in Dayton, Ohio, 
into a rock-climbing gym will make some preservationists wince. St. 
Joseph Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas, turned into apartments, is one 
of the few case studies that used historic tax credits, ensuring that the 
work was done according to the Secretary of the Interior’s standards. 
 All told, this book is an important contribution to the fields of plan-
ning, preservation, and real estate development. It should be noted that 
114      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
much of the guidance and tools presented here can be applied to other 
historic buildings types. While outside the scope of this publication, it 
does highlight the need for guidance on the architectural challenges of 
converting these buildings. Large sanctuaries (and other similar assembly 
spaces) that give religious buildings their unique character are among 
the most difficult spaces to sensitively convert to a new use. One hopes 
that this book that deals so thoroughly with the pragmatic concerns of 
adaptive use will result in more successful projects and that those, in 
turn, can be the basis of a work that explores the challenges and solu-
tions from the preservation architect’s point of view. 


Retired, Rehabbed, Reborn: The Adaptive Reuse of America’s Derelict Reli-gious Buildings and Schools

Review of: "Between Gravity and What Cheer: Iowa Photographs" by Barry Phipp

Hokanson, Drake

Book Reviews and Notices      451 
day Buddhist mourning ritual and traditional Tibetan wedding rites. 
Although written clearly, the book should have included a timeline to 
help readers with the sequence of important family events. Gender 
roles receive cursory attention. Did Migmar’s cleaning job carry greater 
stigma because it was seen as women’s work? Did Tenzin, who had 
been employed longer than her husband, earn more money? If so, did 
that create tension in the household? Also, immigrants and refugees 
often live in communities with African Americans as neighbors: What 
interactions did the family have with blacks? 
 Uraneck, a childless divorcée, filled a void through her relationship 
with this refugee family. “Welcoming these wayfarers,” she writes, “re-
kindles our humanity and heals our broken parts.” These words echo 
the sentiment of numerous Iowans during the Vietnam War era. As 
they supported Governor Robert Ray’s resettlement of refugees, many 
Iowans healed from the wounds of the Vietnam War. Uraneck demon-
strates that when we close the door on refugees, it is not only the refu-
gees who lose out. 
 
 
Between Gravity and What Cheer: Iowa Photographs, by Barry Phipps. Iowa 
City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. iv, 104 pp. 105 color photographs. 
$29.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Drake Hokanson is an author, photographer, and independent 
scholar. He has written about and photographed Iowa extensively, including 
Reflecting a Prairie Town: A Year in Peterson (1994) and The Lincoln Highway: 
Main Street Across America (1988). 
Photographer Barry Phipps is a recent migrant to Iowa from Chicago. 
In his short years here he has brought us a crisp, colorful look at the 
wide reaches of the Hawkeye State. Phipps admits that he knew nothing 
about Iowa’s towns and landscape when he arrived. Between Gravity and 
What Cheer is his attempt to discover some essential visual facts about 
his adopted state. 
 Over four years he traveled border to border and shot hundreds of 
rolls of color film (yes, film). Phipps marked up his state map and headed 
to towns with interesting names (Diagonal, Gravity, What Cheer), even-
tually photographing in all 99 counties. Phipps draws on his training as 
a painter and responds to his subjects almost entirely visually—free of 
history, geography, or a sense of lives lived in a great open state. He 
was particularly drawn to small-town main streets, where he found old 
neon signs, red gas pumps, modern blue steel buildings, and a building 
front painted like the American flag, echoing Robert Frank’s The 
Americans. He brings us rural land as well—rivers, fields, wind turbines 
452      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
—but his eye seems less comfortable here. There are a few Iowa land-
marks, including the Stanton coffee pot water tower and the shrine near 
Buddy Holly’s crash site, plus a scattering of casual portraits, seemingly 
of folks who just happened by to chat with an itinerant camera man.  
 This is an enjoyable book, seeded with the occasional visual joke, 
providing a new and slightly askew view of Phipps’s now beloved state. 


Between Gravity and What Cheer: Iowa Photographs

Review of: "Taking Flight: A History of Birds and People in the Heart of America" by Michael Edmond

Vermaas, Lori

416 
Book Reviews and Notices 
Taking Flight: A History of Birds and People in the Heart of America, by 
Michael Edmonds. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018. 
293 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $28.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Lori Vermaas is a writer and independent American Studies 
scholar. She is the author of Sequoia: The Heralded Tree in American Art and 
Culture (2003). 
“We see only what we’re prepared to see” (6) when we look at birds, 
admits Michael Edmonds, a recreational birder and Wisconsin Historical 
Society staffer. Referring to his reliance on an iBird app while contem-
plating a tundra swan that’s alit on a distant shore, Edmonds argues in 
Taking Flight that our perceptions of avian creatures, whether mediated 
by high-tech references or other rhetorical influences, are the expressive 
result of the beliefs, desires, and values bequeathed by a diverse array of 
ethnically, culturally, and chronologically distinct ancestors. Curious to 
track humans’ regard for birds in the landscape and written record, Ed-
monds embarks on a congenial survey of “the changing ways in which 
people have thought about and acted toward birds over the last twelve 
thousand years” (2) in what today forms the American Midwest. 
 The meaning of birds for midwesterners ebbs and flows between two 
basic values: the spiritual/emotional and the scientific/utilitarian, or 
from “magic and mystery” to “reason and science” (116). By conducting 
a chronological tour of past communities and cultures, Edmonds fleshes 
out the themes. As revealed by their integration of bird symbols into 
earthworks, sculpture, pottery, ritualistic clothing (including head-
dresses), or utensils (especially the calumet, a sacred pipe), or to inspire 
sacred ceremonies, native societies like the Adena, Hopewell, Cahokia, 
Oneota, and those of various nineteenth-century American Indian tribes 
regarded birds as mystical beings, whose role was culturally crucial. 
Birds mediated the spirit and earth worlds, often as messengers, helping 
to ward off anomie. With Euro-American settlement, a more scientifically 
based worldview began to predominate, with the written record its main 
expressive form. Detailed descriptive reports of bird sightings, penned 
by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century explorers and soldiers, coupled 
with studies by nineteenth-century naturalists (such as John J. Audubon 
and Thomas Nuttall), privileged a cosmology in which birds served as 
wondrous evidence of a more systematic, organizing view of nature. 
Book Reviews and Notices      417 
 Yet “scientific knowledge didn’t immediately supplant faith, magic, 
and folklore” (160) among the general public. Many midwesterners, 
those whom Edmonds terms “ordinary” (151), retained mystical per-
ceptions of birds, which he makes clear by including copious examples 
of naming practices and folk beliefs distinctive to different midwestern 
regions and cultural groups, including African Americans. In his last 
chapter, he engagingly wraps up his tour with an examination of late 
nineteenth-century commercial bird hunter accounts and the subse-
quent extermination of many birds, such as the passenger pigeon. 
 Anthropological methods inspire Edmonds’s approach, yet Taking 
Flight triumphs as a descriptive history. Its lengthy timeline also pro-
vides an opportunity to consider the cultural meaning of birds in Amer-
ica, a subject ripe for further academic study. In fact, not many scholars 
have actually written about the meaning of birds in America in general, 
nor have they presented a book-length cultural study of a specific bird, 
though some, like Jennifer Price and, more recently, Jeff Karnicky, have 
offered chapters or a case-study approach. Mark Barrow’s examination 
of the ornithological profession and Scott Weidensaul’s account of bird 
watchers are helpful, yet the paucity of study on this general subject is 
astonishing, particularly since other nature topics, such as trees, have 
attracted more interdisciplinary analyses. Aren’t cultural historians yet 
prepared to identify and tackle subjects like the cardinal in America? 
The raven? The starling? The sandhill crane? The common sparrow—
or why not the eagle? These are subjects that chirp crisply for cultural 
scholarship. In the interim, Edmonds’s work provides a congenial over-
view, a gentle introduction for the nonspecialist, and preparation for 
those nature historians ready to take on the challenge of this yet novel 
subject of investigation.  
 
 
Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley, by Rob 
Harper. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. xvi, 250 
pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer William H. Bergmann is associate professor of history at Slippery 
Rock University. He is author of The American National State and the Early 
West (2012). 
Even though Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio 
Valley is a relatively short book (178 pages of text), Rob Harper offers his 
readers a masterfully researched, granular examination of how American 
expansionism played out in the Ohio valley from the end of the Seven 
Years’ War through the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. Building on the 
observation that the “escalation and de-escalation of hostilities correlates 


Taking Flight: A History of Birds and People in the Heart of America

Eikleberry, Sarah

"A Bond of Common Womanhood Deeper than All Racial Separateness": Race Relations at the Des Moines Young Women's Christian Association

Harris, Bernard F.

Chipping Away at the Bedrock of Racial Intolerance: Fort Des Moines and Black Officer Training, 1917-1918

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 77 no. 3 Summer 2018

Review of: "Coxey's Crusade for Jobs: Unemployment in the Gilded Age," by Jerry Prout

Schwantes, Carlos A.

Coxey's Crusade for Jobs: Unemployment in the Gilded Age

Review of: "Billy Sunday, The Baseball Evangelist: The Story of a Remarkable Life, 1862-1935 by Craig A. Bisho

Broadnax, David Sr.

324      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 These are minor points, however, in comparison to the accomplish-
ment that the book as a whole represents. Prairie Fires is a monument to 
Fraser’s years of working in the archives and thousands of hours thinking 
about how best to understand the sources. It will be the last word on 
Wilder’s and Lane’s lives for years to come. 
 
 
Billy Sunday, The Baseball Evangelist: The Story of a Remarkable Life, 1862–
1935, by Craig A. Bishop. Collierville, TN: InstantPublisher, 2016. 100 
pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography. $20.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer David Brodnax Sr. is professor of history at Trinity Christian Col-
lege. He is the author of “ ‘Will They Fight? Ask the Enemy’: Iowa’s African 
American Regiment in the Civil War” (Annals of Iowa, 2007). 
In the late 1800s and early 1900s Iowa produced what may have been a 
disproportionately large number of professional baseball participants, 
including seven Hall of Famers. Perhaps the most famous of them all 
achieved his greatest fame off the diamond. The life of Billy Sunday, 
who was born the orphaned son of a Civil War veteran and went from 
a middling major leaguer to America’s leading Christian evangelist, is 
the focus of this self-published book by ministry leader and politician 
Craig A. Bishop.  
 The book consists largely of photographs and quotes from news-
paper articles about Sunday’s travels and speeches interspersed with 
Bishop’s descriptions of his life based on newspaper articles and maga-
zine biographies. This is followed by information about Billy Sunday 
landmarks, a brief account of Billy Graham (who was converted by men 
who knew Sunday), and interviews of fellow evangelicals who knew 
Sunday or his associates or whose deceased friends and family mem-
bers did. 
 Although Bishop states that his goal is to “tell the story of a man 
who had a profound influence in our life and culture in America,” he 
also injects his religious and political viewpoints into the past world in 
which Sunday lived (5). All historical scholarship reflects the values of 
its authors, but this is usually implicit. Bishop, on the other hand, asserts 
that theological liberals issued “false teachings” and that “Roosevelt’s 
views of a large federal government were dangerous, socialist and anti-
American” (61–62). He also theorizes that after Emma Goldman gave an 
anti-Sunday speech, “perhaps God had an answer” because the build-
ing in which she spoke caught fire but collapsed before the homes of 
nearby Christians were damaged. Bishop concludes, “Would this be a 
miracle from God? Coincidence?” (52–53). He is certainly entitled to 
these beliefs, but his explicit mention of them further highlights the 
Book Reviews and Notices       325 
differences between his work and conventional historical analysis. He 
briefly cites Roger Bruns’s biography but not William G. McLoughlin’s 
classic study or more recent works by Robert Martin and Margaret 
Bendroth. This newer scholarship has benefited from access to Sunday 
family papers, but Bishop instead cites a Wikipedia article about Sun-
day’s wife. He does not contextualize Billy Sunday within broader social 
changes such as urbanization, twentieth-century evangelical culture, or 
(despite the book’s title and cover photo of Sunday in his baseball uni-
form) the creation of sports celebrity culture. The citations are sparse 
and somewhat disorganized (one footnote number is used twice), some 
of the items listed in the bibliography are not in the citations, and there 
are spelling and grammatical errors. 
 Those interested in facts, newspaper quotes, and photographs 
about the most famous Iowan of the early 1900s will find them in The 
Baseball Evangelist. The book may also be appreciated by those who 
share the author’s values and would use Billy Sunday’s life as a medi-
tation on those values. Those who desire a more scholarly analysis or 
just a thorough and meticulous description, on the other hand, should 
look to one of the other works mentioned in this review. 
  
 
Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, by Kenneth Whyte. 
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. xvii, 728 pp. Illustrations, notes, bib-
liography, index. $35.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Kendrick A. Clements is Distinguished Professor of History 
emeritus at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He is the author of 
The Life of Herbert Hoover: Imperfect Visionary, 1918–1928 (2010). 
Kenneth Whyte’s Hoover is a thoughtful, well-researched, and well-
written one-volume biography intended especially for the general 
reader. If it should miraculously emerge as the best seller it deserves to 
be, it could transform the reputation of the 31st president. 
 Written in brisk, vigorous language enlivened with flashes of wit, 
Hoover is downright fun to read. Colorful biographical sketches intro-
duce major figures, and concise background summaries of important 
issues make following the story easy. Whyte is skillful in presenting 
both sides of issues fully and impartially, making it easy to understand 
why there was disagreement. Although the author is clearly sympa-
thetic to Hoover’s critique of big government, this is as near an impar-
tial biography of this controversial figure as is likely to be written. And 
interestingly, impartiality serves Hoover well. Few if any other Ameri-
cans can match his remarkable contributions to the nation and the 
world over a half-century of public service. 


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