The Annals of Iowa

Review of: "Lincoln's Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America," by Brian McGinty

Bergman, Marvin

Lincoln's Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America

Review of: "The Good Governor: Robert Ray and the Indochinese Refugees of Iowa," by Matthew R. Walsh

Hillmer, Paul

Book Reviews and Notices      105 
 According to Shelton, this shift in sympathies also had racial and 
gendered dynamics. As employers fled urban centers, the most success-
ful white workers attempted to follow them, often leaving behind fi-
nancially struggling cities dominated by impoverished and excluded 
people of color. As teachers—women especially—turned to unioniza-
tion for professional status and dignity in their workplaces, they came 
into conflict with people of color, who argued for greater control over 
the apparatus of the state (including schools) in the name of community 
empowerment. 
 These conflicts further alienated members of minority communities 
from unionism and labor liberalism and empowered conservative crit-
ics who saw both public employees and nonwhite urban “rioters” as 
having “flouted the law and siphoned off the resources of hardworking 
Americans” (2). It was these battles over 1970s urban teacher strikes, 
Shelton argues, that forged a producerist rhetoric in which owners and 
employees of private enterprise were “makers” in conflict with the 
unproductive “takers” of the urban (often non-white) poor and public 
employees. 
 Overall, Shelton makes a compelling case for the importance of 
teacher militancy in the debates over urban public policy during the 
1970s. As he readily admits, however, the book, like any ambitious 
national study, leaves as many questions as it answers. What role did 
strikes by other public-sector workers play in this process? How did the 
provisions of particular laws (for example, arbitration) shape teachers’ 
risky decisions to engage in illegal strikes? If the teacher strikes of the 
1970s played such an important role in undermining labor liberalism, 
why did the coordinated backlash against public-sector unionism at the 
state level begin in the 2010s rather than the 1980s? And, of particular 
interest to Iowans, how did states without large urban centers fit into 
this framework? Such questions are to Shelton’s credit, however, as 
they reveal the groundwork his expansive vision has laid for other 
scholars seeking the roots of neoliberalism in the United States. 
 
 
The Good Governor: Robert Ray and the Indochinese Refugees of Iowa, by 
Matthew R. Walsh. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2017. vii, 
233 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Paul Hillmer is dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sci-
ences at Concordia University, St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of A 
People’s History of the Hmong (2010). 
Thanks to Matthew Walsh, I now see the connection between the gu-
bernatorial candidate whose hand I shook in 1968 at the Clay County 
106      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Fair (still on crutches after his April plane crash) and the people from 
Laos who moved in across the street from our home in Spencer in the 
mid-1970s. “From the close of the Vietnam War until 2010,” writes 
Walsh, “Iowa alone resettled refugees as a state-run voluntary agency” 
(5). Elsewhere, the U.S. State Department contracted with voluntary 
agencies (VOLAGs) like Catholic Charities or Lutheran Social Services 
to resettle refugees.  
 Walsh first focuses on the ethnic Tai Dam, beginning with a fine, 
necessarily brief introduction to their history and beliefs and the place 
they occupied during the two phases of the Vietnam War. These were 
not backward or hapless victims but “shrewd negotiators who man-
aged centuries of survival among more powerful neighbors” (7). De-
siring to be resettled together in one place, they wrote letters to 30 
American governors. Only one, Iowa’s Robert Ray, replied. He requested 
and received a federal exemption from the State Department rule that 
required refugees to be scattered across the country. Resettling one 
linguistic/cultural group, he reasoned, would make assimilation and 
employment simpler and the state’s burden lighter. This emphasis on 
“cluster resettlement,” along with a “work first” philosophy intended 
to keep refugees off welfare and enlistment of local sponsors responsible 
for refugees’ success, were the program’s three cornerstones. “Staying 
off cash assistance represented a form of assimilation to Iowa culture 
and work values” (66).  
 There were bumps along the way. The U.S. Department of Health, 
Education, and Welfare found that families in Ray’s program refused 
welfare (despite qualifying for it), fearing that acceptance would jeop-
ardize relatives’ chances for resettlement. That “work first” approach em-
barrassed ethnic Kinh refugees from Vietnam (settled by the Catholic 
church), who received welfare at higher rates. Male-dominated Tai Dam 
culture interacted problematically with America’s more “liberated” 
social norms and with Job Service of Iowa’s director, Colleen Shearer 
(whose criticism of Kinh welfare rates opened the Governor’s Task 
Force to charges of favoritism). Tensions between Tai Dam and African 
Americans emerged as the former associated blacks with French mer-
cenaries in Southeast Asia, and African Americans who helped resettle 
Tai Dam felt that their charges were both ungrateful and racist. Even so, 
problems were taken seriously and addressed effectively, making the 
Iowa program a model both nationally and internationally.  
 After discussing the Tai Dam’s unique contributions to their own 
successful resettlement, Walsh discusses the dual crises of the Vietnam-
ese “boat people” and the Khmer refugees who fled the Killing Fields 
of Cambodia. These events may be more familiar to general readers, but 
Book Reviews and Notices      107 
Walsh provides historical context before detailing Ray’s role in helping 
both populations. In the case of the “boat people,” Ray was moved by 
Ed Bradley’s 60 Minutes television report. Ray and five other governors 
visited Khmer camps in October 1979. On the day they visited Sa Khaeo, 
50 people died (135). 
 Governor Ray was Christian enough to have compassion for refu-
gee populations, conservative enough (by 1970s standards) to be strate-
gic about resettling them in a fashion palatable to Iowans, and savvy 
enough to anticipate and blunt criticism. Ray’s Iowa SHARES (Sends 
Help to Aid Refugees and End Starvation) program, launched over the 
1979 Thanksgiving weekend, invited Iowans to buy a “share” in hu-
manity for $2.20, the price of a bushel of corn. Ray’s goal of $115,000 
was nearly quadrupled, a sign of his moral and political leadership. By 
1980, Ray was playing a crucial role in the creation of the Refugee Act 
of 1980, which guaranteed three years of federal support to states for 
the refugees they welcomed. 
 Walsh dedicates chapters to the perspectives of refugees and the 
sponsors who worked and lived alongside them. These chapters fit very 
comfortably in the broader literature of immigration and Southeast 
Asian refugee history. Shedding little new thematic light for scholars, 
they are nonetheless indispensable in the telling of this specific story. 
Walsh’s book is as much about refugee agency as it is about Ray’s leader-
ship; the short shrift given those accounts in this review does not reflect 
their importance to our understanding of this subject. 
 Weaving oral history with state records and broader historical lit-
erature into a first-rate yet accessible, short narrative, Matthew Walsh 
effectively makes the case for Robert Ray’s greatness and Iowa’s unique 
role in the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees. 
 
 
A Great State Fair: The Blue Ribbon Foundation and the Revival of the Iowa 
State Fair, by William B. Friedricks. Des Moines: Business Publications 
Corporation, 2017. x, 178 pp. Illustrations, note on sources, notes, index. 
$20.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Michael Kramme is professor emeritus of theater at Culver Stock-
ton College in Canton, Missouri. His most recent books are The Governors 
of Iowa, The Schaffner Players, and Images of America: Washington, Iowa. 
William B. Friedricks begins his book by acknowledging several recent 
books about the Iowa State Fair, explaining that his focus is on the story 
of the Iowa State Fair Blue Ribbon Foundation. He begins by giving a 
brief history of the fair. The first two fairs were held in Fairfield. Later 
fairs were held in Muscatine, Oskaloosa, Iowa City, Dubuque, Burling- 


English

The Good Governor: Robert Ray and the Indochinese Refugees of Iowa

Review of: "White Birch, Red Hawthorn: A Memoir," by Nora Murphy

Olson, Greg

Book Reviews and Notices      109 
White Birch, Red Hawthorn: A Memoir, by Nora Murphy. Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 2017. xvi, 179 pp. Illustration, re-
sources and further reading. $17.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Greg Olson is curator of exhibits and special projects at the Mis-
souri State Archives. He is the author of several articles and books on the 
Ioways, including Ioway Life: Reservation and Reform, 1837–1860 (2016). 
While growing up in a middle-class neighborhood in Minneapolis, 
Nora Murphy never questioned the comfort of the Victorian houses on 
the street where she lived or the belief that everything she could see 
from a nearby hilltop naturally belonged to her, her family, and other 
white people like her. However, Murphy’s complacency about her 
place in America slowly began to be challenged when, as an adult, she 
started working at the Minneapolis American Indian Center. There, 
Murphy’s Native colleagues invited her to become part of a circle that 
showed her the world from a new perspective and led her to question 
many of the conventions she had grown up with. She was forced to con-
sider the extent of her white privilege—a phrase Murphy avoids—and 
to wrestle with “the embarrassing but fuzzy recognition that non-
Natives have some unpaid debt to Native Americans” (10). This reali-
zation sent Murphy on a journey to “uncover a different way of under-
standing what it means to be an American in this land” (10). 
 White Birch, Red Hawthorn is Murphy’s frank account of that voyage. 
In some instances, her journey involved physical travel. She visited her 
family’s homestead in northern Minnesota and her ancestral home in 
North Tipperary, Ireland. In part, her travels helped satisfy her longing 
to reconnect with her past and with the earth. “The conqueror’s thirst,” 
Murphy writes, is “to connect, to belong” (55). 
 The most difficult and painful segment of Murphy’s journey in-
volved self-reflection. She shows rare courage in her willingness to ques-
tion her assumptions and to examine the process by which she and 
those like her have labored to erase the lives of Native people who had 
lived on the land before her family arrived. This exploration takes Mur-
phy back to her ancestors, who, as immigrants, worked hard to put their 
own heritage and their connection to nature behind them in order to 
assimilate. Along the way, Murphy revisits stories she read as a child 
about Paul Bunyan, who cleared the north woods in order to rid it of its 
wildness, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose family took the newly do-
mesticated land as their own without considering the Native people 
who had called it home for centuries. 
 This, in turn, causes Murphy to consider the process by which the 
U.S. government removed Native people from their land in her home 
110      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
state. She examines the Doctrine of Discovery, the 1819 Indian Civiliza-
tion Act, and forced assimilation and lists the more than 40 treaties that 
took place in Minnesota alone between 1805 and 1847. 
 When a Native elder asked Murphy, “When you find the truth, 
what are you going to do with it?” (138), she realized that she was on a 
journey with no end. She understood that she was obliged to tell the 
true story of how the United States was settled in hopes that it would 
help heal the scars of the land and the people. She also concluded that 
she must learn to listen to those who were not like her if she was going 
to become a more effective ally.  
 Murphy has engaged in a process of self-examination that few white 
people seem willing to undertake in public. She acknowledges her fears 
and the shame she felt over her privilege and articulates her struggle 
with clarity. White Birch, Red Hawthorn is a work of great insight and 
bravery that manages to challenge readers’ beliefs without becoming 
strident or arrogant. No matter where we live on this continent, this 
work serves as a valuable guide for all who want to understand the pro-
cess by which our cities, towns, and houses were built on top of some-
one else’s home.  
 
 
A Spectrum of Faith: Religions of the World in America’s Heartland, edited 
by Timothy Knepper, photography by Bob Blanshard. Des Moines: 
Drake Community Press, 2017. ix, 126 pp. Full-color photographs. 
$30.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Bill R. Douglas lives and writes in Des Moines. His article on Des 
Moines’s Calvary Baptist Church in the 1920s appeared in the Summer 
2017 issue of Baptist History & Heritage. 
This lavishly illustrated book is the result of sending Drake University 
students to 15 Des Moines religious communities: three of the four Jewish 
congregations (no Chabad), two Sikh groups, three Muslim mosques 
(Bosnian, primarily Arab, and international), two Buddhist and two 
Hindu temples (including an ethnically Nepali Bhutanese refugee com-
munity), and three Christian churches (Orthodox, Catholic, and Prot-
estant but no Pentecostal). 
 With subsections on history, identity, space, and practice, the proj-
ect should be seen as an exercise in lived religion, as the introduction 
makes clear. The book also succeeds in its aim of uncovering the spec-
tacular contemporary diversity of religious practice in one midwestern 
city. Concentrating on practice leaves at least one major question unre-
solved: why the degree of diversity within religions in Des Moines? Of 


White Birch, Red Hawthorn: A Memoir

Review of: "Iowa Barns Yesterday and Today, Including Silos, Corncribs, Homes, and Businesses" by Karlene Kinger

McMurry, Sally

Book Reviews and Notices      441 
the Midwest (including a handful of references to Iowa) that should 
provide a good starting point for regionally focused studies.  
 Ku Klux Kulture is an outstanding book that will appeal to lay-
persons and scholars alike. It deserves a wide readership.  
 
 
Iowa Barns Yesterday and Today, Including Silos, Corncribs, Homes, and Busi-
nesses, by Karlene Kingery. Omaha: Barnhart Press, 2017. 294 pp. Color 
photographs, map, glossary, index. $29.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Sally McMurry is professor emerita of history at Penn State Uni-
versity. She is the author of Pennsylvania Farming: A History in Landscapes 
(2017). 
Iowa Barns represents a gargantuan labor of love stretching back to the 
1970s, when the author, Karlene Kingery, received a grant to photo-
graph barns and create a presentation that would help promote public 
appreciation of Iowa’s farming heritage. Kingery completed her photo 
tour, created her presentation, and then embarked on a five-year odys-
sey during which she gave hundreds of slide shows to audiences 
throughout the state. Several decades later she returned to the project 
and rededicated herself to barn documentation. This book is the result. 
 The book consists of hundreds of full-color barn photographs, ac-
companied by individual barn biographies that explain how and when 
each barn was built, by whom, and for what purpose. Each entry also 
includes an address. Sometimes period photos are included, or photos 
of the barn in, for example, 1979 and 2013. The photos are grouped into 
15 thematic sections. Some sections are chronological (“19th Century,” 
“Into the 20th Century”) while others focus on materials (“Brick and 
Limestone”), form (“Unique Shapes”); still others refer to uses (“Live-
stock at Home”) or themes (“Institutions and Organizations”). Readers 
unfamiliar with architectural terms will find the glossary helpful. 
Although the subtitle mentions “silos, corncribs, homes and businesses,” 
these features together account for fewer than 20 pages. 
 The barns depicted represent a remarkable range of types and forms, 
most dating to the pre–World War II era. We can recognize feeder barns 
and hay barns, for example. Wisconsin-style dairy barns and barns built 
from catalog designs are also plentiful. There are also quite a few 
unique or unusual examples, such as circular barns and European-style 
house barns. Barns in Plain Sect and other communitarian societies are 
included, although it is not always clear that they are radically different 
from mainstream barns to the same extent that their creators diverged 
from mainstream practices in other respects. There is a section on re-
purposed barns and one on barns with unusual painted decorations. 
442      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 The photos are high in quality, and the documentation for the indi-
vidual barns is impressive. In many cases the author was able to deter-
mine not only the ownership history but also how the barns were used 
and how their uses changed over time. For example, she notes specifi-
cally how the Ink barn interior (Linn County) was organized and even 
which doors horses and cattle used. She includes colorful details that 
enliven the work: a local newspaper notice that helpers at an 1892 barn 
raising were afterward treated to cigars and lemonade; a story of how 
a German immigrant came to Iowa because he had heard of topsoil 15 
feet deep.  
 Although the author takes care to relate each barn to agricultural 
activities on its individual farm, there is only the most general sense of 
how these barns collectively might represent any larger patterns in 
Iowa’s agricultural past, whether regional or temporal. The approach is 
more that of a collector than an analyst. We don’t learn, for instance, 
how the different barns might relate to the changes Alan Bogue de-
scribed long ago in his classic From Prairie to Corn Belt, or indeed to work 
by Deborah Fink (Open Country Iowa) or Sonya Salamon (Prairie Patri-
mony). Iowa Barns can complement but not replace works such as Allen 
Noble and Hubert Wilhelm’s Barns of the Midwest that do provide that 
broader interpretive context.  
 Iowa Barns is a worthy addition to a genre that will help to docu-
ment and promote evidence of a rapidly disappearing agricultural past. 
 
 
The Mistaken History of the Korean War: What We Got Wrong Then and Now, 
by Paul M. Edwards. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing, 2018. xi, 186 
pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Allison McNeese is assistant professor of history at Mount Mercy 
University. Her academic interests include colonial American history, 
twentieth-century American history, Latin American history, and the his-
tory of Iowa, with special emphasis on race and gender issues. 
Some 70,000 Iowans, or close to 3 percent of the state’s population in 1950, 
served in the Korean War. Of those, 528 died in the conflict, and nearly 
half of those who served were still living as of 2012, according to the 
Iowa National Guard. A monument honoring Iowa’s veterans of the 
Korean conflict was dedicated in 1989, and recently survivors have been 
recognized by the opening of new museum exhibits (such as in Water-
loo) and the awarding of long-postponed medals.  
 Although the Korean conflict is often referred to as the “Forgotten 
War” in American culture, a sizable number of memoirs, histories, and 


Iowa Barns Yesterday and Today, Including Silos, Corncribs, Homes, and Businesses

Review of: "Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley," by Rob Harpe

Bergmann, William H.

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 
418      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
closely with the ever-shifting influence of governments,” he argues that 
“unstable and ineffectual governments exerted so much influence be-
cause Indians and colonists sought to use government resources for their 
own ends” (5). Over the period, spiraling “devastation deepened depend-
ence on government patronage and bolstered the influence of leaders 
who could obtain it,” contributing to the “emerging power of a colonial 
state” (6).  
 Harper divides his book into six chapters that capture tidal flows of 
violence. Beginning in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, he por-
trays a tenuous peace that took root as Indians and colonists contained 
hostilities. Despite settlers’ treaty violations, a mix of informal agree-
ments and trading relationships limited internecine violence. Colonists 
and Indians alike sought to cement and augment their influence by 
cultivating patronage among colonial and British imperial agents. 
Throughout the book, Harper’s acute focus on personal relationships in 
the Ohio valley, in this instance the Seneca town of Two Creeks and 
the settler community on the Monongahela River tributary, Red Creek, 
makes his narrative and writing compelling. Moreover, Harper deepens 
and makes more intimate motives and threads of influence that shaped 
moments of peace and violence. 
 Violence escalated quickly after 1773 when Virginian governor 
John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, aggressively sought to secure the upper 
Ohio valley for his colony, funneling patronage opportunities, payment 
(real and promises of), and tools of war into the region, prompting 
Pennsylvania authorities to respond in kind. Local feuds centered in 
Pittsburgh erupted as coalitions formed along vying patronage lines, 
and Dunmore used his advantage to orchestrate a campaign against 
Indians, which fell apart after the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774. An 
uncertain peace largely returned the following year as British authority 
waned and resources from the east dried up. Despite intermittent vio-
lence, opportunities for peace remained through the early years of the 
Revolutionary War because key Indian leaders as diverse as Guyasuta 
(Seneca), the Hardman (Shawnee), and White Eyes (Delaware) pursued 
avenues to peace and patronage even as governments bungled efforts 
to influence the region’s people.  
 Not until the new state governments of Pennsylvania and Virginia, 
as well as the Confederation government and the British Empire, con-
centrated more of their attention and resources on the region in the 
1780s did a “state-sponsored frontier war” of attrition emerge (122). The 
end of the revolution renewed a period of tenuous peace as resources 
of war again diminished and a new American federal government 
remained weak. Resolution of Pennsylvania and Virginia’s borders 
Book Reviews and Notices      419 
clarified lines of political authority, and “the flimsy frontier state began 
to gain traction” (157). Yet violence built through the 1780s as Virginia 
encouraged settlement in Kentucky and the Confederation Congress 
destabilized the region through policy and ineptitude. Harper con-
cludes his study with the new government under the Constitution us-
ing its fiscal powers to fund military campaigns that seemed to certify 
its control of the region. Neglected in the final chapter is the influence 
of state building in Canada because Harper treats the “composite British 
empire” as having “collapsed” in 1776 rather than continuing to evolve 
(176). 
 To be clear, there is not much successful state building in this book. 
Many westerners sought “the backing of an effective state,” but efforts 
to extend the power of states led to outcomes that “escaped the control” 
of state officials as westerners of all stripes “twisted official policies to 
serve their own ends” (127, 141, 146). The most successful state-building 
efforts seemingly came both with institutional developments that are 
not a part of this study and only briefly summarized (156–57) and after 
ratification of the Constitution, which is given perfunctory treatment 
in the closing pages of the final chapter. In some respects, this fits with 
Harper’s exploration of state building from below, how governments 
“cast a long shadow” even when they might appear to be “failed state[s]” 
(146, 178). But it’s a bit unsatisfying because it falls short of bridging the 
gap between state-building failures and successes. Notwithstanding this 
critique, Harper’s study is an admirable contribution to the historiog-
raphy of American expansionism and early state building in the Ohio 
valley. 
 
 
Creating the Land of Lincoln: The History and Constitutions of Illinois, 1778–
1870, by Frank Cicero Jr. Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois 
Press, 2018. xv, 270 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 
$29.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Todd E. Pettys holds the H. Blair and Joan V. White Chair in Civil 
Litigation at the University of Iowa College of Law. He is the author of The 
Iowa State Constitution (2018). 
Casting about for a new writing project, Frank Cicero Jr.—a partner at 
the Kirkland & Ellis law firm in Chicago—stumbled across a sentence 
in a century-old book about the Illinois and Michigan Canal. The sen-
tence noted that, when seeking admission to the Union in 1818, Illinois 
initially was slated to have a northern boundary falling far south of the 
future Chicago. With further investigation, Cicero learned that one man 


Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley

Review of: ""The Infernal War": The Civil War Letters of William and Jane Standard" edited by Timothy Mason Robert

Anderson, J.L.

"The Infernal War": The Civil War Letters of William and Jane Standard

Review of: "From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965," by Jon K. Lauck

Raymond, C. Elizabeth

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 
100      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
country” by Californians who have never actually seen it, will find 
much to cheer about in Jon Lauck’s latest book. From Warm Center to 
Ragged Edge is a fervent regional call-to-arms disguised as a modest 
history of the Midwest’s brief, late nineteenth-century ascendancy in 
American politics and culture and its subsequent decline into margin-
ality during the years highlighted in the subtitle.  
 Lauck makes his argument in three succinct chapters, along with 
an introduction and conclusion. The entire text takes up less than half 
the volume, the bulk of which is devoted to footnotes (of which more 
later). His sympathies are never in doubt. From the beginning, Lauck 
announces that his “primary purpose” is “to bolster the new and con-
certed search for the history of the lost region at the heart of our nation 
by studying what went wrong” (3). In that quest he is a clear, consistent, 
and unabashed booster of the region he defines loosely as “the rolling 
green expanse between the rivers Ohio and Missouri” (2).  
 Readers looking for a nuanced assessment of that expansive region 
will be disappointed. Jon Lauck takes the Midwest as a given, assuming 
that his readers will recognize it as their own home territory. Rather 
than examining its origins or history, he sets out to explain why such 
“vast mental and physical territories . . . have been neglected and mar-
ginalized” in contemporary scholarship (7). Although his context is 
nominally global, with allusions to both Scotland and Catalonia justify-
ing his contention that “the regionalist impulse persists” (6), his book 
focuses resolutely on the American Midwest as “the warm center of the 
world” (108). His perspective on it is predominantly, though not exclu-
sively, scholarly. In this work Lauck apprehends the Midwest through 
its literature and its historical scholarship. He writes clearly about both, 
with a fluency based on extended study of his subject. 
 From Warm Center to Ragged Edge recounts the origin and persis-
tence of the familiar “revolt from the village” characterization of mid-
western writing. The trouble began in 1921 with the publication of an 
essay by Columbia University professor Carl Van Doren in The Nation. 
Van Doren suggested that a bold new crop of contemporary American 
novelists like Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair 
Lewis were unified in their liberating rebellion against the provincialism 
of the interior American villages from which they came. Lauck explains 
how Van Doren’s provocative thesis was taken up and repeated verbatim 
by subsequent literary critics and scholars, all of whom ignored other, 
more nuanced regional writers, and even the nonconforming works of 
the writers initially championed by Van Doren. 
 The damage to midwestern regional reputation was done, how-
ever. Regardless of the determined efforts of regionalist writers like 
Book Reviews and Notices      101 
Frederick Manfred, Ruth Suckow, and Herbert Quick, or publishers 
such as John T. Frederick in The Midland, the region was visible to eastern 
intellectuals only as a backwater. In a prevailing postwar intellectual 
climate of cosmopolitan internationalism, the frequently agricultural 
and small-town subject matter of midwestern writers was easily dis-
missed by modern critics as nostalgic and ultimately inconsequential. 
The difficulties were compounded by concurrent trends in the history 
profession, as midwestern universities enlarged their faculties to en-
compass new areas of study such as Russian history and international 
affairs. Midwestern history did not disappear, but it was no longer so 
prominent or so exclusive a focus. Previously, the history of the Mid-
west had been seen as the history of all America, as illustrated by Fred-
erick Jackson Turner in his famous 1893 essay, “The Significance of the 
Frontier in American History.” By the 1940s, however, that was no longer 
the case. The unfortunate association of Senator Joseph McCarthy with 
Wisconsin further solidified the region’s national reputation as a domain 
of ignorance and prejudice. In that context, the controversial trans-
formation in 1964 of the venerable Mississippi Valley History Review into 
the Journal of American History was emblematic of a broad cultural turn 
away from the American Midwest. 
 In his conclusion Lauck argues for a view of midwestern regionalism 
that does not simply equate it with the 1920s village revolt and thereby 
confine it to the irrelevant past. Instead, he seeks a vibrant, revived re-
gional study that would amplify Hispanic and African American voices 
and grapple with twentieth-century regional transformations in agri-
culture, population distribution, and economy. A culture that obsessively 
seeks out local food, he seems to suggest, might profitably also learn to 
appreciate other, even more consequential forms of regional variation.  
 Lauck is too modest to inform readers that he himself is at the heart 
of just such an effort. Instrumental in the formation of the Midwestern 
History Association in 2014, he has almost singlehandedly rejuvenated 
scholarly and public attention to the region by means of the new organ-
ization and its two associated journals: Middle West Review (where Lauck 
serves as a member of the editorial board,) and Studies in Midwestern 
History (where he is the general editor). In addition, Lauck has pub-
lished four other books on various aspects of midwestern history and 
politics and is editor or coeditor of numerous others. His immersion in 
all aspects of contemporary midwestern regional study makes the foot-
notes of From Warm Center to Ragged Edge a particular treasure trove. 
Longer than the actual text, they are a tour de force for any scholar or 
general reader interested in aspects of midwestern writing or history 
scholarship. Lauck has read broadly and generously, and he shares his 
102      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
knowledge joyfully. These are not the pedantic notes of a critic, but the 
enthusiastic comments of a supportive scholar. No one with interest in 
the region should skip his footnotes. They testify volubly to the fact that 
descriptive writing and scholarly analysis have, in fact, continued in 
and about the Midwest even as it moved to what Lauck regretfully 
characterizes as “the ragged edge” of American culture. 
 
 
The Fighting Sullivans: How Hollywood and the Military Make Heroes, by 
Bruce Kuklick. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017. xi, 212 pp. 
Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliographical essay, index. $27.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Anna Thompson Hajdik is a full-time lecturer in the English De-
partment and Film Studies program at the University of Wisconsin–White-
water. She is the author of “ ‘You Really Ought to Give Iowa a Try’: Tourism, 
Community Identity, and the Impact of Popular Culture in Iowa” (Online 
Journal of Rural Research and Policy, 2009). 
Bruce Kuklick brings together various elements of biography, commu-
nity history/memory, and the broader currents of twentieth-century 
American history through the lens of the “Fighting Sullivans,” five 
brothers who lost their lives together on the USS Juneau during the 
naval battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942. But this is far from a 
simple story. Rather, it is fraught with contradiction and controversy 
and lays bare the many tensions between nation and region, family and 
community, and even propaganda and truth. Ultimately, as Kuklick 
writes in his introduction, it is a book that “shows how narratives of the 
heroic are constructed and why we need them” (3).  
 Kuklick’s work is at its strongest when he places the Sullivans’ story 
in context with such topics as the shifting fortunes of the American war 
effort in 1943–44, Hollywood’s influence on the home front, and the 
postindustrial decline of Waterloo, Iowa. Chapters 8–11 are especially 
valuable, as Kuklick traces the history of Hollywood’s treatment of the 
Sullivan family, turning to such rich archival sources as correspondence 
among movie executives, the film’s director (Lloyd Bacon), various 
screenwriters, and family matriarch Alletta Sullivan. Script treatments 
and various promotional materials also prove to be especially rich ar-
chival documents. Ultimately, the film became much more of a home-
front story, centering on an idyllic family and its strong Catholic faith, 
in stark contrast to the reality of the actual Sullivan family. As Kuklick 
argues, the persuasive power of Hollywood was much greater in the 
1940s than it is now, shaping “morality, politics, and attitudes towards 
social problems” (96).  
 Much of the Sullivans’ story takes place in Waterloo, Iowa, the fam-
ily’s hometown. The author chronicles the family’s working-class exist- 


From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965

Review of: "Local Vino: The Winery Boom in the Heartland," by James R. Pennell

Sopiarz, Josh

Book Reviews and Notices      111 
course there must be ethnic, historical, personal, and theological an-
swers, but the book does not ask the question.  
 Limiting a broad religious tradition to three congregations also 
hides much of the new ethnic diversity within Christianity: Tai Dam 
Mennonites (and animists), Burmese Baptists, Mexican Pentecostals, 
Korean Methodists, South Sudanese Presbyterians and Lutherans, and 
Congolese evangelicals (for starters) complicate a Des Moines religious 
scene that seems a long way from 1950s-era Life and Christian Century 
portrayals of Iowa religion as white, Protestant, middle-class, and gen-
erous but self-absorbed. 
 
 
Local Vino: The Winery Boom in the Heartland, by James R. Pennell. Heart-
land Foodways. Champaign, Urbana, and Chicago: University of Illi-
nois Press, 2017. xi, 192 pp. Illustrations, tables, references, index. $95.00 
hardcover, $19.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Josh Sopiarz is associate professor and reference librarian for 
social sciences and government information at Governors State University. 
He has presented conference papers on craft brewing and wineries in the 
Midwest. 
James Pennell’s romp through wineries in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and 
Iowa offers readers a glimpse into the Midwest’s growing wine industry. 
Local Vino is an ode to the region’s vintners, enologists, vignerons, 
oenophiles, and casual imbibers and reflects Pennell’s quest to better 
understand the wine boom he has recently been observing in the Heart-
land. Initially, Pennell set out to write solely about Indiana’s burgeon-
ing wine industry. At his editor’s suggestion, Pennell expanded his 
scope to include wineries in Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa. The book benefits 
from this expansion; however, Pennell’s ethnographic approach led 
him primarily to wineries reached easily by car from his home base in 
Indianapolis. To his credit, Pennell made many such trips and did his 
homework on the industry in each of the four included states. The result 
is a lively jaunt across a swath of a region not widely known for its wine, 
but whose winemakers are clearly working to establish its reputation 
nationally, if not globally.  
 In the first half of the book, Pennell lays the groundwork for the 
project by identifying three common themes that apply across the region. 
First, local wineries provide generally “merry, festive, convivial” places 
for people to gather and socialize informally. Second, local wineries unite 
“the need for community and the desire to pursue and be rewarded for 
good work” (3). Third, local wineries benefit both from the “buy local” 
movement and the burgeoning international wine market. Pennell 
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. 


Local Vino: The Winery Boom in the Heartland

Review of: "Prairie Defender: The Murder Trials of Abraham Lincoln," by George R. Dekle Sr

Lupton, John A.

82      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
cost of St. Louis and New Orleans). Most of the context is based, appro-
priately enough, on secondary sources. Sometimes the choice of second-
ary source is questionable; for example, his account of the famous 1854 
Grand Excursion on the recently completed Chicago & Rock Island route 
from Chicago to Rock Island and then up the Mississippi by steamboat 
to St. Anthony Falls relies on a 1933 article in the Palimpsest by William 
J. Petersen rather than the more recent and more thorough book, Grand 
Excursion, by Steven J. Keillor (2004). If there’s nothing particularly new 
here for scholars, however, the narrative is clear and engaging enough 
for the book to appeal to any lay person who might be interested in the 
topics it covers. McGinty’s book complements the earlier privately pub-
lished book by Larry Riney, Hell Gate of the Mississippi: The Effie Afton 
Trial and Abraham Lincoln’s Role in It (2006) in illuminating an important 
legal case for the development of Iowa and the Midwest. 
 
 
Prairie Defender: The Murder Trials of Abraham Lincoln, by George R. Dekle 
Sr. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017. xiv, 248 pp. 
Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $34.50 hardcover. 
Reviewer John A. Lupton is executive director of the Illinois Supreme Court 
Historic Preservation Commission. He was formerly an assistant editor on 
The Papers of Abraham Lincoln and has written extensively about Lincoln 
as a lawyer. 
Since the publication of the Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete 
Documentary Edition (LPAL) in 2000, new books on Lincoln’s pre-presi-
dential career have enlightened readers not only on his 25-year law 
practice but on midwestern antebellum society as well. In Prairie Defender, 
George Dekle Sr. relies on 30 years of experience as a criminal lawyer 
paired with the documentary record made available by LPAL to exam-
ine Lincoln’s criminal cases generally, and murder cases specifically.  
 Dekle argues against a long-standing misconception that Lincoln 
detested criminal practice and was not good at it (2). He focuses primarily 
on Lincoln’s 18 murder cases but mentions other criminal cases—most 
notably, a child-rape case in which Lincoln served as prosecutor. He 
devotes one chapter to Lincoln’s pardon practice and concludes the 
book with a summary assessment of Lincoln’s murder cases, decon-
structing several popular myths about his criminal caseload.  
 By examining famous (Almanac, Harrison, and Goings) and not-so-
famous (Patterson, Longnecker, and Bantzhouse) murder cases, Dekle 
provides, for the first time, a complete study of Lincoln’s murder cases, 
demonstrating that Lincoln was a competent and successful criminal 
Book Reviews and Notices      83 
lawyer. The author thrives in his legal analysis. His chapter on the Go-
ings case, in particular, shines. The elderly defendant, Melissa Goings, 
charged with murdering her husband, failed to appear in court. After 
she asked for a drink, Lincoln allegedly suggested that she flee by tell-
ing her there was good water in Tennessee (138). Dekle discounts the 
story and convincingly argues that Lincoln most likely repeated a joke 
from fellow lawyer Usher Linder, who had used a similar story previ-
ously. It is well established that Lincoln frequently borrowed stories and 
inserted himself into them. 
 With murder cases constituting less than 0.5 percent of Lincoln’s total 
caseload, Dekle does not argue that these cases are representative. Lincoln 
was a general practice attorney who occasionally represented and pros-
ecuted alleged criminals. Murder cases are better known because of 
their intrinsic interest and extensive contemporary newspaper cover-
age. Lincoln’s entire criminal practice also was a small percentage of his 
total caseload (approximately 6 percent), which previous biographers 
have used as proof that Lincoln did not like criminal law. Dekle coun-
ters this notion effectively but could have strengthened his argument 
by noting that Lincoln’s criminal caseload generally mirrored the court 
docket as a whole.  
 Two interesting threads appear frequently in Dekle’s analysis. First, 
the social nature of the criminal courts is best exemplified by the un-
favorable treatment Tom Patterson received, despite a pretty clear case 
of self-defense, because he was a newer resident in the community who 
had killed a long-time resident (153). Dekle does not investigate as 
deeply, however, the socioeconomic reasons for leniency in murder/ 
manslaughter cases. Many juries were reluctant to convict if the accused 
had a family lest his wife and children become dependents of the com-
munity. Dekle alludes to this type of leniency with respect to John 
Hibbs, who had been found guilty of manslaughter, and Lincoln as-
sisted in obtaining a pardon for him (93). Second, Dekle implies that 
Lincoln did not work as hard on a case when he knew he would receive 
little or no compensation (53, 189–90). The implication is that Lincoln, 
who argued that lawyers should be paid for their services, was perhaps 
less effective when there was no compensation, contributing to the 
longstanding narrative of Lincoln’s lack of interest in criminal cases. 
 Despite minor interpretive issues of not delving into certain matters 
more deeply, this is an engaging and interesting book that effectively 
demonstrates that Lincoln was indeed a successful criminal lawyer. 
More importantly, it illustrates a clear evolution in Lincoln’s skill as an 
attorney in general.  
 


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Lincoln's Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America

The Good Governor: Robert Ray and the Indochinese Refugees of Iowa

White Birch, Red Hawthorn: A Memoir

Iowa Barns Yesterday and Today, Including Silos, Corncribs, Homes, and Businesses

Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley

"The Infernal War": The Civil War Letters of William and Jane Standard

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965

Local Vino: The Winery Boom in the Heartland

Prairie Defender: The Murder Trials of Abraham Lincoln

Back Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 77 no. 2 Spring 2018

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