The Annals of Iowa

Review of "Glenn Miller Declassified" by Dennis M. Sprag

Lush, Paige

Book Reviews and Notices      213 
Midwest’s culture, both in urban and rural areas. What, too, about 
the many midwestern authors of color? If the Midwest of this era is not 
to be regarded as a region justifiably left behind by the modernizing 
nation but rather as a place where issues relevant to the country’s 
future were being worked out, more scholarship must be carried out 
about the conflicts and alliances among its various cultural groups. 
 Despite these shortcomings, this collection includes some good 
points. For one thing, the endnotes for a good number of the essays 
yield a rich trove of resources worthy of future exploration. A few of 
the essays also either bring to light extremely under-researched topics 
or offer intriguing revisions of previous ways of thinking about them. 
Paul Emory Putz’s essay about Walt Mason’s syndicated poetry is one 
highlight, for he astutely shows how Mason’s poetry skillfully negoti-
ated the boundaries of “high” and “middlebrow” culture. I was also 
fascinated by Kimberly K. Porter’s article about radio station owner 
and on-air personality Henry Field, an Iowan I had never heard of. 
Allan Carlson’s piece about “Midwestern Catholicism and the Last 
Agrarian Crusade” brings to light an influential, yet little-known, 
social movement and makes interesting connections to the Nashville 
Agrarians responsible for the similarly antimodernist manifesto I’ll 
Take My Stand (1930). Jon K. Lauck himself provides a provocative 
revisionist reading of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Sin-
clair Lewis’s Main Street, contending that neither one is actually the 
type of wholehearted critique of small-town midwestern life it has 
been made out to be.  
 This volume makes a number of valuable contributions to the on-
going project of making today’s readers more aware of the cultural 
achievements of midwesterners in the past. Most important, its essays 
both draw attention to a number of lesser-known elements of mid-
western culture that deserve to be examined in greater detail and indi-
cate the type of scholarship that needs to be carried out on them.  
 
 
Glenn Miller Declassified, by Dennis M. Spragg. Lincoln: Potomac Books, 
an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2017. xvii, 386 pp. 
Tables, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer Paige Lush is director of bands and instructor of music at 
McHenry County College. Her doctoral dissertation was “Music and 
Identity in Circuit Chautauqua, 1904–1932.” 
There is perhaps no more cinematic story in the history of American 
music than that of Glenn Miller’s disappearance over the English 
Channel on December 15, 1944. The mystery surrounding Miller’s dis-
214      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
appearance has led to considerable scholarly research but also to spec-
ulation and sensationalism. In Glenn Miller Declassified, broadcasting 
and media researcher Dennis Spragg separates fact from fiction and 
presents the reader with a compelling, insightful, and thorough narra-
tive of Miller’s military service, disappearance, and legacy.  
 Spragg is most effective in subtly countering conspiracy theories 
by reminding twenty-first–century readers that Miller’s disappearance 
happened under circumstances far removed from our own. He quotes 
General Ray Barker exclaiming, “How the hell did we lose Glenn Mil-
ler?” (278). That is certainly a question that crosses the mind of the 
modern reader. The idea that a celebrity could be missing for days— 
especially on a short military flight—before anyone realized it seems 
incredible to us and invites speculation. Spragg, through exhaustive 
documentation, sets up the worst-case scenario that led to Miller’s dis-
appearance, making it comprehensible to modern readers.  
 Glenn Miller Declassified offers an invaluable look into the Allies’ 
use of radio during World War II, including Miller’s direct involve-
ment in day-to-day decisions and operations. Spragg meticulously 
details the circumstances surrounding the broadcasts and live per-
formances of the American Band of the Supreme Allied Command 
and the strategy behind the programming. Miller’s civilian career was 
closely intertwined with the business of radio, so it is not surprising 
that his military life revolved nearly as much around broadcasting as 
it did music making.  
 Spragg’s research relies heavily on military records, many of 
which are reprinted verbatim in the book. These can be hard to follow, 
despite Spragg’s inclusion of a list of abbreviations. Because of the 
sheer number of abbreviations, it might have been better not to abbre-
viate items that appear less frequently, saving acronyms for frequently 
used terms of unwieldy length. Similarly, Spragg introduces readers 
to dozens of Miller’s associates and colleagues, and it can sometimes 
be difficult to keep them straight.  
 Although Glenn Miller Declassified focuses primarily on Miller’s 
service in World War II, Spragg includes enough early biographical 
information that a reader possessing little or no prior knowledge of 
Miller would not be lost. He is similarly thoughtful with his selective 
use of musical terminology and historical references. He does an excel-
lent job of engaging readers whose interests in Miller’s story are varied 
and specialized while still being accessible to casual readers.  
 Spragg spends considerable time addressing the once-popular 
theory that Miller was a victim of “friendly fire” (or, perhaps more ac-
curately, “friendly bomb jettisoning”) from the Royal Air Force (RAF). 
Book Reviews and Notices      215 
That theory is based largely on the recollection of South African navi-
gator T. E. “Fred” Shaw. Spragg’s detailed timeline of RAF move-
ments in the vicinity of Miller’s flight and fact-checking of anecdotal 
evidence supporting Shaw’s claim thoroughly debunk this theory and 
its underlying assumptions.  
 Glenn Miller Declassified will, of course, be of interest to scholars of 
military history and American music. But it is also an excellent re-
source for understanding broadcasting (both of music and spoken 
word) during World War II. Furthermore, Glenn Miller Declassified will 
be of interest to scholars of Iowa and the Midwest, as Miller was a na-
tive son of Iowa whose musical mind was shaped by the band culture 
of the interwar American heartland.  
 
 
Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth 
Century, by Molly Ladd-Taylor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 
Press, 2017. xi, 275 pp. Illustrations, tables, map, graph, appendix, notes, 
index. $54.95 hardcover and ebook. 
Reviewer Michael Rembis is associate professor history and director of 
the Center for Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He 
is the author of Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890–
1960 (2011). 
Molly Ladd-Taylor has written a superb history of sterilization in Min-
nesota that has far-reaching implications for the study of both the his-
tory of eugenics in the United States and the history of the practice of 
sterilization throughout the country. Using a mix of archival sources, 
such as state institution records, the Social Welfare History Archives, 
and the collections of organizations such as the Eugenic Record Office, 
the Women’s Welfare League of Minneapolis, and the Association for 
Voluntary Sterilization, as well as published works, such as the memoir 
of Mildred Thomson, who ran the state’s sterilization program for al-
most 35 years (1925–1959) and was instrumental in the creation of the 
Minnesota Association for Retarded Children (MARC) in 1950, Fixing 
the Poor tells the deeply researched and carefully argued story of ster-
ilization in a state that has not been known for its history of eugenics. 
 Because Minnesota’s circuitous path through eugenic sterilization 
(1925–mid-1970s) was not as clearly lit as the more direct experiences 
of some states, such as California, North Carolina, or Virginia, it pro-
vides a unique and valuable opportunity to show how eugenics and 
sterilization were enmeshed as much with state welfare systems as they 
were with prevailing racialized, gendered, and class-based assumptions 
about proper or “fit“ citizenship. As Ladd-Taylor argues throughout 


English

Glenn Miller Declassified

Review of "Great Plains Bison" by Dan O'Brie

Dehler, Gregory J.

Book Reviews and Notices      207 
vides insightful suggestions about how and why certain persons or enti-
ties wield the power not only to preserve battlefields but also to inter-
pret those sites for the public at large. With so many Civil War memory 
studies populating academic discourse recently, Smith has commenda-
bly added battlefield preservation policy as yet another concept influ-
enced by Americans’ contentious relationship with the war’s legacy.  
 
Great Plains Bison, by Dan O’Brien. Discover the Great Plains Series. 
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. xiii, 150 pp. Illustrations, 
maps, appendix, bibliography, index. $14.95 paperback.  
Reviewer Gregory J. Dehler is a history instructor at Front Range Com-
munity College. He is the author of The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple 
Hornaday and His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife (2013). 
The decline of the American bison, more commonly referred to as the 
buffalo, is a well-known story. At one point as many as 30 million buf-
falo thundered across the Great Plains and beyond, but by 1890 only a 
handful of wild animals remained in its vast former range. Dan 
O’Brien does not introduce any new research on this historical drama 
but brings a fresh perspective as a South Dakota buffalo rancher. His 
love and appreciation of the animal and its natural habitat come 
through the pages of Great Plains Bison. As part of the University of 
Nebraska Press’s Discover the Great Plains series, this slim volume of 
just over 100 pages is an introduction designed to be a quick-reading 
historical and ecological overview of the bioregion’s keystone species. 
 Even though tens of millions of buffalo ranged through the Great 
Plains, the region always seemed vacant to successive waves of white 
settlers. According to the prevailing mindset, elimination of the buffalo 
was a prerequisite to settlement and development. But without the buf-
falo, the flora and fauna of the region were likewise destroyed, with dis-
astrous ecological consequences. Cattle ranches were the first to fill the 
void, but the inhospitable Great Plains, with its blizzards and droughts, 
ended that experiment. Throughout the twentieth century chemical-
intensive industrial agriculture expanded to almost every available acre, 
replacing the native environment with a regime of imported crops and 
animals that were protected by artificial fertilizers, herbicides, and pes-
ticides, and supported by government policies and subsides. 
 O’Brien’s strongest chapters are the ones on agriculture, land use 
and transformation, and ranching, which are clearly the subjects the 
author knows the best. He shares several personal, almost spiritual, 
observations from his career as a buffalo rancher, which are the most 
thought-provoking and valuable aspects of the book. His closing chap-
ter calls for greater respect for the buffalo and the environment. 
208      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 He practices what he preaches. O’Brien’s ranch follows a free-
range, sustainable approach, unlike the mass herding typical of the 
cattle industry. As he summarizes his view, “A buffalo that does not 
move at least a few miles per day is not a buffalo” (99). To some extent, 
Great Plains Bison reads as an extended explanation of why he treats 
his herd the way he does. (Readers can access his personal website at 
www.wildideabuffalo.com for more information.) 
 The chapters on Native Americans and the conservation of the 
buffalo are a little weaker, with several minor errors, such as referring 
to the 1848 Free Soil Party as a coalition of Democrats and Republicans 
(the latter did not yet exist as a political party) and stating that the 
American Bison Society supplied the animals for the Wichita Bison 
Preserve, the nation’s first (it was the New York Zoological Society). 
Both are topics with an expansive literature and historiography that 
are underrepresented in the bibliography.  
 For those with little knowledge of the history of the buffalo or the 
Great Plains, O’Brien provides a handy introduction to the subject, 
although without reference notes and with only a small, somewhat 
dated bibliography, readers might struggle to find where to go from 
here if they wish to read more. Readers already familiar with the buf-
falo may also find value in O’Brien’s telling of the story.  
 
 
Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, 
Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo. Lincoln: University of Ne-
braska Press, 2017. vi, 294 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, graphs, 
charts, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Paula M. Nelson is professor of history emeritus at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin–Platteville. She is the author of After the West Was Won: 
Homesteaders and Town-Builders in Western South Dakota, 1900–1917 (1986) 
and The Prairie Winnows Out Its Own: The West River Country of South Da-
kota in the Years of Depression and Dust (1996). 
In 1873 D. John Johnson, his wife, Kristina, and their two children left 
Dalarna, Sweden, and emigrated to Minnesota. After working awhile 
elsewhere, they took up a homestead in Winfield Township, Renville 
County, earned their patent, and, by 1888, owned 400 acres of land. 
John and Kristina were my great-grandparents. I am one of their many 
descendants, and we are all part of the 46 million or more Americans 
who today descend from homesteading families. The authors of Home-
steading the Plains provide that surprisingly large 46 million figure (1). 
They also challenge many negative academic assumptions about the 
impact and importance of homesteading for American history, as-


Great Plains Bison

Review of "Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri" by Aaron Astor & "The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America" by Matthew E. Stanle

Gannon, Kevin M.

Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri & The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 77 no. 1 Winter 2018

Manuel, Jeffrey T.

Iowa's Original Ethanol Debate: The Power Alcohol Movement of 1933–1934

Review of: "Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder," edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal

Fry, John J.

Book Reviews and Notices      87 
includes only one map, and that map, though clear and pleasing to the 
eye, fails to locate points like Helena, Arkansas; Alexandria, Louisiana; 
or Niblett’s Bluff, Texas—all places of strategic importance referred to 
repeatedly in the text. 
 
 
Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Nancy 
Tystad Koupal. Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017. 317 pp. 
Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $29.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer John J. Fry is professor of history at Trinity Christian College, Palos 
Heights, Illinois. He is the editor of Almost Pioneers (2013) and is writing a 
biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder that pays particular attention to her faith. 
When reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, one is led to 
believe that things happened exactly as they were written. In addition, 
at a speech at a book fair in Detroit in 1937, Wilder said, in reference to 
the most recent book published, that “every story in this novel, all the 
circumstances, each incident are true. All I have told is true but it is not 
the whole truth” (15). After Wilder’s death in 1957, however, readers 
and researchers began to discover many ways that the books were not 
historically accurate. That process accelerated when it was revealed that 
Wilder had previously written an adult memoir she called “Pioneer 
Girl” that publishers had rejected. The memoir was first made widely 
available to the public by the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in 
West Branch, Iowa, during the 1980s. The South Dakota Historical So-
ciety (SDHS) Press published Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography 
in 2014, and it quickly became a best-seller. It is now in its ninth printing; 
more than 165,000 copies have been sold. 
 Pioneer Girl Perspectives is a collection of essays edited by Nancy 
Tystad Koupal, director of the Pioneer Girl Project, and published by 
the SDHS Press. The volume was originally meant to address how the 
publication of Pioneer Girl shapes our understanding of Wilder and her 
work. However, contributors take their considerations in a number of 
new directions, including the life and works of Wilder’s daughter, Rose 
Wilder Lane, the popularity of the Little House books, and the books’ 
literary value. 
 The book is divided into four sections. “Working Writers” begins 
by reprinting Wilder’s Detroit Book Fair speech, and then biographers 
of Wilder and Lane engage the different types of writing each pub-
lished. In “Beginnings and Misdirections,” authors consider the history 
of the Pioneer Girl manuscript and the Little House books compared to 
other early twentieth-century children’s literature. Historians writing in 
the third section, “Wilder’s Place and Time,” situate Wilder in regional 
88      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
and historical context. The essays in the final section, “Enduring Tales 
and Childhood Myths,” explore a variety of literary features of the books. 
 As in all books of essays, some chapters are more insightful than 
others. Readers of this journal will be especially interested in John E. 
Miller’s essay describing the midwestern context of Wilder’s life and 
work. He argues that the Midwest is depicted in the following charac-
teristics of the Little House books: “(1) the prominence of the land in its 
residents’ thinking and the centrality of agriculture in its way of life; 
(2) the Homestead Act and the frontier process as integral parts of its 
historical experience; (3) the crucial role that small towns played in 
its culture; and (4) the development and nurturing of specific values as 
a result of those cultural experiences that helped shape residents’ special 
identities as Midwesterners” (155). Paula Nelson does a thorough job 
placing Wilder’s views on family, women’s roles, farming, and woman 
suffrage into the multiple contexts of the late nineteenth century and 
early twentieth centuries. Nancy Fraser examines the use of the tale of 
the “Bloody Benders” in some Pioneer Girl manuscripts in order to 
assess Wilder and Lane’s relationship to the “yellow journalism” of 
the early twentieth century. Elizabeth Jameson considers how Wilder’s 
troubled and poverty-ridden childhood was transformed into the 
happy childhood of the Little House books. Finally, William Anderson 
gives a fascinating brief history of the Pioneer Girl manuscript between 
Wilder’s death in 1957 and its publication in 2014. 
 Overall, Pioneer Girl Perspectives is an excellent book. It’s slightly 
larger than a normal hardback, and the dust jacket art is beautiful. It 
includes many illustrations from the original Helen Sewell editions of 
the Little House books as well as historical photos of Wilder, Lane, and 
others. Many essays fill gaps in Wilder scholarship or bring together 
what is already known in helpful ways. It is a worthy companion to 
Pioneer Girl on the shelves of anyone interested in the Little House 
books and the way that they depict the West—and the Midwest. 
 
 
Coxey’s Crusade for Jobs: Unemployment in the Gilded Age, by Jerry Prout. 
DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. Illustrations, notes, 
bibliography, index. 152 pp. $25.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Carlos A. Schwantes is Saint Louis Mercantile Library Endowed 
Professor of History Emeritus, University of Missouri–St. Louis. He is the 
author of Coxey’s Army: An American Odyssey (1985) and “Soldiers of Mis-
fortune: Jack London, Kelly’s Army, and the Struggle for Survival in Iowa” 
(Annals of Iowa, 1983). 


Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder

Review of: "Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order," by Jon Shelton

McKerley, John W.

Book Reviews and Notices      103 
ence, heartbreak, and tragic notoriety from the early twentieth century 
to the present against the backdrop of the rising and declining fortunes 
of that blue-collar, industrial city. The book is a bit weaker when the au-
thor sets out to uncover just who the “real Sullivans” were, concluding 
ultimately and perhaps somewhat unconvincingly that prior to their 
entry into the war the majority of folks in Waterloo who actually knew 
them saw the five men as either unambitious louts or mischievous 
hoodlums. The reality of course is lost to history, as most of the Sulli-
vans’ contemporaries are now gone. Kuklick’s actual evidence proves 
thin, consisting mostly of the town’s admittedly anemic response to the 
brothers’ deaths soon after the sinking of the USS Juneau. A more nu-
anced and balanced portrayal of the Sullivan brothers might have been 
appropriate. Still, Kuklick’s discussion of Waterloo’s response to the 
brothers’ collective sacrifice decades later is fascinating and worthy of 
attention.  
 In the 1990s, for example, Waterloo rode a wave of World War II 
nostalgia that resulted in the founding of a multimillion-dollar veterans 
museum named for the brothers. A highly engaged group of World 
War II veterans from across the country, along with more limited sup-
port from the city, helped make this possible. Steven Spielberg’s release 
of the World War II drama Saving Private Ryan (1998) furthered the 
legend of the Sullivan family’s collective sacrifice. Meanwhile, the city 
itself had hit some hard economic times, as postindustrial decline accel-
erated after the 1960s and resulted in the closure of meatpacking plants 
and other associated businesses. As Kuklick notes, “In the first part of 
the twentieth century, when the town was up, the family was down; 
at the end of the century, when Waterloo was down, the Sullivans were 
up” (166).  
 Ultimately, The Fighting Sullivans is a valuable work of cultural 
history. It spotlights a story that suffers tremendously from decades of 
calculated mythmaking and attempts to unpack and deconstruct those 
myths. It would be especially relevant as a text for courses that focus on 
Iowa history, World War II, or twentieth-century American history. 
 
 
Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political 
Order, by Jon Shelton. The Working Class in American History Series. 
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. xii, 274 pp. Notes, bibliog-
raphy, index. $95.00 hardcover, $27.95 paperback, $25.16 ebook. 
Reviewer John W. McKerley is a research associate at the University of 
Iowa Labor Center. He is researching the Keokuk teachers strike of 1970 and 
the origins of Iowa’s Public Employment Relations Act. 
104      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
The 1970s was a critical decade in U.S. history. At the decade’s outset, 
the U.S. labor movement was still a potent and well-recognized force in 
the nation’s economic and political life. Although union members were 
sometimes at odds over civil rights and the Vietnam War, they were 
also crucial backers of and participants in the era’s progressive social 
movements. Moreover, despite the increasing pressure of capital flight 
on unions, a new wave of public-sector organizing seemed to offer new 
possibilities. By the decade’s end, public-sector unions had become a 
newly powerful force, but proponents of a revived free-market ide-
ology (neoliberalism) were poised to undermine the power of orga-
nized labor as a whole and reshape U.S. politics for a generation. 
 Historians largely agree on the broad outlines of this narrative, but 
they continue to debate the identities of its main actors. In Teacher Strike! 
Jon Shelton makes an important contribution to this debate by focusing 
on the interplay between the rise of teacher unionism and neoliberalism 
in the context of the 1970s. 
 For Shelton, unionized teachers’ willingness and ability to use strikes 
(especially illegal strikes) to advance their collective interests played a 
key role in shifting public opinion away from the “labor liberalism” of 
the post–New Deal era. By the end of the 1970s, he argues, “the nation’s 
political center” had developed “a deepening sense that the labor-liberal 
state now victimized both white middle-class Americans and corporate 
America,” leading to “new calls to let the market structure life in Amer-
ica” (160). 
 Shelton develops this argument by focusing on public debates pro-
voked by a series of teacher strikes in major U.S. cities during the “long” 
1970s (roughly 1968 to 1981). Most of the cities in question were in the 
East Coast and Midwest and reflected centers of a pre-1970s political 
economy based around the influence of predominately white, male, ur-
ban, private-sector union members. Shelton draws most of his evidence 
from newspaper opinion pieces and letters to the editor. Perhaps his 
most innovative sources are the letters sent by people across the country 
to American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president David Selden dur-
ing his prison stay in 1970 for defying an anti-picketing injunction. 
 Since World War II, labor liberalism had substantially improved 
the lives of U.S. workers (especially private-sector union members) but 
left many public-sector workers, including teachers, behind. Although 
many prosperous urbanites (union members in particular) were ini-
tially sympathetic to teachers and other public-sector workers, those 
sympathies declined over the course of the 1970s as capital flight, 
recession, and inflation combined to undermine the urban industrial 
economies. 
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 


Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order

Review of: "Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal", by John P. Bowes

Tronnes, Libby

220      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
sources, these editorial lapses stand out. The extensive bibliography 
(almost 100 pages) reveals additional concerns. For instance, William H. 
Stiebing Jr. is credited as author of a number of papers, most if not all 
of which were in fact written by the late historian of anthropology 
George W. Stocking. Stocking’s name is absent, although it appears in 
the endnotes. In other words, the bibliography (which may be mainly 
of interest to scholars) has to be approached with due caution.  
 Both of these books are richly detailed, readable, thought-
provoking volumes well worth the attention of anyone with even a 
passing interest in the intellectual history of early American archaeology, 
mounds (common to the Midwest), and, in the case of Ancestral Mounds, 
their meaning among Native American cultures, past and present.  
 
 
Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal, by John P. Bowes. 
New Directions in Native American Studies 13. Norman: University of 
Oklahoma Press, 2016. xiv, 328 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. 
$29.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Libby Tronnes is a history instructor at the University of Wisconsin–
Whitewater. She is working on a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Wis-
consin–Madison tentatively titled “ ‘We Know We Will Suffer’: Removals and 
Returns of the Rock River Ho-Chunk in the Early Nineteenth-Century Western 
Great Lakes.” 
Too often the narrative of Indian removal is told through the Cherokee 
Trail of Tears. John Bowes’s latest book, Land Too Good for Indians, 
broadens how scholars think and talk about that history. Bowes rejects 
simplifying northern removal histories by linking them to a federal pol-
icy or regional events relative to removal events. His methodology relies 
on “adaptive resistance” rather than the more conventional form of Na-
tive agency. “Indians who accepted the presence of, or worked closely 
with, traders and/or missionaries to maneuver around local, state, or 
federal policies used the means at their disposal to do what they 
thought best for themselves, their family, and their community” (13).  
 Bowes begins with an overview of shifting relationships among 
Great Lakes Indians, Euro-Americans, and British amid the wars and 
other violence in the first 50 years of the American republic. In chapter 
two he contrasts Cherokee removal debates, which centered on consti-
tutional authority and the meaning of sovereignty, with rhetoric sur-
rounding northern removal, in which missionaries and Indian agents 
emphasized the policy’s benevolence and politicians “praised the wis-
dom of Indian communities” (51) who took it upon themselves to save 
their people from white vices and relocate west of the Mississippi. 
Book Reviews and Notices      221 
Bowes’s argument is not that Indians in the North did not understand 
tribal sovereignty. “Rather than resist federal and state policies by as-
serting [their] sovereignty in an American court of law,” Bowes argues, 
Miamis, Wyandots, and other groups “emphasized their desire to re-
tain communal integrity and live beside their non-Indian neighbors 
through different means” (77). Each community’s connections to its 
Indian and non-Indian neighbors and kin complicated and shaped 
efforts to remove northern Indians and produced a wide array of out-
comes.  
 As any modern tribal map shows, some Native communities suc-
cessfully avoided removal while others ended up like the Delaware 
people, a diaspora of kin communities. In his first two case studies 
(chapters 3 and 4), Bowes examines the removal experiences of several 
Ohio Country communities, including the Seneca-Cayuga, Wyandot, 
and Shawnee, and provides a multi-century history of the Delaware 
diaspora. In chapter three, readers learn how an unidentified Shawnee 
leader successfully petitioned the Mexican government in the 1820s to 
settle in Coahuila and Texas. At that time, Mexico offered these Indian 
communities something the United States seemingly could not: a per-
manent home. Even here, Shawnee and Delaware settlements would 
be undermined by future wars of American Expansion, underpinning 
one of Bowes’s overarching points—Indian peoples never stopped 
experiencing removals (213). Bowes’s analysis of the 1833 Treaty of 
Chicago in chapter five, for example, shows the bureaucratic messi-
ness of removal, as the U.S. Senate held up the treaty signed by Pota-
watomi leaders for nearly two years because Missouri politicians did 
not want the Potawatomi to relocate to valuable lands they had chosen 
along the Platte River. 
 Bowes’s book exhibits excellent synthesis of new scholarship and 
crucial representatives of the canon in areas of settler colonialism and 
Great Lakes Indian history. Lacking sufficient maps and charts so im-
portant to understanding removal stories, the rich narrative content is 
nonetheless of great value for engaging undergraduates in scholarly 
removal history.  
 Bowes calls on readers to never forget or ignore the human suffer-
ing buried, implied, or too often casually mentioned in official records 
of forced Indian removals. However, his own accounts in several 
chapters too often slight the traumas in favor of political, legal, and 
economic history. Chapter four is the exception. Whether Bowes uses 
governmental correspondence, county histories, and other primary 
sources differently in that chapter, he better conveys the emotions ex-
perienced by Native peoples grappling with forced expulsion from 
222      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
their homelands. For example, he discusses the starving time faced by 
Senecas during their 1831–32 winter removal from Ohio to Oklahoma 
and describes how, instead of helping them, Superintendent of Indian 
Affairs William Clark blamed their improvidence for their suffering 
(130–31). Readers also encounter Ohio Wyandots who cannot fathom 
why their white Sandusky neighbors, whom they considered friends, 
now wanted them gone. Removal histories are stories of broken hearts 
and interrupted relationships. 
 The Midwest is the beginning, middle, and ending place for many 
northern removal stories, but readers will notice that places like Iowa, 
Illinois, and Wisconsin are slighted in Land Too Good for Indians. If 
readers forgive Bowes this rather substantive oversight (his project is 
really about Ohio Country removals), they should be less forgiving of 
his dismissive treatment of the Black Hawk War, which made Indian 
communities in Illinois and Wisconsin targets for forced removals and 
Iowa a new, albeit temporary, home for some, such as the Rock River 
Ho-Chunks. There is clearly much need for continued analysis and 
examination of northern Indian removal history. This work should 
encourage further scholarship in the field. 
 
 
Hendrik P. Scholte: His Legacy in the Netherlands and in America, by Eu-
gene P. Heideman. The Historical Series of the Reformed Church in 
America 84. Holland and Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans 
Publishing in cooperation with the Van Raalte Institute, 2015. xxxvi, 
277 pp. Timeline, illustrations, maps, footnotes, index. $30.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Douglas Firth Anderson is professor emeritus of history at North-
western College (Iowa), coauthor of Orange City (2014), and coeditor of the 
faculty research open access annual Northwestern Review. 
As early as 1837, Rev. Hendrik Pieter Scholte (1803–1868) wrote to the 
Dutch Reformed readers of his journal De Reformatie that “God might 
yet prepare a Pella [Hellenistic city of refuge] for his oppressed peo-
ple” (225). It took ten years, though, for Scholte to lead the initial con-
tingent of some 600 immigrants from the Netherlands to Marion 
County, Iowa, to plant and plat Pella. 
 Scholte was a Reformed convert from a prosperous Lutheran family 
who owned a box-making company in Amsterdam. He was the leader 
of the Pella colony up until his death, but not without controversy. 
Many of the immigrants questioned his handling of the emigration 
association funds as well as the town land (which he owned); even 
more had trouble with his autocratic manner, his socially remote wife, 
and his religious views. In Pella he became a local business and educa-


Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal

Review of: "A Sugar Creek Chronicle: Observing Climate Change from a Midwestern Woodland", by Cornelia F. Mutel and of "The Big Marsh: The Story of a Lost Landscape", by Cheri Register

Conard, Rebecca

  
THE ANNALS OF IOWA 76 (Spring 2017). © State Historical Society of Iowa, 
2017. 
 
209 
Midwestern Writers  
on Environmental Stewardship: 
A Review Essay 
REBECCA CONARD 
A Sugar Creek Chronicle: Observing Climate Change from a Midwestern 
Woodland, by Cornelia F. Mutel. A Bur Oak Book. Iowa City: Univer-
sity of Iowa Press, 2016. xv, 251 pp. Sources of information on climate 
change, bibliographic essay, index. $16.00 paperback. 
The Big Marsh: The Story of a Lost Landscape, by Cheri Register. St. Paul: 
Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016. 272 pp. Maps, illustrations, 
notes. $17.95 paperback. 
 
MY BEST CHRISTMAS GIFT this past year was time to read 
A Sugar Creek Chronicle: Observing Climate Change from a Midwest-
ern Woodland and The Big Marsh: The Story of a Lost Landscape. 
Those reading and reflecting hours coincided with the presiden-
tial transition, from an administration that made environmental 
stewardship a priority to one that is led by a climate-change 
skeptic who is hostile to environmental regulation. Now more 
than ever, as these two books demonstrate, we need to cultivate 
an environmental ethic with roots as deep as a tallgrass prairie. 
 In A Sugar Creek Chronicle, ecologist Cornelia Mutel takes 
readers into her world, in and around the woodland acreage 
along Sugar Creek north of Iowa City where she and her hus-
band live and raised a family. This is an intimate book, one in 
which Mutel brings the weight of her scientific knowledge about 
climate change, her talent as a science writer, and her personal 
210      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
concern as a parent and grandparent to make the profound grav-
ity of climate change understandable to a general audience. She 
“invites” readers “to consider the importance of climate change 
and to realize that we can—indeed that we must—rapidly take 
action to limit its expression” (x). This understated call to action 
sets the book’s tone.  
 In structure, the book is modeled on the familiar annual-
cycle-of-nature essay style that Aldo Leopold introduced in A 
Sand County Almanac. Mutel weaves two narratives in alternating 
chapters. One is a “Weather and Climate Journal” of the year 
2012—“perhaps the first year that the reality of climate change 
came home to the American public” (xi). The other narrative is 
a “Memoir” in which she reflects on the stages of her life and 
her maturation as an ecologist in relation to the development of 
environmentalism.  
 In each season of the “Weather and Climate Journal,” Mutel 
addresses different aspects of climate change in the form of dated 
journal entries, and she does so in non-scientific language. In 
“Winter,” for instance, she unpacks the fundamental problem 
of climate change—“human-induced increases in heat-trapping 
gases in the atmosphere”—and the resultant greenhouse effect 
(18). She also notes that the greenhouse effect is not a new con-
cept; scientists first observed and named the process in the mid-
nineteenth century. In “Spring,” to take another example, she 
tackles the distinction between climate and weather, explaining 
how the gradual but relentless rise in average global temperature 
affects all natural processes but particularly the “way water 
cycles over and through Earth’s surface.” Again, she cuts to the 
heart of the matter: “More of each year’s precipitation is falling 
in winter and spring, while summer and fall are becoming drier,” 
and weather events are both more extreme and less predictable 
(56). In each of the seasonal chapters, she mixes observations of 
the natural world around her with information and commentary 
on climate change. One can easily imagine what a walk in the 
woods would be like with Connie Mutel.  
 In the “Memoir” chapters, which are shorter, Mutel takes us 
on a more personal odyssey. She begins at the beginning, with 
her childhood in the 1940s and ’50s, when consumer consump-
tion patterns placed less overall stress on the environment. Her 
Review Essay      211 
mother’s premature death from cancer, which came just as the 
author was starting college, “awakened” her to the fragility of 
life and how quickly it can slip away. Her college and university 
years, “Learning, 1965–1975,” coincided with the flowering of the 
modern environmental movement, which gave greater import to 
her studies in biology and plant ecology. In “Mothering, 1976–
1997,” we learn that concern for the environment influenced the 
decisions she and her husband made about where and how to 
live as they raised a family of three boys. Mutel pairs thoughts 
on parenting, as well as her first bout with cancer, with observa-
tions on a succession of environmental wake-up calls that came 
during those two decades: the energy crisis, discovery of the 
ozone hole, and growing concern about the extent of acid rain. 
“Stilling, 1997–2012” is even more reflective, as Mutel introduces 
readers to her grandchildren and assesses the status of environ-
mental problems that will affect their lives.   
 While the interwoven narratives of A Sugar Creek Chronicle 
flow gently, Mutel does not end on a particularly hopeful note. 
A short concluding chapter recaps the major weather catastro-
phes of 2012–2013 and summarizes the latest findings of climate 
scientists as presented in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Inter-
governmental Panel on Climate Change. She notes that despite con-
tinued and intensifying warnings from climate scientists, the 2013 
United Nations Climate Change Conference “made little prog-
ress” toward curbing greenhouse-gas emissions globally (206–9). 
As the book was going to press in 2015, Mutel added another 
short chapter in which her urgency becomes more palpable. We 
are rapidly approaching the critical hour of decision: either do 
little or nothing, which will mean that more and more resources 
will be required to cope with the consequences of a climate that 
is increasingly uncontrollable, or take measures that will slow the 
rate of climate change and minimize its adverse effects.  
 
CHERI REGISTER’S The Big Marsh is equally personal but more 
historical in its approach. Her intent, as she states at the outset, is 
to figure out “how personal stories intersect with public history” 
in a belief that “the deeper we probe the personal, the more likely 
we are to achieve universal resonance.” In her case, the personal 
is Freeborn County, Minnesota, where her family has “a six-
212      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
generation claim on the landscape” (16). Register’s great-great- 
grandparents Robert and Mary Speer, Yorkers of Dutch and Eng-
lish ancestry, were among the first group of white settlers to arrive 
in Moscow Township of Freeborn County in 1855. Another line 
of descent comes from Henry N. and Sarah Ostrander, also York-
ers, who arrived in 1859 and settled west of the marsh in Bancroft 
Township.  
 Freeborn County sits on the Minnesota-Iowa border, and the 
big marsh that is the subject of Register’s book is a wetland created 
by the Wisconsin Glacier. On the historic “pre-drainage” land-
scape, the marsh stretched south and east from Lake Geneva to 
cover large parts of four townships that lay northeast of the inter-
section of modern Interstates 90 and 35. Before Euro-Americans 
arrived, the Dakota, Sauk, and Meskwaki shared hunting and 
gathering space in and around the big marsh. An 1835 mapping 
expedition under the direction of Albert Miller Lea and an 1854 
public land survey began the process of transforming the shared 
land-use practices of native peoples into measured land divisions 
that could be bought and sold, with land use determined by indi-
vidual landowners. As part of that transformation, native peoples 
were cajoled or forced onto increasingly smaller tracts and gradu-
ally moved west and south to make room for more white settlers.  
 Register points to 1877 as a watershed year, so to speak. In 
that year the Minnesota legislature passed the first of multiple 
laws authorizing local governments to make decisions regarding 
proposals to drain wetlands. Two years later, the St. Paul and 
Manitoba Railroad, a predecessor of the Great Northern, sub-
mitted its first proposal for a massive drainage project in the Red 
River’s floodplain. At about the same time, Euro-American set-
tlement around the big marsh reached a plateau. Register found 
no particular evidence that those living around the marsh con-
sidered the wetland to be a hindrance or bother. To the contrary, 
abundant fish and wildlife provided farmers ample means to 
supplement farm production. This was because the Southern 
Minnesota Railroad, which owned much of the marsh, was in no 
hurry to sell the land. In the absence of a resident landowner to 
prohibit or impose restrictions on fishing, hunting, and trapping, 
the marsh continued to function as a commons, although the in-
digenous users had been supplanted by Euro-American farmers, 
Review Essay      213 
gentlemen sport hunters, and commercial hunters supplying 
markets in Chicago and elsewhere.  
 Drought conditions and a series of prairie fires that began in 
1889 eventually destroyed thousands of acres of peat and timber 
lands in the marsh. Then, anticipating a long-term loss of land 
value, the Southern Minnesota Railroad began to sell its holdings, 
but not to ordinary farmers. Urban capitalists saw an oppor-
tunity to profit from large-scale farming. Among them were Min-
neapolis realtor Putnam Dana McMillan and his brother-in-law, 
Albert Hastings, who purchased 6,000 acres and proceeded to 
drain about 3,000 acres of the marsh to create Ricelawn Ranch, op-
erated by hired workers under the supervision of a farm superin-
tendent. In 1898 McMillan, having purchased Hastings’s interest, 
sold the undrained half of his land to another syndicate, which 
intended to subdivide the land and sell the tracts for farming.  
 Three years later, 21 landowners presented a petition to the 
Freeborn County Board of Commissioners calling for the con-
struction of a major drainage ditch, at public expense, claiming, 
as required under Minnesota water law, that it would be of “pub-
lic benefit and utility.” Their petition provoked an organized 
public backlash. Opponents managed to block the project until 
1907, when, thanks to some clever legal maneuvering, proponents 
finally prevailed in court. By November 1909, the big marsh had 
been transformed into arable land, drained by a 17.7-mile main 
channel, 65 feet wide and 12 feet deep, fed by nine laterals, all of 
which directed water more swiftly to the Cedar River. 
  The fight to stop the drainage project—and the consequences 
of that failure—is the central drama of The Big Marsh. Register 
relates that drama in an engaging narrative that weaves through 
the lives of the principal actors as well as those of her own family. 
Among the more outspoken opponents of draining the marsh 
was Register’s great-grandfather Elbert Ostrander, who in later 
decades would operate his farm as a kind of halfway house for 
parolees from Red Wing Reformatory and, during the Great De-
pression, lobby the state legislature for a moratorium on farm 
foreclosures. She is careful to point out, however, that “it would 
be anachronistic to read the popular resistance to the Riceland-
214      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Moscow ditch in terms of twenty-first-century wetland preserva-
tion” because “early conservationists had only a dawning sense 
of ecology” (156). 
 In the bigger picture, Register hypothesizes that drained wet-
lands are part of the “geography of westward migration,” by 
which she means they represent the triumph of entrepreneurs 
like P. D. McMillan over “yeoman farmers . . . with simpler am-
bitions to live securely on land they worked themselves” (211–12). 
If she had delved more deeply into these competing land-use “vi-
sions,” she likely would have found that “yeoman farmers” them-
selves held deeply divided opinions on the benefits of drainage. 
Instead, she ends on a note of redemption. We learn that P. D. 
McMillan and his heirs became generous patrons of fine art and 
education, always for public benefit, primarily through the Min-
neapolis Institute of Art. Finally, she takes us with her to the 2013 
dedication of a wildlife management area in Freeborn County, 
roughly 850 acres in the northern reach of the former big marsh 
where the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is restor-
ing some semblance of the pre-drainage landscape.  
 This is not a story that places climate change front and center, 
as A Sugar Creek Chronicle does, but it does implicate “the contin-
ued tiling and ditching, the dwindling of underground aquifers, 
and the practice of plowing fields bare in the fall with no stubble 
to hold the soil in place” in the land’s declining ability to mitigate 
weather extremes (58). In this sense, Register exposes the com-
plexity of human actions that are undermining the earth’s ability 
to regenerate. She does not acknowledge writers who have influ-
enced her, but there are echoes of William Cronon’s masterful 
explication of land commodification in Indians and the Land: Indi-
ans, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England and William Least 
Heat-Moon’s perambulation around the topographic quadrants 
of Chase County, Kansas, in PrairyErth: A Deep Map. 
 The Big Marsh is nicely illustrated with maps and photo-
graphs. Source notes, however, are in the form of unnumbered 
endnotes referenced by page. For those who pay attention to 
footnotes, the author’s penchant for short chapters facilitates 
note reading to a degree, but an added frustration is the lack of 
Review Essay      215 
an index. A Sugar Creek Chronicle includes an index but no foot-
notes. Mutel compensates for the latter with a chapter-by-chapter 
bibliographic essay.  
 
FAMILY is a secondary theme of both books, although the au-
thors’ perspectives differ. Register examines her forebears, seek-
ing to understand how they valued the natural environment dur-
ing a time of rapidly intensifying land cultivation. Mutel’s eye is 
on the next generation, first as a parent consciously instilling a 
sense of wonder in and respect for nature in her three sons, then 
as a grandmother laying a trail of environmentalist breadcrumbs 
for her grandchildren.  
 Each author in her own way urges more active environmen-
tal stewardship on a personal level. Mutel is more explicit in her 
belief that if enough people would take the environmental con-
sequences of climate change to heart, then we humans, individ-
ually and collectively, would take appropriate actions to slow the 
environmental degradation and ecological destruction that is 
taking place all around us. Toward that end, she provides an an-
notated list of sources where one can find more information 
about climate change. 
 As a public historian with a strong interest in local history, I 
think we need more books, exhibits, and public programs that 
draw on family and local history for environmental education, 
raising awareness about climate change and its consequences, 
and continually urging individuals to live by an environmental 
ethic. Climate-change scientists are repeatedly treated as modern-
day Cassandras, in part because the language of science is dense 
and the human causes of climate change are complex. Connie 
Mutel and Cheri Register have given us two books that deserve 
wide reading and will, I hope, stimulate more works that focus 
on real people in relation to actual environments. These are sto-
ries we all can comprehend and that allow audiences a measure 
of freedom in formulating their own ideas. 


Midwestern Writers on Environmental Stewardship: A Review Essay

Review of: "Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal", by Jess Gilbert

Lauck, Jon K.

Book Reviews and Notices      243 
private institutional records that can seem so dry and one-dimensional. 
In Birk’s hands, county administrators, welfare professionals and ad-
ministrators, foster families, and children rise up from the pages of 
these records as real and interesting characters. Such research is time 
consuming and often tedious, but Birk makes clear its potential for 
building detailed depictions of local life. On that basis alone, this book 
should not be missed. 
 
 
Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal, by 
Jess Gilbert. Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 
2015. xv, 341 pp. Map, table, illustrations, appendix, notes, index. 
$45.00 hardcover, $30.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Jon K. Lauck is past president of the Midwestern History Association, 
associate editor and book review editor of the Middle West Review, and adjunct 
professor of history at the University of South Dakota. He is the author of The 
Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History (2013). 
In recent decades, University of Wisconsin–Madison rural sociologist 
Jess Gilbert has frequented academic conferences and presented im-
pressive papers on rural history, politics, policy planning, intellectual 
history, and midwestern history. His focus has been the hothouse 
environment of New Deal agricultural policy making and the myriad 
ways 1930s farm policy was constructed and implemented. Now comes 
his grand summary statement of all of this work in the form of a book 
in Yale University Press’s Agrarian Studies series. 
 Gilbert’s essential point is that historians have spent too much 
time examining the early stages of the agricultural New Deal, especially 
the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and have been seduced by the lin-
gering power of the images captured by the Farm Security Admin-
istration. More important, Gilbert argues, were the large-scale plan-
ning efforts of the late New Deal, which have been largely forgotten. 
Gilbert hopes that a better understanding of these planning efforts will 
make grand national policy planning efforts easier in the future.  
 Gilbert’s most impressive work focuses on his collective portrait of 
the key contingent of midwestern-born planners in the U.S. Department 
of Agriculture (USDA) who largely led the agricultural planning effort. 
With a nod to cultural Marxism in general and the work of Antonio 
Gramsci in particular, Gilbert sees these men as “organic intellectuals,” 
policymakers who had emerged directly from the midwestern soil to 
construct farm policy for rural America. This argument is meant to re-
but the work of Catherine Stock, who, in her book Main Street in Crisis 
(1992), pointed to the friction between local cultures in the Dakotas 
244      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
and intrusive New Deal bureaucrats who were trying to issue orders 
designed to transform those local cultures. It is also meant to rebut the 
critics of “high modernism” more generally, those scholars who have 
highlighted the coercive actions of the state taken by central planning 
offices and who have more generally chronicled the abuses of local 
and traditional cultures by elite planners. The libertarian-tending 
editor of the Yale Agrarian Studies series, James Scott, is perhaps the 
best-known critic of the potential abuses of central states. (See, for ex-
ample, Scott’s Seeing Like a State [1999]).  
 Where Gilbert is most successful and makes his greatest contri-
bution to this policy history debate is in drawing a clear distinction 
between the midwestern agrarian intellectuals in the USDA who were 
trying to preserve the traditions of the family farm by way of coopera-
tive government action and another set of obnoxious and abusive 
central planners from urban backgrounds who aggressively dismissed 
midwestern agrarian thought and sympathies. Rexford Tugwell is Ex-
hibit A for this latter school of thought. Against Tugwell, Gilbert points 
to men who grew up on midwestern farms and were swayed by 
Protestant reform impulses and attended midwestern farm colleges. 
He notes how their egalitarian sympathies were grounded in the mid-
western family farm tradition, which made the Midwest, unlike the 
“industrializing urban North and the plantation South,” a “substan-
tially one-class society” where “the workers were the owners” (28, ital-
ics in original). Gilbert’s treatment of the unique political and economic 
culture of the Midwest makes Planning Democracy a fascinating must-
read by itself.  
 In the end, Gilbert paints a much more complex picture of the 
New Deal’s agricultural policy world and a brilliant analysis of the 
midwestern farm boys who were once at center stage in the USDA, 
but his treatment of national planning is less convincing. How Wash-
ington-dominated central economic planning can be “democratic” 
always remains a bit of a riddle that his policymakers always seemed 
to muddle through. And there was, in fact, intense organic resistance 
to greater bureaucratic controls from Washington, as Catherine Stock 
has noted in her work. Anthropologist Tom Biolsi also recently 
demonstrated the intense resistance to New Deal agricultural plan-
ning in a case study of the South Dakota experience in a chapter in The 
Plains Political Tradition (2014). Biolsi’s evidence of failure is the best 
indication available for why the later planning stages of the New Deal 
are generally forgotten. Regardless of the relative merits of national 
planning and how the New Deal experience might inform such poli-
cies, Gilbert’s impressive research into the 1930s experience and, in 
Book Reviews and Notices      245 
particular, his keen grasp of the role of Iowa and the Midwest in these 
past debates makes Planning Democracy a must-read for historians of 
the New Deal, regionalism, policy, and politics generally.  
 
 
Amana Colonies, 1932–1945, by Peter Hoehnle. Images of America Series. 
Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2016. 127 pp. Illustrations, bibli-
ography. $21.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Abigail Foerstner is co-coordinator of the science journalism special-
ization at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She is the 
author of Picturing Utopia: Bertha Shambaugh and the Amana Photographers (2000).  
Cedar Rapids photographer John Barry captured Lucille Schaefer 
Kraus dressed for church in the 1930s. Her floor-length calico, with a 
black shawl, apron, and cap reveres the legacy of her past as she grace-
fully embraces the new world of the Great Change in the Amana Col-
onies. Communal societies historian Peter Hoehnle, an Amana native, 
draws on photographs by Barry, trusted Amana leader William Noé, 
West Amana brothers Rudolph and Paul Kellenberger, and others to 
tell the story of the critical and often overlooked reorganization of life 
for people in the Amanas. In grand American fashion, the Great Change 
transformed their communal religious utopia into a for-profit corpora-
tion, designating ownership shares to colonists for their years of ser-
vice and offering wages for farming, carpentry, baking, factory work, 
and all of the other colony jobs—10 cents per hour at first, as Hoehnle 
tells us.  
 Hoehnle’s book documents in text and photo portfolios the rapid-
fire pace of the Great Change from 1932, when Amana residents over-
whelmingly voted for it, to 1945. The book shows how the colonies 
quickly offered a high school education to children for the first time 
and opened the doors to private businesses, scout troops, modern 
dress, and Amana’s first newsletter. From a national perspective, the 
book fills a gap in the Midwest’s depression-era history. We see the 
sweeping force of social and economic change and the faces of people 
who met it with dignity, courage, and determination to build a brighter 
future during one of the darkest periods of American life.  
 Anyone who visits the Amanas for family-style dinners and hand-
crafted goods soon learns how the Community of True Inspiration 
fled religious persecution in Germany in the 1840s and, in the 1850s, 
settled on 26,000 acres along the Iowa River to establish the seven vil-
lages of the communal Amana Colonies. Community kitchens fed the 
body, and 11 church services every week nourished the spirit.  


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