The Annals of Iowa

Otjen, Nathaniel

English

Creating a Barrio in Iowa City, 1916–1936: Mexican Section Laborers and the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Company

Lindaman, Matthew

Home Away from Home: The Camp Dodger Newspaper and the Promotion of Troop Morale, 1917–1919

Back Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 76 no. 3 Summer 2017

Review of: "Jews in Wisconsin", by Sheila Terman Cohen

Wentlin, Sonja

352      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
schemes but also led to a series of very real antiblack territorial and state 
statutes aimed at preventing black immigration to Iowa. Beyond a desire 
to avoid antagonizing the South, that racial imperative to keep blacks 
out also helps explain why Iowans terrorized abolitionists and sup-
ported the Fugitive Slave Act. Moreover, Iowans rejected the Free Soil 
position in the name of sectional harmony but also because they could 
afford to, since the Missouri Compromise had long ago banned slavery 
in Nebraska Territory and ensured that only white farmers and laborers 
would occupy that vast region west of the Missouri River. When the 
Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) repealed the Missouri Compromise, how-
ever, the chilling thought of masters and slaves invading Nebraska Ter-
ritory and sullying the “White Man’s West” overwhelmed their dread 
of disunion and drove many toward Free Soil politics. More attention 
to the role of racism would have strengthened Baker’s overall ap-
proach and provided a solid grounding for his later discussions of 
emancipation and postwar struggles over racial equality.  
 In one of the most original, engaging, and insightful parts of the book, 
the epilogue focuses on how Iowans struggled to define the meaning of 
citizenship, civil rights, and equality after Appomattox and how they 
came to terms with the new biracial Union they helped create. Overall, 
The Sacred Cause of Union is a solid, well-written, and engaging work 
that provides an updated, more inclusive, and more nuanced portrait 
of Iowa’s role in the Civil War. We may hope that the book will spur 
more interest in the Hawkeye State’s important role in safeguarding the 
sacred cause of a more perfect Union.  
 
 
Jews in Wisconsin, by Sheila Terman Cohen. Madison: Wisconsin Histor-
ical Society Press, 2016. 121 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $12.95 
paperback. 
Reviewer Sonja Wentling is associate professor of history at Concordia College, 
Moorhead, Minnesota. She is a coauthor of Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Ori-
gins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel (2012). 
“In my experience all people who have been born in Wisconsin always 
seem to come back,” Louis Heller, descendant of German Jewish immi-
grants, nostalgically noted in a 1948 journal entry (104). Heller’s state-
Thomas R. Baker won the State Historical Society of Iowa’s Benjamin 
F. Shambaugh Award, recognizing The Sacred Cause of Union: Iowa 
in the Civil War, as the most significant book on Iowa history pub-
lished in 2016.—Ed. 
Book Reviews and Notices      353 
ment captures Sheila Cohen’s overarching positive message that Wis-
consin has been good to Jews. She not only pays homage to “midwestern 
nice” but also points to the Jewish symbiosis with Wisconsin that has 
created an enduring legacy. Cohen’s short and loving tribute to the rich 
history of Wisconsin’s Jews highlights unique aspects of Jewish life in 
the Badger State and describes important characteristics of the Midwest 
and its Jewish communities today.  
 Wisconsin emerged as a major hub of German Jewish immigration 
in the Midwest starting in the mid–nineteenth century, followed by a 
large influx of Russian Jews as a result of persecution and pogroms 
throughout Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 
Cohen describes the challenges of Jewish immigrants to adapt and as-
similate to midwestern life but also addresses the tensions within a Jew-
ish community that developed into a rich tapestry of congregations and 
ideologies ranging from religiously observant to socialist and Zionist. 
Most importantly, aided by a colorful array of primary sources, she il-
lustrates Jewish activism for civil rights and establishes the connections 
between Jewish life in Wisconsin and world events that proved to be 
the catalyst for further Jewish immigration, such as Nazi Germany’s 
persecution of Jews and the long shadow of the Holocaust, and the Soviet 
Union’s discrimination against its Jewish citizens during the Cold War.  
 As in other midwestern states, most of Wisconsin’s Jewish popula-
tion remained concentrated in large cities. As a result, much of the 
scholarship has focused on Milwaukee as the center of a thriving Jewish 
community and the home to famous Jews like later Israeli Prime Minis-
ter Golda Meir. (See especially Louis J. Swichkow and Lloyd P. Gard-
ner, History of Jews in Milwaukee [1963] and John Gurda, One People, 
Many Paths: The History of Jewish Milwaukee [2009].) Yet Cohen’s account 
takes readers beyond the urban centers of Milwaukee and Madison to 
the small towns of Sheboygan and Wisconsin Rapids. Cohen concedes 
that “Jewish life in small-town Wisconsin has become only a footnote in 
the Jewish history of the state” (70), but in her interviews she uncovered 
a fondness for and attachment to these small towns as places of a care-
free childhood and safe upbringing. Even Iowa, home to a tiny Jewish 
population by comparison, could point to the small-town roots of its 
most famous Jewish exports: Author Edna Ferber, who later established 
herself in Appleton, Wisconsin, once lived in Ottumwa; and the twins 
who wrote syndicated newspaper advice columns, Esther Friedman 
(Ann Landers) and Pauline Friedman (Abigail Van Buren), were born 
in Sioux City. However, their contributions to American culture would 
not be honed in rural America but rather in urban centers. 
354      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Cohen mentions that dwindling Jewish communities in small-town 
America are far from the only challenges midwestern Jews have faced 
in recent decades. Assimilation, secularization, and intermarriage have 
changed American Jewish identity in general. Her narrative still em-
phasizes the “bonds of a common ancestry that dates back to ancient 
history” (86) as the main marker of Jewish identity, yet a 2013 PEW Re-
search study suggests that Jewish identity in America has evolved into 
what some scholars refer to as an “emancipated diaspora” mentality 
that maintains identity less by looking back than by being outer di-
rected and engaging the other. (See Roberta Rosenberg, “Jewish ‘Di-
asporic Humor’ and Contemporary Jewish-American Identity,” Shofar: 
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 33 [2015], 110–38.) 
 
 
Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir, by Thomas Pecore Weso. 
Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016. xi, 122 pp. Illustra-
tions, recipe, bibliography, index. $19.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Christopher Cumo is an independent scholar in Canton, Ohio. He is 
the author of Plants and People (2015). 
Author and Menominee Amerindian Thomas Pecore Weso offers a per-
sonal account based on childhood and adulthood experiences of the 
folk- and foodways of the Menominee of Wisconsin during much of the 
twentieth century. The book is a contribution to the burgeoning field of 
food history, a dynamic discipline that draws on the work of many 
scholars. As such, this account deserves a wide readership. The method 
flows from Weso’s commitment to fact and discrete detail as the back-
bone of historical reminiscence. The book does not borrow the theoret-
ical architecture of related historical studies, but such constructs would 
be out of place in a memoir. 
 Weso organizes Good Seeds into a preface and 17 chapters. The em-
phasis is on short, evocative passages and a fidelity to the past. As is 
proper for a book concerned with food history, Weso relates the im-
portance of several foods to the Menominee of Wisconsin. We need not 
belabor them all, but in the first chapter the author remarks about the 
importance of potatoes and cornbread as staples in his diet and that of 
the people he knew. Taking Weso’s cue, one can scarcely underrate the 
value of potatoes and corn. Corn, of course, is a primary crop in Iowa and 
other midwestern states, whereas potatoes, originating in the Andes 
Mountains, have emerged as a world crop, at least in the temperate zones. 
Weso begins the second chapter with a third American crop, supplying 
a myth for the origin of tobacco, a plant some might call a noxious weed 
likely native to Virginia. One grasps at once that Good Seeds, rooted in the 


Jews in Wisconsin

Review of: "Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism", by Chris Jennings

Hoehnle, Peter

Book Reviews and Notices      343 
Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, by Chris Jennings. New 
York: Random House, 2016. xv, 488 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliog-
raphy, index. $28.00 hardcover.  
Reviewer Peter Hoehnle is a former president of the Communal Studies Asso-
ciation and former editor of its journal, Communal Studies. He has written exten-
sively (in this journal and elsewhere) about the Amana Colonies and other com-
munal societies. 
Paradise Now is an accessible introduction to five American utopian 
movements of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It is of in-
terest to students of Iowa history because of its treatment of the Fouri-
erist movement, which influenced several small utopian communities 
in the state, and for its chapter on the Icarian movement, whose longest- 
lived communal incarnations were located near Corning, Iowa.  
 The subtitle of Jennings’s book, “the story of American utopianism,” 
is broad and misleading, as he limits his observations to five move-
ments: the Shakers, Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians, and Oneida Perfec-
tionists. Not included in this overview are any successful sectarian 
movements other than the Shakers. Thus, this is one survey of American 
communal societies that makes no mention at all of the Amana Society. 
Jennings focuses on communities that, in his view, attempted to reach 
out to the larger world in an effort at millenarian or utopian transfor-
mation. One could argue that the movements Jennings reviews are the 
most “utopian” in their focus and that others, including groups such 
as the Hutterites and the Amana Inspirationists, were not focused on 
being transformative but, rather, on maintaining a communal lifestyle 
based on their interpretation of biblical directives. One glaring omission 
in Jennings’s work is at least a listing of other communities that would 
serve to broaden the context of American communalism.  
 A review of the bibliography reveals that Jennings’s work is based 
primarily on secondary monographs. This is not a work of scholarship 
so much as an erudite, often witty digest of the work of others. Jen-
nings’s sources do represent the best published works on the move-
ments discussed but include only a handful of journal articles and none 
from Communal Societies, the journal of the Communal Studies Associa-
tion and the journal of record for this field.  
 Jennings’s reliance on classic, if outdated, monographs leads him to 
perpetuate some old canards about the Shakers, in particular, that have 
been discounted by contemporary researchers. For example, the Shakers 
did not invent the clothespin, the flat broom, or the circular saw, nor 
did the Shakers peak at 6,000 members, as Jennings suggests. Jennings 
correctly identifies the future Shaker elder Frederick Evans as an ardent 
disciple of Robert Owen but incorrectly states that he was a resident of 
344      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Owen’s New Harmony community. These and other errors are minor, 
however, and do not detract significantly from the value of Jennings’s 
overview. 
 Jennings offers a commendable summary of the work of Charles 
Fourier and of the movements spawned by his thought, as translated 
through the writings and advocacy of his leading American disciple, 
Albert Brisbane. Jennings includes a lengthy account of the notable 
Brook Farm community of Roxbury, Massachusetts, which eventually 
fell under the spell of Fourierism and became a phalanx during the 
latter part of its brief existence. Because of his cogent discussion of Fou-
rierism alone, I commend Paradise Now to anyone parsing the history 
of the Fourierist-influenced communities in Iowa. Although Jennings 
makes note of many of the 28 known Fourierist communities, he does 
not mention the Iowa Pioneer Phalanx, the one serious expression of the 
movement in the state, which existed in Mahaska County in 1844–1845.  
 Jennings’s treatment of the Icarian movement is, likewise, accessible, 
accurate, and commendable to a reader with an Iowa focus. The Icarian 
movement began in the revolutionary fervor of 1830s France and was 
based on the writings of the French journalist, politician, and theorist 
Etienne Cabet, particularly his novel Voyage en Icarie, describing a visit 
to a fictional utopia. In 1848 Cabet dispatched an advance party of Icar-
ian settlers to Texas to establish his model community. Drought, sick-
ness, and poorly chosen land conspired to bring an early end to the 
Texas Icaria. The faithful regrouped in New Orleans and, under the 
guidance of the recently arrived Cabet, headed north, where they rented 
a portion of the abandoned Mormon settlement at Nauvoo. After Cabet’s 
autocratic leadership led to divisions, the leader and a loyal faction set-
tled near St. Louis in 1856, creating the short–lived Cheltenham com-
munity. A majority of the Icarians soon packed their belongings and 
moved to a 3,100-acre tract of land they owned in remote Adams 
County, Iowa. There, the French utopian socialists recreated their com-
munity of equality on the Iowa prairie. In 1878 divisions between mem-
bers led to yet another fracture that, after legal wrangling, resulted in the 
creation of two communities, New Icaria and Young Icaria. The Young 
Icarians eventually removed to California, where they founded a short-
lived community. The New Icarians, aging and largely dependent on 
hired labor, eventually dissolved their community in 1898.  
 Although Jennings devotes a lengthy chapter to Icaria, the Iowa pe-
riod of the movement is summarized in a scant three pages. Jennings’s 
purpose is not to provide a detailed social history of the Icarian com-
munities in Adams County but rather to place them in context as the 
final expressions of the grand utopian vision articulated by Cabet. That 
Book Reviews and Notices      345 
is entirely appropriate. Anyone wishing further detail on the Icarians is 
advised to read Robert Sutton’s study, Les Icariens: The Utopian Dream in 
Europe and America (1994).  
 Jennings’s work culminates in an interesting, complete, and largely 
error-free chapter on the Oneida Community, which flourished in up-
state New York under the leadership of the enigmatic John Humphrey 
Noyes from the 1840s to the 1880s. This episode of utopian history is of 
interest to social historians but has limited relationship to the history of 
Iowa other than as a unique, if not spectacular, flowering of nineteenth-
century utopianism and millennial anticipation.  
 Errors and omissions aside, Paradise Now is enjoyable, fresh, and a 
worthy introduction to American utopianism. It is not a complete his-
tory of utopianism in the United States, but it springs to the forefront of 
the books that I would recommend to anyone with even a passing inter-
est in these movements or in the history of the early nineteenth century.  
 
 
Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841–
1869, by Shirley Ann Wilson Moore. Race and Culture in the American 
West Series. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. xv, 368 pp. 
Map, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer J. T. Murphy is professor of history at Indiana University South Bend. 
His research and writing have focused on frontier settlement, the Oregon Trail, 
and the military history of the nineteenth-century U.S. West, among other topics. 
On Christmas Day, 1849, Jacob Y. Stover and 26 other gold seekers from 
Iowa City stumbled into Rancho Cucamonga, a 13,000-acre cattle ranch 
and vineyard east of Los Angeles. They had traveled the overland trail 
to Salt Lake City, then taken the Old Spanish Trail over the desert into 
California. The ranch manager, an African American named Jackson, 
welcomed the visitors, fed them, and let them fill their tin cups with 
wine, which Stover remembered drinking “as fast as the Indians could 
tramp it,” even though their host suggested moderation. “Gentlemen, 
you have had a hard time of it,” he recalled Jackson saying, “but de first 
ting you know[,] you will know noting” (83). Despite his hospitality and 
apparent skill in managing a large ranching operation, Jackson had only 
a minor place in Stover’s memory; he was simply part of a humorous 
interlude. This is one of many stories related by Shirley Ann Wilson 
Moore in her informative study of African American participation in 
the westward migrations. She wants us to recognize their presence and 
understand their significance; otherwise they will remain hidden from 
our collective memory.   


Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism

Review of: "Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland/The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border," by Bridget Ford

Etcheson, Nicole

Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland/The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 76 no. 1 Winter 2017

Review of: "History of Transportation, Henry County, Iowa," by the Henry County Historic Preservation Commission

Grant, H. Roger

134      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
History of Transportation, Henry County, Iowa. Mount Pleasant: Henry 
County Historic Preservation Commission, 2015. 273 pp. Illustrations, 
maps, index. $29.00 paperback. 
Reviewer H. Roger Grant is Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Professor and Cen-
tennial Professor of history at Clemson University. A prolific author of books 
and articles about railroad and transportation history, his most recent books are 
Railroaders without Borders: A History of the Railroad Development Corporation (2015), 
and Electric Interurbans and the American People (2016). 
The Henry County Historic Preservation Commission, sponsor of Aban-
doned Towns of Henry County and Unincorporated Towns of Henry County, 
has created a third title that deals with the history of this southeastern 
Iowa county, specifically its transportation history, covering four core 
areas: water, roads, railroads, and aviation. This product of the collec-
tive efforts of the Henry County organization is a charming review of 
its countywide transportation past. Although coverage is a mishmash 
of original documents, remembrances, and commentaries and not al-
ways structured chronologically, the book offers a good picture of how 
residents shattered the tyranny of distance, providing a microcosm of 
Hawkeye State transport history. 
 Water never became a practical local option. The only stream of im-
portance was the Skunk River, a shallow waterway that emptied into 
the Mississippi River near Burlington. Yet during the frontier period 
discussions took place about making this stream navigable for steam-
boat traffic. But it would require the costly construction of a slack-water 
canal system, something that had been successful on several other mid-
western streams. 
 Roads became the sensible response. Prior to the Good Roads 
movement after 1900, public roads were almost universally poor. Still, 
the county in the 1850s claimed an all-weather plank road that linked 
Mount Pleasant with Burlington. Although area enthusiasts proposed 
similar wooden roads, they never became much more than paper proj-
ects due to their high construction and maintenance costs. Then, as auto-
mobile and truck ownership expanded, better roads appeared. Not only 
were the principal routes marked, but in the 1920s some were paved, 
including a bizarre privately financed highway known as the Coleman 
Road. Ultimately, much better highways served the county, highlighted 
by the recent upgrading of U.S. 218, the “Avenue of the Saints.” As ma-
jor roads improved, county residents also benefited from intercity bus 
operations, mostly between the 1930s and 1950s. 
 The Railway Age did not miss Henry County. By the end of the 
nineteenth century, steel rails served virtually every community. The 
Chicago, Burlington & Quincy eventually dominated, with its historic 
Book Reviews and Notices      135 
main line slicing through the county on an east-west axis. The Peoria, 
Illinois, stem of the Minneapolis & St. Louis also served the northern part 
of the county. But as early as the 1930s line abandonments began, re-
sulting from increasing highway competition, eventually leaving only 
the high-density Burlington main line to serve the county with freight 
and Amtrak service. 
 Resembling water transport, aviation never gained much local im-
portance. There were early balloon ascensions and aerial “barnstormers,” 
entertainment that morphed into pleasure flights and commercial agri-
cultural services. Landing strips appeared, the most notable being devel-
opment of a small, modern airport in Mount Pleasant after World War II.  
 The historic preservation commission has created an unusual type 
of localized transportation work. Readers should enjoy its efforts. Per-
haps this approach will inspire others to consider a similar study of 
their county’s transportation heritage. 
 
 
The Iron Road in the Prairie State: The Story of Illinois Railroading, by Simon 
Cordery. Railroads Past and Present Series. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 2016. xvii, 216 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, 
index. $60.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Scott E. Randolph is assistant professor of business administration at 
the University of Redlands in southern California. His research and writing 
have focused on railroads during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. 
Much like its prairie neighbors to the west, railroads made Illinois. Chi-
cago remains the most important railroad hub in North America, and 
the railroads that traversed the state provided the critical infrastructure 
that linked the commodity crops of the Great Plains; the coal, dairy, and 
manufacturing of the Midwest; the timber and international trade of the 
Pacific Coast; and the cotton and timber of the South with the markets, 
specialty manufacturing, ports, and capital of the Northeast and New 
England. Simon Cordery chronicles this relationship from the 1830s to 
the present with an emphasis on the period prior to 1945. Readers fa-
miliar with the two volumes on Iowa railroads in the Railroads Past and 
Present series produced by Indiana University Press will find much to 
enjoy in this volume on railroading in Illinois. Like other books in the 
series, The Iron Road in the Prairie State is intended for railroad enthusi-
asts and general readers rather than for an academic audience. The book 
is well documented, but the author does not attempt to break new 
ground in his analysis, concentrating instead on providing a concise 
and eminently readable survey of the topic. 


History of Transportation, Henry County, Iowa

Review of: "Lincoln and Emancipation", by Edna Greene Medford and of "Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment", by Christian Samito

Not a member yet

Creating a Barrio in Iowa City, 1916–1936: Mexican Section Laborers and the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Company

Home Away from Home: The Camp Dodger Newspaper and the Promotion of Troop Morale, 1917–1919

Back Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 76 no. 3 Summer 2017

Jews in Wisconsin

Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism

Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland/The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 76 no. 1 Winter 2017

History of Transportation, Henry County, Iowa

Lincoln and Emancipation/Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment

Iowa's Last Liquor Battle: Governor Harold E. Hughes and the Liquor-by-the-Drink Conflict

7,461

11,101