The Annals of Iowa

Review of: "Great Plains Indians", by David J. Wishar

Wood, W. Raymond

335 
Book Reviews and Notices 
Great Plains Indians, by David J. Wishart. Discover the Great Plains Se-
ries. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. xviii, 147 pp. Maps, 
graph, illustrations, bibliography, index. $14.95 paperback. 
Reviewer W. Raymond Wood is professor emeritus of anthropology at the Uni-
versity of Missouri–Columbia. His most recent book, with Robert M. Lindholm, 
is Karl Bodmer’s America Revisited: Landscape Views Across Time (2013).  
Born in Scotland, and today a distinguished historical geographer at the 
University of Nebraska–Lincoln, David J. Wishart has adopted the 
American Great Plains as his chosen research area. The Great Plains is 
a giant ecological region that extends from Canada to Texas and from 
the Rocky Mountains to the western margin of Iowa. Two of Wishart’s 
previous books have explored various aspects of the region; here he 
turns his attention to the story of the Native American residents of the 
region from prehistory to 2010. 
 This small volume consists of four chapters that cover significant 
stages in the history of the Indians of the Great Plains. The introduction 
begins with an outline of the status of the Plains Indians in the 2010 
federal census. Although the history of these peoples extends into 
southern Canada in the following chapter, the remainder of the book is 
devoted solely to those Indians living within the present-day contigu-
ous lower United States; maps of tribal distribution end at the Canadian 
boundary. Iowa enters into the story principally through that of the Io-
way Indians, whose history mirrors that of their neighboring tribes to 
their west. 
 Chapter one, “Since Time Immemorial,” summarizes the prehistory 
of the inhabitants of the region. Wishart’s masterful text begins 13,500 
(or more) years ago with the first known peopling of the region and 
ends with the arrival of smallpox and other European diseases for 
which Native Americans had no inherited immunity. This led to mas-
sive depopulation across the entire Great Plains—and the continent. 
There were two contrasting lifeways in the region: that of the western 
bison-hunting nomads and, after about A.D. 900, the eastern sedentary 
village-dwelling farmers. The two groups interacted in mutual trade, 
but they also raided one another, especially for horses after the intro-
duction of those animals. 
336      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Chapter two, “Land and Life around 1803,” reviews how those In-
dians lived in the years before the arrival of the new diseases. Wishart 
begins with their concept of the land: territoriality was synonymous 
with occupancy—where they lived over the course of years—not some-
thing that was “owned.” Wishart reviews their hunting practices, agri-
cultural skills, ceremonies, gender roles, and other relevant aspects of 
daily life. Each group occupied its own ecological niche, with its re-
sources and sacred places, and had its own annual cycle. It was an or-
dered life, one that came to an end at the beginning of the nineteenth 
century. 
 Chapter three, “A Century of Dispossession,” chronicles the means 
by which the government stripped the Indians of most of their lands 
and the efforts made to eradicate their traditional ways of life. This is a 
record of broken treaties and broken promises, capped by the establish-
ment of government schools for children that were expressly designed 
to “detribalize” and “civilize” them, in part by denying them the right 
to speak their own languages. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opened 
the floodgates to white settlers on the Great Plains, an area that previ-
ously held only a thousand or so fur traders. But their ultimate loss was 
the near-extinction of the bison, an animal both revered and necessary 
for their sustenance. 
 Chapter four, “Against All Odds,” an epilogue, records the remark-
able recovery of Great Plains Indians from a population low to today’s 
growing population. One of the most notorious efforts to assimilate In-
dians into white society was the General Allotment Act of 1887, which 
allotted each individual Indian a given plot of land—land that was often 
sold to land-hungry white settlers. Reservations today are a patchwork 
of Indian and white-owned lands. Some tribes, like the Mandans, had 
been almost extinguished by smallpox in 1837, but today the Mandans 
are thriving on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. Indeed, 
as Wishart asserts, Great Plains “reservations are now islands of popu-
lation growth in a sea of rural population decline” (91). 
 The story of the Indians of the Great Plains is not unique; a similar 
story could be told of the Indians of the eastern United States, as well as 
those of the western United States. These are the stories of how the 
United States came to be what it is today, and they should be known to 
all Americans. 
 
 
  


English

Great Plains Indians

Review of: "Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics," by Michael J. Lansing

Magliari, Michael F.

Book Reviews and Notices      139 
porary magazines and newspapers may have featured lofty language, 
but the harsh battles over the highway’s route indicate that economic 
gain also played a role in the creation and routing of the Jefferson High-
way. Henry rightly concludes that further research into the Jefferson 
Highway is needed to trace the efforts to mark and construct the route 
within the other states through which it passed. Such research should 
build on the solid foundation laid by Henry and someday lead to a com-
prehensive history of the Jefferson Highway. 
 
 
Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics, 
by Michael J. Lansing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. xii, 
353 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $45.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Michael F. Magliari is professor of history at California State Univer-
sity, Chico.  His work on rural radicalism includes “Populist Historiography 
Post Hicks: Current Needs and Future Directions,” Agricultural History (2008); 
and “The Populist Vision: Modern or Traditional?” Journal of the Gilded Age and 
Progressive Era (2009). 
The meteoric rise of the North Dakota Nonpartisan League (NPL) is one 
of the most astounding episodes in the annals of American radicalism. 
Within two years of its sudden appearance in 1915, the angry wheat 
farmers who flocked to the NPL seized command of North Dakota’s 
Republican Party and captured control of the state government in Bis-
marck. Over the next six years, from 1916 to 1921, three-term Governor 
Lynn J. Frazier and his supporting cast of NPL legislators implemented 
nearly every plank in their visionary platform, a document that com-
bined the most appealing reforms previously championed by North 
Dakota’s Populist and Socialist parties. 
 As an economic satellite of Minneapolis and St. Paul, North Dakota 
had always been subordinate to powerful corporate interests based in 
Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Along with the Northern Pacific, the Great 
Northern, and two other domineering railroads, Twin Cities banks, 
flour mills, and grain elevators monopolized the marketing of all wheat 
grown in the region. Statehood in 1889 had done nothing to change that; 
neither had the struggles of farmer-owned cooperatives sponsored by 
the Grange, the Farmers’ Alliance, the Farmers’ Union, and the Ameri-
can Society of Equity. All fell short, as did the efforts of those who opted 
for radical third-party politics in the Populist and Socialist movements. 
 The NPL emerged out of those earlier agrarian crusades. Aiming to 
liberate North Dakota’s wheat growers from the stranglehold of corpo-
rate monopolies, the NPL called for the establishment of state-owned 
banks, flour mills, and grain elevators. It also demanded a state-run sys-
140      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
tem of grain grading, publicly funded hail insurance, and tax exemption 
for farm improvements. All this, and much more, was signed into law by 
Governor Frazier following the epic legislative sessions of 1917 and 1919. 
 The amazing spectacle of an ostensibly Republican administration 
implementing a Populist-Socialist program resulted from the NPL’s 
defining strategy. In 1907 North Dakota adopted the direct primary 
system, which enabled voters to nominate the candidates that their re-
spective parties fielded for public office. For frustrated Socialists and 
former Populists who had concluded that third parties were hopeless 
causes in America’s formidable two-party system, direct primaries cre-
ated opportunities for radical outsiders to move indoors. Nominally 
“nonpartisan,” the North Dakota NPL effectively constituted a new 
third party that mobilized like-minded Republicans, Democrats, and 
Socialists to vote as a bloc in the state’s GOP primaries. The stunning 
results triggered a rapid expansion of the NPL among farmers through-
out the American West and the Canadian Great Plains. 
 The dramatic story of the Nonpartisan League has been well told 
by numerous historians, including Theodore Saloutos, Elwyn Robinson, 
Edward Blackorby, Larry Remele, and, most notably, Robert Morlan, 
whose Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915–1922 (1955) re-
mains a classic. Their accounts, however, focus almost exclusively on 
North Dakota. While understandable given North Dakota’s centrality 
in the NPL saga, there has long been a need for a book-length examina-
tion of the NPL as a national, or even international, movement. After 
all, as Michael Lansing points out in his new work, the NPL at its peak 
claimed nearly 250,000 members in 13 states plus the Canadian provinces 
of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Between 1917 and 1923, the NPL main-
tained a national headquarters in St. Paul from which it launched 
vigorous recruiting drives that tested the appeal and adaptability of 
the NPL beyond its home turf. However, despite winning some im-
pressive victories in state legislative races, particularly in Minnesota, 
Montana, and Idaho, nowhere did the NPL come close to matching its 
achievements in North Dakota. 
 The reasons remain unclear. Regrettably, Lansing never delivers on 
his promise to provide a “North American” coverage of the NPL. His 
concentration remains squarely centered on North Dakota, and he offers 
only scattered, uneven, and cursory glimpses of NPL activities in other 
states and provinces. For no single locale does he conduct the complete 
and systematic analysis of existing economic and political conditions 
required for a persuasive explanation of NPL performance.  
 The shortcomings of his book are well illustrated by his skimpy 
treatment of Iowa, where the NPL failed to take hold, despite winning 
Book Reviews and Notices      141 
the support of James Pierce, the influential editor of the Iowa Homestead, 
and enrolling 15,000 members in 1918. Why the NPL subsequently fal-
tered in a state that would soon send Smith Brookhart to the U.S. Senate 
remains a mystery that Lansing cannot convincingly explain in the 
scant two pages he devotes to the Hawkeye State. In the end, Lansing 
has disappointingly little new to say about his fascinating topic, either 
in Iowa or anywhere else in North America. 
 
 
The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, by 
Jefferson Cowie. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. 
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. viii, 273 pp. Illustrations, 
graph, notes, index. $27.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Roger Biles is professor of history emeritus at Illinois State University. 
His books include The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 
1956–2000 (2011). 
Nearly three-quarters of a century after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death 
historians are still struggling to make sense of the New Deal. Was FDR’s 
reform program more success than failure? Did it possess any coher-
ence at all or was it just a hodgepodge of programs slapped together 
hurriedly to confront a frightening economic collapse? Did its imple-
mentation signal a decisive break with the political economy that had 
prevailed in the United States since its founding in the eighteenth cen-
tury? Was it simply a form of corporate liberalism, as New Left revi-
sionists insisted, that substituted modest changes to forestall radical 
alterations at a time when a thoroughgoing transformation seemed pos-
sible? Or, somewhere in between, was it a “halfway revolution” that 
established a new liberal consensus suitable for an essentially cautious 
population seeking a modicum of change to preserve an essentially 
healthy economy temporarily thrown off its game? In The Great Excep-
tion, Jefferson Cowie presents another possibility and offers a fresh, 
original look at a perennial historical conundrum. 
 The Andrew J. Nathanson Professor at Cornell University’s School 
of Industrial and Labor Relations and the author of several books on 
twentieth-century U.S. history, Cowie uses a wide lens to examine the 
meaning of the New Deal. He shows how government policies of the 
1930s charted a new course and how those departures differed signifi-
cantly from what followed after the 1970s. Reflecting the book’s title, 
he posits that the reforms crafted during the Roosevelt administration 
constituted a singular exception to the manner in which government 
operated before and after the crises of the Great Depression and World 
War II. The remarkable expansion of the federal government’s role in 


Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics

Review of: "The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics," by Jefferson Cowie

Biles, Roger

Book Reviews and Notices      141 
the support of James Pierce, the influential editor of the Iowa Homestead, 
and enrolling 15,000 members in 1918. Why the NPL subsequently fal-
tered in a state that would soon send Smith Brookhart to the U.S. Senate 
remains a mystery that Lansing cannot convincingly explain in the 
scant two pages he devotes to the Hawkeye State. In the end, Lansing 
has disappointingly little new to say about his fascinating topic, either 
in Iowa or anywhere else in North America. 
 
 
The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, by 
Jefferson Cowie. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. 
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. viii, 273 pp. Illustrations, 
graph, notes, index. $27.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Roger Biles is professor of history emeritus at Illinois State University. 
His books include The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 
1956–2000 (2011). 
Nearly three-quarters of a century after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death 
historians are still struggling to make sense of the New Deal. Was FDR’s 
reform program more success than failure? Did it possess any coher-
ence at all or was it just a hodgepodge of programs slapped together 
hurriedly to confront a frightening economic collapse? Did its imple-
mentation signal a decisive break with the political economy that had 
prevailed in the United States since its founding in the eighteenth cen-
tury? Was it simply a form of corporate liberalism, as New Left revi-
sionists insisted, that substituted modest changes to forestall radical 
alterations at a time when a thoroughgoing transformation seemed pos-
sible? Or, somewhere in between, was it a “halfway revolution” that 
established a new liberal consensus suitable for an essentially cautious 
population seeking a modicum of change to preserve an essentially 
healthy economy temporarily thrown off its game? In The Great Excep-
tion, Jefferson Cowie presents another possibility and offers a fresh, 
original look at a perennial historical conundrum. 
 The Andrew J. Nathanson Professor at Cornell University’s School 
of Industrial and Labor Relations and the author of several books on 
twentieth-century U.S. history, Cowie uses a wide lens to examine the 
meaning of the New Deal. He shows how government policies of the 
1930s charted a new course and how those departures differed signifi-
cantly from what followed after the 1970s. Reflecting the book’s title, 
he posits that the reforms crafted during the Roosevelt administration 
constituted a singular exception to the manner in which government 
operated before and after the crises of the Great Depression and World 
War II. The remarkable expansion of the federal government’s role in 
142      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
American life, notably to the benefit of workers and their families, trans-
formed economic institutions, altered class relations, commenced the 
realignment of the nation’s two political parties, and raised important 
questions about traditional values. Most important, the nation thrived 
as never before during a brief era of equity that spanned the immediate 
post–World War II decades. Wages rose to unprecedented levels, trade 
unions thrived, consumerism scaled new heights, economic inequality 
declined, and economists spoke glowingly of capitalism’s triumph. If 
white male industrial workers fared better during those years than 
women and minorities who remained consigned to the margins of the 
economic system, residual gains undeniably brought the benefits of 
American prosperity to all wage earners. And the legal breakthroughs 
of the 1950s and 1960s began to dispel the barriers that had cordoned 
some groups off from the societal mainstream. Yet for all its profound 
influence, the author maintains, the New Deal failed to establish a per-
manent welfare state. Even during the halcyon days of the postwar era, 
the New Deal edifice rested upon a fragile foundation. The beneficial 
changes engendered by the path-breaking legislation of 1935–1938 
amounted to a temporary respite from less salutary traditions in the na-
tion encompassing race, social class, immigration, individualism, and 
culture. Historic constraints resurfaced, and the inherent weaknesses of 
the New Deal coalition mounted during the 1970s. In this view, what 
has been dubbed the Reagan Revolution might better be termed the 
Reagan Restoration. 
 More extended historical essay than monograph, The Great Exception 
is a sophisticated reinterpretation of a crucial period in American his-
tory that readers will find as helpful for contextualizing recent develop-
ments as for understanding the events of the 1930s. Clearly written and 
cogently argued, the book should engage historians, journalists, and all 
readers interested in comprehending the nation’s current situation—
and in forecasting its future. The author’s view of the New Deal as a 
great exception to the conservative politics that held sway during most 
of the twentieth century in the United States suggests that the imminent 
return of a period when collective economic rights flourished seems un-
likely. The resurgence of the values and ideas triumphant throughout 
most of the nation’s history, dormant for a large portion of the last cen-
tury, has resulted in what Cowie sees as a new Gilded Age of economic 
inequality and unrestrained individualism. Resurrecting the ethos of 
the New Deal, which he believes led to a golden age of social respon-
sibility and economic security in the United States, will be possible only 
if the American people comprehend the influences that first created and 
later undermined the celebrated reform period. 


The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics

Review of: "American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains," by Dan Flores

Lookingbill, Brad D.

114 
Book Reviews and Notices 
American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, by Dan Flores. 
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016. 213 pp. Illustrations, maps, 
bibliography, index. $24.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Brad D. Lookingbill is professor of history at Columbia College of 
Missouri. Among his research and writing interests are the history of the Great 
Plains, environmental history, and military history. 
My family and I drove across the Great Plains this summer. We paused 
at a popular restaurant called Simon’s Catch near Elk City, Oklahoma. 
Its walls were decorated with animal trophies, including the heads of a 
pronghorn, a bear, and a buffalo. Although seldom seen in the region 
today, these creatures and many others dominated the North American 
interior a long time ago. 
 Dan Flores insists that the wildlife of the Great Plains once rivaled 
the Serengeti of Africa. Offering personal observations mixed with “big 
history,” he studies the species native to the grasslands from West Texas 
to the Upper Missouri River. He recalls Walter Prescott Webb’s classic 
The Great Plains (1931), which contained only a brief section on animals. 
However, Flores meditates on something other than a Darwinian strug-
gle on the western frontier. Critical of American attitudes toward the 
great beasts, he posits that “our slaughterhouse on the Great Plains was 
profoundly immoral” (8). 
 Flores begins by discussing the prehistoric megafauna of the Great 
Plains, such as lions, mammoths, cougars, saber-toothed cats, giant sloths, 
dire wolves, and wild horses. He devotes most of his attention to the 
pronghorn, coyote, wolf, grizzly, and bison, who survived what paleo-
biologist Paul Martin called “Blitzkrieg Overkill” between 8,000 and 
13,000 years ago. A fine chapter on the nineteenth-century horse trade 
features reports from military expeditions as well as the correspon-
dence of President Thomas Jefferson. Throughout the book, Flores’s 
approach to source material is selective yet compelling. 
 Flores is at the top of his game when analyzing the bison ecology. 
He contemplates competing narratives about the demise of the bison, 
giving special recognition to traditional Native American stories of cul-
ture heroes. Under optimum conditions, he estimates, the bison num-
bered in the range of 25 million during the first half of the 1800s. Unfor-
tunately, a study conducted in 1886 indicated that only 1,073 still lived. 
Book Reviews and Notices      115 
While debunking the famous legend that the U.S. military conspired 
with the federal government to eradicate the herds, Flores highlights the 
oft-cited words attributed to General Philip Sheridan about “destroying 
the Indian’s commissary” and traces them to a fabrication by a Texas 
hide hunter named John Cook. In fact, the army officer actually declared, 
“I consider it important that this wholesale slaughter of the Buffalo 
should be stopped” (131). Beset with environmental changes, exotic dis-
eases, and unregulated hunting, the bison barely escaped extinction. 
 With a lyrical flourish, Flores concludes the book with a sentimental 
call to “re-wild” the Great Plains. Like many naturalists, he acknowl-
edges that the prairie is as sublime as canyons, mountains, and forests. 
He touts the ongoing efforts to create parks and preserves, although 
most have fallen short of artist George Catlin’s vision of 1832. Anyone 
who has driven across this vast country sees its emptiness, encounter-
ing many places in the grasslands that remind the author of “a dustier 
Iowa, with more than a hint of ammonia, feedlots, and hog farms” (162). 
Flores hopes that future visitors will encounter a more romantic land-
scape, where large animals and human beings might play. 
 My only disappointment in Flores’s book stems from the absence 
of endnotes, footnotes, or other forms of citation. His bibliography lists 
12 pages of published materials but gives no record of archives and col-
lections for further research on the last big animals. Such additions to 
the book would have made his passionate plea on behalf of this lost 
world even more noteworthy. 
 
 
Frontier Democracy: Constitutional Conventions in the Old Northwest, by 
Silvana R. Siddali. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xv, 
392 pp. Illustrations, tables, maps, notes, index. $120 hardcover.  
Reviewer John Dinan is professor of politics and international affairs at Wake 
Forest University. He is the author of The American State Constitutional Tradition 
(2006) and Keeping the People’s Liberties: Legislators, Citizens, and Judges as Guard-
ians of Rights (1998). 
Scholars have recently begun paying long overdue attention to the more 
than 230 state constitutional conventions held since 1776. Although no 
conventions have been called during the past 30 years, the longest such 
gap in American history, they were once held regularly to frame inau-
gural state constitutions or revise existing constitutions, albeit more 
often in some states than others. In fact, 14 state constitutions currently 
require that referenda on whether to call a convention be held at peri-
odic intervals, as in Iowa where a referendum is considered every ten 
years, most recently in 2010. 


American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

Review of: "Thomas Hart Benton: Discoveries and Interpretations," by Henry Adams

Robertson, Breanne

146      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Scholars interested in the Midwest will be pleased to see four essays 
connected to the region. Matthew Pehl looks at Detroit autoworkers in 
the 1950s, exploring how the experience of industrial work shaped their 
religious practices. Kerry Pimblott uses Cairo, Illinois, to show how Black 
Power activism relied heavily on the town’s black churches. Erik Gellman 
also highlights the religious dimensions of Black Power activism, exam-
ining the 1960s life of Chicago’s Urban Training Center for Christian Mis-
sion. Jarod Roll, on the other hand, looks at a more rural setting: the min-
ing town of Galena, Kansas, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth 
centuries. He explores the “belief world” of the town’s miners and how 
their faith in the myths of capitalism shaped the development of Pente-
costalism. Dan McKanan’s essay is somewhat connected to the Midwest 
as well: it provides a close reading of the popular fiction of George Lip-
pard (a Pennsylvanian) and Ignatius Donnelly (a Minnesotan). But 
McKanan’s piece is largely devoid of a sense of place, striking a bit of a 
discordant note compared to the other essays in the book. 
 Essay collections have a negative reputation in some quarters; they 
can be perceived as superfluous or incoherent, lacking thematic unity. 
But The Pew and the Picket Line is an example of a collection done right. 
With an outstanding introductory essay on the historiography of reli-
gion and labor by Cantwell, Carter, and Drake, along with cutting-edge 
research throughout the rest of the book, this collection should be 
essential reading for historians of American religion and labor. With 
substantial attention given to communities in Illinois, Kansas, and 
Michigan, it should also be of interest to scholars of the Midwest. 
 
 
Thomas Hart Benton: Discoveries and Interpretations, by Henry Adams. 
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015. xi, 364 pp. Illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $50.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Breanne Robertson is a historian at Marine Corps University. She has 
published two articles in the Annals of Iowa (2011 and 2015) about New Deal 
murals. 
Thomas Hart Benton: Discoveries and Interpretations provides a retrospec-
tive look at art historian Henry Adams’s career-long fascination with 
Missouri muralist Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975). One of American 
Regionalism’s “Big Three,” along with Grant Wood and John Steuart 
Curry, Benton painted narrative scenes of midwestern history, mythol-
ogy, and modern life that resonated with Depression-era audiences; in 
December 1934 he became the first American artist to appear on the 
cover of Time magazine. Yet Benton also regularly defied expectations 
and provoked critics with candid depictions of controversial subject 
Book Reviews and Notices      147 
matter, such as the lynching of an African American at the Missouri State 
Capitol, and incendiary rhetoric about the art world establishment. In 
1935 Benton famously swapped insults with American modernist Stewart 
Davis in the pages of Art Front, and he was later fired from his teaching 
post in Kansas City for making derogatory remarks about the curators 
at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.  
 Adams began working on Benton in 1986, when he joined the Nelson-
Atkins Museum of Art as curator of American art. Among his earliest 
exhibitions for the Kansas City museum was a major retrospective of 
Benton’s work to commemorate the centennial of the artist’s birth. The 
landmark show helped to restore popular and, albeit more slowly, crit-
ical appreciation for Benton’s homegrown modernism, which fell out of 
favor after World War II. Since that time, Adams has authored three 
book-length studies on Benton: Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original 
(1989), Thomas Hart Benton: Drawing from Life (1990), and Tom and Jack: 
The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock (2009). 
This latest volume features 13 essays drawn from previous public 
lectures, unpublished writings, and hard-to-find articles in popular 
magazines and small-run exhibition catalogs.  
 According to Adams, the collection reflects a historical moment 
when Benton and his art stood “at odds with the approved direction of 
modern painting toward ever-greater abstraction and with an art world 
that was rigidly controlled by critics and dealers in New York” (ix). The 
54-page introduction, titled “Playing with Fire: The Risks and Rewards 
of Studying Thomas Hart Benton,” presents a meandering narrative that 
integrates Benton’s biography with Adams’s professional development 
against an evolving field of study. Prominent scholars and critics appear 
both as heroes and villains, and Adams employs provocative language 
to describe his decades-long struggle to bring acclaim to Benton’s art. He 
asserts that “even today, to some New York art critics [Benton] is still the 
number-one bad boy of American art, a kind of apostate, even a Satanic 
figure, because of the way he turned his back on modern art” (3).  
 Now a professor at Case Western Reserve University, Adams 
seems still on a campaign to overturn critical aspersions that cast Ben-
ton as a bigoted, reactionary, and antimodern artist. Adams tracks the 
precipitous rise and fall of Benton’s career through individual case 
studies covering topics ranging from country music to art market fakes 
to representations of race and place. Despite their varied tone and ap-
proach, the essays cohere around several key arguments. First, Adams 
aims to rehabilitate popular assumptions about Benton’s political views 
by discrediting his adversaries, highlighting his ethnically and racially 
diverse social circle, and demonstrating a steadfast antifascist agenda 
148      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
in his teaching and his art. Second, Adams strives to situate Benton 
alongside such Missouri cultural luminaries as Mark Twain and George 
Caleb Bingham, arguing that Benton has been unfairly vilified for fol-
lowing a similar approach to local subject matter and popular culture. 
Finally, Adams maintains that Benton translated the expressive color 
and pulsating rhythm of Synchromism, an avant-garde style of Ameri-
can modernism, into representational form and regional subject matter. 
It is in this same commitment to rhythm that Benton’s influence can be 
discerned in the paintings of his most famous pupil, Abstract Expres-
sionist Jackson Pollock. 
 Adams is at his best when he allows his breadth of professional ex-
perience to guide his analysis. In addition to university teaching and 
museum work, Adams has consulted for galleries and auction houses; 
the essays derived from these activities—his in-depth study of Benton’s 
artistic activities at Martha’s Vineyard, his insightful analysis of Ben-
ton’s technical process in drawing and printmaking, and his illuminat-
ing discussion of authentication and connoisseurship—not only add to 
our understanding of Benton, but also make a meaningful contribution 
to a scholarly field that too often excludes dealers, collectors, and other 
actors and aspects of the art market. Nevertheless, the desire to present 
a collection of essays that can each operate independently has resulted 
in a volume that is both longer and more repetitive than necessary. Ty-
pographical errors are also frequent enough to be distracting.  
 Written over the course of three decades, the book is less a reinter-
pretation of Benton’s art than it is an album of scholarly snapshots that 
tell the story, in aggregate, about the intellectual journey of a single 
scholar within the changing field of art history. As Adams himself ex-
plains, it was precisely because “attitudes about Benton and his art are 
going through a dramatic shift; the old animosity toward his work 
seems to be fading” that the time had arrived to assemble his writings 
on Benton for publication (x). As this backward-looking impetus for the 
collection suggests, some chapters seem outdated in methodology and in 
argument, particularly when compared to the rapidly expanding liter-
ature through which contemporary readers can learn about Benton and 
his art. Interested readers will want to supplement Adams’s book with 
the exhibition catalog American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood 
(2015), which contains essays by prominent art historians and covers 
much of the same ground as Adams’s book. Other publications of note 
include Erika Doss’s Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism (1991), 
Justin Wolff’s biography Thomas Hart Benton: A Life (2012), and Leo Ma-
zow’s award-winning Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound (2012). 
 


Thomas Hart Benton: Discoveries and Interpretations

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 76 no. 4 Fall 2017

Review of: Lincoln and Congress, by William C. Harri

Hubbard, Charles M.

Book Reviews and Notices      439 
Lincoln and Congress, by William C. Harris. Concise Lincoln Library. Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017. ix, 165 pp. Illustrations, 
notes, essay on sources, index. $24.95 hardcover and e-book. 
Reviewer Charles M. Hubbard is professor of history and Lincoln Historian at 
Lincoln Memorial University. He is the author of Lincoln and His Contemporaries 
(1999) and edited Lincoln, the Law, and Presidential Leadership (2016); In His Words: 
Readings from the Life of Abraham Lincoln (2014); and The Many Faces of Lincoln (1997). 
William C. Harris contributes significantly to our understanding of the 
political environment surrounding Lincoln throughout his presidency. 
He provides perceptive insights into the unique relationship between 
Lincoln and the congressional leadership as both sought to provide 
supporting legislation to prosecute the war and reconstruct the Union. 
Harris quotes extensively from the Congressional Globe and depends on 
the words of members of the House of Representatives and the Senate 
to express their personal views and those of their respective constitu-
ents on a variety of critical legislative issues, including habeas corpus, 
conscription, the two controversial Confiscation Acts, and ultimately the 
Thirteenth Amendment. 
 Lincoln and Congress is organized chronologically, beginning with 
the secession crisis of 1860–1861 when Lincoln demanded Republican 
support against the expansion of slavery. The concise narrative evolves 
into an insightful and thoughtful assessment of potential threats to 
the U.S. Constitution, civil rights, and institutions of the government. 
During the fall and winter of 1862, Lincoln and Republicans suffered 
from disappointing war news and the frustrating results of the off-year 
elections. Harris emphasizes Lincoln’s extraordinary leadership in this 
difficult political environment to unify an otherwise divided Congress 
to support his policies and the war effort.  
 The final section of the book is devoted to a discussion of Lincoln’s 
final address to Congress on December 6, 1864. In that address (an under-
utilized source), Lincoln lobbied for quick adoption of the Thirteenth 
Amendment. He also made specific references to the impact of the war 
on the western states. Summarizing the Secretary of the Interior’s report 
on western affairs, Lincoln noted that the “great enterprise of connect-
ing the Atlantic with the Pacific states by railroad and telegraph lines 
has been entered upon with a vigor that gives assurance of success” 
(117). Possibly of as much interest to James Harlan of Iowa and other 
western representatives was his call that the “Indian system should be 
remodeled.” Lincoln said that the reforms should provide for “the wel-
fare of the Indian and the protection of the advancing settler” (117). 
Here Harris calls attention to the domestic agenda that Lincoln, ever 
faithful to his Whiggish principles, endorsed. Lincoln respected Congress 
440      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
as the voice of the people and cooperated with sensitivity and under-
standing whenever possible.  
 In Lincoln and the Radicals (1941), T. Harry Williams established the 
view that Lincoln and the Radical Republicans engaged in an ongoing 
confrontation. Harris argues persuasively that Lincoln and the radicals 
cooperated on a complex domestic agenda while enacting supportive 
legislation for the war effort. However, Harris, possibly to be concise, 
often drifts into oversimplifying his conclusions. Nonetheless, despite 
occasional lapses, he contributes to a fuller understanding of the most 
complex, pragmatic, and idealistic political leader in American history, 
particularly Lincoln’s amazing ability to work with Congress. 
 
 
Lincoln and the Democrats: The Politics of Opposition in the Civil War, by 
Mark E. Neely Jr. Cambridge Essential Histories. New York: Cambridge 
University Press, 2017. ix, 211 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $24.99 
paperback. 
Reviewer Jennifer Weber is associate professor of history at the University of 
Kansas. She is the author of Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents 
in the North (2006). 
About halfway through Lincoln and the Democrats, author Mark E. Neely 
Jr. notes that, “for the most part,” historians have “simply neglected” 
the Democratic Party during the Civil War years (85). For the most part 
that is true. In the past decade or so, however, the Peace Democrats, or 
Copperheads, have received considerable attention. War Democrats, 
though, have remained largely in the shadows. Although Neely does 
not say so directly, this slim volume attempts to shed light on that less 
flashy group while making some (rather limited) efforts to knit their 
story together with that of their more cantankerous political brethren. 
The result is a collection of thought-provoking essays that is easily ac-
cessible for advanced undergraduates and the interested public as well 
as more scholarly types. 
 Neely is one of the leading political historians of the period, so one 
should always pay attention to what he has to say. In this, which he says 
is his last book on the Civil War, he does not disappoint. He argues, for 
instance, that the Civil War era was far less partisan and divided than 
other scholars have suggested; that the main reason Democrats per-
formed so well in the 1862 elections was that Lincoln did not campaign, 
even indirectly, for his party; and that Lincoln helped bring the country 
into a “new era of human rights” (204). Each of these arguments is likely 
to make Civil War historians sit up and pay attention, for each is new 
and innovative—and compelling. 


Lincoln and Congress

Review of: "Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America", by Kristen Layne Anderson

Bigham, Darrel E.

Book Reviews and Notices      347 
of better-known figures and including people barely identified in his-
tory except by skin color. Her strength is in laying out slavery’s strict 
parameters and reminding us of its constrictive power, yet she seems 
inspired by the people in this book, and so should her readers. 
 
 
Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-
Century America, by Kristen Layne Anderson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana 
State University Press, 2016. viii, 278 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, in-
dex. $48.00 hardcover and e-book. 
Reviewer Darrel E. Bigham is professor of history and director of Historic 
Southern Indiana emeritus, University of Southern Indiana. He is the author of 
On Jordan’s Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley (2005) 
and Reflections on a Heritage: The German Americans in Southwestern Indiana (1980). 
The title of this work is a bit unfortunate. Besides the awkward first word, 
the study is much narrower than it suggests. It is not about all Germans 
but about “German radicals” in St. Louis between 1848 and about 1868. 
It does not, moreover, offer much by way of context—that is, how these 
people and this place compared to or with their counterparts in other 
places, especially in river border cities such as Cincinnati, Evansville, 
Louisville, and upriver communities in Iowa.  
 Kristen Anderson asserts, without much evidence, that her book is 
the first analysis of such Germans’ opposition to slavery and how the 
Civil War and emancipation affected their views on race. She acknowl-
edges that the “radicals” represented a fraction of the larger German-
speaking communities of St. Louis, which, like other midwestern cities, 
gained a large number of German immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s. 
St. Louis had a large Roman Catholic population, as well as “Old Lu-
therans” who built the Missouri Synod. It was also a center for the ecu-
menical Evangelical Synod of North America. There were also the 
“Forty-Eighters,” free-thinking liberals like Carl Schurz. The “Grays” or 
“church Germans” thought quite differently from “Greens” like Schurz 
about the Union, emancipation, and race, and their leaders were prom-
inent opponents of the Irish bishops in the East who urged Catholics to 
become acculturated. The dynamics of intra–German American St. Louis, 
in short, need a fuller discussion. 
 Having offered this cautionary note about the author’s claims, I 
should acknowledge that her extensive use of German-language primary 
sources is impressive. She relies heavily on the Anzeiger des Westens and 
the Westliche Post, two prominent German-language newspapers. The 
former, originally Democratic, became Republican after the passage of 
the Kansas-Nebraska Act and was a prominent supporter of German 
348      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
radical positions. After it went out of business in 1863, its new owner 
again made it a Democratic paper, the Neue Anzeiger des Westens. The 
Post was established in 1857 and remained a solidly Republican publi-
cation through the 1860s. It survived into the 1930s. 
 After providing a valuable introduction, which includes an over-
view of St. Louis on the eve of the Civil War era, Anderson develops 
her narrative in six chapters. The catalyst for the emergence of the Re-
publican Party among many Germans was, as it was for many native-
born Americans, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which they perceived as a 
threat to their opportunity for further development in the West. Their 
opposition was economic, not moral. In the next and longest chapter of 
the book, Anderson traces the radicalization of Germans on matters of 
slavery and race between 1854 and 1860. She acknowledges that Cath-
olics and Lutherans were not so inclined, suggesting religious roots for 
Germans’ positions on the future of African Americans. In chapters 
three and four she discusses the impact of the Civil War on St. Louis 
Germans, some of whom supported the Union cause. Radicals came to 
support emancipation because abolition was perceived as offering the 
same sort of fair chance that immigrants desired. For the same reason, 
many supported a civil rights amendment to the Constitution. In the last 
two chapters, Anderson explores the extent to which German Republi-
cans were willing to stand with African Americans. Radicals backed the 
suffrage amendment, although most Germans in St. Louis opposed it. 
By 1870, even radical Germans retreated from advocating blacks’ rights. 
Fear of resurgent nativism and anti-German cultural issues like Sunday 
laws became more important to them. Whiteness trumped equality. 
 How the trajectory of German Republicans’ stance on emancipation 
and race was distinctive remains unanswered here. Many native whites, 
Democrats as well as Whigs, also joined the Republican Party after the 
Kansas-Nebraska Act and were staunch pro–Abraham Lincoln Unionists. 
They supported the abolition, civil rights, and suffrage amendments. 
But most believed that that was all that was needed. By the early 1870s, 
many had become advocates of civil service reform. Quite a few re-
turned to the Democratic Party—notably Lyman Trumbull and John 
Macaulay Palmer in neighboring Illinois. 
 This study, which is aimed at an academic audience, should encour-
age further research into the internal dynamics of German-speaking 
Missouri as well as other nearby states that gained substantial numbers 
of German immigrants after 1836 and well into the 1880s. 
 
 


Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America

Review of: "Fostering on the Farm: Child Placement in the Rural Midwest", by Megan Birk

Effland, Anne

Book Reviews and Notices      241 
ployed here to analyze that rhetoric” (12). Such passages, and much of 
this book overall, would have benefited greatly from a good editor 
who could have helped the author distill his sometimes illuminating 
understanding of the spectacle of nineteenth-century printed landscape 
images into the fascinating read that his subjects deserve. For this the 
publisher should bear as much responsibility as the author. 
 
 
Fostering on the Farm: Child Placement in the Rural Midwest, by Megan Birk. 
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015. viii, 234 pp. 
Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Anne Effland is senior economist for domestic policy at the Office 
of the Chief Economist, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Much of her broad-
ranging research and writing has focused on agricultural labor, including that 
of migrants, women, and children. 
In Fostering on the Farm, Megan Birk offers an intertwined history of 
agrarian ideals and child welfare policy that is both sweeping and 
steeped in detail. Moving us beyond the oft-told stories of the orphan 
trains and the naive beliefs in the inherent virtue of farmers and out-
door living, Birk digs deep into the harsh realities of both farming and 
farm placements of needy children at the turn of the twentieth century. 
She takes us through a half-century of changing views of American 
farm life and care of indigent children, explaining the rise and fall of 
the farm placement system and the eventual adoption of paid foster 
care and family preservation, with a preference for keeping children in 
town and urban settings. 
 Birk centers her study on the rural Midwest, the focus of the late 
nineteenth-century glorification of rural homes for orphan children. 
Birk, however, is most interested in the local manifestations of that ideal 
rather than the more familiar national story. She grounds her analytical 
narrative at the county level, tracing the growing and changing ad-
ministrative structures and the actual care experiences of children and 
families involved in farm placements. Birk presents the philosophies, 
practical politics, and daily administration of county programs as the 
movement in favor of farm placements grew, then follows their trans-
formation as state institutions took progressively greater control and 
often moved children farther from their original homes. Interspersed 
throughout are the stories of individual children’s and families’ expe-
riences, deftly lifted from the same local institutional sources that sup-
port the rest of the study. Birk has meticulously combed county and 
state government records, records of private institutions, annual re-
ports of state and county governing boards, other government reports, 
242      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
newspaper accounts, convention proceedings, and contemporaneous 
social science studies to bring a wealth of detail to her narrative. 
 Birk neatly places the local experiences she documents within the 
broader national context of changing public and professional enthusi-
asm for farm placements. She bookends the study with chapters on the 
construction of an American rural mythology based on Jeffersonian 
agrarian ideals in the mid- to late nineteenth century and on the de-
cline of that mythology in the early years of the twentieth century. In 
between, Birk describes how these changes played out in the Midwest.  
 She begins by examining the development and operation of the 
county farm placement system that took the place of county-run poor 
farms and other institutions for orphan children in the Midwest. As 
the examples of abuse and overwork of placed-out children increased 
and attracted the attention of the press and the public, state govern-
ments intervened and slowly removed control of child placements 
from county governments. In the end, increasingly professionalized 
state-level child welfare systems found rural placements difficult to 
supervise and began to place children in homes and family care in 
towns, closer to social services and schools and away from the dangers 
and isolation of farms.  
 Among the book’s greatest strengths is its depth of detailed re-
search in local sources. Readers with an interest in child welfare sys-
tems or education in the Midwest during this period will be delighted 
with the wealth of sources in her notes and bibliography. The depth of 
detail can make the narrative somewhat dense, on occasion weighing 
on its momentum and flow. Yet by carefully situating her work in the 
broader literature on agrarianism, childhood on farms, and social wel-
fare institutions, Birk steadily advances her thesis through these details, 
bringing readers to understand, almost without realizing it, how the 
broader changing views of farm life were manifested in the daily exe-
cution and supervision of child placements at the local level. Refer-
ences to the broader literature, which ranges across multiple fields and 
periods, will be valuable for readers with particular interests who want 
to delve deeper into those subjects.  
 Iowa readers may be disappointed to discover that Birk’s Midwest 
encompasses primarily the Old Northwest—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, 
Michigan, Wisconsin—with only very occasional references to Minne-
sota and Iowa and virtually none to other states many consider part of 
the Midwest. An explanation early in the book as to why the work is 
focused on those five states would have been helpful. Still, local histo-
rians of the Midwest, or any region, must be inspired by Birk’s skilled 
use of local sources—especially the ubiquitous county government and 
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 


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Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 76 no. 4 Fall 2017

Lincoln and Congress

Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America

Fostering on the Farm: Child Placement in the Rural Midwest

From Model Farm to a College with Students: Benjamin Gue, Peter Melendy, Adonijah Welch, and the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, 1867-1869

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