The Annals of Iowa

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 75 no. 1 Winter 2016

Grossnickle-Batterton, Stephanie

English

Lock the Granary, Peggy: Rhetorical Appeals to Rural Women in the Woman's Standard, 1886-1911

Review of: "Myths of the Rune Stone: Viking Martyrs and the Birthplace of America," by David M. Kruege

Elmquist, Kristin

452      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Stanley in 1956, Edwards returned on occasion to visit and maintained 
ties with relatives in North Dakota. To research the book, he did a num-
ber of oral history interviews, checked the local newspapers and histories, 
and plumbed his memory and the memories of others for stories of his 
home town. Natives of a Dry Place is the result, a memoir that tells the 
story of town and county residents in an interesting way. 
 After explaining how the oil boom of recent years has pulled at the 
fabric of society and changed the landscape in troubling ways, Edwards 
lays out the design of his book: he will tell stories of local people who 
represented the virtues that are so vital to their society. Edwards under-
stands that Stanley’s people “cultivated a distinctive way of thinking 
about the world and how an upstanding person ought to behave, a set of 
values or character traits or habits of mind,” that is, virtues (24). People 
in other places had them, too, Edwards says, especially on the northern 
Great Plains. Virtues he highlights include resoluteness, steadfastness, 
devotion to community, pluck, commitment, optimism, a spirit of ad-
venture, and modesty. Each virtue has its own story, each one highly 
engaging and readable. Resoluteness tells of the death of Tom Scrivner 
in 1923 and the men who tried to rescue him without thought of them-
selves from a deep, dry well left behind on the prairie when the original 
landowner moved away. Steadfastness is the story of his father, “a nec-
essary man” (45)—rural mail carrier, town fix-it man, pillar of the com-
munity. Pluck tells the story of Edwards’s much older sisters, who 
moved to Portland, Oregon, during World War II, to be welders in the 
shipyards. Each chapter has depth and complexity. Edwards’s father 
was not a good family man at first but he grew into it. Tom Scrivner 
may have been pushed into that well by angry young Finns, who re-
sented his dalliance with a young Finnish girl, whom he married when 
she became pregnant. No one in this book is perfect. Many human foi-
bles are on display, but virtue shines through. 
 Natives of a Dry Place is well written, heartfelt, and thought provok-
ing. Those who grew up in small towns in the Midwest or on the Great 
Plains may find much to relate to. Those who want to understand the 
values that shaped rural society in the past and that remain present to-
day, even in the face of demographic change, decline, or displacement, 
will learn much from this book.  
 
 
Myths of the Rune Stone: Viking Martyrs and the Birthplace of America, by 
David M. Krueger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 
x, 213 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $130.99 hard-
cover; $36.99 paperback.  
Book Reviews and Notices      453 
Reviewer Kristin Elmquist teaches history at Park Center Senior High School in 
Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. She holds an M.A. in cultural anthropology special-
izing in immigration history at New York University.  
Myths of the Rune Stone is the latest contribution to a long discussion of 
a curious event that occurred in rural Minnesota at the end of the nine-
teenth century. In 1898 a Swedish immigrant farmer named Olof Ohman 
claimed to have unearthed a stone near Alexandria, Minnesota, that 
was inscribed with ancient runic characters that told a strange story. 
According to the translated runic characters on the stone, in 1362 Viking 
warriors were present in the area and were attacked by “skraelings”; 
they left an inscription on the stone in memory of their dead. Ever since, 
scores of Minnesotans have taken sides in the debate over the authen-
ticity of the stone and the possibility of a Viking trip to the heart of 
Minnesota—an area thickly populated with Swedish and Norwegian 
immigrants by the 1890s when the stone was found. 
 Religious studies scholar David M. Krueger dives into the Kensing-
ton rune stone story, not to address the familiar arguments about the 
stone’s veracity but to analyze the significance of the intense interest in 
the stone from its “discovery” until the present. He exhaustively exam-
ined archival texts, published books, and accounts of rune stone–related 
events, and analyzes those events as “rituals” performed for “civil reli-
gious” purposes to meet the needs of different populations. 
 Krueger focuses on different themes for different eras of the rune 
stone story. The earliest phase focused on immigrant communities’ 
sense of belonging, particularly in the context of the 1862 Dakota War 
in western Minnesota. Krueger examines the alleged deaths chronicled 
on the stone as a “blood sacrifice myth,” absolving immigrant commu-
nities of guilt for displacing the earlier residents of the area. In this way, 
the indigenous population was scapegoated in the conflict over terri-
tory. Krueger interprets interest in the stone in the 1920s up through the 
1948 display of the rune stone at the Smithsonian in the context of rural 
vs. urban, immigrant vs. “American,” and intellectual vs. common-
sense struggles in the definition of American identity and values. He 
argues that the rune stone played a role in religious debates between 
Catholics and Protestants in the 1950s; the stone could be seen as 
“proof” of Catholic patriotism, because the pre-Reformation Christian 
Vikings who allegedly came to the middle of the North American con-
tinent would necessarily have been Catholic. He goes on to situate later 
public rituals involving the rune stone in the Cold War and Vietnam 
eras, including a National Guard helicopter mission to locate evidence 
of an ancient Viking settlement—what Krueger terms the “re-taking 
of rune stone hill.” Krueger speculates on what new narratives await 
454      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
the rune stone story, particularly in the face of renewed immigration to 
Minnesota from other parts of the world and new communities com-
peting for Minnesotan—and American—identities.  
 This is an excellent contribution to the long history of rune stone 
discourse. Krueger’s disciplinary background brings a fresh and potent 
perspective to the subject. Scholarly in his approach and format, Krue-
ger supports his ideas with deep knowledge of rune stone texts, events, 
pageants, comic books, and speeches and the views of both prominent 
supporters and detractors. In addition to its local interest, the book will 
be fascinating for anyone exploring how civic myths are constructed, 
and in this case how a region can appropriate civil religious ideas for its 
own purposes and to help construct its own identity by reimagining its 
history, creating its own rituals, and defining itself against other groups 
in a national context. Krueger’s study makes a valuable contribution to 
regional and immigration history and elucidates the role that civil reli-
gious rituals play in defining a community’s identity. 
 
 
Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest, by Jason 
Weems. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. xxvi, 340 pp. 
Illustrations (some in color), notes, bibliography, index. $122.50 hard-
cover, $35.00 paperback.  
Reviewer Jane Simonsen is associate professor of history at Augustana College, 
Rock Island, Illinois. She is the author of “On Level Ground: Alexander Gard-
ner’s Photographs of the Kansas Prairies” in Recovering the Prairies (1999). 
Barnstorming the Prairies makes the Midwest’s dubious reputation as 
“flyover country” worth a double-take. In this image-rich investigation 
of prairie landscapes, aerial views become the defining angle of a mod-
ern perspective that shaped agricultural policy, regional art, and archi-
tectural innovation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Earlier 
midwesterners primarily experienced the landscape as horizontal, but 
the prospects enabled by flight shifted their visual axis to the vertical, 
reorienting ocular perceptions of “progress.” Weems’s study performs 
a similar function, creating a fresh take on visual studies of midwestern 
landscapes by ascending to the aerial.  
 Elevated prospects were not an entirely modern invention. Bird’s-
eye views date back to the Renaissance and were a common way to rep-
resent the expansionist’s romance of distance. Gridded landscapes—
emphasizing equality, control, and individual opportunity—operated 
in conjunction with other methods of spatial understanding, including 
topographical maps, farmstead lithographs, and citizens’ profiles. Ag-
ricultural crises during the interwar years made this idealism untenable 


Myths of the Rune Stone: Viking Martyrs and the Birthplace of America

Review of: "Iowa’s Record Setting Governor: The Terry Branstad Story," by Mike Chapman

Walch, Timothy

Iowa's Record Setting Governor: The Terry Branstad Story

Review of: "The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire," by Todd Nathan Thompson

Summers, Mark Wahlgren

270      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
readers a chance to examine interesting topics that might not other-
wise have been included. Because of the importance of dairying to 
Wisconsin, Apps includes a fairly substantial spread on the “oleo 
wars” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Despite the ascend-
ance of margarine after World War II, Wisconsin law requires that 
butter be served to all of those in state institutions, whether students, 
patients, or inmates. In another sidebar about World War II, there is a 
listing of all items rationed during the war and providing the dates 
during which the rationing took place. Because Apps covers so many 
topics, no one topic is examined in any significant depth. He has foot-
notes and a bibliography, however, so readers who want more can 
easily find the sources from which Apps drew his text. 
 This is a beautiful book. I suppose it could be called a “coffee table 
book,” because of its lavish illustrations, heavy, slick paper, and use of 
color, but that would not appreciate its real usefulness as a fairly ency-
clopedic piece of history. It is clear that Apps has put a great deal of 
thought and care into this book, and he has covered a wide array of 
topics that should engage anyone with an interest in the agricultural 
history of the upper Midwest. It would make a good model for similar 
tomes on the topic for other midwestern states. Wisconsin Agriculture is 
gorgeous, interesting, and sure to provide new information even to 
people who think they already know a lot about this topic. At $34.95 
for a hardcover, this is a bargain book.  
 
 
The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire, by Todd 
Nathan Thompson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 
xii, 178 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.50 hardcover. 
Reviewer Mark Wahlgren Summers is professor of history at the University of 
Kentucky. His books include A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Re-
construction (2009) and The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865–1878 (1994).  
Humor: it’s no laughing matter. Visitors to the memorial in Washing-
ton, D.C., can see in Abraham Lincoln’s image the Great Emancipator 
and the grave man of sorrows, but it may be his fame as a homespun 
joke teller that has endeared him to most Americans and made them 
feel closer to him than to any other president. Now, in The National 
Joker, Todd Nathan Thompson lifts that aspect into the importance it 
deserves. Arguing that Lincoln’s yarns and quips were not just humor, 
but satire, he makes a compelling case for their use as a powerful rhe-
torical weapon on his behalf. 
 Lincoln’s gift for humor was already well known out west before 
his election. How feelingly his opponents knew it! The rising politi-
Book Reviews and Notices      271 
cian was a master of sarcastic slings and deadly zingers at the self-
important “little big men” he came up against—always cushioned by 
self-deprecating humor. During the Civil War, books like Old Abe’s 
Jokes, Fresh from Abraham’s Bosom captured a president able to draw on 
everything from Aesop’s Fables to Joe Miller’s joke book to give a light 
touch to a serious matter, always making an apt illustration of the 
larger point he wanted to make.  
 Where Thompson advances common knowledge is in noting how 
much Lincoln consciously used his humor satirically, to mock and ex-
pose the pretensions of those ranged against him, and how much his 
belittling descriptions of himself helped create a public image working 
to his political advantage and taking the sting out of the potential lines 
of attack that enemies could use against him: that he was a self-made 
man who, in his own words, had done a “d—n bad job” of it; that he 
was ugly, ungainly, tall, rustic, and, by eastern standards, wholly un-
presidential. That image became the norm in a burgeoning illustrated 
press, where for the first time presidential caricatures ranged not in 
the handfuls but in the hundreds. Only in the South and in England, 
where rising from the bottom and awkward manners were treated as 
contemptible and where images of Lincoln as race-mixer, devil, or 
vampire qualified as inspired art, could his intended image-making 
fail to take hold. Elsewhere, Democrats could hardly do damage by 
exposing in their opponent limitations that he so readily satirized 
himself. Far from denigrating him, caricature only embodied the im-
age that Lincoln had designed for himself. 
 Thompson’s argument works; his book, richly laden with cartoons 
—each of them explained perhaps more than necessary—is crammed 
with insight. He knows his satirists, and the Civil War had them, thick 
as brevet generals: Sut Lovingood, Orpheus C. Kerr, Petroleum V. 
Nasby, Bill Arp, and Artemus Ward. He also can fit them into the 
broader tradition of frontier humor, dating back to Davy Crockett, 
whose sallies may have inspired a young Mr. Lincoln. If there is any 
limit, it is as minuscule as the combined jokes of the Great Emancipa-
tor’s half-dozen successors: Why did none of them learn from Lincoln? 
Why did so many later presidents treat humor and satire as if they 
lessened the dignity of their office? Why, as late as 1952, would Adlai 
Stevenson’s wit be used as an argument against his fitness to take the 
highest office in the land? If that is this review’s punch line, it is a 
punch of the most diluted sort. Thompson’s National Joker ought to be 
taken seriously by all scholars. 
 
 


The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire

Review of: "The Sand Art Bottles of Andrew Clemens," by Roy Sucholeiki

Ching, Barbara

276      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
The Sand Art Bottles of Andrew Clemens, by Roy Sucholeiki. Jefferson, 
NC: McFarland & Company, 2015. vii, 138 pp. Illustrations (many in 
color), appendixes, references, index. $55.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Barbara Ching is professor of English at Iowa State University. She 
is the author of “ ‘This World Is Ours’: The Bily Clocks and Cosmopolitan Re-
gionalism, 1913–1948” (Annals of Iowa, 2009). 
In The Sand Art Bottles of Andrew Clemens, Roy Sucholeiki has written a 
wide-ranging, copiously illustrated appreciation of Iowa artist Andrew 
Clemens’s sand art bottles. Neither a catalogue raisonné nor a biog-
raphy (critical or otherwise), Sand Art Bottles relies on a lengthy 1945 
interview with Clemens’s relatives conducted by Marian Rischmueller 
for information about the life and career of Clemens (1857–1894).  
 The third son in a family of six boys, Andrew was a self-taught, iso-
lated artist and a highly motivated entrepreneur. The son of German-
speaking immigrants who moved several times in search of op-
portunities in the upper Midwest, Andrew spent most of his life in 
McGregor, Iowa. After encephalitis left him deaf at the age of six, he 
attended the Iowa School for the Deaf in Council Bluffs. Sometime in 
the early 1870s Clemens began to make sand art bottles to sell in a lo-
cal shop where the owner also made and sold them. Clemens gathered 
colored sand from a cave in Pikes Peak State Park; according to Sucho-
leiki, such collecting was a tradition that may have been started by the 
native inhabitants of the region. Certainly, the book’s final chapter, a 
survey of the handful of sand bottle creators Clemens inspired, dem-
onstrates that other white men in the driftless region carried on sand 
collecting and bottle crafting for several generations. Sucholeiki also 
discusses at some length Ole Anderson, a bottle creator who worked 
out of a souvenir shop in Yellowstone.  
 Packing sand into upside-down apothecary bottles, Clemens 
quickly distinguished himself by his pictorial skill, particularly the 
fine delineation he could achieve. He created special tools to enable 
that precision. He often designed bottles to order; clients requested 
personalized bottles to commemorate weddings, birthdays, and holi-
days. An order sheet reproduced in the book offers bouquets, steam-
boats, marine scenes, and the like as central images. The prices ranged 
from $.50 to $4.50 depending on size and complexity. An appendix 
lists recent auction prices for the bottles, reaching as high as $45,000. 
When he signed the bottles in sand, Clemens did so near the bottom, 
on the back. In early bottles, Clemens would add that he was “a deaf 
mute.” 
 Sucholeiki reads the recurring features of Clemens’s bottles as a 
blending of regional and American motifs. The bottles’ bases feature 
Book Reviews and Notices      277 
abstract, wavy bands of varying colors, a depiction of the region’s 
geology: the sand itself. The upper segments regularly portray eagles 
and American flags, situating the artist and his subjects in the United 
States. Objects or locales are faithfully illustrated at the center of the 
bottles. Sucholeiki identifies a bottle depicting George Washington 
as Clemens’s masterpiece and devotes a chapter to its development. 
The book closes with Sucholeiki’s brief statement on Clemens as 
a “fully fledged professional artist” in contrast to his followers and 
other folk artists. Such distinctions may not be of great interest to most 
readers; what the book does well is document the possibility for creative, 
widely applauded creative expression in rural Iowa in the late nine-
teenth century.  
 
 
Skunk Hill: A Native Ceremonial Community in Wisconsin, by Robert A. 
Birmingham. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015. xii, 
116 pp. Maps, illustrations, census chart, allotment chart, notes, bibli-
ography, index. $14.95 paperback.  
Reviewer Eric Steven Zimmer is a research fellow at the Center for American 
Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS) on the Pine Ridge Indian Res-
ervation. He is the author of “Settlement Sovereignty: The Meskwaki Fight for 
Self-Governance, 1856–1937” (Annals of Iowa, 2014). 
In this fascinating and accessible contribution to midwestern history, 
archaeologist Robert A. Birmingham details the founding and decline 
of the village at Skunk Hill, a large community of Potawatomi people 
founded on the bluffs of central Wisconsin in 1905. The Skunk Hill 
community, he argues, “was the most prominent of several ceremonial 
communities in Wisconsin based around a cultural and spiritual re-
vival movement known as the Dream Dance,” often called the “Drum 
Dance,” which “swept across the Midwest and eastern Great Plains in 
the late nineteenth century” (2). The U.S. government had forced these 
Potawatomies onto a reservation in Kansas decades earlier. They fled 
that place before securing dozens of land allotments around Skunk 
Hill on which they assembled a cohesive community of about 20 fami-
lies. The Skunk Hill Potawatomies lived, worked, and worshiped on 
that land base for more than 20 years. They shared a communal ceme-
tery and a space for harvesting maple sap, as well as areas for cere-
monies and dances. Skunk Hill disbanded in the early 1930s after its 
founders, many of whom were spiritual leaders, died and most com-
munity members sold their land. 
 Birmingham deftly deploys archaeological and archival evidence 
to piece together the story of Skunk Hill. He also cultivated relation-


The Sand Art Bottles of Andrew Clemens

Review of: A Peculiar Imbalance: The Fall and Rise of Racial Equality in Minnesota, 1837–1869, by William D. Green and of Degrees of Freedom: The Origins of Civil Rights in Minnesota, 1865–1912, by William D. Gree

McKerley, John W.

A Peculiar Imbalance: The Fall and Rise of Racial Equality in Minnesota, 1837-1869/Degrees of Freedom: The Origins of Civil Rights in Minnesota, 1865-1912

Review of: Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865–1920, by Michael K. Roseno

Jorsch, Thomas F.

182      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865–1920, by Michael K. Rosenow. 
The Working Class in American History Series. Urbana and Chicago: 
University of Illinois Press, 2015. xii, 223 pp. Map, tables, illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $95.00 hardcover, $30.00 paperback.  
Reviewer Thomas F. Jorsch is assistant professor of history at Bethany College, 
Lindsborg, Kansas. His research and writing have focused on American so-
cialists during the Progressive Era. 
Through examination of rituals and practices about death and dying 
in Chicago, southern Illinois coal country, and western Pennsylvania 
steel towns, Michael Rosenow argues that between the Civil War and 
World War I working-class Americans sought to maintain basic human 
dignity in death as an industrializing economy increasingly turned 
them into disposable commodities. Rosenow explores the culture of 
death not only surrounding large-scale events like Haymarket, Dia-
mond, and Homestead but also localized incidents such as dying from 
an accident in an Illinois coal vein or miscommunication in a Pitts-
burgh steel mill. In facing death, workers sought to restore their hu-
manity and give meaning to their lives but also revealed the ethnic, 
racial, gender, and especially class tensions of the time. 
 Rosenow begins by establishing an “industrial accident crisis” in 
the United States, where workers were injured and died at rates far 
exceeding those of other industrialized nations. Workers’ bodies be-
came contested territory among those defending the new industrial 
order, seeking to reform it, and living it. Corporate leaders saw workers 
as expendable while reformers tried to impose protective legislation. 
Workers viewed both groups as controlling them when what they de-
sired most was the independence they had lost over the decades. Even 
in death workers faced class marginalization as grisly incidents claimed 
workers’ lives, funerals were expensive, and cemeteries were segregated 
by class. Despite these obstacles, workers sought to retain their humanity 
by claiming agency surrounding death. 
 Rosenow is at his best when analyzing how workers defined death 
on their own terms in a working world where they held little control. 
In the Illinois coalfields—a chapter Iowa readers will find interesting 
for its connection to working-class life in Iowa as treated by Dorothy 
Schwieder—employers defined death as the fault of individual miners 
and part of the risk of work. Miners, alternatively, staged elaborate 
rituals to mourn the dead, ease the sorrow of the living, instigate re-
form, and preserve “the good death.” Much like the Civil War soldiers 
studied by Drew Gilpin Faust in This Republic of Suffering (2008), the 
working class often lived truncated lives and died in horrendous 
ways, thus not allowing for a typical “good death” scenario. Illinois coal 
Book Reviews and Notices      183 
miners banded together through fledgling unions to provide death ben-
efits in a communal effort to maintain human dignity in death, paving 
the way for the creation of the United Mine Workers of America, one 
of the most powerful unions in the nation. In western Pennsylvania, 
steel workers provided mutual aid through churches and fraternal 
organizations, although these were often segregated by ethnicity after 
steel unions were crushed in the wake of Homestead. 
 Much of the book features a labor-versus-capital narrative that 
oversimplifies the fluid nature of class, casting doubt on the explana-
tory power of its case studies. Whether at Homestead or Haymarket or 
in southern Illinois, Rosenow draws fairly strict battle lines between 
capitalist owners and exploited workers. One wonders, however, how 
much the rituals of death hold up when class lines break down. In Iowa 
coal country, for example, class lines could be obvious when miners 
lived in coal camps while managers and owners lived elsewhere. The 
lines were not so obvious in places like Boone and Madrid, where miners 
often lived in the same town as managers, attended the same churches, 
played on the same baseball teams, and joined the same lodges. Both 
groups mingled with farmers and the town’s middle class. Catastrophes 
in the mines affected the whole community, sometimes leading to cross-
class reform movements. When miners died, they were buried in the 
same cemeteries as teachers, artisans, and politicians, often irrespec-
tive of ethnicity, unlike the examples of Chicago and Union Miners 
Cemetery in Illinois. This is not to question the validity of the author’s 
case studies but to wonder how much of a “barometer” (98) they are 
for the larger working-class experience with death, especially in the 
Midwest.  
 The author offers a tantalizing and well-researched glimpse into 
the rituals of death for workers whose lives held little value outside 
their own communities in industrializing America. How suggestive 
they are for the broader working-class experience remains to be seen. 
 
 
St. Louis and Empire: 250 Years of Imperial Quest and Urban Crisis, by Henry 
W. Berger. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. xi, 353 
pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.50 hardcover. 
Reviewer Thomas J. Gubbels is associate professor of history at Lincoln Uni-
versity. His research and writing focus on Missouri history and the history of 
transportation. 
Students of American foreign policy often ignore the Midwest, assum-
ing that the region has played no role in establishing the nation’s in-
ternational goals. Henry Berger’s St. Louis and Empire, however, places 


Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865-1920

Review of: Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism, by Mark R. Stol

Douglas, Bill R.

190      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
look at the contemporaneous processes by which it is also forgotten. 
“Rather than facilitating memories of Simmons,” she explains, “Floyd 
of Rosedale was designed to make people forget” (73). The welter of 
anger that resulted from how Simmons was treated in that 1934 game 
disappeared as Governors Herring and Olsen redirected the public’s 
attention from a serious confrontation with racial issues to a porcine 
absurdity. “Political intervention not only calmed interstate anxieties,” 
Schultz observes, “it also glossed over and de-racialized any contro-
versy concerning Simmons’s place on the gridiron” (89). This was a 
fate to which Simmons resigned himself once his playing days were 
done. “Football’s a racket,” he said. “I play it because I love it. I know 
I’ll be forgotten in two or three years” (98). Floyd of Rosedale is thus a 
talisman for how forgetting shapes remembering, indelibly fostering 
narratives that obscure as much as they crystallize popular historical 
memory. Schultz, in turn, challenges her readers to remember Sim-
mons, Trice, and Bright, rather than “allowing their legacies to drift 
into the ether of neglect” (146). Yet, in that act of remembrance, “the 
racialized memories of these three men and the injuries and insults 
they sustained while playing college football best serve contemporary 
society by reminding us that coming to terms with the past must also 
include efforts to engage with the present” (146).  
 
 
Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmental-
ism, by Mark R. Stoll. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xiii, 406 
pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Bill R. Douglas is an independent historian—and Presbyterian—
based in Des Moines. His work focuses on Iowa’s religious history. 
Environmentalists were Presbyterians. That’s the short summary of this 
long, engaging, and partially persuasive book. The longer summary is 
that Congregationalists in the nineteenth century, with their ordered 
commons, and Presbyterians in the early twentieth century, with their 
call for stewardship of the vast lands left for federal management, 
formed and dominated the American environmental movement. To be 
precise, Stoll argues that environmental leaders of the first half of the 
twentieth century had grown up Presbyterian, though they were often 
lapsed. The book’s most important and provocative contribution is in 
recovering denominationalism as an essential category in American 
thought and practice. 
 This is a quirky book. The entire first part is a description of Ameri-
can nineteenth-century landscape artists. Patient readers may admire the 
full-color plates. Impatient readers may wonder about their relevance. 
Book Reviews and Notices      191 
Rest assured that the artists whose work is depicted had Congrega-
tionalist connections and environmentalist convictions. 
 Stoll is at his best in tracing the political nature of Presbyterianism 
from its Scottish roots to American adaptations. Its representative polity 
made it more attuned to a national perspective than its Congregation-
alist cousins. With this wider social vantage point, God as manifested 
by nature needed to be protected from the depredations of a fallen 
humanity. Presbyterianism’s strong preaching tradition reinforced the 
moral certitude with which prophets like John Muir attacked environ-
mental degradation. 
 Iowans Stoll lists include United Presbyterians Henry Wallace and 
James Wilson. Stoll’s reliance on minimal biographical information is 
not always sufficient. It is true that Henry A. Wallace was deeply in-
fluenced by his grandfather Henry Wallace, but his religious proclivi-
ties veered much wider, as an article by Mark Kleinman in this journal 
in 1994 and the most comprehensive biography (by John Culver and 
John Hyde) have explored, but which Stoll does not cite. 
 More troubling for Stoll’s thesis are three non-Presbyterian envi-
ronmentalists from Iowa that Stoll does include: cartoonist Jay N. 
“Ding” Darling, the son of a Methodist minister; Aldo Leopold, of 
German Lutheran background; and William Temple Holladay, who 
helped save the bison from extinction and who grew up Seventh-Day 
Adventist. Stoll brackets them as defenders of wildlife, but it is not clear 
why that subcategory of environmentalism should exempt its propo-
nents. Leopold, at least, cannot be so easily pigeonholed, but Stoll ar-
gues that he was most influential posthumously. 
 It would be intriguing to chart a denominational study of Progres-
sivism. There must have been considerable overlap with the environ-
mentalists Stoll lists. How much of Presbyterians’ influence on envi-
ronmentalism was simply a result of their proximity to power in the 
Progressive era? 
 One aspect of Stoll’s edifice that merits further study is his use of 
the “lapsed” category as stand-ins for actual active Presbyterians. Cer-
tainly the most noted category in contemporary American religious 
surveys is the emergence of the “nones.” Closer examination has sug-
gested that this is a very diverse group. I believe it was Martin Marty 
who proposed that there are no generic atheists—it is always a partic-
ular God and set of religious beliefs that they deny. Stoll’s insights on 
lapsed Presbyterians suggest that a revival of the category of denomi-
nationalism should not be restricted to card-carrying members. 
 Stoll’s knowledgeable summary of late twentieth-century environ-
mentalism indicates that he is pessimistic about the chances of saving 
192      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
the planet. I am less pessimistic and less willing to admit the virtues of 
history as a predictor. 
 Sometimes a book can be better at being provocative than being 
right. Inherit the Holy Mountain can be useful to both environmental 
and religious historians—to the former in tracing religious roots of en-
vironmentalism and to the latter in suggesting that there may be many 
connections between denominations and American culture that are not 
yet fully explored. 
 
 
A Complex Fate: William L. Shirer and the American Century, by Ken 
Cuthbertson. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. xxviii, 
548 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Jeff Nichols is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Illi-
nois at Chicago. His research has included investigating the role of newspapers 
in wartime Chicago. 
Just weeks after graduating from Coe College in 1925, William L. Shirer 
left his family home in Cedar Rapids, eventually working as a deck-
hand to pay for passage to Europe. By the time he returned for his fif-
tieth class reunion, he had been a print journalist who had sat with 
Charles Lindbergh, Mahatma Gandhi, and Hermann Göring; a pioneer-
ing broadcaster who managed to scoop the Nazis in reporting the sur-
render of France; a blacklisted novelist who could not afford to fix his 
furnace; and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, possibly 
the best-selling historical work written in modern times. Shirer’s cou-
rageous reporting from Berlin, which included a remarkable partner-
ship with Edward R. Murrow, guarantees his place among the greats 
of American journalism.   
 Canadian journalist Ken Cuthbertson is not the first to write a biog-
raphy of Shirer, although Steve Wick’s The Long Night (2011) is mostly 
set in the 1930s. Cuthbertson begins by exploring the deep Iowa roots 
of the Shirer family. In 1913, when Shirer was just 9 years old, his fa-
ther, an assistant U.S. attorney, died from peritonitis, and his mother 
made the unhappy decision to move to her hometown of Cedar Rapids.  
 Shirer was an inconsistent student who could pass as an adult, and 
his adolescence was defined by work. At 15, he worked as a civilian 
clerk at Camp Funston in Kansas. Abetted by his mother, Shirer again 
lied about his age to tour the Midwest on the Chautauqua circuit, an 
experience that deepened his sense of wanderlust. Through Ethel Out-
land, his journalism mentor at Coe, Shirer won a job in the newsroom at 
the Cedar Rapids Republican, earning his first exclusive by barging into 
Jack Dempsey’s private Pullman car and waking the sleeping boxer. 


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