Reviews

Ever Oversold An illustration from an 1891 book presents the seizure of the Boone and Galloway girls in highly melodramatic terms.

FRONTIER DRAMATICS

The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap that Shaped America By Matthew Pearl Harper, 2021; $27.99 The title oversells, but don’t be put off by that. Matters involving Jemima Boone’s kidnapping are but a fraction of this book, and nothing in Taking persuaded me that that abduction shaped America. Even so, the book absorbingly chronicles the roil of events and individuals along the American frontier during the Revolution, particularly its protagonist, the remarkable Daniel Boone (1734-1820), explorer, settler, archetype—and Jemima’s father.

The setting is what eventually became the state of Kentucky. The time is the late 1770s. The era and locale featured atrocities, betrayal, espionage, and pitched battles, but also heroism, decency, dignity, even wisdom. American settlers were fighting the British for independence. Indian tribes were not only fighting for their long-held land but for their survival.

As author Pearl observes with some understatement, “The frontier remained in limbo, caught in a struggle among Indians, settlers, the British, and nature itself.”

On July 14, 1776, Jemima, 13, and two other girls were rowing near Fort Boone, named for her near-legendary father, when Shawnee and Cherokee braves seized the trio.

The Indians likely meant to use their captives as trading chips with the British or the settlers. But the raid backfired. A great woodsman, Daniel led a team that rescued the girls unharmed—a feat facilitated by the captives’ cleverly marked traces.

Taking becomes far more interesting after the rescue: Daniel’s capture by Shawnee braves in 1778; his adoption by Blackfish, a chief of that tribe; his escape, aided by his adoptive Indian mother; the Indian siege of Fort Boone; Daniel’s court-martial for treason, contrived by jealous enemies. He defended himself and was not only acquitted but promoted from captain to major in the militia.

The author errs by not recounting Daniel’s

UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES early life. What of his boyhood and early manhood? How did he acquire those phenomenal wilderness skills? Why, unlike so many settlers, did he respect Indians? Pearl, however, does engagingly depict the ruthless realpolitik practiced by British, settlers, and indigenes. And he understands his story’s import. “Blackfish proposed a true revolution. . .to turn the frontier into an integrated, shared space,” he writes. “Evidence suggests elements of this appealed to Boone, too. Instead, the Kentucky settlements became. . .a testing ground of an American doctrine of expansion by force. . .” —Howard Schneider has reviewed books for Military History, Aviation History, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

Delightfully Deadpan

Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton was not only an agile and hilarious giant of silent movie comedy, but one whose grasp of what could be accomplished with cameras and editing equipment transformed the nickelodeon’s merely moving pictures into a series of 20-minute comedies that still amaze and delight. When talkies arrived, Keaton’s fame plateaued, but he never stopped working. From 1900 as the 5-year-old linchpin of his family’s top-billed vaudeville act until his death in 1966, Buster Keaton was always providing laughs.

Slate film critic Dana Stevens has shaped a quarter of a century’s worth of legwork into Camera Man. Researching prodigiously, locating shorts thought lost, and reading tons of reviews and profiles, she has developed a genuine feel for what made Keaton distinctive and funny. Describing her subject’s innovations and pratfalls, Stevens explains how his “whole comic persona sprang from a kind of sublime passivity.” And she makes clear Keaton’s place in history as “a living bridge between live entertainment of the nineteenth century and the mass-produced technology of the twentieth.”

But Stevens dilutes the value of that research with pervasive speculation on what “might” have happened when she finds no evidence. And she shows scant interest in the work outside of film that sustained Keaton for decades.

For instance, she mentions that he toured in road shows of Broadway comedies but cites not one play or role. Most bothersome, she constantly roams byways, a tic that stalls the Keaton narrative and leaves readers confused about just where in that story we are.

But Camera Man’s weakness is also a strength. Extraneous material tangles Keaton’s tale but also provides a sort of plum pudding filled with interesting arcana. Keaton breakfasts at a Child’s restaurant; Stevens devotes three pages to the chain, the first to use woman servers. Keaton does a movie scene in blackface; Stevens cuts to a chapter about Bert Williams, the Black humorist and Ziegfeld Follies star. Keaton misses out on a role in the 1931 Grand Hotel; Stevens spends eight pages on that film, including such tidbits as stars Greta Garbo and John Barrymore not having an affair during the shoot. A reader’s tolerance for Stevens’s approach will depend on the degree of pleasure those plums provide. —SCOTUS 101 columnist Daniel B. Moskowitz laughed joyously at the Keaton two-reelers that he streamed to prepare for writing this review.

Camera Man by Dana Stevens Atria, 2022; $28

Peak Keaton The hyphenate star composed and posed for a characteristic still while making his 1928 comedy The Cameraman.

Anti-War Warrior General Smedley Butler addresses a protest in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 9, 1935

Uncle Slam Wants You

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire By Jonathan M. Katz St. Martin’s, 2022; $29.99 A disturbing but illuminating account of American imperialism in the first decades of the 20th century, Gangsters covers military actions in nine countries with special attention to the career of highly decorated Marine Major General Smedley D. Butler (1881-1940).

Each chapter focuses on a particular American intervention in such widely scattered locations as the Philippines, Cuba, China, Haiti, and Panama. Addressing each episode, Katz presents the greater politico-historical context, the Marines’ participation, including Butler’s own role, and a current-day look back based on Katz’s first-hand observations of long-term effects, local memories, and lingering attitudes toward Americans. Katz documents effectively how these campaigns sought to support American companies and banks, with little regard for the local populace whose lives and communities those interventions disrupted and often destroyed. At home the party line was that these actions expressed benevolent support for democracy and assistance in development for peoples unready for self-governance. Perhaps with the exception of Cuba, most Americans know far less of these imperialist undertakings than do those whose countries were in the line of American fire.

To underpin his narrative, Katz uses a wide variety of solid secondary sources and archival documents, listed in an extensive selected bibliography and notes. To understand what Butler did and how he thought, the author arranged access to correspondence, writings, and photos of Butler and family. Katz shows Butler’s thinking as it evolves from that of a naïve young underage Marine at Guantánamo Bay to his late-life questioning of anti-democratic actions he helped carry out. As Butler wrote in a 1935 article in Common Sense, “I spent most of my life

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES © DON TROIANI, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2021/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES © DON TROIANI, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2021/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES being a high-class muscle-man for big business, for Wall Street, and the bankers. . . . I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

Katz unspools a gripping account of the “small wars” that America engaged in during the century of very large wars. Gangsters is not a happy read but its content and insights will appeal to many readers. Those who reflexively support the American interventions or see them as necessary evils will disagree with Katz’s overall arguments, but nonetheless will find his book well worth reading and contemplating. —Barbara Finlay is a long-time contributor to American History.

“The scum of the earth.” Samuel Adams might have called British regulars that. Exasperatedly watching Redcoats pause to plunder a defeated enemy’s debris, the Duke of Wellington definitely did. Unlike Adams, Wellington knew better when in a calmer frame of mind.

With the Royal Navy handling the island nation’s defense, King George III’s Britain opted for a small, all-volunteer land force. Recruiters were expected to enlist serious professionals, not cannon fodder or criminals on the run. Magistrates had to certify enlistment as voluntary. Army life had real attractions for the working class. Employment was assured and, more importantly, so were pensions for those who lived long enough to retire, whether owing to age or disability. Skilled tradesman taking the King’s shilling could often make money on the side. There was even an outside chance of becoming an officer and attaining “gentlemanly” status. Enlistees tended to have other options as trained workers, or at least as unskilled laborers.

Such men weren’t mercenary. In the years of tension preceding the Revolutionary War colonists frequently offered regulars land, money, and other incentives to desert. Few considered accepting.

Some feared punishment. Many had other mature, considered reasons. Men who were neither unthinking minions nor automatons took seriously their oaths of enlistment and expressions of patriotic loyalty. And Redcoats saw the Patriot movement at its worst—the chaos and mob violence that leaders like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin eschewed.

Naturally some unsavory characters did enlist, their misdeeds broadcast for ages. But interestingly any one soldier was as likely to be a victim of thuggery as a perpetrator of the same. Irish civilians often deliberately crippled occupying soldiers for life. Some American colonists looked “humane” only in comparison. The one offense widespread among soldiers was boosting property to compensate for the privations of campaign life.

Campaigns were also the arena in which Redcoats excelled—and not just at conventional warfare. While colonists became proficient in the close order formations needed to win major battles, King George’s regulars adapted proficiently to the open order tactics that day to day operations in American forests demanded.

Many factors contributed to Britain’s defeat—geography, inferior commanders, French participation in the war. Volunteers shows that ordinary Redcoats’ dedication and performance was not among them. —James Baresel is a freelance writer in Annandale, Virginia.

redcoats Rethunk

Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution By Don N. Hagist Westholme, 2020; $34.

Standing Tall Regulars like this member of the 29th Regiment of Foot circa 1770 acquitted themselves better than is supposed.

Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie

song to woody

“Intimacy” seems an odd way for a biographer to label the lens through which he views his subject. But by drilling deeply into Guthrie’s writings, Haverford College Professor Gustavus Stadler shows how powerfully intimacy shaped this iconic folksinger’s art and politics.

Intimacy was everything for him. The intimacy of tenderness and trauma made life heaven and hell. It was how the body felt when struck by disease and violence, the feelings that shut down an emotionally abused soul and gave rise to an unearned inner conviction of worthlessness. Most of all, intimacy was about transcendence. Connection was Guthrie’s balm for the harm he and people like him endured.

He grew up amid violence in Oklahoma. His earliest memories of his father, a political operative and suspected Klan member, were of him bruised and bloody from brawling. Huntington’s Chorea, a genetic disease, tormented his mother, sending Nora Belle Guthrie into terrifying spasms and episodes of public weeping. “Us kids would stand around the house lost in silence, not saying a word for hours, and ashamed, somehow, to go out down the street and play with the kids, and wanting to stay there and see how long her spell would last, and if we could help her,” Guthrie recalled in his book Bound for Glory. Spells aside, Nora taught Woody, whom she called her “worried little man,” how singing could soothe troubled minds. When the boy was six, sister Clara, 14, argued with Nora. The clash ended with Clara Woody Guthrie: in flames; she died from the burns. One An Intimate Life account has her setting herself afire to scare By Gustavus Stadler her mother. Woody was 14 when his mother Beacon, 2020; $26.95 may have flung a kerosene lantern at his sleeping father, setting Charlie’s torso ablaze.

Trauma Woody endured as a boy and later witnessed among Oklahoma migrants imbued him with a desire to understand and ease the feelings of people like those scraping by in the Depression. He found joy in connection through singing and writing, seeing his art as a healing force. He was “not just an expert at creative expression, but…a caretaker, a healer, and an organizer,” Stadler writes.

A love affair with Martha Graham dancer Marjorie Mazia exposed him to women who battered their bodies in the service of dance, out of painful discipline creating beauty. He exulted in erasing boundaries between himself and a dedicated group of people out to do good, whether dancers or workingmen. He developed a reverence for collective action. Capitalism was how the system isolated people, he said: “The best part about the union hall is that it teaches you how to be free to talk and think and to hear that you are some good to somebody, some use, some help to the people of the world. A sweetheart can help to tell you this. A fellow union member can too.”

Any reckoning of Guthrie as nurturer involves an inventory of the damage he himself did. His relationship with Mazia ended her marriage and his own to first wife Mary. After marrying and having children with Marjorie he cheated on her, too. He grew distant from her and their kids, including son Arlo. Struggling with alcoholism and Huntington’s, he struck his wife and children. His marriage to Marjorie ended in divorce.

Although beautiful at times Stadler’s prose is hard going. More general biographies examine Guthrie’s politics, musical career, and his deep affection for family. Stadler’s focus on intimacy highlights how honest, fearless, generous, and unceasingly creative Guthrie was as an artist. He never shed his anger and alienation but, trapped in that cauldron, he forged an incredible sweetness of spirit. Whose songs better than his summon Americans’ connection to land and people? Who better expresses tenderness for the dispossessed and so strengthens our common humanity? When Guthrie sings Hobo’s Lullaby, all of us humans are along for the ride: “Now don’t you worry ‘bout tomorrow/Let tomorrow come and go/Tonight you’re in a nice warm boxcar/ Safe from all that wind and snow.” —John Reichard writes in Silver Spring, Maryland.

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