Book Reviews

Conscience: Conversations with Sterling M. McMurrin on Philosophy, Education, and Religion.

By STERLING M. MCMURRIN and L. JACKSON NEWELL. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996. xxxii + 389 pp. $28.95.)

It is perhaps fitting that Sterling M McMurrin, a life-long and contributing member of the Mormon church, passed away on April 6, 1996, exactly 166 years from the day that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized. The religion of Mormonism permeated his life, gave him the spiritual sustenance to achieve a remarkable career, and provided an intellectual instrument for the expression of his exceptional talents as a philosopher, historian, and educator Loyal to his church but critical of what he observed as its failings, he had such a disarming quality that everyone from high church officials to college undergraduates was won over by the cogency of his sincerity and rationality.

To tell the story of McMurrin's life, close friend and able scholar L. Jackson Newell spent eight years recording fifty-two sessions of two hours each in interviews As a professor of higher education and currently president of Deep Springs College in California, Newell is uniquely qualified as a teacher and author in the philosophy and history of higher education to present the life of this extraordinary individual.

Sterling Moss McMurrin was born in Woods Cross, Utah, in 1914, spent his early years in Ogden, and moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was fourteen. He graduated from Manual Arts High School and completed his first year of college work at the University of California at Los Angeles before enrolling at the University of Utah in 1933 because of asthma attacks suffered in the southern California climate. He completed a bachelor's degree in history and political science in 1936 and a master's in philosophy in 1937.

A major influence in his life was his maternal grandfather, William Moss, the general manager of the Deseret Land and Livestock Company, one of the largest ranching operations in Utah. At the age of nine, he began working on the ranch and continued each summer until his late teens As the interviews show, it would be a mistake to underestimate the impact this rough experience had on his later career as a highly sophisticated philosopher, distinguished teacher, educational administrator, and the U.S commissioner of education in the Kennedy administration. His natural good judgment was tempered and enlarged by his contacts as a ranch hand It is understandable why everyone from university presidents to high government officials and Mormon church leaders turned to him for advice.

McMurrin's formal connection with the LDS faith started upon completion of his M.A. degree when he taught for seven years in the church's seminary and institute system. In his second year, he married Natalie Barbara Cotterel, whom he had met while they were undergraduates With summers spent in graduate work at the University of Southern California, he finally completed a Ph.D in philosophy in 1946 and taught there for two years before joining the faculty at the University of Utah in 1948, again moving chiefly for health reasons.

Although apart from any formal relationship with the Mormon church, he continued his keen interest in his faith and in 1965 saw the publication of his book, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion, the preeminent treatise on Mormon philosophy His active criticism of LDS doctrine and practices led to excommunication proceedings against him in 1954 that ended when David O McKay, church president at the time, announced that he would be the first witness in his defense at any church trial. McMurrin maintained his church membership to the end of his life, was proud of his Mormon heritage, could announce "that a fair number of its fundamental teachings are sheer nonsense," yet could also insist that "I am critical of the church, but I'm for it, not against it."

In his questioning, Newell skillfully reveals the depth of McMurrin's thinking as a philosopher and emphasizes the highly retentive memory he could draw on to recite exact conversations held as long as fifty years before His intellectual capacity was far above the norm and brought him to prominence as national and international leaders sought his counsel When he entered a room, attention was immediately focused on him.

Sterling M. McMurrin was an extraordinary human being, full of good humor, with an innate sense of humanity toward others, and a joy of living that he conveyed to all who had the good fortune to know him Anyone who reads this book will come away from it with spirit lifted in having had the opportunity to share in the life of an exceptional man.

Brigham D Madsen University of Utah

Re-imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art.

By RICHARD W. ETULAIN. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. xxvii + 241 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $17.95.)

Because every generation must rewrite the epic of its past (and cultural history is no exception), the historical record of the American West has been subject to extensive reinterpretation in recent decades, and the bibliography of revisionist books and articles grows steadily longer Much of it is predictable in its method, but occasionally there are refreshingly new approaches. In his new book Richard W Etulain sets out "to provide what no other western historian has yet attempted: an overview of the cultural and intellectual history of the twentieth-century West" (p. xv).

Etulain divides his book into three parts: "The West as Frontier," "The West as Region," and "The West as Postregion." Each section is further divided into three chapters, one dealing with fiction, a second with historiography, and a third with art In "The West as Frontier," for example, Etulain's chapter on "Frontier Novels" discusses Owen Wister, Mary Hallock Foote,Jack London, Frank Norris, and Zane Grey; among the historians, he deals with Frederick Jackson Turner and Frederick Logan Paxson; and from the artists he is concerned primarily with Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, and the Taos artists such as Ernest Blumenschein In "The West as Region" he treats Willa Cather, H L Davis, and John Steinbeck among the novelists; Walter Prescott Webb, Bernard DeVoto, and James C. Malin among the historians; and Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry among the artists. In "The West as Postregion" he considers novelistsJoan Didion, Wallace Stegner, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, A B Guthrie, Jr., Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, M Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan, and a host of others. Among the postregional historians he discusses Henry Nash Smith, Earl Pomeroy, Stegner, Robert Wooster, and Patricia Nelson Limerick. And for the artists he selects Georgia O'Keefe, Clifford Still, David Park, Mel Ramos, Ed Ruscha, Judith Baca, and Robert Smithson.

The author's readings of the novelists and historians are of the same quality as his interpretations of the painters: reasonable and lucid, refreshingly clear of the solemn and pedantic cant of the critical theoreticians. As he says on his last page, "Even though societal pressures and academic trends often stress single-subject interpretations such as race, gender, and place, students of western culture must embrace a much broader view if they are to understand the full significance of the fragmented unity of the contemporary West. Only when these notable subjects are viewed as spokes intersecting at the hub of western experience will one discover the large and lasting significance of modern western culture" (p 212).

Etulain's book is a lively and engaging study of the amazing cultural diversity of the West, a heritage in art, literature, and historiography made possible by the region's complex geography, ethnicity, and history Re-imagining the Modern American West is an important resource for helping us to see more clearly how we got where we are and to dispel even more effectively the myths that others believe about us—and that we ourselves sometimes believe.

Robert C Steensma University of Utah

Remaking the Agrarian Dream: New Deal Rural Resettlement in the Mountain West.

By BRIAN Q. CANNON. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. x + 195 pp. $40.00.)

Sometimes good things really do come in small packages Brian Q Cannon's monograph examining the New Deal's program to resettle farmers from submarginal land to presumably more economically viable farms (typically on irrigation projects in the Mountain West) runs to only 155 pages of text but encompasses a wealth of useful information and a significant corrective for traditional interpretations of this experiment.

The study focuses on the residents of a dozen Resettlement Administration (later Farm Security Administration) projects in six western states: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Utah. This was hardly one of the New Deal's larger programs, and yet it retains a special interest because of the philosophical assumptions that guided it and the insights it provides into the needs of poor farmers. While laying out the facts and relevant statistics, Cannon, with the aid of a number of interviews with participants, vividly develops the human side of the story.

Typically, the relocation process began with optimism on all sides The relocatees, coming from a background of extreme deprivation, wanted badly to believe the new settlements would yield the good life Federal administrators wanted just as badly to believe their program would produce happy and productive citizens. But the opportunities for disillusionment were great—and mistakes were made. The rush to get the program underway (and occasional political influence) led to selection of poor land and other miscalculations Farm families raised in the tradition of the independent yeoman farmer resented close supervision of their work and spending habits by insensitive or condescending bureaucrats, and government officials excused failures by blaming the relocatees for laziness and mismanagement. It would have been easy to turn this into a diatribe on the foolishness of trying to use government as the solution to any human problem

But Cannon does not do that. In a nicely balanced analysis, he rejects the view of other scholars that it was unreasonable to expect success from a "group of ignorant sharecroppers" and produces persuasive evidence that "out-migration" from the projects was not markedly higher than among other groups during the Great Depression. Moreover, in a sophisticated treatment of life in the settlements, he finds real bonds of community and caring If hardly anyone got rich, the program at least made it possible for many families, with much hard work, to maintain their dignity and look back on the experience years later with satisfaction.

Adverse criticism is hard to come by. This is largely history "from the bottom up" with a strong quantitative base. Political historians might wish for more information about the opposition the Resettlement Administration stirred in Congress or the interference or support of state officials—but that would be a different book Nor does Cannon confront the basic conceptual problem with the Roosevelt farm policies, i.e., an unwillingness to admit that the primary agricultural surplus was farmers. Nevertheless, this superb work of scholarship is "must" reading for any student of the New Deal's agricultural assistance programs.

F. Alan Coombs University of Utah

Army Wives on the American Frontier: Living by the Bugles.

By ANNE BRUNER EALES (Boulder: Johnson Books, 1996 xiv + 210 pp Paper, $16.95.)

In 1892 Frederick Jackson Turner pored over the pages of the 1890 census. What intrigued him was the fact that the vast body of land known as the American frontier had been settled Virtually, continued expansion west had come to a close. There simply was no more frontier This "revelation" that the frontier had closed sparked an idea that would guide a generation of historians—that the frontier had given a peculiar shape to the American character (albeit a peculiarly masculine one).

Within the last two decades younger generations of scholars—particularly feminist scholars—have begun to question the impact of the frontier on gender If the frontier did help form a national character defined by democracy and individualism, it certainly had more to do with the shaping of a masculine identity than a female one.

Frontier women, as Glenda Riley has argued in her work The Female Frontier (1988), displayed fairly consistent patterns of domesticity that transcended geographic locations. In other words, the "female frontier" did not significantly alter women's roles because of their dependence on a Victorian construction of gender. Social controls and gender views kept men in the workplace and women in the home.

In contrast, Anne Bruner Eales in her work Army Wives on the Frontier: Living by the Bugles demonstrates how women's roles and self-perceptions were significantly altered by the frontier experience Relying on fifty diaries of army officers' wives living during the nineteenth century, Eales reconstructs lives that were shaped by Victorian standards, pervasive institutional norms, and an ongoing dialogue with the unknown. Contrary to other frontier women, army wives took on the personas of their husbands when the soldiers were on patrol or away on extended campaigns Following a strict class regimen, officers' wives were segregated from enlisted men's wives and were awarded social rank according to the husband's place in the army hierarchy. Their dependence on servants and laundresses freed them to express themselves in a way that focused less on domesticity and more on individual pursuits. Consequently, the new environment "overwhelmed eastern norms" as women were now being judged not on "performance" of social ritual but rather on how well they adapted to "a rough and hazard-filled man's world" (p 8) Unlike Glenda Riley who finds that economic opportunity and occupational heterogeneity existed only for the men, Eales finds that western culture valued and promoted women's equality both economically and politically.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter is the one titled "A Drink of Dirty Water." It analyzes women's reactions to eastern society upon their return from the frontier. Unlike many women who went west, an army wife usually returned east with her husband due to his reassignment Many were disgusted with the increased commerce and pollution Some felt out of place because eastern women had such white skin (compared to their dark tans). Eastern women and children also looked upon the returning women as oddities because few could relate to the dangers and uncivilized nature of the West. Moreover, army wives found themselves more tolerant of various races and ethnic backgrounds and less tolerant of traditional gender roles Libbie Custer, perhaps the most famous of the army wives, observed that women in her hometown were "so fagged with domestic cares, kitchen drudgery, leading a monotonous life" that she concluded, "No Civil life for me except as a visitor" (p. 169).

Generally, the book is well written and topically well organized. Eales's failure to examine the journals and memoirs of enlisted men's wives, however, makes her findings incomplete. Nevertheless, this work shows how a combination of military and frontier life forever affected these women's gender views Indeed, women embarking on such a life would give the army camp song "The Girl I Left Behind Me" a different connotation from that of the soldiers or the rest of society for that matter. They would never be like the girl left behind; they would be transformed into the "New Woman" of the early twentieth century.

Mark R. Grandstaff Brigham Young University