Book Reviews

Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South.

Edited byMichael J. Pfeifer. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 336 pp. Paper, $28.00.)

AMERICANS’ ALL-TOO-FREQUENT RESORT to “lynch law” to execute alleged (and actual) criminals as well as other perceived troublemakers is one of the black eyes on this nation’s history. Understandably, the vast majority of scholarship on lynching and other race-based forms of violence focuses on the American South. Michael Pfeifer’s edited collection of essays, Lynching Beyond Dixie, admirably fulfills its title’s promise in extending our gaze beyond the former Confederacy to recognize “rough justice” as a national—not simply a regional—phenomenon.

The volume’s ten essays (plus an excellent editor’s introduction) take the reader on a tour of the United States, with half of the chapters focusing on “the West” (primarily Texas, Arizona, California, Kansas, and Utah), three on the Midwest, and two on the Northeast. The collection’s novelty is somewhat diminished by the fact that four of the ten essays have been published previously, but the convenience of having them all in one place justifies the book’s utility and contribution. One of the book’s truly outstanding features is a table charting all the known lynchings that took place outside the South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, grouped by state but also including information about the locality, date, names of victims, race, alleged offense, method of killing, and sources. That the table is nearly sixty pages long, in small print, is itself a sobering testimony to the human toll of just this small slice of American violence.

As is common in the literature, the authors cannot agree on what constitutes a lynching. Helen McLure stretches the definition to include a wide range of lethal hostilities between whites and Indians, as well as other cases that I would classify as murder, frontier violence, or mass violence. Without a precise definition, too many dissimilar types of violence are all included inside one term, thus diminishing its analytical utility. Even more questionable is Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua’s reference to “academic lynching” (166), in which scholars pay more attention analyzing white perpetrators than black victims—a critique-worthy imbalance, to be sure, but does it really constitute a contemporary act of lynching remotely akin to the original lethal act?

All of the authors should be congratulated for their outstanding and careful primary source research. In many ways, the host of local nineteenthand early twentieth-century newspapers are the star witnesses here, as they represent the only known documentation for many of these lynchings. As for the individual essays, I can mention only a few highlights. Christopher Waldrep’s essay on the tension between politics and law in 1850s San Francisco—site of the largest vigilante movement in U.S. history—insightfully demonstrates how Americans came to exalt majoritarian politics over abstract constitutional law. Brent Campney’s treatment of Reconstructionera Kansas is a fine example of respectfully challenging previous scholars’ arguments through careful research and nuanced argument. Dennis Downey effectively contrasts the involvement of two ministers (one white, one black) in a 1903 lynching, thus revealing competing public theologies, democratic theories and discourses, and politics of the street.

UHQ readers will be especially interested in Kimberley Mangun and Larry Gerlach’s analysis of newspaper treatments of the 1925 lynching of Robert Marshall in Carbon County, Utah, and its aftermath. Based on an impressive body of research, the essay reveals that the lynching conformed to fairly standard national patterns. Particularly interesting was the organization of a Day of Reconciliation in 1998 to heal the wounds from the lynching. Despite positive national press coverage, local residents grumbled that the event failed to remember the original murder that provoked the lynching; they also complained that dredging up the past was hardly a way to promote racial good feelings in a community that had largely forgotten the event. While acknowledging the challenges associated with this kind of post-conflict reconciliation, more familiar to us from settings such as South Africa or Rwanda, the authors seem overly dismissive of local concerns and critiques. Even more distracting are repeated mentions of Mormonism’s troubled history with race, but in a way that is only tangentially connected to the case at hand, thus making the references seem speculative and almost gratuitous.

Scholars unfamiliar with the broader literature on lynching may miss some of the nuances propelling the various authors’ arguments. But all students of American history will benefit from considering how this nation’s conceptions of law, justice, democracy, popular sovereignty, and the common good are all rooted, at least in part, in a bloody history of extralegal violence. As this volume powerfully indicates, lynching is not just a southern problem—it is an American problem.

PATRICK Q. MASON Claremont Graduate University

The Selected Letters of Bernard DeVoto and Katharine Sterne.

Edited by MarkDeVoto. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2012. xix + 508 pp. Cloth, $29.95.)

AFTER A MASS FIRING OF non-Mormon faculty in February 1915, freshman Bernard DeVoto soured on the University of Utah and fled to Harvard. From a purported Cambridge vantage he wrote his inflammatory “Utah” for the American Mercury of March 1926. Without his Ivy League reinvention, DeVoto might never have edited the Saturday Review of Literature, written the influential “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s, or been the first native Utahn to win the Pulitzer Prize. A century later, however, it is not Harvard but the University of Utah whose press logo adorns DeVoto’s definitive body of correspondence.

As recently as 1974, DeVoto’s biographer Wallace Stegner could write that “the name of Utah’s most prominent writer is still spelled in his home state with three letters, M.U.D.” Utah’s imprint on this long-awaited collection signals that the hatchet is buried and concedes that DeVoto’s gifts of observation and description outweigh his sins. Into these letters to Katharine Sterne (the “gallant” dedicatee of his The Year of Decision: 1846), DeVoto poured his passion for western history unabashedly.

Sterne, a tubercular patient in Poughkeepsie, New York, initiated their epistolary bond with a fan letter praising a 1933 DeVoto story in the Saturday Evening Post. One decade and nearly eight hundred letters later, DeVoto confessed, “I certainly never would have written to a man as I have to you [and] you have represented some blend of wife-daughter-mother to this odd soul” (364).

In 1940 DeVoto, with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., made a field trip of western rivers and trails for Year of Decision, dispatching rambling narratives to Sterne. “I found that a boyhood in the mountains plus Uncle Sam’s careful training of an intelligence officer [during World War I] have soundly supported historical research,” he exulted. “All my recreation of the country from [explorers’] journals was right” (238).

DeVoto’s reactions to monumental events enlighten us, particularly World War II, during which he studied extreme first aid (“I now know how to deliver babies in the street”), and the Great Hurricane of 1938, which devastated New England (“water cascaded with a roar loud enough to drown out the wind”) (309, 180). The hurricane struck less than a month after a personal drama nearly as turbulent: DeVoto’s blowup at his idol and “father image these last three years,” the poet Robert Frost, whom he said was “break[ing] down into about equal parts willful child, demanding child, jealous woman, and mere devil” (176, 174). Mutual recriminations continued through 1943, when DeVoto told Sterne, “I’ll remind him that the life insurance tables give me the probability that I’ll outlive him” (355). Fatefully, by the time Frost recited his poetry at the Kennedy inauguration, DeVoto had been dead five years.

An appendix to the book, “The Bucolics of Decadence,” a memoir of DeVoto’s youth he drafted at Sterne’s request, is a treasure of Ogden history. In the memoir, he maintained that Moroni Olsen, a fellow community theater alumnus, agonized over changing his name on Broadway. “I had great difficulty,” cracked DeVoto, “dissuading [Olsen] from dropping the i” (434).

Formerly a New York Times art critic, Sterne held her own with perspicacity and wit. She grumbled, for example, that another patient endlessly disrupted her sleep with “nose-blowings that are answered by hounds in [neighboring] counties; farts that contravene every convention of decent and humane warfare” (366). The correspondence ceased at her death in 1944.

The index disconcertingly omits many names of importance to researchers of Ogden history. Otherwise, this collection’s significance as guide to DeVoto’s strengths and biases cannot be overemphasized.

VAL HOLLEY Washington, D.C.

Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States 1870–1930.

By Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2012. viii + 235pp. Cloth, $49.95.)

THE STORY OF THE IRISH and Chinese laborers who constructed the first transcontinental railroad—culminating with the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit in northern Utah on May 10, 1869— has been told in countless books and venues and stands as an example of the contribution that millions of immigrants from many countries have made in building America. However, for Central Pacific Railroad officials preparing for the construction eastward from California, Chinese workers were not the first choice. “Prior to 1869, the Central Pacific briefly considered importing ‘thousands of peons’ from Mexico but Euro American opposition in California ended that possibility” (38). But not for long; as early as 1871, Spanish-speaking residents of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico took employment with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad to become the first of thousands of traqueros from Mexico and the American Southwest to build and maintain the network of railroads that spread across North America. In Utah, Spanish-speaking workers helped construct the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad from Denver to Salt Lake City in the early 1880s and have worked to maintain Utah’s railroad tracks ever since. By the first decades of the twentieth century, “Mexican origin workers sought gainful employment in virtually every state in the union” and made up the largest group of railroad track maintenance workers in the American West (168).

Jeffrey Garcilazo begins his study with an overview of the significance of the railroad in the West and how Hispanic workers filled an essential role, especially as other immigrant workers—Italians, Greeks, Irish, and Chinese—moved from railroad maintenance work to jobs in the mines, industry, and small businesses. In time, some Hispanic workers also moved from the railroad to other jobs as the $1.25 per day they earned fell far short of wages in other industries. Five chapters focus on the Hispanics— Labor Recruitment, Work Experiences, Labor Struggles, Boxcar Communities, and Traquero Culture. In these chapters Garcilazo addresses such questions and topics as why Mexican track workers were hired, what incentives they were offered, the arduous and dangerous work, the challenges that workers faced, unionization and other forms of resistance to perceived mistreatment, and the community life of workers and their families in the United States. The latter chapter is of particular interest to cultural historians and folklorists as the author describes the family, religion, godparenthood, mutual aid societies, food, folktales, superstitions, songs, Mexican patriotism, Americanization, and the dominant role that women played in fostering and maintaining a culture that sustained their men in the isolated and difficult jobs they encountered.

Readers should be aware that this study was completed in 1995 as the author’s dissertation at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jeffrey Garcilazo passed away in 2001 at the age of forty-five. We owe a debt of gratitude to mentors, colleagues, and family who carried through with the publication of this important study. However, the most recent sources cited in the extensive bibliography are from the mid-1990s, and an updated or supplemental bibliography would enhance the usefulness of this study.

As questions of immigration reform, restriction, and citizenship continue to demand our attention, it is important that we look back to examine how the Hispanic community became such an important force in America’s political, economic, social and cultural history. This book is an excellent resource to help further our understanding and hopefully encourage students of Utah history to investigate further the traquero and other Hispanic experiences in our state.

ALLAN KENT POWELL Salt Lake City

Gunfight at the Eco-Corral: Western Cinema and the Environment.

By Robin L.Murray and Joseph K. Heumann. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. xii +260. Paper, $24.95.)

IN GUNFIGHT AT THE ECO-CORRAL, Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann seek to analyze representations of nature in western films through an “eco-critical” lens. This project has several goals: first, to include westerns in the broader canon of nature writing; second, to explore how environmental concerns are reflected in these films. The third goal, a call to extend “the middle place” to westerns, is a response to American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism by Joni Adams (2001) and will be fairly unintelligible to readers not familiar with that work.

The authors organize their first five main chapters around a central environmental concern. Chapter one deals with the conflict between free-range ranching and fenced-in homesteads, chapter two with the conflict between different types of mining, chapter three with property rights and access to water, chapter four with land and oil rushes, and chapter five with the building of the railway. Chapter six differs in that it examines the portrayal of Natives’ relationships with the environment in both white and Native-made movies.

Gunfight is simultaneously insightful and deeply flawed. It is strongest when it explores a particular film in-depth and then applies an eco-critical reading to that film, as it does with The Last Hunt and Smoke Signals. The book also presents innovative readings of well-trod classics like Shane and newer films like There Will Be Blood, making a compelling argument for the need to pay attention to the environmental conflict at the heart of those movies and many other westerns. In this way, Gunfight succeeds in its first goal of demonstrating that westerns are a form of nature writing and can be read as such.

As long as Gunfight stays within the realm of analyzing westerns as nature texts, it is on solid ground, but when the authors try to evaluate these narratives in relation to contemporary and modern environmental concerns, the book runs into trouble. For instance, the authors repeatedly demonstrate that the environmental message of a particular group of western films did not reflect contemporary scientific thinking about the causes of environmental degradation. The point of this argument is unclear, however, because, as the authors acknowledge elsewhere, moviemakers create films in response to idealized understandings and myths about the West, not current research. Inexplicably, however, the creation of popular attitudes toward the environment and the West are almost entirely absent from the book.

Many of the films are also loosely situated historically, making it hard for non-experts to understand the significance of their particular environmental message. For instance, the Johnson County War, though referenced repeatedly, is not adequately explained, nor is progressivism, the New Deal, or the significance of 1960s counterculture. This is where the chapters that focus on one or two films, such as Smoke Signals, stand out because those films are clearly grounded in a historical and environmental context. Experts will be disappointed by the hit-and-miss nature of many of the sources that the authors do cite, with major works in the field replaced by ones that are obscure or out-of-date. Overall, this work would benefit from a more comprehensive grappling with the voluminous literature on resource exploitation in the West.

Perhaps of most concern is the way that a book that claims to deconstruct binary understandings of the environment ends up deploying just such a binary understanding of Native Americans. In their reading of Smoke Signals, the authors rather uncritically accept that Natives have a special, sustainable attitude toward the environment. This view fits comfortably with their goal of trying to present an alternative to mainstream environmentalism but ignores the literature on the image of the ecological Indian, as well as the anthropological and archaeological literature on native land use and subsistence strategies.

Despite these problems, Gunfight will be a valuable resource for anyone looking to explore western films through a new lens. The book also provides a good starting point for further studies seeking to link environmentalism and popular culture in the West.

CHRISTOPHER HERBERT Columbia Basin College

Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil

War. By C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,2012. xv + 228 pp. Cloth, $39.95.)

IN CROOKED PATHS TO ALLOTMENT, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa seeks to disrupt dominant narratives about the ideological homogeneity of late nineteenth-century Indian reformers and the inevitability of the dispossession and destruction of Indian nations under the Dawes Act; further, he links the development of federal Indian policy to the broader trends in the political development of the post-Civil War nation. He does so by telling the stories of two “alternative reformers”—Ely S. Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca leader who served as the commissioner of Indian Affairs under Ulysses S. Grant, and Thomas A. Bland, founder of the National Indian Defense Association (NIDA) and an outspoken critic of forced assimilation.

Through Parker and Bland, Genetin-Pilawa examines how alternative reformers sought to seize the opportunities at “constitutive moments” of Indian policymaking after the Civil War. Genetin-Pilawa argues that these moments were points where these alternate reformers had real opportunities to challenge, derail, and redirect the intensification of coercive federal policies aimed at forcing Indian assimilation into the national polity. To make this case, Genetin-Pilawa begins with a new look at Parker’s brief career as commissioner of Indian affairs (1869–1871). Parker is depicted as a political innovator and as a stalwart, if inconsistent, protector of indigenous rights who sought to soften and slow down federal efforts to resolve the Indian question through forced assimilation. In this way, Parker looked towards a gradual, voluntary, and humane assimilation process that was in marked contrast to the aggressive plans developed by non-Indian reformers. While these white reformers eventually forced Parker out, Genetin-Pilawa demonstrates that his resistance was a significant twist in the crooked path to allotment.

Turning to Bland and the NIDA, Genetin-Pilawa convincingly shows their initial success in challenging the Dawes Act and the assumptions that underlay the work of the act’s supporters, such as the Indian Rights Association (IRA). These groups typically took a condescending view of Indian capabilities and sought to impose their own “civilizing” solutions to the Indian problem. Bland and NIDA, on the other hand, aimed to uphold tribal sovereignty and involved Native people in developing and presenting alternative proposals. In telling this story, Genetin-Pilawa rescues Bland and NIDA from obscurity and illuminates them as an effective, if ultimately unsuccessful, impediment to coercive assimilation; he provides a clear example of how the drive toward allotment could have taken a different, more Indian-centric path.

However, Genetin-Pilawa also aims to demonstrate how these Reconstruction-era federal Indian policies “reflected and shaped” the political development of the nation between the Civil War and the Progressive Era—and even foreshadowed some of the ideas, policies, and processes espoused by John Collier during the Indian New Deal of the 1930s. It is a worthwhile goal, yet here the narrative falters. The links between the discussions of Indian policy and the course of national political development are often tenuous. For example, while Genetin-Pilawa shows that both the NIDA and IRA delved into the proper role and authority of government over its citizens and wards, he provides little evidence that these discussions informed, or were part of, broader national conversations.

Taken as a whole, Crooked Paths succeeds admirably in questioning the inevitability of coerced assimilation after the Civil War. It serves as an important reminder that there were viable, potentially less destructive paths not taken in the quest to resolve the “Indian problem.” It less successfully shows how those discussions and ideas were linked to broader themes and activities of American political development, even as it points to the ways that could be done.

TIMOTHY M. WRIGHT University of Washington

Bombast: Spinning Atoms in the Desert.

By Michon Mackedon.(Reno: Black Rock Institute, 2010. xv + 234 pp. Cloth, $60.00.)

WHAT CONSTITUTES “SOUND SCIENCE,” and who determines it? Experts? Then who qualifies as an “expert”? Particularly in the field of nuclear testing, officials knew the importance of their language and chose it carefully. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and government officials had a mantle of authority, “expert” opinion, and “sound science,” which allowed them to spin information about activities ranging from the testing of explosives to the description of outcomes—all in an effort to retain public support in the atomic age.

Bombast: Spinning Atoms in the Desert delves deeply into this subject. From the beginning, Michon Mackedon posits her central question: how “official rhetoric [was] used to pull the wool over our eyes?” “And so,” she states, “this book is about words” (xiii). Mackedon began the project after serving as vice chairperson of the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects. Through this position, she recognized that the Department of Energy has hidden behind “layers of irony” for decades. Thus began her exploration into the politics and nuances of atomic language, as well as its effect on history (xiii).

Mackedon relies heavily on secondary sources to support her thesis, but this is appropriate for the style and purpose of the work. Her use of primary sources to illuminate cultural and public response makes the writing provocative and compelling. Unfortunately, Bombast catalogs the nuclear tests in too brief a fashion. In some sections, the author provides little substance other than a test’s code name, the occurrence of fallout or other complications, and the emergence of public concern, followed by the Atomic Energy Commission’s usual response pattern of stressing the importance of “national security, their previous safety record, the role of experts, the soundness of the science employed, and the economic advantages sure to accompany the test,” while all the time assuring of the public’s safety (149).

The examination of the creation of code names and the language used to describe atomic testing to the public provides an intriguing angle on the subject. However, in the end, Mackedon does not deviate far from the established historical research. Her goal of examining the nature of rhetoric surrounding atomic testing proves only partially successful. The connection between code name and nuclear event is not always explicitly stated and, in many cases, seems repetitive. Overall, she offers little in terms of new research about site selection, individual tests, or the nuclear waste disposal debate. Even so, this work functions well as an introduction to atomic testing in Nevada.

Overall, Bombast is quite accessible to the average reader. Mackedon uses an engaging, logical style of writing that holds the attention of her readers. She glides easily from topics such as site choice decisions to the testing period itself, all the way through to present-day waste site determination. The illustrations and side commentary add much to an already entertaining narrative. Each side note addresses the irony of the atomic age, whether in culture, politics, or a combination of the two.

While Mackedon is not the first to discuss atomic rhetoric, she does present the most extensive overview of the language used to promote nuclear weapons. She articulates the ironies of the AEC’s choice of humanizing or affectionate names for such a violent technology. Mackedon also addresses the consistent pattern of AEC responses to public concern over the side effects of testing and fallout. This was accomplished through the use of press releases and discussions of “site suitability,” “sound science,” and “expert” opinion, strategies that stretch even to modern times; little has changed in the language used to calm public fear, and, as demonstrated by Mackedon’s research, it doesn’t seem as though it will any time soon.

KATHERINE GOOD Virginia Tech