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Reviews
Governors and the Progressive Movement
By David R. Berman
Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2019. xii + 303 pp. Cloth, $49.00
The years from 1890 to 1920 saw a blizzard of reforms on a dizzying array of subjects, including a graduated income tax, women’s suffrage, prohibition of alcohol, pure food and drug, direct election of United States senators, regulation of corporate power, and the IRR reforms (initiative, referendum, and recall), among others. An enormous body of literature has dissected aspects of this busy period. Among the most influential synthetic works that explain the reasons for this reform impulse are Richard Hofstader’s The Age of Reform and Robert H. Wiebe’s The Search for Order. More recent, culturally focused works include Nell Irvin Painter’s Standing at Armageddon and Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent.
David Berman has contributed a good deal to that literature over many years. In this book, he provides an overview of the era at the state level: brief descriptions of governors’ reform programs around the country and some of the results of their efforts. Scholars of the era have studied individual governors, especially Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette (including books by Robert Maxwell and Nancy Unger and La Follette’s own autobiography); California’s Hiram Johnson (Michael A. Weatherson and Hal W. Bochin); and New Jersey’s Woodrow Wilson (Ray Stannard Baker, David W. Hirst). The careers of Wilson and the most famous of all “progressives,” Theodore Roosevelt, have spawned hundreds of books and thousands of articles, mostly focused on their presidential years.
Berman makes a persuasive case in this book that while national legislation and U.S. presidents get plenty of scholarly attention, most reform legislation came at the state level, in what Louis Brandeis called the “laboratories of democracy.” The book moves from region to region, highlighting the varying accomplishments of governors while remaining alert to regional differences and contexts, especially race in the South and mining and railroad company power in the West. Berman makes a plausible argument that populist governors of the 1890s should be included as part of a continuous push toward reform.
For all the strengths of this book, there are some debatable choices. They begin with the title’s reference to the “Progressive Movement,” and Berman’s use of the capital P throughout. Progressive is a much-argued about term today, just as it was in the early twentieth century, and lumping such a variety of reform efforts (by Populists, Democrats, and Republicans) into a single “Progressive Movement” seems problematic. Berman admits that the Progressive label is slippery, in clunky prose that unfortunately mars the book in some places:
Berman’s definition leads to some odd bedfellows: should we really consider, for example, the Mississippi Democrat Theodore Bilbo (“an out-and-out white supremacist”) and New York Republican Charles Evans Hughes part of the same Progressive Movement because they favored some of the same issues (101)? Berman also passes over eugenics too quickly, defining it narrowly as “the sterilization of people who were considered deficient or undesirable” (310). That leaves out eugenic legislation like antimiscegenation marriage laws or the “positive” campaigns that featured “best baby” contests at state fairs. These reservations aside, David Berman has written a useful, comprehensive reference volume that covers the entire nation and that gives governors their due.
Jeff Nichols − Westminster College
Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory
By Cynthia Culver Prescott
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. 408 pp. Cloth, $39.95
Fully 130 years after the professed closure of the frontier, the myth of American pioneer spirit and the centrality of “manifest destiny” has yet to die out. Cynthia Culver Prescott’s 2019 Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory asks how and why this myth persists on American landscapes and in American cultural memory through public art. Prescott weaves together the history of “some 200 public monuments erected in the American West (and East) since 1890, including 185 . . . pioneer monuments,” to highlight regional, political, and religious patterns of artistic representations of pioneer women (xii). She asserts that, “Since the 1890s, Americans have claimed their place within a national story of westward expansion and responded to local social change by erecting pioneer monuments” (18).
In her examination of these “pioneer mother monuments,” historian Prescott engages with art history, anthropology, and sociology to analyze not only the works of art themselves, but also the meaning various communities have made and remade through these monuments. More importantly, she approaches this task by highlighting the literal role women have played in representations of the mythic Old West, noting that despite many changes in American culture, one constant is that “pioneer monuments used gendered imagery to enshrine white settlers on the landscape” (4–5). While Prescott points to the ways public monuments emphasize racist notions of Anglo-American dominance of the West, she argues that it is also the oftentimes misogynistic portrayals of women in pioneer statues that reinforce this false memory of the triumph of white civilization.
Prescott establishes a rough periodization of various trends in these pioneer mother monuments. From 1890 to 1920, first generations of western pioneers expressed anxiety about whiteness in these early monuments that often repeated assumptions about Social Darwinism. Women in these statues moved from allegory to depictions of “actual western women,” representing domesticity even in the wilderness (41). Then from 1920 to 1940, “white westerners turned their attention to a new source of anxiety: white women’s sexuality.” They “responded . . . by erecting pioneer monuments that enshrined their gender ideals.” Prescott argues that this genre of conservative, white motherhood in pioneer-themed art was so popular and widespread it should “be called the Pioneer Mother movement” (48). From 1940 to 1975, artists experimented with avant-garde versions of pioneer womanhood, but “many westerners remained committed to traditional representations of pioneer women in long dresses and wide-brimmed sunbonnets as an antidote to what they perceived to be the ills of modernity” (98). A Cold War emphasis on displaying pioneer families with “children embodying hope for the future” was also replaced by frustrations with rebellious 1960s American youth (111). Prescott says, “Amid this growing generational gap, previous decades’ longing for the supposed golden age of the 1850s appeared outdated and even wrong-headed” (121). But, she notes, “Interest in pioneer monuments increased again amid the culture wars of the late 1970s through the early 1990s, offering a way for smaller western communities to claim significance within a larger national story” (129). And these “clashing cultural values . . . produced very different pioneer commemorations in disparate locations,” often showing rifts between progressive cities and conservative locales (17). Finally, Prescott looks from the 1990s until present in an increasingly diverse United States, where “Americans’ varied efforts to remember—or forget—early white settlers reveals the limits of inclusivity in pioneer commemoration and the persistence of U.S. settler colonialism” (253).
Prescott’s emphasis on pioneer monuments that received local pushback or feedback in the process of memorialization supports her argument that these public monuments reflected their respective cultural moments and geographical places. She also demonstrates the investment many members of the public had and continue to have in representations of the western pioneers, especially where it might lead to heritage tourism. For example, Prescott describes how the oil magnate E. W. Marland led a national competition for a pioneer monument in his adopted home of Ponca City, Oklahoma, in 1927. It culminated in an exhibition of the designs at galleries across the United States, even in eastern cities like Boston and New York (68–69). The clear winner was artist Bryant Baker’s vision of Pioneer Woman, which Prescott argues “was likely favored by the public and selected by the competition’s sponsor because it skillfully balanced Marland’s desire for a sunbonneted mother with the bolder Pioneer Woman imagery that had emerged in western painting and illustration more than twenty-five years earlier.” Public audiences reached this decision in spite of the recommendations of “the professional art community” (71).
Prescott’s reading of pioneer monuments also includes observations about religious iconography and how religion manifests physically onto these works of art. She describes the ideal of a “Prairie Madonna” as not only an antidote to the shocking modern values of the New Woman in the 1920s, but also as part of a religious framing of pioneer women of the past. Prescott also explains that “by coopting Catholic Madonna imagery, these prominent male artists simultaneously proclaimed the moral superiority of Protestant Anglo-American women over Catholic women (many of whom were Latina or European immigrants) in the West” (55). Artist August Leimbach built on this imagery in his Madonna of the Trail, a series of “twelve identical Pioneer Mother monuments . . . for a dozen states, stretching from Maryland to California” (66). Fittingly, Leimbach’s work was commissioned by the “conservative women’s organization” the Daughters of the American Revolution, whose lineage Prescott reminds readers was “presumably white” (67). Certainly monuments featuring pioneer women holding Bibles were also allegorical markers of their civilization and purity.
These religious connections to pioneer women monuments become even more obvious in the context of the Mormon artistic tradition that Prescott explores, especially in chapter four, “Mormon Exceptionalism, Assimilation, and Americanness, 1890–1980.” At first blush, it might seem Prescott’s examination of Mormon pioneer monuments would be better served in a project dedicated to Mormon cultural history.
However, this particularly strong chapter supports her larger argument that turn-of-the century Latter-day Saints seeking assimilation into American culture used their westward migration as a way to signal true Americanness, as well as whiteness (134). The examples Prescott notes of Mormon pioneer monuments also complicate the varying representations of gender she notes in other American communities over the last 125 years; the statues that included women were much more conservative and emphasized patriarchal families in ways that mirrored LDS theology. These public representations of pioneer women, she argues, “depicted Mormon migration as a crucial part of the national project of western conquest and settlement, while holding up Mormon frontier families as models for the American nation” (135).
Pioneer Mother Monuments is a truly exceptional look at over a century of memorializing the American West through monuments; however, the public art Prescott cites does not always include the pioneer mothers she seeks to highlight. Where women are conspicuously absent in the monuments she describes (like Mahroni Young’s 1947 This is the Place in Salt Lake City, Utah), these examples might have benefitted from a more thorough discussion about what their absence meant and the intentions of presumably male donors and artists in constructing a vision of the West that did not include even allegorical women. Or, when appropriate, she might have broadened her argument to one comparing representations of gender.
Nevertheless, Pioneer Mother Monuments is an ambitious undertaking in both the scale of the study and its potential for public outreach. In addition to her academic writing, Prescott has created a website (www.pioneermonuments. net) to bring the conversation about gender and pioneer monuments to audiences outside the ivory tower, which also provides an easy resource for readers to find images displayed elsewhere in the book.
Indeed, Prescott is very aware of nonacademic audiences, and she addresses ongoing public engagement with Old West mythology and its incongruence with or reaction to increasing American multiculturalism. For example, in Upland, California—a community roughly forty miles east of Los Angeles with a large and growing Latinx population—Prescott observes how residents have maintained a fondness for their copy of Leimbach’s Madonna of the Trail statue into the twenty-first century. She concludes that “Uplanders’ devotion to the postwar middle-class American dream may help explain their continued embrace of their Madonna’s maternal ideology, while their efforts to come to terms with their community’s growing ethnic diversity no doubt increases the appeal of the Madonna’s whiteness” (260–61). She also acknowledges that even though there may be more pushback to building monuments to a pioneer past in more progressive communities, as a whole, “Americans remain hesitant to question national mythology centered on westward expansion” (289). And even when they do resist these public monuments, pioneer statues still receive more criticism for their depictions of race rather than gender.
Pioneer Mother Monuments does the hard work of documenting 125 years of public monuments depicting pioneer women and the American West, showing how artists, donors, and communities have grappled with this past in conjunction with their contemporary values and beliefs. Representations of the past are inherently political, and Prescott’s worthy book acknowledges not only how and why different communities remember American westward expansion, but also how these memories and representations have and continue to obscure the history of the West and the diverse peoples who shaped it.
Amanda Tewes − University of California, Berkeley
Iron Mining and Manufacturing in Utah
By Evan Y. Jones and York F. Jones
Cedar City: Southern Utah University Press, 2019. xvi + 484 pp. Paper, $24.99
In 1850, Brigham Young issued a call for a socalled iron mission to southern Utah (Iron County) to establish an iron manufacturing industry that would mine the iron ore deposits discovered west of present-day Cedar City, Utah. During the next six years many furnace test runs were made, with varying degrees of success. Numerous problems beset the iron works, which were never as successful as had been hoped. On October 8, 1858, Brigham Young advised Isaac C. Haight, the manager of the Deseret Iron Company, to shut the operation down.
However, that was not the end of iron mining in Utah. Iron Mining and Manufacturing in Utah, by Evan Jones and York Jones, focuses on the major iron mining operations of Iron County and the Ironton and Geneva smelters. There were other iron mines in Utah, as well as coal mines and limestone quarries whose products were used in the steel-making process. All these enterprises were important, but the focus of this book is a strip of land west of Cedar City, Utah, about twenty-one miles long and three miles wide, that contained some of the most extensive and spectacular iron ore deposits in the western United States.
Iron Mining and Manufacturing takes a long view, beginning with the formation of iron ore millions of years ago. It then discusses the Iron Mission operation in Cedar City in the 1850s and the subsequent operation at Iron City in the 1870s and 1880s. In the 1920s, after nearly forty years of inactivity, came the building of the Ironton plant, the coming of the railroad to Cedar City, and the iron mine at Iron Springs. These developments were followed by operations at Desert Mound (1924–1936) and Iron Mountain (1935–1943). The book covers the construction of the Geneva plant by the United States government during World War II and the resulting dramatic expansion of the mining operations at the five iron mining areas of Iron County. After the booming post-war years, the mines suffered a long slow winding down period (1960–1980). The decline and ensuing mine closures are also discussed, with the last mining operation closing in 2014.
York Jones—who worked for thirty-three years at the iron mines for Utah Construction Company, beginning as a surveyor and ending as the mine manager—began this book. After retiring, York worked another twelve years overseeing the dismantling, disposal, and environmental reclamation of the mine’s assets. Evan completed the book started by his father. He too spent his career in mining, first for the iron mines west of Cedar City, Utah, and eventually moving to Farmington, New Mexico, where he worked at Utah Construction Company’s coal mines located there.
Iron County has a rich history of iron mining, and the Joneses tell about the people, companies, smelters, railroads, and mines that created that history: their successes and failures, and the mines that were worked, when, where, how, why, and by whom. This book is well researched, and it synthesizes many primary resources into a narrative that provides the story of over 160 years of iron mining and manufacturing in the state of Utah.
Paula Mitchell − Southern Utah University
Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture
By Chip Colwell
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 348 pp. Paper, $19.00
In Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits, Chip Colwell studies the troubled relationship between Native Americans and museums in the United States; he does so by looking at the historic battle to reclaim Native artifacts looted and hoarded for centuries by whites. Colwell believes that repatriation offers a path toward reconciliation for Indigenous peoples and museums: “repatriation extinguished the old idea that museums could preserve and present Native American culture without input from Native Americans themselves” (264). As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Colwell has personally negotiated repatriations and offers an insider’s account of the process. He therefore offers new insights for a history well known to scholars of Native American studies.
Colwell skillfully uses his experiences to drive the narrative’s structure. He pivots the historical and contemporary struggles around four repatriations involving the Zuni, Cheyenne, Tlingit, and Miccosukee peoples. In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Repatriation and Graves Protections Act (NAGPRA). NAGPRA sketched out a path for repatriating remains and objects, but the procedure relied on compromise between American Indians and museum officials. Colwell is in the both fortunate and unfortunate position of being able to directly assess the law’s effectiveness over the last twenty-five years. While there have been many victories for American Indians, Colwell warns that there is a long way to go before Native America’s culture is entirely reclaimed. After all, NAGPRA doesn’t apply to private collectors.
There has been little scholarship on these questions since 1990. Colwell mixes analysis and personal experience in a meaningful way, and the stories that emerge are captivating. Connie Hart Yellowman, a Cheyenne, was among the nation’s delegation that visited the Smithsonian in 1993 to retrieve remains of those who died in the Sand Creek Massacre, and she kissed the skull of a thirteen-year old female. Years later at a powwow, Colwell asked her why, to which she replied, “Because she had never been held for years” (95). Native people’s perspectives control the narrative, and Colwell acts as a liaison between them and the reader. He also includes “a note on the terms American Indian, Native American, etc.” that explains why he uses certain terms to describe groups of people (271). He supports his decisions with a historical discussion regarding how popular labels such as American Indian and Native American developed and changed over time. Colwell’s primary concern is bringing forward Indigenous perspectives, but the individuality of his story can be challenging for historians.
To put it simply, Colwell’s story can’t be recreated in any meaningful way by scholars. His personal experiences consistently fill gaps where historians would need to place empirical evidence. Nonetheless, Colwell’s sincerity and thoroughness alleviate potential problems, as in this explanation: “some of the dialogue was reconstructed from people’s memories or written notes from meetings, which understandably vary in quality and reliability; it was impossible to corroborate exact quotes” (p277). Not every reader will be satisfied with this, but most readers will sympathize with Colwell’s busy life and accept his expertise as a good enough reason to believe him.
Colwell successfully articulates the struggles of American Indians to reclaim their culture from museums in the United States. His success comes from the sincere and careful way he tells the story. Colwell uses his insider knowledge to empower other people’s voices rather than his own, and this in of itself is worthy of high praise. Terms and labels are something historians often take for granted, and scholars in the field should take note of Colwell’s willingness to have frank discussions about the controversies around labeling groups of people. Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits stands as a definitive study about repatriation’s necessity for Native American to retain and preserve their diverse cultures.
Dean McGuire − Utah State University
