Book Reviews 399 purpose of bringing total market price plus payments up near the parity level” (p. 115). “In order to ensure that support prices should be close to parity, the Farm Bureau was pressing strenuously in 1941 for mandatory commodity loans at 85 percent of parity” (p. 132). The book makes clear that in the era it covers there was no devia- tion by the Farm Bureau from its primary objective of increasing farm income. Camden, Indiana Claude R. Wickard

Forge of Democracy: The House of Representatives. By Neil MacNeil. (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1963. Pp. xi, 496. Notes, bibliography, index. $6.75.) Neil MacNeil, the chief congressional correspondent for Time, has attempted “to define the House of Representatives . . . as a living political institution . . . [in the light of] its own past and traditions” (p. ix) . Although he does not plow very deeply the ground he has tried to cover, he has covered it. The result is a neither unentertaining nor uninformative survey of the workings of the House, greatly emphasizing the post-World War I1 period, treating less extensively the “modern House” from Thomas B. Reed to Sam Rayburn, and referring sporadical- ly to the House’s first century of existence. The organization is topical, with a chapter on each of fifteen major aspects of House activity, and with one exception every chapter subject (the speakership, the rules, the lobbies, legislative oversight, relations with President or Senate, etc.) is dealt with topically rather than narratively or chronolog- ically even in a loose sense. The author’s sources were in part published monographs and documents, but he relied most heavily on “the distilla- tion of my own daily observation of the House for eight years and of many thousands of conversations with its members” (p. x). From such sources and plan flow both the virtues and the defects of the book. MacNeil states clearly where the House’s rights and duties are unique, and where they must co-ordinate with the President and the Senate. He enlivens his discussion of the speakership, and indeed his whole book, by focussing on such giants as Henry Clay, Reed, “Uncle Joe” Cannon, Nicholas Longworth, and Rayburn. He describes the evolution of the “political” speakers (Le., speakers who saw them- selves as more than parliamentary functionaries) and agrees with them that to a great degree the strength of the House depends on the strength of the speaker. Powers, procedures, and rules of the whole House and its agencies are outlined clearly. What is perhaps the book’s most useful section, however, is the thirty-six-page narrative, really an excursus from the author’s general plan, describing the battle in 1961 between Rayburn and Howard Smith over enlarging the Rules Com- mittee. Although this is a book largely without theses, the few that the author has are in some cases questionable. Today’s House, he says, restrains the more “liberal” President and Senate because they are subject to “bullet-vote” pressures from urban minority groups in populous states (p. 38). Even if this is in some sense an explanation of the situation, there are surely other reasons for it. Also questionable is the repeated view that, only since Woodrow Wilson’s or Theodore 400 Indiana Magazine of History

Roosevelt’s incursions has the President become as he is today, the usual initiator of legislative programs. With the conclusions that the House has been useful, hard-working, and subject to change no one would argue. On too many historical points the author is unfortunately incautious, oversimple, or mistaken. For example, did Speaker Henry Clay indeed force President James Madison into war in 1812 against the latter’s will (p. 25) ? Did Theodore Roosevelt “singlehandedly settle the Russo-Japanese War of 1904” (p. 239) ? And William Jennings Bryan did not appear at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1896 “an unknown man” (p. 316). Perhaps it is summary enough to point out that MacNeil’s strongest chapters, in this reviewer’s opinion, deal with very recent events or intra-House arrangements (such as the 1961 Rules Committee fight, or the informal “clubs” and blocs among the members), and his weakest chapter is the most broadly historical one (Chapter 2, on the relations of the House to the President and Senate). For an historical comprehen- sion of the House, this book is less than helpful. As a description of the Rayburn and John McCormack periods and a readable account of how the House works, it is useful and informative. Indiana University Walter T. K. Nugent

Generalization in the Writing of History: A Report of the committee on Historical Analgsis of the Social Science Research Council. Edited by Louis Gottschalk. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963. Pp. xiii, 255. Notes, index. $5.00.) Not many historians can avoid being stuffy when called upon to consider such a subject as generalization in the writing of history, and some of the historians involved in this present effort of the Social Science Research Council have turned out essays which they might better have tucked into their desk drawers. The truth is that any historian tries to make his materials say something truthful and im- portant, and that it does not help him to learn, first of all, that it is desirable to do so (he knows that), nor to hear that there are (as the editor, Gottschalk, points out) at least six different types of generaliza- tion. One recalls the rather sharp remark of Samuel Eliot Morison during his notable presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1950. Morison told his auditors that he did not believe in courses in historical method. He said that he left the teaching of such courses to those of his colleagues who did not write. There is something artificial about generalizing on generalization-something like the philosophy books on the method of method. It lends itself to tautology, to unduly wise comment, and to a certain amount of pre- sumption. The phrase “practicing historian” recurs in these pages, which seems to say that many historians do not practice and hence cannot enter the temple. This is doubtless pressing the point; one knows what the authors of such essays mean; but there is a generaliza- tion here which does not read well. The individual essays are of course mixed, as one would expect. Some strike fire, notably that of David M. Potter, as thoughtful an analysis of generalization as one would wish for. Potter is too clever