BOOK REVIEWS

Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakenings 1625-1760. By MARILYN J. WESTERKAMP. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 266p. Maps, bibliography, index. $29.95.) The Great Awakening appears very different in light of Marilyn Wes- terkamp's new book. In it neither Jonathan Edwards nor George Whitefield emerges as important as previous works have suggested. Westerkamp set out to study the Great Awakening among Presbyterians in the Middle colonies. Many others have focused on New England. Perry Miller and his disciples depicted the movement as a sudden and unanticipated response to the preaching of a reformulated Calvinism. Other historians examined the social, economic, and psychological circumstances of revival converts but typically retained the focus on New England. Westerkamp began with such a social analysis but found no patterns that might explain revivals. She then turned to the study of revivalism as ritual and asked "could these rituals have a life of their own?" Of course the answer is "yes." Westerkamp found a revival tradition among Presbyterians beginning in Ireland in 1625. Might Whitefield have recognized these early "revivals" as something similar to his own? Again the answer is "yes." They were very large meetings, often outdoors, which lasted several days; they were marked by intense emotion; and they were intended to free participants from guilt and to enable them to identify with the larger religious community. While revivals were not constant, the tra- dition was unbroken until at least 1760 and, Westerkamp implies, much later. In Scotland and Ireland itinerants had been common and controversial, long before Whitefield began to preach. Revival narratives had been pub- lished often, long before Edwards wrote his. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey the revivals historians call "The Great Awakening" broke out shortly after large numbers of Scots and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians arrived. Although her book does not extend to Virginia and the Carolinas, Westerkamp tells us that revivalism followed the migration of the Scots and Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania to these areas. The role of the laity, highlighted by her title, constitutes a secondary theme in Westerkamp's book. While she finds less conflict between the laity and clergy than do some historians, she depicts a constant lay demand for religious revivals through periods in which many clergy were drawn to rationalism or other expressions of the faith. The Great Awakening occurred because the clergy returned to the tradition which lay people had kept alive. It was a "triumph" for the laity. 636 BOOK REVIEWS October

In the end, Westerkamp did not write a history of the Great Awakening among Middle colony Presbyterians. Most of her book focuses on the revival tradition in Ireland and Scotland. A survey of revivalism in Pennsylvania and New Jersey remains to be written, along with other studies which might connect the tradition she has discovered to the Great Awakening in New England, to the American Revolution, and to nineteenth-century evangel- icalism. Moreover, further study of the laity who were so central to the revival tradition she describes would be appropriate. Westerkamp has told us little about their families, for instance, and nothing about how these revivals functioned in their day-to-day lives. Yet surely it is unfair to point out what is missing in a book that studies Scotland, Ireland, and the Middle colonies over 140 years. Westerkamp helps us better understand the Great Awakening in the Middle colonies and, by implication, challenges our view of the Awakening elsewhere. Her work should result in a fresh approach to the Great Awakening as one episode in the evolution of a major religious tradition. Jonathan Edwards, step aside—pending further work which might link this new uncovered Presbyterian tradition to more familiar strands of Amer- ican religious history.

Ohio State University at Newark RICHARD D. SHIELS

Gilbert Tennent, Son of Thunder: A Case Study oj Continental Pietism}s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies. By MlLTON J. COALTER, JR. (New York and Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986. xx, 227p. Appendix, bibliography, index. $35.00.)

Partially in response to a provocative 1982 essay by Jon Butler, recent studies of the eighteenth-century revival of religion have tended to focus on "fleshing out" our understanding of the several revivals that we have collectively called "the" Great Awakening. Milton Coalter's study of Gilbert Tennent (1703-1764), the leading "awakener" among the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the Middle colonies, is one such study. The author professes modest goals. He wishes to augment "the traditional search for the social and religious threads that made the Awakening an inter-colonial event" with "equally intensive investigations into the critical variations among the colonists' revival experience" (p. 168). In essaying the first book-length work to focus on Tennent, Coalter also attempts to enrich our understanding of the Scotch-Irish Calvinist revival by arguing that it was influenced in significant ways, through Tennent, by Continental 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 637 pietism in general and by the Dutch cleric Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen in particular. Between 1729 and 1758 Tennent stood at the center of the tumultuous events surrounding the outbreak of heart-felt religion in the Raritan River Valley and eastern Pennsylvania, the consequent bitter debates between Presbyterian supporters and opponents of the revival, the schism that then officially divided the denomination into New and Old Side synods between 1741 and 1758, and the eventual Presbyterian reunification in the latter year. He was, with Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, the most important of the American awakeners. Despite his significance, materials for a satisfactory biography of Tennent do not exist (for instance, we do not even know the name of his first wife), and Coalter's work is least successful as biography. His life is not in any essential way the basis of the book's structure and organization; indeed, Tennent himself never dominates the narrative and does not emerge as a fully developed actor in the story Coalter tells. The available material apparently will not yield insight into motivation, and the student of pietistic spirituality will find little of interest here. While much richer than any previously available, Coalter's portrait is nonetheless seriously limited. Nor is the author entirely successful in justifying his book's cumbersome subtitle. Two leading Continental pietists, Frelinghuysen and the Moravian Nicholas Ludwig Count von Zinzendorf, figure prominently in two sections of his analysis, in which Coalter successfully demonstrates the importance of the former's positive influence on Gilbert Tennent in the 1730s as well as the significance of Tennent's opposition to the latter in the 1740s. But Coalter fails to establish the centrality of either to the career of the "son of thunder" or to the course of the Awakening in the Middle colonies. All that said, Coalter's study of Tennent remains a significant achieve- ment. It is, of course, useful as a reminder of the complex influence on the awakeners and of the ecumenical scope of the transatlantic revival, what Susan O'Brien recently has called "the first evangelical network." In ad- dition to his insights on Tennent's interactions with Frelinghuysen, Coalter analyzes the Presbyterian's relationship with the Anglican Whitefield in useful and provocative ways and points up Tennent's continuing cooperation with New England supporters of the revival. The book also provides much information about the actual practice of ministry in the first half of the eighteenth century in British America. But Coalter makes his greatest con- tribution in his thorough and thoughtful analysis of Presbyterian politics between 1730 and 1760. His narration of the Subscription Controversy and Adopting Act, the debate over itinerancy, pastoral education and the locus of sovereignty in the denomination, the Presbyterian schism and subsequent 638 BOOK REVIEWS October reunion is simply the best we have and could be read with profit by any student of the revival. And that is no minor accomplishment.

University of Texas at Austin HOWARD MILLER

"To serve well and faithfully": Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800. By SHARON V. SALINGER. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1987. xiii, 192p. Appendixes, index. $29.95.)

Over one half of the white people who migrated to the American colonies from Britain and Continental Europe were servants, and Pennsylvania was one of their main destinations. Indentured laborers served terms varying from four to seven years without wages in return for freedom dues of land and money when they completed their service. They are not an easy group to trace because few of them left any personal records. Sharon Salinger, however, has worked diligently on court records, probate data, tax lists, shipping notices, and newspaper advertisements to present the first mono- graph on this significant group of migrants since Cheeseman A. Herrick's White Servitude in Pennsylvania: Indentured and Redemption Labor in the Colony and Commonwealth (1926). Salinger argues that there were three main stages in the development of bound labor in Pennsylvania. Between the founding of the colony and the 1720s, when most immigrants came from England, she considers that servitude was a benign, paternalistic, largely rural institution based on oral agreements, personal ties, and minimal overt conflict between masters and employees. From the 1720s to the mid-century, she suggests that the system altered, for German and Scotch-Irish servants outnumbered those from England and indentured servitude became more impersonal, exploitative, harsh and urban, and dominated by written contracts. She characterizes the final phase between 1750 and 1800 as a time that witnessed the withering of servitude and the emergence of free wage labor as the predominant type of work in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, the first five chapters include major arguments that are not fully substantiated. Depiction of servitude as an increasingly urban phenomenon founders on the statement that "in 1745, more than 58 percent of the servants were bound to Philadelphians, and in 1772, 38 percent of the servants were purchased by city residents" (p. 174). The notion that relations between servants and masters became more brutal and led to a higher incidence of running away remains unproven (the material cited from newspaper advertisements does not clinch the argument). The fact that only 6 percent of Philadelphia's servants took to their heels by the late colonial period similarly undercuts the hypothesis that increased social con- 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 639 flict occurred between owners and servants. Data presented on post-servitude careers is too thin to sustain anything more than tentative conclusions about the limited mobility and poor prospects of ex-servants. And the mortality estimates for servants on the ocean crossing are so much higher than for other groups of transatlantic migrants that more explanation of the calcu- lations made, and of the reasons for mortality, is needed. Chapter 6 and the Epilogue present a much more assured interpretation. Here Salinger lucidly accounts for the decline of servitude in Pennsylvania after 1763: labor surplus replaced labor scarcity, wage rates fell below the cost of unfree labor, a decreasing amount of capital was available for in- vestment in servants, and a vacillating economy required more flexible work arrangements. The transition from unfree to free labor brought changing contractual relationships between masters and employees, and more entre- preneurial spirit in the workplace superseded the "moral economy" of the colonial period. It is in this final part of the book that the best analysis appears and a convincing picture of the struggles and insecurity produced by changing labor relations is delineated. In the earlier sections, as noted above, the emphasis on the growing harshness and urban nature of servitude fits somewhat uneasily with the evidence produced.

West London Institute of Higher Education KENNETH MORGAN

Inheritance in America: From Colonial Times to the Present. By CAROLE SHAMMAS, MARYLYNN SALMON, and MICHAEL DAHLIN. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. xii, 320p. Figures and tables, appendixes, index. Cloth, $32.00; paper, $12.00.)

The wealth of individuals must be transferred from one generation to the next about every thirty years. The procedures have been governed in a very orderly fashion as set out in the laws of the various states and former colonies, and the details of execution have been recorded in county court- houses throughout the land since the inception of governments. The authors of Inheritance in America have set for themselves the task, in some ways monumental, of covering this process by first describing the inheritance laws in each of the colonies in about 1720 and the states in 1790, 1890, and 1982. They also have buttressed these with statistics largely from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in roughly those years. These statistical data for a common law state are contrasted with those of Los Angeles County in the community property state of California for the years 1890 and 1980. This broad sweep of history is accompanied with other detail including brief descriptions of other colonial studies of inheritance as well as important 640 BOOK REVIEWS October judicial decisions. The authors even devote a chapter or two to inheritance procedures employed by the super rich in the 1970s, and they discuss social security as it affects retirement plans of the elderly today, certainly the equivalent of receipt of an inheritance for ordinary people. They also present an extensive bibliography. It might very well be that the book can serve as an initial reference on the legal, social, and economic aspects of inheritance for anyone wishing to study broad changes in the last three centuries. The book can serve as a reference for the many details of intestate shares with or without children, escheat, the concept of disregarding wills, disinheriting children, the position of kin, trust funds, and even homestead exemptions. Certainly the book is a reference for the deep changes in women's rights as ramified in inheritance laws and procedures through the centuries. We obtain the solid chronicling of women as feme covert, feme sol, or feme sole trader in various centuries. There is even a section on women's rights in general and a plea for their ability to control and manage estate policy and administration as well as to own estates. The authors place heavy emphasis on the rights of the wife as opposed to those of children, and also as opposed to those of daughters and of sons. The authors do not emphasize the fact that children, particularly sons, often labored five or ten years on family farms as adults and more than earned their keep for another ten years as children. The authors find qualitative changes before 1790 arising from the general elimination of primogeniture and entailed estates and before 1890 with changes in inheritance law and the gradual increase in the ratio of personal estate to real estate. They strongly emphasize the ability of estates to be subdivided, as farms became less important relative to holdings of stocks and bonds in people's portfolios. Yet, as late as 1870, the census reported real estate to be % (not %) of the value of total estate of people. The book describes in many ways the great transformation that took place in the institution in the last three centuries. Yet one finds the ending chapters to have very little indeed to do with the subject matter of earlier chapters. What are the central issues? Women's rights? Benefits to children as compared to wives? Retirement benefits of the rich compared to the poor? The rise in literacy rates and the ability to handle financial and legal records? The general aging of the adult population? The rights of government compared to those in the Forbes list of super-rich? Changes in general levels of inequality in the country? Changes in the institutions of inheritance over the centuries touch on many such issues. The authors find a general weakening in the position of women between 1750 and 1790 in Bucks County, partly because of very optimistic as- sumptions about the number of probated cases (if one considers the number of taxpayers and the population of the whole of Pennsylvania as reported 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 641 in 1760). One wishes that a more adequate reporting of Bucks County data had been presented. What were the number of probates each year and what was the average dispersion of wealth and ages of deceased in eighteenth- century Bucks County? What do the lists of deeds of gift and deeds of sale tell us? We do know in general that the average value of land and real estate averages per capita in Bucks County were far greater than those of the average for Pennsylvania and the country in 1798. Inherited wealth probably did not have the importance suggested in Inheritance in America. The number of acres granted and warranted grew 3.3 percent in Pennsyl- vania in the eighteenth century, a rate signifying 2.5 times as much acreage in one generation as the preceding. The overriding transformation in Pennsylvania in the three centuries probably was not stated in the study as it pertained to wealth ultimately appearing in all inheritances. Only a minority or, at best, half of families had real estate in previous centuries. Many of the old necessarily were dependent on the young and certainly had nothing to be probated. Today, wealth distribution, considering the present value of future social security payments, means a much greater proportion of persons can share in inher- itance. The distribution of housing values of all people in Bucks County is much more egalitarian today than it was in 1798 or in 1750.

Ohio University LEE SOLTOW

Paupers and Poor Relief in New York City and Its Rural Environs, 1700- 1830. By ROBERT E. CRAY, JR. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. xii, 269p. Tables, appendixes, bibliography, index. $34.95.)

Robert Cray's gracefully written work is no mere nuts-and-bolts institu- tional history. While covering significant aspects of poor relief, Cray fruit- fully emphasizes the poor themselves and the general socioeconomic developments in society at large. Thus, the author assesses, for example, lower-class migration patterns, the development of communities among free blacks, and the responses of poor persons to the poor relief system. However, we see little of the political role and activities of the lower classes. Having described poverty as a minor problem before 1700, Cray alternates sections on New York City with analyses of rural poverty in counties adjacent to the city. Stressing his disagreement with David Rothman, Cray shows how increased population size and diversity led city officials from 1735 on to rely on the almshouse to reduce costs and, in time, to reform the poor. Looking at rural areas, Cray sees a sense of paternalism pervading the 642 BOOK REVIEWS October eighteenth century, but he emphasizes that the overriding goal was to keep poor relief costs low. At first, a boarding out system reflected the sense of community; the poor were treated as friends and neighbors. When the rural areas faced greater poverty in the 1700s, they responded with what Cray sees as an innovative and flexible willingness to experiment. Almshouses became popular about the time of the Revolution, but they typically gave way to the pauper auction and other relief forms. However, by 1830, and even before, the almshouse solution had triumphed in the rural areas as it had in the city. Looking at the poor themselves, Cray examines groups including Indians, blacks, and women. In addition, his coverage of New York City after 1800 is built on an analysis of immigrants in the almshouse. Cray emphasizes that economic inequality deepened over time and that land ownership was no guarantee against dependency. He demonstrates that poor people typically resisted institutionalization and that blacks were especially effective at avoid- ing it. Paupers and Poor Relief is richly textured and defies short summarization. Cray uses a nice blend of primary and secondary materials to offer suggestive, at times provocative, commentary on relevant developments in geographical areas that extend well past New York. He draws comparisons with other areas, although not as much with Pennsylvania as the readers of this journal might like. Also, he incorrectly says Philadelphia did not begin the policy of eliminating outdoor relief and using work in the almshouse as an in- strument for reform until after 1815. In fact, that happened before the American Revolution. On more general matters, Cray demonstrates the vital importance of both public outdoor relief and private poor relief. Still, he gives less coverage to the extent and workings of those relief efforts than seems appropriate or possible. His discussion of New York City must be supplemented by the work of Raymond Mohl. But it is the work's many strengths that stand out. Cray is right to emphasize the significance of his analysis of rural areas. His work is must reading for those interested not only in poverty but also in the nature of society and its development over time. Cray's work is, in sum, a valuable, impressive, and welcome addition to the literature on the nature and meaning of poverty in early America.

University oj Cincinnati JOHN K. ALEXANDER

Benjamin Franklin: A Reference Guide, 1907-1983. By MELVIN H. BUX- BAUM. (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1988. viii, 796p. Index. $55.00.) The first volume of Buxbaum's Reference Guide to Franklin, covering the years 1721 to 1906, appeared in 1983. The present book constitutes the 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 643 second and final volume of a secondary bibliography of Franklin. Paul Leicester Ford made the only previous attempt to compile a reasonably complete secondary bibliography in his Franklin Bibliography: A List oj Books Written by or Relating to Benjamin Franklin, but it was published in 1889 and is therefore not as current as even Buxbaum's first volume. Of course, Ford's bibliography also attempted to be a complete primary bibliography, and, rather surprisingly, in this it has never been superseded, though much more evidence is now conveniently available for a primary bibliography than Ford could gather. One great advance since Ford's bibliography is for the books Franklin printed. C. William Miller's descriptive bibliography of Benjamin Franklinys Philadelphia Printing 1728-1766 (1974) is definitive, though minor additions and corrections can now be made. Buxbaum's Reference Guide is an extremely useful work, and every good reference library should have a copy. Despite my research on the history of Franklin's Autobiography, I did not know of a Columbia University master's thesis (no. 1947.31) that I would have read years ago if I had known that it existed. Occasionally, Buxbaum writes excellent annotations calling attention to the faults of the piece or to later corrections (e.g., nos. 1938.71. 1941.64, 1950.14), but most of the annotations are descriptive. Fully half of the entries describe popular pieces with no scholarly content; Buxbaum evidently decided to print everything he unearthed concerning Franklin on the principle that it might be useful to someone. Unavoidably, Buxbaum's bibliography has errors and lapses. An occasional annotation contains wrong information: no. 1943.27 corrects the author and refers to "Adam Spencer," but the person in question was actually Archibald Spencer; no. 1969.21 incorrectly says that Franklin witnessed the death of Daniel Rees. I was surprised that no. 1947.38 cited P.L. Ford's old edition of Jefferson rather than Julian Boyd's authoritative one. Somehow Buxbaum credits Phillip M. Marsh with a study that Lewis Leary actually wrote (no. 1948.34). Occasionally Buxbaum describes revised versions of works without real- izing that he described them earlier: 1969.24, cf. 1963.36; 1938.108, cf. 1931.62; 1973.9, cf. 1972.17; 1977.20, cf. 1976.36; 1978.20, cf. 1976.41. More often, revised and improved editions are ignored. Buxbaum cites Henry C. Mercer's discussion of "Franklin's Fireplace" from Mercer's The Bible in Iron (1914.25), but does not list the two revised and expanded editions of the work. And sometimes articles are listed without reference to their revised appearance in later books (e.g., 1968.8; 1971.2). A number of important works are omitted. By far the most surprising is Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit oj Protestantism, arguably the most influential view of Franklin to appear in the twentieth century. Although the original German edition appeared in 1904-1905, it is not in 644 BOOK REVIEWS October

Buxbaum's earlier bibliography; and since the revised, enlarged edition appeared in 1920 and the English translation in 1930, it should be in this volume. Another influential book in intellectual history, Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure ofScientific Revolutions (1960; rev. and enlarged edition, 1970), makes major use of Franklin, but is not in Buxbaum. Neither is Kuhn's fundamental essay, "The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research," in A.C. Crombie, ed., Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Invention, from Antiquity to the Present (1962). Dard Hunter's expert discussion of Franklin's roles in papermaking, Papermaking in Pioneer America (1952), is not in Buxbaum, though a popular account of papermaking with a superficial discussion of Franklin is cited (no. 1968.21). Considering the length of the work, there are comparatively few typos. The major fault with the bibliography is that the subjects are poorly indexed. The author index is excellent, but subjects are all gathered under "Franklin, Benjamin" with sometimes a full column and a half containing hundreds of undiscriminated references under a single heading (e.g., "honors and tributes," p. 770). Since the major reason for a secondary bibliography is to be useful to students and scholars who are investigating particular topics, it is surprising that the book does not have a good subject index. Numerous subjects of the essays are not indexed at all. To cite just a few examples: Buxbaum notes that Jonathan Odell's poetic satire on Franklin is at the American Philosophical Society (no. 1951.9), but Odell is not in the index. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier is the subject of nos. 1955.36-37, but he is not in the index. Addison, Defoe, and Swift are mentioned in numerous entries but are not in the index. Although the lack of a good subject index diminishes its value, Benjamin Franklin: A Reference Guide is an essential companion to Franklin studies.

University of Delaware J.A. LEO LEMAY

The Book Culture of a Colonial American City: Philadelphia Books, Bookmen, and Booksellers: Lyell Lectures in Bibliography, 1985-6. By EDWIN WOLF 2ND. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. viii, 227p. Illustrations, ap- pendixes, index. $35.00.)

Most readers of the PMHB need little introduction to Edwin Wolf 2nd, long admired for his fine biography of rare-book man A.W.S. Rosenbach and as Director (and re-creator) of the Library Company of Philadelphia, a highly respected early Americanist and bibliographer. The publication of his Lyell Lectures confirms WolPs continuing vitality. This reviewer would 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 645 like to look forward to the possibility that Wolf might follow Ben Franklin's example and provide us with what would be a notable autobiography. In his Preface, Wolf recalls his personal development as a book collector, when he determined to acquire the hundred books most likely to be found in a colonial American library. Even an account of that odyssey would be welcome. But lacking such contributions, we still have good reason to be grateful to WolPs many accomplishments, of which the most notable surely has been his re-establishment of the Library Company and an enhanced understanding of the importance of books—and their reading—to eigh- teenth-century Americans. Along with Caroline Robbins, Whitfield Bell, Douglass Adair, Bernard Bailyn, Millicent Sowerby, among others, Wolf helped refashion our thinking about the intellectual context of the American Revolution. WolPs avowed purpose in the Lyell Lectures is typically modest: "I have not drawn general conclusions from the evidence [but] merely set it down." He leaves to others the assessment of the historical significance and the socioeconomic importance of readership. His intent is "to present a method for documenting the existence of certain books in a specific locality within a specific timespan." In so doing, he offers a pattern for the bibliographical approach to the "History of the Book." Wolf does more than confirm his bibliographical competence: he confirms the reality of the eighteenth-century American as a reader of books, as a collector, as a purchaser. He makes a mockery of Dr. Johnson's arrogant address to Philadelphia's John Ewing: "Sir, what do you know in America? You never read! You have not books there." Wolf reminds us of the reality, how education became the mark of the eighteenth-century American gentle- man and how books contributed to that education. The founding of the Library Company in 1721 by Franklin and his friends is accorded considerable attention, but it could be argued that Wolf might have made more of its importance. He does allow Franklin to speak again to the issue: "These Libraries have improv'd the general Conversation of the Americans, made the common Tradesmen and Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defence of their Privileges." The fact is the Library Company catalogues afford a unique glimpse of the reading (and political) interest of influential Philadelphians in the eighteenth century. Enthusiasm for the Abbe Fenelon's Adventures de Telemarque, for example, is better appreciated when we are reminded of the Abbe's "triad of morals; kings exist for their subjects; war is evil; and nature is grand." Among the most interesting of WolPs Lyell Lectures are the third and fourth—"They Lived History" and "Lawyers and Law Books." One leads 646 BOOK REVIEWS October easily to the other. Wolf refers to Meyer Reinhold, Richard Beale Davis, and this reviewer to illustrate the importance of history to colonial readers, but makes his own case for the long-term currency of Raleigh's History of the World, with its skeptical attitude toward the alleged divinity of monarchs, and aptly reminds us of the frequency with which colonists encountered Plutarch's hives and Livy's praise for the glories of the Roman Republic. However, comments on the preeminence of Tacitus, especially as translated and edited by Thomas Gordon, seem very familiar; so, too, is the treatment of Catherine Macaulay, Henry Carey, and James Burgh. On the other hand, the absence of any reference to Obadiah Hulme's Historical Essay on the English Constitution (published in London in 1771 and on the shelves of the Library Company by 1775) is puzzling. The same can be said for the treatment of Joseph Addison's play, Cato, A Tragedy, performed in Phila- delphia in 1749 but very familiar to Nathan Hale, Patrick Henry, and George Washington. Perhaps such concern is misplaced. While it was not Wolf's purpose to move beyond the documentation of the existence of certain books, he cannot resist the temptation to do so—occasionally. So—how can these lectures be fairly assessed? By remembering the lecture format that was the origin of this volume, by appreciating the quality of the documentation, by noting the value of the two appendixes (the one being a comprehensive listing of bookseller's advertisements in Philadelphia newspapers, the other a sampling of Philadelphia wills with books). Book Culture oj a Colonial City may not be Wolf's best, but it is a pleasure. It would have benefitted from a concluding essay and better copy editing: for example, Earchard (p. 16) should be Echard; Richard Molesworth should be Robert (p. 112), and this reviewer's name has several spelling variations.

University oj Central Florida TREVOR COLBOURN

Legacies oj Genius: A Celebration oj Philadelphia Libraries: A Selection oj Books, Manuscripts, and Works oj Art. Edited by EDWIN WOLF 2ND. (Phil- adelphia: Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Li- braries, 1988. 266p. Illustrations, index. $25.00.)

Legacies oj Genius is the printed catalogue of a major exhibition, held during 1988, of some of the grander resources of Philadelphia area libraries. The enterprise is an unabashed product of bibliophilic boosterism. Even Philadelphians have failed, editor Edwin Wolf 2nd laments, to "glory in the remarkable, spine-tingling resources of the special collections in the 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 647

area's libraries. . . . It's time to let them know." The project is both the product of and spur to a larger effort among the heads of the area's special collections to make more visible and useful the riches in their care and to participate in various cooperative programs in cataloguing, interlibrary loan, and collection development, among other things. Wolf was a sparkplug in channeling these early cooperative efforts in the direction of "a world-class exhibition, with an impressive catalogue, buttressed by public programs and given a heaping measure of publicity." Boosterism aside, the result is a remarkable cooperative undertaking by the sixteen members of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Col- lections Libraries, which includes several kinds of libraries. The published catalogue, a product of Meriden-Stinehour Press and one of the last works designed by the late Stephen Harvard, is extraordinarily handsome. All of the 200-plus items exhibited and described in the catalogue are illustrated in the best Meriden-Stinehour tradition: silhouetted on the white text stock, they provide almost tactile pleasure. Eighteen of the items also appear in full color, including two on the cover. The catalogue is divided into thirteen, essentially topical sections, rather than organized library by library. Pride of place, not surprisingly, is given to "The Art of the Book." It and the following section, "Literature," are the largest units in the book. Some of the sections, including "Women's History" and "Afro-American History," reflect newer fields of research, if not of acquisitions. Most are more traditional categories, such as "Discovery & Exploration," "Natural History," and "American History." Some of the sections help spotlight the holdings of the more specialized libraries within the Consortium—e.g., the holdings of the Annenberg Research Institute, St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, and the Presbyterian Historical Society in "Religion" and those of the College of Physicians in "Medicine." The order of the items within the divisions is chronological. This may be as good a device as any, especially for such a miscellany, although it gives rise to at least one anomaly: Number 18, the Hesiod, printed by Bodoni in Parma, is entered at 1785 for its imprint date although it appears to be in the show for its stunning binding, executed as a college prize book by Pawson & Nicholson of Philadelphia in 1863. The title for the exhibition and catalogue comes from Joseph Addison's definition of books as "the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation, as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn." What manner of things are these legacies of genius? From what quarters and from what times did they arise? Where—in Philadelphia, at least—do they now reside? Listed in the catalogue are 232 items, drawn from the sixteen cooperating libraries. About 5 8 percent of these are printed books, pamphlets, or broad- 648 BOOK REVIEWS October sides (no newspapers), 29 percent are manuscripts (or typescripts), and 13 percent are graphic materials such as prints, photographs, or drawings. Nearly all of this material (in terms of the physical artifacts, not necessarily the texts) originated in Western Europe, the British Isles, and what is now the United States. Only a handful of items comes from other parts of the globe—specifically, Mexico, the Middle East, Asia. About 8 percent of the items date from the fifteenth century or before (the earliest being ca. 1000). The percentages mount: 9 percent for the sixteenth century, 12 percent for the seventeenth, 25 percent for the eighteenth, and 34 percent for the nineteenth. But does genius fail us in the twentieth century? Only about 12 percent of the items derive from our own, fast expiring, century, and of these only five come to us from after the Second World War. Three of those five are materials of the Roman Catholic church, from the collections of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. Does this signify the arrival of a new Age of Faith? The contributions made by the participating libraries range from the Presbyterian Historical Society's three items to the Rosenbach Museum & Library's twenty-four, but, mostly, parity reigns, despite differences in the size and character of each institution's holdings. Most of the selections are in the "treasures of the library" tradition, and certainly treasures aplenty there are: a Caxton presentation to King Edward IV, a Nuremberg Chron- icle, a Shakespeare First Folio, a Bay Psalm Book, the unique proof of the first printing of the Declaration of Independence, an Audubon Elephant Folio, a Huckleberry Finn first edition, a Kelmscott Chaucer. If the purpose of this project was to spread abroad a greater knowledge of the collections of the sixteen libraries, one wonders whether that could have been more effectively achieved if brief descriptions of the collections, highlighting special strengths and research opportunities, had been published in the catalogue. As it is, the burden of imparting such information is borne entirely by the item descriptions, but this is done unsystematically and, given the topical organization, in a scattered fashion. For this reviewer, a happy surprise was discovering how rich and diverse are the holdings of Temple University. Temple contributed eleven items, below the average number, but these items range from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, and were apparently chosen to represent considerable, though unheralded, strengths in the history of science, private press books and other aspects of the graphic arts, and the history of journalism and mass communication. That revelation, and similar ones for other libraries, could have been made with greater directness and clarity.

American Antiquarian Society JOHN B. HENCH 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 649

The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, Vol. 2, Parts 1 and 2. The Artist as Museum Keeper, 1791-1810. Edited by LILLIAN B. MILLER, with SIDNEY HART and DAVID C. WARD. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1988. xlii, 678p., xxv, 679-1318p. Illustra- tions, calendar, appendix, index. $105.00.)

Volume 2 of the Charles Willson Peale and family papers is an extension from Volume 1, published earlier. The selected papers here provide a great source of data for interpreting the historical actions and roles of Peale and his children. This period covers the key work of Peale in his influential museum development, as well as his natural history contributions and his continuation of technology interests and actions. His prime achievements had, of course, been in art, and his art work remained in this period. Unlike some other artists who turned off their art when they moved into different operations, Peale kept painting and including his products in his great museum. The selection, organization, and presentation of the writings of Peale and his children, as well as letters received by them, are excellent and innovative. Significantly, Peale's writings include not only his correspondence but also diaries and documents. His are the bulk of the materials included, only about a fifth of the publications being letters sent in by correspondents. This is primarily because more of Peale's work has been preserved than that of his communicants—except for Thomas Jefferson. It is unusual for an artist to have written as much as Peale did and even more unusual to have his writings preserved so extensively. The manner by which his writings were preserved is particularly important. At an early point, he wrote drafts which he incorporated in a letterbook. They often included crossouts or changes, which are included in the Miller books, giving fully accurate information but making it more difficult to read through them than to read his forwarded letters. In 1803 Peale became deeply involved in using and improving the polygraph, a device for making one to five copies of a letter as it was handwritten. This was invented by John Isaac Hawkins, but when he returned to England, he gave Peale the opportunity to sell polygraphs in America. Peale used it himself, kept improving it, and sold or turned over a few to individuals, notably to Jefferson and Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Much of Peale's correspondence with those individuals related to the polygraph which soon preserved most of the enormous numbers of Jefferson writings, as well as those by Peale. The Peale volumes contain so much information—especially on art, museums, natural history, and technology in this period—and they are so well organized and listed that they will be a prime source for research, not 650 BOOK REVIEWS October only on the Peaks but on several topics. The many paintings (most of them by Charles Willson Peale, but a number by James Peale, Titian Ramsey Peale, and a few others) reproduced in this volume are fundamental sources. Photographs of key objects add to the volume's worth. The editors have included all the drawings that were produced within letters and documents, but, because they have not been altered at all, some of them are not very sharp. These photographic publications are not useful merely because the men were artists; they also provide some insights that were not written up and in some cases cannot be. Charles Willson Peak's character, changing over time, emerges through the two published volumes. Throughout, for example, Peale remained very respectful of major figures, such as Jefferson. Yet, particularly in Volume 2, the result of his increasing general effectiveness and control of his works becomes clear. He became distinctly more self-confident and less ready to accept the views of all those to whom he wrote. The broad contributions of Peale, his sons, and their correspondents are becoming increasingly apparent. This collection of their writings is unique in providing access to better understanding, study, and interpretation of this critical period. Most notably, it becomes clear that Peak's combined work in museum development, in some sciences and technologies, and in con- tinuing his art productions was widely influential. This volume is well organized and readable throughout, but will be used particularly for seeking out and applying all sorts of data that can be located easily. It is a notable accomplishment.

Smithsonian Institution BROOKE HlNDLE

A Mighty Empire: The Origins oj the American Revolution. By MARC EGNAL. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988. xv, 38 lp. Maps, figures, appendix, index. $36.95.)

A Mighty Empire provides an analysis of political divisions in five colonies (Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina) during the eighteenth century, culminating in the independence movement. Rejecting imperial, progressive, and neo-whig interpretations, Marc Egnal argues that in all of these colonies durable, upper-class factions emerged between 1690 and 1762, factions that were either committed to imperial expansion or to the maintenance of the status quo. The "expansionist" party, he argues, joined with a "lower-class" or "popular" party to advocate re- sistance to British policies in the 1760s, ultimately supporting American independence. The "nonexpansionist" party, Egnal maintains, was always 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 651 more cautious and pursued accommodation with Britain, finally becoming loyalists. Conscious of distortions generated by terms like "faction" and "party" or "upper class" and "lower class," Egnal qualifies, so that they become relative categories. In A Mighty Empire a faction of traders, modest land- owners, and artisans is "lower-class" in relation to an "upper-class" party of transatlantic merchants and high royal office-holders. Regrettably, this reader was not convinced that this usage provides helpful analytic categories, or that the assignments of particular individuals within them were always satisfactory. Colonists assigned to a lower-class party in one context might be viewed by a reader as upper-class in another; and "upper class" does not necessarily mean the same thing in all the colonies and time periods Egnal treats. Consequently, doubts arise whenever the author presents broad generalizations about upper-class political alignments. More problematic is EgnaPs assignment of people and groups to "ex- pansionist" and "nonexpansionist" parties. Egnal starts from two valuable if not entirely original insights: first, that some colonists were much more aggressively expansionist than others, owing primarily to economic interests, though also as a consequence of religion and ethnicity; and second, that the alignments of the 1760s and 1770s in every colony were shaped by their particular historical contexts. Egnal then proceeds to retell the political histories of each of the five colonies as if there had always been an underlying conflict between expansionists and non-expansionists. Egnal maintains that this ongoing division supplied the foundation for the polarizations of the Revolutionary era. "Between 1763 and 1770," he asserts, "in each province two groups of wealthy individuals, with markedly different visions of Amer- ica's development, clashed over the proper response to British mea- sures. . . . These factions, which had emerged by the 1750s, were little changed in their makeup from earlier decades" (p. 123). These claims are founded on EgnaPs assignment of seemingly all political activists to one camp or another. Sometimes a fragment of evidence justifies his inference, but more often he makes the designation without explanation. Other political interests are secondary. Occasionally Egnal recognizes the problem, noting that when New Yorkers "set down their sentiments" during the conflict, they mostly "dealt with specific problems," not "the broader issue of Amer- ica's future" (p. 189). Evidently most New Yorkers were more concerned with "specific problems" like quartering British troops or the Stamp and Townshend Acts than with expansion. Moreover, even those designated as "nonexpansionists," he reports, shared the "expansionists' " view of America as a "burgeoning land" (p. 189). But although Egnal is aware that leaders of all stripes drew on common assumptions regarding the growth of the American colonies, and that expansion was only one of many issues that 652 BOOK REVIEWS October commanded attention, he insists that this single division supplies a more powerful explanation of the patriot-loyalist split than the political, economic, and ideological motives adduced by earlier interpreters. Indeed, he musters a thirty-page appendix listing patriots and loyalists grouped according to expansionist and non-expansionist categories to buttress his analysis. But for this reader any one of the interpretations the author aims to revise—imperial, progressive, or neo-whig—is truer to the realities of the Revolutionary era and more persuasive.

University of Connecticut RICHARD D. BROWN

The Constitution and the States: The Role oj the Original Thirteen in the Framing and Adoption oj the Federal Constitution. Edited by PATRICK T. CONLEY and JOHN P. KAMINSKI. (Madison: Madison House, 1988. xii, 340p. Illustrations, chronology, bibliography, index. $29.95.)

The celebration of the bicentennial of the Constitution inundated us with books, pamphlets, magazines, and broadsides on the origins of our federal system. Little in that deluge was new or very enlightening. Just when we thought it was safe to begin browsing the new releases shelf again, a second wave of essays on the Constitution has broken upon us. This time, the subject is ratification. Lay readers of history be warned: far out at sea another wave is forming; we will soon be awash in books on the Bill of Rights. Patrick Conley and John Kaminski have assembled thirteen essays on the ratification of the Constitution in the old states. The bulk of the essays were written for the collection; a few are reprinted from other publications. The authors are well-known scholars, archivists, and public historians. Taken as a whole, the essays remind us that each state contemplated ratification in the context of its own particular situation and its own domestic politics. The lay reader will be surprised to discover the diversity and avidity of these political quarrels. The ratification controversy was not a separate issue for such able partisans; rather, it fit, or was jammed, into the existing structure of personal and factional alliances. In the bicentennial we were treated to discourses on the theory and meaning of the Constitution; at the various state ratification conventions, delegates gave more weight to the potential political and economic consequences of another sovereign govern- ment. The lay reader also will be surprised to learn the extent to which leaders of the Antifederalist movement became pillars of the new federal government. One might even argue that the most significant fact about the ratification struggle as a whole was that just about everyone who was anyone in the new states accepted the new federal government after ratification 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 653 was a fait accompli. For political leaders whose offices had come into existence through violent revolution against a powerful central government, such acquiescence in the federal system was a remarkable feat. All of the essays in this collection are narrative in style. Harold Hancock reminds us that Delaware was riven with animosities derived from the late war. It ratified quickly to insure its own domestic tranquillity. In Penn- sylvania, Paul Doutrich tells us, the radicals who had dominated state lawmaking were rattled by depressed economic conditions; the better-or- ganized Federalists not only controlled the ratification convention, they went on to write a new state constitution. New Jersey, whose debt and trade problems under the Confederation exceeded those of Pennsylvania, ratified without much dissent, according to Mary Murrin. Albert B. Saye informs us that Georgia had the safety of its frontier on its mind when it ratified, apparently without any opposition. Christopher Collier's essay on Connect- icut focuses upon the skills of its Federalist politicians—at the Constitutional Convention and in their home state. John J. Fox reports that only an underhanded partisan deal in Massachusetts insured that the delegates to its convention, a majority of whom had serious reservations about the new Constitution, would accept it, while in Maryland, Gregory Stiverson writes, a vociferous minority of Antifederalists turned the state convention into a donnybrook. The outcome was inevitable in Maryland—the Federalists had the votes—but Samuel Chase and William Paca gained national prominence from their leadership of the opposition. Jerome Nadelhaft demonstrates that the debate over the federal Constitution in South Carolina followed the fault lines of low-country versus back-country disputation over the state constitution. In both, the conservative, large-plantation-dominated low coun- try won the day. Jere Daniell proves that the Federalists in New Hampshire simply outmaneuvered their rivals; the Federalists rigged the rules of the ratifying convention, gathered better information than their opponents, and made crucial alliances to insure success. Alan Briceland spends more time than any of the other contributors on the debates at the ratification con- vention, a sensible move in light of the oratorical skills of the Virginia delegates and the survival of a number of accounts of their arguments. Kaminski's analysis of ratification in New York follows the chronology of Federalist victory, tracking the way in which the Federalists dangled the potential commercial benefits of strong national government and waved news of Virginia's ratification in the faces of the delegates to win a narrow majority. Alan Watson, writing on North Carolina, and Patrick Conley, covering Rhode Island, have a different tale to tell. Both states waited until the new government was inaugurated to ratify, the former undergoing a change of heart, the latter capitulating to an increasingly impatient federal 654 BOOK REVIEWS October government. A brief introduction by Paul Scudiere and a concluding essay on sources frame the thirteen narratives.

University of Georgia PETER C. HOFFER

Proceedings of the House of Assembly of the Delaware State 1781-1792 and of the Constitutional Convention of 1792. Edited by CLAUDIA BUSHMAN, HAROLD B. HANCOCK, and ELIZABETH MOYNE HOMSEY. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988. l,020p. Frontispiece, appendixes, indexes. $75.00.)

This work completes the two-volume set of proceedings of the House of Assembly in the Revolutionary era that was proposed by the Delaware American Revolution Bicentennial Commission more than a decade ago. The first volume began with the minutes of 1770, before the Revolution, in order to take up where previous reprinting of assembly minutes had broken off. This volume runs to 1792, the year that the first Delaware state constitution was supplanted by a second one. The extension also allows inclusion of the proceedings of the second constitutional convention, which met in the fall of 1791 and again in the spring of 1792. The records of some assembly sessions are missing because they cannot be found, even when they are believed to have been printed. But the existing material furnishes rich documentation for historians and can be supple- mented by the 1776-1792 journals of the upper house, the Legislative Council, which were reprinted a century ago. The present volume also assists scholars by providing a historical introduction, lists and brief sketches of the members of the House of Assembly, a compilation of the titles of legislative acts, and indexes of persons, places, and subjects. The introduc- tion, written by the late authority on local history, Harold B. Hancock, suffers from the absence of any account of elections that might have thrown light on the composition of successive assemblies and have explained some of the recorded votes in the lower house as well as the occasional disputes with the upper house, whose members served terms three times as long as those of the annually elected members of the House of Assembly. Scholars will be happy to find here the contents of all three of the published journals of the second Delaware constitutional convention: (1) the minutes of the first session of the convention (November-December 1791)j (2) the proceedings during that session of the committee of the whole, where the major work of the session was accomplished; and (3) the minutes of the concluding session (May-June 1792). The original imprints are now rare and have seldom been collated. It is a bit odd to find the minutes of the committee of the whole presented here before those of the 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 655 convention proper. The latter offer little of value, but do give immediately a list of members and furnish a scaffolding for the work of the so-called grand committee. Reference to "a bewildering array of constitutional pro- ceedings" (p. 776) throws an unnecessary mystery over the relationship between these documents. The great subjects demanding the assembly's attention were those re- garding the conclusion of the war (including the payment of debts, large and small) and those connected with the establishment of new state and national governments. In reviewing the proceedings of the constitutional convention the average reader's attention will no doubt be drawn to the role played by the most distinguished delegate, John Dickinson. Elected president of the body at its convocation, Dickinson resigned this post near the beginning of its second—and final—session because "it required so close a confinement as to be prejudicial to his health" (p. 859). Yet he attended the convention every day and was one of its most active members. A close study of the votes Dickinson cast at the convention, as well as of the motions he made or seconded (which were numerous), might be re- warding. His contemporary and political opponent Richard Bassett was also a very active member, frequently at odds with Dickinson. Bassett was a political conservative, but as an ardent Methodist convert, he was more friendly even than Dickinson to some civil rights measures, including pe- titions against slavery and the slave trade. The Quaker miller and proto- capitalist Joseph Tatnall (a very silent member) and the Wilmington school- teacher-editor Robert Coram (remembered as the author of a pamphlet called Political Inquiries) were other delegates to the convention whose votes deserve study.

University oj Delaware JOHN A. MUNROE

Sunday School: The Formation oj an American Institution, 1790-1880. By ANNE M. BOYLAN. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. xii, 225p. Illustrations, bibliographical note, index. $26.50.)

Nineteenth-century Americans were incessant institution-builders and none moreso than evangelical Protestants. An important but heretofore overlooked part of the evangelical institutional world was the Sunday school. Anne M. Boylan redresses that oversight in this fine study of the evolution of American Sunday schools from 1790 to 1880. She finds that Sunday schools assumed such an ever-increasing importance that "whereas in 1820 Protestants had thought about children's religious experiences primarily in 656 BOOK REVIEWS October terms of family and church, by 1880 it was impossible to conceive of them without reference to the Sunday school" (p. 160). Such institutional success among America's churched population belied the more meager and secular beginnings of Sunday schools in the late eighteenth century. Like their British counterparts, the first American Sun- day schools were created to counter the illiteracy of poor working children. Their primary emphasis was rudimentary instruction rather than religious indoctrination. Within a generation, however, Sunday schools had been dramatically transformed. By 1830, Boylan argues, they had become places to disseminate evangelical doctrines and values. More than anything else, these antebellum Sunday schools sought the religious conversion of their pupils. This shift in purpose allowed Sunday schools to work alongside, rather than in competition with, the common school movement. As a result, Sunday schools grew in number and popularity and soon became a "per- manent fixture in American life" (p. 20). Yet Sunday schools were anything but permanent in character according to Boylan. Indeed, she finds them undergoing fundamental change once again between 1860 and 1880. Influenced by the theology of Horace Bushnell and the educational theory of Johann Pestalozzi, Sunday school organizers and teachers shifted the institution's emphasis away from con- version towards Christian nurture and gradual spiritual growth. Sunday schools continued to socialize the young with evangelical mores but now did so with a more benevolent view of a child's moral and spiritual condition. Boylan's sensitivity to the institutional dynamism of Sunday schools is only one of the many strengths of her perceptive analysis. She avoids the temptation to depict the Sunday school as a coercive device for social control and instead presents it as a remarkably effective instrument for passing on those evangelical and republican virtues deemed essential for individual and societal stability. Likewise, she avoids the pitfall of writing purely institu- tional history by telling us much about all those who played substantial roles in the movement—managers, teachers, and pupils alike. Perhaps most importantly, Boylan sets the story of Sunday schools within several broader contexts that help illuminate the place of Sunday schools within American culture as a whole and serve to link her work with that of many other social and economic historians. Nineteenth-century notions of childhood and ad- olescence, the feminization of American Protestantism, the rise of free public schooling, and the quest for a Christian America are just some of the larger developments with which the history of Sunday schools is connected. Ironically, the one wider context that receives insufficient attention is American religion itself or more specifically American religious education. To her credit, Boylan draws useful contrasts between American and British Sunday schools. And her decision to focus on the Sunday schools of five 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 657 evangelical denominations (Baptist, Congregational, Low Church Episco- palian, Methodist, and Presbyterian) and the interdenominational American Sunday School Union is entirely legitimate. What is missing, however, is any sustained discussion of how influential or important Sunday schools were outside of evangelicalism. Consequently, we are left to wonder whether their use by other religious groups (e.g., High Church Episcopalian, Lu- theran, Mennonite, Mormon) played any role at all in the formation of this American institution.

Trinity College RICHARD W. POINTER

The Miller Heresy, Millennialistny and American Culture, By RUTH ALDEN DOAN. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987. xi, 286p. Index. $34.95.)

The Millerites never expected history to last, much less for historians of the next century to write about their movement. They were of course profoundly wrong about the future, but they escaped the attention of serious historians for generations. Despite two decades of scholarly interest in mil- lennialism, the largest and most spectacular millenarian movement in Amer- ican history was largely ignored by academics. After a long period of popular attack on or defense of the Millerites (by Clara Endicott Sears and Francis D. Nichol, respectively), and the first promise of a non-polemical approach to them (by Alice Felt Tyler and Whitney Cross), these adventists finally gained the attention, though not yet undivided, of historians Edwin S. Gaustad, as editor of The Rise of Adventism (1974), J.F.C. Harrison in The Second Coming (1979), and R. Laurence Moore in Religious Outsiders and the Making oj Americans (1986). But with David L. Rowe's Thunder and Trumpets (1985) came the first extensive scholarly treatment of Millerism itself, and this had been followed by Michael Barkun's Crucible of the Millennium (1986), which compares and contrasts Millerites and Utopians, and interpretive essays on Millerism and millenarianism published as The Disappointed (1987), edited by Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler. While they failed to escape history, the Millerites finally have earned their place in history, and Ruth Doan now has made her own fine contribution to this welcome historiographical development. Doan by no means provides the kind of narrative retelling of the Millerite story that David Rowe does. Although she has obviously mastered the Millerite materials, and seasons her study with fresh anecdotal information on the movement, her interests lie less in describing Millerism than in analyzing the interaction between the adventists and their opponents within 658 BOOK REVIEWS October the context of antebellum American culture. Doan believes the study of Millerism and anti-Millerism provides a key to understanding the American religious culture of the 1830s. On the one hand, the criticisms and caricatures of the Millerites did as much, in her view, to characterize the critics themselves as the adventists, because in attacking Millerites critics reaffirmed their own orthodox articles of faith. On the other hand, the process of opposing the Millerites prompted important changes in American culture for which the adventists, ironically, deserved some credit. For to refute the adventists, evangelicals relied on a new orthodoxy, predicated on an un- expected alliance of evangelicalism with Transcendentalism, some aspects of reform, and other brands of "liberalism." Doan defines Millerism as an outbreak of "radical supernaturalism" which entailed an emphasis on divine transcendence and the inadequacy of human effort. As a result, the Millerites stood (though perhaps not on ascension rock in white robes) at cross-purposes with a mid-nineteenth-century American culture which was undergoing a shift from the supernatural to the secular, from Puritan piety to Victorian moralism. In building toward their own version of the American millennium, opponents used—and exploited—Millerites (as they did the Mormons) as a multi-faceted foil. They accused them of not only heresy but immorality, anarchism, and insanity. Based on her doctoral dissertation at the University of North Carolina but without any residual "dissertation-ese," Doan's book is brilliant and imaginative, sparkling with insight and literary polish. Dividing itself about equally between the Millerite "heretics" and their antagonistic contempo- raries, this study should interest religious, cultural, and social historians. It serves as a model of the way the "margins" in American history illuminate the "mainstream."

Riverside, California JONATHAN M. BUTLER

Typhoid and the Politics oj Public Health in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. By MICHAEL P. MCCARTHY. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987. ix, lOlp. Index. $10.00.)

Lincoln Steffens described Philadelphia as "corrupt and contented" (p. 3). The city's failure to provide clean water for its residents, and the consequent continuation of widespread typhoid fever epidemics into the twentieth century reinforced Philadelphia's bad image. Other cities had managed to solve their water problems earlier, and therefore it seems fair to ask why Philadelphians delayed funding the filtration system that would ultimately end citywide typhoid epidemics. 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 659

In Typhoid and the Politics oj Public Health in Nineteenth-Century Phila- delphia^ Michael P. McCarthy entertains the possibility that the postpone- ment of the installation of water filters in Philadelphia did not result solely from political infighting, corruption, and the general incompetence of a city government run by a Republican machine. "Typhoid was a difficult disease to detect and control, and not surprisingly medical experts disagreed about the best way to prevent it," McCarthy writes (p. 4). Therefore, ambiguity concerning the causes and correctives for typhoid fever might account for some and maybe even most of the delay. Council votes against the filtration system could have represented the honest negative opinions of men with good public health intentions. McCarthy describes the battle to win the two-thirds majority of both councils' votes needed to pass a bill appropriating the money to start the filtration system. His account is detailed and exceedingly interesting. Alas, despite McCarthy's success in casting several actors in better light than other historical accounts may have done, in general the story he tells about Philadelphia's water filters is no polish for the city's tarnished image. When a scandal made Charles F. Warwick mayor rather than Boies Penrose, Penrose supporters in the Select and Common Councils thwarted many of Warwick's projects—including the water filtration system. When the appropriation bill failed, an attempt to privatize water distribution involved $5,000 bribes for council members' votes and subsequent public disclosure of the bribes. Only in January of 1900, after more than a decade of fighting, was the new mayor, Samuel Ashbridge, able to unite council members enough to win the appropriation but even then only after enormous public outcry and pressure. When all is said and done, it is hard to disagree with the Inquirer 1899 editorial which said of those who had voted in opposition (dubbed the Typhoid 13 by the Public Ledger), "They must, one would think, have the skin of a rhinoceros and the consciences so calloused as to proof against any impression" (p. 70). McCarthy struggles to interpret many of the opponents of the appropri- ation bill more favorably than did the Inquirer. He cites confusion about germ theory as a cause for opposition. The failure of bacteriological ex- amination to show consistently the typhoid bacteria may have given some councilmen pause. The city, however, had consulted some of the country's leading water experts and engineers, and by 1890 there seemed to be little disagreement in the health and water departments or within the city's medical establishment that filtration would be a cost-effective way to supply the city with clean water and to reduce substantially its typhoid fever morbidity and mortality rates. This book contains some fine pictures of the Philadelphia water works and a well-documented account of the political events surrounding Phila- 660 BOOK REVIEWS October delphia's quest for clean water. It is these political events rather than changes in medical knowledge or public health technology that seem to have been most important in determining the fate of water filtration and the course of typhoid fever in the city.

University of Pennsylvania GRETCHEN A. CONDRAN

The Transfer of Early Industrial Technologies to America. By DARWIN H. STAPLETON. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987. x, 215p. Illustrations, selected bibliography, index. $18.00.)

This study, an expanded version of Stapleton's dissertation in the Hagley Program at the University of Delaware, is made up of a general introductory chapter and four case studies of the transfer of technology from Europe to America during the early nineteenth century: "William Weston, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, and the Philadelphia Plan for Internal Improvements," "Eleuthere Irenee du Pont: Eleve des Poudres to American Gunpowder Manufacturer," "Moncure Robinson and the Origin of American Railroad Technology," and "David Thomas and the Anthracite Iron Revolution." Together these chapters neatly summarize what we know about the process of technology transfer in the historical setting and add important details to several significant cases. The author, who already has published a useful guide to those antebellum Americans who travelled abroad to seek technological information, provides a thoughtful introduction to the subject of transfer in his opening chapter. Three periods can be identified: 1600 to 1800 or 1810, when most transfers were by immigrants to these shores; 1800/10 to 1850, when many Amer- icans travelled abroad to study improvements for themselves; and post- 1850, when American technology had in most areas achieved a parity with Europe and transfer of technology was both expected and routinely accom- plished. In general, he concludes, we know more about those transfers that "took" than about those that failed, that most successful transfers were in fact made up of multiple transfers of related pieces of technology, and that successful "takes" had to be diffused beyond their point of transfer or remain "isolated and backward." The case studies themselves, all well done and successful summaries of what is known, vary in originality. Stapleton has published already on Benjamin Henry Latrobe and Moncure Robinson, for example, so these chapters are convenient returns rather than entirely new contributions. Similarly, a great deal has been written about E.I. duPont, though Stapleton adds new materials and casts new light on the transfer of his gunpowder 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 661 knowledge and practice to America. Readers are likely to find the chapter on David Thomas particularly useful, because his acknowledged role in bringing Welsh anthracite blast furnaces to Pennsylvania has not been well understood. Like Thomas, the rest of Stapleton's subjects plied their trades in the Middle Atlantic states. After years of dominance by New England textile mills, the history of early American technology is beginning to take on a distinctly mid-Atlantic bias. Such institutions as the Hagley Museum, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Pennsylvania have become important sources of support for work on the subject. It is work that casts credit on everyone involved.

Case Western Reserve University CARROLL PURSELL

Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union's Ethnic Regiments. By WILLIAM L. BUR- TON. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988. x, 282p. Selected bibliography, index. $26.95.)

Thirty-seven years after the publication of Ella Lonn's massive study, Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy (1951), William L. Burton has ventured into the field with his study of the ethnic regiments of the Union Army. In his preface, Burton acknowledges the overwhelming presence of Lonn's work and remarks (correctly) upon that volume's shortcomings, particularly Lonn's tendency to stereotype ethnic and racial groups. Burton recognizes that any fresh approach to the subject cannot merely amplify the already detailed accounts of Lonn, but must find some new significance in the ethnic experience of the Civil War. The core of Burton's work is three chapters detailing the separate histories of the various Union ethnic regiments, categorized as "German," "Irish," and "Others." Burton excludes other ethnic military units, offering as explanation only the assertion that the regiments "most vividly record the ethnic experience of the war" (p. 44). His discussion is a straightforward narrative of the organizational history of each regiment, with special attention given to the leadership of the units and the frequent political squabbles about their control. Relatively little attention is given to the actual battlefield records of these units. The principal sources used by Burton are those familiar to Civil War scholars: regimental histories, diaries and letters of participants, published War Department records, and the militia records of state archives. A major flaw in Burton's research is his failure to exploit the abundant resources of the ethnic newspapers, particularly the German ones. Many of these papers reported frequently on the ethnic units and their inner conflicts. 662 BOOK REVIEWS October

Burton's basic narrative of the ethnic regiments is surrounded by a number of other chapters of varying relevance. Some seem to serve only to deliver extraneous fruits of the author's research, as when he presents a collection of wartime songs and speeches, much of it deservedly forgotten material. Other chapters appear to reflect Burton's effort to find some new significance in his subject. He sounds the theme in the opening chapters that the conflicts in the ethnic regiments can be seen as the extension of the ethnic politics of the localities and states from which they came. This is a good idea, but unfortunately Burton does not develop it very well. A key element might have been to explore the phenomenon of the ethnic militia groups in local politics in the prewar years, but Burton breaks no new ground on that subject. His discussion of ethnic politics in the 1850s seems to understate the political influence of nativism; one would have had difficulty convincing a good many immigrants at the time that "nativism in 1860 was a spent force" (p. 16). His concluding chapter argues that ethnic historians have tended to be too filiopietistic and unduly concerned with portraying a particular group's struggle against the rest of society; his book is therefore a healthy antidote because it reveals the internal conflicts at work within the ethnic regiments. This appears to be an attack on a straw man, and betrays a lack of acquaintance with the current work of ethnic historians. One can certainly argue that ethnic historians in their current concern with community studies of particular localities have not taken sufficient note of the wartime experience as an influence upon the immigrant group. But no one familiar with these local community studies can fairly assert that ethnic historians are uncritical or unaware of the internal conflicts within ethnic groups. Leaving aside Burton's theorizing about ethnicity and ethnic history, readers can find in his book a useful fund of information about the im- migrants' experience in the Civil War. One will consult it, however, more as a supplement to Lonn's work than as a replacement for it.

Villanova University JAMES M. BERGQUIST

Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society. By JEFFERY T. SAMMONS. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. xix, 318p. Illustrations, index. $24.95.) John L. Sullivan and His America. By MICHAEL T. ISENBERG. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. xii, 465p. Illustrations, appendixes, bibliographic essay, index. 24.95.) An aspect of American social history once shunned by scholars, the history of prizefighting is finally receiving the attention it deserves. Isenberg's 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 663 biography of John L. Sullivan, the first national sports hero and the best- known American of his generation, is well researched, accurate, and thor- ough. Sullivan's life is examined from his birth in 1858 until his death sixty years later. He was a sturdy youth who became well-known among Boston's sporting fraternity for his feats of strength and boxing skill. Early successes with his fists encouraged him to pursue boxing as a career, even though it was universally banned. He won the heavyweight championship in 1882 and quickly became a national celebrity for his willingness to meet all (white) comers and his ability to knock most of them out. His greatest victory was a seventy-five round knockout of Jake Kilrain in 1889 in the last bare-knuckle championship fight. His incredible courage and determi- nation to win the match in 100° heat which took 136 minutes certified his apparent invincibility. Sullivan capitalized on his status by staging highly profitable boxing exhibitions, national tours, and stints on the stage. He earned over one million dollars and spent every penny. Sullivan lost his crown to Jim Corbett in 1892 in the first heavyweight championship fought under the Marquis of Queensberry Rules. It was a legal contest organized by a New Orleans athletic club for a purse in addition to the usual sidebets. Corbett won handily in twenty-one rounds, but it was not simply the victory of guile over brute force. It also was a win attributable to youth, speed, skill, superior conditioning, and hunger. Sullivan was well past his prime yet courageously battled for over an hour against a man who was his superior. Isenberg astutely analyzes Sullivan's role in the Gilded Age. He was idolized for epitomizing all the virtues and sins of the male bachelor sub- culture. The public was in awe of his strength, physique, eating and drinking capacities, and his efficient use of his body as a fighting machine. He represented action over thought, victory over compromise, and deed over character. The quintessential working-class hero, he was even admired by middle-class folk who frowned upon his immoral life-style but still respected his (periodic) dedication and accomplishments. Sullivan raised boxing up from its nadir, when bouts were held in secrecy, to the stage where legal bouts were fought in prestigious clubs under "civilized" rules. He is seen as a transitional cultural hero who reflected the strains and uncertainties of a modernizing society. I have few criticisms of this excellent work. The lively prose and intel- ligent analysis are bolstered by research in contemporary newspapers, the National Police Gazette, and the Braathen Papers, Circus and Related Arts Collection, Milner Library, Illinois State University. Isenberg corrects many of the popular myths or inaccurate perceptions we have of Sullivan, largely based on such films as Gentleman Jim (1942) and The Great John L. (1945). The length of the narrative could probably have been shortened, particularly 664 BOOK REVIEWS October the discussion of the sporting fraternity and working-class culture which has been so well analyzed by Elliott J. Gorn in The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (1986). I found only a few minor factual errors, mainly in the discussion of the subterranean world of New York, where the author relied to a large degree on dated popular historical works of uncertain reliability. Sammons's Beyond the Ring examines the role of boxing in twentieth- century American society and also how the sport reflected dominant historical themes. Focusing on the heavyweight division, Sammons deals with such topics as the relationship between boxing and the law, organized crime, racism, the media, and international affairs. Sammons contends that pugilism reached its apex in popularity and prestige as a compensatory activity during the 1920s. The sport then pur- portedly reflected the social conflicts dividing traditionalists and modernists, and its legalization under state supervision curtailed personal liberties just like Prohibition. Developments in boxing in the early 1930s are seen as reflecting the growing American role in international relations, and the sport is regarded as a barometer of the national mood in which profiteering surmounted xenophobia, and ethnic groups are pressured to conform to the values of the core culture. Joe Louis is portrayed as far more than a black or national hero because he exposed, directly or indirectly, many of the contemporary racial problems, and his career demonstrated the unlikelihood of total black assimilation. Sammons asserts that after World War II prize- fighting served as an important nexus for organized crime, big business, and television, and that the underworld control of the sport reflected its growing ability to secure control over other economic sectors. The author provides a valuable discussion of the connections between the ring and the civil rights movement, focusing on Muhammed Ali's rebellion against con- ventional religious and behavioral standards by becoming a Black Muslim and an anti-war activist. Finally, Sammons explains why boxing continues to exist today, despite its atavistic character, because it seems to fulfill cultural values and psychological needs, and provides a glimmer of hope to under- privileged youth who aspire to the American dream. A number of weaknesses mar this ambitious study. Sammons tries to cover too broad a period too quickly, going for breadth rather than depth. Subjects that transcend the heavyweight ranks are barely mentioned, certain other topics of minor consequence are not discussed, and the second Liston- Ali fight is never even mentioned. Sammons provides some good analysis of the role of boxing in American society, but some of the connections between boxing and the society it reflects are pretty loose. Sammons draws on some very good research in the period since 1930 by using federal investigations, legal cases, and local newspapers, but such sources as Ring 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 665 magazine and Sports Illustrated were not consulted. Several serious factual errors mar Sammons's account: The Corbett-McCoy fiasco in 1900 did not cause the end of legal boxing in New York because the law permitting it had been repealed months before (p. 22); Cincinnati Mayor Julius Fleisch- mann was no reformer but an associate of boss George Cox (p. 26); the Carpentier-Dempsey fight of 1921 could not possibly have been heard by millions (p. 67); and the International Boxing Club did not stage 99 percent of all championship fights between 1949 and 1959 (p. 164). Both Beyond the Ring and John L. Sullivan and His America are welcome contributions to the growing literature on sport history. Of the two, Isenberg's biography, the first on Sullivan in nearly fifty years, is the more accom- plished, and will undoubtedly be recognized as definitive.

Northeastern Illinois University STEVEN A. RlESS

H.H. Richardson: Architectural Forms jor an American Society. By JAMES F. O'GORMAN. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987. xv, 171p. Illustrations, bibliography, source notes, index. $24.95.)

Despite his premature death at forty-seven in 1886, Henry Hobson Richardson has continued to be revered as one of the seminal figures of American architecture—a status which has been reflected in the written word as well as the preservation of his most important works. The literature began in 1888 with the extraordinarily complete and beautifully illustrated Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works by Mrs. Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, which remains one of the standards by which architectural biographies are judged. A member of an accomplished New York family which had patronized Richard Morris Hunt in Newport, and a personal friend of the architect, she best of all judged his achievement against the backdrop of his age. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen- turies, Montgomery Schuyler and Lewis Mumford did much to keep alive Richardson's reputation—though with a subtle but significant shift towards the polemical interpretation of his work as a basis for modern design. That direction was continued by Henry Russell Hitchcock in his well-known biography, The Architecture oj H.H. Richardson and His Times (1936), which linked Richardson to Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, and ulti- mately to the basis of modern architecture which Hitchcock was defining simultaneously in the Museum of Modern Art exhibit which gave "The International Style" its name. In H.H. Richardson: Architectural Forms jor an American Society, James O'Gorman offers a group of essays which refine our knowledge of Richardson 666 BOOK REVIEWS October even as they redefine architectural history away from the pseudo-science of the "new social history" ilk back towards its origins as literate criticism made interesting by superbly crafted writing. Unlike Joseph Rykwert's erudite The First Moderns in which the footnotes threaten to outweigh the text, O'Gorman writes without footnotes, giving Richardson to us with a directness that absolutely suits the subject. Stated simply, the book is a terrific read with the pace and style of a good novel, making it one of the finest pieces of architectural writing since O'Gorman's lead catalogue essay in The Architecture of Frank Furness, for the Philadelphia Museum of Art's exhibit in 1973. After a generation of researching and writing about Richardson, the author offers a distillation of Richardson's achievement as the originator of archi- tectural forms that conveyed the scale and power of American commerce while simultaneously finding the informal and rustic forms that expressed the private lives of the great merchandisers. This is a convincing approach, for by linking the style to its purpose, it becomes possible to see Richardson's work in the late nineteenth-century context of his peers who were grappling with similar problems. All successful late nineteenth-century architects con- fronted the necessity of adapting modern technologies to the new large- scale building types that the railroad, the factory, and the city mandated. Those who merely expanded the convoluted small buildings of the 1870s learned the importance of scale either directly or from Richardson. The result was the popularity of the Richardsonian Romanesque and the allied forms of the classical revival that stood out by contrast against the old, complicated designs. Those forms, however, should not be viewed as essential to the technology or the typology of modern architecture, for the art deco 1920s and the post-modern 1980s have each used large but complicated forms with equal conviction and success. While O'Gorman decisively captures Richardson's powerful ability to represent the new American commercial elite, there is another side of Richardson's achievement that is not mentioned but warrants comment. It was Richardson who almost single-handedly transformed architecture from a regional craft not much above contracting to a profession whose elite commanded high fees and earned large commissions throughout the country. Though the stage had been set by the new national culture first seen at the great resorts and then in the national press, it took the Richardsonian persona to capture the popular imagination. In this, he was unlike his regional counterparts—Furness in Philadelphia and Hunt in New York—who, despite far greater numbers of commissions, never broke out of their regional base. Richardson by contrast worked across the industrial heart of America from New England to St. Louis and Chicago, and from Albany to Wash- ington, D.C., creating a practice which O'Gorman points out rankled Frank 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 667

Lloyd Wright even as it anticipated such modern superstars as I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson, who now rankle their regional contemporaries. For better or for worse this fundamentally transformed architecture in America and may have been Richardson's most significant accomplishment.

University of Pennsylvania GEORGE E. THOMAS

Benton Spruance: The Artist and the Man. By LLOYD M. ABERNETHY. (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1988. 182p. Illustrations, appendix, note on sources, works cited, index. $40.00.)

This is an unusual book. Studies of individual American printmakers are rare, largely the exclusive province of print specialists who typically favor the catalogue raisonne. Abernethy thus helps to fill a decided gap with this biography of Benton Spruance, who was, if not exclusively, then certainly most significantly, a printmaker, specifically a lithographer. Nevertheless, Abernethy's readers will find Ruth E. Fine and Robert F. Looney's The Prints of Benton M. Spruance (1988) an indispensable companion, since the book unaccountably dispenses with the kind of apparatus that usually ac- companies discussions of works of art. Information concerning media, di- mensions, variant editions, and the like is missing from both the captions identifying the reproductions of Spruance's works and the listing of his lithographs appended to the text. Taxing Abernethy, who is neither an art historian nor a print specialist, with failure to conform to the conventions of an unfamiliar discipline would be churlish if such knowledge were not crucial to an informed consideration of any artist's work. Abernethy's avowed purpose, however, is less to evaluate or explicate Spruance's art, than to record the experiences and activities of an artist who was, one presumes, a friend and colleague at Beaver College where Spruance taught for more than three decades and where Abernethy presently serves as chairman of the history department. Since memories are short and, lacking the intervention of a dedicated conservator, letters and other memorabilia quickly vanish, the author has performed a valuable service in conducting interviews with friends and associates and meticulously searching out ma- terial in institutional files, family papers, and private correspondence. He has, moreover, skillfully woven these materials into a narrative that is clear, jargon-free, and accessible to the general reader. With the exception of a chapter devoted to Spruance's culminating series, The Passion of Ahab, and a short summary chapter, the book is structured biographically; in addition to tracing his development as an artist, it duly considers Spruance's formative years and his character as a family man, 668 BOOK REVIEWS October

teacher, and participant in artistic causes and civic concerns. In some meas- ure, Abernethy succeeds in portraying the artist and the man, but the result is oddly one-dimensional. Spruance emerges as an admirable human being— conscientious, sincere, responsible—and entertaining companion, inspiring teacher, and dedicated and painstaking artist. Yet he also comes across as somehow passionless and uncomplicated. A careful reader may discern clues to conflicts and tensions—Spruance's doubts about the worth of his early work (some of which he destroyed), the need for reassurance poignantly expressed in his letters to Carl Zigrosser, his extra-marital affairs—but the author has been unwilling to probe such areas. He treats Spruance's art in much the same manner, seeing it as progressing more or less smoothly toward greater technical facility and maturity of vision. The resulting portrait offers little help in accounting for the anguish expressed in works such as Black Friday (1958), a deposition theme that preoccupied the artist for two years; neither does it aid in understanding the radical thematic shift that Spruance's work evidenced in the post-World War II period. As regards art, the book is strongest in explaining the technical procedures of lithographic practice together with Spruance's own explorations and in- novations in the medium, especially his work in color lithography. It is unfortunate then, but understandable given the economics of publishing, that only eight lithographs could be reproduced in color. Less defensible, however, is the space given over to boring and repetitive photographs that add nothing to an understanding of either the man or his art. Why, for example, was it thought advisable to print three photographs, two on facing pages, of Spruance working with students at the lithographic press? Surely more of Spruance's work, even in black and white, would have been pref- erable. Such insensitivity to visual interest and pertinence hardly induces confidence in a book about a visual artist. If it encourages further study of Spruance's work, the book may be said to have justified itself, for there is much to be done in assessing his relation to the art of his time both stylistically and thematically. Abernethy has not attempted to establish a context that would make this possible. As he would probably be the first to admit, his is one approach to a study of Benton Spruance, man and artist. Others will be needed for a deeper understanding of either.

George Washington University ANNE CANNON PALUMBO 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 669

The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School oj Philadelphia, 1838-1939. By DAVID F. LABAREE. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. xiv, 208p. Figures, tables, chronology, appendixes, index. $30.00.) Private Philanthropy and Public Education: Pierre S. duPont and the Delaware Schools, 1890-1940. By ROBERT J. TAGGART. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988. 257p. Maps, illustrations, tables, bibliography, index. $34.50.) These two intelligent books have both focused upon a single feature of a growing educational system without sacrificing the outlying historical context to their subject. Taggart's immediate issue is the philanthropic role of Pierre duPont in Delaware, but his larger topic is the relative democratic propriety of elite influence in public schooling. He approaches duPont both from within his clan (where several formidable adversaries awaited) and from an expansive state-wide perspective (frequently determined after 1900 by the influence of Wilmington, the state's largest city). Similarly Labaree concentrates on the history of Central High School, founded in 1838 and the oldest in Philadelphia. Even more aggressively than Taggart, Labaree pursues the deeper, more theoretical implications of educational change: exactly how did the market (i.e., the force of supply and demand) and politics shape and undermine by turns the educational center of the city school system? The specific historical content of both books is new and very instructive, but even more important both books probe the relevant influ- ences outside the school or system so often ignored by an intramural scholarly examination. Taggart has set Pierre duPont in a late nineteenth-century philanthropic mold: he practiced, not charity, but a stimulation of community "reforms." Pierre became the catalyst for duPont family members who sought strategic interventions in the public weal. In 1918 he created the first of three foundations to systematize his giving and to focus it upon education in Delaware. Only recently had he realized that his state had the worst school attendance record in the nation and spent 30 percent under the national average on its pupils. The new (1917) state law centralizing the school system, he sensed, offered the possibility of checking the long-standing preference for local, voluntary control of public schools. In this regard, like most systems in the southern states, Delaware lagged behind the nation by a generation or more. Pierre duPont came to education via a fund-raising campaign with J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller for the American Red Cross among other defense projects of World War I. Taggart notes but does not emphasize that duPont's early philanthropy sustained a "defense" posture in urging 670 BOOK REVIEWS October

upon the school special Americanization and naturalization practices. Crit- ics—both rich and poor—objected to duPont's efforts to raise taxes for school measures and characterized his interference as "undemocratic." Tag- gart is not defensive about the philanthropist's paternalism and documents well duPont's methodology: scientific research of a problem, orchestration of expert testimony and recommendation, extensive public advertising and lectures on the preferred plan, and, failing to convince taxpayers with argument, the funding of a model program, which would not receive funding indefinitely. If the public and the state did not adopt his proposals within a "reasonable" time, duPont let the project die. Pierre duPont, however, did show remarkable resiliency in education, particularly in school construction, where his own matching funds often became the incentive for public support. Between 1917 and 1926 he spent $3 million and convinced the state to spend $2 million more. When it was objected in the mid-1920s that there were not funds, he received appoint- ment as tax collector, professionalized the system, and produced an enormous surplus for public schools. Correctly, Taggart credits duPont with the mod- ernization of the Delaware system; more problematic is his characterization that duPont only stimulated the public or the state to administrative initia- tives or legislation. Time and again duPont employed well-financed and well-trained agents, often ministers like Joseph H. Odell and Richard W. Cooper, in power maneuvers that went beyond the "education" or pro- gressive "reform" of the public. It would have been well had Taggart gone beyond Delaware's boundaries to inquire into duPont's educational and philanthropic interests. Were such interests restricted to Delaware at the very moment he was transforming the corporations of Dupont and General Motors into national, even international, conglomerates? How different really were his philanthropic takeovers from his corporate exploits? The work of Barry Karl, Morrell Heald, Peter D. Hall, Stuart Brandes, and others would have helped enormously here to reformulate the meaning of "reform," "philanthropy," and "public education." Such questions confront more directly the politics and economics of educational change, which are precisely the issues addressed by Labaree's excellent study. At no point does Labaree assume education has been a separate, one-sided, or gratuitous exercise of the political economy. Central High School began in Philadelphia with a mixed commitment: on the one hand, its founders respected the republican values of the socially minded citizen; on the other, they tolerated capitalist values fostering meritocracy and individual achievement. Throughout its history the school careened between the goals of political equality and social inequality, between public benefit and private advantage. Labaree takes it as axiomatic that "the first 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 671 of these is grounded in wide access and the second in narrow access; and as we shall see, success in either undermines the other" (p. 96). Central High School admitted its students for a generation on the basis of an entrance examination. Labaree offers a fascinating argument about the centralizing force of such a school bejore the bureaucratization of the city system. The school's dominance of the system was a function of its economic value to the middle class, its "cultural property," the increasing importance of manners, speech, etc. in a society turbulent enough to make downward mobility an established tradition. Antebellum Philadelphia con- tained only a quarter of its population in the middle class, yet the proprietary middle class, especially, dominated the school's policies throughout the nineteenth (and twentieth) century. Its acceptance of this meritocracy pro- moted "the primacy of markets over politics but under the ideological cover of procedural fairness" (p. 26). This primacy has come to be an established American pattern, though never totally dominating "politics." If some of his argument is unnecessarily polarized, Labaree still retains his historical instincts. He recognizes that meritocracy in the antebellum period differed from its later mutations. He details how the high school's mid-nineteenth-century exclusiveness declined with the creation of com- peting schools, how the emergence of the city school board eliminated Central's ability to coerce grammar schools to alter their curricula, how it was forced to change its rigorous "practical" orientation to college prepa- ration, how the professionalization of teaching undermined the elitism and collegial governance of Central's faculty. Turn-of-the-century Progressivism only exacerbated these tendencies, yet Central High's leaders found ways to counter these inroads. Largely through institutional stratification (e.g., high school versus grammar, high school versus manual training school), Central High held on to its tradition of exclusiveness and in 1939 was restored to its original preeminent position, a selective high school drawing (college-bound) students from the entire city. These two studies present not only different educational cases; they represent two distinct historical methodologies. Much more than Taggart, Labaree sees his subject as an organic phenomenon: there is no way to change one part without serious ramifications elsewhere. Taggart has ac- cepted many of these ramifications as unexpected and unpredictable (i.e., not entirely rationalized, pragmatic) and has attributed very limited control even to agents like Pierre duPont. Taggart's sense of historical contingency has forced him to view duPont less ideologically. By contrast, Labaree has reached beyond Central High School, not, like Taggart, with a political or economic analysis of a larger historical context, but with a theoretical ar- gument about "market" and "politics." These ideological notions tend to obscure the necessarily tenuous, contextual detail beyond the high school. 672 BOOK REVIEWS October

Labaree has introduced few individuals or institutions that do not appear as pawns of larger historical forces, seldom as agents with surprising initiatives or insights. In their own way, both studies are substantive, insightful, and well-written, but as good as they are, each would do well to engage and appreciate the historical values of the other.

New York University PAUL H. MATTINGLY