430 REVIEWS

The Americas

BRIAN W. BLOUET and FREDERICK C. LUEBKE (Eds), The Great Plains: Environment and Culture (Lincoln and London: The University of Nebraska Press for the Center for Great Plains Studies, 1979. Pp. xxviii + 246)

For a hundred years since John Wesley Powell’s seminal Report of 1878 on the semi-arid American West, geographers and historians have continued to be fascinated by the Great Plains region. Noted scholars-Webb, Malin, Shannon, Hewes, Fite, Ottoson, Berkhofer and Meinig-have struggled to understand and interprete it. Yet as Hewes confesses, “the story of who occupied the land and how is not well told, at least by geographers”. This volume, the first in a planned annual series on topics relating to the Plains, promises to remedy the deficiency. The Great Plains is a collection of twelve papers on the “cultural heritage of the plains”, presented to the 1977 symposium of the Center for Great Plains Studies. The contributors to this interdisciplinary effort include five geographers, five historians, a rural sociologist and a cultural anthropologist. Each considers an aspect of settlement and occupation from an environmental or cultural perspective. Given the strong environmentalist tradition in the historiography of the Plains, deriving from Walter Prescott Webb’s classic work, it is not surprising that this viewpoint predominates, although a culturalist, John Hudson, deserves pride of place for the premier essay in the volume.

Co-editor Frederick Luebke’s introductory essay masterfully describes the historio- graphy of the environmentalist-culturalist debate and places each chapter within that framework, which serves as the connecting theme of the book. Luebke carefully distin- guishes Webb’s deterministic and a historical emphasis from that of Turner, Shannon and Malin, all of whom also considered cultural and temporal forces. Some may question Luebke’s decision to rescue from deserved oblivion the Webbian sociologist Carl Kraenzel, but Kraenzel’s dictum “adapt or get out” conveniently serves as the pithy, if simplistic, summary of the environmentalist position.

The twelve substantive essays are arranged in a broadly chronological order. In the opening essay, anthropologist Waldo Wide1 of the Smithsonian Institution succinctly traces fifteen centuries of cultural adaptation in the Republican River basin from the earliest known human habitation to the modern Indian tribes. British geographer G. Malcolm Lewis then reviews the changing geographical perceptions of the Plains, from the “immense Plains” description of the Indians and early explorers of the eighteenth century to the “strategic Plains” view of modern-day military planners. Especially notable are Lewis’s elaboration of a theory of cognition and his time-line chart which illustrates cognitive changes.

Four contributors consider water problems in the agriculture of the Plains. Geographer Bradley Baltensperger shows that western plainsmen made “massive behavioral adjust- ments” in cropping and tillage techniques because of periodic droughts, but eastern plainsmen remained largely unaffected because rainfall was adequate in their region. Timothy Rickard, another geographer, describes the irrigation movement of the years between 1890 and 191.5, when William E. Smythe and fellow irrigationists propagated the dream of a densely populated land of small-sized, intensively cultivated farms in the semi-arid plains. The failures of nineteenth-century farmers to adjust successfully to climate conditions on the Plains contributed to the Dust Bowl disaster of the thirties which historian R. Douglas Hunt describes in vivid detail, with accompanying photo- graphs of dust storms and their resulting soil erosion. The long-term detrimental effects of this erosion are documented by Leslie Hewes, who ingeniously maps county crop insur- ance rates in 1975 to prove that the chief area of high risk agriculture remains the Dust Bowl region.

Several specialized topics add variety to the story of the Plains. Political historian David Trask locates the behavioral roots of Nebraska Populism in agricultural cropping practices and ethnocultural identities. Several of his statistical measures (“index of

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defection” and hogs-per-farm ratios) are problematic and his interpretation of chattel mortgages as instruments of financial distress is doubtful. Roger Grant, another historian, imaginatively describes the standardized railroad stations of the Plains, illustrating with photographs the evolution from small portable buildings to the elaborate second- generation station which included living space for the depot manager. That the architec- ture of such mundane structures should reveal as much social and economic history is a tribute to the author.

The essay of greatest interest to historical geographers is John Hudson’s theoretical analysis of country towns platted along the railroad lines, which he aptly describes as the “last true trade center towns built in the United States”. Using central-place theory and locational design principles, Hudson shows that the precedence of railroads in the Plains led to the platting of “T towns”, with Main Street running perpendicular to the town rail depot, instead of the traditional New England village with a central square. Hudson also distinguishes central-place towns and inland towns (away from rail centres) and explains why the automobile revolution and institution of rural free mail delivery undermined the inland towns. Rural sociologist Glenn Fuguitt offers a more sanguine picture. Based on a careful analysis of the population statistics since 1950, it concludes that in the 1950s the rate of decline slowed in non-metropolitan counties in the Plains and that there is even a shift to growth in counties adjacent to metropolitan centres.

Historians Gilbert Fite and Mary Hargreaves provide an assessment of the institutional adjustments of inhabitants of the Plains in the twentieth century, due to environmental conditions. Both stress the “too-much syndrome”, the “colonial status” of the area, the rapid depletion of ground water resources and the costly institutional burden. Perhaps Fuguitt’s conclusion of increasing population stability in the Plains will prompt Fite and Hargreaves to reassess their generally pessimistic portrait.

Historical geographers might appreciate a more rigorous theoretical analysis by the contributors, and historians may notice the neglect of important themes, such as cattle raising, land tenure, immigrant cropping patterns and energy resource development. Serious scholars will sorely miss an index. Nevertheless, this book merits the interest of all geographers and historians who seek to understand the effects of environmental forces on human society.

Kent State University ROBERT P. SWIERENGA

DAVID B. DANBOM, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and The Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900-1930 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979. Pp. ix + 195. $10.25)

For many of the public, agricultural industrialization brings to mind a fairly modern development, one embodied in the large mechanized farm and promoted essentially by an agent of a powerful but distinct minority of the population, the corporation. Author Danbom takes a much more sweeping view, seeing the foundation of industrialization as already laid between 1900 and 1930 and industrialization itself as nothing less than a revolution in organization and efficiency, “the pre-eminent values of our industrial society”. But most different from the usual view of agricultural industrialization-and certainly most controversial-is Danbom’s perception of it as a revolution instigated by the urban majority and imposed on the rural population basically for the benefit of the urbanite. The efforts of the urban activists, or Country Lifers, towards this end, the resistance of the farmers to these efforts, and the eventual guarantee, notwithstanding, of the ultimate achievement of the goals of the revolution, with all its fateful consequences for farmers and the nation as a whole, are the principal topics of Danbom’s presentation.

The Country Life Movement may be said to have formally begun with the completion of the report of the Country Life Commission and its presentation to President Theodore Roosevelt before he left office in 1909. The report represented the mounting concerns of social thinkers, agricultural scientists, government officials, businessmen and others over