Frances Willard: A Biography by Ruth BordinReview by: Karen J. BlairThe American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 1 (Feb., 1988), pp. 238-239Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1865853 .

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238 Reviews of Books

view; nor does he show that Pottsville declined because its elite failed to do these things. Would not straightforward economic forces, which he does not fully consider, have produced the same results in any case? As Pottsville's coal played out and as railroad and telegraph communication improved, it became more efficient to shut most small collieries and mills and to manage those that remained from Philadelphia. Wilkes-Barre, conversely, served New York as well as Philadelphia and provided goods and services (and jobs for the wives and children of miners) for an anthracite industry that earned profits into the 1920s. Davies's welcome contribu- tion to urban economic and social history tells us less than he hoped about the economic consequences of values and social institutions.

DAVID C. HAMMACK

Case Western Reserue University

STUART B. KAUFMAN et al., editors. The Samuel Gompen Papers. Volume 1, The Making of a Union Leader, 1850-86. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1986. Pp. xxxvi, 529. $39.95.

This book, the initial volume of a projected multivolume printed edition, is the latest product of the Samuel Gompers papers project begun undex the direction of Stuart B. Kaufman in 1973. Over the years the project staff has collected in excess of one-half million documents, three hundred thou- sand of which appeared in a 1979 microfilm edition entitled, "American Federation of Labor Records: The Samuel Gompers Era." A second microfilm edition, "The American Federation of Labor and the Unions," is planned. This is the first such project to be exclusively dedicated to a working-class figure.

As the earlier microfilm edition and now the first of the printed volumes make abundantly clear, the Gompers collection and Kaufman's skillful manage- ment of the editorial project are both highly praise- worthy. The author of an earlier, somewhat contro- versial study of the social and intellectual sources of Gompers's economic and trade union philosophy, Kaufman did his apprenticeship on Louis Harlan's acclaimed Booker T. Washington papers project, and, indeed, there is striking evidence of the men- tor's influence in this project.

Having said all of that, I must report that this first volume of the Gompers papers is somewhat disap- pointing. One actually gets a better feel for the man-what he thought, how he operated, why he was so successful-from reading a volume or two of the Gompers Letterbooks in the Library of Con- gress. The problem is that most of the early manu- scripts involving Gompers and his activities with the Cigarmakers International Union, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU),

and the early American Federation of Labor (AFL)-manuscripts that Gompers assiduously col- lected and preserved-were destroyed during the year (1895) thatJohn McBride succeeded Gompers in the AFL presidency and union headquarters were moved from New York to Indianapolis. As a consequence, the documents in this volume, most of which were drawn from such printed sources as newspapers and union journals, more accurately reflect the public than the private man. As it is, this volume is much more a documentary history of the early, formative years of the modern American labor movement than a collection of Gompers manuscripts as such.

Given that caveat, what the editors do, they do extremely well. The first twenty pages contain doc- uments covering Gompers's London childhood and his early years in New York City. Following are sections concerning Gompers's introduction to so- cialist thought, his experiences in the cigarmaking industry and association with trade unionism, the organization of the AFL, its predecessor, the FOTLU, and its most bitter rival, the Knights of Labor, and two of the more volatile movements of the day, the campaign for the eight-hour day and Henry George's single tax.

Each of the fourteen sections is preceded by a five hundred to one thousand word introduction that establishes the historical context and identifies the historical significance of the documents that follow. The documents are reproduced with as little edito- rial intervention as possible and are well but not excessively annotated.

Not too surprisingly, the documents, especially those covering Gompers's early years, tend to sup- port the argument advanced in Kaufman's mono- graph, Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the American Federation of Labor, 1848-1896 (1973), concerning resilient Marxist influence in Gompers's evolving social and economic thought. Conversely, those doc- uments related to conflict between the AFL and the Knights of Labor and to socialist challenges to AFL policies and leadership illustrate a conservative strain in Gompers's evolving trade union philosophy that would become increasingly dominant in his later years.

GARY M FINK

Georgia State University

RUTH BORDIN. Frances Willard: A Biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1986. Pp. xv, 294. $25.00.

Frances Willard (1838-98) was one of the most famous, respected, and influential women in nine- teenth-century America, but no biography of her has been published in the last forty years. Having

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United States 239

established herself as an able chronicler of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (1981), Ruth Bordin has now written a sound portrait of temperance's primary exponent. Using diaries and scrapbooks that had been lost since the turn of the century, Bordin illuminates both the private and the public life of a skilled leader with a broad social vision. Willard did not appear to challenge society's accepted ideals about women's traditional virtues, but she pressed them into service, awakening hundreds of thou- sands of female temperance advocates to realize their own power by supporting a "Do Everything" policy for "Home Protection."

Willard initiated impressive programs, from co- operative kitchens to free kindergartens, social pu- rity, and female suffrage, which her followers devel- oped, ultimately making a great impact as reformers. Surprisingly, Bordin manages to avoid rehashing material she treated in her earlier book. Instead, she argues that Willard, the person, can be disentangled from temperance history to demon- strate her strong commitment to a broad range of social and political causes, including Christian So- cialism, transatlantic feminism, and the labor move- ment. Although Bordin is quick to praise Willard's eloquence as a public speaker, her astuteness as a politician, and her success in carrying out an ambi- tious social program, she does not ignore her short- comings. She scrutinizes Willard's hypocrisy on the issue of lynching, her selfishness in her personal relationships with Kate Jackson, Anna Gordon, and Lady Henry Somerset, and her differences with the Methodist clergy, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the WCTU factions opposed to her support for women's suffrage and for the Prohibition party. Bordin succeeds, too, at synthesizing, coherently but succinctly, the backgrounds of numerous mass movements that Willard supported. Finally, Bordin's survey does not topple the assumptions about Frances Willard with which women's histori- ans have worked in recent decades, but it chronicles them fully, with great care and persuasiveness.

KARENJ. BLAIR

Central Washington University

WILLIAM R. MAJORS. Change and Continuity: Tennessee Politics since the Civil War. Macon, Ga.: Mercer Uni- versity Press. 1986. Pp. x, 127. $9.95.

Students of Tennessee history suffered a sad loss with the untimely death of William R. Majors in April 1986. He was a thoughtful analyst of Tennes- see politics and the author of important works on Gordon Browning and Edward Ward Carmack. His third book, Change and Continuity: Tennessee Politics

since the Civil War, reflects his years of careful re- search in the field and expresses some strong ideas about the political heritage of the Volunteer State. Although conceding that Tennessee has experi- enced enormous changes over the last 125 years, Majors aligns himself with those who stress continu- ity rather than disruption in southern history. In Tennessee, he claims, "a basic cultural pattern ... or more specifically a Bourbon conservatism has per- sisted relatively unaltered" (p. ix). Echoing the sen- timents of George Tindall and others, he finds in Tennessee a conservative "community of interests," which "when faced with change or demands for reform adjusted, accommodated to reform, and reconciled innovation with tradition" (p. 1 10). In the process Majors also builds on an interesting paper he presented at the 1981 meeting of the Southern Historical Association in which he argued that V. 0. Key had misinterpreted some important elements of the state's politics in his chapter on Tennessee in Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949). The present book challenges Key's emphasis on the "Civil War and Mr. Crump," contending that the state's basic political patterns were established be- fore the Civil War and that the structure of political debate owes more to the Bourbon period than to the wartime era.

With this book, Majors has done a real service to the study of Tennessee history in the twentieth century. A smoothly written, interpretive survey of Tennessee's past, the book addresses a number of important issues in state and regional historiogra- phy. It is especially well suited for use in Tennessee history classes at the high school or college level. Perhaps the most disappointing part of the book is its bibliographical essay. Majors has been content to summarize the literature and has thereby missed an opportunity to provide a sharper and more biting critique of the available scholarship. Nevertheless, this book offers students a fine introduction to the state's past and provides experts a challenging framework for analysis.

DAVID D. LEE

Western Kentucky University

WILLIAM A. LINK. A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920. (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1986. Pp. xii, 275. $26.50.

William A. Link explains in his preface that the "main purpose in this book is to understand the rural past through a study of its schools" (p. ix). He divides the study into two sections. Part 1 (chaps. 1-3, "Localism and the Rural School") considers the plight of education during the post-Reconstruction

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