176
Reviews of Books
and unearned access to Fourteenth Amendment history as a source of law and legitimation" (p. 16).
Accordingly the opinions of the Warren Court were
bound to be unpersuasive, incoherent, and historically
vulnerable (p. 184).
Brandwein's intent is to unmask the process by
which this official Court history was socially constructed, to the end that Reconstruction history may be
used to promote "a more aggressive Fourteenth
Amendment jurisprudence" protecting black rights
and criticizing recent Rehnquist Court reactions to
Warren-era decisions (p. 7). Her research design consists of chapters describing northern Democrat and
Republican views of slavery as an interpretive issue in
Reconstruction policy making; an account of Supreme
Court decisions from 1873 to 1896 adopting the Democrat Party position; two chapters on the FairmanCrosskey debate; detailed analysis of the Warren
Court reapportionment decisions; and a chapter proposing a sociology of constitutional law.
For readers of this journal, perhaps the most important issue in the book is raised by the author when she
asks: "What ... is the status of my claims in regard to
the social construction of knowledge about Reconstruction? Are my claims any less determined by the
social and institutional frameworks that I inhabit while
I undertake my scholarly work?" (p. 21). Her answer
is: no, but that does not matter, because Stanley Fish
says antifoundationalist epistemology, to which Brandwein subscribes, is not supposed to "underwrite research practice" (p. 21). Her research design rests
upon her "belief structures," which enable her to be
"certain" in her "sense of relevant and weighty evidence" (p. 21). In other words, she does not need
epistemology because she is not interested in acquiring
knowledge of the subject she is writing about and does
not claim to be saying anything truthful about Reconstruction history, the Supreme Court, or constitutional
law. This acknowledgment of the relativist fallacy is a
disincentive for the reader to take this book seriously
as a contribution to constitutional history.
HERMAN BELZ
University of Maryland,
College Park
DAVID M. PLETCHER. The Diplomacy of Trade and
Investment: American Economie Expansion in the
Hemisphere, 1865-1900. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 1998. Pp. ix, 458. $44.95.
David M. Pletcher provides a detailed examination of
American international trade and investment in the
Western Hemisphere during the late nineteenth century. Although trade with Europe dominated America's economie statistics, he points out that American
promotion of economic expansion focused more on
non-European countries, especially continental neighbors. As the desire to annex territory in Canada and
Mexico or islands in the Caribbean declined throughout the late nineteenth century, economie connections
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW became of correspondingly greater importance. Even
so, Pletcher stresses that the United States's outward
thrust was unsystematic, halting, and continually subject to fierce public and legislative debates—elaborating the argument of his The Awkward Years: American
Foreign Relations under Garfield and Arthur (1962).
Some business groups worried about overproduction
and sought new markets, but many others were protectionist. Similarly, partisan divisions and weak leadership in both Congress and the executive branch
precluded any unified policy of commercial expansion.
Pletcher's first section describes the advance of
American commerce from 1865 to 1886 into Canada,
Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, and
South America (each in a separate chapter), but he
continually stresses the complications and reversals
that slowed this process. Debates over tariff policy, the
merchant marine, and reciprocity treaties, all hotly
partisan issues during the late nineteenth century,
show how domestic political contests shaped an ambiguous international commercial policy. Although
businessmen in Central America developed railroad
and banana companies, more ambitious schemes for a
transoceanic canal stalled. Americans invested heavily
in Cuban sugar even before 1898, but inadequate
steamship service, the high U.S. tariff, and Britain's
trading dominante limited their activity in most of the
rest of the Caribbean. In South America, initiatives to
curtail British domination by forging a Pan American
movement affected policy rhetoric more than economic relationships.
From 1885 to 1895, the period covered in the second
part of the book, private interests and the government
became more assertive in pressing for common market
trade in Canada, organizing a more effective structure
for Pan-Americanism, and seeking to build a canal
through Nicaragua. None of these initiatives succeeded, as U.S. economie expansionism remained contested by protectionists at home and by hemispheric
opponents. During the 1890s, however, economie depression together with a series of sharp confrontations
in Haiti, Chile, Brazil, and Venezuela, which challenged European power in the hemisphere, boosted
the popularity of pro-expansionist arguments.
By the late 1890s, which Pletcher examines in his
third and briefer section, the growing interest in
enhancing Americans' economic position in the hemisphere coalesced around Cuban independence and the
war with Spain. Again, Pletcher provides a detailed
analysis of specific business groups and stresses the
contradictions and uncertainties in their diverse economie arguments. In the "improvised expansion" of
the turn of the century and the subsequent protectorate policy in the Caribbean, economics continued to
play "an important but not always decisive role" (p.
325).
Pletcher's book has many strengths. One is the
inclusion of Canada, a country often neglected in
studies of the Western Hemisphere. He presents a
thorough examination of the major issues: fisheries,
FEBRUARY 2001
Canada and the United States
tariff reciprocity, and commercial ties such as railroads. Another is Pletcher's exhaustive research in
English-language archival sources and secondary
works. This book will become a standard reference for
specific historical information on U. S. exports, imports, and direct investments with each country in the
hemisphere. Moreover, Pletcher adroitly blends analyses of public policy and private business. Entrepreneurs developing railroads, steamship lines, mines,
cable networks, and tropical products—ultimately as
important in shaping hemispheric relationships as formal diplomacy—receive thorough examination.
Pletcher's overall argument seems anchored largely
in the historiographical debates, so prominent in the
1970s, over the role of economie interest in foreign
policy. Pletcher does not see economie empire as "a
way of life" (in the words of revisionist scholar William
Appleton Williams) and suggests that the revisionist
emphasis on economie expansionism was insufficiently
nuanced. Although economie impulses are centra( to
his study, he convincingly concludes that businesses
and governmental sectors were both conflicted over
expansionism.
A traditionally crafted narrative on the role of
American private intererts and the domestic political
debates over U.S. economie foreign policy, Pletcher's
work provides a wealth of information on late nineteenth century U.S. policy within the hemisphere.
EMILY S. ROSENBERG
Macalester College [All reviewers of books by Indiana
University faculty are selected with the advice of the
Board of Editors.]
ELIZABETH SANDERS. Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917. (American
Polities and Politica] Economy.) Chicago: University
of Chicago Press. 1999. Pp. x, 532. Cloth $48.00, paper
$16.00.
Elizabeth Sanders's choice of title will send tingles
down the spine of many a historian of the Gilded Age
and Progressive era. Might this be the book that
explains why tens of thousands of industrial workers
joined the Populist movement despite their glaring
differences with farmers? Might this be the book that
dispels Lawrence Goodwyn's pessimism that "true
democracy" ended with the election of 1896? Might
this be the book that incorporates the insights of
Theda Skocpol and other political scientists into a
compelling narrative of the rise of the modern American state? Will farmers and workers be its principal
historical actors? In point of fact, farmers and workers
are largely absent from the book, readers will discover.
Sanders focuses instead on "the public positions taken
by political representatives" (p. 3), and the action in
her book takes place primarily in the halls of Congress.
Sanders sets up her study as a counter to the
"corporate liberal" school. Progressive reform came
not from scheming big businessmen, Sanders argues,
hut from politically mobilized farmers in the South and
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 177
West. She supports this contention by dividing the
United States into three regional blocks: an industrial
"core" based primarily in the Northeast, a "periphery"
in the South and West, and several "diverse" localities
mostly in the Midwest. She then tallies the roll call
votes in Congress on several key reforms, including the
Hepburn Act (1906), the Underwood Tariff (1913),
the Federal Reserve Act (1913), the Clayton Antitrust
Act (1914), and the Smith-Lever Act (1914). Congressmen from the "periphery" seeking "to establish public
control over a rampaging capitalism," Sanders maintains, convinced enough representatives from "diverse" regions—especially Democrats closely allied
with labor unions—to enact their "agrarian statist
agenda" (pp. 3-4). Farmer radicalism not only did not
end with the downfall of Populism, she concludes, it
had an "afterlife" that extended well into the twentieth
century. "The Progressive reforms of 1909-1917 had
their roots in programs advocated by a long succession
of Grangers, Anti-monopolists, Greenbackers, Farmers' Alliance members, Populists, and Farmers' Unionists" (pp. 149, 159).
Historians will find Sanders's approach to her subject rather curious. Her regional classifications, based
on manufacturing output per capita, not only seem
arbitrary; they also are derived from the 1919 census,
which Sanders herself admits may "reflect an intensification of industrial production for World War I" (p.
21). She also does not distinguish between regional
and party loyalties. By the early twentieth century, the
Democratie Party was almost entirely confined to the
"periphery." How do we know, then, what motivated
members of Congress on a given measure? Did "periphery" representatives vote against the Payne-Aldrich Tariff of 1909, for example, because they were
from the countryside or because they were Democrats?
Given the strong party loyalties of the time, the Jatter
seems quite likely. Moreover, Sanders's voting analysis, the core of her argument, constitutes only a small
portion of her book. The rest consists of long summaries of the era's political battles, based almost exclusively on secondary sources, which historians will find
familiar and, in some cases, outdated. These summaries, it should also be noted, are organized topically
(around specific political movements and case studies
of the legislative process) so that each chapter circles
back to the beginring and runs through to the end.
This not only makes for considerable repetition, but it
also leaves it up to the reader to determine how
everything fits together.
Sanders's conclusions do not seem to move forward
either. In fact, her argument bears a striking resemblance to that of John D. Hicks, Solon J. Buck, and
other Progressive historians, who saw much continuity
between Populism and early twentieth-century liberalism. No one will deny that specific ideas among the
platforms and resolutions of 4grarian radicals were
later enacted into law. But historians have long given
up the notion that Progressive reform was linked in
any meaningful way to a producer movement that was
FEBRUARY 2001