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Reviews of Books and Films
workforce of assemblers, many of whom work for
piecework wages at home.
Perhaps the book's most important chapter is the
one that focuses on the valley as the "feminist capital
of the nation" in the 1970s and 1980s, when both the
mayor and majorities of the San Jose City Council and
Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors were female.
Rather than present the lives of the largely middleclass female activists as anomalous or as exemplary
success stories, Matthews asks us to consider what
difference women's political power made in the lives of
working-class women. She traces the origins of local
female political activism to female engineers and
technicians (Who, while not feminists, nevertheless
pursued feminist goals of workplace equality) and to
an anti-growth movement of the 1950s and 1960s that
developed in opposition to the governing coalition of
local businessmen. It is no accident, Matthews suggests, that issues of comparable worth and of safety
and health emerged during the era of female leadership in the valley, even if the real gains of women
workers were limited by a continuing imbalance of
power between the technical and investing elite and
the non unionized workforce of the newer technical
industries.
Rather than present Silicon Valley as a model for
the nation, these two books point to the negative
consequences of globalization and of employment in
high-tech industries for the majority. Workers who in
the 1930s or 1940s could at least dream of homeownership through union wages can now scarcely find
housing near their valley jobs. While Pitti points to the
long arm of the "devil" of race to explain this outcome
for the ethnic Mexicans who are his subject, Matthews
suggests that more than one "devil" is at work. She
concludes that only a shake-up "of some magnitude"
(p. 258) could again open the hope of achieving the
California Dream for the newest workers of the Silicon
Valley.
DONNA R. GABACCIA
University of Pittsburgh
JOYCE A. HANSON. Mary McLeod Bethune and Black
Women's Political Activism. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 248. $32.50.
Mary McLeod Bethune was a towering figure in twentieth-century African-American history. With a position in the National Youth Administration during
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency, Bethune became the first black woman to attain such high political
office, and as a leader of the "Black Cabinet," she
helped to set a national agenda for African Americans.
But these crossover successes came after an already
remarkable career as an educator and leader of black
women.
Joyce A. Hanson offers a history of Bethune's ideas
about, and exercise of, leadership. Her book's title
draws attention to a consistent thread in Bethune's
vision: she placed the needs and values of women at
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
the center of the black community and envisioned an
educated and mobilized womanhood as the engine of
its transformation. Once Hanson brings Bethune from
childhood through a short marriage, she organizes the
book around Bethune's principal projects. Bethune
founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute
for Negro Girls (later Bethune-Cookman College) in
1904 and served as its president until 1942. Over the
course of her presidency, Bethune earned a reputation
among whites and blacks as a savvy fundraiser and a
strong, if difficult, administrator. She also provided a
model of education for girls and women that trained
them for political activism and community leadership.
In 1912, Bethune connected with the woman's club
movement and emerged in the late 1920s as president
of the National Association of Colored Women.
Through clubs and the association, she gained regional
and national platforms and the chance to create a
unified expression of black women's interests. She did
not succeed in remaking the association along the lines
she favored, but she made herself visible to white
politicians. Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert
Hoover named her as an expert on black education to
commissions on child welfare, and through club work
she came to the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt.
From clubs Hanson moves to Bethune's job in the
New Deal from 1935 to 1944 and her success at making
the National Youth Administration serve the needs of
young African Americans. While acquiring a taste for
formal political leadership in those years, Bethune also
learned the importance of having a political base.
Hanson turns, in her final chapter, to the founding of
the National Council of Negro Women by Bethune in
1936 and its program under her leadership until 1949.
This project, Hanson argues, was intended to build
that political base of black women.
Hanson has a good eye for the evidence about how
associations and institutions work, and she realizes the
importance Bethune assigned to that perspective. This
is especially displayed in her chapter on the National
Youth Administration, where Bethune made small
adjustments to bureaucracy that allowed black field
staff to report straight to Washington without having
their observations filtered through white superiors.
The same habit of mind, and the same skill on
Hanson's part, is evident in the chapters on the
National Association and National Council, which
describe Bethune trying to perfect the flow of ideas
and work out from the center of national leadership to
the counties and towns where things needed to happen.
The main thrust in all the chapters, however, is to
locate the ideas from which Bethune drew inspiration
and against which she defined herself. In her journey
from Dwight Moody's evangelical training to the New
Deal-a journey familiar to students of the social
settlement movement-Bethune also navigated between the poles defined by Booker T. Washington and
W. E. B. Du Bois. As an educator, she crafted a
synthesis in which women were trained to work but in
APRIL 2004
Canada and the United States
jobs providing leadership. As a leader, she would not
remain silent in the face of discrimination, but neither
would she insist on full integration. From the model of
individual improvement, evident not only in Washington's ideas but also in the National Association of
Colored Women, Bethune became an advocate of
institutional change.
There is little inwardness to Hanson's study of
Bethune. This matters not just to satisfy a reader's
hunger for biography but also to account for Bethune's
intellectual receptiveness to ideas about social change
and her ability to integrate at least parts of them into
her schemes. Hanson views Bethune as a transitional
figure. Formed in the nineteenth century by the dominant voice of Washington and by convictions about
women's moral superiority, Bethune adapted to the
twentieth century by learning to value citizenship,
imagine politics as a place for women, and mobilize
her race for a long struggle. This is a useful insight, but
it is also one that begs for more attention to the
individual who could adapt and change with such skill.
ANN D. GORDON
Rutgers University
ROBERT MIRALDI. The Pen Is Mightier: The Muckraking
Life of Charles Edward Russell. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan. 2003. Pp. xiii, 328. $32.50.
Robert Miraldi has filled a gap in the historical
literature of the muckraking era (circa 1900-1914) in
American journalism history with his brisk-paced, factfilled narrative of the life of Charles Edward Russell,
an important reporter and editor of several of the
period's leading reform-minded metropolitan newspapers and magazines. Miraldi seeks to set Russell in his
rightful place among the pantheon of great reform
journalists that included contemporaries and acquaintances Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair,
and David Graham Phillips.
Very early in the volume, Miraldi states that Russell
was as recognized in his time as any of the aforementioned muckrakers for his breadth of work, his elegant
style, and the strength of his reform convictions. What
Russell lacked, which Miraldi feels led to his being
passed over by historians of muckraking, was a "signature" piece of muckraking journalism of the type
published by his better-remembered peers, such as
Steffens's Shame of the Cities (1902), Tarbell's History
of the Standard Oil Company (1902), Sinclair's The
Jungle (1906), and Phillips's "Treason of the Senate"
(1906).
Nevertheless, Russell's credentials as a journalist
were impeccable, and they placed him at the forefront
of his profession in his time. After breaking into the
big-time of New York City daily journalism as a
reporter with the Commercial Advertiser, Russell
quickly established a reputation as a facile writer and
a reporter who knew where to dig for the juicy scandal
and corruption stories that circulation-hungry metropolitan dailies in Manhattan sought in a competition-
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545
driven market that included more than two dozen
newspapers. He was plucked from the Advertiser by
James Gordon Bennett, Jr.'s New York Herald, where
he distinguished himself by being one of the first
reporters from the East Coast to reach flood-ravaged
Johnstown, Pennsylvania. He rose to the position of
city editor for the Herald's Brooklyn bureau, where his
sharp news sense and firm guidance caught the eye of
one of the nation's premier publishers, Joseph Pulitzer, who lured Russell to join the staff of theNew
York World as city editor, literally becoming third in
the newspaper's chain of authority.
Before he moved on to establish a reputation as a
writer for the muckraking magazines, Russell was once
again lured by a major newspaper to jump into its fold,
William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Although Russell said his job with the World was "the
best I ever had," he still left the paper when Hearst
dangled a substantial salary increase before his eyes.
Russell's journalistic output was marked by what
Miraldi describes as "prodigious research," which was
turned into engrossing, informative, and vivid newspaper and magazine stories. His typical targets of exposure involved political and corporate corruption and
the collusion between party bosses and industrial
barons that comprised the staple content of the muckraking magazines. But Russell was not just a journalist,
nor did he leave his political and social convictions in
his desk at his office. Russell became an activist and
was several times nominated for political office by the
Socialist Party. He remained a member of the party
until his pro-interventionist stance on World War I led
to expulsion. Russell also was known for his oratory,
especially as a political candidate, his love of music,
and his published poetry.
Miraldi is the author of several well-regarded books
on the muckraking journalists, and it is his welldeserved reputation that makes the annoying errors
and misstatements that crop up in the book hard to
understand. For example, in the first page and a half of
the prologue, there are two glaring errors: the second
sentence gives Russell's life dates as 1860-1941, but at
the end of the same first paragraph is found "when he
died in 1940." In addition, the footnote for the latter
reference states that Russell's obituary in the Washington Tribune, an African-American newspaper, was
published on April 26, 1901. There is a reference to a
"Samuel" Medill of the Chicago Tribune, when it
should have been Joseph Medill (p. 22). In discussing
the New York Herald, the author refers to Bennett as
"taking over the newspaper in the 1830s," when it is
common knowledge that he founded the Herald in
1835. Such flaws, of which there are more, detract from
the value of a book that brings out of the shadows an
important journalistic figure from a critical time in the
nation's history.
JOSEPH P. MCKERNS
Ohio State University
APRIL 2004