Canada and the United States
versities and the Question of Professionalization," and
"Fear and Optimism: The Americanization Career of
Grace Raymond Hebard." Chapter five, "Our Government Thinks We Can," details the role of the federal
government in the West, primarily as evidenced in the
often conflicting ambitions and cross purposes of the
Bureau of Education and the Labor Department's
Bureau of Naturalization. The final chapter, "Our
Own House Needs Readjustment," concludes with
"the collapse of Americanization" and the ultimate
canonization of a racially restrictive American immigration policy in the Immigration Act of 1924, in whose
passage western legislators played major roles, from
Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington State, the
zealous chairman of the House Immigration Committee, to Senator Hiram Johnson who triumphantly
affirmed, in the name of his fellow exclusionists, that
"California's cherished policy is now the nation's maturely determined policy" (p. 188).
From among the hundreds of personages associated
with the Americanization movement in the West, Van
Nuys is especially taken with Hebard (1861-1936), who
in her lifetime personified the Americanization movement in Wyoming and much of the West. A self-made,
first-generation "new" woman, professor of political
economy and Wyoming State regent of the newly
founded Daughters of the American Revolution, she
was prideful of her "greatest heritage of all" as "a
pioneer daughter of pioneer parents" but passionately
claimed to value her work as an Americanizer as "most
precious." Even her fear of the "heterogeneous mass"
of South and East European immigrants and her
preference for "homogeneity" do not diminish her
stature in Van Nuys's esteem.
No less admired by Van Nuys, although more thinly
portrayed, is Simon Lubin (1876-1936). A redoubtable
social worker, business man, and Harvard-trained
economist, in 1913 Lubin created the California Commission ofImmigration and Housing (CCIH), chairing
and coordinating for a decade the best and most
comprehensive Americanization program in the nation. Carey McWilliams was to become his latter-day
successor. Inspired by a melting-pot cosmopolitan
outlook, Lubin, according to Spencer Olin, the most
liberal leader of the California Progressives, lent decisive momentum to social reform. All too belatedly
and futilely in 1920, Lubin even devised a blueprint for
a unique federal super agency, a department of nationbuilding, his CCIH writ large, to "intensify" the talents
of all Americans, native and foreign-born alike, that
was to culminate in a Bureau of National Culture "to
think through the whole problem" (p. 164).
In so prodigious an undertaking, Van Nuys has hewn
a difficult path marked by recurrent cross-stitching
that makes it difficult at times to follow his complex
narrative. Yet, he has proved himself more than equal
to the task at hand. The Americanization movement
did not succeed in Americanizing many immigrants.
But as Van Nuys persuasively demonstrates, the movement "through its organized channels ... helped
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1243
Americanize the West when larger processes of national integration are concerned" (p. 195). This is the
special achievement of his book and it is impressive.
MOSES RISCHIN
San Francisco State University
CARLOS ARNALDO SCHWANTES. Going Places: Transportation Redefines the Twentieth-Century West. (The
American West in the Twentieth Century.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2003. Pp. xix, 419.
$39.95.
In this book, Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes analyzes how
the introduction of railroads, then automobiles, and
finally commercial airlines sequentially changed the
nature of economic and social life in the American
West. It is an ambitious undertaking, commendable
both in its attempt at tripartite comparative transportation history and in its focus on one geographically
discrete area of the United States.
The book is beautifully written, in an engaging style
that is accessible to both the scholar and the lay
reader. Schwantes has chosen to write a somewhat
personal account of developments, leavening the historical narrative with anecdotes drawn from his own
life. The result is a work that has a significant degree of
humanity to it, something that is further enhanced by
the inclusion of a remarkable collection of nearly 100
black-and-white period illustrations, primarily photographs and advertising literature. These visuals have
not been widely published before, and those that
depict employees or passengers working on, or traveling in, a train, car, or airplane are particularly compelling.
Schwantes is at his best when discussing the evolution and impact of the railway system in the western
part of the United States. He presents the West at the
turn of the twentieth century as an area that was
sparsely populated and ripe for development by railroad interests. These interests, he maintains, continued to define major aspects of life in the West at least
until after World War II. It is the development and
periodic "reinvention" of the nation's rail system, the
latter in response to the changing nature of the
competition it faced, that provide the primary underlying themes of this work.
The author's stated intent is to "offer an extended
interpretive essay of transportation and its impact on
the modern American West" (p. xvi), with particular
attention to how transportation modes continually
redefine a landscape, or, as he terms it, the "space of
place." Schwantes provides a well-reasoned account of
how and why the automobile, bus, and truck, and later
the airplane, significantly undercut the financial stability of the once dominant railroads. He also draws
intriguing parallels between the evolution of the various transportation modes, such as linking the Federal
land grants and loans that underwrote railroad development in the late 1860s and 1870s with the govern-
OCTOBER 2004
1244
Reviews of Books and Films
ment airmail contracts that supported the launching of
commercial aviation in the 1920s and 1930s.
However, this book is more descriptive than analytical, and readers looking for an over arching thesis that
explains the collective impact of trains, cars, and
airplanes on the West will be disappointed. While
there are numerous comparisons of two of the transportation modes, primarily to explain the ascendancy
of one form over the other, there is little analysis of the
combined impact of all three modes. For example,
while the author describes how railroad interests capitalized on the fear that towns had of being bypassed
by a rail line and observes a similar development for
the early named highways (e.g. the Lincoln Highway),
he does not attempt to determine whether the siting of
major airports generated the same feelings among
competing communities. Given the relatively sparse
population in the West, the placement of airports and
the later creation of airline hubs undoubtedly had
profound effects on the development of nearby localities.
Schwantes also elects to follow a chronological, as
opposed to a topical, approach to his discussion of the
various modes of transportation. This approach leads
to a degree of unevenness in the book. There is a
considerable amount of information on the development of the railway and airline industries, but little
comparable material on the growth of the automotive
industry. Similarly, the sociocultural changes wrought
by commercial aviation are not discussed to the extent
that such changes are examined for railroads, automobiles, and buses.
Nonetheless, Schwantes's study is grounded in a
solid core of secondary accounts and provides a wellwritten synthesis of the transportation developments
that "redefined" the West in the twentieth century. As
such, it would be an excellent choice as a text or
supplementary reading for an introductory course in
American transportation history. Although scholars
specializing in railway, automotive, or airplane history
will not find new material in their respective areas of
expertise, some of the chapters might have utility as a
source of comparative information regarding the evolution of transportation modes other than the one in
which an individual scholar specializes. More importantly, Schwantes identifies and explores aspects of
American transportation history that are worthy of
further analysis by other researchers.
MICHAEL L. BERGER
Arcadia University
DANIEL TYLER. Silver Fox of the Rockies: Delphus E.
Carpenter and Western Water Compacts. Foreword by
DONALD J. PISANI. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press. 2003. Pp. xxi, 392. $34.95.
This new book by Daniel Tyler is a biography of
Delphus E. Carpenter (1877-1951), who was Colorado's commissioner of interstate streams at a crucial
juncture in ongoing disputes between states over water
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
rights in the West. "Silver Fox" was a moniker afforded Carpenter by a friend. Silver foxes, large members of the red fox family, have reputations for great
patience, strong survival instincts, adaptability, determination, and sensitivity to their surroundings-all
attributes that Tyler believes characterized Carpenter.
Carpenter, a second-generation Coloradoan from a
pioneering ranching family, was from Weld County in
the Greeley area, along the Front Range north of
Denver. He attended and graduated from the law
school of Denver University, reading successfully for
the law in a Denver law office. He returned to Greeley
to practice law, married a local woman with a ranching
background, started to raise a family, and bought a
ranch. In 1908, running as a conservative states' rights
Republican associated with livestock and irrigation
interests, he won a four-year term in the state senate.
As a legislator, he concentrated on water law and
represented Colorado in a water dispute with Wyoming. A turning point in his life came in 1912, when he
unexpectedly lost reelection to a Bull Moose Republican. Carpenter left elective politics, and in 1913 a
Republican governor appointed him streams commissioner, a post he held until forced out by a new
Democratic governor in 1934. Parkinson's disease rendered Carpenter bedridden for the rest of his life.
Carpenter, in dealing with water controversies,
started out accepting the traditional riparian legal
principal of first in line, first in right, which benefited
water-rich Colorado. However, he came to realize that
states not as blessed with water resources would take
what they needed, no matter the legal consequences.
This was particularly true of rapidly developing California. Moreover, in keeping with many other westerners of his day, Carpenter accepted the Jeffersonian
vision of the family farm as a bedrock of democracy,
along with Herbert Hoover's precepts of rugged individualism. But over the years, especially after the
Supreme Court ruled against Colorado in the protracted case with Wyoming in 1922, Carpenter decided
that it was time for a new approach. He concluded that
interstate compacts, authorized by the compact clause
of the Constitution and usually used to settle boundary
disputes between the states, could also be used to
settle water cases. He saw state compacts as a way to
reduce the number of lengthy legal actions between
the states that he believed, no matter who won, almost
always resulted in an expansion of federal power over
western waters that eroded states' rights.
Carpenter participated in many state compact negotiations, including ones concerning the Rio Grande,
North Platte, Republican, and Arkansas Rivers. The
complex issues under consideration had to take into
account such matters as the projections of the flow of
streams over long periods of time and assumptions
about the projected rate of western progress. Flood
control and irrigation were important, but conservation and recreation were secondary, given an emphases
on promoting physical and population growth. It could
be said that the long-term civil and generally congenial
OCTOBER 2004