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Reviews of Books and Films
Donna C. Schuele's well-written, thorough, and
thoughtful discussion of the evolution of married
women's property rights, women's suffrage, and the
right of women to practice law in California is a model
for further state history discussions on this topic,
particularly relating to Texas, Utah, and New Mexico.
Judson A. Grenier's chapter, entitled" 'Officialdom':
California State Government, 1849-1879," although
somewhat bland in its composition, is essential as a
reference, for it provides a comprehensive listing of
officeholders from governors to superintendents of
public instruction. Edward Leo Lyman has written
engagingly of local governments in California. He
covers significant ground with his study of San Bernardino all the way to San Francisco. Not only are the
issues for county officers and courts carefully considered, but Lyman offers a variety of nuances rarely seen
in the historical literature on this neglected subject.
Robert Chandler concludes with a consideration of the
role of the federal government in California. What is
of import in his chapter is its documentation of federal
influence during California's early history few other
historians have observed. The U.S. government had an
impact on the history of pre-Civil War California in a
number of ways from early military rule and Indian
policies to transportation, control of the sea coast, and
the placement of a U.S. mint in the Golden State.
This volume has much to offer the general reader
and the professional historian, and its editors and
authors can take pride in its fine contribution to
California's history.
JOHN R. WUNDER
University of Nebraska,
Lincoln
FRANK VAN Nuvs, Americanizing the West: Race, Immigrants, and Citizenship, 1890-1930. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2002. pp. xv, 294. $35.00.
More squarely than any other recent work of scholarship, this book by Frank Van Nuys addresses the
Americanization movement in its classic early twentieth century years as a great reform cause, a prospect
that Edward George Hartmann did not quite capture
in The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant (1948),
that Gerd Korman in Industrialization, Immigrants, and
Americanizers: The View from Milwaukee, 1866-1921
(1967) did not presume to entertain, and that even
John Higham in his magisterial Strangers in the Land:
Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955) did
not pursue to closure.
Van Nuys places the Americanization movement in
a distinctively novel context. He is the first historian to
select the semi-mythic, all-American West, that other
United States, extending from the Mississippi River to
the Pacific Ocean, as the focus for his research. He
then turns to the crucial juncture in the West's modernization, even as that vast region was being driven to
confront its virtually unacknowledged and formidable
ethnic diversity. As Walter Nugent has reminded us,
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
urbanization and industrialization at the turn of the
twentieth century were transforming America's once
remote, indeterminate, and exploited frontier colony
into "an integral part of the United States" (p. 3). In
short, nation-building with its commitment to order,
efficiency, centralization, and standardization was being equipped with the keys for implementing the
absolute mandate to unite a divided America in the
throes of a supreme national crisis. A purposively
formative process and no incidental engagement, nation-building had received the blessing of Frances
Kellar of Chicago and New York, whom Higham
called "a presiding genius of the still amorphous
movement for Americanization." Most conspicuously
of all, in California Progressivism sprang up as a
full-throated, innovative political culture with the Lincoln-Roosevelt-Republican League opening the way to
singular triumphs for popular government. When the
1912 Progressive ticket of Theodore Roosevelt and
Governor Hiram Johnson, "the party of social justice,"
endorsed the first party plank (drafted by Kellor and
Jane Addams) ever designated to promote the welfare
of the immigrant, the new West rocketed to national
attention.
This book is so wide-ranging and eclectic in its scope
that it is essential to identify the author's cogent
guidepost chapter titles and part titles. Encapsulating
his topical concerns, methods, and tone of historical
treatment, they also highlight the plethora of Americanizing agents and institutions that he has chosen to
address. The opening chapter, "The Stuff from Which
Citizens Are Made," with its part titles, "The Importance of Being White Pioneers" and "Immigrant Wests
and Racial Constructs," leaves no doubt of the centrality of the region's preemptive layered racialist
frame of mind, represented most famously by the
"racial frontier" between whites and others ordained
by Chester Rowell, the preeminent Progressive intellectual. Chapter two, "Progressivism, Americanization,
and War," proceeds to the heart of the matter with
three parts entitled "Progressive Americanization and
the California Commission of Immigration and Housing," "Western Progressives, Councils of Defense and
Wartime Americanization," and "Post-War Americanization in the West," wherein English, naturalization,
and citizenship dominate the bonding agenda. Chapter
three, "Some Information on Capital and Labor," with
part titles "Employers, Unions, and New Immigrants,"
"The Wobbly Menace: Labor Radicalism in the West,"
and "Industrial Americanization," relates to the itinerant seasonal and cyclically employed unskilled disparate labor force (largely of South and East European immigrants) in the mines, mills, and smelters,
and unskilled Japanese and Mexican laborers in the
fields often confronting business leaders with instrumentalities of their own. Chapter four, "Education and
Citizenship," focuses directly on the often hodgepodge
classroom pedagogics of the Americanization crusade
under four topics: "English, Citizenship and Night
Schools," "Americanizing Immigrant Women," "Uni-
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2004
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
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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-
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