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316
agriculture and labor. Federal action was a total failure.
The British blockade threatened to destroy the “selfrecovering” market, but heavy British purchases kept the
price up. The crisis passed in the autumn of 1915, and with
it went large scale organized anti-British sentiment in the
South.
In his analysis of Hoke Smith and the New Freedom,
1913-1917, Dewey Grantham shows that Smith’s progressivism was limited to measures that were primarily of benefit to the South, and that he “could scarcely conceive of the
government as an active force in an urbanized and industrialized America.” Grantham thinks that Smith was a political opportunist whose vanity and innate rebelliousness undermined his good judgment.
The study of Eugene Talmadge and the New Deal by
Sarah McCulloch Lemmon contains ex cathedra, judgments
on the New Deal, but it does reveal Talmadge’s “duplicity”
in using federal funds to balance the state budget. When his
request for more funds was turned down, Talmadge increased
his opposition to the New Deal program and soon broke
entirely with Washington. Perhaps, Gene’s demagoguery
could have been pointed up a bit more.
As a whole this is a good volume and as such it is an
appropriate tribute to Albert Ray Newsome by his former
students.
Indiana University
Chase C. Mooney
Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power. By Edward H.
Buehrig. (Bloomington : Indiana University Press,
1955. Pp. x, 325. Index. $5.00.)
This would be a slender volume indeed if its author had
confined himself strictly t o discussing Woodrow Wilson and
the balance of power. But Professor Buehrig has compensated for a scarcity of materials bearing directly on his
topic by employing freely his talent for analysis and by
venturing at times into peripheral matters. The result is a
provocative book that will be of interest t o all scholars in
the field of American diplomatic history.
This book to a large extent deals with American foreign
policy in relation to World War I during the period when the
United States was a neutral. It describes the evolution of
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Wilson’s policy from a rigid defense of neutral rights to his
attempts at mediation and an advocacy of a league of nations
as a means to bring about a negotiated peace. Most of this
is a story well known to historians. But by making the most
of his evidence the author has shown that Wilson during the
latter stages of American neutrality eventually developed
an appreciation of the balance of power. This is an interpretation that a few scholars have advanced in sketchy and
tentative form, but no one heretofore has attempted to deal
with the problem as exhaustively as Professor Buehrig. In
fact, he goes so f a r as to say that “concealed in the January
22, 1917 address to the Senate-indeed underlying Wilson’s
whole policy of peace without victory-was an appreciation
of the balance of power point of view: namely, that stability
is to be found in an equilibrium of forces no less than in
moral excellence” (p. 274). To substantiate this claim the
author has to interpret the statement “There must not
be a balance of power, but a community of power” as an inadequate expression of what was in the back of Wilson’s
mind. As proof of his contention Professor Buehrig points
out that in his “peace without victory” speech Wilson implied there should exist among major antagonists a material rather than a legal equality.
The chapter “The Submarine in German Policy” contains a strikingly lucid description of why the German high
command decided to stake so much on unrestricted submarine warfare, and how Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg was
persuaded that even intervention by the United States would
not be sufficient to save England from the effects of a ruthless employment of the submarine by Germany. Professor
Buehrig seriously doubts whether unrestricted submarine
warfare could have been averted. He believes: “Only if
the United States by drastic pressure on the British blockade, could have started a substantial flow of trade with
Germany, would the German military and naval authorities
have been disposed to neglect the opportunities which they
believed the submarine afforded” (p. 83).
The author has little patience with those who argue that
the munitions manufacturers were a cause of American involvement in World War I. And he sees no evidence to suggest that Germany’s resentment was a controlling factor in
her action since “an absence of munitions in the American
Book Reviews
317
trade with the Allies could hardly have altered the chain of
circumstances,” especially when the submarine was aimed
at the whole British economy. He takes more seriously the
charge that loans to the Allies contributed to the entry of
the United States into war but counters with the argument
that “the final crystallization of the American policy of neutrality in the first four months of 1916 cannot reasonably be
attributed to anxiety over the safety of Allied loans, which
had begun to be sizable only in the autumn of 1915” (p. 95).
Another example of the excellent analytical quality of Professor Buehrig’s writing is his demonstration that the United
States could not detect bias for the Allies in its policy because
economic and political factors reinforced each other and could
only have been separated by Germany’s confining her unannounced submarine attacks to armed enemy merchantmen.
In the chapter “Defense of Principle” the difficulties of
Wilson, Bryan, and Lansing in arriving at a sound foreign
policy are ascribed in a large measure to their living in a
nation unaccustomed to dealing with the problems of security.
These men are depicted as too prone to “judge America’s
political connection with the rest of the world in terms of
legal, moral, and philosophical ideas, universal in application”
(p. 150). In the author’s judgment, Wilson displayed a weakness when he based his policy on sentiment and represented
“German autocracy as the cause for America’s embroilment
and democracy as the guarantee of American security”
(p. 150). But this analysis does not take into consideration
the dynamic quality of Wilson’s belief in the mission of
America which predicated that the United States should
stand before the world as a champion of liberty and democratic ideals. It was his devotion to the mission of America
that put driving power into Wilson’s policy and in time gave
vitality to his growing appreciation of the balance of power.
The Wilson of 1916 who began to define nationalism “in
terms of democratic ideals, and identification of those ideals
with the universal interests of mankind” (p. 247) becomes
more comprehensible when it is recalled that this was the
same man who at New Haven in 1912 declared Americans to
be “the trustees of all the confidence of mankind.”
Despite the use of a considerable body of manuscript
and secondary materials there are certain gaps in Professor Buehrig’s research. A notable omission is the absence
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of any reference to Harley Notter’s important book, T h e
Origins of the Foreign Policy of Woodrow Wilson. Also there
is no discussion of the sinking of the “Laconia” which as
Samuel S. Spencer, Jr. in his Decision for War has demonstrated, had considerable influence on both Wilson’s and the
American people’s thinking during the crisis of February and
March, 1917. But these deficiencies do not keep the book
from being a significant and interesting contribution.
Washington, D.C.
John Wells Davidson
T h e Railroads of the South, 1865-1900: A S t u d y in Finance
and Control. By John F. Stover. (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1955. Pp. xviii, 310. Maps,
bibliography, and index. $5.00.)
Professor Stover, associate professor of history at Purdue University, has produced a study of interest not only to
the Lexington group of railroad historians but to economic
and general historians as well. The central theme of his
study is suggested by the subtitle, A S t u d y in Finance and
Control. He traces the shift of the railroads of the South
(defined here as the eight Confederate states east of the
Mississippi plus Louisiana and Kentucky) from being
financed, managed, controlled, and owned chiefly by southerners in the pre-Civil War period to the dominance of northern finance and control by 1900. In so doing, he also gives
an excellent sketch of construction of the southern network
and of the combination and merger movement of the period,
1865-1900.
The introductory chapters present the background to
1865. The impact of the Civil War is described in terms of attempts to fill gaps in the network, problems of equipment and
maintenance, deterioration in service, and military destruction.
In 1865, although “the Southern railroads were in ruins,” the
wrecks belonged to southern individuals, cities, and states.
The extent to which borrowed money or funded debt had been
raised abroad or in the North and the extent of state and
local aid and assistance are portrayed in completing the background picture.
The thirty-five year period, 1865-1900, is divided into
four sub-periods. The first period, 1865-1873, was marked by
the physical rehabilitation of the roads, their equipment and