Canada and the United States
[American] culture and could be said to create culture
at least as much as each model responded to it" (p. 93).
To suggest that cultural change is a product of organizational imperatives rather than vice versa, however,
requires the author to go far beyond the few pages he
devotes to this controversial point; Perrow stands on a
thin evidential foundation in these and other propositions. (To his credit, he admits it.)
Perrow confronts an even more serious empirical
challenge in trying to explain the failure of viable
economic alternatives, specifically the decline of smallscale manufacturing in Philadelphia. Relying on Scranton's Figured Tapestry: Production, Markets, and Power
in Philadelphia Textiles, 1885-1941 (1989), which challenges simplistic theoretical explanations for the decline of flexible production mills in Philadelphia, Perrow simply concludes "it is a sobering reminder that
much of organizational life and behavior is simply
beyond the generalizing powers of analysis at this
time" (p. 93).
In the second part of the book, Perrow explores the
"second big business" of the nineteenth century: the
railroads. Why did railroads privatize so quickly? Why
were they so poorly regulated and for so long? Here he
probes the organizational logic of railroad development, relying heavily on the work of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Walter Licht, Gerald Berk, and especially
Frank Dobbin's Forging Industrial Policy (1994). Challenging Chandler's explanations for structural change,
Perrow suggests that there were several available and
equally efficient developmental options open to midnineteenth-century railroads; the logic of efficiency did
not dictate a single path toward integration and centralization. Taking a comparative approach (as he had
in exploring the divergent paths of Pennsylvania and
Massachusetts mills), Perrow examines rail industry
development in the United States, Great Britain, and
France. Although state power figured differently in
each nation, in many ways the three did not radically
diverge until well into the nineteenth century; railroad
development in the United States "started out with a
well-established tradition of mixed public-private ownership or government ownership, with substantial regulation" (p. 158). By the 1860s, U.S. railroads, unlike
those in Europe, were privatized, almost unregulated,
and well on their way to becoming the behemoths that
Grangers and Populists would rail against. As in
Europe, state-owned railroads, like the Western &
Atlantic Railroad in Georgia, had been able to operate
efficiently and profitably. There was nothing inevitable
in bureaucratic national consolidation; departmentally
structured regional railroads and firms relying on
contracting out were both viable alternatives to centralized rail development. Both were destroyed by the
organizational power of the nation's larger railroads.
The explanations offered by others-including imperatives of efficiency and culturally rooted emphases on
economic individualism and opposition to big government-are all strongly refuted by the author.
Taking on Chandler's structuralist and functionalist
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
533
arguments, and Dobbin's neo-institutional views, Perrow's discussion of corruption is, to this reader, one of
the most interesting and compelling parts of his book.
Perrow treats instances of corporate corruptionbribery, illegal and deceptive financial dealings, and
violation of regulatory statutes-as important instruments for concentrating wealth and power (pp. 144,
155). These, along with more "legal" exercises of
power, were important determinant variables in the
rise of corporate bureaucracies. Corruption and bribery, Perrow argues, are more compelling explanations
for any failures to regulate railroads than cultural
explanations.
Perrow's book does not offer a fully realized and
airtight argument of his thesis, but his case is clearly
and cogently expressed, and his refutations of alternative theories are often strong and convincing. This is a
useful and stimulating book that will generate much
controversy and, I hope, additional research. The
passionate intensity of the author and the lack of
obfuscation in his arguments are refreshing.
GERALD ZAHAVI
State University of New York,
Albany
SUSAN WILEY HARDWICK. Mythic Galveston: Reinventing
America's Third Coast. (Creating the North American
Landscape.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 175. $42.95.
Celebrated by singer Glen Campbell, Galveston is a
place that invites visitors to stroll along its beaches and
marvel at its historic buildings. Yet for generations of
immigrants, it was also the Ellis Island of the South.
This slim but meticulous study recaptures the lives of
those immigrants and how they shaped this Texas city.
Susan Wiley Hardwick, a cultural geographer, argues
that it was the relentless boosting by merchants and
the waves of immigrants who passed through
Galveston that made it a "key part of a distinct and as
yet undefined geographic region" (p. 10). It is in the
city's vernacular forms and archival materials that she
finds evidence for Galveston as the Iynchpin for America's "Third Coast" (p. 150), building on the work of
her noted colleague, Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov, along
with the late John Brinckerhoff Jackson. But for all of
its strong insights into Galveston's built and social
environment, Hardwick's book tends to overlook the
historical complexities that put the city on the map.
From its beginnings, Galveston's rise rested on the
ability to attract capital and residents. Built on little
more than a grassy sandbar, its fortunes rose with the
expanding cotton economy that dominated Texas after
its rebellion against Mexico. The expansion of cotton
brought enslaved African Americans to the island
along with migrants from overseas. German immigrants followed, and many stayed instead of moving on
to the hill country further inland. Galveston's Germans, however, did not fully participate in the political
system; voting laws effectively concentrated power in
APRIL 2004
534
Reviews of Books and Films
the hands of native-born whites prior to the Civil War.
Following the war, still more immigrants from Italy,
Poland, Greece, and Mexico, along with free blacks,
poured into the city, but political fragmentation did
not yield rigid segregation. To be sure, the white
merchant elite continued to dominate, but the social
effects of dispersal yielded a rich, interlocking mosaic
of churches and homes that gave Galveston an integrated, unified feel.
Inventing both the city and the region, Hardwick
concludes, also required overcoming environmental
shortcomings. Prior to the Civil War, the island relied
on steamships; afterwards it belatedly turned to railroads in a bid to outflank its rival, Houston. In this
sense, Galveston's development paralleled that of
more populous New Orleans. Both cities faced down
severe yellow fever epidemics; both were continually
challenged by other cities upriver and inland. But the
Great Storm of 1900 delivered a crippling blow. Hardwick avoids a simple tale of decline by carefully
tracking how citizens reformed local government, first
by passing the Galveston Plan, which put power in the
hands of municipal directors elected at large, and then
by empowering politicians to reorganize the island's
physical space. Engineers raised street grades and built
a massive seawall, seventeen feet above mean low tide,
to keep at bay. Although Galveston continued to lose
trade and residents, reforms and rebuilding after the
1900 hurricane prevented this trickle from turning into
a flood.
It was the end of immigration, however, that would
set Galveston past apart from Galveston present. In
the book's most intriguing chapter, Hardwick tells how
the "Galveston Movement," a short-lived effort to
redirect Jewish immigration from New York to the
Midwest, brought the world to the city once again.
Movement leaders selected Galveston over New Orleans because of the city's preexisting immigration
facilities and rail links. Beginning in 1907, movement
workers met Russian and Polish refugees fleeing pogroms at the docks before sending them onto their new
homes. Hardwick stresses that it was the concatenation
of Galveston's small but influential Jewish community
and international organizations, such as the Jewish
Immigrants' Information Bureau, that made the movement possible. But its success was short-lived. By the
beginning of World War I, popular sentiment had
turned against immigration, but before the movement
collapsed, it rescued at least ten thousand people while
changing the religious complexion of America's heartland.
In her conclusion, Hardwick argues that when the
bottom fell out of the cotton and shipping economy
during the Depression, city leaders settled on heritage
tourism as the island's new draw. She suggests that this
new gambit might hold promise because Galveston,
although still dominated by its white elites, has maintained an "integrated residential and commercial landscape" (p. 142) typical of America's Third Coast. Yet
her argument implies that the city was more of a
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
gigantic melting pot, something akin to what tourist
boosters proclaim today, rather than the flawed historical product of race, class, and politics characteristic of
many southern cities. Hardwick ultimately details the
geography of diversity in Galveston but not the geography of power that underlies it. As a result, she is wise
not to claim too much, saying that she offers only a
prologue to a much larger story. Her well-documented
study should inspire others to uncover the more complex past lurking behind Galveston's historic facades.
MATTHEW W. KLINGLE
Bowdoin College
ERIC SANDWEISS, editor. St. Louis in the Century of
Henry Shaw: A View beyond the Garden Wall. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2003. Pp. xviii, 251.
$32.50.
During the nineteenth century, St. Louis, Missouri,
became one of the nation's largest and most important
cities. From a frontier town of 4,600 at its incorporation in 1823, by 1900, St. Louis stood as the nation's
fourth largest city with nearly 600,000 residents. The
new metropolis served as a great emporium drawing
on Mississippi River trade and extensive rail connections to its hinterland and beyond. The city also
developed a manufacturing base of considerable import, while its institutions and civic leaders became
models for the nation. As with a number of older river
cities, St. Louis history writing recently experienced a
mini-renaissance including important works by contributors to this volume.
This collection of nine essays, commissioned by the
Missouri Botanical Garden, the Missouri Historical
Society, Tower Grove Park, and Washington University, emerged from a St. Louis conference held in 2000
on the one hundredth anniversary of Henry Shaw's
birth. Shaw, a successful and wealthy St. Louis businessman and philanthropist, emigrated to the city from
England in 1819; he died in 1889, having contributed
significantly to the city and the book's sponsoring
organizations. The essays trace St. Louis's nineteenthcentury transformation into a western metropolis of
"skyscrapers and steel factories, ragtime dance halls
and German beer gardens, kosher groceries and
Gilded Age mansions" (p. 7).
The book covers a range of topics including public
culture, "biographical sketches of representative
men," African Americans, immigration, economic history, scientific research, public education, theater culture, and literary life. Several essays stand out for their
sharp insights into St. Louis and U. S. history. Walter
Kamphoefner places his essay on nineteenth-century
immigration in the context of a "majority-minority"
city, an issue of current and historical interest. As St.
Louis evolved from a French village into an American
metropolis, immigrants (and migrants) profoundly influenced the city, especially those from Germany and
Ireland. By 1860, immigrants constituted half of St.
Louis's population, but Irish and German Americans
APRIL 2004