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Reviews of Books and Films
including dozens of interviews with participants as well
as many archives, by a scholar knowledgeable about
theater and familiar with its personnel and practices. It
discusses summer stock across the nation, choosing
breadth over depth of treatment, a survey rather than
a case-study approach. LoMonaco presents the results
in explanatory introductions to chapters followed by
vignettes of specific theaters that illustrate the points
of the chapters.
LoMonaco locates the origins of summer stock in
the growth of the middle-class tradition of vacations in
the mountains or at the beaches. This afforded a ready
market for evening entertainment in the woods. The
demand attracted ventures into summer theater in the
country and sustained their success, often as long as
the resort area itself thrived. Accompanying this trend
was the Little Theater movement, which spawned
other theaters in similar rural resort locales. The most
famous among these was the Provincetown Players.
Two things made it possible to combine arts with
commerce: owners with an interest in drama who were
satisfied with simply making ends meet to keep their
theater open, and the very low costs of production
compared to Broadway. The people who founded and
led summer stock companies were, by and large, young
men of wealth, often from Ivy League schools, who had
trained in drama at college.
LoMonaco claims that unionization of actors triggered a series of changes in the mid to late 1930s,
requiring higher salaries and more profitable venues,
making it difficult to sustain less commercial, more
artistic and adventuresome companies. This encouraged productions built around visiting star performers
to attract larger audiences and to balance budgets. As
a result, summer stock became less a place for novices
to practice and more a paid holiday for Broadway
stars. Some stars even began to organize their own
productions, with a director and a few core actors who
would tour summer theaters. LoMonaco does a good
job of relating these changes in summer stock to the
larger theater history of the United States.
A subsequent solution to cost problems was to stage
musicals, which were very popular and profitable in the
1950s but required larger venues. The solution was
theater in a circus tent instead of the traditional
converted barn. The stage was surrounded by the
audience on all sides, and scenery was dispensed with.
The book concludes with a glimpse at summer
theater in the 1960s, by which time the star system and
union wages had increased expenses, and television
and the decline of weeklong vacations in regional
summer resorts shrank audiences, driving theaters to
seek new ways to keep their doors open. Some went
nonprofit and sought subsidies; others dismantled their
stock companies and rented to amateurs or touring
combinations. Yet others found a special niche market. But summer stock would no longer be a significant
part of American theater and drama.
This is a book of stories about the people who made
summer stock. Much of it is told in personal, biograph-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ical terms, depicting the intimate connection between
the personalities of leaders and the success of their
companies. It draws the reader in, especially if one
recognizes a place one has visited. And LoMonaco
does a fine job of recounting and explaining the rise
and fall of summer stock. Unfortunately the story is
not placed in the larger context of recreation and
leisure, of middle-class culture, and of America in the
1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This would have added significantly to its value.
RICHARD BUTSCH
Rider University
STEPHANIE A. CARPENTER. On the Farm Front: The
Women's Land Army in World War II. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2003. Pp. viii, 214. $40.00.
The story of Rosie the Riveter is a familiar one with its
emphasis on industrial work for women previously
reserved for men only. During World War II, millions
of women entered well-paying factory jobs to churn
out military equipment at a record pace in order to win
the war. In the process, they broke long-standing
gender barriers confining women to seasonal and
unskilled blue-collar work that paid far less than the
jobs to which they now had access. Learning how to
rivet, weld, and handle complex technology in defense
training classes, women flocked to war production
urban areas to fatten their paychecks and do their bit
to bring American soldiers home. The image of these
women in the media was an egalitarian one, but it
conveyed the ultimately misleading message that most
of them were middle class and eager to become
full-time homemakers once peace was declared. In
fact, most were working-class women who had been in
the labor force before Pearl Harbor, and eighty percent of them wanted to keep their war jobs.
It has taken decades for this story to be told with any
kind of historical accuracy, and most of the attention
to women in World War II has concerned the urban
industrial worker. Stephanie A. Carpenter has now
written a book on gender changes on the rural front in
her thorough description of the Women's Land Army
(WLA) , formed in 1943 as part of the Emergency
Farm Labor Program. This program was designed to
provide labor power for the nation's farms where it was
needed and to make up for profound labor shortages
caused by military recruitment and migration to urban
centers. The WLA was created to encourage the
employment of women over the age of eighteen, and
three million ultimately served in it within a variety of
farm operations. Carpenter makes the case that this
rural story of gender change has been ignored for too
long and that women broke barriers in this arena just
as they did in the industrial sector. In both instances,
she argues, the changes permanently altered stereotypes of women that had limited their ability to earn a
living.
Carpenter provides a nice historical context for the
WLA by beginning her study with thumbnail sketches
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Canada and the United States
of the Women's Land Army of America in World War
I, New Deal work programs of the 1930s, and state or
private labor initiatives of the early 1940s. All paved
the way for recruiting women into farm labor during
World War II on a national level. She also reminds us
of women's traditional role on the family farm as
primarily that of food raiser and cook, with the heavy
field equipment left to men. The WLA challenged that
division of labor, although Carpenter points out that
the Great Plains and the South were greatly resistant
to such gender changes and largely refused to make
them.
The way that race affected employment of women
during the war in crop and dairy production was
profound according to the study, as white women
refused to accept African Americans in the WLA in
the South (although black women had been used in the
fields since slavery) and southern farmers largely refused to hire white women for this work. Similarly in
the West and Great Plains, Mexicans were primarily
used as migrant laborers, and there was greater resistance to incorporating white women into harvesting
operations. Although Carpenter covers race in her
discussion and includes a photo of black women, I
longed for more extensive coverage of how the war
affected employment of nonwhite women on farms. I
suspect that this is where the dominant story is for
Mexican-American and Native American women during the war, while agriculture continued to be a prime
source of employment for black women even though
many of them left such work for better paying industrial jobs in urban centers. No one has yet told this
story in the detail it deserves. I would have felt better
about how race is handled in this book had chapters
been devoted to such women. Instead, they are largely
invisible within a text that suggests how central race
was to employment of women on farms.
Another area that could have been explored in
greater depth is the ideological place of rural women
in American culture and how World War II affected
this picture. Carpenter has exhaustively researched the
WLA and its various activities, and her book should
serve as the starting point for anyone interested in
gender issues on the wartime farm front. Perhaps
another book is waiting in the wings for Carpenter or
some other historian who will tell us how the white
farm woman has evolved in American culture from
being an icon of the pioneer, an emblem of Manifest
Destiny, to a symbol of sexual innocence and wholesomeness. How did the WLA intersect with this iconography, and what was the postwar image that
emerged? In contrast, how have nonwhite women on
the frontier and on the family farm been portrayed?
Gendered racialized attitudes toward farm work and
rural life are deeply embedded in American mythography, and a study of the WLA lends itself to highlighting those attitudes. The legacy of Rosie the Riveter is that women can and should do all kinds of work.
Although Carpenter makes a good case that the WLA
left a parallel legacy for the farm, the disappearance of
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177
the family farm and continued mechanization of farm
labor has made that legacy shrink in importance. The
more important story, in my mind, is the way agricultural practices in World War II changed our conception of women in general and rural women in particular, white and nonwhite.
MAUREEN HONEY
University of Nebraska,
Lincoln
FRANKLIN ODO. No Sword to Bury: Japanese Americans
in Hawai'i During World War II. (Asian American
History and Culture.) Philadelphia: Temple University
Press. 2004. Pp. 328. $19.95.
Seldom has a work drawn from military history provided such a rich assortment of provocative reflections
on ethnic group identity, racism, and social forces.
Franklin Odo tells the story of the Varsity Victory
Volunteers (VVV), a group of Nisei (largely college
students) from Hawaii joined the Hawaiian Territorial
Guard in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor. Discharged on racial grounds by mistrustful
military and government authorities, these Nisei then
volunteered to support the war effort as manual
laborers breaking rocks and digging ditches. Their
stalwart service so impressed Army commanders that
they approved the organization of a volunteer all-Nisei
combat team, in which the VVV men enlisted. This
team ultimately became part of the famous 442nd
Regimental Combat Team.
Although the VVV has long been celebrated in
Japanese-American communities, notably as a springboard for the creation of Nisei soldiers, and has been
commemorated in reunions and stories, Odo diligently
fleshes out its largely unknown history, creatively
combining archival research with oral history to forge
a new and expanded view not just of the VVV but of
the formative prewar history of Hawaiian Nisei.
Traditionally, histories of the wartime Hawaiian
experience have emphasized the unfailing patriotism
of the Nisei soldiers and stressed their "double victory" over fascism abroad and bigotry at home. During
the postwar years, Nisei veterans (notably Daniel
Inouye) succeeded in attaining positions of political
power, and in the process they democratized Hawaii.
To his credit, Odo is not content simply to reiterate
this triumphalist (and assimilationist) taie. Rather,
building on work by scholars such as Eileen Tamura
and Gary Okihiro, he uses the story of the VVV to
critique the ways in which the wartime JapaneseAmerican experience has been absorbed into a "model
minority" myth, "informed by a persistent justification
of the status quo" (p. 8). According to this myth, the
wartime heroism of Japanese Americans was based
primarily on Japanese cultural attributes such as hard
work and respect for education, which enabled them to
adjust successfully to mainstream society and to
achieve postwar success-thus serving to reinforce
unrealistic and conservative notions that American life
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