Reviews of Books
970
ever, were repeatedly schooled in the ways of modesty.
Thus would female manners serve to ward off the
sexual danger posed by the social intercourse of the
sexes.
In the antebellum era, Hemphill argues, manners
served to disguise the contradictions of inequality in a
nominally egalitarian society. Class inequalities were
masked by the silent exclusion of all but the respectable from the code of manners, but the critical innovation in manners, and the critical cultural work they
performed, was in the area of gender. A new "ladies
first" code of etiquette characterized a social world
ostensibly ruled by women. But the deference required
of men to their "rulers" was not that rendered by
inferiors but, quite the opposite, a set of protective
behaviors required by female inferiority. Hemphill
argues that making women the apparent rulers in
social affairs served to compensate them for their
exclusion from economie and political power, thus
providing a "ritual solution" (p. 221) to the disquieting
anomaly of inequality in America. Women may have
bought into this regime, Hemphill speculates, because
it placed the burden of women's sexual safety on men,
requiring them to control their sexual impulses.
Hemphill's keen sensitivity to the ways in which the
code of manners changed over time and varied with
class, age, and gender enables her to detect innovations—peer relations, middling audiences, ladies
first—that signal real social and cultural shifts. Her
findings shed considerable light on current debates
among historians. She argues that, well before the
Revolution, assertive and ambitious Americans were
rejecting aristocratie power and formulating a middleclass ethos based on self-mastery. There was no tension between aristocratie refinement and republican
equality, she insists, since refinement was arrogated
toward egalitarian ends. And she questions the rigid
separation of antebellum life into male and female
spheres, pointing to the "social sphere" as evidence of
a world of experience shared by both sexes.
Questions remain. How are we to distinguish emulation from appropriation of the aristocratie code of
manners? Are Lord Chesterfield's rules for comporting one's body truly the ancestor of the Victorian rules
for controlling physical appetites? How can one establish that the motive for "ladies first" was the need to
mask inequality? Nevertheless, Hemphill makes important and original contributions to debates on our
understanding of the workings of class and gender in
America.
TAMARA PLAKINS THORNTON
State University of New York,
Buffalo
ROBERT C. FULLER. Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in
American Religious History. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.
2000. Pp. ix, 237. $27.50.
The history of American popular religion, religious
innovation, and "unchurched" religious experience
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
outside the confines of sects and denominations provides ample evidence of the use of mind-altering
substances including peyote, LSD, jimson weed, hallucinogenic mushrooms, marijuana, wine, and coffee,
which have served as "elixirs of ecstasy." Here religiously motivated drug use assisted individuals in their
spiritual quest for innerworldly mystical experience.
Drugs were also integral to rituals that sustained
communities of faith. Robert C. Fuller even suggests,
citing psychopharmacology, that human societies actively pursue drug-induced intoxication as a spiritual
quest for ecstasy, akin to a species-specific fourth drive
added to the basic drives of hunger, thirst, and sex. He
develops this interdisciplinary approach, combining
secondary historical sources with anthropological and
sociological writings, to examine four descriptive case
studies: Native American religions and the peyote cult
of the Native American Church; psychedelics and
metaphysical illumination during the counterculture in
the 1960s; wine use among denominations and new
religious movements; and coffee and marijuana in
unchurched spirituality.
Fuller wishes to avoid generalizations about Native
American religions. Nevertheless, he develops an ideal
typical construct that is not situated within any concrete tribal or historical context. According to this
formulaic approach, Native Americans have devised a
religious complex ("New World Narcotic Complex")
that invests sacred meaning to botanicals that aid in
the interaction with the spirit world. Shamans variously employ tobacco, tulpi, datura, and mescal to
attain ritualized ecstasy and to communicate with the
supernatural world by means of trances, vision quests,
and divinations. "The Shamanic Complex"—the ecstatie flights of the soul—allow these specialists to
diagnose and cure, find lost objects, predict the future,
protect persons from supernatural and natural Bangers, and maintain and restore harmonious relations
with the spirit world.
Fuller employs this ideal type in a compelling account of peyotism among Huichol and other southwestern tribes during early Spanish colonization and
the subsequent Americanization and Christianization
of this religion following the failure of the Ghost
Dance revitalization in 1890 and the devastating consequences of reservation life. The pan-Indian movement incorporated in 1918 as the Native American
Church was a syncretism of Christian sacramental
ritual and Native American shamanism. Fuller recounts the decades of state suppression of the ritual
use of peyote and the recent United States Supreme
Court decisions and Religious Freedom Restoration
Act (1993) that have legitimated peyote use. Peyote
religion, however, like other Native religious practices,
was not repressed only because of sacramental drug
use. Missionary groups, Indian boarding schools, Bureau of Indian Affairs agents on reservations, and even
"progressive" tribal factions actively attempted to
eradicate Native language, mythology, and religion.
The discussion of the psychedelic movement care-
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Canada and the United States
fully details the rise of LSD as a medium to achieve
metaphysical illumination of an alternative reality.
Championed by Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and others, Fuller asserts that this movement restructured American religion. Following the
emergence of the Hippie counterculture in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury during the 1967 Summer of
Love and the allure of Eastern mysticisms associated
with the Fourth Great Awakening after World War II,
"psychedelics led a good many Americans down the
road toward a more Romantic, postmodern, and unchurched form of spiritual thinking. Even among those
who didn't use them, psychedelics were a symbol of
metaphysical illumination available to all who venture
past the narrow confines of consensus religion" (p. 89).
Fuller details the ritual use of wine among acculturated mainstream denominations such as Episcopafians, Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews and the ascetic
rejection of wine in the nineteenth century by "grape
juice Christians," (Methodists, Baptists, and evangelicals). Here wine was not an elixir of ecstasy but helped
foster a sense of group identity and community solidarity. Wine also played an important part among new
religious sects. Among the Love Feasts in the Amana
Colony of Iowa, early Mormonism in the time of
Joseph Smith, and the religious enthusiasm of Thomas
Lake Harris's Brotherhood of the New Life, wine
promoted "social jollification," holy intoxication, and
ecstatic experiences.
The final case study examines the emerging postmodern unchurched spirituality exemplified by "aesthetic delight" and the valorization of natural pleasures through the use of coffee as a sacramental
beverage in coffee house culture and "marijuana and
the celebration of interiority." This chapter fails to
persuade that people in search of postmodern spirituality heighten their attainment of a transcendental
Other through these drugs in these settings.
Each chapter-length case study develops a discrete
illustration of Fuller's thesis that drugs assisted Americans in achieving spiritual attainments and community. It is unclear throughout this book whether the
author's central focus is ecstatic religion or druginduced religiosity. Fuller struggles in his concluding
chapter to ascertain the general historical or sociological significance of this "quest for ecstasy" in America.
To answer this question, he might have attempted a
comparative analysis of religious enthusiasm and ecstatic religion in America, considering religious innovations that eschewed drugs such as the evangelical
pietism of the Great Awakenings, the Holiness movement, Pentecostalism, early Shakerism and Methodism, and many others forms of popular religion. Ann
Taves, in Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Difference from Wesley to James
(1999), offers important insights into the historical
significance of ecstatic religion in America.
Instead, Fuller introduces tangential discussions of
the legality and extra-legality of religious drug use,
poses the question of whether or not drug-induced
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
971
ecstasies make valid truth claims, and attempts to
define under what conditions drug-induced ecstasy
promotes "mature spirituality." Despite its limitations,
the book introduces an important and neglected subject in American religion that should encourage renewed interest by historians and social scientists.
JULIUS H. RUBIN
Saint Joseph College
BILOINE WHITING YOUNG and MELVIN L. FOWLER.
Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis.
Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 2000. Pp. xi,
366. Cloth $55.00, paper $24.95.
In the 800s, ancestors of modern Native Americans
began to develop what became the Mississippean
culture, a way of life that lasted until the first Europeans invaded the Southeast. Based on extensive maize
cultivation, this society developed settlements connected by trade relations and stretching from Minnesota to Mississippi. By about 950, the Mississippeans
living at what is now called the American Bottom in
Illinois, just east of St. Louis, came together to begin
the settlement of Cahokia. This community, which got
its name from one of the tribes of the later Illinois
Confederacy, became the largest center of Native
population in America north of Mexico. Stretching
more than six miles in each direction, the city had a
population of between 15,000 and 25,000. Within its
boundary stood at least 100 earthen mounds, some
more than 100 feet high and covering an area larger
than a football field. Because of its size, the large
population strained the local resources badly. Gradually they depleted the forests, and that led to increased
erosion and flooding that disrupted food production.
Then, having to deal with the garbage and sewage for
15,000 or more people posed difficulties. Surviving
evidence suggests that when Cahokia's rulers proved
unable to deal with these threats their city faded away.
This book traces the history of archaeological awareness and work at the Cakohika site and the professional career of Melvin Fowler, one of the pioneer
scientists to work there. From the 1769, when George
Rogers Clark described the site to The American
Magazine, to the 1950s, amateurs dominated investigations of the mounds. Then Fowler began his decadeslong career working first for the Illinois State Museum
and later for the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He and other scholars faced repeated shortages of
funds and the continuing efforts of farmers, builders,
and land owners to use the thousands of tons of soil in
the mounds for local construction projects.
The federal highway survey accompanying the building of the interstate highway system in the 1960s
brought an urgency and an opportunity to do largescale, serious investigations at Cahokia. Guided by
aerial photographs, scholars located dozens of
mounds, the outlines of defensive palisades, and the
sites of dwellings and temples. Repeated archaeological research since then has raised frequent debates
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