Book Reviews
67
analytical. Mayer is good at characterizing people and poor at analyzing
issues. This is a n unfortunate division of talents for this particular
project, since the GOP usually emphasized issues and party organization rather than men. Mayer does not probe very deeply into the sources
of Republican strength after the Civil War and leaves unasked or undeveloped many arresting questions concerning voting habits of minority
groups, farmers, and workers who were strongly attached to the party.
The book is poorest in dealing with the period from Grant to Theodore
Roosevelt, where it seldom rises above doubtful textbook stereotypes.
The author leaves the impression that the party succeeded in this long
period because i t was corrupt and evasive rather than because i t appealed to voters on significant issues. Though still a common view,
this interpretation of the party has been sharply and effectively
challenged in many recent works. The book is best in dealing with the
twentieth century, though i t only implies answers to the basic political
question of those years: what happened to Republican leadership after
Theodore Roosevelt, and why did the party’s coalition of support vanish?
Mayer analyzes major and minor figures well. His judgments of
Lincoln and the party’s founders a r e shrewd and stimulating. He is
much too charitable, however, toward Theodore Roosevelt, attributing
to him many accomplishments belonging rightly to subordinate figures
in the Progressive movement. He simply ignores many of Roosevelt’s
questionable activities and dangerous tendencies. Mayer’s discussion of
Hoover is well balanced and thoughtful, as are his comments on Alfred
M. Landon and the Republican moderates of the 1930’s and 1940’s. He is
much too generous with Eisenhower, who emerges as the pure vanilla he
doubtless was, but who also requires some pointed historical assessments
in view of the contradictory Republican attitudes he symbolized.
Since he does not analyze very many major issues or treat much
with organizational matters, Mayer has not really written a history
of the Republican party but a history of its national campaigns set
in a general discussion of the events around them. He undertook a
difficult task. To write the history of a major political party is to
write the history of a country, and his work ought to be judged first
in that light. This book is seldom penetrating and covers only the
high spots of Republican history, but i t is a useful general introduction
to the party’s public national history.
University o f Texas
H. Wayne Morgan
The Teaching of Amem’can History in High Schools. By Maurice G.
Baxter, Robert H. Ferrell, and John E. Wiltz. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964. Pp. 160. Index. $3.00.)
Books in American History: A Basic List for High Schools. By John
E. Wiltz. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964. Pp. ix,
150. One hundred selected titles, author index. Paperback, $1.00.)
The Teaching of American History in High Schools deserves careful
consideration by teachers, professors of both history and education,
supervisors, librarians, administrators, school boards, and downtown
68
Indiana Magazine of Histow
quarterbacks. Such consideration should lead many in each group to
change their ways.
From interviews with some two hundred Indiana teachers of American history, questionnaire surveys of all such teachers and their school
librarians, and personal experiences and beliefs, the authors report that
American history is generally poorly taught. Much fault is laid to
teachers who were not intellectual to begin with, took too much education
and too little history, and read little or no history outside their formal
preparation.
The authors say frankly that teachers do not practice the tenets that
they are supposed to have learned in education classes, but rely chiefly
on the textbook and on loose discussion and questioning. The products
of such teaching are described as learning little history, lacking ability
to read and write, and distracted by extra-curricular activities. Suggested remedies are more lectures bolstered by more quizzes, discipline,
and teacher preparation, less discussion, less supervised study, abolition
of study halls, more homework, both essay and factual tests, less
current events, less audiovisual, and perhaps less television (p. 88).
Others share the blame with teachers. Most libraries are woefully
inadequate and are often centers for social rather than intellectual
activities. Librarians themselves deserve praise, but they get little help
from teachers and a r e overworked, especially at custodial and disciplinary duties. Instruction benefits little from the typical department head,
principal, central office administrator, or parent.
Two suggestions are made for correcting the sorry state of affairs.
School boards could do much, but the main solution offered is to “return”
the preparation of history teachers and the supervision of high school
teaching of history to college and university departments of history.
The book is f a r more accurate than the many published caricatures
of public education, but i t is not a “photograph” as claimed in the
Foreword. It is, rather, a painting in which hues and emphases a r e
determined by the artists’ feelings and convictions. A photograph would
give due space to the admitted proportion of good teachers. It would
show the relationship among different kinds of history and between
history and the contemporary social sciences. It would show that history
textbooks are written largely by historians. Truly supervised study
would appear desirable, and reading and writing would not appear as
well taught through examination as by instruction. Instruction in American history, poor as it may be by absolute standards, would appear
better than that in the other social studies and better than ever before.
(The history of education has been neglected by professional historians.)
Furthermore, a photograph would show that college and university
departments of history generally show little concern for the teaching
of history.
The long paragraph on pages 34 and 35 is true, but it is only
half the story. The other half can be shown by paraphrasing i t in
reverse. In looking at the professor problem, an interesting point appears, namely the lack of concern for teaching on the part of many
history professors. Seldom do they think of themselves a s members of
the teaching “tribe.” Most of them look upon themselves as historians
Book Reviews
69
who happen to teach. They, therefore, associate good teaching, when
they think of it at all, with knowledge of history to the exclusion of
teaching techniques. Many veteran professors have said that the teaching of history must always remain secondary to their study of history.
The reviewer has seen this attitude in conversation with professors
eager to talk about their own research, never about methods and
materials of teaching. Few of them read any journal about teaching.
The number of professors of history who belong to the National Council
for the Social Studies is pitifully small. That only a handful of the
thousands of professors of history should have felt sufficiently identified
with the teaching profession to join this national body is a startling
fact. Social Education, the journal of the Council, draws as many
blanks when put t o history professors as do the names of Erling Hunt,
I. James Quillen, or Edgar Wesley. And i t goes without saying that
most history professors, despite abundant opportunity on their own
campuses and in their own classes, never dream of engaging in pedagogical research and writing. The genuine concern of Indiana University
professors of history for school teaching is almost unique, but one
questions whether so many of them would have shown this concern
if the Lilly Endowment had refused financial support.
Books in American History is a n excellent and unusually well annotated bibliography. It will prove invaluable to teachers and librarians
in building school library collections; but i t is to be hoped that Ralph
and Marian Brown’s American history book list, soon to be published
by the National Council for the Social Studies, will be more helpful for
the lower half of high school readers.
There a r e public school people i:i Indiana who feel that they have
had more than their share of criticism recently without the addition of
a new volume of i t by Hoosier historians. Indiana schools, however, are
fortunate that many professors of history in their state university not
only criticize public education, but also seriously t r y to help improve it.
They write textbooks. They participate in programs about public
education and, more surprisingly, sometimes attend such programs
without participating. They conduct special courses for teachers both
on and off the campus. They visit schools, especially classrooms of
their students. They serve as school consultants. Three of them, with
the help of others and of non-historians including the trustees of the
Lilly Endowment, produced the books under consideration here. To the
best of this reviewer’s knowledge, the schools of no other state are
so well served by its own historians.
Duke Universitu
William H. Cartwright
Southern. History in the Making: Pioneer Historians of the South. By
Wendell Holmes Stephenson. ([Baton Rouge] : Louisiana State
University Press, 1964. Pp. ix, 294. Notes, index. $7.60.)
This volume is intended a s a tribute to a group of historians who
made important contributions to southern history in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. The author, while born and educated in
Indiana, has spent nearly thirty years in the South, teaching at the