An American Dissenter: The Life of Algie Martin Simons, 1870-1950 by Kent Kreuter;Gretchen KreuterReview by: Henry F. BedfordThe American Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 3 (Feb., 1970), pp. 937-938Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1854653 .

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Americas 937

the scalawags, but balks at considering the carpetbaggers in a new light. Few of the generalizations are genuinely new, however; they are either restatements or amalgams of older and newer interpretations. Nearly three-quarters of the book treats the years before passage of the Reconstruction Acts in I867, a period about which we already know much; the remainder of the volume, covering the I867-I877 period about which we need to know more, is disjointed and episodic. This book stands as an important addition to the growing number of Reconstruction syntheses, but it gives us little that is new. Princeton University JAMES M. MCPHERSON

RAIL ROUTES SOUTH: LOUISVILLE'S FIGHT FOR THE SOUTHERN MARKET, I865-I872. By Leonard P. Curry. (Lexington: University of Ken- tucky Press. I969. Pp. X, I50. $5.95.)

AT the end of the Civil War in I865 Louisville was in a favorable position to reopen and hold the trade of a large part of the South. Its prime asset was the Louisville- controlled Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which had thrived on war traffic and which held a fine strategic position for the postwar trade. The dominance of river transportation was fading. Cincinnati, with its trading area primarily to the north- ward, had to depend on the rivers for its southern trade, except for the adjacent area in Kentucky. Cincinnati's efforts to secure through rail shipments by a rail con- nection at Louisville were essentially defeated when the latter city successfully insisted upon a difference in track gauge between the Cincinnati line and the connecting lines at Louisville. Evansville, too, sought to secure access by rail to, the southern trade, but it was restricted by Louisville's enterprise in building the controlling railroads.

Cincinnati's great effort to reach the South was concentrated upon the con- struction of the Cincinnati Southern Railroad from Cincinnati to Chattanooga. Much of Professor Curry's book deals with the efforts of Cincinnati to get the approval of the Kentucky legislature for this enterprise and with the opposition of Louisville and the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company. In I872 the legislature gave its approval, and construction of the road got under way. It was opened in i88o.

This is a short book, and the author does very well what he set out to do. He gives us a needed building block for the construction of the story of the commercial and railroad rivalries of the South. He makes some contribution, too, to a better understanding of the local political history of Kentucky. Although Curry has done his own research, much of the story has been previously accessible in several works on the Louisville and Nashville and the Cincinnati Southern Railroads. The related ground that he does not cover is vast, but it is probably unfair to criticize a book for what it is not. Curry has added illumination to a difficult and important subject.

University of Alabama JAMES F. DOSTER

AN AMERICAN DISSENTER: THE LIFE OF ALGIE MARTIN SIMONS, I870-1950. By Kent and Gretchen Kreuter. (Lexington: University of Ken- tucky Press. I969. Pp. xii, 236. $7.50.)

In the eighty years before his death in I950, Algie Martin Simons gradually outgrew his youthful socialist militance and returned to the Republican faith of his forebears. Although he broke with the Socialist party over American entry into the First World

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938 Reviews of Books

War, his political and ideological migration from Left to Right was less abrupt than his departure from the party indicated.

Simons' radicalism was the indigenous American brand, however orthodox his Marxism may occasionally have appeared. At the University of Wisconsin he had heard Frederick Jackson Turner and Richard T. Ely challenge the economic and social dogmas of their contemporaries. Social work in Cincinnati and Chicago made Simons susceptible to the Christian socialism he discovered in settlement houses. He progressed to Daniel De Leon's "scientific" Socialist Labor party and then to the moderate Marxism of Berger, Hillquit, and Debs. An occasional candidate and party functionary, Simons wrote for the socialist press for about twenty years. In his vehement phase he helped found the IWW and edited the International Socialist Review; as he mellowed, he edited the Coming Nation, a polite weekly that pro- vided cultural inspiration for socialist families. His biographers suggest that early periodical versions of Social Forces in American History were superior to his book published in I9II. As Simons grew more conservative after leaving the socialist movement, he turned out patriotic tracts for the Wisconsin Loyalty Legion, texts on scientific management in the I920's, and pamphlets opposing health insurance for the American Medical Association. He thought Henry Ford an attractive presidential possibility, voted for Herbert Hoover, anci opposed much of the New Deal.

Simons lacked, Kent and Gretchen Kreuter believe, a reliable intellectual rudder. From his boyhood in Wisconsin through his service to the AMA, he was a debater who accepted a proposition and then looked up arguments. His future in the socialist movement was never more bleak than when he left it; pride, as well as patriotism, contributed to that decision. His nationalism, however, was constant and is demonstrated in his concern for the nation's history and his attempt to give radicalism a distinctly American slant, as well as in his position in 1917.

The Kreuters have used extensively the Simons collection at the Wisconsin State Historical Society. They have also sampled other manuscripts, read the Socialist press, and relied on previous unpublished studies of Simons. Their interpretation is uncomplicated and convincing, their prose superior to that of Simons himself. He will not need another biography. Phillips Exeter Academy HENRY F. BEDFORD

TOWARD COMMON GROUND: THE STORY OF THE ETHICAL SOCIETIES IN THE UNITED STATES. By Howard B. Radest. [Ethical Culture Publica- tions. Published in collaboration with the American Ethical Union.] (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company. I969. PP. xii, 348. $8.5o.)

THE dust jacket reads: "A history of Ethical Culture is a history of the times." This is a reasonable assertion, but one the volume fails to demonstrate. Mr. Radest has little to say about ethical culture's relationship, direct or casual, to such movements and moods as modernism, scientism, positive thinking, mental health, noblesse oblige and patrician reform, status anxiety, social engineering, the Americanization of Jews, the contending merits of exhortation and force in effecting social change, or the "death of God" and "secular city" debates. This is a pity, for ethical culture, it seems to me, touches on, and therefore should illuminate, all of these manifestations "of the times."

The study is one of missed opportunities because of narrow research as well as of narrow conceptualization. No manuscript materials and almost no primary sources of

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