Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady: An Insider's View of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis IslandProject by F. Ross HollandReview by: Karal Ann MarlingThe American Historical Review, Vol. 99, No. 2 (Apr., 1994), p. 632Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2167439 .

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632 Reviews of Books

relates either the in-depth discussion of scholarly theory or the book's title to her ample coverage of chant and hula. The volume lacks a concluding summary and could use a bibliography. Yet her account of Hawaiian musical development within the larger arena of indigenous cultural change will en- lighten many readers. The seven chapters, assembled from primary sources and secondary works, are well supplemented with illustrations quotations, index, and glossary.

LINDA S. PARKER

San Diego State University

UNITED STATES

F. Ross HOLLAND. Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady: An Insider's View of the Statue of Libertp-Ellis Island Project. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1993. Pp. xix, 266. $39.95.

F. Ross Holland, a former National Park Service official, came out of retirement in the early 1980s to serve as assistant to the president of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation because he believed that private sector involvement in public projects was a good idea. Public-private cooperation was also an early buzzword of the Reagan administration. Like George Bush's "thousand points of light," it had the advantage of sounding high-minded, but what such cooperation meant only became clear to Holland as James Watt's Interior Department, the Park Service, Lee Iacocca of Chrysler, and assorted morons and demi-crooks drawn from the beltway and boardroom did battle over the restoration and interpretation of the Statue of Liberty.

In fact, the Reagan ideologues believed that virtu- ally any business could do society's work better than the public sector could; the rhetoric of public-private cooperation cloaked a festering contempt for govern- ment and those who worked in it. The reader will come away from this study marveling, however, that any of these posturing clowns-business bigwigs or federal bureaucrats-contrived to get the statue ready for the patriotic orgy staged at her feet onJuly 4, 1986.

The 1980s were awash in red-white-and-blue, lump-in-the-throat pageantry, much of it staged for television by David Wolper, who produced the cen- tennial hoopla for the Statue of Liberty (two years earlier, he had filled the home screen with Elvis impersonators during the opening of the 1984 Olym- pics in Los Angeles). For his gala in New York Harbor, Wolper pulled out all the stops: fireworks, the Reagans and Walter Cronkite in person, an essay contest named for deceased teacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe, a parade of tall ships, and teary renditions of "America the Beautiful," every element packaged and polished with a bottom-line cynicism that makes one delighted to learn that the event lost money, although you and I and everyone else who made a contribution to the Foundation eventually

picked up the tab. That's how things generally went with the project. The show-biz elements that might turn a profit or enhance the prestige of a board member got the most attention. Fancy brochures. TV commercials. Photo-ops staged around the renova- tion of especially telegenic parts of the statue. Behind the scenes, life on Liberty Island was one long, vicious catfight to which the Statue and the changing mean- ing of the immigrant experience became all but irrelevant.

This is not a book for those who hold a high opinion of human nature. Iacocca, president of the several commissions and foundations involved in the restoration (until the Republican Party began to sus- pect that he was a closet Democrat and presidential hopeful), emerges as a self-important potentate from Detroit, swooping into meetings-or storming out of them-surrounded by a retinue of corporate flacks. And the rest of the business world is not much better: executives connive to build hotels cheek by jowl with national landmarks or to amass enough public-service points on their resumes for new upper-echelon jobs. Architects are pie-in-the-sky artistes with no interest in the practicalities of moving crowds and selling postcards. Political appointees are mean and dumb. Only the long-suffering troops of the Park Service and the immigration historians who drew up the exhibition scenario for the Ellis Island museum emerge from the tale with a shred of honor.

The question of how the public interest is best served in instances in which some detente between public and private sectors seems advisable is an im- portant one, as the recent dispute over awarding concession contracts in national parks to Japanese companies demonstrates. Holland is a nimble guide through the minefield of regulations and practices that govern such relationships. And he makes it clear that ideological purity does ndt preserve landmarks. But the most fascinating thing about his book is his cast of terrible, pungent characters. I found myself wishing that he had turned his notes into a John Grisham-style novel. The ingredients are all there: greed, inflated egos, blood lust. Of course, the critics would say it was overblown and unrealistic. Nobody could be that awful!

KARAL ANN MARLING

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

DONALD WORSTER. The Wealth of Nature: Environmen- tal History and the Ecological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. 1993. Pp. x, 255. $25.00.

A generation ago aspiring young professional histo- rians like Donald Worster were warned in graduate schools to be "objective." Values, emotions, and hopes for changing the world were supposed to be carefully suppressed in the interest of "historical truth." Any display of "bias" in a research monograph was cause

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1994

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