Review

Reviewed Work(s): Making America: The Society & Culture of the United States by Luther
S. Luedtke
Review by: Steven D. Neuwirth
Source: Journal of American Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3, American Art and Music (Dec., 1993),
pp. 448-450
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British Association for
American Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27555752
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 448 Reviews
Thomas M. Davis, A Reading of Edward Taylor (London and Toronto:
Associated University Presses, 1992, ?28.00). Pp. 223. ISBN o 87413 428 5.
Edward Taylor was determined to find analogues in the natural world of God's
presence. Revelation was never total of course, but therein lies the power behind
his verse: if the world is an analogue of God's existence then the mystery of his
presence or intentions (and ultimately not knowing them) provides poetic grist to
the mill. If God is everywhere then everything can be used to show his presence :
spiders, spinning wheels, roses, even language itself. And yet the most central of
Taylor's concerns, as Thomas M. Davis states in the introduction to his book, is
the relation of Taylor's poetry to his spiritual state that evolved during the fifty
years he was a minister. That evolution encompassed profound joy at praising
Christ in verse and an equally profound awareness of the nature of personal sin
through the act of writing poetry. Fifty years is a lengthy evolution of any poet's
standards and so Davis's approach is, as he makes clear at the outset, essentially
textual and chronological: "It is precisely the time of composition and the
distinctive character of certain Meditations... that define significant changes in his
central theme." Through this we come to understand more about the earlier
Meditations as well as establish a context in which to examine the later poems,
although initially Davis examines Gods Determinations because its experimentations
laid a foundation for the Meditations.
Yet despite the successful experimentations in God's Determinations Davis sees
a "radical" limiting of the scope of Taylor's poetry and a narrowing of concerns
in the Series 1 Meditations. Davis does not however, see limitation in this limiting
nor does he detect repetition in narrowing concerns. The early Meditations show
Taylor the poet meeting Taylor the devout Christian, transcribing the natural
world and natural emotions through imagery into a personal relationship with
God. Not only is there wonder at the Greatness of the Divine but also a linguistic
celebration at the wonders of language itself. Davis sees a new awareness in these
early Occasional poems and meditations, an awareness of self and, through this,
a personal response to events and things described: Taylor's distinctive voice
begins to emerge.
Yet as Davis reminds us, Taylor is not simply writing poems. The Meditations
are an attempt to come to know the person of Christ. Despite this attempt, or
perhaps because of it, Taylor became increasingly concerned with the quality of
his poems, particularly in the way that poor poetry began to be seen in the context
of sin. Davis examines these poems and the Meditations of Series 2 with this
development in mind and does so through impressive and detailed exegesis.
The Open University john murphy

Luther S. Luedtke, ed., Making America: The Society <& Culture of the United
States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992, $34.95).
Pp. 5 54. ISBN o 8078 2030 X.
The "Preface" to Making America is unambiguous about its purpose: "to give
a critical and historical account of the United States that will both excite the
public interest and provide a text for college and university courses in American

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 Reviews 449
Studies and related fields. " No mean feat for a single-volume anthology. The task
at hand is simple : can teachers use this anthology as a textbook for their courses
in history, literature, society, politics, rhetoric and composition and American
Studies? I would say no, "No in Thunder" to borrow a phrase from Melville.
Of the twenty-six essays only seven make muster. That's not a very good return
on a student's (or a teacher's) investment.
Essay collections (especially those that aspire to textbook status) must be
models of intellectual rigor and academic integrity. That is to say, authors must
either support their opinions in the body of the essay, or they must direct their
readers to literature on the subject via the footnote. Unfortunately, not one essay
in Luedtke's anthology includes either a footnote or an endnote. I never know
(and my students will never know) how the contributing scholars reached their
various positions, no less be able to trace their opinions to the scholars' source(s).
College students need to see opinions documented. Further, too many of the
essays in the anthology present simplistic overviews of complex issues -
American values, the national character, American consciousness. I want my
students to appreciate the complexities of the American experience ; so I want
essays that pursue nuance with a vengeance, that trust the student to rise to the
challenge of intellectual discourse.
The collection has other faults. The essays in Making America do not "hang
together" as a coherent, unified, whole. This is not so much a textbook as a
collection of opinions on a wide range of subjects. I had hoped for a
dialogue/debate between scholars about timeless, salient issues centering on -
who we Americans are and why we are who we are. But the individual essays in
Making America neither speak to nor respond to any other essay in the anthology.
Thus, while Making America is a multidisciplinary text, most of the authors write
from the perspective of a single discipline - i.e. few scholars refer to works from
other disciplines. Making America is intended to be an American Studies
textbook, and American Studies is an inter-disciplinary as well as a multidisciplinary
subject. The textbook should model the method, not merely present the material.
As a textbook too, this one fails students in not identifying the more obscure
people, places, events, philosophical movements and scientific terms referred to
in the essays, and in not providing enough historical, demographic and statistical
information, or enough charts, graphs and maps.
Last, and most disappointing, there are no essays that examine the contributions
of Native American, Hispanic/Latino and Asian populations. The textbook is
virtually Anglo-Centric in its focus (the noticeable exception are the essays by and
about women and African-Americans). It needn't have been so. Luedtke points
us in the direction of a varied examination of the national experience when he
refers us to anthropologist Theodore Schwartz's definition of American culture.
According to Schwartz, if there are "core characteristics of American culture, one
of them would be the cultural, social, and political adaptation to diversity"
(emphasis mine). And there is a latent promise in Luedtke's discussion of the
current debate over "American" values. "Scholars," Luedtke notes, "tend to
divide into two camps : those who emphasize consensus and the ' core ' values by
which the society is defined and unified and those who stress diversity, pluralism,
and tensions in American values" (19). But the promise is not fulfilled. The essays

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45 o Reviews

sweep over the ethnic experience and homogenize American society and culture
into a familiar trace.

Lancaster University steven d. neuwirth

Shawn Lay (ed.), The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical
Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s (Urbana and Chicago : University
of Illinois Press, 1992, $32.50). Pp. 230. ISBN o 252 018326 X.
In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, attempted
to transform the Invisible Empire from a regional to a national organization. Its
initial successes outside the South were largely swept away by the end of the
decade. But they were sufficiently striking in its first half for this limited
renaissance of America's most notorious secret society to attract the attention of
historians who, until recently, have interpreted them mainly in terms of ethnic
conflict (particularly anti-black), appealing largely to marginalized rural and
small-town whites in lower income groups.
This book contests this interpretation. Its conclusions are drawn from six
careful case studies of 1920s Klan activity in Western towns: Denver, Colorado;
El Paso, Texas ; Anaheim, California ; Salt Lake City, Utah ; and Eugene and La
Grande, Oregon. The Klan which emerges from these studies is not a fanatical
fringe group but draws its membership generally from a balanced cross section
of the white male Protestant population. It indulged in only limited violent and
vigilante tactics; utilized conventional political techniques; and directed its
animus much less against blacks than against Catholics, Jews and non-Anglo
Saxons in the Prohibition era and during the post-war threat to traditional
Protestant morality.
Amongst the challenging conclusions drawn by the seven authors in this book,
two deserve to be emphasized. First, there is the confident assertion that few
topics in the American past more clearly demonstrate the "validity of the famous
dictum that ' all history is ultimately local history ' than the Ku Klux Klan of the
1920s" (p. 9). Secondly, although this book's authors believe that future scholars
will discover remarkable variety amongst Klan centres in the 1920s, they reach
the sombre conclusion that "it is clear that the biased stereotype of the Invisible
Empire as an irrational movement that lay outside the major currents of
American life must be discarded. Not only does this traditional view unfairly
depict the millions of average Americans who joined or supported the Klan, but
it obscures the racism and bigotry that have traditionally pervaded United States
society" (p. 222).
This book's authors foresee "practically limitless" research possibilities for
Klan studies in the future. It is to be hoped that, amongst these, will be greater
investigation than these seven stimulating scholars have been able to provide into
the role of American ex-servicemen in the Klan of the 1920s and the function of
the complex activities of the Invisible Empire across America in the presidential
election of 1928. In this respect, attention may be drawn to the question of the
influence of Bishop Alma White of the Pillar of Fire Church which had a college
in Denver, Colorado. Her pro-Klan writings, especially her Heroes of the Fiery

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