United States
1291
cracker, who intentionally misspelled many of his
words, and who used quaint anecdotes and personal
and family reminiscences to make his points, was
humor. Parker misses a great opportunity to study
Arp's relationship to his readers by failing to specu-
late about why his audience found his work so funny.
Arp was his day's Lewis Grizzard, another cranky
southern satirist, and both Grizzard and Arp owed
their popularity far less to their ideas than to the
unique ability of humor to make audiences feel
superior and secure.
TED OWNBY
University of Mississippi
STEPHEN CRESSWELL. Mormons and Cowboys, Moonshin-
ers and Klansmen: Federal Law Enforcement in the South
and West, 1870-1893. Tuscaloosa: University of Ala-
bama Press. 1991. Pp. viii, 323. $35.95.
Stephen Cresswell, although not explicitly addressing
the issues of political science state-building theory,
deepens American historians' current effort to "bring
the state back in." He examines a major agency of the
national government, the Department of Justice, and
its efforts to enforce federal law in the face of
widespread citizen resistance. He reveals the limits of
the "center's" ability to extend its authority to the
"periphery" as well as the conditions under which
national authority was successfully asserted in the late
nineteenth century.
Beginning with the Civil War, the number of
legally defined federal crimes steadily increased. The
Department of Justice's marshals arrested violators,
district attorneys prosecuted them, and district judges
heard federal criminal cases. Other agencies, partic-
ularly the post office, treasury, and army, worked
with Justice to track down and punish federal crimi-
nals.
There have been studies of episodes and specific
agencies of federal law enforcement but no general
history of the Department of Justice since Homer
Cummings and Carl McFarland's Federal Justice
(1937). Cresswell's book is not a comprehensive his-
tory but is valuable because it focuses on the officials
on the front lines of particularly difficult enforcement
campaigns and how local citizens responded to their
efforts.
Cresswell's case studies examine two southern
states and two western territories. He chooses the
South and West because citizen resistance to distant
central authority was greatest in these peripheral
regions. The only clearly successful assertion of na-
tional authority was the crackdown on Mormon po-
lygamy in Utah, because it was backed by widespread
condemnation among non-Mormons, congressional
determination to outlaw the practice, and presidential
will to enforce the laws. Battling the Ku Klux Klan in
northern Mississippi was a losing war against vio-
lence. Prosecuting Tennessee moonshiners looked
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
successful on paper only because the high number of
convictions concealed lenient sentencing. The record
of prosecution of outlaw "cowboys" and other viola-
tors of federal laws in Arizona was mixed, with some
successes but continuing citizen resentment. Gener-
ally Cresswell blames unimpressive results on inade-
quate congressional appropriations for federal law
enforcement; attorneys general who rarely assisted
the district attorneys with useful legal advice in diffi-
cult cases; and federal district judges who reflected
local attitudes rather than national standards. The
bottom line, though, was the unwillingness, some-
times forced by violence and intimidation, of local
citizens to cooperate as witnesses or jurors.
Cresswell reveals how political history, even admin-
istrative history, is intimately linked to social history.
He demonstrates that authority and law reflect both
the conceptions and activities of representatives of
the state at the top and the customs and responses of
citizens at the bottom. His book will be of interest to
historians of state development as well as southern
and western specialists.
WILBUR R. MILLER
State University of New York,
Stony Brook
JOHN N. INGHAM. Making Iron and Steel: Independent
Mills in Pittsburgh, 1820-1920. (Historical Perspec-
tives on Business Enterprise Series.) Columbus: Ohio
State University Press. 1991. Pp. xi, 297. $45.00.
In this volume John N. Ingham highlights the vitality
of small and mid-sized manufacturing firms in the
nation's most dynamic industry. Frustrated by the
prevailing Chandlerian preoccupation with huge,
capital intensive, integrated mass producers, Ingham
counters with a close look at the resilient independent
iron and steel firms in Pittsburgh between 1820 and
1920. These moderate-sized businesses found prod-
uct and market niches that allowed them to survive
and even multiply in the face of an organizational and
technological revolution. Masters of the local econ-
omy as early as the 1850s, the iron barons and their
mercantile partners became Pittsburgh's elite. A self-
conscious upper class, they jealously guarded entry
into their social world. Rising with the Republican
Party, this elite held the reins of political power; when
waves of immigrants flooded the city, they used
progressive rhetoric and reforms to maintain and
even extend their dominance. In short, the barons
"remained lords of all they surveyed" (p. 190).
This book draws on two sets of mid-nineteenth to
early twentieth-century data: a listing of all the inde-
pendent mills, their choice of technique, and volume
of output; and a roster of all mill owners, their
representation in selected social registers, and an
assigned family rank. The roster of mill owners
divides the mill families into elite, core, noncore, and
marginal categories based on a method devised and
1292 Reviews of Books
described by Ingham in an earlier book, The Iron
Barons (1978). Armed with this information, Ingham
measures the persistence of firms and, with selected
examples, explains how the independent firms sur-
vived. After two bruising experiences, independent
iron and steel manufacturers avoided head-to-head
competition with Carnegie Steel. Because Andrew
Carnegie did not benefit from economies of scale in
puddling, crucible steelmaking, or the open hearth
process, smaller, nonintegrated firms could profitably
employ these techniques to supply niche markets with
highly specialized wares. These were the typical iron
and steel firms of their day, accounting for more of
Pittsburgh's employment and productive capacity
than the newly formed U.S. Steel.
More than scale separated these iron barons from
the Carnegie men. While Carnegie engaged in rabid
antiunionism that led to violence, the independents
grudgingly accepted Amalgamated unions and en-
joyed relatively peaceful labor relations. This en-
trenched elite shunned Carnegie and his lieutenants,
excluding them from Pittsburgh's social and cultural
swirl. The Carnegie interests avoided local politics,
perhaps because they knew that the entrenched elite
would blunt demands for government regulation of
business and expenditures for social welfare.
This volume owes much to Philip Scranton's pio-
neering book Proprietary Capitalism (1983). It demon-
strates once again that industrialization involved
more than the simple progression of scale and tech-
nique. To re-create our history we need to study small
businesses as well as large ones. But we also need to
recognize that the independent iron and steel enter-
prises were not typical small businesses. With their
demands for inanimate power, sizable physical plant,
and working capital, iron firms discouraged entry by
those who possessed only luck, pluck, and diligence.
Escalating costs of entry limited the number of po-
tential entrants to those who had ready access to
capital, while retained earnings and intermarriage
enabled the pre—Civil War elite families to bequeath
their positions to the next generation and beyond.
DIANE LINDSTROM
University of Wisconsin,
Madison
CRANDALL A. SHIFFLETT.Coat Towns: Life, Work, and
Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia,
1880-1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press. 1991. Pp. xx, 259.
This book is intended as a revisionist study of Appa-
lachian coal company towns. Instead of being oppres-
sive and exploitive, as previous historians claim, coal
mining offered the Appalachians work, and company
towns gave them a better life style, Crandall A.
Shiffiett argues. Harmony, a strong sense of commu-
nity, and positive feelings about both the town and
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER
the company were the norm. Anticompany feelings
and anticompany behavior such as strikes and vio-
lence were the aberrations.
Arranged topically rather than chronologically, the
study is divided into four parts. Part 1 discusses
preindustrial Appalachia that, according to the au-
thor, was a worse place to live and work than the
company town. Part 2 explores the coming of the coal
companies and the making of the company town. Part
3 examines the union. Part 4 looks at coal towns as
social and cultural communities and the activities of
the miners and their families within them.
The book has some commendable aspects. Shiffiett
makes extensive use of both oral histories and coal
company records for his research. Especially well told
and documented are the rise of several southern
Appalachian coal companies and the early methods
of mining coal.
As a revisionist study, however, the book is weak.
There is no effort to reinterpret the dynamics of the
coal town or the interaction between company offi-
cials and coal miners. Shiffiett merely tells what was
good about the towns and leaves out the bad: the
deadly mine explosions, the unsanitary conditions,
the mine guard system and the beating and murders
of union organizers, black lists and housing contracts,
coal company scrip and monopolistic company store
prices, the companies' refusal to put checkweighmen
at their mines, and all those other things that pro-
duced Bloody Mingo, the Armed March on Logan,
the Matewan Massacre, Bloody Harlan, and other
events that characterized the Appalachian coal fields
until the coming of the union in the 1930s.
In trying to make his revisionist case about life and
culture in the coal camps, Shiffiett leans heavily on
oral histories. "Most striking about former miners
and their families are their positive recollections of
life and work in [the] company town" (p. 150), he
writes, and the "perspectives of former miners on life
in the company town sometimes contrast sharply with
conventional images of company towns" (p. xiv).
Oral histories give a nostalgia about company towns
that belies the actions of their inhabitants: open and
expressed opposition and hostility to the system. The
contradiction between the nostalgia and the reality is
certainly worthy of exploration. Shiffiett, however,
ignores the miners' protests against the system and
dwells instead on their fond memories.
The author decries "generalizations about the 'av-
erage' company town" (p. 9), but his book is filled with
sweeping generalizations and, too often, he provides
no supporting evidence for the broad assertions.
"Goal companies prohibited the use of the church for
labor agitation," he contends, "but it is doubtful that
the miners were troubled by that to any great extent"
(p. 197). "There is little evidence that mine work
mitigated social prejudice against immigrants and
blacks" (p. xv). Abundant evidence exists to the
contrary of each assertion and other historians have
cited it.
1992