Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America by Ronald T. TakakiReview by: John S Haller, JrThe American Historical Review, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Oct., 1980), pp. 991-992Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1869071 .

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United States 991

resolution for annexation, Texas had the privilege of dividing itself, not into 312 states, but into as many as five. It gave up more than a fourth of its territorial claim in the Compromise of 1850, but it retained so vast and so diverse an expanse that, from time to time, a further cession or a division made sense to some of its citizens. During the next decade and a half they proposed various and con- flicting plans for reducing its size or for cutting it up into two or more states.

Divisionists came the closest to success with the onset of Radical Reconstruction. The Radical Re- publicans, in Congress and in the Texas constitu- tional convention, were now the most enthusiastic advocates of partition. Thaddeus Stevens liked the idea, and the Joint Committee on Reconstruction approved the Beaman bill, which would have carved Texas into three parts, but which never got through Congress. The favorite scheme of Texas Radicals would have created a new state of West Texas and would have admitted it into the Union while leaving the rest of Texas unrepresented and under military occupation. In 1869, a draft of a constitution for the new state was published as a pamphlet (of which only a half-dozen copies are known to have survived). Even the proponents could not agree on the boundaries, however, and opponents derided the "State of Coyote" and "the howling of the coyotes" who wanted it. The con- troversy prolonged the convention and helped to account for the delay in the readmission of Texas. "Since 1869, the 'Coyotes' have been heard occa- sionally on the western horizon, but the noise has been from a lonely few baying at the moon rather than from a ravenous pack intent on tearing to pieces its helpless victim" (p. 137).

Though historians of Texas have made passing reference to divisionist movements, Ernest Wallace is the first to undertake an exhaustive treatment of the theme. His book is rather brief, with only about 144 pages devoted to the history of the subject and with 46 given over to an appendix reprinting the Constitution of the State of West Texas. Still, his account is authoritative and detailed enough to be called definitive. Nine maps show the outlines of West Texas and other proposed new states. The book will be of interest primarily to aficionados of Texas history, secondarily to students of Recon- struction in general.

RICHARD N. CURRENT

University of North Carolina, Greensboro

RONALD T. TAKAKI. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nine- teenth-Century America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1979. Pp. xviii, 361. $15.95.

Over the past decades, historians have made nu- merous efforts to analyze the racial thinking of white Americans toward blacks, Indians, Chinese, and other "coloreds" of the world. With few ex- ceptions, these efforts have tended to focus on one race at a time. Ronald T. Takaki has attempted to broaden our range of vision by seeking areas of commonality that encompass all of white America's race attitudes. He has recognized the multifaceted nature of this task-the need to examine racism against the background of broadly defined political, social, and economic forces-and has convincingly extracted the racial mood of white Americans from the ideologically murky waters of the nation's self- portrait. To be sure, this was no easy task as it re- quired Takaki to stalk profanely through the very sanctum sanctorum of American beliefs. Utilizing a broad array of sources-from Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson to Bret Harte, Henry George, Al- fred T. Mahan, and others-he has examined those values, images, ideas, and assumptions held or shared by the "culture-makers" and has attempted to tie racial thought to a broader spectrum that in- cluded the Protestant ethic, principles of self-gov- ernment, nationalism, and individualism. Borrow- ing from both Marx and Melville, he concludes that nineteenth-century white Americans "muti- lated" the full potential of their ideals by allowing racial oppression to feed on the very forces that made America into a world power. Each phase of America's transformation from an agrarian-com- mercial economy to a technological and bureau- cratic society has its own "iron cage" within which society defined, controlled, and projected its image. And within each cage, Americans played out a role that integrated both the demon and the divine, or, to borrow from D. H. Lawrence, "clever America lies on her muckheaps of gold, strangled in her own barbed wire of shalt-not ideals and shall-not moral- isms."

What Takaki has undertaken is ambitious by any standard, although there is certainly nothing novel in the attempt. In recent years historians have taken great pains to dissect the dynamics of American politics and the paradox of its democratic ideology. Some of the most exemplary thinking among white Americans in their effort to assert democratic ideas is ironically wed to racial attitudes of the bassest sort. The reality of this paradox brings one in full circle (Melville would have been proud), for the very term "freedom" acknowledges an irksome in- ternalized conflict that casts shadows across its broadest interpretation. The "colored" races stood at arm's length from the body politic and had to be made safe before being made democratic.

Over and over again, one is impressed with the breadth of Takaki's analysis. Yet there is room for even greater breadth. His American character-

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992 Reviews of Books

izations of the Chinese and Negroes are strikingly reminiscent of the depictions given by Carl von Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae (1735), and G. W. Cable's portrayal of blacks as a race under the influ- ence of the instinctual life had a "scientific" origin that extended backward through the centuries among European savants. Had Takaki read more in the medical and scientific literature of the era, he probably would have had to expand his theme to encompass the self-images of Western culture as op- posed to simply American society. Attitudes on women's inferiority that he attributes to American physicians was part of a much larger anthropologi- cal and medical background with origins deep in European thinking. The anthropometry of race and sex has a most fascinating history with the author- ship of studies on the brain weight of women and the mental differences between the races and sexes bearing no one stamp of nationality. Despite these deficiencies, Iron Cages is a thoughtful and impor- tant study and deserves careful reading by histo- rians and social scientists.

JOHN S. HALLER, JR.

Indiana University Northwest

ROBERT C. BANNISTER. Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought. (American Civilization Series.) Philadelphia: Temple Univer- sity Press. 1979. Pp. 292. $17.50.

Robert C. Bannister reassesses themes Richard Hof- stadter pioneered in Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944). Here Bannister is only concerned with examining the impact of those specifically "Darwinian concepts of struggle for existence, natu- ral selection, and survival of the fittest" (p. 7), not with evolutionism more generally. Bannister insists that Hofstadter was wrong to argue that a powerful conservative Social Darwinist movement justified the status quo in the Gilded Age and sanctified rac- ism, imperialism, and militarism after 1890. Indeed, Darwinism repelled conservatives because of its competitive and relativistic implications. Bannis- ter's thesis is that reformers and liberal academics created a "myth" of conservative Social Darwinism for their ideological purposes. Bannister effectively shows that Gilded Age conservatives often labeled Social Darwinists did not fit his definition of the term. Such conservatives as William Graham Sum- ner, Herbert Spencer, and Andrew Carnegie wanted "stability, consensus, homogenity, and peaceful change under a capitalist regime"; there- fore, they found "little comfort in a cosmology that posited permanent struggle as the engine of prog- ress" (p. 136). They retained their faith in classical economics, "Lockean liberalism," and a "Frank- linesque" success mythology (p. 136). Bannister

concedes they were evolutionists, but Lamarckians, not Darwinians. Then Bannister traces the emer- gence of the myth of conservative Social Darwinism from the 1890s to the 1940s on two levels simultane- ously: certain post- 1890 intellectuals usually consid- ered Social Darwinists-eugenists, racists, Nietzsche's followers, certain literary naturalists, and foreign policy commentators-who were not Social Darwinists by his definition; and how re- formers and liberal academics invented the myth of Social Darwinism as a weapon to use against their conservative opponents in public politics.

No brief review could treat Bannister's in- telligent book adequately. His discussions of partic- ular individuals appear generally accurate, and his thesis of the "myth" of conservative Social Darwin- ism as he defines it is a useful contribution. If his discussion of Gilded Age conservatives amply dem- onstrates that they were not "Social Darwinists," this is a valuable but not especially new character- ization. Bannister seems unaware that Lamarckian- ism could be and was used by conservatives to jus- tify the status quo. That Bannister found so few Darwinian social thinkers is less astonishing when it is understood that many American scientists resisted Darwinian selectionism until the 1920s. Bannister's grasp of science and its history is decidedly superior to Hofstadter's, but it can be criticized here and there, as, for example, when Bannister correctly summarizes the popular misconception of August Weismann's scientific ideas circa 1900 but unfortu- nately shares that misapprehension. And Bannister ignores the new scientific hereditarianism after 1900 (as, for example, mutationism and mental testing) that lent fresh scientific legitimacy to eugenics and immigration restriction and created racial mental testing-perhaps it was these socially divisive devel- opments Hofstadter mislabeled "Social Darwin- ism." Finally, Bannister's style is often unnecessarily difficult, and his discussions of individuals and themes after 1890 are often too brief, as, for ex- ample, his treatment of the Social Darwinist myth after World War I, which is lamentably reduced to an abbreviated epilogue.

Yet on balance Bannister has added to the gen- eral understanding of "Social Darwinism."

HAMILTON CRAVENS

Iowa State University

SUSAN F,STABROOK KENNEDY. If All We Did Was to Weep at Home: A History of White Working-Class Women in America. (Minorities in Modern America.) Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press. 1979. Pp. xx, 331. $17.50.

Another in a series of studies of minorities in mod- em America, this work presents a succinct portrait

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