The Tennessee Yeomen, 1840-1860. by Blanche Henry ClarkReview by: Fletcher M. GreenSocial Forces, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Dec., 1942), pp. 259-260Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2570593 .

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LIBRARY AND WORKSHOP 259

who are looking for tangible material to use for in-service training of both staff and volunteers.

RUTH DODD MORGAN

University of North Carolina

PSYCHIATRIC ASPECT OF CIVILIAN MORALE. Prepared by the Military Mobilization Committee of the American Psychiatric Association. New York: Family Welfare Association of America, 1942. 63 pp. $0.50.

"This is a total war. Fitness of the civilian worker is of equal importance with fitness of the fighter. The outcome of the war depends upon the staying power of the civilian worker just as much as upon that of the soldier." Just as the armed forces of our nation must withstand the physical might of the Axis powers, so our civilian population must be prepared to resist our enemies' methods of psychological warfare. This little pamphlet might appropriately be called a psy- chological manual of arms for the civilian group in war time. Five papers are presented. The first deals with the experiences of other countries in handling war psychoses; the second discusses the assets and liabilities of social institutions dur- ing periods of stress; while the remaining three papers treat of anxiety and its social control, morale, and fatigue.

This work should be a most valuable manual or guide for the instruction of civilian defense workers, and the part they can play in our total war effort.

WILEY B. SANDERS University of North Carolina

REORGANIZATION OF PUBLIC WELFARE IN MICHIGAN:

A STUDY OF THE TRANSFORMATION OF A SOCIAL INSTITUTION. By Ernest B. Harper and Duane L. Gibson. Special Bulletin 318. East Lansing, Michigan: Agricultural Experiment Station, Michi- gan State College, June 1942. 80 pp. Tables and Graphs.

From the viewpoints of content and method- ology, this eighty-page bulletin on the reorganiza- tion of public welfare in Michigan is most intriguing, and it should be of value to social workers, sociology teachers, researchers, and social planners, as well as public administrators. The results of the study make a real contribution to the sociology of institutional accommodation or adjustment to social change, and also offer practi- cal implications of the theoretical generalizations.

As to content, the report has four main divisions: "(1) a brief sketch of the history of the poor law in general with particular reference to events in Michigan up to the summer of 1938, (2) a detailed description of the administration of emergency relief during the transitional period of 1933 to 1938 in selected counties, (3) public knowledge and opinion of the emergency relief program in the summer of 1938 just before the welfare referendum vote, as discovered in the same counties, and (4) the 1939 reorganization and later developments."

As to methodology, the case-study approach was used "to discover social forces, problems, conflicts and trends" in the four selected counties, while the data obtained from the survey, in which 2,119 persons were interviewed, were subjected to statistical analysis "for the purpose of comparing typical groups in respect to knowledge and points of view." For purposes of interpretation the results are set in an historical frame of reference.

As stated in the Foreword by Professor Harper, "the study emphasizes the importance of recogniz- ing that the development of a satisfactory system of public welfare, so essential for social organiza- tion and current defense efforts, is a slow and continuous process and dependent upon popular education and gradual changes in emotional attitudes, particularly on the part of the rural elements of the population. More specifically it represents an attempt to evaluate the part played by various interest groups in the state in the process of adjusting the institution of relief to changed social conditions."

ANNE WILLIAMS TILLINGHAST

University of North Carolina

THE TENNESSEE YEOMEN, 1840-1860. By Blanche Henry Clark. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1942. 200 pp.

For some years now, historians and sociologists of the South have been attacking the distortion, fathered by the northern abolitionists and fostered by southern romanticists, that the people of the Old South were composed essentially of wealthy planters, poor whites, and Negro slaves. Among those who have done much to rediscover the millions of middle class yeomen of the Old South is Professor Frank L. Owsley of Vanderbilt University. He and his students have been exploring the unpublished schedules of the Census which give a detailed and fairly accurate picture of this class. Miss Clark, working with Owsley,

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260 SOCIAL FORCES

has relied largely upon these schedules together with state and county records, newspapers, and agricultural magazines for her study of the Tennessee yeomen.

The book is organized around five major topics: the status of the nonslaveholder, the farmer and his landholdings, agricultural organizations, the agricultural awakening, and agricultural produc- tion. The first two divisions are the important and significant sections of this study. Here Miss Clark's findings are not only interesting but also noteworthy, one might almost say startling. Of the nonslaveholders in 1850, makipg up about 65 percent of the population, about 45 percent were nonlandowning tenants, squatters, share- croppers, and laborers. Even 12 percent of the slaveholders were landless in 1850. The per- centage of landless decreased about five percent between 1850 and 1860. Most of the landless owned property of some kind, generally livestock. Miss Clark finds that the evidence does not support the view that there was a wide social gap between the slaveholder and nonslaveholder. Neither does she find evidence to prove that the slaveholders pushed the nonslaveholders off onto the poorer lands. Furthermore the nonslaveholders took an active interest in politics, although they seldom occupied places of leadership. Position and social distinctions were determined by economic levels and not by slaveholding per se.

There is little variation in the agricultural organization and awakening of Tennessee from that shown by other writers in other southern states. There seems to have been a somewhat more concerted drive for statewide control of agricultural development that produced a single agricultural periodical as the state organ and a Bureau of Agriculture. We learn also that an agricultural college was established in Tennessee in 1846, the first in the Union.

It is too bad that such a worthwhile book is marred by a dull, tedious style. The repetitions and great mass of details tend to obscure the significant findings and conclusions. The book's usefulness would have been greatly increased by more generalization and interpretations.

FLETCHER M. GREEN

The University of North Carolina

GUINEA'S CAPTIVE KINGS: BRITISH ANTI-SLAVERY LITERATURE OF THE XVIIIth CENTURY. By Wylie Sypher. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1942. 340 pp. $3.00.

While the author of this survey of British anti- slavery literature of the eighteenth century admits that the "book has been twice 'completed'- and is not yet complete," he has prepared one of the most detailed general reviews of a century of antislavery agitation in the British Isles which has yet appeared. Frank J. Klirigberg's The Anti-Slavery Movement in England of 1926 was largely an analysis of "humanitarianism" as applied to slavery and the slave trade; W. L. Mathieson's British Slavery and Its Abolition of 1926 placed chief emphasis upon political and economic aspects of the movement; and Reginald Coupland's The British Anti-Slavery Movement of 1933, a course of lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute at Boston, was necessarily brief and generalized. Cecil Moore, Lois Whitney, and more recently Eva B. Dykes have also dealt with this subject.

Professor Sypher seems to have followed most closely the pattern of ideas which Russell P. Jameson developed in his Montesquieu et l'esclavage: gtude sur les origines de l'opinion antiesclavagiste en France au XVIII8 si&cle of 1911 and which E. D. Seeber developed in his Anti- Slavery Opinion in France During the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century of 1937. He does not, however, like Seeber, expand his analysis around a chronological framework and for that reason does not achieve Seeber's clarity. After a chapter in which Sypher gives a general picture of shifts in eighteenth century ideologies, he discusses "currents of opinion" with respect to the Negro and slavery: "'Oriental' and Indian Slavery," "the Pseudo-Africa of Ignorance and Fancy," antislavery in the West Indies and the American colonies, "the Nature of the Negro," and the impact of natural rights, religious thinking, humanitarianism, and the "commercial spirit" upon antislavery thought.

It is in the last two-thirds of the book, however, that Sypher makes his contribution, an analysis of the treatment of the Negro in eighteenth century fiction, drama, and verse. Of special interest is his distinction between the noble and the Common Negro of English literature and his exposition of the influence of the Oroonoko legend created by Aphra Behn and the Inkle and Yariko legend of Mocquet, Ligon, and Steele. In this discussion of his material Sypher writes understandingly and well, but one detects a struggle against a hidden anti-Negro bias which reveals itself oc- casionally in such statements as: ". . . the eight-

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