James M. Bergquist

Book Review: The Press of Labor Migrants in Europe and North America: 1880s to 1930sThe Press of Labor Migrants in Europe and North America: 1880s to 1930s. Edited by HarzigChristiane and HoerderDirk. Bremen: Labor Newspaper Preservation Project, Universität Bremem, 1985. Pp. 602. DM 15.

of some essays seemed less a matter of necessity than the desire to provided extended comment on a particular associate of the Frankfurt School. Redundancies across essays give the book an unedited quality. Despite these shortcomings, Exiles is worthwhile reading for those with a scholarly interest in the Frankfurt School or a highly developed interest in the history of intellectual thought in social science.

Book Review: Immigrants in the Valley: Irish, Germans and Americans in the Upper Mississippi Country, 1830–1860Immigrants in the Valley: Irish, Germans and Americans in the Upper Mississippi Country, 1830–1860. By WymanMark. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1984.

In some ways, the title promises more than this book delivers. It is primarily an intellectual and institutional history of the German American Alliance in Missouri. Like the Alliance, its executive board and many other things German in Missouri, the study is largely focused on St. Louis. On the positive side, unlike many traditional histories of elites, this one treats their influence with the masses not as a given, but as a subject for investigation. Detjen emphasizes, as have others, that the leaders of the Alliance were largely generals without armies. The constitutency of 75,000 they claimed to command was just a loose federation of diverse local clubs of varying nature, without a central purpose or program, whose contact with the state and national organization hardly went beyond the two or three cents per member in dues they handed over. To the extent that the Alliance had a unifying purpose, it was in opposition to prohibition. Detjen is no doubt right in his claim that it was never as effective a pressure group as the AntiSaloon League, but one could hardly expect it to be, for the constitutency upon which it drew was much smaller. Rather than recounting the increasing proportion of Missouri population subject to prohibition under local option laws, it would have been more revealing to state what proportion of the German stock was thus affected. After all, prohibition never commanded a majority in a statewide referendum in Missouri, not even in 1918. With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, however, prohibition soon became a sideshow. The Alliance was only one of a number of German American institutions, including Lutheran and Catholic churches, to rally in sympathy for the German cause and in support of American neutrality. Among rank and file German Americans, however, these sentiments were broader than they were deep, and were secondary to a fundamental loyalty to the United States. A turnout of 12,000for the first Neutrality League rally had shrunk to 350 by the third rally not seven months later as the growing unpopularity of the German cause in America became manifest. But no such sensitivity to public opinion was shown by the aggressively defensive Alliance leaders, even though their agitation often proved to be empty threats, as in the election of 1916. What the Alliance did manage wasto bring the wrath of public opinion down not just on itself, but upon German Americans generally. By forcing a choice, the Alliance hastened the demise of the very culture that they were trying to preserve. When Alliance leader Charles Weins berg wasarrested in April 1918 under the Espionage Act (though not convicted) the organization instantly vanished with hardly a trace. A labor of love by an author who has long since left history for a career in law, the book is anything but dilletantish. Detjen has consulted a wide variety of sources in German as well as English, and is as sure-footed in tracing the roots of ethnic identity in St. Louis as he is in explaining the legal intricacies of a disloyalty trial. If his conclusions are not startling, they are nonetheless firmly grounded and effectively presented, adding nuances to the broad national canvass sketched by Fred Luebke. The prohibition issue might better have been treated topically rather than injected at various points in the chronology, and some immigration statistics on p. 21 are clearly erroneous, but this in no way weakens the authors thesis. University of Missouri Press has done its usual handsome job of production, adding another solid volume to its offering in German ethnicity.