Change and continuity in twentieth century America: the 1920's

(print) ix, 456 p. ; 22 cm1919 : PRELUDE TO NORMALCY David Burner 3 -- OIL AND POLITICS Burl Noggle 33 -- THE FARMERS' DILEMMA, 1919-1929 Gilbert C. Fite 67 -- LABOR IN ECLIPSE Mark Perlman 103 -- THE RISE AND DECLINE OF WELFARE CAPITALISM David Brody 147 -- THE FUNDAMENTALIST DEFENSE OF THE FAITH Paul A. Carter 179 -- THE KU KLUX KLAN Robert Moats Miller 215 -- PROHIBITION : THE IMPACT OF POLITICAL UTOPIANISM Joseph R. Gusfield 257 -- FICTION OF THE JAZZ AGE Frederick J. Hoffman 309 -- THE REVOLUTION IN MORALS Gilman M. Ostrander 323 -- THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY : FROM NARCISSISM TO SOCIAL CONTROL John Chynoweth Burnham 351 -- METROPOLIS AND SUBURB : THE CHANGING AMERICAN CITY Charles N. Glaab 399 -- NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS 439 -- INDEX 44

Change and continuity in twentieth-century America

(print) 287 pThe Emergence Of America As A World Power : Some Second Thoughts Richard W. Leopold 3 -- The Square Deal In Action : A Case Study In The Growth Of The "National Police Power" John Braeman 35 -- The New Deal And The Analogue Of War William E. Leuchtenburg 81 -- The Great Depression : Another Watershed In American History? Richard S. Kirkendall 145 -- Continuity And Change In Government-Business Relations Arthur M. Johnson 191 -- The Emergence Of Mass-Production Unionism David Brody 221 -- Poverty In Perspective Robert H. Bremner 263 -- Notes On The Contributors 281 -- Index 28

Twentieth-century American foreign policy

(print) ix, 567 p. ; 22 cmIntroduction vii -- The Changing Interpretive Structure Of American Foreign Policy Charles E. Neu 1 -- Writings On American Foreign Relations : 1957 To The Present David F. Trask 58 -- Bureaucracy And Professionalism In The Development Of American Career Diplomacy Waldo H. Heinrichs, Jr. 119 -- The United States A World Power, 1900-1917 : Myth Or Reality? Paul A. Varg 207 -- The United States And The Failure Of Collective Security In The 1930s Manfred Jonas 241 -- The United States And The Atlantic Alliance : The First Generation Lawrence S. Kaplan 294 -- Canada In North America Robert Craig Brown 343 -- Recent United States-Mexican Relations : Problems Old And New Lyle C. Brown And James W. Wilkie 378 -- The United States And Cuba : The Uncomfortable "Abrazo," 1898-1968 Allan R. Millett 420 -- The United States And Great Britain : Uneasy Allies A. E. Campbell 471 -- From Contempt To Containment : Cycles In American Attitudes Toward China Warren I. Cohen 502 -- Notes On The Contributors 560 -- Index 56

Review of \u3ci\u3eProgressive Oklahoma: The Making of a New Kind of State\u3c/i\u3e By Danney Goble

At the time of its adoption, the Oklahoma state constitution of 1907 was widely regarded as the epitome of advanced progressivism. Yet that auspicious beginning has scarcely been matched by the state\u27s later history, in which leading motifs have been corruption, demagoguery, and control-not always unchallenged, but largely successfully maintained-by vested private interests. The virtue of the present work lies in its providing clues to explain this apparent paradox. Its defect is Goble\u27s failure to grapple with this question-or even to recognize that a problem exists. In part, the difficulty is a result of the book\u27s chronological limits. Goble focuses upon less than two decades: from the opening of the western half of the state in 1889 to the adoption of the constitution. But the more fundamental shortcoming is that he fails to apply the same critical analysis to the rhetoric of Oklahoma progressivism that he does to the values held by the founding settlers. Goble does an excellent job of showing the entrepreneurial and commercial motivations of those who settled the Oklahoma Territory; the central role played by town-site speculation with the accompanying feverish competition to attract railroads in the territory\u27s development; and the ascendancy of the more successful and aggressive merchants and wheeler-dealers. Politics revolved partly around the factional struggle within the Republican party over federal patronage, partly around the struggle by rival communities for a share of the largess available from the territorial government, such as county seat designations and public institutions. Similarly impressive is his account of how in the eastern half of the state-the so-called Indian Territory-a minority of enterprising mixed-blood and adopted whites succeeded behind the facade of tribal ownership in monopolizing the land and its resources for their own profit; how the resulting economic growth led to an influx of non-Indians who soon outnumbered the tribesmen and whose anomalous legal status led to increasing pressure on Congress to terminate the tribal governments and communal land ownership; and how, after those goals had been attained, unscrupulous grafters stripped the Indians and freedmen of much of their land allotments. Drawing upon the insights of William A. Williams and James Willard Hurst, Goble presents a graphic picture of the Boomer mentality prevailing among late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Oklahomans. The central metaphor of what he terms their Weltanschauung of youthful competitive capitalism was a vast, impersonal marketplace in which free competition automatically guaranteed moral progress and economic growth. Accordingly, the dominant ethos called for the removal of those restraints upon individual creative energies that restricted the pursuit of private gain (pp. 38-39)

THE DUST BOWL AN INTRODUCTION

In March 1985 the Center for Great Plains Studies of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln held its ninth annual symposium Social Adaptation to Semiarid Environments. The relevance of that topic was evident alike to specialists and to the reader of daily newspaper stories about drought and accompanying starvation in Africa, recurring crop failures in Russia, China\u27s struggle to feed its teeming population, out-of-control grassland fires in Australia, and depletion of ground water supplies and continued soil erosion in the North American Great Plains. Specialists in a broad range of disciplines explored the ways in which different societies have adjusted in the past, are currently responding, and can adapt more effectively in the future to the problems of a semiarid environment. A number of the sessions focused upon the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, a fitting concentration, as the term had first been used almost exactly fifty years before. More important, however, the Dust Bowl has become the paradigmatic example of ecological failure in mankind\u27s struggle to adapt to a semiarid environment. In the process, the term Dust Bowl has taken on two distinct meanings. In a strict sense, it refers to a particular locale, northeastern New Mexico, southeastern Colorado, western Kansas, and the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles. More broadly, Dust Bowl has become a shorthand label for the complex of difficulties-drought, low farm prices, and human distress-afflicting the Great Plains as a whole during the depression decade. The following papers explore some of the concerns suggested by the phrase Dust Bowl