history book review. The book is attached below. I also attached a sample book review and a guide, but it must be written in MLA format and double spaced, and has to be 4 pages in length.
Review Reviewed Work(s): Inventing the "American Way": The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement by Wendy L. Wall Review by: Judith E. Smith Source: The American Historical Review , FEBRUARY 2010 , Vol. 115, No. 1 (FEBRUARY 2010), pp. 248-249 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/23302847 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review This content downloaded from 155.33.16.124 on Fri, 28 Aug 2020 19:04:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 248 Reviews of Books to a surprising degree, especially in a downtown that bucked the national pattern of decline in the 1930s. Prior to World War II, Reno s promoters hardly had to advertise their city because its divorce colony at tracted steady press coverage. As Las Vegas began to compete in the postwar years, however, Reno's boost ers became more aggressive. Through the 1970s, Reno managed to expand its roster of casinos, which in turn made a larger footprint in the downtown area and grad ually emptied city streets of local residents. Only then, more than a half-century after Reno's initial rise as a tourist destination, did the city really begin to see large outside corporations and investors displace local own ership of tourism-oriented businesses. By the 1970s and 1980s, Reno, like Atlantic City, devolved from an urban playground to a place benighted by urban problems. As Barber observes, in the past two decades Reno's leaders have had to rethink their approach to economic devel opment. Once a powerful national magnet, Reno could no longer compete even within its own state. With Las Vegas becoming a fantasia of replicas of world-re nowned landmarks and renewing its embrace of adult transgressions, Reno turned to a seemingly unlikely al ternative: adventure tourism. In contrast with its de velopmental strategy a century before, modern Reno has come to rely on its setting in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Lake Tahoe, transforming a setting once seen as challenging and uninspiring into one with potential for outdoor adventures. Less surprising has been the city's recent embrace of a more conventional type of revitalization that includes downtown living, en tertainment districts, and riverfront redevelopment. Once known as a resting place for cast-off wedding rings in a fabricated divorce ritual, the Truckee River now supports whitewater rafting and riverside pedes trian walks. Barber devotes relatively little attention to the im pact of tourism on ordinary Reno citizens and is vir tually silent about the experience of African Americans in the city's divorce trade and tourism industry. If her book misses opportunities to broaden the scope of the social impacts of Reno's economic development, it still does an admirable job of situating Reno within many national trends, including the demise of the western frontier, progressive reform, the emergence of mass culture, economic depression, and the upsurge of post war consumerism. Her work makes a compelling case for more nuanced scholarship on the role of image in the history of managing cities in growth and decline. J. Mark Souther Cleveland State University Wendy L. Wall. Inventing the "American Way": The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press. 2008. Pp. xi, 320. $35.00. The significant contribution this book makes is the way in which it identifies the creation and circulation of a framework of consensus as a "political project," one that originated as one side of an argument in the 1930s and then became a widely, though not universally, ac cepted form of common sense in the 1950s. Wendy L. Wall shows how the project took shape through wide ranging discussions in three distinct periods with dif ferent dynamics: the late 1930s contests over the direc tion of New Deal labor and economic policies; wartime debates over national purpose and especially over what needed to be subordinated to the ideological demands of national unity for the war effort; and new postwar fears of totalitarianism and the resulting social require ments for fighting a national cold war against commu nism. Wall identifies the most important groups that actively participated in the thirty-year-long "cultural conversation" of building support for this consensus: "business and advertising executives, interfaith activ ists, government officials, and other cultural elites" who "seized on the notion of a unifying and distinctive 'American Way' and sought to define it in ways that furthered their own political and social agendas" (p. 5yf . Language was an important battlefield in this polit ical project, with "free enterprise" coming to substitute for the more pointed language of "private enterprise" utilized by the advocates of various New Deal forms of economic security and industrial democracy. Debates regarding the cultural definition of "American" fell be tween a more robust ethnic, pluralist, and potentially racially diverse framing of the country as a "nation of immigrants" on the one hand and the foregrounding of a common Judeo-Christian identity that proposed ci vility and tolerance as substitutes for demanding racial equality on the other. Wartime and left-wing discus sions that identified the external threat of fascism gave way to frameworks that subsumed fascism and commu nism under the overarching label of totalitarianism and accused these ideologies of endangering the "American Way." Wall notes that, more often than not, those with money and influence 'won' the cultural battles of the 1940s and 1950s by shaping the terms of public debate" (p. 11yf + H U E R R N L V P R V W S H U V X D V L Y H L Q G R F X P H Q W L Q J W K e central role of the business community in spearheading specific campaigns that called for tolerance, pluralism, and unity to defend their vision of market-based cap italism, thereby emphasizing individual freedom, rights, and opportunities rather than democracy or egalitarian economic or social values. These campaigns proved to be enormously successful in rallying diverse constituencies, including national interfaith coalitions like the National Conference of Christians and Jews. A 1939-1940 National Association of Manufacturers (NAMyf F D P S D L J Q H [ S O L F L W O \ O L Q N H G W K H S U R W H F W L R Q R f free enterprise to freedom of speech and religion. One postwar campaign attempted to mobilize "Letters to It aly" from Italian Americans to encourage their rela tives to vote for the Christian Democrats rather than the Communists in the 1948 elections. Similarly, an other campaign lobbied ethnic community newspapers and organizations to support a "Letters from America" program and a "Crusade for Freedom" to emphasize American Historical Review February 2010 This content downloaded from 155.33.16.124 on Fri, 28 Aug 2020 19:04:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Canada and the United States 249 American political freedom and consumer abundance in contrast to the stark postwar conditions in Europe. Wall's research makes extensive use of the records of the NAM and the Advertising Council during and after World War II as well as the papers of Advertising Coun cil leader Thomas D'Arcy Brophy, the American Her itage Foundation, and its president Winthrop Aldrich. Brophy, president of an advertising agency, was an ac tive promoter of a mild form of ethnic, religious, and (sometimesyf U D F L D O W R O H U D Q F H D V D P H D Q V R I J D U Q H U L Q g support for American-style capitalism and anticommu nism. He effectively led the Advertising Council as it arranged White House conferences, roundtables, and public service campaigns in pursuit of his goal of "re sell[ing] Americanism to Americans." Aldrich, an op ponent of the New Deal and the conservative chairman of Chase National Bank, led the effort to mobilize pri vate-sector support for Brophy's public service cam paigns, particularly the 1947-1949 Freedom Train. Un der the leadership of Brophy and Aldrich, what had begun as a postwar traveling exhibit of key documents from the National Archives abandoned an emphasis on unfinished democracy in favor of a more explicit pro motion of free enterprise and freedom of religion as bulwarks of anticommunism. Wall's claim that the business-promoted efforts to "define a unifying national consensus" gave many work ing-class ethnic and black Americans "a powerful lever with which to pry open some doors of America's main stream culture" is less convincing (p. 11yf 0 D N L Q J W K L s case more persuasively would require different sets of sources, especially those exposing the differing debates and contested political agendas within ethnic and black communities, in addition to Wall's accounts of the ef forts of leaders such as author Louis Adamic, the NAACP's Walter White, and the National Urban League's Lester Granger. The consensus focus on tol erance as a civic virtue ran the risk of negating citizen ship demands altogether, as a black journalist wrote in the Baltimore Afro-American on December 31, 1949, remarking that "[t]here is nothing to be tolerant of. All people should be treated equally not because it is the 'nice thing to do' but because they are equal." Judith Ε. Smith University of Massachusetts, Boston Jeffrey G. Barlow. From Hot War to Cold: The U.S. Navy and National Security Affairs, 1945-1955. Stan ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2009. Pp. xii, 710. $65.00. As early as the spring of 1943, Jeffrey G. Barlow ob serves, military planners in the United States viewed the direction of World War II with so much clarity that they began planning for the postwar peace. Yet within two years of the bombing of Hiroshima, the same plan ners were faced with a new enemy with seemingly lim itless reach and power. That the certainty of victory over fascism failed to reveal with the same clarity a co herent strategy to defeat the Soviet Union is perhaps the thorniest of the many problems in Cold War history. With this book, Barlow offers an important examina tion of American foreign and military policy during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. The United States Navy, he contends, offers an extremely useful lens through which the transformation of American policy from "national defense" to "national security" can be understood. Barlow points out that many of the antecedents of the United States' Cold War national security policy lay in World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt and his service chiefs faced the dual problems of fighting a global war against fascism and a battle for the direction of grand strategy with their more polished British counterparts. The solution to both problems lay in organizational re forms. FDR brought his service chiefs together as the Joint Chiefs of Staff and provided them with a support system that streamlined the distribution of resources while also increasing U.S. control over the direction of strategy. The navy, Barlow argues, proved itself to be extremely adept at recognizing and adapting to the ne cessity for the services to act jointly. At the same time he points out that Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King and his staff were equally adept at positioning the navy as the country's principal force for securing the postwar peace. Peace with Japan and Germany was soon overshad owed by the threat emerging from Soviet Russia and Joseph Stalin. Barlow argues that ambiguities sur rounding Soviet foreign and military policies resulted in a level of forward American military presence and en gagement incongruous with traditional peacetime pol icy. Uncertainty abroad was only exacerbated by the re cently revealed power of the atomic bomb and the short-lived American monopoly on such weapons. Am biguity, however, extended beyond plans for a future war with the Soviet Union, for the bomb proved to have an even greater destabilizing effect on the traditional roles and missions of the armed forces. Barlow observes that naval officers successfully nav igated service policy to deal with both the Soviet threat and the interservice debate over roles and missions. The branch moved beyond its original suspicions of de fense unification and used the redefined national se curity structure to reorganize its own Office of the Chief of Naval Operations framework in ways that would serve both the nation and the navy. A decade of for ward-looking naval officers proved instrumental in shaping the direction of national security policy away from the newly created U.S. Air Force's strategy of atomic blitz and toward a strategy in which aircraft car riers and conventional operations appeared the most reasonable means of engaging Soviet proxies without setting off a nuclear war. With a strong evidentiary base drawn from extensive primary source material, Barlow's text offers a fasci nating and important examination of organizational re form within a military organization and the ways in American Historical Review February 2010 This content downloaded from 155.33.16.124 on Fri, 28 Aug 2020 19:04:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms