The Log Cabin in America: From Pioneer Days to the Present (review)

276civil war history the attention O'Connor gives to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (whose paternal grandmother was "German"), to Grace Kelly ("whose mother is of German descent"), or to Victor Herbert (whose mother took a German for a second husband ) ? Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian Jew, becomes one of O'Connor's "German-Americans" apparently because he spoke German and settled in St. Louis! Even author O'Connor can pass for a "German-American," as he dedicated the book "To my Hessian great-grandfather." O'Connor's chapter on German-American Jews provides a good example of his essential dilletantism. August Belmont, the Rhenish-born banker-politician-sportsman-socialite, is given major space (eight errorstrewn pages) in the section even though he never made a move to identify himself with the Jewish community; but Jacob H. Schiff and Louis D. Brandeis, two towering figures in German-American Jewry, are not even mentioned. Furthermore, it makes no sense to mention the Jewish background of Belmonts, Seligmans, Ochses, and Strauses, and to omit it when discussing (at some length) Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Oscar Hammerstein I, and Charles P. Steinmetz. Occasionally, O'Connor puts individuals aside long enough to talk about issues and movements, such as the periodic German emigration to the United States, German-American settlements and neighborhoods, and German-American reactions to the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the two World Wars. But even here his treatment is merely a rehash, and not a lively one at that. The author may have intended this book to stand as the German counterpart to William V. Shannon's The American Irish and the late Michael A. Musmanno's The Story of the Italians in America. But where Shannon (incisively) and Musmanno (defensively) handled their subjects with great familiarity and understanding, O'Connor fails to demonstrate more than a superficial knowledge gained from hasty scissorsand -paste work. Irving Katz Indiana University The Log Cabin in America: From Pioneer Days to the Present. By C. A. Weslager. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969. Pp. xxv, 382. $12.50.) In 1939 Harold Shurtleff published The Log Cabin Myth in which he attacked the prevailing belief that the first English colonists in North America lived in log cabins. Shurtleff studied the origins of this myth and made a rather thorough evaluation of contemporary descriptions of the structures built by the early English and Dutch settlers. He found that the American log cabin was introduced by Scandanavian settlers in New Sweden and then briefly discussed the spread of this form of habitation and its subsequent role in American political campaigns. Now, after a book reviews277 period of thirty years, C. A. Weslager, who has written extensively about the history, archeology and Indian tribes of the Delaware region, has covered much of the same ground and has added a considerable amount of detail to Shurtleff's work. He deals with the origins and distribution of the log cabin as well as with its place in folk culture and in American political campaigns, and in so doing he has added some revisions and has indicated the Russian contribution to log housing along the northwest coast. Weslager points out, as did Shurtleff, that colonists constructed the same type of houses that they were familiar with in their homeland. He discussed the distribution of log houses in Europe and demonstrates that they were introduced in the Delaware Valley by Swedish and Finnish settlers in New Sweden. German settlers, however, also introduced log cabins and contributed to their diffusion as did the Scotch-Irish, who quickly adopted this form of construction. Despite new emphasis on the contribution of the Germans and the suggestion that log cabins, which not only were adapted to the environment but which were cheap and easy to build, were an important element in facilitating migration by American pioneers, the author becomes too involved in details. Long passages which deal with style and construction techniques and which include lists of log cabins in various areas will be of interest primarily to local historians and log cabin enthusiasts and will be less useful to historians interested in the broader implications of the study. There are, for example, sections dealing with the...