Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews ed. by Joel Myerson (review)

BookReviews 243 plusproperty. By the 1980s,the firm, by then called CF&I Steel Corporation, was no longer an integrated operator. Makingits steel from scrap in electric furnaces, it wasstill a significant producer, and the largest employer in the Pueblo area. It is a storyof challenge and response for the firm throughout the century, a story that Scamehorn tells clearly and well. There are two aspects of this book that command broader attention. First, it concerns one of the "non-core" firms in the steel industry. Nearly every study, with the exception of my own (Making Iron and Steel: Independent Mills in Pittsburgh, 1820-.1920, Ohio State University Press, 1991) and one by Mansel Blackford (A PortraitCast in Steel: Buckeye International and Columbus, Ohio, 1881-1980, Greenwood Press, 1982) has focused on the giants of the industry. Scamehom's analysis givesyet another view of the ability of smaller firms to adapt and change with the market;to transcend the mandates of mass production and "throughput" that Alfred Chandler has lionized (see, for example, Chandler's The VisibleHand: The ManagerialRevolution in American, Harvard University Press, 1977).The other element of importance is the view of the "Ludlow massacre," and of labour-management relations generally in the industry, from the standpoint of management rather than labour. As far as I know, all previous works have tended to side almost completely withlabour in these confrontations (see especially, Howard M. Gitelman, Legacy of theLudlow Massacre: A Chapter inAmerican Industrial Relations, University of Philadelphia Press, 1988).Scamehorn is perhaps too uncritical of the firm in its handling of these labour matters, and I doubt that he will manage to convince most labour historians of his stand, but it nonetheless stands as an important corrective to the existingliterature. It is, all and all, a very good and useful study. John N. Ingham University of Toronto •••••• Joel Myerson, ed. Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. 1992. Joel Myerson is a bibliographical scholar who, in three earlier volumes, has jointly listed and annotated most, if not all, known reviewsof both Emerson and Thoreau. This new volume is a sampling of those reviews, supplemented by a nineteen-page introduction of some key annotations. Readers may well ask what such reviews add to our understanding of the authors, whether the selections merit inclusion, and how useful the introduction actually is. 244 CanadianReviewofAmerican Studies Of the 115reviewson the two authors, 73 are reviews of Emerson's works, which take up 300 of the 400pages, and only 42 are reviews of Thoreau's works. For economy , Myerson has edited the longer reviews, and replaced a reviewer's excerpts of the texts (the usual practice in the day of judicial criticism) by bracketed references to recent standard editions of each author's works. In addition, Myerson has listed the sources of additional reviewshe was not able to include, 207 on Emerson's writings and 60 on Thoreau's. Editorially, this disproportion of treatment is to be expected. Emerson produced eight books of essays,two original volumes of poetry, and fivemajor addresses over a period of four decades. Through his connections to "refonned" Unitarian ministers (organized into the Transcendental Oub), Emerson had numerous friends and disciples to write many influential reviews. In contrast, Thoreau published only two works in his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merri.mack Rivers (1849) and Walden(1854). Being that they were generally reviewed only briefly in abolitionist journals, utopian newsletters, or smaller papers, it is not surprising that both books were publishing failures. Because of this discrepancy, Myerson treats the reviews of the two authors' works differently in his introduction. With Emerson, Myerson annotates a selection of reviews included in the volume to show the range of judgements being made. He points out that many of the early reviews by conservative commentators-such as Francis Bowen (editor of the influential North American Review) and Andrews Norton (orthodox Unitarian professor of theology at Harvard) condemned three aspects of Emerson's writings: his dependence on German and continental philosophy,his use of "mystical"language that negated linear logic, and his ignoring of Christian or Unitarian orthodoxy. In annotating these reviews,however, Myerson barely touches on the...