The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850-1900 (review)

84C I V I L W A R II I S ? ? R ? Confederate Agent. Kinchen disclaimed having written a definitive account but he has produced a brief general work which must suffice until this interesting subject receives the comprehensive treatment it deserves. Gordon H. Warren Winston-Salem State University The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 18501900 . By Paul KIeppner. (New York: The Free Press, 1970. Pp. x, 402. $9.00.) Borrowing many techniques from the behavioral sciences, Paul KIeppner argues that political behavior from 1850 to 1900 in Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin was determined primarily by the ethnic and religious identifications of the voters. In the 1850's mobility, immigration, moral reform movements and Know-Nothingism produced a "new structure of political action" which prevailed until the 1890's. Men chose parties on the basis of their religious attitudes. Those whose religion stressed "right behavior" ("pietists") joined the Republicans, the party of the "great moral ideas" which would use strong government to eradicate sins. Those whose religion stressed "right belief ("ritualists") naturally turned to the Democrats as the party which traditionally had rejected a strong role for the state in regulating behavior. The principal political clashes of the late nineteenth century were not economic wars between debtors and creditors but were ethnoreligious battles over temperance and parochial schools. The 1890's produced two major voting shifts. In 1894 all groups left the Democrats whom they blamed for hard times. In 1896 pietists moved toward Bryan's Republicans who tried to minimize religious conflict. The author's frequent claims for novelty are a bit overstated. His classification of "pietists" and "ritualists," as he notes, corresponds rather closely to Lee Benson's categories of "puritans" and "nonpuritans" in The Concept ofJacksonian Democracy (1961). But the basic problem is that readers must accept many of KIeppner's conclusions on faith alone. The major conclusions rest on the voting behavior of townships and wards which the author has identified by their ethnic and religious compositions. To test his conclusions readers would need both a list of the units he considered representative of each ethnoreligious group and a set of precise criteria for the categorization. In Appendix A, he declares that he used quantitative and qualitative sources to identify these compositions, but this is not enough. What percent of a ward's voters had to be Polish for him to call it a Polish ward? 99 per cent? 51 per cent? 33 per cent? When one is basing interpretations on 15 per cent shifts in voting, the answer to this question is crucial. (Because such lists are as important documentation for quantification studies as footnotes are to traditional history, publishers should be encouraged to include them in appendices.) It is equally difficult to BOOK REVIEWS85 evaluate his analyses of the symbolic appeals in newspaper editorials. He admits (fn. 30, p. 152) that others might interpret attacks on "British free trade" and "Republican paternalism" in tariff debates as economic arguments and not as the cultural appeals he considers them. WiUi no list of the editorials in his sample, the reader cannot test his statistics. The footnoting in the book is highly eccentric. Many provocative statements are made without documentation. Sources which contradict each other are sometimes (e.g., fn. 13, pp. 339-40) lumped together in a single footnote with no indication of why he accepted or rejected one interpretation instead of another. The fact that most of Kleppner's conclusions must be taken on faith becomes important because other researchers have reached different conclusions with similar methods. In his work on Wisconsin, Roger E. Wyman has maintained that the allegedly pietistic Norwegians responded mainly in economic terms to the tariff issue in 1890 and that German Lutherans voted Republican in 1896 not out of revulsion at Bryan's pietism but out of fiscal conservatism. This reviewer examined the voting behavior of the only twenty-two Wisconsin wards and townships whose ethnic composition he could identify in the descriptive parts of the book. He discovered three significant qualifications to Kleppner's ritualist-pietist dichotomy. In 1896, when Wisconsin Democrats fielded a pietist Yankee presidential candidate and a ritualist German Lutheran gubernatorial candidate...