The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War by Adam Arenson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 78 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY and western expansion. Southern commentators wrote in a similar vein about the railroad and the limitless expansion of the nation. One of the great strengths of Miner’s study is its balanced focus on southern railroad development along with the rest of the nation. Second, Miner focuses on Americans’ growing concern with the dangers of the new technology , including its impact as a centralizing force on the nation’s economy. Americans blamed panics and recessions on the “soulless corporation .” Writers concerned with the damage wrought by the railroad focused on its wanton destruction of nature and the dangers of “demon-steam.” Many Americans recognized that traveling by rail could be hazardous and result in injury or death. Miner showcases the worries of writers and newspapers about the threats of new corporate power and technology . But skeptical writers were not the norm. Americans celebrated the railroad as a positive good for the nation, encapsulating the dreams of writers, boosters, businessmen, and the general public. Has there ever again been a moment in American culture when a technology was so widely praised and embraced? Miner conveys clearly how the railroad shaped American culture and how Americans adapted to the technology. “Progress,” he concludes, “was a permanent fixture” of American life (265). But over time Americans also contested the definitions of progress associated with the business culture built by railroads. Whose progress was it? Who benefited from the railroad? Today, Americans have grave doubts about new technologies and they often dispute the benefits of technology . Nineteenth-century Americans, in contrast, rarely questioned the advantages of the railroad. A Most Magnificent Machine is a scholarly testimony to Americans’ response to the railroad; it stands as a fitting capstone to a remarkable career spent documenting American business and its impact on society. Gregory L. Schneider Emporia State University The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural CivilWar Adam Arenson This book examines the long-term effort of some St. Louis civic leaders to insist on the central position of St. Louis, Missouri, as it developed through most of the nineteenth century. The ambiguities of a city in rapid expansion at the junction of the three major regions—the East, the South, and the new West—molded the effort to extend St. Louis’s importance beyond its original settlement by Frenchmen and emigrants from the border South. Senator Thomas Hart Benton played a leading role in this early phase of development; he sought to finesse Missouri’s identity as a slave state by making it the center of western expansion. Arenson also explores the tensions created by the arrival of new migrants who disturbed the planter-trader traditions that predated the Louisiana Purchase. Massive immigration from Germany in particular altered the cultural outlook of St. Louis. A small number of slaves resided in the city because of the availability of cheap immigrant labor, reducing slave ownership to a status symbol. The arrival of new families from New England sparked the creation of institutions with no loyalty to the South, such as Washington University and the Saint Louis Mercantile BOOK REVIEWS SUMMER 2011 79 Library Association. German craftsmen, workers, and intellectuals also enriched a cultural stew that conflicted with the city’s early southern paradigm. Arenson sees the great fire of 1849 as a seminal event in the city’s development. The rebuilding cleared away the heart of the old French city and made the town a modern mercantile hub. Benton promoted the building of a transcontinental railroad terminating in St. Louis, and used his long presence in the U.S. Senate to keep alive a project that faded in the face of the manifest superiority of other routes. The great Gasconade bridge collapse of 1855, which sent a trainload of St. Louis notables to their deaths, punctuated a period of heavy investment in railroads that aimed to make Missouri a dynamic center of transportation. The Civil War saw a coup against the state government and a long period of anarchy “outstate,” sparked by the sharp political and cultural divide between St. Louis and the rest of Missouri. The Radical regime came to power in the state late...