An American Hometown: Terre Haute, Indiana, 1927 by Tom Roznowski (review)

BOOK REVIEWS FALL 2011 95 An American Hometown: Terre Haute, Indiana, 1927 Tom Roznowski As the title suggests, An American Hometown is a social history of 1927 Terre Haute, Indiana. Roznowski’s longing for the past is obvious. He yearns for the simpler, more resourceful and environmentally friendly days in which families bonded together through a sense of community and pride in their hometown . However, his rose-colored vision of the past and lack of source citations will make it difficult for readers to separate fact from fiction as he draws heavily from the murky waters of memory and speculation. Roznowski organizes the book in a directory -style format, with individual entries of people and places in alphabetical order. Entries vary in length from one line to three pages. Roznowski focuses on the everyday people who lived in Terre Haute, from grocers and barbers, to vaudeville performers, mediums , and baseball players. As such, the book is full of useful quick references, but it lacks a cohesive narrative of the town in 1927. It offers a sense of the characters who made up the town but fails to examine the richness of how Terre Hautians interacted with each other and their environment on a day-to-day basis in the years before the Great Depression. In addition, many of the entries merely include the name of the person along with where they lived or worked, telling the reader little more than they could find in a city directory. Roznowski’s decisions about who to include in the book appear arbitrary, based as much on “mellifluous monikers”—such as Leefronia Laffoon—as on any other standard. Surprisingly, the Hulman family does not receive its own entry, nor does the Clabber Girl Baking Powder Factory operated by Hulman and Company. Neither does the mayor, Ora D. Davis, a Republican in a town with a long history of supporting Democrats. In several entries, Roznowski hints at the town’s Red Light Disctrict. However, the notorious Madam Edith Brown remains starkly absent from the text despite Terre Haute’s national reputation as “sin city.” Despite these shortcomings, Roznowski deserves praise for his discussion of the Jewish and Syrian communities, as well as “Baghdad,” the African American neighborhood. To his credit, Roznowski does not sugar coat race relations, dealing with segregation, mob violence , lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan. The Tom Roznowski. An American Hometown:Terre Haute, Indiana, 1927. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. 288 pp. ISBN: 9780253221292 (paper), $24.95. BOOK REVIEWS 96 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY book devotes sections to the city’s labor history , including references to Eugene V. Debs. Roznowski even provides an account of the 1935 General Strike that shut down much of the city. In demonstrating Terre Haute’s commitment to social service, Roznowski pays homage to the Friendly Inn that gave many people a helping hand as well as the County Poor Farm. He might have enhanced this theme by including some discussion of the Terre Haute chapter of the Florence Crittenton Home, which provided assistance for single mothers. Terre Haute had the only Crittenton Home in the state, which linked the city to the national Progressive reform effort. An American Hometown raises a central question: Why study Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1927? Why this town, in this year? Roznowski claims that after 1927, Terre Haute lost its sense of community and self-sufficiency. In the introduction he blames the dwindling of the railroad and the nation’s decreasing dependence on coal for the steady decline of the city. There is certainly truth in these claims. However, other national forces—most notably Prohibition— contributed to Terre Haute’s decline before 1927. Prohibition hit Terre Haute and its thriving brewing trade particularly hard, and it also reverberated through the city’s glass bottling industry. Farmers around Terre Haute also felt the impact of agricultural problems in the early 1920s. In short, sectors of the city’s economy suffered before the onset of the Great Depression and the decline of the coal and railroad industries. Roznowski blames the loss of Terre Haute’s manufacturing on corporate leaders ’ desire to find non-union labor in other areas of the country. That certainly occurred...