Caught Between Roosevelt and Stalin: America’s Ambassadors to Moscow by Dennis J. Dunn (review)

BookReviews 161 achievement. The shape of her central argument demands that James, because hewas a white male writer who criticized sentimental women novelists, must be a combatant in "a pitched gender battle between ... sentimental women novelists like Evans, who stoutly insisted upon their right of access to the public arena of political and literary exchanges ... and ambitious young males writers like James, who were just as determined to eject the sentimental , the commercial and the popular from the realm of art" (2). Assuming that a novel by such a writer must have an "agenda" of supporting maledominant high culture, of siding "with the world of critics" (3), Donaldson suggests James created the embedded flaws in the narrator's viewpoint "perhaps inadvertently"(l9), and chooses to believe in the author's confusion rather than back down from her totalising vision of gender. She is similarly constrained in her treatment of Mark Twain whom she reads as a white male wnter "unwilling to pursue" the powerful contradiction of racial stereotyping his novel offers (95). In spite of the occasionally confining aspects of Donaldson's rigid categories , this book is a valuable contribution to the recuperation of formerly neglected texts as legitimate subjects of literary study. Donaldson insists, for example, on juxtaposing the work of women novelists such as Augusta J. Evans and Frances Watkins Harper, whose books were extremely popular when published, with canonical novels by Henry James and Mark Twain. Her discovery of surprising points of contact and equally surprising bases of difference in these texts gives readers a new perspective on well-known works as well as a sense of the dominant literary culture Evans, Harper, and other popular novelists were, consciously and unconsciously, contesting in their writing. The book's last chapter, "Toward Modernism," is a powerful essay on the increasing stylistic fragmentation and social inclusiveness of the novel in the years immediately preceding America's slide into another war. ElainePark St. Mary's College Dennis]. Dunn. CaughtBetweenRooseveltand Stalin:America'sAnibassadors to Moscou).Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998. Pp. 349. There have bean individual monographs published on the experiences of some of President Roosevelt's appointees assigned to represent the United States at the Moscow post from 1933 (the year recognition of Russia was 162 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadtenne detu.de.samericames initiated) to 1945, but Dunn's is the first study to incorporate the history of all the ambassadors and aides who succeeded William C. Bullitt, the first u;, ambassador to the Soviet Union. Dunn's study is also the first to make extensive use of the materials available to researchers in the newly opened Soviet archives. Their use enables the author to undertake an ambitious reappraisal of the flawed foreign policy contrived by Roosevelt toward Stalin's Russia both before and during World War II, culminating in the notorious sell-out of Poland and Eastern Europe to the Soviets by the western Allies. In addition, Dunn's research reveals much about Joseph Stalin's policy toward the United States and demonstrates how, in ignoring the advice of his own ambassadors, Roosevelt pursued a headstrong course of appeasing the Soviet leader unnecessarily. The focus in this monograph is partially on the two world leaders, Stalin and Roosevelt, which is natural and perhaps inevitable, and to a lesser degree on the five men sent on missions to Moscow. They include, besides Bullitt (1933-1936), Joseph E. Davies (1936-1938), Lawrence A. Steinhardt (1939-1941), William H. Standley (1942-1943) and W. Averell Harriman (1943-1946). Of the five, Bullitt, Davies, and Harriman were closest to Roosevelt personally and politically, but only Davies can be said to have remained loyally and wholeheartedly committed to their chief's policy of cultivating Stalin and appeasing him on every issue. Only Bullitt had enough courage to present Roosevelt in January, 1943, with a report containing a searing critique of his policy toward Stalin in which he reviewed the incontrovertible record of the Soviet leader's brutal regime and treachery, predicting what would happen to Eastern and Central Europe if he persisted in his course of yielding everything to the Soviets and demanding nothing in return. Bullitt's able analysis...