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80CIVIL WAR HISTORY to endure. With improved transportation and lower rates eastern goods entered in increasing quantities. Consumers now eagerly turned from the cloth produced by the local mills to the ready-to-wear clothing of eastern manufacture. The sheep industry declined in these states also as vast grazing lands to the westward entered into production. No longer did a small mill in Minnesota have a competitive advantage over the giants of Lawrence and other eastern mill centers. One by one the local mills shut down, the victims, as the author says, "to the very economic progress they had helped to create." Some mills fought back and some won. It is pleasant to know that human enterprise and judgment could still make a difference. The Faribault Woolen Mills of Faribault, Minnesota, first sought to survive by turning from fabrics to pants and shirts. When this move failed to produce the desired results, the company entered successfully into the manufacture of quality blankets. The Appleton Mills in Wisconsin saw and profited from a regional opportunity: the manufacture of woolen felts for paper mills. The Flint Woolen Mill in Michigan, on the other hand, overlooked an opportunity, and died. It succeeded in staving off the fatal day for a time by converting to the manufacture of carriage cloth, but by 1909 it had lost out to eastern competitors. In the year of its closing it still clung to carriage cloth, turning down orders for automotive top lining—and the chance to build a future on the automobile industry burgeoning in its own dooryard. The author mentions other pioneer manufacturing enterprises neglected by scholars, among them paper plants, rope walks, wagon works, and breweries. It is to be hoped that these and others will be investigated . Professor Crockett has given us a model. Harry Brown Michigan State University The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1SSS-1S9G. By Richard Jensen. (Chicago: Universitv of Chicago Press, 1971. Pp. 357. $12.50.) Tweedledum and Tweedledee are dead. Richard Jensen's analysis of midwestem politics in the last quarter of the nineteenth century quietly lays to rest the old image of the two major political parties in the Gilded Age as nearly identical in their devotion to graft and their failure to face issues, along side that other casualty—the liberal or Progressive theme of politics as an extension of the conflict between the exploiters and the exploited. Jensen's central contention is that "religion was the fundamental source of political conflict" and hence shaped the political issues, rhetoric, and alignments of the period. Because political power is determined by the electoral behavior of millions of voters of no individual importance, the author supplies an impressive foundation of quantified evidence—electoral, religious, ethnic, economic, and demo- book reviews81 graphic. He concentrates on evidence found on the state and local levels, chiefly in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. Jensen's book contributes substantially to our understanding of the political revolution of the 1890's. At the heart of the upheaval lay the different ways in which voters understood the relationship of morality to the power of the state. Pietists (chiefly Methodists, Congregationalists , Disciples of Christ, most Baptists and Scandinavian Lutherans) demanded that governmental authority be used to cleanse society of sin, while liturgicals (Catholics, Episcopalians, and German Lutherans, among others) opposed all such measures as unwarranted incursions by the state into the affairs of the church. Thus pietists, who tended to adhere to the Republican party, supported prohibition, Sunday closing laws, and legislation regulating parochial schools, while the liturgicals, more comfortable in the Democracy, opposed them. Party structures and modes of electioneering were transformed by these issues, which tended to dominate midwestem politics by 1890. Until that time the parties drew upon military concepts and attitudes; campaigns were designed to achieve the highest possible levels of voter turnout among the party faithful. During the 1880's the pietists, most of whom were political amateurs, captured control of the Republican party on the local level and tried to convert it into a vehicle of moralistic reform. Liturgical voters, among whom German Lutherans were especially important, increasingly moved into Democratic ranks to produce the spectacular victories of 1890...

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