The Smiling Phoenix: A Study of Southern Humor, 1865-1914 (review)

380CIVIL WAR HISTORY entation of justice for the Negro will be inconclusive. The author often fails to indicate from which specific Freedmen's Bureau book or manuscript record he has drawn his information and he occasionally fails to record the source of a quotation or of information correctly. Slipshod proofreading, which permitted some discrepancies between footnotes and the body of the text to escape uncorrected, may account for numerous errors in punctuation and for some glaring errors in spelling; but it cannot be held responsible for a pedestrian style and a lack of sense of proportion and of unity in the construction of paragraphs. Despite these criticisms, however, and despite the lack of maps and illustrations, this is a valuable book on reconstruction in Florida. Kenneth E. St. Clair Tarkio College The Smiling Phoenix: A Study of Southern Humor, 1865-1914. By Wade H. Hall. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1965. Pp. xv, 375. $8.50.) The author of this volume has diligently traversed the trackless wilds of the Franklin J. Meine Collection of American Humor and Folklore at the University of Illinois and a variety of other sources, including the humor columns of newspapers. But one finds it difficult to characterize the result with which he emerges. The book is a mine of information. It is a morass of information. It may prove useful to specialists in literature and history. It probably will disappoint the casual reader. This reviewer cannot resist the conclusion that Professor Hall would have benefited from a more modest—and more manageable—conception of his subject. If, after the manner of Shields Mcllwaine with the poor white, he had undertaken to trace the evolution of, for instance, the Negro as a stock comic character in southern literature, he would have had a more coherent book. Instead, he throws it all in. Originally a dissertation in English, the study seems to have been conceived as an exercise in classification . Thus, its structure is a succession of topics under each of which the author strings out at length illustrations culled from the literature of the period, political oratory, and newspaper paragraphs: Civil War; Reconstruction ; Reconciliation; The Image (chiefly of the plantation, but also other local color themes); Survival; The Negro; The Poor White; Politics; The Picaro; The Philosopher; and Shapes (or literary forms). It is not, therefore, a literary history—at least not in the conventional sense. And the historian will miss the analysis of development or evolution that he mav prefer. He will find, however, that humor reflected the times, that it conveyed the image of the romantic plantation myth, smoothed the way for acceptance of a "New South," and consigned the Negro to a subordinate role in society while it made him the protagonist in many of the plots. Moreover, it moved sharply toward gentility and away from the low-life vitality of the Old Southwestern humorists, toward book reviews381 religious sentiment, didacticism, pathos, and the exploitation of local color and folklore. Incidental historical judgments are sometimes shallow, as in one unique contribution to revisionism: "Had Northern politicians but retained their sense of humor when planning the Reconstruction program, reconciliation could have taken place before it did." Or downright startling: "the rise of the Negro politically and economically"—toward the end of the nineteenth century! But the author touches all the bases. His book and its bibliography will therefore become valuable reference tools. The lecturer or writer will find summarized and categorized useful material to illustrate and enliven his points. Here one can encounter such familiar authors as Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Richard Malcolm Johnston, and George W. Bagby, and such less familiar figures as Frank L. Stanton, Opie Read, Sam W. Small, and F. Hopkinson Smith, together with the new phenomenon of female humorists, Will Allen Dromgoole, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Jeanette Walworth. Because of the book's plan, however, one will gain more intimate acquaintance with their creations than with the authors: such characters as Mozis Addums, Bill Arp, Uncle Remus, Old Si, Brother Dickey, Old Wash, and the like, who crop up, some of them repeatedly , under the appropriate rubrics. Civil War buffs should note that, despite the tide, the...