The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 85, July 1981 - April, 1982 Page: 351

Book Reviews

land itself, Duden related to German readers, provided its own sure
antidotes for whatever noxious flora and fauna existed in the New
World. It was an environment that fostered the advance of a superior
people. The Indians, Duden rationalized in much the way of Wash-
ington Irving in Astoria, were becoming extinct as a result of their
own deficiencies. Above all other characteristics, however, was the
land's fruitfulness. "A farmer rarely knows how many chickens he has.
If he needs eggs, he sends his children to the nearby woods to look for
them. They often gather one to two hundred eggs at a time, but even
the most careful searching does not prevent one from being surprised
by new groups of baby chicks from time to time" (p. 120o).
After its publication, Duden's Report aroused both strong support
and strong animosity. The editors preserved significant aspects of this
dialogue in the appendices, which also note Duden's changes in sub-
sequent editions.
As a work of scholarship, the volume leaves little to be desired. The
book will interest scholars in a number of disciplines.
Schreiner College GLEN E. LICH
Marvin Jones. By Irvin M. May, Jr. (College Station: Texas A8&M
University Press, 1980. Pp. xv+ 296. Preface, illustrations, bib-
liography, index. $22.95.)
Marvin Jones was one of those country boys who grew to love the
unpredictable Great Plains land, but vowed he would never try to
make a living off of it. Instead, he went to Congress where, in the
1920s, he could not believe that agriculture's premier problem was
the farm surplus, preferring to regard the real problem as one of dis-
tribution. Yet he opposed the notion that the U.S. government should
purchase food for hungry Americans, since he thought that the capital-
ist system would take care of them. He was, in short, a typical rural
conservative congressman of the day, utterly lacking solutions for the
nation's problems, even for its farm problems.
During the depression he supported all sorts of farm welfare mea-
sures-drought and flood relief, low-interest loans and guaranteed
annual appropriations for farmers, the farm-bankruptcy bill-but
voted against most similar welfare measures for urbanites. As chair-
man of the House Agriculture Committee, Jones had no long-range
plan to deal with the deepening disaster in the farm belts and did not
even enjoy the theoretical discussions of agricultural policy under-

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