The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 89, July 1985 - April, 1986 Page: 91

Book Reviews

and social Darwinism. Thurber, a company town, is an unnatural set-
ting for folk village culture. The town was a patchwork of numbered,
ethnic barrios. A calendar of international holidays conflicted with min-
ing shifts, and company stores doubtlessly had a hard time supplying
this ethnic Babel. Nearly twenty nationalities were represented, and
while Hooks surveys their colorful costumes and traditions in a way
that would gladden the best local colorists, he also questions the ability
of culture and institutions to soften impermanence and humanize such
a mining outpost, where management matched ethnics to jobs with the
detachment of military strategists deciding whether a campaign is best
executed by air or ground or naval forces. Thus, blacks without experi-
ence were weighed against Irish with mining and union backgrounds in
terms of the different problems they posed for management and
supervisors. And thus, Hooks examines the roles of family and eth-
nicity in a Thurber where the houses, churches, schools, and dance
halls were owned by The Company.
Other essays, such as those by T. Lindsay Baker and Bobby D. Weaver,
probe roles of myth and personality in this intriguing area, where
many of the assumptions of regional and ethnic history seem turned
upside down. A particularly moving section of illustrations records
stark realities of migration that are often forgotten in studies of ethnic
enclaves that predate the itinerant photographer. The pictures and ten
essays together attest to complex mechanisms by which groups balance
continuity and change, and they remind us today of the repository of
experience in folk culture.
US Army Command and General Staff College GLEN E. LICH
Robert E. Lee. By Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens. Edited
by Harold Simpson. (Hillsboro, Tex.: Hill Junior College Press,
1983. Pp. xv+22s. Introduction, photographs, notes, bibliogra-
phy, index. $1o.)
Harold B. Simpson has unearthed two brief and obscure articles on
Robert E. Lee and has edited them into a thin but respectable book.
The selection by Jefferson Davis clearly shows that the Confederate
president knew Lee quite well, appreciated his talents, and displayed
high respect for him. Although most people assume that the two first
got to know each other during the Civil War, they had been friends
from the time that Lee entered West Point one year after Davis had.
Their lives also crossed when Lee, as an outstanding field-grade officer,
was superintendent of West Point while Davis was secretary of war dur-
ing the Franklin Pierce administration. Although highly laudatory in