It's strange to find all of the revisionism about a past that my family still has PTSD about. Hoover was second only to Hitler and Stalin in their eyes. MacArthur with his "fend for yourself" order to the troops in the Philippines when he took his furniture and left people behind in the retreat, comes in a close fourth in my family. The hubris of the entitled is without equal. President Truman won our undying loyalty when he fired MacArthur. They would have given him sainthood if he had, had him shot. Do you have any parallels in Canada or England?
REH Journal of American History September 2010 Book Reviews 5, Serving Their Country: American Indian Poli-tics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. By Paul C. Rosier. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. viii, 360 pp. $39.95, ISBN 9-8-0-674-03610-9.) Paul C. Rosier of Villanova University has written a fascinating study documenting how federal American Indian policies intersected with national and international issues. He states that instead of analyzing "native politics and life in discrete chronological units," his focus is on how "American Indians figure in significant ways in constructing the discourse and discussions of the American empire" (p. 2). Although other historians have written about specific eras in which this intersection occurred, Rosier's intriguing and sweeping study adds much to the literature. The author builds on his work that ap-peared in the Journal of American History in 2006. The book's greatest contribution is the author's treatment of the period from 1945 through the Vietnam War. He shows how Na-tive Americans affected and were affected by the foreign policy debates since the end of World War II. He does this by focusing on federal, reformers', and Indians' responses to the desperate plight of the Navajos and its con-nections to Harry S. Truman's Point IV Pro-gram as well as to the discussions of rebuilding Europe articulated in the Marshall Plan. He clearly explains that the creation of the Indian Claims Commission had conflicting origins; it spurred Indian nationalism, was part of termi-nation policies, and yet it was "embedded firm-ly in an international context" after the Ho-locaust (p. 119). Rosier documents the Cold War justifications to take Indian lands and na-tive and reformer responses to these travesties. In describing Tuscarora activism, the Ameri-can Indian Chicago Conference of 1961, and the founding of the National Indian Youth Council, he is also quite effective in explaining how anti-colonial rhetoric intersected with the rise of Indian activism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He also documents how the State Department used cultural programs as part of its Cold War containment policies, hiring the native performer and artist Tom Two Arrows to tour Southeast Asia. Rosier's work has drawn information from numerous collections, including the papers of the National Congress of the American Indi-an, the National Indian Youth Council, and the American Indian Movement. He has also made use of published Native American auto-biographies, including those of Vietnam veter-ans. Yet surprisingly, he did not conduct inter-views with living Native Americans, some of whom he writes about, nor did he make use of the valuable materials in the Doris Duke Oral History Project or the interviews of World War II veterans in the Wanamaker Collection at In-diana University's Mathers Museum of World Cultures. Native American communities also have extensive oral history projects. Conse-quently, he relies too heavily on government or Indian organizational documents and draws too little from reservation voices. He has ac-cepted, as many historians have, the accusa-tions made against Alice Lee Jemison, a critic of the Indian New Deal, whose uncle was the leading Seneca political leader of the twentieth century. If she was a subversive, why did she have a federal government job, why was she seen favorably by her own Seneca people, and why does her Federal Bureau of Investigation file clear her? Laurence M. Hauptman State University of New York New Paltz, New York The Journal of American History September 2010 Book Reviews 585 Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism. By George H. Nash. (Wilmington, Del.: isi, 2009. xxii, 446 pp. $27.95, ISBN 978-1-935191-65-0.) George H. Nash created a new subfield with the book version of his Harvard University dis-sertation. Detached and impartial in tone, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (1976) gave readers no inkling of his own political position. Reappraising the Right, a collection of his essays, speeches, and introductions from the last twenty-five years, is quite different. He writes now as a commit-ted conservative but with the same analytical rigor and interpretive insight as before. In the 1950s and 1960s the conservative intellectual movement blended the tradition-alism of Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver with the libertarianism of Milton Friedman and Frank Chodorov. Anticommunism, embod-ied in such figures as Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, was the movement's glue; the National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. was its central organizing figure. In the 1970s, however, the movement gained two groups of new recruits. One was the neoconservatives, Jewish literati and ur-ban policy intellectuals from Commentary and The Public Interest, such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol. The other group was the new religious Right, more significant for the voting power it brought to conservatism than for its intellectual firepower. The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 brought this conservative coalition to power. It failed to di-minish the size of the federal government or reverse Roe v. Wade (1973), but it presided over the dissolution of Soviet communism. It split into warring factions during the Bill Clinton era but regained a provisional sense of unity behind George W. Bush, especially after Sep-tember 11, 2001. Four of the five parts of Nash's study explain these developments. A series of essays on ne-glected figures of the early Cold War era culmi-nates in a retrospective on Willmoore Kendall, one of the most eccentric and cantankerous stars in the history of American political sci-ence. Part 2 offers a survey of the life and work of Buckley, the astonishingly prolific journalist who achieved youthful notoriety with God and Man at Yale (1951) but spent much of the rest of his career reconciling argumentative and fis-siparous conservative groupings. Part 3 asks: what special role have American Jews played in the conservative movement? A few, such as Eugene Lyons and Ralph de Toledano, were "premature anticommunists" during the Mc-Carthy years. More overcame an early sense of cultural antagonism to embrace the Christian branch of the movement in the 1980s. By the early 1990s Podhoretz found himself joining hands with Pat Robertson in a shared concern for Israel. Nash pauses from his survey of recent histo-ry to pay tribute in part 4 to Herbert Hoover's role as the movement's godfather. His own three volumes on Hoover's life are unparal-leled for detail and interpretive rigor. Here he adds further insights, including a fine study of Hoover's uneasy relationship with Presi-dent Calvin Coolidge. He ends the book with a meditation on the future of the conserva-tive movement, emphasizing the fact that, de-spite recent electoral reversals and a continuing struggle over the Reagan legacy, it is stronger and more embedded in American life than ever before. Patrick Allitt Emory University Atlanta, Georgia
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