Dissenters All

...Gerald Johnson's The Lunatic Fringe, which takes its title from a phrase of Theodore Roosevelt's, is built primarily about a political theme...

...The author has a good deal of fun with the temperance movement, which offers worthies like John B. Gough ("the finest pearl dragged from the cesspool of Rum") and Carry Nation, who shouted "Glory be to God...

...it displays his knack for tying together diverse personalities into a connected narrative...

...The long struggle for land reform is traced from the early "rent wars" to Henry George, Ignatius Donnelly, and the Populists...

...It is a narrative, he says, of "a daft, honest, and all-but-incredible lot of men and women" who functioned as a sort of national conscience through the years of American expansion...

...Holbrook's volume is a lively one, written in a jaunty, popular spirit...

...For those who may flinch at seeing Theodore Roosevelt in company with Sockless Jerry and Tom Watson, the author reminds us that Roosevelt, who admitted to having read books, and worse to having written them, was considered for this reason to be dangerously unstable...

...As his choices indicate, Johnson has a strong affinity for the "wild-eyed radical" who, it appears, is not always so wild-eyed and who a generation later is much less radical than he is accused of being...

...Stewart Holbrook, whose Dreamers of the American Dream appears as part of the Mainstream of America series, has written more than a dozen previous books on American history —most recently, The Age of the Moguls for the same series...

...Gerald Johnson, who served for nearly twenty years on the Baltimore Swnpapers, has long been known for his penetrating and astringent comments on the American scene and for his incisive studies of social and political history...

...Holbrook's chapters on prison reform, agrarian revolt, the labor movement, and the relief of the unfortunate, however, receive serious treatment...

...He does not dig deeply into the motivation or causation of reform, but his book is an excellent, readable survey of the history of attempts by well-meaning men and women (with perhaps a few frauds) to bring happiness and justice into American society...

...Recognition of the right to disagree, as both Holbrook and Johnson believe, is one great strand of our national strength...

...He is on the side of the nonconformist, makes no bones about it and is moved to anger—in the present or in retrospect—at those who distrust the new and dread the different...

...T. R. himself was called a madman for publicly suggesting that rich men were something less than deities, and, as Johnson points out, the "red-tinged" 1892 Populist platform of Simpson and Donnelly was almost all embodied in legislation by 1926, even with Republican support...

...The range of the characters who appear in his narrative is refreshingly broad, from earnest reformers such as Dorothea Dix (who reformed prisons, not lonely hearts) and Samuel Gridley Howe (who accomplished much more than being the husband of the lady who wrote Battle Hymn of the Republic) to such off-beat oddities as Orson Fowler, the phrenologist, and Dr...

...while she threw rocks at saloon mirrors...

...Thomas Gallaudet, Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Howe, Helen Keller, Louis Dwight, and a host of other forgotten but important laborers for the poor, the oppressed, or the unfortunate are given recognition for their work...

...Johnson could, of course, extend his list of so-called political loonies indefinitely, lending proof thereby to the endurance of the strain of dissent in American history...

...Included in his list are Tom Paine, the Grimk sisters, Horace Greeley, Ignatius Donnelly, Sockless Jerry Simpson, Mary Ellen Lease, "Coin" Harvey, John Peter Altgeld, Carry Nation, Theodore Roosevelt, and Tom Watson...

...despite the constant pressures of conformity, past and present, it is heartening to observe in their accounts that which Johnson aptly calls "a reasonable hospitality to ideas...

...Both, though it is implicit rather than explicit in their pages, contain the same message—that Americanism is not always conformity, that dissent must not be confused with disloyalty...

...He wryly dedicates his book to "the unterrified American—if any," and then proceeds to tell the stories of fourteen Americans who were not...

...The history of the labor movement ranges from the steel strikes of the post-Civil War years to Gene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and the CIO...

...He manages also somehow to gather in Victoria Woodhull, the free-love spiritualist and free-souled consort of the famous, because she is far too interesting to leave out...

...These two books, both by able interpreters of the American past, are laudable additions to this growing body of literature...

...Similarly the women's rights movement provides author and reader with innocent amusement over the strong-minded Amazons who objected to being called "females," cut their hair short, and wore bloomers...

...Hartman, the inventor of Peruna...

...The existence of our "lunatic fringe" testified to a strong American belief in "seizing and applying those ideas that are right even though they run contrary to prevailing opinion," to use Johnson's phrase, and both authors, like the rest of us, hope that the time will never come when the freedom to disagree is suspect in America, or when Americans lose the courage to contemplate them in our past with precision and understanding...

...Holbrook's book is essentially a history of American reform movements from their first great burgeoning in the 1840s to the days of Technocracy...

...It is good to see figures such as Donnelly, Simpson, Harvey, and others drawn from obscurity and given recognition for their contributions to the native reform tradition, in company with the better-known reformers such as Altgeld, Paine, or George...

...Reviewed by Russel B. Nye One by-product of the recent Age of McCarthy has been a renewed interest in the history of American dissent, signalized by the appearance within the past two or three years of several studies of controversial men and issues, stressing the depth and continuity of the native dissenting tradition...