| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

An Undergrowth of Folly: Public Order, Race Anxiety, and the 1903 Evansville, Indiana, Riot. By Brian Butler. (New York: Garland, 2000. xx, 273 pp. $50.00, ISBN 0-8153-3722-1.)

The focal point of Brian Butler's book is the 1903 Evansville riot, which began when a bar argument led to the shooting of a white policeman. The book is less concerned with the details of the riot itself, however, than with the intersection of racism and the quest for public order in Victorian America. 1

According to Butler, three strands came together to provide the necessary conditions for the riot. The first was Evansville's "disordered subculture" of drinking, prostitution, and gambling. In detail, Butler traces the history of this subculture and of the attempts by the city's civil authorities and Victorian "moral arbiters" to eliminate or at least circumscribe it. A crucial development was the arrival in the 1850s of German immigrants whose numbers and cultural attitudes would undermine Anglo ascendancy and make possible the flourishing of the city's saloon culture. The second strand consists of the Negrophobia that burst into view during the Civil War decade as the African American population rose from 95 to 1,427. Underlined by incidents of lethal violence, the omnipresent racism that surfaced now would become even stronger over time. A final strand was the disproportionate degree to which the African American migrants became involved in the "disordered subculture" that Butler describes. . . .

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