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Review
| Shapers of the Great Debate on the Great Society: A Biographical Dictionary, by Lawson Bowling. Westfield, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005. 344 pages, $75.00, cloth.
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| As the fifth installment in Greenwood Press's Shapers of the Great Debate series, Lawson Bowling's biographical dictionary of the Great Society is a welcome addition. It is a readable text the great value of which is that it avoids polemics. Because of the tumultuous nature of the 1960s, there is little interpretive middle ground concerning the Great Society. Thus, authors either write glowingly of Lyndon Johnson's legislative program or condemn it as hopelessly naive. Indeed, part of the difficulty in teaching the 1960s is the passions surrounding issues such as civil rights, poverty, and the Vietnam War. Because many historians and authors writing on the 1960s have a living memory of the decade, their books reflect the era's divisive nature as much as they chronicle its history. For example, while Alan Matusow's The Unraveling of America or Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage are great reads, due to their interpretive frameworks neither are suited for high school or lower-level undergraduates. By avoiding polemics this tidy little volume neatly reveals the personalities and political fault lines around which the president and the Great Society traversed. |
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Like the other four books in the Shapers of the Great Debate series, Bowling's volume is a biographical dictionary dedicated to the proposition that "people make history in the circumstances in which they find themselves." Organized around the biographies of the nineteen major figures involved in building, shaping, and critiquing the Great Society, Bowling's book is ideal for a class devoted to the 1960s or post-1945 America. Bowling's Introduction is a well-written and cogent presentation of the primary political and social forces shaping Johnson's Great Society. Finding the fine line between brevity and substance, the text which follows outlines the basic contours of the debates surrounding the Great Society. The biographies are divided into three sections; "Building A Great Society," "Challenging the Great Society," and "Both For and Against." |
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Choosing nineteen individuals as the most important historical actors involved in 1960s domestic policy is daunting but it is difficult to fault Bowling for any of his choices. Spanning the ideological and political spectrum, the author has chosen labor organizers, intellectuals, senators, civil rights leaders, and conservative pundits. From Lyndon Johnson and Richard Daley to Michael Harrington and William Buckley, all pertinent factions are represented by significant and key individuals. Inclusive without being patronizing, women and African Americans are well represented in the main text and the appendix's brief biographies. By examining Congresswoman Edith Green and civil rights activists Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin alongside Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the intellectual Edward Banefield, Bowling depicts the diverse political culture of the 1960s. |
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Bowling's prose is elegant and lively and successfully brings his characters to life. Not satisfied with staid and tired narratives, the author brings refreshing insight and an understanding of complexity to his biographies of such diverse figures as Barry Goldwater and Tom Hayden among others. Though he hardly mined the archives to source this work, Bowling makes the most of his secondary and sparse primary sources. So, while not breaking any new interpretive ground, Bowling has definitely penned a useful book. It is a handy resource for high school students and undergraduates, and is well suited for an advanced placement high school course, a freshmen college class, or a handy reference in a university library. |
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| Ohio University |
Jeff Bloodworth |
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