Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West by Andrea G. Radke-Moss

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 111, no. 1 federal legal circles. The thousands of newly appointed anti-liquor agents were, by some accident of legislative procedure, excluded from normal civil service rules. Washington Senator Wesley Jones — a figure of venerable seniority regularly referred to, in his own time and in this book,as“the Senator”— advocated prohibition while supping at the qualificationsbe -damned patronage trough.Thomas Revelle, his hand-picked U.S.Attorney on Puget Sound, was a former preacher turned minimally competent real estate lawyer. Roy Lyle, the regional prohibition director,secured recognition among F.B.I. investigators as “practically a mental moron.” Enforcement chief William Whitney, a previously disgraced local politico, manufactured evidence and manipulated witnesses . Protected from removal by Senator Jones,this hapless trio failed miserably in their assigned task,recording a long-term conviction rate of barely 20 percent. Ironically, Revelle, Lyle, and Whitney did manage to send Olmstead to federal prison. The much ballyhooed “Whispering Wires Case”was tried in Seattle federal court in 1926. With no credible witnesses willing to testify,the prosecution relied on wiretaps, presented in the form of a superficially impressive volume of extracts. The government, the judge, and the jury chose to ignore the inconvenient fact that the tapping of telephone conversations was forbidden by Washington state law.A legion of critics, among them Louis Brandeis, the New York Times, and J. Edgar Hoover, condemned the practice.In 1928,however,the U.S.Supreme Court, in a five-four ruling crafted by William Howard Taft, upheld Olmstead’s conviction and established wire­ tapping as a legally proper tool of justice. Metcalfe might usefully have expanded on the legal issues raised by a Seattle bootlegger’s trial. He would have produced, however, a less entertaining book.The author writes with style, in one instance succinctly describing Olmstead associate and longtime federal snitchA.I.Hubbard as “a bulky misshapen lad” who “entered puberty suddenly and in a matter of months took on the features of a man of forty”(p. 99). Sadly, Philip Metcalfe passed away shortly after completing the manuscript of Whispering Wires. The volume at hand strongly suggests that he would have become a considerable figure in the non-fiction literature of the Pacific Northwest. Robert E. Ficken Issaquah, Washington Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West by Andrea G. Radke-Moss University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2008. Illustrations, photographs, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 368 pages. $45.00 cloth. The Morrill Act of 1862 created land-grant colleges in the West and Midwest that were, according to Andrea Radke-Moss, “among the first public institutions in the world to practice coeducation” (p. 1). As the title Bright Epoch suggests, Radke-Moss, Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University-Idaho, seeks to highlight the successes of women from the 1860s to the First World War in four coeducational land-grant colleges: Iowa Agricultural College in Ames; Oregon Agricultural College in Corvallis; the University of Nebraska, Lincoln ; and Utah Agricultural College in Logan. Building successfully on Gail Bederman’s ideas about women’s use of gendered space at the Chicago World’s Fair in Manliness and Civilization, Radke-Moss asserts that “women students succeeded in negotiating new spaces of gendered inclusion and equality at landgrant colleges” (p. 2). Bright Epoch traces women’s experiences in these four coeducational colleges with thematic chapters on the social and spatial aspects of campus life, literary societies, coursework,  Reviews sports,militarydrill,andwomen’sparticipation in the movement for suffrage and equal rights. Administrators expected women students to be “campus housekeepers” and to prepare to be farm wives, but women established their own priorities in coursework, campus activities, and post-graduate careers. One of the main strengths of the book is Radke-Moss’s extensive primary source research at the campus level. She investigates the publications of literary societies,charts changes in course catalogs,and draws on rich materials in campus newspapers, alumni materials, photographs, cartoons, and student memoirs and diaries. In the midst of amassing the details of many women’s experiences , she also takes time to address some lives in more detail, including the budding writer Willa Cather at Nebraska and future suffrage leader Carrie Chapman (Catt) at...