Gateway Cities and Other Essays by Leonard K. Eaton

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 417 historians, even a casual review of the documents reveals the manifold considerations involved in conducting a canning business in the early 20th century. Newell’s efforts are perhaps of less value to historians of technology. The emphasis of the Doyle Collection is on British Co­ lumbia, although there is information on the American industry. Doyle’s careful analysis of canning machinery, cannery labor, and op­ erating costs draws on the Canadian experience, yet Canadian can­ neries seldom attained the same level of technological sophistication as the massive American plants located on Puget Sound and throughout Alaska. During the half decade immediately before the establishment of the BCPA, the average British Columbia cannery produced only 38 percent of the annual output attained by the average cannery in Alaska, the industry’s most heavily mechanized region. The Canadian canneries operated successfully at a lower level of mechanization be­ cause of the premium position their product occupied in the vital English market and the ready availability of inexpensive native and Chinese labor in most of the province’s fishing regions. Newell’s in­ troductory essays to each chapter imply that the Canadian experience so well documented by Doyle can be extended to include the industry as a whole. She claims that technological change “did not play as large a role in this food-processing industry as it did in most of the others” (p. 15), a claim that simply cannot be upheld if the large American canneries are included in one’s picture of the industry. The Doyle Collection is virtually unique, providing an unequaled view of the organization and operation of the canned-salmon industry in the early 20th century. While Newell has attempted to select documents that reveal trends and events within the industry, and on the whole has succeeded admirably, some of her selections, particu­ larly lists of fishermen’s names, cannery trademarks, and cannery supply lists will probably be of interest principally to students of the industry. Patrick W. O’Bannon Dr. O’Bannon is principal historian with John Milner Associates, Inc., a cultural resources consulting firm in Philadelphia. He has published on the subject of technological innovation within the Pacific Coast canned-salmon industry. Gateway Cities and Other Essays. By Leonard K. Eaton. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989. Pp. xvii + 203; illustrations, notes, index. $39.95. In laying aside “traditional scholarly objectivity” (p. xiii), Leonard Eaton has written an engaging collection of nine essays rooted unabashedly in his midwestern past and organized loosely around the theme of a “Gateway City,” a metaphor borrowed from CarlJonas, the 418 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Nebraska novelist. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Omaha was the quintessential gateway city, an urban setting in which a river valley, a railroad network, and a warehouse district were “particularly important” (p. xiii) because they established the commercial connec­ tion between the urban core and its periphery, and between one gateway city and another throughout the North American midsec­ tion. Eaton never quantifies how many gateway cities there are; he is more concerned with the warehouse districts of four representatives of the type: St. Joseph, Missouri; St. Paul, Minnesota; Omaha, Nebraska; and Winnipeg, Manitoba. Since boyhood Eaton has been intrigued with warehouse structures, and, now that he is a retired architectural historian (one of his major contributions has been to cast appropriate light on the role of clients in architectural innovations), he has taken the time to update past research and to initiate new work concerning the structure, function, and history of Midwest ware­ houses after the 1885 construction of H. H. Richardson’s Marshall Field Warehouse in Chicago. How well does he succeed? The “disparate nature of the essays” (p. xi) indicates something of their unevenness. Because of their focus on particular gateway cities or on architects who designed for corporate clients in need of warehouses, the first six chapters cohere. The last three (with discussions of Jens Jensen, two lesser-known commissions of John Root, and George Caleb Bingham’s Election Series paintings) are less relevant to the book’s theme: that the construction of Midwest warehouses within the past century was more important...