Gold Mountain Turned to Dust: Essays on the Legal History of the Chinese in the Nineteenth Century American West by John R. Wunder

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231 Reviews 230 OHQ vol. 120, no. 2 these stories live and work for us in bettering diverse human relations and protecting our fragile planet — whether through ambitious new practices such as decolonization, or more familiar ones such as reconciliation — remains the challenge. Robert E. Walls University of Notre Dame ELEANOR BALDWIN AND THE WOMAN’S POINT OF VIEW: NEW THOUGHT RADICALISM IN PORTLAND’S PROGRESSIVE ERA by Lawrence M. Lipin Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2017. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 272 pages. $27.95 paper. Lawrence M. Lipin’s Eleanor Baldwin and the Woman’s Point of View is a finely crafted portrait of a Progressive Era Portland journalist and speaker that offers students and scholars of American feminism and radicalism key insights into the texture and complexity of movements for social change. Through this readable and intellectually vibrant account, readers come face to face with the contradictions linking Baldwin, a labor rights advocate and critic of finance capitalism with an abolitionist heritage, to women’s rights, New Thought enthusiasm, and anti-Catholic diatribes associated with the 1920s Ku Klux Klan. Baldwin was the daughter of a New England Methodist circuit preacher and abolitionist who stressed voluntary individual conscience over tradition and hereditary church affiliations. Abolition offered a historical precedent for putting aside self-interest and acting on one’s moral compass. Baldwin and her brother Henry, a monetary radical supporter of the Greenback and Populist parties, saw exploitation of wage labor in the late-nineteenth-century industrial economy as another form of bondage that was furthered by an unholy alliance of corporate and government leaders protecting a restrictive monetary system. Between 1906 and 1909, Baldwin produced a daily column, “The Woman’s Point of View,” on the editorial page of the Portland Telegram . Building on Victorian tropes of female moral character to suggest that sympathy and benevolence were qualities that justified the influence of independent women in all aspects of economic and social life, she insisted that women in Progressive Era America were central to building a better world. Although some columns linked crass materialism with male power and corruption, others explored a variety of social feminist issues such as proper parenting, child labor, settlement-house life and the need for residences for wage-earning women, the dangers of vaccination, social hygiene and the single standard of sexual behavior, egalitarian marriages, and compassionate approaches to the poor and to criminal offenders. Citing female citizenship as the prerequisite for reform, her columns warmly supported woman suffrage. In no arena, however, did Baldwin speak truth to power more explicitly than in her critique of capitalism. Bridging middle-class women’s culture and radical political economy, she pointed to profit seeking by fashion, meatpacking, and milk interests at the expense of nature and family well-being. Although not identifying as a socialist, Baldwin called on women readers as consumers to recognize the benefits of government -run banks and mines while supporting the labor movement. Capitalism’s problem, she insisted,“wasunder-consumptionbythemasses, caused by the unequal power relations that concentrated wealth in the hands of a few” (p. 153). Utilizing the radical labor theory of value, Baldwin preached a cooperative approach to social relations. Yet she emphasized that the key to revolutionary progress lay in the mind, a major strand of New Thought teaching that collective thinking could shape the material world. As a “religion of social protest” that connected body and spirit, New Thought sought to break down both Victorian moral conventions limiting women’s sphere and impulses toward violence and greed (p. 142). In the years after publishing Money Talks (1915), for example, Baldwin lectured trade unionists on currency as a “spontaneously created social force or energy” (p. 153). World War I intensified Baldwin’s dedication to the mystical faith that fluid thought was bound together by forces of attraction. She assured readers of the postwar Oregon Labor Press, for example, that the Bolshevik Revolution was part of the history of human liberation and that communist opposition to ecclesiasticism did not connote animosity to religion in its spiritual sense. Indeed, the anti-institutional perspective of New Thought teaching set the grounds for her subsequent denunciation of the Roman Catholic...