Peter Conolly‐Smith. Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture,1895–1918 .Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895–1918 byPeter Conolly‐SmithReview by: By Jonathan M. HansenThe American Historical Review, Vol. 110, No. 3 (June 2005), pp. 812-813Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.110.3.812 .

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searing national spotlight. To mute charges that Mor-mons owed ultimate political allegiance to an entityother than the nation, church president Joseph F.Smith, under oath, diluted claims of revelation andauthority, thereby impairing the religious glue of someof the Mormon faithful.

Among the strands Flake pursues is the question ofhow religions successfully manage profound changewithout forfeiting identity. For the Saints this entailedthe reworking of institutional memory: a forgetting oftheir founding prophet’s last revelation (polygamy)while rediscovering his first, an encounter with God,which theretofore had only a recessive place in Mor-mon consciousness, overshadowed by the appearanceof the Book of Mormon and the rise of the church.

Flake may oversimplify here. Mormonism’s firstgeneration was dying off in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s,just as Smith’s narrated First Vision began to ascend inimportance. Its entry into the scriptural and culturalcanon may represent a natural process of recovery akinto the formulation of the gospels in the two genera-tions after Jesus’s death. Yet Flake is brilliant in baringthe function of the rediscovered First Vision for areconstructed Mormonism blinking—but soon toflourish—in the light of an altered reality.

Flake knows the power of narrative. She is steepedin the practice of law and in the study of constitutionalhistory, religion, feminist theory, ritual, and identityformation. No more sophisticated mind has turned itsattention to the history of the Latter-day Saints.

PHILIP BARLOW

Hanover College

PETER CONOLLY-SMITH. Translating America: An Immi-grant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895–1918. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.2004. Pp. ix, 414. $22.95.

This book describes the vertiginous collapse of Ger-man-American Kultur in New York City between 1895and 1918. Once hailed by anxious WASPs and pomp-ous Germans alike as the measure of vitality andvision—of all that was missing from Anglo-Americanarts and letters—by the end of World War I Kultur hadsuccumbed to the crushing assimilative force of anemergent popular media. Author Peter Conolly-Smithemphasizes that the war only completed a processalready under way. The anti-German hysteria that warunleashed in the United States would have beennegligible without the medium to transmit it. In a cityrent by language differences, new cartoons, comics,films, and theater delivered visual messages that anyimmigrant could understand: look and act like themand you’ll have a rough go of it here. Better to lookand act like us.

Kultur did not yield to pop culture overnight. It didso as the result of a quarter-century-long process ofsocial mediation that Conolly-Smith calls “transla-tion.” Translation is really a form of negotiation. Inliterature, the translator negotiates between languag-

es; in turn-of-the-century New York, translators nego-tiated between cultural communities. There are manyfascinating characters in this book, but few villains.The imagery Conolly-Smith examines emerged as theproduct of artistic agency, audience participation, eco-nomic imperative, and social prejudice. The author hasa sharp eye for partly-intended consequences. Forexample, he tells the story of one German-Americancartoonist who so thoroughly Americanized his audi-ence that he translated himself right out of a job.

This book succeeds by superimposing the narrativeof German-American acculturation over the morefundamental process of America defining itself. At theturn of the twentieth century, suffrage and laboragitation, political corruption, and economic disparity,among other things, unsettled conventions of socialpropriety and national loyalty, engendering vociferousdebate. Joining the debate was a host of new voices,many of them transported by the new visual media thatare the subject of the book. Conolly-Smith is especiallyinterested in German-American voices, and he turnsfor evidence to three influential and competing Ger-man-language dailies: the conservative New YorkerStaats-Zeitung, the socialist New Yorker Volkszeitung,and the New Yorker Morgen Journal of William Ran-dolph Hearst. Offering a lesson in how to read anewspaper, Conolly-Smith extracts not only cartoons,comics, and advertisements but also extensive com-mentary on theater, films, and the new pop cultural ingeneral. A Smithsonian imprint, this book is full ofilluminating images; with Conolly-Smith’s deft guid-ance, acculturation occurs before our eyes.

Acculturation often implies linear progression.Conolly-Smith demonstrates how complex accultura-tion really is. Immigrants’ adjustment to the UnitedStates was never simply a matter of loyalty dividedbetween old country and new. Cutting across nationalloyalty were all sorts of other allegiances and affilia-tions: to competing forms of cultural expression, tonewspapers, political ideologies, race and gendernorms. The complex of loyalties, allegiances, andaffiliations that constitute life can cohere, of course,but they often do not. This study shows how NewYork’s different German-American communities ne-gotiated positions on important social issues, ulti-mately negotiating difference away.

The pace of the acculturation that Conolly-Smithdescribes is breathtaking. I found myself wondering ifone can argue conclusively about cultural changebased on evidence drawn from a single generation—from less than that, in fact. For despite purporting totrace the collapse of Kultur over two-plus decades, thebalance of the book addresses the five years of WorldWar I. Might a longer scope mitigate evidence ofKultur ’s collapse? Anthropologists have taught us tothink of cultural change in generational terms, inpatterns of ebb and flow. Did Kultur go underground?Did it migrate? Did it reemerge elsewhere in theUnited States? To bolster his argument, Conolly-Smith points to Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moyni-

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han’s conclusion in Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negros,Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City(1963) that Germans disappeared as a group by mid-century, but we have come to think of ethnicity inrather different terms from the religious and politicalinterest groups that were the focus of the Glazer/Moynihan study. This is just another way of saying thatI would like to see Conolly-Smith extend his analysisbeyond World War I. I look forward to the sequel.

JONATHAN M. HANSEN

Harvard University

HUPING LING. Chinese St. Louis: From Enclave toCultural Community. Philadelphia: Temple UniversityPress. 2004. Pp. ix, 286. Cloth $68.50, paper $22.95.

Huping Ling’s book makes two important contribu-tions. First, it is a history of a Chinese community inthe Midwest, a region that has received little attentionin terms of Asian-American studies. Second, it pro-poses a model, defined as cultural community, forunderstanding post-1965 Asian-American communi-ties.

In the first part of the book, Ling provides a detailedaccount of the Chinese-American community of a fewhundred people in St. Louis in the period between the1870s and the 1960s. Mainly due to the Chineseexclusion laws and anti-Chinese prejudice, the major-ity of the Chinese in St. Louis were adult men withfamilies in China, and most were in the laundrybusiness. They lived in a small back street, known asHop Alley, in downtown St. Louis. In Hop Alley, therewere Chinese grocery stores, Chinese restaurants, andthe headquarters of the On Leong Merchants andLaborers Association. The On Leong Association “wasthe legislative, judiciary, and administrative authority”for the Chinese in St. Louis (p. 89). It sponsoredcultural activities such as the Chinese New Yearcelebration. Its headquarters provided local Chineseresidents with spaces for family and social gatherings.Hop Alley was a commercial, residential, and recre-ational sanctuary for Chinese St. Louisans.

Ling’s remarkable research brings Hop Alley to life.Old newspaper accounts, stories told by the few re-maining residents of Hop Alley, photos of families andof social gatherings, and church and cemetery recordshave all been mined to reconstruct the bygone com-munity. Utilizing merchant status, which was an ex-empt category according to the Exclusion Act of 1882,and American citizenship, Chinese St. Louisansstarted in the late nineteenth century to bring wivesand children over from China. Chinese merchant wivesin St. Louis wore American dresses, spoke English,and even decorated their houses the American way.Chinese wives of common laborers and small mer-chants, however, worked hard in helping to run familybusinesses such as restaurants and in raising a family.The appearance of families helped bring the Chinesecommunity closer to the mainstream society. Chinesewomen actively participated in Christian church activ-

ities, while their children went to public schools as wellas Sunday schools. American-born Chinese partici-pated in World War II as soldiers or as factoryworkers. Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943opened a small door for Chinese professionals toimmigrate to St. Louis. The urban renewal movementfinally affected the Chinese community in the 1960s,when Hop Alley had to make way for the city’s newstadium.

The second part of the book details the variouspolitical, economic, cultural, and social activities of theSt. Louis Chinese community in the post-1960s period.In this section, Ling establishes the cultural communitymodel. “Common cultural practices and beliefs of itsmembers” (p. 12) define such a community. Such acommunity runs ethnic-language schools, newspapers,and religious institutions, sponsors cultural and socialactivities, and organizes political coalitions. A culturalcommunity, Ling further points out, does not usuallyhave its members live in a specific geographical loca-tion such as the old Chinatown.

Ling presents ample facts to support her proposedmodel. She shows that, in the period between the1960s and 1980s, the Chinese in St. Louis experiencedseveral changes that caused the disappearance of theold ethnic enclave and the establishment of a culturalcommunity. First, many Chinese moved to live in thesuburbs. Second, most of them moved away from thelaundry business and into other service businesses.Third, newly arrived Chinese immigrants and college-trained, American-born Chinese worked in profes-sional jobs. In this process, community organizationssuch as the St. Louis Chapter of the Organization ofChinese Americans and cultural institutions such asChinese-language schools emerged. Instead of a geo-graphic Chinatown, such organizations and institutionscreated a sense of community. Language schools,cultural institutions, and political organizations existedpurely for reasons of ethnic solidarity and for thesocial and cultural needs of members.

This emerging cultural community, Ling points out,experienced further development in the 1990s and2000s. The influx of several thousand Chinese immi-grants, most of whom were professionals and students,added to an already viable Chinese community in St.Louis. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, thiscommunity supported two Chinese-language newspa-pers, organized the Chinese Cultural Days activitieseach year, and had many community organizations andcultural institutions. In 2001, the Chinese-languageschool had three hundred students in sixteen classes.

Ling’s model for a cultural community is well estab-lished and solidly supported. The model breaks thestereotypes of old ethnic enclaves and establishes anew way of understanding modern ethnic communi-ties. The book is an appropriate read for those in thefields of ethnic and immigration history, community

Canada and the United States 813

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