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Commonwealth: A Journal of Political Science  Volume 15, Number 2  September 2009

 2009 PPSA/LORL, PA House of Reps. ISSN 0890-2410

Book Reviews

Comments from the Book Review Editor

Given the positive response received by the editors to the first
collection of book reviews that appeared in the 2007 issue of
COMMONWEALTH, we decided to continue the practice with this
volume and, barring a major backlash from our readers, into the future.
The seven books reviewed here are an interesting and diverse collection.
Five deal directly with some aspect of Pennsylvania, but all were
released by in-state publishers. Readers are encouraged to recommend
books for review here. Readers interested in reviewing books for
COMMONWEALTH should send their names, contact information, areas
of scholarly interest, and brief curriculum vitae to Dr. Thomas J.
Baldino, COMMONWEALTH Book Review Editor, Department of
Political Science, Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766.

Citizen Lobbyists: Local Efforts to Influence Public Policy. By Brian
L. Adams. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2007. 235 pp.,
$71.50 cloth, ISBN: 978-1-59213-569-2; $25.95 paper, ISBN: 978-1-
59213-570-7

As noted by Brian L. Adams, an associate professor of political
science at San Diego University, scholars have spent more effort in
trying to gauge the power of interest groups than in trying to understand
their tactics. He might have added that scholars have also focused
disproportionately on lobbying at the federal level, thereby
overemphasizing lobbying by large organizations and losing sight of
lobbying by community groups. We seemingly have become so
distracted by the emergence of the “astroturf” generated by professional
lobbyists that the dynamics of genuine grassroots efforts have been
relatively neglected. Adams’s straightforward book is a welcome respite
from that pattern.



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The lure of the influence issue is not unknown to Adams, but he
astutely attempts to link it to such factors as who is doing the lobbying,
what issues the activists tackle, and―in particular―how they attempt to 
exert influence. Of course, this is a daunting task and one that is not
going to produce a truly satisfactory resolution any time soon, if ever.
Ultimately, this book only scratches the surface, as perhaps is to be
expected.

Adams identified 85 activists in the community of Santa Ana―an
“older” suburb of Los Angeles with a population of 320,000, a large
Latino sub-population, and severe problems with overcrowding―and he 
wrangled interviews with 55 of them, focusing on their tactics.
Unfortunately, the concept of tactics is limited primarily to what
activities were undertaken (e.g., speaking at a public meeting or
publishing a letter to the editor), what activist associations exist (e.g.,
neighborhood associations or political parties), and what issues were
addressed (e.g., gang violence or school curriculum). It would have been
interesting to see some other factors addressed, such as the extent to
which an activist played “hardball” (admittedly problematic to define) or
was motivated by a single transient issue (such as a proposal to widen a
street) as opposed to a more longitudinal involvement (e.g., an ongoing
concern about taxation).

The most obvious limitation of Citizen Lobbyists is that the
research―this is an adapation of a doctoral dissertation―is limited to a 
single community, and the characteristics of this case study subject
appear to have much to do with the author’s conclusions concerning
influence. Adams, who readily concedes that there is no such thing as a
“typical” community, concludes that Santa Ana’s citizen lobbyists
tended to address issues that were “neither complex nor complicated.”
Accordingly, they did little to provide new information to public
officials. (Of course, public participation often says something about
public opinion, the problem often being just how to read the tea leaves.)
In addition, because they necessarily specialized in particular issues and
tended to deemphasize collaboration, the Santa Ana activists did little to
improve their local governments’ problem-solving capacity.

Had Adams picked a community with more sophisticated and
successful citizen lobbying efforts, he presumably would have had a
better opportunity to address what makes for a successful community
lobbying effort, collaborative or otherwise. The lack of such an effort in
Santa Ana leads us to ask, if nothing else, why effective citizen



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leadership arises in some communities or on some issues more than
others. Of course, that is yet another complicated subject in itself and
does not render Citizen Lobbyists anything less than a decent
contribution on an important subject.

James Yoho, J.D., Ph.D.
Independent Scholar

Restructuring the Philadelphia Region: Metropolitan Divisions and
Inequality. By Carolyn Adams, David Bartelt, David Elesh, and Ira
Goldstein, with Joshua Freely and Michelle Schmitt. Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press, 2008. 256 pp., $74.50 cloth, ISBN: 1-59213-
896-9; $25.95 paper, ISBN: 1-59213-897-7

Restructuring the Philadelphia Region should be required reading
for every resident of the nine counties (and the 353 municipalities within
them) that the book covers. But that would require a coordinated
metropolitan policy, which, as Carolyn Adams and her coauthors point
out, is highly unlikely in a “region that is decentering and has balkanized
into hundreds of small, separate jurisdictions that offer their residents
widely differing opportunities to work, live, and educate their children”
(193). As this quote suggests, the authors offer a sobering vision of the
metropolitan area that is bolstered by a mountain of data (too rich and
voluminous to summarize adequately in a review), much of it collected
through the Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project (www.temple.
edu/mpip/) upon which this book fruitfully builds.

Relative to other urban areas in the United States, the Philadelphia
region is marked by a highly unequal distribution of wealth manifested in
the form of spatially concentrated pockets of poverty that are isolated
from economic opportunity through “job sprawl.” The jobs that are most
widely dispersed across the region, and thus the farthest from public
transit routes, are also the lowest paying. The poorest residents of the
region accordingly have the longest commutes to work, yet they are also
the least able to afford cars. The geographic concentration of poverty is
reinforced by a housing market that provides a limited range of
residential options to residents making below the median metropolitan
income of $51,980 (mostly in the cities of Camden, Chester, and
Philadelphia, along with several inner-ring suburbs). Not surprisingly,
the available evidence shows that these communities have the highest

http://www.temple. edu/mpip/
http://www.temple. edu/mpip/


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percentages of homes purchased through subprime mortgages and the
highest foreclosure rates.

Also not surprising is that the vast majority of the best public schools
in the region are concentrated in communities with “highly-educated,
high-earning populations” (115). Interestingly, Adams et al. found
through regression analyses that the average educational level of the
overall community was a much stronger predictor of public school
student achievement (measured by SAT score) than was average income.
Still, it is far more expensive to move into a community with high-
performing schools, as indicated by the strong, persistent, and positive
relationship between school achievement and housing prices.

Residents of the region’s poorest communities face the greatest
obstacles to finding work, endure the longest commutes, suffer the
fewest housing and schooling options, and shoulder the largest state and
local tax burdens. Using a hypothetical household earning the median
metropolitan income and living in a house priced at the median
metropolitan market value ($174,044), Adams et al. conclude that “in the
majority of suburbs, our hypothetical household would have been paying
under $6,500 in combined state and local taxes, compared with the same
household paying over $6,500 if they lived in Philadelphia and over
$8,000 if they lived in the distressed city of Chester” (149–150).

With regard to unequal taxation, the authors conclude that “the result
of the region’s intense fragmentation into hundreds of small jurisdictions
is that by exercising choices among communities, people can opt out of
paying the full cost of their location choices” (150). Indeed, the strongest
theme in the book is the negative consequences of government
fragmentation. For instance, the authors attribute job sprawl in part to the
fact that both Pennsylvania and New Jersey historically have left land
use planning to separate municipalities and in some instances have
actively discouraged intermunicipal coordination (45). Disparities in
education are also partly attributable to the fragmentation of school
districts, which, in turn, is exacerbated by state policies, especially in
Pennsylvania, that use local school district property taxes to fund public
schools (134–138 and 158). The authors note as well that municipal
fragmentation allows companies to pit municipalities against one
another, as in the case of Towers Perrin, a consulting firm that “benefited
from over $14 million in promised state and local government incentives
to move 1,100 employees one mile from Voorhees, New Jersey, to
Cherry Hill, New Jersey” (159).



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If Adams et al. are clearly in favor of regional cooperation, they
depart from scholars such as Myron Orfield and Neal Pierce who urge
cooperative action among elected local officials. Instead, the authors
foresee a “regionalism by default” (196) led by nongovernmental
institutions—regional authorities, business improvement districts,
neighborhood development organizations, community development
financial institutions, and foundations—that have formed “an
increasingly thick network across the region, mobilizing money and
political support that would not be available to traditional institutions of
government” (195). That is slim solace, to say the least.

Richardson Dilworth
Drexel University

Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in
Philadelphia. Edited by Richardson Dilworth. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press, 2006. 240 pp., $88.50 cloth, ISBN: 1-59213-344-4;
$28.95 paper, ISBN: 1-59213-345-2

The publication in 2000 of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The
Collapse and Revival of American Community renewed scholarly interest
in the apparent decline of social capital in the United States and its
ramifications for particular communities. In this edited volume,
researchers closely examine social capital in the city of Philadelphia in
historical context, in urban education, and in neighborhood and other
locally based institutions. The result is a compelling book that makes a
rich contribution to the literature on both social capital and the city of
Philadelphia.

The first three chapters are devoted to Philadelphia’s social capital in
historical context. These chapters paint a convincing portrait of
Philadelphia as a vibrant center for social capital in different historical
eras. In Chapter 1, for example, Jerome Hodos extols the city’s 1876
Centennial Exposition as a monumental event that required sustained
participation within groups, otherwise known as bonding capital, as well
as the more outward looking, bridging capital, which requires the
creation of bonds between and across groups. Likewise, in Chapter 2
Mark Brewin encourages the reader to rethink the relationship between
voting and social capital. While most contemporary literature on
electoral participation suggests that voting is a result of social capital,
Brewin postulates that in Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century,



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Election Day’s voting rituals actually “create[d] and promote[d] social
capital” (41). Voting’s inability to create social capital in modern
America may be one possible reason for the decline in electoral
participation. Concluding the first section, David Contosta and Carol
Franklin discuss how social capital was at work in the “preserv[ation]
and enhance[ment]” of Wissahickon Park in the twentieth-century (56).
Maintaining “one of the largest urban park networks in the world”—one
that includes many different communities and constituencies—requires
sustained bonding efforts within and between groups (57). In large part,
the park’s success can be traced to the social bonds that it created.

Comprised of two chapters, Part II examines social capital in urban
education. In her chapter titled “Leveraging Social Capital: The
University as Educator and Broker,” Barbara Ferman makes a
compelling case for how universities can build social capital in their
cities. She cites Philadelphia’s Temple University as an example. Ferman
encourages universities not to neglect their natural role in “seeding the
kinds of values and fostering the types of activities that we associate with
democratic life and practice” (88). Whereas Ferman summarizes the
various social capital initiatives developed by Temple’s University
Community Collaborative of Philadelphia (UCCP), Melina Patterson in
Chapter 6 reviews the West Philadelphia Improvement Corps (WEPIC),
a partnership in West Philadelphia among the University of
Pennsylvania, public schools, and other neighborhood organizations. The
goals of WEPIC were to establish broad partnerships, build social
networks, and improve the lives of those in the community. Lives of
West Philadelphia residents frequently were improved, but Patterson
cautions that these efforts at community improvement often are
exceedingly difficult in locales faced with broad structural inequalities
that have persisted for far too long.

In the third and final section of the book, the authors consider “the
role of local institutions in social capital production” (12) such as credit
unions (Chapter 6), African American-owned businesses (Chapter 7),
economic development projects (Chapter 8), closely-knit neighborhoods
(Chapter 9), and churches (Chapter 10). Though each chapter offers
something unique and rewarding, Patricia Stern Smallacombe’s chapter
on the Kensington section of Philadelphia presents an interesting
perspective on the limitations of bonding social capital. Predominantly
populated by poor working-class whites, Kensington has been largely left
behind in the “postindustrial economy” and “institutional efforts to



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address racism around the city.” Therefore, its residents “increasingly see
themselves as disenfranchised majority citizens” (178). The result of the
monumental societal shifts, Stern Smallacombe argues, is that residents
looked inward and achieved social identity strictly within the
neighborhood, which generated negative attitudes concerning work,
education, pregnancy, and families. In the end, Kensington’s high
bonding social capital has been to the detriment of bridging social capital
and connecting to outside institutions.

In the concluding chapter, Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin
Ginsberg place social capital into its appropriate context and draw
connections among the chapters. They argue that the decline of popular
politics, reflected in political parties and protest movements, and the
subsequent growth of “personal” modern politics that make the process
open to anyone, have precipitated the decline in social capital. Herein is
the crux of the problem. While it is easy for scholars and pundits alike to
blame citizens for the decline of social capital, this book causes the
reader to ponder the larger, structural reasons for its decline. It is a
valuable contribution to the literature on social capital and the city of
Philadelphia.

Kyle L. Kreider
Wilkes University

The Realignment of Pennsylvania Politics Since 1960: Two-Party
Competition in a Battleground State. By René M. Lamis. University
Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 398 pp.,
$65.00 cloth, ISBN: 978-0-271-03419-5

Scholars of politics often do not give enough attention to state-level
and local-level analysis of major political trends. This is certainly true in
the work on electoral realignment. René M. Lamis’s The Realignment of
Pennsylvania Politics Since 1960 adds much to the realignment
discussion by focusing in great detail on electoral changes in one state
over the last 50 years. She believes such state-level analysis can help
develop a more comprehensive understanding of what has happened to
the American electorate since the 1960s. In the case of Pennsylvania, she
argues, “recent Democratic gains are aftershocks of the culture-wars
realignment playing out after the main event of the realignment has
occurred” (36). She relates these changes to the aftershocks that followed
the New Deal realignment. The book tries to explain why Democratic



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presidential candidates fared so well in Pennsylvania since the 1960s
when Republican senatorial and gubernatorial candidates remained
highly competitive. It provides thorough statistical analysis of state
voting and demographic trends while telling the story of each election
from 1960 to 2004. It makes an excellent addition to electoral
realignment theory as well as Pennsylvania political history.

This well-structured book sifts through 50 years of election data.
After first reviewing the current state of realignment theory, it examines
presidential electoral change both nationally and within Pennsylvania.
Lamis begins with the New Deal realignment to show how the South
began moving away from the Democrats with the election of Truman and
how Kennedy was the last non-Southern Democrat to win the Presidency
until Obama did in 2008. The book notes how culturally liberal states
moved toward the Democrats, while culturally conservative ones moved
toward the Republicans. This is termed the “culture war realignment,”
and its aftershocks led to a relatively stable party system at the turn of the
century as “voters in the fifty American states sorted themselves out”
(53).

Drawing upon Pennsylvania voter and demographic data, the rest of
the book provides a wonderful journey through all the gubernatorial and
senatorial elections in Pennsylvania from 1960 to 2004, along with
analysis of the 2006 and 2008 elections. While Lamis sometimes
presents an avalanche of statistical data, charts, and figures, her analysis
is thorough and she provides strong evidence for her thesis. The story
that unfolds explains how Pennsylvania has become a moderately
Democratic state over the last 50 years. Culturally liberal and culturally
conservative counties sorted themselves out during a period of culture
war realignment. The clearest examples are the counties surrounding
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, which respectively have become more
Democratic and Republican. The qualitative background information
about candidates illuminates why certain moderate Republicans such as
Tom Ridge, Dick Thornburgh, John Heinz, and Arlen Specter have been
so successful, while Republican presidential candidates have not fared as
well. The success of these moderate Republicans explains the rampant
ticket-splitting observed in Pennsylvania. Senator Rick Santorum appears
as the major outlier, and the portrait of Pennsylvania’s electorate painted
by the author makes it easy to see why Bob Casey Jr. beat him so handily
in 2006.



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This work provides an excellent foundation for future analyses of
Pennsylvania elections. The postscript on the 2008 election reinforces the
argument that Pennsylvania is moving in a Democratic direction. An
interesting image is drawn of the state being divided demographically
and politically by the Appalachian Mountains. To the east, the population
is becoming younger and more educated as young people leave the
western counties. What were once some of the strongest Republican
counties east of the Appalachians have seen Democratic gains over the
last two presidential elections.

Having grown up in a Democratic household in Lancaster County, I
can personally attest to this trend. Over the past few election cycles,
“closet” Democrats have been finding their voices in Lancaster and much
of the eastern half of the state at the same time that more educated,
urban, and cosmopolitan individuals have moved to this region from the
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York areas. This change has affected
county voting trends and it may predict additional Democratic advances
in the East. The most astonishing picture of this trend appears in a map
showing how only six counties in Pennsylvania have seen gains in
Republican Party registration from 2004 to 2008. The rest have seen
varying degrees of Democratic gain. When combined with the 2008
registration data showing that 67.3% of voters aged 18 to 24 are
Democrats, opportunities for future Republican electoral success appear
bleak. The book properly notes, however, that these trends are not set in
stone.

The 2008 election also reinforces the argument that new
realignments do not completely erase old ones but build upon them
instead. Although the author makes a strong case for the culture war
realignment, the 2008 election demonstrates that economic issues from
the New Deal realignment are still alive and well.

Lamis essentially predicts Senator Arlen Specter’s switch to the
Democratic Party in 2009. Her review of the state’s electoral history
identifies Congressman Pat Toomey’s near-upset of Specter in 2004 as
an example of how the state’s Republican Party has become more
conservative and thus less able to endorse someone like Specter. As she
persuasively notes, “My best guess is that moderate-to-liberal
Republicans like Senator Specter are likely to have a tougher time
winning GOP nominations in the future. . . . The irony is that it is exactly
this type of moderate-to-liberal candidate who has the best chance of
getting elected statewide” (278). After reading this book, one senses that



110 BOOK REVIEWS

Specter read the writing on the wall and realized that he could no longer
win a Republican primary even though he has the qualities necessary to
win a general election.

This final point about Specter reinforces how important this book is
not only for academics studying realignment but also for practitioners
seeking state or federal office. The book is well written and rich with
data and statistical analysis. It will appeal to professional political
scientists, journalists covering the state, and students in classes on
Pennsylvania politics.

Daniel Mallinson
Villanova University

Pivotal Pennsylvania: Presidential Politics from FDR to the
Twenty-First Century. By G. Terry Madonna. Mansfield, PA:
Pennsylvania Historical Association, 2008. 126 pp., $14.95 paper, ISBN:
1-932304-40-1

The May 2008 Democratic primary election brought much national
attention to Pennsylvania as the two candidates, Senators Barack Obama
and Hillary Clinton, battled to secure enough votes to win their party’s
nomination. The national media descended on the State, which occupied
center stage for more than a month. Although Clinton’s victory in
Pennsylvania did not deliver her the Democratic nomination, the election
marked the first time since 1976 that Pennsylvania’s voters played an
important role in the nominating process of either party.

But as G. Terry Madonna documents in his book, Pivotal
Pennsylvania: Presidential Politics from FDR to the Twenty-First
Century, the Keystone State has earned its reputation as a battleground in
general elections for the presidency. In eight chapters, each averaging
less than 20 pages, Madonna reviews the last seven decades of the
twentieth century and the first decade of the current century. The
chapters are organized in essentially the same manner: first an
examination of each presidential election in terms of the major issues
that animated the Democratic and Republican Party primaries both
nationally and in Pennsylvania, then an account of the parties’
conventions and nominees, and finally an analysis of the general election
campaign in Pennsylvania incorporating voter turnout data and, where
appropriate, analysis of how the various regions of the state cast their
votes.



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Those unfamiliar with Pennsylvania’s voting history may be shocked
to learn that for over 40 years the state was solidly Republican,
consistently supporting the GOP’s presidential candidates while also
electing them to statewide office and even the mayor’s office in the
state’s largest cities. The Democrats’ fortunes began to improve with the
election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. Even though Herbert Hoover
carried the state for the GOP that year, the popularity of Roosevelt and
his New Deal brought the incumbent president victory in Pennsylvania in
1936, the first time since 1912 that any Democrat had carried the state.
Pennsylvanians vacillated between the parties in subsequent presidential
elections, thereby earning the state its reputation as a battleground. In the
conclusion, Madonna treats the 2008 primary campaign but not the
general election. He does note, however, that the Democrats had won
four consecutive presidential races in the state as of 2004. Still, it would
have been helpful had he speculated about the implications of either an
Obama or McCain victory for the state’s role as a battleground in the
2012 election cycle.

Pivotal Pennsylvania is an excellent overview of a large northeastern
state’s historical place in modern presidential electoral politics.
Considering the book’s brevity, the author could have devoted more
pages to any one of the elections he covers, and the conclusion ought to
have provided a more comprehensive synthesis of the material. But these
are the complaints of an academic. General readers and students will find
much to enjoy and learn from Madonna’s work, while historians and
political scientists will have a handy reference on Pennsylvania’s place in
presidential campaigns.

Thomas J. Baldino
Wilkes University

Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty: Dreams,
Disenchantments, and Diversity. By Kathleen Pickering, Mark H.
Harvey, Gene E. Summers, and David Mushinski. University Park, PA:
Penn State University Press, 2006. 256 pp., $66.00 cloth, ISBN: 978-0-
271-02877-4

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation
Act of 1996 (PRWORA) instituted a transition from traditional welfare
embodied in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to
Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). The goal was to move



112 BOOK REVIEWS

families off welfare by imposing time limits and requiring either work or
community service in order to receive benefits.

Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty compares the
experiences with welfare reform in four regions known for persistent
rural poverty: Appalachian Kentucky, the Rosebud and Pine Ridge
reservations in South Dakota, the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and the
Mississippi Delta. By selecting two representative counties in each of
these regions, the authors explore policy implementation both within and
between regions. These regions mirror the national trends in that welfare
caseloads declined dramatically in the period of study from 1996 to
2003. Why they declined and what happened to former welfare families
is the subject of this study.

The strength of this work is the mix of quantitative and qualitative
analyses. The authors—sociologists, an economist, and an
anthropologist—bring a diversity of methodological perspectives that
provide different insights into the experiences of TANF recipients. A
statistical section places each region in state context while also allowing
for comparison between regions. Case studies of each region, based on
interviews with government case workers, private sector agency
representatives, and current and former TANF participants, provide
insights into unique conditions that shape policy implementation.

The story of welfare reform in each of these regions is complex,
involving the interplay of social and economic structures within the
dynamics of local politics and agency interaction. The outcomes of
devolution of program implementation are mixed. In Mississippi the
privatization of social services limited accountability, while in South
Dakota the state and tribal governments clashed over program
administration. The Texas Local Workforce Development Boards created
a hostile atmosphere for program recipients, in some cases using
sanctions to drop families from the rolls and in others creating
bureaucratic disincentives to joining in the first place. Kentucky
counties, on the other hand, developed a “community approach” to
welfare reform involving considerable coordination between government
agencies and community organizations.

Access to good jobs depends, in part, on having the requisite
education and technical skills. States varied widely in their approaches to
education for TANF participants. In Kentucky, PRWORA was
implemented in the wake of a major education reform program, giving
communities both educational infrastructure and valuable experience in



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providing services. TANF participants in Kentucky were able to count
time spent obtaining a GED or even taking courses at community college
in lieu of work requirements. Participants in Texas and Mississippi, on
the other hand, could not. Texas recipients complained that their required
work hours limited time available to obtain an education, and some even
noted that they had more time to pursue an education under the old
AFDC programs.

No matter how effectively a policy is implemented, a “welfare to
work” program is effective only when there are permanent, well-paying
jobs with benefits to be had. In each of these regions, efforts of TANF
participants to transition off government support were often derailed by
the structure of the local economy. Unemployment is high in chronically
poor regions, but underemployment is even more of a problem.
Participants did leave the programs after finding jobs, but those jobs
were often seasonal in nature and paid minimum wage. Limited access
to child care and public transportation presented further barriers to
continued employment upon leaving TANF. In Mississippi, TANF
participants found themselves competing for jobs with workers laid off
when manufacturing moved offshore. Only in the Rio Grande Valley did
the booming border economy provide some hope for job seekers.

In the end, poor families survive as they always have—with a
combination of government assistance, work in the formal and informal
economies, and family support that the authors call “the everyday
economy.” Informants in Texas and Mississippi noted that TANF pays
so little for the bureaucratic costs and work involved that the program “is
not worth it,” and they quit the program to make it on their own. The
most vulnerable were single mothers whose precarious support systems
occasionally failed. Respondents reported that they sometimes went
hungry when all support failed.

Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty confirms, in nuanced
detail, what many suspected about the impact of PRWORA, that the
decline in caseloads had less to do with the improving economy than
with the specific dynamics of program implementation. In the end,
PRWORA may not have helped recipients as much as did the recipients’
own resilience and reliance on traditional means of economic survival.

E. Brooke Harlowe
Lock Haven University



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Bethlehem Steel: Builder and Arsenal of America. By Kenneth
Warren. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. 352 pp.,
$45.00 cloth, ISBN: 978-0822943235

This is the fifth book in Kenneth Warren’s examination of the
growth and decline of the American steel industry during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. His first was a business biography of
industrialist Henry Clay Frick [Triumphant Capitalism: Henry Clay
Frick and the Industrial Transformation of America (Pittsburgh, PA:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000)]. He then examined the coke
industry in the Pittsburgh region in Wealth, Waste, and Alienation:
Growth and Decline in the Connellsville Coke Industry (Pittsburgh, PA:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001). Returning to the makers of the
American steel industry, Warren wrote a biography of Charles Schwab,
an executive who played key roles at both United States Steel and
Bethlehem Steel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
[Industrial Genius: The Working Life of Charles Michael Schwab
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007)]. Warren then
turned his attention to America’s largest steel producer for most of the
twentieth century—U.S. Steel—and examined in close detail its rise and
more recent struggle for survival [Big Steel: The First Century of the
United States Steel Corporation, 1901-2001 (Pittsburgh, PA: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2008)]. In the book under review, Warren shifts from
the company that Schwab helped create—U.S. Steel—to the organization
that Schwab turned into U.S Steel’s arch rival and America’s second
largest steel manufacturer for most of the twentieth century: Bethlehem
Steel. For scholars interested in the industrialization of Pennsylvania in
the late nineteenth century and those interested in the deindustrialization
of the state in the late twentieth century, these five books combine to tell
an important story from the corporate viewpoint.

Bethlehem Steel was a major employer in Pennsylvania from World
War I through the 1970s. It originated as part of the iron industry that
existed in Pennsylvania throughout the nineteenth century. Unlike the
steel industry, iron manufacturing tended to be small and decentralized.
Although many iron makers attempted the switch to steel in the late
nineteenth century, few succeeded. Warren develops this context quite
well, and he nicely places the early history of Bethlehem Steel in this
regional story in addition to linking changes in the industry with broader
international trends. He then chronicles how Bethlehem Steel profited
from the carnage (and America’s late entry) into the two world wars.



BOOK REVIEWS 115

Bethlehem Steel owes its rise in the industry largely to sales to Europe
while the United States remained “neutral” for the first few years of
World War I. As with his book on U.S. Steel, Warren does an excellent
job tracing the decisions—both good and bad—made by Bethlehem’s
executives in the twentieth century. Like many companies in decline, by
the time Bethlehem management realized the company was in trouble in
the late twentieth century, it was largely too late to stop the slide. Warren
criticizes Bethlehem’s inbred management for making decisions that in
many cases were not bold enough to deal effectively with domestic and
foreign competition. The story of Bethlehem’s decline is fascinating
because by just changing names and dates it could be applied to almost
any major American manufacturer over the past 40 years. Bethlehem and
U.S. Steel charged foreign steel makers with “dumping” when the
American companies were simply being outproduced and undersold.
Warren also makes clear that Bethlehem’s difficulty in dealing with its
unions while it was in decline was a legacy of the company’s aggressive
anti-union activities during its period of growth.

All in all, Warren has done a superb job of telling the saga of the rise
and decline of one of Pennsylvania’s major twentieth century
corporations. Although he discusses Bethlehem’s anti-union labor
practices (and what was even for the industry unduly high executive
pay), this volume is a corporate history within an international context.
Other works will need to be consulted for a full picture of life for
workers at Bethlehem Steel. Warren’s text on the nineteenth century is
full of competitors’ names that scholars not well versed in Pennsylvania
industrial history may not know, but overall he develops the context
well.

For me, the biggest question about this work is its relationship with
Warren’s four other books from the same press. All five volumes tell
interrelated tales and overlap in both story and context (this is
particularly true of the three most recent works). Although each book
tells an important part of the long story of the state’s industrialization
(and deindustrialization), a scholar needs to read all five to fully
understand the story from the corporate side. This volume on Bethlehem
Steel should be read by people interested in the Lehigh Valley and the
steel industry, but whether it will appeal to a broader spectrum is
doubtful. While the story of Bethlehem seems to me to be more
interesting that that of its larger competitor (because of its earlier history
and its odder twists and turns), I would be hard pressed to tell someone



116 BOOK REVIEWS

who was going to read only one book on the steel industry to choose this
one over Warren’s work on U.S. Steel. Ironically, the author has
produced an outstanding book on an interesting topic that may appeal
only to a very limited market simply because he has produced so many
other works on similar topics.

John H. Hepp, IV
Wilkes University