It was a superb choice, one that captures both the staccato spirit of the Jazz Age (as Zelda’s husband Scott named it) and the ‘‘jit- tery rhythms” of Meade’s leading figures. The chapters unfold as a yearly chronicle of the lives of Parker, Fitzgerald, Ferber, and Millay: What emerges is a cultural archaeolo- gy in which Dorothy becomes the literary light of the “Algonquin Round Table” and The New Yorker, Zelda and Scott ride the crest of Caf6 Society, “Vincent” (Millay) wins a Pulitzer for poetry, and Ferber wins one for her novel So Big. As the decade progresses, most of these bright young things4xcepting Ferber, who seems to be temperamentally balanced-lose much of their sparkle to a common penchant for messy and booze- infused lives. Parker, between haunting speakeasies with her pal Robert Benchley, engaging in destruc- tive love affairs, and attempting suicide, man- aged to carve out a successful writing career. New Yorker editor Harold Ross wrote her, “God Bless Me! If I never do anything else I can say I ran a magazine that printed some of your stuff. Tearful thanks.” In the 1930s, she and her husband, Alan Campbell, followed the money to Hollywood, where she was most notably a member of the screenwriting team that won an Academy Award for A Star Is Born in 1937. By the end of the 1920s, Zelda and Scott had reeled out of control, with Scott living in an alcoholic blur (out of which he neverthe- less produced The Great Gafsby) and Zelda obsessed with a manic desire to become a bal- let dancer. By the final chapter of the book, Zelda has begun the round of hospitalizations in mental institutions that would envelop the rest of her life. She wrote a respected novel, Save Me the Waltz, in 193 1, but schizophrenia eventually overwhelmed her and she died in a hospital fire at the age of forty-seven. In a 1931 poll, Millay was voted one of the ten most famous people in America. She and her husband lived a sheltered life in the Berk- shires, where, although addicted to morphine and alcohol, she continued to write poetry. Her popularity waned, however, in a mod- ernist age that dismissed her style as unfash- ionable. By the end of the decade, “the endless party was over,” with Ferber alone escaping the self-destructive tsunami. She became an enormous success with the 1926 publication of her novel Show Boat, which Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, and Florenz Ziegfeld turned into a milestone musical the following year; she also formed a dazzling Broadway partnership with George S. Kaufman, result- ing in such stage successes as The Royal Family, Dinner at Eight, and Stage Door. The movie based on her novel Cimarron won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 193 I, and her later books Saratoga Trunk and Giant also became major motion pictures. Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin grew out of Marion Meade’s love for the 1920s, and for the way writers live their lives. She has cho- sen fascinating characters who illuminate both and who scintillate by their complexi- ties. It is a book that deserves wide reader- ship. AMY HENDERSON Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery Hahn, Steven A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 624 pp., $35.00 cloth, $19.95 paper ISBN 0-674-01765-X paper Publication Date: November 2003 ISBN 0-674-01 169-4 cloth Steven Hahn, Roy and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, has written an award-winning book. Set in the rural South, it covers the years from the 1850s to the early 1920s and explores intersections of work, kinship, and the changing nature of African American political consciousness. Hahn essentially defines politics as the “possible.” Politics among the enslaved, therefore, were generally local and individu- alistic. They were determined by the charac- ter of the master, the size and stability of the slave community, the nature of work, and the availability of outside information. The strug- gle was primarily a continuing negotiation over labor conditions and personal autonomy. Yet, there was always some awareness of the world beyond the fields and the family. The Civil War expanded that awareness and created new possibilities. The conflict meant that those slaves who remained at home discovered unaccustomed leverage in bargaining with their owners. For the more than four hundred thousand who fled to the North, it meant the acquisition of a new sense of self. For the more than two hundred thou- sand who served in the Union army or navy, it meant actively participating in their own liberation. At the war’s end, it meant that freemen and freedmen throughout the South were able to meet in local conventions to assess their goals and the meanings of free- dom. Their goals, however, stayed the same- personal and communal autonomy. They stayed the same when Reconstruction’s promise of equality contracted. They stayed the same as new options, ranging from emi- gration and the creation of all-black commu- nities to biracial alliances with white conser- vatives or dissidents, appeared. All were tried. Nothing was rejected and all were measured by the same yardstick. Did it advance the goals of the African American people? Beneath this dogged persistence, Hahn asserts, there lay a grassroots network of kin groups and local organizations that gave structure, shape, and continuity with the past to each new movement. Hahn’s research is impressive. He has explored new issues and raised new ques- tions. His book is an excellent companion to Leon F. Litwack’s Trouble In Mind (1999) and Edward Ayers’s The Promise of the New South (1992). Although it is occasionally ponderous and over-written, A Nation Under Our Feet is a work of imagination, ambition, and intellectual reach. It will be an essential part of graduate seminars on southern history for a long time to come. MARTIN HARDEMAN Eastern Illinois University Gidlow, Liette The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Exclusion, 1890s-1920s Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press Publication Date: July 2004 260 pp.. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-7864-0 Given the intensity of the recent presidential election and the increase in voter registration and participation, it may be difficult to accept that voting dropped to its lowest point at a time when half of the voting-age population was enfranchised by the passage of the Nine- teenth Amendment. In this inaugural contri- bution to Johns Hopkins’s Reconfiguring American Political History series, Bowling Green State University assistant professor Liette Gidlow examines the impetus, meth- ods, and results of the Get Out the Vote (GOTV) campaigns of the 1920s. Except for a momentary up tick in 1912, voter participation steadily declined from 80 percent in 1896 to less than 50 percent by 1920. Chief among the causes was the dimin- ished hold of the two major political parties over their members as a result of political reforms that weakened party machines and loyalty. Gidlow provides an interesting sociocultur- al explanation for the GOTV motivation and tactics, initially broached in a 2002 article, “Delegitimizing Democracy,” in The Journal of American History. In this volume she elab- orates her analysis more fully, describing the tactics-including publicity campaigns of businesses and business associations, women’s groups, and civic organizations- that by today’s standards are quaint, but that reflected the growing effects of Madison Avenue advertising and the rapidly expanding influence of consumerism. Sometimes, however, Gidlow uses terms without adequate definition-such as elites, middle class, good citizenship, public sphere, publicness, discursive dominance, and civic dominance. This makes it difficult to evaluate her thesis that class (elite and middle), gender (male), and race (white) reshaped public dis- course and institutional arrangements “by transforming both the public meanings of cit- izenship and the organization of political practices” that “legitimized, institutionalized, naturalized, and propagated their political 60 HISTORY