River Jordan Book

This is an entertaining, insightful, and unusual public history of Indiana focusing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Few outside of Indiana will have heard of it, and probably fewer will read it, but for those interested in not just Indiana but a fair depiction of how American life was in those times, this is a fascinating read. Martin's sources are mostly oral histories, and the tone is very boisterous, not dry at all, and almost ADHD in the number of anecdotes he manages to cram into a paragraph - yet his transitions between thoughts are smooth, and the work overall is rarely dull. One does, however, need to have a good basic idea of who some of the more important national personalities of the early 20th century were - e.g. Wendell Willkie, Samuel Gompers, etc. - because this book was written for an audience of that time period that would've already known those things. For that reason, I'd hesitate to recommend it to most members of my generation, as badly educated in our own country's history as most of us are. However, it really does stand as a shining example of what a public historian can accomplish, and is totally different from bland, committee-approved pablum and dense scholarly drivel that we think of as "history" today.

The irony is that Martin in this edition has to share billing with James Madison, a hotshot professor of history at IUB whose smarmy, self-important introduction attempts to overshadow Martin's entire book, to the degree that Madison's biographical blurb on the back cover is actually longer than the author's - and this was back in 1992, before Madison had really done anything. Madison's introduction loudly tells the reader what to look for as though the reader needs to be told, where the meaning is (because he is, clearly, the only person who knows), leaves out half of Martin's accomplishments in his biography of the man, and most egregiously starts out with his opinion (presented as undisputed fact) that "most older histories aren't worth reading", which flies in the face of everything that Martin stood for in the first place. Madison's introduction is so completely insulting to the work he purports to respect so highly that it makes one suspect that he's going out of his way to damn with faint praise because Martin, despite not having a doctorate, is twice the historian that Madison will ever be, and Madison knows it.

Ironically, in so doing, Madison provides a window into where Indiana's post-1900 "hardening of the arteries" progressed after Martin wrote this book - thanks to the postwar epidemic of self-important Baby Boomer men "with status", Madison included, it progressed into full-on coronary thrombosis. It seems to be a rule in Indiana that every male of that generation who has succeeded in Indiana, from the current Governor on down, must act as though history starts and ends with them, and that others simply do not matter. No one today ever opposes them for it no matter how outlandish their actions, because everyone else in Indiana has inherited what Martin recognizes to be the pathology of the 1940's Hoosier - an awareness that the good times of the 1890's are over, but also a denial of that fact, which gets deeper and deeper the longer time goes on, creating a vacuum for abuse. Martin, and James Whitcomb Riley for that matter, would be appalled by what Indiana has become today thanks to this sort of behavior, which makes a book like this all the more important. Few born in the last 30 years who are familiar with the Indiana of today will even recognize much of it in this book. It's a shame that a state with so much potential once went so far astray, and that Martin wasn't taken seriously enough in his time.