Reviews for In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy

The average rating for In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-03-01 00:00:00 Dorothy Kipp I have finished slogging my way through Homer Soc0lofsky's The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison. This was neither an interesting nor easy read. I made this choice quite a while ago, when I first started reading the presidential biographies and chose not to read the highly recommended 3 volume set by Siever (I am saving that time investment for a much more interesting man, like Teddy Roosevelt). This book focused only on the presidency of Harrison, with a small amount of personal history provided. Socolofsky organized the presentation of Harrison's four year presidency, not in chronological order, but rather by topics such as Domestic Programs, Foreign Policy, and the President's Travels. I found this approach rather disjointed, as the author apparently chose to write so succinctly that much of the information was not grounded in other events occurring at the time. He included a chapter, The Passing of the Civil War Generation, which read much like an obit column of the time. Little in the chapter had to do with Harrison, but oddly enough I found it to be one of the more interesting parts of the book, as it illustrated the end of the romantic era of the Civil War. Sorry I did not chose Calhoun's short biography instead. Harrison was the centennial president. He and the Republicans swept back into power by the stoking of working man's fear that a change in the tariff policy might result in job loses to cheaper overseas labor (sound familiar??). The Fifty First Congress, controlled by Republicans and lead by a Republican President, took this as a mandate to legislate the Republican platform. The election was not as lopsided as might appear because 6 states were added to the Union between November 1889 and July 1890: North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming, bolstering the Republican power. This congress in 300 days enacted more legislature than any other congress, the most significant being the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Silver Purchase Act, and the McKinley Tariff Act. Harrison had managed however to alienate much of the power of the Republican congress by his appointments. He was by nature a bit of a loner and made most of his decisions with little input from Republican leaders which put their noses out of joint. Added to that fact, he belatedly invited Blaine, who considered himself a power behind the throne, to be Secretary of State, but the two of them never seemed to figure out how to pull together in harness, which added to dysfunction. Perhaps Blaine was frustrated that his fourth bid for the Presidency was unsuccessful, and his health was beginning to fail. The nation, observing so many major changes and feeling the tension within the Republican Party, decided in the 1890 election to sweep out Republicans, leaving Harrison for the last two years of his term with a contentious Democratic congress. Socolofsky points out that Harrison, frustrated on the domestic front, then turned his attention internationally, with his policies paving the way for a more aggressive promotion of the United States in foreign affairs. During this time, he negotiated a treaty with Great Britain over fishing and sealing rights (a very detailed chapter that truly did not capture my attention), a heated contest with Chile that almost broke out into a war, a continued search for a Pan American treaty that would allow for a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and the establishment of a treaty with Hawaii to provided the US with a foothold in the Pacific. As Harrison's presidency winds down, the effects of the legislation of the 51st congress is beginning to take full effect and Cleveland on his return to office will inherit the depression of 1893. And now, back to Cleveland.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-17 00:00:00 Frank Patrick I have a passion for United States history; I would have to in order to achieve my goal of reading a biography on every U.S. President. I often think nonfiction works are riveting when others would find them unreadably boring. I see rich context and I love understanding the background of each person and the role it plays in their decision making process, but others see nothing more than an encyclopedia that should be used as a reference, but not continuous reading. The book they are imagining is this book; "The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison." It's important to note that the authors never set out to write a full-fledged biography. They gave a brief summary of his life and lead-up to the presidency, but the main intention was a detailed analysis of Benjamin Harrison's Presidential Administration. Authors Homer E. Socolofsky and Allan B. Spetter decided to break up the book into sections (Foreign Policy, Domestic Policy, Travel, etc) rather than by chronology, and they cover an impressive range of issues throughout; however, these two facts combined with very dry writing styles yielded something that reads more like a dictionary than a readable work of nonfiction. There are certainly points of this work that piqued my interest, including Harrison's role in the passing of the Sherman Anti-Trust act, the rapid industrialization of America in the 1890's, the buildup of the U.S. Navy, and Harrison's appointment of Henry Billings Brown to the Supreme Court (Brown wrote the decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson which established court backing of 'separate but equal' segregation laws). The issue with this work is that those points of interest are inherent to the presidency of Harrison, not the writing of the authors. In fact, they do little more than introduce you to these points in much the same way I am here, where the introduction is nice but the juicy detail should be found elsewhere. This work was never going to be a thriller or even a traditional biography, but I expected much more. Overall, it took me almost an entire calendar year to read because I could not motivate myself to pick it up and work my way through the dry pages. And while the authors certainly deserve more credit for the historical content than I am giving them, what they set out to do just does not mesh with my preferences for a readable historical work.