Review of: Keokuk and the Great Dam. Hallwas, John E

Anfinson, John O.

English

Dada/Surrealism

Keokuk and the Great Dam

The Annals of Iowa

Iowa Research Online

The Annals of Iowa 
Volume 61 Number 4 (Fall 2002) pps. 454-455 
Keokuk and the Great Dam 
John O. Anfinson 
ISSN 0003-4827 
Copyright © 2002 State Historical Society of Iowa. This article is posted here for personal use, 
not for redistribution. 
Recommended Citation 
Anfinson, John O. "Keokuk and the Great Dam." The Annals of Iowa 61 (2002), 454-455. 
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.10644 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online 
454 THE ANNALS OF IOWA
subject and its historical context, and about the image itself. Merry
Foresta, serüor curator of photography at the Smithsonian American
Art Museum, discusses in her foreword the myriad ways photography
shapes what we see and understand about landscape.
It is almost churlish to find fault with this outstanding work, but
there is one place where Neuzil and his editors could have improved
it. The last section of the book reproduces Bosse's map of the upper
Mississippi, made contemporaneously with his photographs. River
experts wül be able to read the map and brief accompanying notes and
recogrüze the changes in the landscape between then and now. Schol-
ars of cartography, of course, will appreciate the map as a document in
and of itself. But the broader audience—and this book certairUy strives
for and deserves to reach a broad audience of nonspecialists—will not
get as much out of the reproduced map as it would if there were some
befter efforts to match its "then" with some image of "now." Juxtapos-
ing Bosse's map with current Corps river navigation charts would al-
low viewers to orient themselves and also drive home the point about
how drastically we haVe changed this landscape in just over 100 years.
Bosse's photographs deserve to be known by every scholar, edu-
cator, and interpretive program on the upper Mississippi, and Neuzil's
book is an excellent vehicle for their dissemination.
Keokuk and the Great Dam, by John E. Hallwas. Images of America Series.
Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2001.128 pp. Illustrations. $18.99 paper.
Reviewer John O. Anfinson is a historian for the Mississippi National River and
Recreation Area, a unit of the National Park System. His book. The River We
Have Wrought: A History of the Upper Mississippi River, is due out in early 2003.
Keokuk and the Great Dam is a historical travelog. Through some 160
captioned illustrations (mostly photographs), John E. Hallwas docu-
ments the origins and construction of the Keokuk, Iowa, hydroelectric
project. Keokuk Ües at the foot of the Des Moines Rapids, on the upper
Mississippi River. The rapids made navigation at low water treacher-
ous but offered the potential for hydropower. Boosters in Keokuk had
long hoped to subdue the rapids and capture the river's power. The
purpose of his book, says Hallwas, is to get people to appreciate the
project that achieved both dreams. When completed in 1913, the pow-
erhouse was the largest in the world, and the power line, which ran
144 miles to St. Louis, the longest. The dam's reservoir extended over
60 miles upstream, flooding the rapids. The project, Hallwas claims, is
"the largest privately funded construction project in world history" (8).
Book Reviews and Notices 455
Hallwas's book is not an academic accoimt of the hydroelectric
project or the Mississippi River; for that one should corwult Phillip
Scarpino's Great River: An Environmental History of the Upper Missis-
sippi, 1890-1950 (1985). The book's value is as a photographic history.
Through the illustrations, Hallwas details the engineering and con-
struction processes. He stresses the role of Hugh Cooper, the genius
behind the project's promotion, design, and construction. As an engi-
neer who brought h¿ talents to the Mississippi, Cooper reminds one
of James Eads, who designed the Eads Bridge at St. Louis and the jet-
ties that opened the river's mouth to sea-going vessels (see John Barry's
Rising Tide). Hallwas's book is, inherently, a history of the early devel-
opment of hydroelectric power in the Midwest and the Uruted States.
Barrios Nótenos: St. Paul and Midwestem Mexican Communities in the
Twentieth Century, by Dionicio Nodin Valdés. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2000. viii, 380 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography,
index. $45.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.
Reviewer Everard Meade is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of
Chicago. His research focuses on modem Mexican history and on Mexican
and Central American immigration to Iowa and the Midwest.
In 1949 Gus Garcia of the League of United Latin American Citizens,
frustrated with Mexican commvinities in the Urüted States that wanted
to call themselves Sparüsh-American or Latin-American, remarked, "I
define a Latin-American as a Mexican who has become prosperous
and joined the Rotary Club" (164). Aspirations for middle-class status
remain a staple of contemporary identity narratives, such as Hunger of
Memory by Richard Rodriguez, to the detriment of structural vmder-
standings of the discrimination and economic inequality facing Mexi-
can communities in the United States. In their focus on memory and
discourse, more sophisticated "histories from below" written by prac-
titioners of the "new cvdtural history" similarly occlude basic ques-
tions of social inequality. Community studies tiiat tackle discrimina-
tion head on, moreover, often compartmentalize racial and economic
justice or at least elide broader synchronie structures of exclusion and
inequality in their emphasis on local struggles. In his history of Mexi-
can conununities in St. Paul and the Midwest, Diorùcio Nodin Valdés
exchanges the "hunger of memory" for the "memory of hvmger." He
provides a systematic examination of the structural reality of social
and economic marginalization of Mexican individuals and commurü-
ties in the twentietti-century Midwest, one in constant dialogue with
local experience and idiom.



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