The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 79, July 1975 - April, 1976 Page: 239
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Book Reviews
lin Green. In the leading segment Robert F. Oaks, an assistant professor of
history at The University of Texas at Arlington, describes the trying of
General Howe's patience during the British occupation of Philadelphia in
1777 while General Washington was having his soul tried at Valley Forge.
The invading army almost doubled the size of the city, thus creating prob-
lems of discipline, housing, fuel, food, and entertainment, both high and
low. Oaks concludes that the nine-month occupation discouraged loyalists,
and may well have prolonged the war sufficiently to permit an American
victory.
Bruce I. Ambacher, also an assistant professor at Arlington, discusses in
his essay the impact of Andrew Jackson's bank war on politics in Philadel-
phia. New leaders who were willing to support the president and who used
petitions and mass meetings to rally the voters took over the Democratic
party. Both Ambacher and Oaks provide a city's-eye view of a national
event that occurred within it, but Richard G. Miller, chairman of the
history department at Arlington, traces the response of a city to a national
movement that swept over it. He concentrates upon the effort to install a
commission form of government in Fort Worth from 1899 to I907. Un-
successful in local elections, the businessmen-reformers won by pushing a
new charter through the state legislature. Miller contends that the new
government with at-large elections resulted in less voice for the lower class
while responding to the needs of business.
Richard Wade, professor of history from the City University of New
York, comments in the concluding essay upon the use and misuse of his-
torical analogy with special focus on the progression of ghetto peoples to
middle-class respectability. This has been the pattern in the past, but, he
maintains, it does not apply to the modern black who is locked into the
ghetto by prejudice and tradition. This "time bomb ticking away" (p. 147)
can be defused, according to Wade, by a major housing policy that would
require inclusion of Io to 15 percent low and moderate-income housing in
any multi-unit development utilizing public subsidy. He argues that this
scheme would distribute slum problems so they would be borne by the total
urban population and would ease the "white noose around black down-
town" (p. 147).
This, of course, is a variation on the old theme that you can cure slum
lesions with better housing. Dispersion might mean better schools, but it
would carry the poor away from welfare facilities and make them largely
dependent upon expensive automotive transportation. Over the long-run,
however, particularly if the energy crisis forces a greater density on the
cities the idea might have some merit. His case against historical analogy239
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 79, July 1975 - April, 1976, periodical, 1975/1976; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101203/m1/271/: accessed March 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.