Robert Kennedy; he was fired and later
rehired, and eventually he left the NAACP
for a major law firm. Drawing on his experiences in two different social and cultural
worlds, Steel has no trouble getting to the
dark heart of our nation’s racial ills in this
polished, accomplished book. (June)
★ Oneida:
From Free Love Utopia to the Well-
Set Table—An American Story
Ellen Wayland-Smith. Picador, $27 (336p)
ISBN 978-1-250-04310-8
In this impressively thorough and
engaging work, Wayland-Smith tells the
story of the Oneida Community, a 19th-
century utopian Christian commune that
later became known for silverware manufacturing. The author, a descendent of
community founder John Humphry Noyes,
combines stellar research with exceptional
critical analysis that considers the community in light of the work of Sigmund Freud,
Karl Marx, and George Bernard Shaw.
Organized in upstate New York in 1848,
Oneida was marked by a practical approach
to finances and countercultural religious
beliefs, including free love or “complex
marriage.” A schism split the religious
community and it dissolved as Noyes grew
old, but his descendants continued to run
Oneida’s business operations—primarily
silk, animal trap, and iron spoon factories.
Their spoon factory soon shone brightest,
becoming one of the top silverware companies in the country until its 2006
bankruptcy. Wayland-Smith demonstrates
that Oneida was very much a product of its
time, placing the community in the context
of the Second Great Awakening and the
expansion of American capitalism while
highlighting Noyes’s incorporation of
communism, utopianism, eugenics, and
spiritualism (among other aspects of industrial modernism) into his belief system.
This book is a fascinating look into the
strange history of Oneida silverware and
how its origins reflect an exhilarating period
of American history. Agent: Rob McQuilkin,
Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (May)
The Incomplete, True, Authentic,
and Wonderful History of May Day
Peter Linebaugh. PM (IPG, dist.), $15.95 trade
paper (192p) ISBN 978-1-62963-107-3
In these collected ruminations spanning
three decades, historian Linebaugh (Stop,
It’s odd that pit bulls have such a bad
reputation, when around the early
20th century they were really
America’s dog.
Petey, from the
Little Rascals series,
was a pit bull.
Absolutely! [Petey]
is one of the dogs
people are more
familiar with, but
celebrities like Gary
Cooper and Fatty
Arbuckle also had pit
bulls. As I say in the
book, Rin Tin Tin
[a German shepherd]
appeared in 37 movies, but there was a
pit bull named Pal that appeared in
224 films. Both were very much the
all-American mascot.
What caused public opinion of pit
bulls to turn?
More than anything, the ball started
rolling downhill as a result of a very
well-intentioned effort by animal
welfare groups and law enforcement
to eradicate dog fighting—which
was a necessary thing to do. But
because the subject was so horrify-
ing to so many people, and because
the press seized on that aspect and
sensationalized it, the dogs kind of
got swept into that. There were all
these wild speculations about
behavior by people who weren’t
qualified to talk about it. That
triggered a kind of gonzo magazine
reportage in the ’70s about hanging
out with dog fighters and doing
this taboo thing. Magazines like
Esquire and Harper’s were running
all these bad-boy
types of features.
It got more and
more popular.
Can people really
predict which breeds
are more likely to
bite or attack?
The science has
been really clear
that there’s a very
predictable pattern
around who gets
bitten and why.
You’re much more
likely to be bitten if
you’re on the dog’s home turf. And
children ages five to nine have the
highest rates of being bitten, [because]
they are very mobile, they are very
curious, and they don’t yet have an
understanding of the importance of
respecting the dog’s space. There are
all kinds of reasons why they might
not understand what the dog is sig-
naling to them. Dogs are seen as a
big, fun toy. And boys are twice as
likely to be bitten as girls. That pat-
tern’s been in the research for years.
One would think that by now parental
supervision would be preached from
the mountaintop when anything like
this happens. But we’re embroiled in
this discussion about good traits and
bad traits and good breeds and bad
breeds. And that message gets lost.
—Kyle Tonniges
[Q&A]
PW Talks with Bronwen Dickey
Man’s Best Friend?
In Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon
(Knopf; pub month, May; Reviews, Feb. 29), Dickey sets out to
uncover how and why a particular breed of dog developed a bad
reputation in Western culture.
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