Visions of Zion: Christianity, Modernization and the American Pursuit of Liberty: Progressivism in Rural Nelson and Washington Counties Kentucky.

Visions of Zion: Christianity, Modernization and the American Pursuit of Liberty: Progressivism in Rural Nelson and Washington Counties Kentucky. By J. Larry Hood. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: University Press of America, Inc., c. 2005. Pp. vi, 292. Paper, $40.00, ISBN 0-7618-3065-0; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-7618-3064-2.)

J. Larry Hood has written on topics as diverse as the Nixon administration and affirmative action and Civil War politics in Kentucky. His most significant contribution, however, is an outgrowth of his 1980 dissertation. Although some of the work under review was foreshadowed in an earlier article, it is more fully elaborated and documented in the present book, an examination of two contiguous rural Kentucky Bluegrass counties primarily during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Rural Progressivism, according to Hood, is not an oxymoron; its animating spirit was an enthusiastic embrace of Christian millennialism and the pursuit of liberty rather than a reaction to corrupt urban political machines. Like John D. Hicks, who linked nineteenth-century Populists with twentieth-century Progressivism, Hood sees the origins of Progressivism in Nelson and Washington Counties as an attempt to preserve traditional values and fulfill the nation's mission as a model to the rest of the world. Initially, this optimism, sense of mission, and prosperity spawned efforts to constrain the power of trusts, to build better roads to move farm products to market, to improve moral values through better education, and to eliminate the scourge of drunkenness through Prohibition.

In asserting their traditional values and millennial optimism, citizens of the two counties welcomed modernization as a means to reinvigorate society and reduce isolation. The speed of change and the coming of World War I, however, undermined the independence of individuals and disrupted traditional roles within families. The war to end all wars, in fact, merely ended the optimism and sense of man's certain march toward Zion. Disillusionment replaced optimism as Nelson and Washington Countians saw their world turned upside down. Their perception that rural America represented the best values and culture the nation had to offer was shaken by the forces of modernity that they had embraced just a few years earlier. The 1920s ushered in the collapse of Zion.

Hood does not explain why he selected Nelson and Washington Counties for analysis except to suggest that they were a "microcosm ... of what the nation had been and of what much of it would remain during the next two decades, an illustration of rural America's hopes, dreams, and expectations" (p. 9). Although his research is thorough, he is not totally convincing in his argument that what happened in these two counties was replicated elsewhere. Curiously, he includes as an appendix an informative essay describing how the experience of these two counties supported, modified, or contradicted the themes and conclusions of historians of Progressivism. It is as though he wrote one book addressing the first half of the subtitle and concluded with an appendix addressing the second half.

While his book may claim more than it proves, Hood's meticulous research, his exploration of the rural reform experience during the Progressive era, and his willingness to place his topic in a larger historiographical context make it a useful model for others to test how representative Nelson and Washington Counties were.

NICHOLAS BURKEL

Marquette University