On Primm's "Lion of the Valley"
Gunther Barth’s review of James Neal Primm’s Lion of the Valley is as short and glossy as the book is long and (selectively!) thorough, echoing the common refrain: this is the book on St. Louis’ history, relatively shorn of editorializing, and placing the city in context as, at one time, the frontier capital of the world, the “Rome of the West”. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch refers blithely to Primm’s masterwork as “the standard modern desk reference for the history of St. Louis”. In a review for the Annals of Iowa, David A. Walker accepts Lion as authoritative, but laments that the book’s perspective is “restricted to the city limits”.
In the Foreward to the third edition, Robert R. Archibald (president of the Missouri History Museum, publisher of the book) calls the book “the first comprehensive history of our city and region to be published in nearly a century”. He also remarks, interestingly, that when the book was re-released with a second edition in 1990, nine years after its first publication, Primm saw fit to update it with a twelfth chapter on “urban renaissance”. Primm notes that from 2011, this “title seems extravagant”. To be sure, his writing on the 70s into the 80s, the last pages of the book, primarily busies itself with the creation of narrative in which total decline of the metro area has been largely staved off, where cultural amenities (the Arch, the various stadia) may somehow suffice for the “funereal” atmosphere of downtown, the utter collapse of the urban population who are fleeing for the suburbs in droves. In his account, shades of his own private boosterism delicately shade events and local aspirations. As a Missouri Historical Society member and University of Missouri-St. Louis professor, his own involvement in the topic is rather obvious.
Walker’s review, mentioned above, offers a curious description of Lion as primarily concerned with the political and the economic. Here I could not disagree more. For all of Primm’s strengths as an exhaustive cataloguer of historical sources (seriously, the “Notes on Sources” section at the end of the book is bewilderingly comprehensive), he is no economist. History here is a daisy chain of vignettes, whipped into intelligibility through sheer obdurate adherence to chronological reportage. Politics and economics are taxonomic categories for the particular actions of great men which, bestride the parapet, singularly shaped and fostered the city. Part of this is, doubtlessly, due to the outsize influence of business clubs and other cabals of the rich in city politics and business, and their propensity to leave self-aggrandizing memoirs and journals available for researchers. However, I am left wanting a systematic treatment of both, especially as the city’s fortunes modulate over time. For example, the rivalry and conflict with Chicago is primarily expressed as a turf war between local business luminaries in the respective cities, shored up when necessary by New York finance, culminating in the standoff over the Eads Bridge. But this approach utterly ignores the shifting landscape of regional and national development which threw the two cities into conflict—and it wasn’t sheer proximity or local cultural pride. Additionally, mere pages are spent on labor history, while the West End palaces of the Turners and pseudo-aristocratic families are gushed over for pages.
In sum, Lion of the Valley is a great history for the unitiated, a universalist urban biography stuffed with figures and powerful men, but for a historian of developmental tendencies, its use is limited to a stuffed folder of further lines of research.