The Southwestern Division

490 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tions that had once been exciting lost their tang after years of routinization . Wind tunneljockeys might prolong the life of a pet apparatus long after it had outlived its usefulness. The continuity in Langley’s personnel and research programs re­ mains a key to understanding the laboratory’s advances and short­ comings. Whether the Langley case makes an argument for the NACA as a hero or sluggard depends, finally, on one’s expectations of the possibilities for institutional innovation in large bureaucratic structures. Clayton R. Koppes Dr. Koppes, Irvin E. Houck Professor in the Humanities and chairman of the Department of History, Oberlin College, is the author of JPL and the American Space Program: A History of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which won the Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology in 1983. The Southwestern Division: 50 Years of Service. By D. Clayton Brown. Dallas: Department of the Army, Corps of Engineers, 1987. Pp. viii + 196; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, appendix, index. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been a major player in the 20th-century game of American economic development. Through its support of an international military force, its many water resource projects, and its oversight functions in water quality, the corps has executed the mandates of a Congress and a nation that wanted and needed state-of-the art technology to provide security at home and abroad. For these reasons, as well as the more celebrated contretemps between the corps and environmentalists, the place of the army en­ gineers in the broader context of American life begs for interpretation. D. Clayton Brown, a member of the history department at Texas Christian University, had before him this task and two more. Schol­ arship on the army engineers has been driven either by the sense of the romantic (studies of 19th-century topographers), by the corps itself via its internal publications program, or by critics of engineer environmental degradation. Rarely were attempts made to balance these conflicting impulses into a creative synthesis of value to corps personnel and general audiences alike. The second challenge was the anomalous relationship of army en­ gineer “divisions” within the structure of the agency. Divisions cor­ respond in the corporate world to the “regional office,” facilitating (or blocking, depending on one’s point of view) the flow of infor­ mation between corporate headquarters (the Office of the Chief of Engineers) and the field (corps districts). Anyone attempting an as­ sessment of the history of a division confronts the supervisory capacity of the corps without the more tangible factors of policy-making or actual project development. Serving several masters dramatizes both the potential for engineer monographs and the hazards of contract scholarship. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 491 The Southwestern Division, based in Dallas since the late years of the Depression, oversees district functions from western New Mexico to central Arkansas and from southern Missouri to the border with Mexico. This region has dramatic extremes of culture, topography, and history, and its modern development, like most of the Sun Belt in which it resides, is a function of federal spending to “prime the pump” for economic prosperity. But this book reflects little of this context as it shifts from chronology to projects to internal organiza­ tion. The relationship of the districts to the division is overlooked, as are the weaknesses of corps commander personnel changes every three years and the dependency of the agency on federal funding. The bibliography points up some of the shortcomings of the nar­ rative. More research needs to be done on the post—World War II era in the region. The most powerful national politicians of the last two generations have come from Texas, among them Lyndon B. Johnson, Sam Rayburn, and Jim Wright. Their influence on the corps was (and still is) significant. Perhaps the delicate nature of the division’s rela­ tionship to Congress precluded analysis of this factor. Even though the army engineers have produced several dozen vol­ umes on many aspects of their organizational existence, the problems outlined above endure. One hopes that the willingness of the corps to continue evaluating its environmental and engineering policies

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