Styling vs. Safety: The American Automobile Industry and the Development of Automotive Safety, 1900–1966. By Joel W. Eastman. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984. xvi + 280 pp. Cloth, $23.75; paper, $13.00.)

"Unlike the other branches of municipal service, the police were at the very heart of the great clashes within urban America" (p. 166). This huge unlike will surprise anyone familiar with the history of the great clashes over public education, housing, recreation, regulation of monopolies, and distribution of public services. These battles provided the content for more general debates about municipal government, beyond reform rhetoric. This critique was, in fact, broader and more complex than Teaford suggests, and political in the deepest sense of the term: this was where a myriad of conflicting groups and forces in urban America struggled most directly over what the new industrial capitalist city meant for the shape and capacity of modern democracy. It simply does not help to reduce all this to a caricatured "failure" theme easily pressed into service as a negative reference and never examined closely or carefully in its own terms. Ironically, though Teaford works hard to have us respect the accomplishments of Gilded Age municipal government, he undercuts his efforts by having so little historical respect for the struggles central to it. This antipathy is a curious attribute for the study of a government system premised on the legitimacy of popular debate and democratic decision making. Certainly, careful attention to the actual content of politics might have suggested that the contesting forces, in all their complexity, were not prisoners in the citadels of cultural "success" or "failure" that overshadow Teaford's book. Far from being either busy at work or culturally disoriented by the complexities of the new pluralism—the choices he seems to offer—they were, in many different ways on a very broad field, struggling over the future of their environment, their social order, and the values of their society. Is it too much to expect that all this might have been part of Teaford's otherwise excellent study, rather than being dismissed as the smoke obscuring our view of the Brooklyn Bridge and similar monuments to successful city government?