Claire Strom offers an insightful and nicely crafted treatment of the problems caused by Texas fever and the campaign to eradicate the disease. Texas fever is a cattle disease which is transmitted by ticks. In the nineteenth century, the fever was enzootic in much of the American South. Southern cattle, which were infected as calves and then constantly reinfected, suffered morbidity effects such as lower weight gain, but they seldom fell deathly ill. By contrast, northern cattle lacked immunities and died like flies when infected by ticks. As a result, the annual moving of southern cattle to northern markets generated huge interregional disputes. Tick eradication represented an important case of efficiency-enhancing technological and institutional diffusion promoting southern development. So long as ticks were present, southerners could not import the high-quality breeding stock needed to improve herds and develop a modern dairy industry.

The eradication program directly affected hundreds of thousands of farmers in about 16 states. Eradication involved a radical imposition of the police power of the state and required a fundamental shift in the constitutional balance of power between the states and the federal government. The national government, pressured by northern cattle interests and by the loss of European markets, imposed its will on a suspicious and often hostile southern society. None of this would have been possible without the scientific advances that led to an understanding of the disease's etiology. Strom deals with all of these issues. She makes the latest scientific advances on Texas fever accessible to nonspecialists, she analyzes the path of discovery that led to historic medical breakthroughs, she offers an excellent account of the origins of Texas fever, and she places the problems confronted in the American South in context with those that plagued other countries that harbored similar tick-borne diseases. But her main focus is on the distributional splits within the South, and in particular on “yeomen” opposition to eradication. Here, she analyzes the dynamics of local- and state-level battles between the supporters and opponents of eradication and details the infighting between state and federal authorities.

Strom argues that tick eradication programs were not in the self-interest of “yeomen” farmers, so they lashed out to protect their property and their way of life. Shootings, intimidating officials, and dynamiting dipping tanks were all too common occurrences. She repeatedly notes that southern yeomen were different from other farmers. The term “yeoman” is rather loosely defined and issues that might be formally tested with more data and quantitative skill are handled descriptively. The political economy of fencing laws closely paralleled that of tick eradication. Strom's analysis would have been stronger if she had given more attention to this issue and in particular to Shawn Kantor's work.

Were Strom's southern yeomen the uniquely selfish, brutish, ignorant, violent ruffians that she makes them out to be? Maybe, but I am not convinced that many northern farmers would not have behaved in a similar fashion if confronted with the same government policies. The southern opposition to tick programs was a part of a general pattern of opposition to government campaigns to combat livestock diseases. Although many, perhaps most, farmers in all sections of the country were law abiding citizens, large numbers of rural folk engaged in activities that endangered their neighbors’ livelihoods and, in many cases, their neighbors’ lives. To wit, in spite of explicit state and federal bans, hog farmers in the northern states spread live hog cholera virus by illegally vaccinating their own animals. When foot-and-mouth disease and other highly contagious maladies struck, it was common to find farmers rushing to move their animals out of the area ahead of an expected quarantine order. More egregious were the dairymen who fought tooth and nail against efforts to clean herds of bovine tuberculosis. A gun-toting grandma in Pennsylvania, hundreds of ruffians in Iowa, and scores of unruly farmers in California represent some of those who made headlines by threatening public officials doing their constitutional duty. There were also the tens of thousands of northern farmers who slithered in the shadows and knowingly sold TB-infected cows to scoundrels, who then doctored the animals to disguise the disease, before reselling them to other unsuspecting dairymen. In doing so, the original owners and their middlemen were probably responsible for the deaths of thousands of anonymous victims—far more than the unfortunate few gunned down by the southern hooligans fighting tick eradication. Strom may be right that southern yeomen represented an especially violent segment of American society, but when it came to breaking the law to protect their property, southern yeomen had a lot of company in other regions of the country.