Debby Applegate

I was first introduced to historian Debby Applegate by an interview she gave on the New York Times Book Review about her recently released Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age.

But instead of starting with this book I circled around and read first her Pulitzer Prize-winning work of a few years earlier: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher.

It took me quite a while to figure out why Madam was a fitting coda to the biography of Beecher, one of America’s first celebrities of the modern era.

“Americans have little appetite for examining the dreary mechanics behind the spectacle of our dreams” Applegate laments in the closing paragraphs of Madam.

This seemed to me pretty much what Applegate was doing in the first biography.

In telling this story she was telling a rather unvarnished version of the powers behind New York in a way, I think, that befits the tradition Robert Caro started with The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

Who after all are the heroes of American myth: gangsters like Dutch Shultz and Al Capone, the sturdy men in blue and the courts of Law and Order, Broadway and Wall Street.

Polly Adler, a 12-year-old Jewish immigrant from Belarus, was corrupted at every stage of the way by the free-for-all big city. When it came time to pay her dues, it usually meant big-time protection payments to lawyers and district attorneys, to judges and cops and vice squad detectives.

This began with the puritanical inclinations of the first Jewish relatives who take her in once she landed in America. It was cultivated by the lures to a single and poor young woman promised by the rides of Coney island and the early dance halls of Brooklyn and Queens, and solidified by a rape, abortion, and later an intoxication by men wielding power.

The usual spin was that Polly “bribed” the cops. The reality was that Polly was fitting in with a tradition of corruption that originated with the Democratic machine of Tammany Hall.

The crooks were every bit the tool of the politicians. Poverty and the grinding wheels of American style capitalism kept everybody in line.

It was this system that made it easy for hoodlums to beat the crap out of Polly’s “girls” when they so wished, and it was the same system that kept quiet Franklin Roosevelt’s preference for felatio from prostitutes when he was Tammany Hall’s favourite choice for the White House.

And I couldn’t help but share Polly’s terror when one of New York’s most brutal and unpredictable killers, Arthur Simon Flegenheimer, a.k.a. Dutch Shultz, suddenly decided to make Polly’s apartment his operations base during a bloody gangland war.

Applegate deftly highlights Polly’s disgust for the lure of narcotics and alcohol and their affects on the johns and her employees, things for which Polly had a ringside seat at the beginning of her long association with prostitution.

These are also part and parcel of “the dreary mechanics” of the American way and American style celebrity.… (altro)

Henry Ward Beecher’s great contribution to the American style of religion seems to be that faith could be a matter of joy, not the fear and self-loathing Beecher learned from his famous Puritanical father Lyman Beecher.

His impact on the American psyche seems to have gone even deeper than his father.

One big reason was that he reached the summit of his powers at yet another turning point in transportation, communications, and the new business of celebrity.

While struggling to make it as a minister on America’s frontier, Beecher’s early tract on what a preacher could be found its way into the hands of easterners who had money to invest and a keen sense of what people were willing to pay for.

We’re talking mid-19th century America when the penny press was giving ordinary men outsized reputations. Beecher became a charismatic speaker, a persuasive writer, and eventually great political tool for the then radical new Republican Party.

He wrote or had ghost-written enormously popular and financially rewarding books and articles. And he used the new trains to hopscotch between audiences.

Northerners and Southerners weren’t all that far apart on their opinion of the inferiority of blacks toiling in America’s slave system. But one could argue that the rising abolitionist presses inflamed the differences, much as FOX News inflates differences between Republicans and Democrats today.

There were the clear unreconcilable facts of the US Constitution and societal norms. Americans could see the evidence around them that all men were not born equal. But the country averted its eyes from slavery, and not just the slaveowners.

Then came the political compromises in Washington, most particularly the Fugitive Slave laws and the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court decision which really stoked radical opinion and drove the country closer to civil war.

The role of the charismatic speaker in public discourse is what makes this biography of Beecher published in 2006 so relevant today.

The many parallels between Beecher and Donald Trump are startling. Both had domineering successful fathers, both were raised with self-loathing and a punishing obsession with making it on their own.

Both took excessive liberties with their celebrity, ran up mountains of debt, and both channelled the political discourse of the nation.… (altro)

Summary: The Pulitzer prize-winning biography of the most famous preacher in nineteenth century America, and the scandals around his sexual life.

The story of the writing of this biography strikes me as nearly as interesting as the book itself. It began when Debby Applegate was an undergraduate student at Amherst researching famous Amherst alumni. She selected Henry Ward Beecher and then went on to write her senior thesis about him. She then went on to Yale, making him the subject of her doctoral thesis. And like any good writer of theses in history, she sought a book contract to turn it into a book. This was in the Clinton era and the sex scandals surrounding his administration. However, due to the time needed for research, it finally published in 2006 (in paper in 2007). The culmination of this twenty year project was that the book was a National Book Critics Award Finalist and winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Her biography traces the life of Henry Ward Beecher, who, if not the most famous man in America, was certainly the most famous preacher of America. He was asked by President Lincoln to speak at Fort Sumter at the end of the Civil War, an event overshadowed by Lincoln’s assassination. He filled the pulpit of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, a nineteenth century megachurch. At one point he drew a $100,000 salary–in the nineteenth century. He pioneered a more informal style of preaching using humor and pathos and emphasizing the love of God as well as social reform.

He was a mover in the abolitionist movement, although Applegate emphasizes his ambivalent record. One one hand, he raised money to emancipate slaves and sent rifles to Nebraska and Kansas to aid abolitionists–“Beecher Bibles.” On the other hand, he counselled caution and moderation, offending more radical proponents like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. He also campaigned for women’s suffrage and for temperance.

The book portrays his distinguished family. His father Lyman was a New England Calvinist, later transplanted to Cincinnati as president of Lane Theological Seminary. Harriet Beecher Stowe, was his sister. One of the striking facts is that all of his children departed from this stern Calvinism, although a number were ministers. Nine were writers. Applegate traces Henry’s career from his early struggles with his charge in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, where he first begins to shift from the more Calvinist form of preaching to the more informal and engaging style he observed among the Methodists. His success was great enough to attract the notice of church leaders in Indianapolis, who offered him a salary that finally allowed him and Eunice to live more comfortably. Increasingly his preaching focused on the love of God rather than human sinfulness. This, in turn, caught the attention of Henry Bowen, who lured the Beechers to Brooklyn, and the shared ambitions of building up Plymouth Church.

Applegate chronicles the influence of money and power that became increasingly alluring to Beecher. Bowen helped Beecher with his debts and Beecher contributed to his publishing enterprises. Beecher’s fame led to political influence within the newly born Republican party. As he became ever busier on social campaigns, he and Bowen relied more on Theodore Tilton for his writing enterprises.

This powerful alliance unraveled when Beecher became emotionally, and, it seems likely, sexually involved with several women, culminating in an affair with Tilton’s wife Elizabeth. Applegate records a tawdry set of confrontations, confessions, retractions and denial, and ultimately a civil trial that ended with a hung jury and a church trial that exonerated Beecher and shamed his accusers.

Reading the biography brought to mind the Apostle Paul’s counsel to a young pastor, Timothy: “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Timothy 4:16, NIV). As he pursued pastoral success, he jettisoned unpopular doctrines for public acclaim. Having struggled with desperate circumstances, he gave way to the allures of money, power, and sex. At one point he defends and propounds free love and the rightness of intimacy with a woman not his wife. And sadly, because of his success, the leaders of his church cast a blind eye to these abuses, and the relational wreckage that resulted with Bowen, the Tiltons, and others.

If the biography came after the scandals of the Clinton administration, it came before the sex scandals, #MeToo, and #ChurchToo of the last decade. It seems to me that Applegate’s biography ought be recommended reading for aspiring ministers as well as the church boards who oversee their efforts, especially where such efforts result in significant growth and acclaim for minister and church. The biography explores not only the personal temptations but the systemic dynamics that contribute to pastoral unfaithfulness and the covering up of moral failures. The biography also traces the rise of the personality cults around pastors, which may arguably have begun with Beecher. A study of the circle around Beecher reveals a web of dysfunctionality. Even if none of this interests you, read this simply for Applegate’s fascinating chronicle of one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth century.… (altro)