Hum. We think we are so modern and special, uniquely privileged and uniquely corrupt.
But back in the nineteenth century, preacher Henry Ward Beecher was both uniquely privileged as a great preacher and uniquely corrupted as a great adulterer. He was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and he is the subject of Debby Applegate’s The Most Famous Man in America.
Beecher’s fame could be put to good use. When the feminist Victoria Woodhull was criticized for her ideas,
Woodhull, a radical feminist and an advocate of free love, answered critics by proclaiming that her ideas on sexual freedom simply mirrored the advanced practices of Henry Ward Beecher, who, she said, preached every Sunday morning to a dozen of his mistresses.
Beecher was in at the creation of the Republican Party and a strong anti-slavery advocate. His father was Rev. Lyman Beecher, a leading light in the Second Great Awakening in the early years of the nineteenth century.
But what sort of a man was Beecher? That, according to George Marsden, we really do not get to find out in Applegate’s biography.
We do not get any sense of his interior life, his spirituality or his religious anxieties. What we have instead--as Ms. Applegate's title implies--is the engaging story of a celebrity.
It seems that Beecher’s humanity got submerged in his fame, much like another flawed moral leader, Martin Luther King, in the twentieth century.
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