Ohio History Journal

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THE HUMILIATION OF HENRY WARD BEECHER IN

THE HUMILIATION OF HENRY WARD BEECHER IN

THE WEST

 

by DAVID MEAD

Assistant Professor of English, Michigan State College

In the columns of Ohio's newspapers of nearly a century ago

lies the dramatic account of Henry Ward Beecher's rejection as a

lecturer by the indignant citizens of the West, a story which has

not been revealed by the biographers of the great Eastern divine.

Not that Beecher was the first celebrity to be humiliated by Ohio's

lecture public in the boisterous 1850's. Ralph Waldo Emerson,

during his Ohio journeys of 1850 and 1852, had been reminded

often enough that he was a pantheistic dreamer whose disjointed,

unintelligible philosophizing had little to do with the practical

affairs of life. In 1854 the New York reformer George William

Curtis, had visited the state with a "namby-pamby, up-townish"

lecture on "Success." His listeners, men who had experienced the

struggle of the West to escape the economic bondage of the eastern

bankers and who loved their mercantile account books next to

their homes and families, resented his implication that wealth had

nothing to do with success in life. And the western press, in re-

minding Curtis that he would do well to remain at home, could not

suppress a sneer at the fashionable cut of his coat "or the particular

shade of yellow gloves." Parke Godwin of the New York Evening

Post suffered when he took the liberty with Ohioans in 1855 of

contrasting the social standards of the East and West in a discourse

entitled "American Social Life." His hearers objected vehemently

to his disparagement of the West's great middle class, "the sub-

stantial architects of our greatness," and dismissed both Godwin

and his lecture as "a miserable and disgraceful failure."

But these orators antagonized Ohioans merely by their opin-

ions. They offered nothing worse than annoying philosophical

speculation; Beecher, however, was associated with something much

more offensive-a financial speculation. In 1855 the eloquent min-

ister of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church hired himself out to a shrewd

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