Carolyn Eastman. The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity. Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2021. 360 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-6051-6.
Reviewed by Kaden Ivy (University of Notre Dame)
Published on H-Early-America (December, 2021)
Commissioned by Patrick Luck (Florida Polytechnic University)
Unique talent, wild ambition, adoring audiences, drug addiction, and a public downfall have characterized many celebrities' lives. They also factored into the story of one of the American republic's first celebrities, as Carolyn Eastman deftly chronicles in The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity. The titular "Mr. O" is James Ogilvie (1773-1820), a teacher and orator whom Eastman describes in the introduction as "the earliest and most significant American celebrity you've never heard of" (p. 2). Throughout her monograph, Eastman offers several explanations for why we likely have not heard of Ogilvie, yet she also makes a compelling case for why we should hear of him now. Coming to Virginia from Scotland as a young man, Ogilvie began his career as a teacher of oratory before commencing a lecture tour that gave rise to his celebrity. Along the way, Eastman shows, he befriended such well-known figures as Thomas Jefferson, Washington Irving, Charles Brockden Brown, and Benjamin Rush. After an ill-fated attempt at authoring a book, Ogilvie returned to Europe before ending his life back in Scotland, in relative obscurity. Nevertheless, Ogilvie's unique life, as traced in the book "through the pathways of the country he adopted and the people he encountered" (p. 5), allows Eastman to map onto his experiences the rise of American oratory, a burgeoning celebrity culture, and the developing values of the new democratic republic.
The Strange Genius of Mr. O contributes to a long-growing body of scholarship on the development of American oratory, including landmark works by Christopher Looby (Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States, 1999), Sandra M. Gustafson (Eloquence is Power: Orality and Performance in Early America, 2000), and Eastman herself (A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public After the Revolution, 2009). Mr. O is also a contributor to the field of celebrity studies, exploring the ways in which Ogilvie pursued, attained, and leveraged that elusive categorization. What sets Eastman's methodology in Mr. O apart is her scaling down of these fields' broad concerns to the singular case study of James Ogilvie. She invites us to trace the development of national phenomena through Ogilvie's experiences and achievements. So, in many ways, Eastman offers a new history of American oratory, a study of early American celebrity, and a biography of a significant yet critically neglected figure in the culture of the early republic. Ogilvie's celebrity was, in her words, "a nexus where so many elements of early national life crossed" (p. 7).
Eastman's thirteen chapters are brisk, well researched, and meticulously focused. They are also engaging and pleasurable to read. The book moves chronologically through Ogilvie's life, beginning with his youth in Scotland, where his education at Kings College in Aberdeen stressed the arts of elocution and eloquence. Ogilvie soon became enticed by the United States and its possibilities for democratic thinking, so he hopped a ship to Virginia in 1793, settling in Fredericksburg to teach school. There his educational reputation began to rise, as Eastman accounts in chapters 2 and 3. Ogilvie invited the public to his students' orations and solidified his belief that education and an informed citizenry were the keys to sustaining democracy. He also developed his radical bona fides, joining the likes of William Godwin and Thomas Paine in declaring his atheism and developed an addiction to opium in the form of laudanum, which, along with his love of teaching, kept him afloat during this time. Ogilvie worked his way across Virginia, teaching in Richmond and eventually securing the patronage of Thomas Jefferson, who built him a school near Monticello in 1806. Jefferson charged Ogilvie with the education of his son and often invited him to give paid lectures at Monticello to his elite neighbors.
After working for Jefferson for two years, Ogilvie decided to pursue a public lecture tour in 1808, which Eastman chronicles in chapters 4-8. Described by Ogilvie to Jefferson as "a romantic excursion," the tour allowed Ogilvie to practice what he preached, using his own example to make the case for oratory and deliberation in the new republic (p. 63).[1] As Eastman summarizes, Ogilvie's public lectures "demonstrated how to think intelligently about important public matters" such as women's rights, dueling, gambling, and suicide, creating a space wherein people "could gather to think together" and model "not unity, but community nevertheless" (p. 64). It was during this tour that Ogilvie's more national celebrity began to develop, hooking his audiences with his words as well as his delivery, "bringing words, movement, and expression into a harmonious whole" (p. 68). Ogilvie was nothing if not a performer—as Eastman explores in chapter 8, he gave his talks in a toga—and he used gesture and bodily performance to convey his message. His abilities entranced audiences, and his performances became "a merger of wonder and reason into a harmonious whole" that allowed "audience and speaker [to] engage in dynamic, embodied exchanges" (p. 74). Eastman notes that Ogilvie toed an interesting line between charismatic entrancement and rational persuasion, all in the service of elevating American oratory to "a central role in preserving the democratic process" (p. 72).
Ogilvie's popularity increased, with audiences viewing him as a well-traveled cosmopolitan to welcome to their cities and newspapers increasingly referring to him as a celebrity. As Eastman summarizes, as his celebrity rose, "Ogilvie=oratory" (p. 132). As with many celebrities, though, Ogilvie was not without his detractors and controversies. Two of the primary ones that Eastman tracks are Ogilvie's subtle onstage suggestions of his atheism in Philadelphia and a derisive pamphlet about Ogilvie's talents that was published in New York. Though both proved headaches, they were largely inconsequential to his career, which Eastman reads as evidence of the "insular" societies that characterized the early republic, even in areas as large as New York and Philadelphia (p. 117).
Eastman's ninth chapter recounts Ogilvie's two-year sabbatical to Kentucky, which he began in 1811 after three years on the road. Ogilvie was enticed by the culture away from the cosmopolitan East. He was able to write more and, for a time, was relieved of his opium addiction, feeling restored by Kentucky's fresh spring waters. However, as Eastman wryly puts it, as much as Ogilvie vanquished his addiction, "he tried to vanquish Indians as well," getting caught up in the fervor leading up to the War of 1812 and at one point writing that a war camp is "a glaring theater for the occasional exhibition of oratory" (pp. 160 and 174). Ogilvie soon found, however, that the day-to-day of war did not lead up to its nationalistic aspirations and left the militia after three months.
Chapter 10 returns Ogilvie to the public stage of oratory, when he came to Washington, DC, in 1814, at the height of what has been called "the golden age of American oratory" (p. 180).[2] Oratory had by this point become a popular social activity, especially attending speeches and debates at the US Capitol, where Ogilvie himself gave a lecture on, appropriately, the importance of oratory. Ogilvie's earlier vision for oratory sustaining democracy was in many ways coming to fruition, and he began to deliver lectures advocating for oratory's continued growth in the form of educational networks and dedicated lecture halls. These lectures, Eastman argues, continued Ogilvie's mission of "[offering] up a vision of a republic tied together by democratic deliberation," a vision he had in many ways created previously but was also continually aspiring to (p. 187).
Eastman's final three chapters depict what happened when Ogilvie flew too close to the sun, publishing a book that was, to put it mildly, unsuccessful. Entitled Philosophical Essays, Ogilvie's book appeared in 1816 and is described by Eastman as "a rambling, poorly conceived vanity project that the author published without benefit of editors or advice from friends with perspective" (p. 201). It consisted of three "stream-of-consciousness essays" and concluded with a "strange, disorganized autobiography" (p. 203). Reviewers were not kind to the book, with some even bringing into question Ogilvie's oratorical talents and earlier fame. The story of the book's reception allows Eastman to make one of the most intriguing theoretical claims of her monograph: that the failure of Ogilvie's book evinces the differences between oratory and text in the early republic. Eastman notes that, apart from his talents, Ogilvie had few early analogues in the realm of oratory, nor did he have critics to remark on his lectures. He was a singular sensation. On paper, though, Ogilvie "entered an arena filled with comparable texts and able critics," so to have not expected a deeper level of criticism for his writing was, in Eastman's estimation, "spectacularly egotistical or, at the very least, naive" (p. 209).
Fed up with the United States, Ogilvie returned to Europe in 1817, where his reputation in many ways preceded him. He lectured periodically across England and his home country of Scotland for the next three-and-a-half years, though the celebrity he once experienced in America eluded him. Eastman chalks this failure up to a difference between the celebrity cultures in the two locales and also notes the mediocre reviews these later lectures received. After failing to receive an earldom for which he was allegedly a candidate and selling for cash his half of an estate he inherited, Ogilvie became increasingly melancholy and returned to his reliance on opium before his death on September 12, 1820.
At this point in her monograph, Eastman's tone changes, and I suppose mine in this review should do the same. I hesitate to say much about how Eastman treats Ogilvie's death, as so much of her rhetorical effectiveness turns on unexpectedness, which, in turn, allows her to spend her thirteenth chapter in fascinating rumination on how academics should ethically and truthfully examine the figures and events of the past. Suffice it to say that the thirteenth chapter of Mr. O is not to be missed, for what it reveals about Ogilvie but also how it questions and models academic methodology.
The book's clarity occasionally suffers from the challenges inherent in tracing the development of larger historical movements through the lens of a much more localized person and story, resulting in sometimes jarring historiographic tangents that take focus off of Ogilvie. Even still, these sections serve important contextual purposes, and Eastman's prose is engaging and energetic throughout. All told, The Strange Genius of Mr. O is a worthwhile read for scholars interested in early American history, oratory, celebrity culture, the development of republicanism and democracy, and those interested in learning about an obscure but significant early American figure.
Notes
[1]. On deliberative democracy, see Sandra M. Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
[2]. See Edward G. Parker, The Golden Age of American Oratory (Boston: Whitemore, Niles, and Hall, 1857).
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Citation:
Kaden Ivy. Review of Eastman, Carolyn, The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity.
H-Early-America, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56437
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