American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism by J. D. Dickey

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism by J. D. Dickey Patricia U. Bonomi (bio) American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism By J. D. Dickey. New York: Pegasus Books, 2019. 400 pages, 6" x 9". $29.95 cloth, $29.95 ebook. This is an unusual book. Author J. D. Dickey, an independent writer and historian, clearly became enraptured with the Great Awakening of the 1740s in colonial North America. Finding parallels between the religious heats of the mid-eighteenth century and the volatility of today's state of national affairs, he undertakes to bring the story to a wider reading public. The intense evangelical period of the Great Awakening opened with the arrival in 1739 of English evangelist George Whitefield. While colonials had experienced a number of local revivals and passionate religious controversies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, none ever rose to the fevered and combative heights reached in the Great Awakening. To Dickey, Whitefield's shrewd talent for publicizing his appearances, ability to draw adoring crowds, fierce criticism of orthodox clergy while attracting support from zealous evangelicals, to say nothing of the more than one hundred fractured churches scattered in his wake, carry the scent of demagoguery. Historians who uncovered Whitefield's extraordinary grasp of near-modern marketing skills and attention-getting techniques, and on whose research Dickey depends for his narrative, have never gone so far. Nonetheless Dickey sketches out what he sees as similarities between the eighteenth-century Awakeners and today's partisan tangles, politico-religious trumpery, and such earlier rabble rousers as Joseph McCarthy, Huey Long, and the nineteenth-century Know-Nothings. After setting forth the demagogue theme in his introduction, the author launches into twelve chapters of extended and detailed description of the leading figures and dramatic episodes of the Great Awakening. Whitefield is the star, along with a large cast of American evangelical preachers and their opposers: the initial embrace and later parry of Whitefield by Jonathan Edwards and Gilbert Tennent; the steady support and radicalism of Andrew Croswell; the war between Old Side and New Side clergy; the antics of James Davenport; the passionate and increasingly political sermons of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew; and the fervent defense of tradition and empire by colonial clergy of the mother Church of England. Oddly, regarding the Anglicans, Dickey repeatedly cites New England sources (favored throughout the book), though the main Anglican denouncers of provincial religious and political excess were long centered in New York, which colony here gets short shrift. [End Page 411] These twelve chapters are based largely on the published writings of historians over the past half-dozen or so decades, occasionally supplemented with quotations from sermons and writings by leading eighteenth-century participants. Unquestionably Dickey has read widely in the secondary literature. There are some errors and lapses of context in these chapters, and most of the story will be familiar to students of the period. Nonetheless, Dickey lays out the narrative with verve and flair, and the larger reading public will likely enjoy the ride. Because this review appears in a history journal, however, certain authorial decisions regarding style and the marshaling of evidence bear noting. Sidebar-like chunks of indented and italicized text that interrupt the story are inserted without explanation. Women, after an initial introduction, are called thereafter by their first names (Sarah, Abigail), while men are always addressed by their surnames—with one striking exception, "Jonathan" Mayhew, toward whom the author apparently felt a special kinship. Above all is Dickey's quirky way of citing sources. In place of traditional numbered endnotes, he offers at the conclusion of each chapter a sequence of page numbers from the text, a phrase of Dickey's from such a page within quotation marks, and then the secondary source from which the author drew that thought or paragraph. Other times he quotes directly from a secondary or primary source, which he sets off with single quotation marks within his own quoted phrase. One passage from a minister in Salem has no citation at all. Only after much back-and-forth page-flipping can the reader discover, or...