The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity by Carolyn Eastman

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity by Carolyn Eastman Sandra M. Gustafson The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity. By Carolyn Eastman. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 358 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity is an impressive achievement. Carolyn Eastman's reconstruction of the life and career of the Scottish cultural entrepreneur James Ogilvie is at once deeply researched, expertly situated in several bodies of scholarship, and a delightful reading experience. From the title forward, The Strange Genius of Mr. O aims to appeal to both experts in the field of early American history and interested general readers. Eastman's study also has broad implications, engaging questions concerning the historical nature of celebrity, the place of opium in the transatlantic world, responses to religious skepticism in the early republic, constructions of masculinity both in the classical world and on the North American frontier, the different valences of oratorical and print culture, and the relationship of historical maladies to present-day understandings of mental illness. Tracing all these themes as they radiate from the core narrative of Ogilvie's life, Eastman provides her readers with a tale of postrevolutionary America that underscores central tensions between the classical republican thought that fueled the revolution and the emerging realities of a modern commercial republic. The "strange genius" that Ogilvie possessed was a talent for oratory, which he transformed into a lucrative performance art while advocating for its central role in a republican system of education. Ogilvie's choice of form has a distinctly antiquarian flavor today, when people give speeches, addresses, sermons, or lectures but not "orations." Ogilvie, though, belonged to a world where oratory was not only a recognized practice; it was celebrated as the preeminent republican genre. Ogilvie made a name for himself as a celebrity orator starting late in the first decade of the nineteenth century. But he sank into oblivion within a few years, in part because of his lingering association with atheism. This too reflected specific features of the early republic; as Eastman notes, the modern sense of "celebrity"—that is, one who is fashionable or popular—emerged [End Page 315] later in the United States than in Britain or France. In Ogilvie's day, the term retained the sense of an "exemplary" (129) figure, a meaning that complicated his reception, particularly after his religious skepticism came to public attention. A relevant body of scholarship that Eastman overlooks is the work of the historians who analyzed early American political culture through the lens of "classical republicanism"—Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, J. G. A. Pocock, and Joyce Appleby, among others—emphasizing the Renaissance-era recovery of Greek and Roman thought and its impact on Europe's North American colonies.1 As one influential aspect of this movement, classical oratory was elevated to a place of eminence in the political imagination and given a central role in higher education. Students were trained in classical rhetoric, read orations by Demosthenes and Cicero, and practiced to become great orators themselves. The republican enthusiasm for oratory shaped a public culture in which Dr. Joseph Warren's decision to wear a toga while delivering the annual Boston Massacre Oration in 1775 evoked, as Eastman notes, "the classical opposition to tyranny" (146).2 By the time Ogilvie donned a toga for his lecture tour of the United States in the 1810s, his mode of dress had become such an unremarkable feature of modern republican iconography that reviewers rarely mentioned it; indeed, Eastman notes that by the early 1800s, the toga no longer conveyed a revolutionary spirit but rather signified "the social stability of a culture that would not succumb to extralegal violence, as had the French Revolution" (146). The common thread linking these two meanings of the toga was devotion to the preservation of the republic, whether from foreign tyranny or internal disorder. The significance that Eastman assigns to Ogilvie's Roman attire captures...