Volume 25, Number 17 · November 9, 1978
A Founding Family
By George M. Fredrickson
Chariot of Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family
by Marie Caskey
Yale University Press, 422 pp., $25.00
Henry Ward Beecher: Spokesman for a Middle-Class America
by Clifford E. Clark Jr.
University of Illinois Press, 296 pp., $11.95
No other nineteenth-century family had a greater impact on American culture than the Beechers. A case could perhaps be made for the Jameses, but only if one adopts a rather elevated view of culture and weighs the long-term influence of Henry and William on American letters and philosophy more heavily than the Beechers' direct and continuous contribution to the shaping of popular attitudes over three-quarters of a century. Despite their enormous importance, the Beechers have only recently come into their own as objects of serious and sophisticated historical study. During the reaction against 'Victorianism' that set in during the 1920s, the leading members of the family were cast as mouthpieces for the cant, vulgarity, and sentimentalism of a benighted age. Lyman (1775-1863), the Beecher patriarch, father of thirteen children, was portrayed as the last hell-fire Calvinist, thundering anathema at violators of a repressive Puritan morality. His sermons on 'intemperance' were widely published. Henry Ward, his most famous son, emerged from Paxton Hibben's muckraking biography of 1927 as a kind of P.T. Barnum of the pulpit—a sanctimonious, self-seeking hypocrite who spoke for the worst tendencies of a corrupt era.
Review, 3084 words
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