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

Reviewed by Mark Boonshoft

I have never had to worry about spoiler alerts when writing a book review. Until now. (I’ll try to confine them to the footnotes). Carolyn Eastman’s new book tells the tale of a Scottish-born, melancholic, laudanum-using celebrity who barnstormed the early-19th century United States and drew crowds to his eloquent oratorical performances. Who was this omnipresent, opium-addicted, opinionated, oracle of oratory? Mr. O, of course. The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity is a mesmerizing biography of an early American celebrity who, for a decade, was seemingly everywhere, and then everywhere forgotten.

The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity
By Carolyn Eastman
University of North Carolina Press, 2021
360 pages

The titular Mr. O — James Ogilvie — first brought his talents to New York City in the winter of 1808–1809. Shortly after he left, a satirical pamphlet appeared that dragged Ogilvie as a narcissistic “flim-flam man.” When Ogilvie returned to the City a few years later, he challenged the pamphlet’s author to a duel. Mind you, one of Mr. O’s regular orations was about the dangers of dueling. Such was Ogilvie’s power to delight and excite audiences, and also to enrage them. In Eastman’s telling, Ogilvie’s New York escapades encapsulate much else about the early republic: its disconnected print culture of the period, burning conflicts over religion and politics, and, most importantly, the power that Americans vested in oratory. The brief section on New York City is emblematic of how, throughout the book, Eastman offers a riveting tale of Ogilvie’s life that helps us see the early republic anew.

But first, we meet Ogilvie, long before he arrived in New York, as a young and ambitious college student in Aberdeen, not far from his birthplace in the northeast of Scotland. Ogilvie got in a spat with a classmate one day, and they opted to finish their fight through poetry. The results were published, only one copy survives, and of course Eastman found it. This is a doggedly researched book.[1] From this experience, Ogilvie learned that words and elocution might be the ticket to fulfilling his grandiose ambitions. The most obvious way to make a career on words and oratory would be through the word. Ogilvie’s father and other relatives were ministers.

But that was not the path for Mr. O, which became clear when he arrived in Virginia during the 1790s to teach. Eastman breezes through Ogilvie’s fifteen years as a teacher in only two chapters. Yet, she uses that space effectively to situate his politics, his ambitions, and his vices. Though Ogilvie’s elocutionary and oratorical curriculum impressed, he did not hide his sympathies for transatlantic radical politics that were associated with the French Revolutionaries. Ogilvie fashioned himself a “citizen,” admitted to atheistic leanings, and even brought the work of the freethinking radical, William Godwin, into the classroom. All of this alienated Ogilvie’s employers, the stodgy (mostly Federalist) trustees of various academies. Ogilvie’s politics cost him his first job, in Fredericksburg, and he bounced to other small towns before landing in Richmond. Ogilvie had learned that he might need to suppress his politics to engage his audiences. He also began to find inspiration in opium eating, as it was called; mostly, he drank laudanum. Opium use is an important thread in Ogilvie’s life. Eastman unravels the different ways Americans understood the drug, including as something that enhanced intellectual clarity.

With these lessons learned, and now a widower, Ogilvie hit the road to make it as a full-time orator. Eastman’s discussion of his early travels, in 1808, explains both his methods for generating interest, and his ambitious goals. Most communities did not have theaters, and the traveling show he aimed to put on was not standard fare. So Ogilvie networked relentlessly. He suppressed his partisanship and radical politics to ingratiate himself with all of the powerful men and well-connected women in a city or town. Their support convinced the public he was not a charlatan. Then he took the stage and addressed his oratory to civic problems. Namely, he made the case for elevating oratory in American civic culture. That Ogilvie managed to build an audience owed to his efforts, and also a recognition that oratory was powerful (a central theme in all of Eastman’s work).[2] That also made it threatening. When Ogilvie let slip his religious skepticism, during a performance in Philadelphia, the audience turned against him. If oratory could elevate a society, so too, talented orators might use their powers to undermine social order.

The most interesting discussion of Ogilvie’s tours relate not to his experience in cities — sorry Gothamites — but in rural America. His arrival in small communities was a shock or a revelation. Ogilvie brought something new to these “vernacular communities of listeners,” who had plenty of experience with the spoken word, but mostly offered by ministers. Eastman teases out how Ogilvie’s seeming cosmopolitanism entranced his small-town audiences and reflected back at them their own provincialism. He also aroused gendered anxieties. Oratory celebrated masculine rationality and leadership, ideals taken from the classics. Ogilvie’s sartorial choices told the story: he performed in a toga. But to grow his audience, Mr. O intentionally appealed to women — the importance of female education was a frequent topic of his orations. Women’s enthusiasm for Ogilvie made some men uncomfortable.

In only three years on the road, Ogilvie proved himself to be a strategic self-promoter, who could win over diverse audiences, but sometimes drew their ire. In other words, he had all the makings of a celebrity, though in a culture in which the concept of celebrity was inchoate. Around 1811, at the height of his fame, Mr. O took a detour to Kentucky to kick his opium habit. Ogilvie ended up beating the drum for war through viciously anti-Indian orations. His influence also finally seemed to peak. Ogilvie gave a speech in the US Capitol, the fount of oratorical excellence in the nation, about the importance of oratory. By this point, he also had imitators, which reflected his own success and the fact that Americans saw oratory as essential to national progress.

Then Ogilvie’s spell over the American public evaporated. His strategic blunder? In 1816, he wrote a book. A bad book. And the public skewered him. His responses were apparently better than the original volume. Ogilvie’s “writing improves remarkably when motivated by rage,” Eastman notes, in a standout line of an unusually funny book. For Eastman, Ogilvie’s fall from grace tells us much about the emergent celebrity culture of the United States, in which condemnation was as much a part as celebration. It also shows the budding competition and disjuncture between print and oratory. Proponents of print capitalized on Mr. O’s dreadful book as evidence that their medium was superior.

Ogilvie retreated to Britain. He managed to stay successful for a time, though never could recreate the enthusiasm that he generated in the United States. This contrast allows Eastman to clarify what precisely explained Ogilvie’s American ascent. Ogilvie rode a wave of aspirational nationalism and classical fetishism that suffused the United States. All of that was absent in Britain. The remainder of the book focuses on Ogilvie’s melancholy, situates it within the culture of sensibility of the time, and is one of the best examples of the empathy that we all hope the historical method allows.[3] Ogilvie’s story comes to a sad denouement just as his greatest hopes for the United States came to fruition. The later antebellum years were an age of oratory; lyceums exploded in popularity just as Ogilvie’s celebrity faded.

And then we all forgot about him. That we learn so much from Ogilvie’s story might suggest why. Ogilvie was a celebrity in a United States that was still in its “awkward years,” a period later Americans chose to overlook. Always careful to situate Ogilvie in his own time and place, Eastman compares the celebrity culture Ogilvie experienced with the contemporaneous British equivalent. She mostly demurs from drawing comparisons with earlier and later celebrities in the United States — though she does compare him with later successful orators. Perhaps reflecting the post-colonial moment in which he lived, Ogilvie seems more comparable to colonial American celebrities than their 19th century counterparts.

In particular, parallels to George Whitefield jump to mind. Both men relied on elite patronage and the press to make their name.[4] Both men came from abroad: Whitefield was English and Ogilvie was Scottish. If George Whitefield was the first British Invasion, then Ogilvie is kind of like the Britpop invasion of the 1990s. We hold the former sacred, and chose to forget the latter.[5] Ogilvie was not a minister, though he was reared in a family of them. It showed. As Eastman notes, the enthusiastic preaching style of Awakening ministers — though here she means the Second Great Awakening — had Scottish roots.[6] Interestingly, non-Evangelical Protestants feared that Ogilvie might use his eloquence to spread atheism; at the same time, they worried camp revivalists would similarly upend the social order. Eastman perceptively notes that though nobody drew direct lines between the two, “a religious huckster and a political or atheistical demagogue amounted to two sides of the same coin in the early republic.” This generation of Americans might have been wary of hucksters, but their children encouraged a celebrity culture defined by P.T. Barnum, the huckster par excellence. Barnum also sponsored the phenomenally successful initial American tours of the Swedish singer, Jenny Lind, who became one of the major celebrities of the antebellum era. How do we situate Ogilvie in that arc from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century?  

An extended treatment of that question, though, would have taken the reader far outside of Ogilvie’s own world. Ultimately, the strength of this book is the astounding source base Eastman has compiled, which — along with beautiful prose and analytical precision — allows her to tell a rich and detailed story that will appeal widely. This book exhibits all the virtues of both popular and academic history, and eschews the flaws of both. Carolyn Eastman’s The Strange Genius of Mr. O left me feeling a bit like Ogilvie’s rural audiences: awed.

Mark Boonshoft is the incoming Executive Director of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. His first book, Aristocratic Education and the Making of American Republic, was published in 2020 by the University of North Carolina Press.

[1] SPOILER ALERT: They published their war of words as The Ogilviad. I mean come on!

[2] For Eastman’s broad analysis of the place of oratory and speech in American public life, see A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public After the Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

[3] Non-Spoiler: I cannot do justice to this section without giving too much away.

[4] Frank Lambert, “’Pedlar in Divinity’: George Whitefield and the Great Awakening,” Journal of American History 77, no. 3 (December 1990): 812–837.

[5] Though (What’s the Story) Morning Glory still slaps.

[6] Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton University Press, 1989).