Gorgeous Hussies and Parlor Politics

Joseph Yannielli*

One of the advantages of digital history is that it allows its practitioners to comment on public events in real time and achieve a potentially broader and more immediate impact. And what event could be more gripping than a big old scandal? Scandals tap into a seemingly universal appetite for tawdry drama. In times of great crisis or division, they serve an important cultural function. Brimming with prurient details, amplified by politicians and the media, public scandals are manufactured distractions. Really good scandals also have the capacity to shake revered institutions to their core—to disturb and expose powerful elements that are normally obscure or hidden.

Of all the endless varieties of public embarrassment, the sex scandal holds a special place for its ability to shed light on subterranean social anxieties. The latest example offers up a juicy blend of the military, politicians, the CIA, and the FBI (and the East Tuscaloosa Junior Marching Band, and Kevin Bacon, and your mom, and who knows how many others by the time the investigation is concluded). But the story is as old as America . . . or at least as old as Old Hickory.

The Petticoat Affair that almost derailed Andrew Jackson's first term as President was perhaps the first major American sex scandal. And like the still-unraveling Petraeus Affair, it disgorged fascinating information about the inner workings of power in what would become the world's mightiest military machine.

A 19th century cigar label depicting
the scandalous Peggy (O'Neal) Eaton

In her groundbreaking book Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government, historian Catherine Allgor points to the crucial role of elite women in the political culture of the federal government. Long before winning the right to vote powerful women, Allgor says, hosted influential social events, followed political debates, and conferred with their husbands. In doing so, they created the vibrant intellectual and social spaces necessary for democratic politics to function. Of course, plenty of ordinary women also made a political splash during this same period (check out marvelous new books by Stacey Robertson and Carol Faulkner, for example). These women tended to be less conservative, or from different religious backgrounds, or less economically privileged than the Washington elite. Among them may be counted Margaret "Peggy" Eaton.

Without delving into a complicated biography, it will suffice to say that Eaton was an intelligent and ambitious young women who attracted the attention of politicians and military officials in the nation's capital (Senator Andrew Jackson was an early admirer). When her first husband, a naval officer, died at sea, rumors circulated that he had killed himself as a result of his wife's alleged infidelities. Her marriage to Senator John Eaton shortly thereafter added further grist to the gossip mill, and when Jackson appointed Senator Eaton as his Secretary of War in 1829, Washington erupted. Floride Calhoun, wife of Vice President John C. Calhoun, led a campaign to ostracize the Eatons from important social and political gatherings. The

President became involved and eventually his entire cabinet split into factions. After an excruciating media circus, Secretary Eaton and the rest of the cabinet resigned and the government persevered. And Peggy Eaton lived in infamy, later immortalized by Hollywood as The Gorgeous Hussy (oh, Hollywood).

The Petticoat Affair, as it came to be known, says a lot about class, gender, and sexuality in the Early Republic. But it also says a great deal about American political culture. Compared to other other sex scandals involving 19th-century politicians, it was unusually potent and destructive. The connection between the Jefferson and Hemings families, which rivals the Petticoat Affair for media-fueled speculation, did not significantly impair Thomas Jefferson's presidency. Indeed it took almost 200 years, Annette Gordon-Reed, and DNA evidence for historians to take the relationship seriously. Richard Mentor Johnson, a Jacksonian Democrat and Vice President under Martin Van Buren, made no secret of his relationship with the enslaved Julia Chinn. Although it damaged his career, and opponents published racist, sexually-charged cartoons, it did not have a lasting impact on the government. James Henry Hammond's omnivorous sexual appetite, which ranged from his college friends to his teenage nieces, resulted in a minor setback for his political ambitions, but it did not derail his career as a pro-slavery pamphleteer or his appointment to the Senate in 1857. And yet a dispute between Floride Calhoun and Peggy Eaton spiraled into a moral panic that almost brought the Jackson administration to its knees. Why did the coercive and brutal actions of slaveholders matter less than the hasty marriage of a widow?

James Akin, Newburyport, MA, c. 1804

The recent Petraeus scandal differs significantly from the original Petticoat Affair. For one thing, the sexual infidelities attributed to the Eatons were based on rumor and innuendo, while Petraeus's indiscretions have been amply and authoritatively confirmed by Google and the FBI. It may be more useful to compare Petraeus to his CIA predecessor, Allan Dulles, "a serial adulterer" whose rampant womanizing did nothing to impede his career. Although President Obama has been drawn into the controversy, making for an inauspicious start to his second term in office, it does not seem likely to destabilize his administration. At the same time, this latest scandal points to a hidden world of power and influence. Paula Broadwell, Petraeus's alleged paramour, is an ambitious scholar-soldier who earned unprecedented access to the General. Jill Kelley, the object of Broadwell's jealousy, is a wealthy volunteer ambassador with routine access to the highest ranking leaders of the United States military. Broadwell seems to have developed a relationship with Petraeus based on mutual respect and admiration. She followed him to Afghanistan, wrote his biography, and offered sympathy and companionship. She is a proud athlete and a public intellectual who performed 60 pushups on stage in front of a live studio audience. Kelley, in contrast, appears to be a classic parlor politician, operating behind the scenes, facilitating social events for the military elite, and building influential contacts. When confronted with allegedly harassing messages from Broadwell, she did not hesitate to mention the matter to a personal friend in the FBI, who then passed the information to Washington politicians, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

It may be too soon to attempt to draw conclusions from this unfolding drama. But a few things are evident, even at this early stage. The media, which eagerly pounced on the story, has presented a narrative that might be described as Gorgeous Hussies: The Sequel. Major news outlets are scrambling for any scrap of information about Broadwell and Kelley, despite their own painfully obvious desire to stay out of the spotlight. Like the public commentators who fretted over Peggy Eaton's polluting influence on the Jackson administration, there has been much hand-ringing about the "pillow talk" between Broadwell and Petraeus. Interestingly, according to Allgor, contemporaries depicted Peggy Eaton in similar terms, as a dangerously powerful "courtesan." The coverage of Kelley has been especially severe, if not voyeuristic. A feature article on CNN focuses on her "smart canary yellow dress" and "hot pink handbag," and quotes "a senior official" describing her as a "bored, rich socialite." There is a point in every scandal, perhaps, when the coverage passes from the real to the absurd. The Daily Show, mocking the media descent into tabloid gossip, has suggested that the military institute a ban on heterosexuals.

Even so, it might be worth asking why this scandal, like the Petticoat Affair, has caused so much consternation. Generals Petraeus and Allen, the establishment figures at the center of the controversy, have presided over a military-intelligence complex responsible for funneling over $1 trillion in tax revenue into wars that have cost countless lives. No senior military or intelligence official resigned over the disgrace of Abu Ghraib. Yet marital infidelity (admittedly sleezy and reprehensible) is career suicide. That could be the biggest scandal of them all.

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* Joseph Yannielli is a doctoral student in History and contributes to the blog Digital Histories at Yale.

Boston Globe Coverage on Class Project

Randall Stephens

Early last month I posted a short piece on a class website project that my students and I did as part of a fall history readings/methods course. We created a resource website for the Moswetuset Hummock, a historic outcropping of land near our college, which played an important role in the first encounters between Indians and English settlers. If nothing else, the effort inspired students to get out of the classroom and do history.

The students and I had no idea that the website would garner the attention of our local Quincy newspaper. And we certainly didn't imagine that the project would draw the attention of the Boston Globe. But . . . it did. And we're thrilled to get that kind of attention!

Jessica Bartlett reports on our efforts and what we hoped to achieve. ("Eastern Nazarene College students create website on Quincy's Moswetuset Hummock," Boston Globe, January 25, 2012.)

Although the small section of Quincy known as Moswetuset Hummock is where Massachusetts derived its name, relatively few know the significance of the small marsh located on Quincy Bay.

Students from Eastern Nazarene College are hoping to change that.

The small, wooded area that separates Quincy Bay from the Neponset River received recent exposure with the help of six ENC students and History Professor Randall Stephens, who created a website dedicated to exploring the significance of the shore and detailing its place in history.

Part class history project, part exploratory jaunt through time, the website includes information on the Indians that lived in the area, to the relations with new settlers, to the diseases that would decimate the tribes by the time Myles Standish meet the tribe leader in 1621. >>> read on

It will be tough to trump this when we take on our next class project!

How Streaming Media Services Affect our Perception of “Owning” Music and Movies

Philip White

Despite the company’s recent price increases, the decision to split its DVD delivery and streaming businesses and the lamentable choice to name the former “Qwikster” (as one friend commented, “It sounds like fast-drying spackling!”), I am an avid Netflix fan. And if the company can increase its still-inadequate library of on-demand content, this miser may eventually ditch my old, 500-pound behemoth of a TV and invest in one with Netflix streaming built in, or maybe just a Roku box. Right now, I occasionally watch a movie on my HTC Flyer tablet, which is a better viewing experience than an iPhone/iPod but still a little rinky dink for my liking.

So why does the ability to get movies without waiting for a DVD to arrive or, heaven forbid, leaving the house to patron the nearest Redbox, appeal? Because it’s quick, convenient, offers a (soon to be) wide choice and there’s a predictable, all-you-can-watch fee instead of an individual charge per disc. And if I sometime think that Amazon’s Instant Video has a better selection, maybe I’ll forsake Netflix.

So that’s the good, but what about the bad or potentially bad? How is the rise of streaming film and TV content affecting studios large and small, and the actors, producers, directors, crew members and others they employ? Were some of the same questions asked when other new technologies were rolled out? The television? The videotape machine?

Certainly, DVD and Blu-Ray sales are down. And movie prices continue to rise, much to my horror. $12 for a ticket? In the middle of Kansas? Really? I also loathe the gimmicky “cinema suites” that offer a crappy buffet and cheap beer if you’re willing to fork over $20 bucks or more per ticket, and possibly the shirt off your back, too. But how much of these price hikes and the luxury concept that seems to be borrowed from major league sports’ premium on suites and boxes is attributable to movie studios, and how much to the theater companies themselves? I admit that I don’t know.

What I do know is that the ability to stream movies and music on demand, on mobile devices as well as at home, is profoundly affecting how we think about owning this content. The point of buying a DVD (I still haven’t succumbed to the allure of Blu-Ray, though after being blown away by watching Saving Private Ryan in this format on my friend’s big screen it has been tempting) used to be that you could watch one of your faves whenever you like. Well, with streaming you can do that, while removing the embuggerance of actually having to get up from the couch, or, in my case, trusty leather recliner.

When I fully embrace streaming, there will be no disc to scratch, misplace or lose to the clutches of the kids. My wife and I will no longer yell at each other for me absent-mindedly putting The Fellowship of the Ring (mine) in the case meant for The Devil Wears Prada (hers). And if a film is bad, there will be no wait while I send the accursed item back to the Netflix warehouse, and then wait for them to send out the next DVD in your queue. Heck, even without switching to video on demand and just using Netflix’s plain ol’ two DVDs at a time plan, I buy less than a quarter of the DVDs I purchased even two years ago. And those I do get or request for a birthday or Christmas present are true favorites, rather than the mediocre films I kinda liked but only watched once a year that I used to purchase or hint at before Netflix. So, for me at least, I’ve almost completely abandoned DVD ownership, without even jumping headlong onto the bandwagon. And I’m not alone. According to Time DVD sales were down by 18.3% in the first six months of 2012, while spending on kiosk and on-demand services was up by 40 to 45%. Movie studios and distributors are doing their best to reverse this trend by ensuring that physical copies are available for rent and purchase a lot sooner than via Redbox, Netflix or Amazon.

The mass adoption of movie streaming is the biggest historical change in the film industry since the

introduction of the VHS-playing VCR to the U.S. in 1977. Once this format had smacked down Sony and its upstart Betamax (what is it with Sony and propriety formats? Anyone remember MiniDisc?), VHS gave people the ability to watch high quality (for that time) productions in their own home, as well as the ability to record live TV. With Netflix and its kind, the focus has shifted again, as it’s now no longer necessary to have a home-based content device, as a tablet or even a smart phone will suffice. We’ve gone from a cinema-based model to home-focused to mobility-focused, which in apt, given the ever-greater ease of international travel and the greater geographical transience within America today.

And what of music? I am not a Pandora user, nor have I logged into Spotify since signing up. I’ve come to prefer Amazon’s MP3 store to iTunes because of lower prices and my love of using the Amazon Cloud Player on my tablet, and usually buy digital instead of CDs, but I still buy as much music as I did a few years ago. Not sure that’s typical though–I know a lot of people, particularly in the UK where Spotify is more established–who listen to music almost exclusively through streaming offerings, whether it be radio or a paid subscription service.

In the U.S., how long will it be before the majority of major labels make 25 percent of revenue through streaming music subscribers to Spotify et al? Is this already diminishing CD and MP3 sales? The concept is similar to the instant video vs. Blu-Ray/DVD debate–a large and soon-to-be unlimited selection at your fingertips against the tangibility and permanent ownership of a physical product. I still find it easier and safer to plonk in a CD while in the car rather than messing around with an iPod, but with voice-controlled media systems becoming more prevalent (the new iPhone, for instance) and the continued success of satellite radio, that may change soon. I was late to the Netflix party, so maybe eventually I will succumb to the charms of music on demand, and stop buying music. I’m determined that vinyl will be the exception–still loving my Technics SL-1700 turntable and the sleeve design and notes on records old and new!

Thoughts? Do you primarily stream music and movies, or still buy individual copies (be they digital or physical)? Are the media changes afoot much greater than those of the 20th century?

San Francisco Moving Picture Time Machine

Randall Stephens

It's really hard to believe that 60 Minutes has been on the air since 1968. (In fact, you can watch original episodes in their entirety here.) This Sunday proved the show still has much to offer all these years later.

In a segment called "60 Minutes Rewind," the program turns its attention to a remastered film, an amazing, rare bit of footage from more than 100 years ago. Way back when two clever filmmakers decided to mount a camera to the front of a trolly car that was rattling down Market Street. The footage is astonishing. I'm thinking about using it in my fall course, the United States from Reconstruction to World War I. Like this 1848 daguerreotype of Cincinnati, the moving pictures might encourage class discussion on what we can learn about a large American city from this film from so long ago. (See also how the story follows the sort of digging, investigation historians have to do.) Have a look and see what you think . . .

Singing the News in 18th-Century Paris: An Interview with Robert Darnton

Randall Stephens

Over a month ago I interviewed Robert Darnton at this blog on the ongoing discussions about a Digital Public Library of America. Of course, in addition to being a spokesperson for a national digital library and director of Harvard libraries, he is also an accomplished historian. He's written or edited a variety of books, including The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979); The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books, 1984); Berlin Journal, 1989-1990 (W. W. Norton, 1991); The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (W. W. Norton, 1995); and The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). His most recent book, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), examines how songs sung on 18th-century Paris streets "provided a running commentary on public affairs . . . during a period of rising discontent. He uncovers a complex communication network, illuminating the way information circulated in a semi-literate society."*

I spoke with Darnton back in April about his research for the book, the surprising story he found, and the importance of oral sources for the study of history. (Thanks to Carissa Schutz, my admin assistant for transcribing the interview.)

Stephens: In Poetry and the Police you write about the transfer of information and the spread of news and gossip in the 18th century. What do historians know about literacy in France during this age?

Robert Dartnon: Yes, of course, it’s very difficult to know exactly what the literacy rates were 250 years ago, we have dubious sources, notarial archives, registers of people signing baptisms and marriage, that sort of thing. On the whole we have rough estimates. Urban France was more literate than rural France. It turns out that northern France was more literate than southern France, and so on. But the fact is that this was a society where people were largely illiterate, and those who could read often had only a primitive capacity to do so.

So, think of Paris around 1750. How did people know the news? How do they get information about current events? Well, they did so through oral means. There are certain places where they’d go to gossip about what was actually happening. And there were no newspapers in the modern sense of the word. The Gazette de France was heavily censored. All periodical literature actually was censored. So you could say for printed versions of the news, it hardly existed.

What I argue in this book is that they found out about current events through oral exchanges and in particular through songs. Paris was full of street singers, many were beggars, they had fiddles. They would set up shops, so to speak, at a street corner, fiddle away and ball out a song. The songs that they sung were news essentially. That is to say Parisians were improvising new words to old tunes every day. It’s astonishing what the production was. And it wasn’t terribly difficult to compose these songs. They were very simple ballads mostly. There’s some intrigue in the government, or the king has a new mistress, or the price of bread is shooting up, or it might just be the weather. People were discussing this in music through new verses to old tunes. And I came upon a wonderful run in the archives of manuscript, little sheets of paper, on which people jotted down the new verses and then carried them around in their pockets, traded them for other bits of paper, on which there were other verses.

Stephens: It was like an underground press in a way?

Darnton: It was like an underground press, but the fascinating thing is that they were then sung. Not just by the beggar and then street singers, but by ordinary people in market places, sometimes in cafes, often in public gardens. I mean, Paris was full of song. And of course historians haven’t paid much attention to this because oral information doesn’t get recorded by and large. What I did was to try and figure out what the messages were so I went through vast collections, hundreds and hundreds of these songs and I have statistical estimates of how many there were. I could prove, for example, that there were at least three new songs composed every week around 1750, but that’s just from the evidence that has survived in the archives. I would say that we’ve got a dozen new songs almost every day being composed.

The question then is, what did they sound like? Because the music, the tunes, could’ve actually reflected the meaning of these songs and when you see the references to them in the archives, there are scrapbooks called Chansonnier that you can go through. This notes “sung to the tune of” and name of a tune that I, at least, had never heard of such as “La Béquille du père Barnabas,” or, in English, “The Crutch of Father Barnabas.” Well no one has ever heard of that tune I think today. And then I found that in the music department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, they have keys to the tunes. So I can look up “The Crutch of Father Barnabas” and there I get the musical annotation.

A friend of mine Hélène Delavault is a cabaret singer in Paris and she agreed to record the songs. Therefore, the book I wrote has the texts of a dozen of these songs as examples of what was actually flowing through the streets of Paris around 1750. The reader can read the original French and then my translation of it and at the same time tune in to Hélène Delavault recording online which is available free of charge. (Listen to them here.)

Stephens: That’s available on the Harvard University Press website?

Darnton: That’s right. There’s a Harvard Univ. Press website but it’s open access, it’s free, and it’s a way of , so to speak, hearing the past. I mean, recovering sounds from the past. Not perfectly because this cabaret performer Hélène Delavault has quite a beautiful voice actually and the street singers were pretty coarse, but still you can get at the way tunes carried meanings, which were largely political.

In fact in April in 1749 the government fell. There was a big political crisis and all the contemporaries agreed about the cause of the crisis. In one word: songs. It sounds strange, and that’s a little too simple, but in fact there’s lots of evidence that the government fell because of a particular intrigue that took the form of a nasty song about the king and Madame Pompadour. So there’s no question that songs could actually be a factor in political crisis.

Stephens: Could royal authorities do anything about that? Could they squelch the singers? Was there an official attempt to do so?

Darnton: There was, yes, because this was such a powerful political force that the royal authorities paid attention to it. And actually I begin the book with a sort of detective story because the head of the Parisian police received an order from the top person in the government: Find me the author of the song that begins with, and they just had the first line: “Monstre dont la noire furie” (Monster whose black fury). That’s all they knew. The monster was Louis XV. They had to somehow find the author to this song. So they had spies in cafes and they fanned out and eventually one of the spies actually found a student who had recited this song/poem and he is arrested through a kind of ambush. It’s very amusing to see how they staged the arrest, because they didn’t want the word to spread that they were cracking down. They wanted to find accomplices, other people who were connected. So his name was François Bonis. He was interrogated in the Bastille. He said where he got the song. That person was arrested; so A got it from B, B got it from C, C got it from D, then D says “yup, I got it from E,” but meanwhile I got three other songs or poems from X, Y, and Z. And they’re all arrested. And they got poems and songs from other people so soon the police were trailing six poems and songs through overall networks of diffusion in Paris. And you can map the way the songs work into Parisian society with tremendous precision. So it’s possible, thanks to this police force, to actually do a very serious sociological study of oral diffusion.

Stephens: It sounds like one of the lessons of this is that even if a state pursues censorship, there will be ways that people will communicate, gossip with one another.

Darnton: Yes that’s one of the things I find fascinating because the state around 1750 could definitely control the printed word. If gossip escapes from their control, they crack down on it. They understand that it’s important, but they can’t stop it. So they really do have spies in all of the major cafes. In a separate run of documents I found reports of police spies that are written in dialogue. Now whether the dialogue is perfectly accurate, I don’t know. In the document X says to Y and Y responds to X, and you can reproduce the dialogue that occurred there according to the police spies. Now I don’t know if the spies touched up things in order to ingratiate themselves to their superiors. Police archives have to be read with a lot of skepticism, but still you can find the subjects that are being discussed and it’s clear that the state is very concerned about oral means of diffusion, even though this is in principle an absolute monarchy.

It’s a fascinating moment in which you see an old form of absolutism going back to Louis XIV and the 17th century confronted with a growing sense of participation in public affairs, if only by discussion. So you could say this is an example of Jürgen Habermas’s work on the public sphere. I’m not totally convinced by Habermas’ thesis, although I think it’s an important one. Certainly it is possible to reconstruct the way political acts and ideas, public affairs are being discussed and disseminated throughout a very large public.

Stephens: And this happens at a specific point in western history when this was possible? It sounds like it was almost a transitional point before the press has more freedom and influence.

Dartnon: That’s right I think this does indeed represent an intermediate phase. It’s quite a long phase. How can you precisely date it? But certainly around 1750 in big cities, even smaller cities, but especially Paris, there’s a huge interest in public affairs. It often accompanies war so from 1740 - 48 you’ve got the War of the Austrian Succession and then 1756 - 63 the Seven Years War. People follow the war and they want information. But you could get it somewhat from the official newspaper, especially when there were victories. But when things go badly you get it by going to certain benches in the Luxembourg Gardens where gossips gather. There’s a tree in the garden of the Palais-Royal called the Tree of Cracow and everyone who was interested in what was really happening would go to this tree where people were just gossiping about politics nonstop. It reached such a level that some foreign ambassadors actually sent servants to plant gossip or to pick it up because people wanted to know what was happening. And you couldn’t do this through the printed word.

Stephens: It seems too that there’d be other examples of this in other cities. I don’t know how far back the Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park dates.

Darnton: It is fascinating to compare London and Paris. It’s not just Hyde Park but the London coffee houses and the Parisian cafés were doing very similar things. But of course working class people didn’t go to cafes so much. They went to drinking establishments, guinguettes some of them are called, which are different in character but that didn’t stop them from gossiping.