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.

History, Gender, and Sexuality Roundup

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Lisa Hilton, "Mistresses through the ages Prostitute, concubine, mistress, wife: the boundaries are blurred in this study," TLS, February 9, 2011

What is a mistress? Elizabeth Abbott, who has also published A History of Celibacy and held the post of Dean of Women at Trinity College, University of Toronto, offers this definition: “a woman voluntarily or forcibly engaged in a relatively long-term sexual relationship with a man who is usually married to another woman”. Given the persistence of this model across time and cultures, Abbott maintains that “mistressdom”, like celibacy, is therefore an essential means by which to consider sexual relationships outside marriage – “in fact, an institution parallel and complementary to marriage”. Considering the media’s current obsession with love-rat footballers and cheating celebs, “mistressdom” might also be considered a safe bet for a publisher’s list, and Abbott duly provides us with a generally cheerful tumble through adultery down the ages.>>>

Elizabeth Varon, "Women at War," NYT, February 1, 2011

What do women have to do with the origins of the Civil War? Growing up in Virginia in the 1970s, I often heard this answer: nothing.

Much has changed since then. A new generation of scholars has rediscovered the Civil War as a drama in which women, and gender tensions, figure prominently. Thanks to new research into diaries, letters, newspapers and state and local records, we now know that women were on the front lines of the literary and rhetorical war over slavery long before the shooting war began.>>>

Adam Kirsch, "Macho Man: Exodus recast Israel’s founders as swaggering heroes and secured Leon Uris a place on the Jewish bookshelf even though, as a new biography shows, he was a mediocre writer and a troubled person," Tablet, February 1, 2011

Jews take pride in calling themselves “the people of the book,” and while there’s something a little vainglorious about the phrase—all peoples have books, don’t they?—its appeal is easy to understand. For millennia, in the absence of land and power, Jews found a kind of virtual sovereignty in texts, and the history of Judaism from the Babylonian Exile onward could be written as a history of books and writers—the Torah and the Prophets, the Mishna and Gemara, Rashi and Maimonides, down to modern, secular authors like Theodor Herzl and Sholem Aleichem and Primo Levi.

And then there’s Leon Uris.>>>

Carol Tavris, "The new neurosexism," TLS, January 26, 2011

. . . . Today we look back with amusement at the efforts of nineteenth-century scientists to weigh, cut, split or dissect brains in their pursuit of finding the precise anatomical reason for female inferiority. How much more scientific and unbiased we are today, we think, with our PET scans and fMRIs and sophisticated measurements of hormone levels. Today’s scientists would never commit such a methodological faux pas as failing to have a control group or knowing the sex of the brain they are dissecting – would they? Brain scans don’t lie – do they?>>>

The It Gets Better Project

Heather Cox Richardson

I am fascinated by the It Gets Better Project, a video project started by Seattle writer Dan Savage, who decided to take a stand to stop the frightening rate of suicide by gay teenagers. Desperate to do something to save these endangered kids, he and his husband made a film assuring desperate teenagers that no matter how bad high school seemed with its taunts and

hatred, “it gets better.” They asked others to tell their own stories, also on video, to let students know they were not alone.

That first video has been followed by hundreds of others and has gotten widespread national attention, although the project itself is only weeks old.

The videos are touching and smart, and, I hope, comforting. The people who have made them assure LGBT high schoolers that their lives will get better. Eventually, the films promise, they can hope to have the wonderful lives the videographers enjoy.

But for a historian, the videos are also culturally fascinating. The ones I have watched—and this includes all those selected by Mr. Savage himself to be highlighted on his blog—have a very clear message aside from reassuring youngsters about their ability to survive the jungles of high school, although the second message appears to be an unconscious one.

The life the IGBP promises to young viewers is strikingly conventional. The videos promise college, and an excellent college experience at that. They promise fulfilling careers in a field in which the student excels. They promise supportive friends. And they promise marriage and children. Far from being the call to riot and revolution that opponents of gay rights might expect, these are calls to conventional middle-class respectability.

Those filming the IGBP videos reinforce their verbal message. They are uniformly articulate and smart—who else would record a video?—wealthy enough to have laptops with webcams, and technologically savvy enough to know how to use them and how to cut a clean video. They are also widely enough read to know of the IGBP.

The IGBP is designed to reassure LGBT children that they are valued and have a future, but it also seems to have within it an unconscious call to mold upwardly-mobile, family-oriented professionals. (A parodist has caught this with his own “It Gets Worse” video, purporting to be the story of an uneducated, single, poor, lonely assistant night manager of a Ladies Foot Locker who longs for the days of junior high school when he could make himself feel good by abusing gay students.)

This raises fascinating questions about social change. What effect it will have on a specific population to have such attractive role models calling its members to a wonderful life of education, professional jobs, stable marriages, and children? Would such calls work with different populations who perceive themselves as out of the mainstream of American society? To what extent are these sorts of videos capable of changing the lives of young LGBT people who view them? How will they change the attitudes of straight viewers? (The reaction of the Fort Worth City Councilors to the IGBP video of Joel Burns suggests that observers find the personal appeals in the IGBP profoundly moving in a way they may not find abstract questions of gay rights.)

There is much concern over videos that recruit terrorists. But if it is also possible to use the internet to move individuals for other ends, that also has the potential to change the world.

This revolution is indeed being televised . . . or at least podcast. How it plays out is of great interest to scholars of social movements, as well as to American society.

Leigh Eric Schmidt on Ida C. Craddock and Late-Victorian America

(Cross-post from Religion in American History)
Randall Stephens

On October 18, 1902, the New York Times ran this curious obituary. Readers must have done a morning coffee spit-take:

"Chose Death Before Prison. Ida C. Craddock 'High Priestess,' Was to Have Been Sentenced for Circulating Improper Books"

Ida C. Craddock, 'High Priestess of the

Church of Yoga' in Chicago, and an exponent also of Spiritualism, Theosophy, and other creeds, committed suicide in her room, on the top floor of 134 West Twenty-third Street, yesterday, by inhaling illuminating gas and slashing her wrist. It was the day upon which she was to be sentenced again, as she had been several times before, for circulating books and pamphlets explaining her peculiar beliefs, built up from a conglomeration of Oriental religions. . . . Miss or Mrs. Craddock was forty-five years old. She was rather handsome, and was usually well gowned. She was born in Philadelphia, her parents being Quakers.

Leigh Eric Schmidt takes up Craddock's strange, fascinating story in his forthcoming Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (Basic Books). Much of it is startling, to say the least. In an era of buttoned down formality and Protestant prudery Craddock broke more rules than one could shake a ruler at. She dabbled in all manner of fringe-ish religion. The one-time Methodist moved with some ease into Quaker circles, Spiritualism, Free Thought, Eastern Mysticism, amateur biblical studies, Sexology . . . .

For some time she lectured as a self-proclaimed expert on phallic cults. Not a typical Chautauqua circuit subject.

Schmidt, with narrative skill and analytical insight, draws on Craddock's life to tell a broader tale of American religion in this age as well. (It's made me wonder about what we can learn about the whole from unusual subjects.) Says Schmidt: "The retrieval of Craddock's life from the vaults of vice suppression offers an entryway into major social and political issues of her day--and, often enough, of our own as well" (xi). She tested the country's Christian identity and it's moral certainty. In small ways, her exotic religious and secular outlook foreshadowed later developments: religious seeking, experimentation, new age dabbling, secular crusading. ". . . Craddoock floats only occasionally into view as a feminist," precursor, Schmidt observes, "a tragic free-speech martyr, a steamy occultist, or a sexologist ahead of her time. The diaphanous quality of those memories should not dissolve the grainy roughness of her life, the audacity and disrepute of it" (273-74).

In the interviews embedded here, I ask Schmidt about Craddock's career and her higgledy-piggledy path from Methodist to sexologist. Schmidt reflects on the larger meaning of religious dissent in these years and discusses the shape of American religion in the late-Victorian age. In part two of the interview he also comments on a couple of his current projects.