John Brown Still Lives!: America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change (review)

John Brown’s soul still marches on. At least so suggests R. Blakeslee Gilpin in his history of Brown’s place in American memory. Analyzing mostly biographers and painters, Gilpin argues that Brown remains so powerful because he strikes straight to the heart of America’s ongoing struggles with racial inequality, violence, and change. Both in life and death, “Osawatomie” Brown has made Americans face tough questions over how racial equality should best be achieved, who should lead the charge, and what role, if any, violence must play. Memory-makers have constantly manipulated Brown’s image, Gilpin shows, as they selectively address (and ignore) aspects of this American dilemma.

While the first three chapters chronicle the last decade of his life, the heart of the book analyzes the use and abuse of Brown’s memory after Appomattox. The memorializing really began with biographer Franklin Sanborn in 1870, a member of the “secret six” that originally funded the botched Harpers Ferry raid a decade before. Sanborn worked tirelessly to transform Brown into a peaceful, paternalist hero of abolition, denying the old man’s violence and African Americans of their agency. Amazingly successful, the image of peaceful saint rang true for a generation and set the backdrop for future biographers (and rival leaders of the N.A.A.C.P.) Oswald Villard and W. E. B. DuBois. Villard largely rehashed Sanborn’s saint, which supported his stance that civil rights should be led by white elites like himself. Dubois rebuffed the Whig historical framework of gradual progress from which Villard operated altogether, and he praised Brown’s radical ends and violent means as the blueprint to build black freedom atop a hostile white foundation. Villard’s book sold well; DuBois’s did not. Yet both stood overshadowed by the success of Stephen Vincent Benet’s 1928 epic poem John Brown’s Body, which trumpeted sectional reunion over issues of race and slavery.

Brown’s image was beginning to shift by the 1920s, however, as the saint succumbed to the violent fanatic. A leading light of the Nashville Fugitives, deifiers of the Old South, Robert Penn Warren depicted Brown as a morally-bankrupt lunatic with the blood of the Civil War dead dripping from his hands. That New England abolitionists followed his lead, Warren accused, proved the region’s depravity and repudiated their modernizing “New South” progeny. Meanwhile, fueled by his antiwar sentiments as dark clouds gathered over 1930s Europe, muralist John Steuart Curry emblazed the fanatical image on America’s consciousness at the Topeka State House. Creating the most famous visual of the man to date, Curry’s colossal Brown toted a Bible in one hand, a rifle in the other, with slain soldiers resting at his feet. A few years later, Harlem painter Jacob Lawrence crafted a far more nuanced depiction that landed somewhere between Curry and DuBois. Still upholding Brown as a hero for black freedom, Lawrence nevertheless forced audiences to at least reconsider the man’s martyrdom and use of religiously sanctified violence.

Gilpin’s subjects are necessarily selective, but some omissions are glaring. First, a brief epilogue breezes through Brown’s memory during the last sixty years, disallowing much discussion of the Civil Rights era. Gilpin also says little about academic historians apart from C. Vann Woodward’s neo-Fugitive harangue. And despite the political ramifications of Brown’s memory, politicians (a brief nod to Barack Obama notwithstanding) remain conspicuous by their absence as well. Finally, cultural history always faces the bugaboo of reception and interpretation. None of Gilpin’s conclusions are far-fetched; however, some interpretations of visual art–his take on Lawrence’s paintings, for instance–seem open to viable alternatives. Nonetheless, Gilpin provides a compelling analysis of an important topic. As President Obama’s recent reelection kickoff speech in Osawatomie suggests, John Brown indeed still lives.