The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity by Carolyn Eastman (review)

Originally from Scotland, James Ogilvie became a celebrity lecturer in the United States during the 1810s. Although he is long forgotten, his career contained cycles of celebrity familiar to modern Americans: his meteoric rise as a popularlecturer in 1808, episodes of public backlash, professional missteps, and an ill-fated struggle to regain his former glory at the end of his life. These cycles were new to Americans as the time. The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity recovers a provincial nation, uncertain of its identity and future but inspired by Ogilvie's promise of oratory to knit the republic together. His distinct style of argumentation on social topics (never overtly political) such as dueling, gambling, suicide, or female education filled halls. In Eastman's hands, Ogilvie's celebrity becomes a "mirror" for his audiences and a window for contemporary readers into a regionally isolated and insecure United States.

Eastman's first book A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public After the Revolution (Chicago, 2009), mapped the emergence of America's distinctive oratorical culture and its promise for the new nation. With this biography, Eastman offers a crucial origin story that teases out the contingency of early national culture. Whereas some of the elements of modern celebrity culture existed in Britain at the time, Ogilvie's story charts their emergence in the United States in the 1810s in distinct ways that were crucial to Ogilvie's appeal. He offered provincial Americans access to "worldy cosmopolitanism" and the promise of a vehicle, oratory, to knit together and strengthen the republic (5).

Eastman reconstructs Ogilvie's career through painstaking work with early American newspapers, while tracing his correspondence through papers of eminent public figures from whom he sought patronage. Viewed through the life of a celebrity orator, many of the transformations of the 1810s, from transportation to nationalism, appear less rapid or inevitable, while Ogilvie becomes an unexpected agent of change. Eastman draws a clear line from Ogilvie's tours and advocacy for the role of oratory in a republic to the "golden age of oratory" and emergence of the lyceum movement, put in motion by his early auditors long after Ogilvie was forgotten. Eastman's argument for Ogilvie's tremendous influence on national culture is extremely compelling and explains why he was forgotten. Ogilvie participated in the new phenomenon of celebrity in ways that were distinct to the identity, insecurities, and infrastructure of the early national period.

The reasons oratory became so important to the young republic can be found in Ogilvie's appeal: He became a cosmopolitan mirror for communities anxious about their own identities and place in the nation. Ogilvie emerged from a culture that connected the power of the spoken word with social advancement: The Ogilviad, a poem that escalated a fight at King's College in Scotland to print in 1789, documents a "specific moment in time and the power of words for college boys" (14). Ogilvie's early success as a schoolteacher in Virginia and use of innovative pedagogy that emphasized speaking were unsettled by rumors of his atheism. Early struggles pushed him to the remarkable conclusion he should launch a lecture tour.

Throughout his oratorical career, Ogilvie's fierce advocacy for the power of elocution to sway audiences challenged some taboos, nearly destroying his career, but left others untouched: He never appeared to question the institution of slavery or racial oppression even as he sustained advocacy for female education.

The heart of the book examines Ogilvie's decade touring, with thematic chapters focused on the dramas of his celebrity (a deliberate nod to celebrity scholar Sharon Marcus). We discover Ogilvie's lifelong romance with opium, his dangerous allusions to atheism, an excursion to Kentucky and exuberant...