November 5 — The Most Famous Man in America: A Conversation with Henry Ward Beecher
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Debby Applegate will reveal her insights on the life of this fascinating Indiana figure who preached a gospel of abundance in the 19th century. Beecher was a prominent voice in the most important issues confronting American culture at the time: antislavery and women’s suffrage. Immersed in many controversies, Beecher’s struggles as a leader still resonate with contemporary society.
When: Monday, November 05, 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Where: Second Presbyterian Church, McFarland Hall, 7700 N. Meridian St., Indianapolis, IN 46260
The program will open with a dramatic presentation of Beecher’s dynamic sermons by Henry Ryder, delivered from the very pulpit from which Beecher spoke while in Indianapolis. Q&A will follow Applegate’s presentation. Admission is free. A pre-event book club is available. Presented by Second Presbyterian Church and Indiana Historical Society.
So who was Henry Ward Beecher? A former pastor at 2nd Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, for one thing. Probably the most flamboyent minister 2nd Pres is ever likely to have. Born in 1813 to America’s last great Puritan minister, he was for a while overshadowed by his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the century’s bestselling book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But when pushed into the ministry, the charismatic Beecher found international fame by shedding his father Lyman’s Old Testament–style fire-and-brimstone theology and instead preaching a New Testament–based gospel of unconditional love and healing, becoming one of the founding fathers of modern American Christianity. By the 1850s, his spectacular sermons at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights had made him New York’s number one tourist attraction, so wildly popular that the ferries from Manhattan to Brooklyn were dubbed “Beecher Boats.”
Beecher inserted himself into nearly every important drama of the era—among them the antislavery and women’s suffrage movements, the rise of the entertainment industry and tabloid press, and controversies ranging from Darwinian evolution to presidential politics. He was notorious for his irreverent humor and melodramatic gestures, such as auctioning slaves to freedom in his pulpit and shipping rifles—nicknamed “Beecher’s Bibles”—to the antislavery resistance fighters in Kansas. Thinkers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Twain befriended—and sometimes parodied—him.
And then it all fell apart. In 1872 Beecher was accused by feminist firebrand Victoria Woodhull of adultery with one of his most pious parishioners. Suddenly the “Gospel of Love” seemed to rationalize a life of lust. The cuckolded husband brought charges of “criminal conversation” in a salacious trial that became the most widely covered event of the century, garnering more newspaper headlines than the entire Civil War. Beecher survived, but his reputation and his causes—from women’s rights to progressive evangelicalism—suffered devastating setbacks that echo to this day.
For some reason, the word “Clintonesque” comes to mind.
Now this larger-than-life figure has a worthy biography. Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, author Debby Applegate has spent 20 years researching and writing about Henry Ward Beecher. She first discovered Beecher as an undergraduate in the college archives at Amherst College, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1989. She continued her work on Beecher while a Sterling Fellow in American Studies at Yale, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1998. Her research for the book spanned the American Revolution to the Gilded Age, and took her to scores of historical archives and scholarly libraries across the country, from country athenaeums to ivy covered towers to the damp basements of elderly great-grandchildren.
Her writing has won her numerous prizes and fellowships, has appeared in publications from the Journal of American History to The New York Times and has taught at Yale and Wesleyan Universities. The Most Famous Man in America has won the 2006 Frederick G. Melcher Book Award, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for the Best Biography of 2006 and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, NPR’s “Fresh Air” and the Chicago Tribune, amongst many others. Go to to www.themostfamousmaninamerica.com for more information about the book and author.
Got Questions? Call 317-253-6461 or e-mail 2church@secondchurch.org
If this event sound interesting, check out … Some other local events illuminating the 19th century issues that inspired Stowe: the history of “Federal Justice in Indiana” September 17; “Performing Modesty: War, Commemoration, and the Sexual Politics of Publicity” October 5; and “Slavery, the Courts, and the Underground Railroad” November 15.
September 10th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
[…] November 5 — The Most Famous Man in America: A Conversation with Henry Ward Beecher Pulitzer Prize-winning author Debby Applegate will reveal her insights on the life of this fascinating Indiana figure who preached a gospel of abundance in the 19th century. Beecher was a prominent voice in the most important issues confronting American culture at the time: antislavery and women’s suffrage. Immersed in many controversies, Beecher’s struggles as a leader still resonate with contemporary society. check it out […]