The Southwestern Humorists

In days of yore, or so I'm told, critics had an unfortunate tendency to dismiss the 19th century southwestern frontier as something of a literary wasteland. In doing so they merely followed the popular sentiment, alas still alive and well today, that those states that had aligned themselves with slaveholders in the Civil War could only be untutored racist barbarians, too morally and spiritually impoverished to be capable of great literature on the same level with their genteel and cultured brethren to the North. However, the rising tide of a rapidly opening canon over the last half century has brought to light many texts otherwise ignored, and it is no longer acceptable to assume that Mark Twain and William Faulkner, for example, sprung up unassisted from the scorched earth of the American South. Reading the Southwestern Humorists, we discover their roots grown long in the rich soil of a significant frontier literary tradition.

Southwestern Humor was in its heyday in the decades leading up to the Civil War, 1830-1861 when William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times, a weekly New York sporting paper, was known for its humorous sketches. The authors of these sketches often hailed from the southwestern frontier territories, from Georgia and Alabama, Tennessee and Missouri. Their gentlemen narrators sought to record for public consumption the way of life in these wild proto-states, the dialect of their people, and the unique humor of the rugged frontiersman. Widely read outside of New England (still under the thumb of the literary giants in Boston), the Spirit of the Times was a success due in large part to the anti-romantic, realistic writings of the southwest.

The authors who penned these tales were not professional "men of letters" (like New Englanders Emerson and Thoreau) but doctors and lawyers deeply engaged in the lives of the communities about which they wrote. Men like Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, Kittrell J. Warren, and George Washington Harris lived and worked, for the most part, in the communities that appear in their stories, and the narrators they created were similar to themselves. Intimate outsiders, the authors and their narrators were too educated to truly fit into the worlds they wrote about, but ideally situated to describe them.

Reading what they describe is always a curious experience and occasionally rather hard to take since much of what must have been considered humorous in the 19th century is rather appalling now. The description of the casual abuse of slaves and animals and the brutal violence of everyday relationships would scarcely be tolerated in today's strangely moral publishing world, unless their depiction was accompanied by a multitude of disclaimers and a healthy moral at the close. But these authors give it to us raw; while evil is often punished and good rewarded, it seems more accidental than anything else. Universal justice is by no means to be relied upon. As Richard Boyd Hauck argues in A Cheerful Nihilism (1971) readers will find in the protagonists of this literary tradition a nihilism that renders them incapable of making meaning in an absurd world. Though they are often adept at pulling a confidence trick, these protagonists lack the ability to create and maintain confidence, both in themselves and in the world around them.

William Dean Howells' The Leatherwood God

Set in the Ohio country, far from the city card-sharps and street swindlers, William Dean Howells' 1916 The Leatherwood God takes up the problem of a different kind of con man, the "false prophet." Published in the wake of what's sometimes called the Third Great Awakening and set in the middle of the Second, it's not surprising that The Leatherwood God is all about the dangers of religious revivals. The Third Great Awakening, characterized by its postmillenial emphasis on reform, gave us Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Salvation Army, and the Oneida Perfectionists (believe it or not, the silverware company got its start as a religious commune practicing communal marriage). All this came in addition to the religions formed or reformed by the Second Great Awakening (1800-1830ish): the Mormons, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Church of Christ, and the Millerites. The popularity of such religious movements cannot have gone unnoticed by any curious observer with the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

So Howells' novel places us right at the nexus of nineteenth-century religious excitement and anxiety. The possibility of the second coming of Christ, the reformation of the earth, and the perfection of mankind stood balanced against the risk posed by charismatic but many times itinerant preachers whose characters and interests were often unverifiable and sometimes directly counter to those of the communities in which they worked. The Leatherwood God takes up the true story of a preacher of precisely this kind, Joseph C. Dylks, who appeared in the small community of Salesville, Ohio in 1828.

Howells' Dylks is certainly modeled on the original (right down to his reported tendency to snort like a horse), but he is presented with a degree of sympathy that is a bit surprising in a text on this subject. Howells' novel doesn't just give us the appearance and rise of Dylks, the so-called Leatherwood God; it grants him an interiority not often given to con men in literature. As I have said before, the con man is a master of surfaces; we seldom see his depths. But with Dylks, we hear a lot about a con man's desire to believe in God and in himself, about his cowardice and nagging self-doubt, about the significant physical abuse he suffers at the hands of "unbelievers" after he fails to produce a promised miracle, and about his possibly suicidal plunge into a river while leading his followers to God's city (soon to be realized somewhere in the neighborhood of Philadelphia). Instead of the grin of the successful con man, we have the constant fear and desperation of the chronic liar.

Dylks is an object for pity, yes, but he is also a danger, and Howells does not consider his career as a false prophet a harmless one. We are given to understand that Dylks' "Little Flock" of followers survives him and continues in faith despite his ignominious death, a reflection of the enduring commitment of the followers of the real Dylks. The power wielded by such false prophets is enormous and highly problematic in a nation reliant upon a protestant ethics of hard work. The wry and atheistic Squire Braile describes the appeal of the Leatherwood God, and in doing so maps out the vulnerability of the American religious consciousness: "You see ... life is hard in a new country, and anybody that promises salvation on easy terms has got a strong hold at the very start. People will accept anything from him. Somewhere, tucked away in us, is the longing to know whether we'll live again, and the hope that we'll live happy ... we want to be good, and we want to be safe, even if we are not good; and the first fellow that comes along and tells us to have faith in him, and he'll make it all right, why we have faith in him, that's all." Like the quack selling cure-alls or the swindler with the get-rich-quick scheme, the false prophet promises an enormous reward in return for a mere show of confidence. It is a pity he cannot deliver.