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.