Book Review

Brooklyn's Henry Ward Beecher gained celebrity status with his gospel that a loving God would bring industrializing America's multiple disruptions to a happy conclusion. A skilled manipulator with words and personal gesture, he became energized by the dynamism of his late-nineteenth-century surroundings. Within his evolving liberal Protestant subculture, traditional restrictions and rules crumbled, revealing a new cosmos of boundless possibilities. Then, in 1874, at the height of his personal success, Beecher became embroiled in a scandal involving accusations from Theodore J. Tilton, once a close associate.	1
Questions abound in this affair: Did Reverend Beecher have sexual intercourse with Elizabeth Tilton, a devout member of his Plymouth (Congregational) Church? Were Beecher's intimacies with Mrs. Tilton different in kind from those that in happier times had characterized his unusually close bond with Mr. Tilton? In becoming admittedly enmeshed with Beecher, was Mrs. Tilton passively manipulated by her pastor, or was she assertively seeking her own self-definition? Did Theodore Tilton's disintegrating religious faith trigger an irrational jealousy toward his wife and Beecher, who shared the same spiritual universe? Did Theodore Tilton's flagging literary career (and Beecher's role in its unraveling) create the rage that led to the subsequent charges of adultery? Were some of the participants in this relational triangle practitioners of "free love" (Victoria Woodhull's much-publicized solution to the gender rigidities of the 1870s)? Richard Wightman Fox provides no final answers to those questions, as that is not his purpose. Instead, he searches for deeper revelations in the participants' stories. Conflicting discourses—involved first in a private cover-up and later in a messy trial—thoroughly intrigue him, and he successfully passes his own fascination along to his readers.	2
Fox has written of Reinhold Niebuhr that "his charisma was no pulpit act." Can the same be said of Beecher, who actively sought popular approval with his ebullient brand of good news? In "The Liberal Ethic and the Spirit of Protestantism," first published in the Center Magazine (Sept.–Oct. 1987), Professor Fox blasted the kind of modern, soft, therapeutic Protestantism that Beecher helped invent. Religion, he has suggested in various places, needs to be far more tough-minded than that to do good work in the world. Quite publicly, Fox has hungered for a new religious vision that might both inspire sacrificial self-restraint and generate an ennobling collective purpose.	3
As a well-known critic of "the culture of consumption," Fox might be expected to be unsympathetic toward the likes of Henry Ward Beecher, who developed a new user-friendly religion that yielded to the material desires of his age. Yet, instead of lambasting Beecher in Trials of Intimacy, Fox rather goes after historians who both reduce Beecher to a mere negative symbol and too easily merge the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century with modern mass consumerism. Instead of discovering a relevant past in order to address present concerns, he explores a unique past religious subculture on its own terms. He accomplishes that in the manner of students of language who seek to reveal past perceptions of reality in a close examination of multiple discourses.	4
Other reviewers of this work have called his approach postmodernist. In an earlier essay ("Intimacy on Trial: Cultural Meanings of the Beecher-Tilton Affair") published in his coedited The Power of Culture (1993), Fox's style did appear influenced by, as he put it, "today's Foucauldian academic climate." But even in that piece he appeared somewhat reluctant to fall into postmodernism's "very fashionable" philosophical system. In a subsequently coauthored introduction to his coedited A Companion to American Thought (1995), he claimed his evolving perspective to be closer to historicism. In Trials of Intimacy, he straddles a fine line between historicism and postmodernism. With historicism, he assumes that each era has within itself distinctive understandings of meaning and purpose. With postmodernism, he values every nuance of divergent understanding within the conflicting discourses of the Tiltons and Beecher.	. . .