Author Carolyn Eastman (Photo courtesy Carolyn Eastman)
Carolyn Eastman, a professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, when researching her previous book, “A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public After the Revolution,” came across mention of a curious professional orator named James Ogilvie. Eastman began burrowing into newspapers, letters and diaries to learn about this remarkable character. The result of her research is “The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity,” which she'll discuss at noon on Thursday, July 15, at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
Ogilvie, a Scottish immigrant, traveled rough passages throughout the young republic, in England and Scotland, presenting topical speeches like an early 19th-century series of TED talks. Ogilvie came to Richmond near the outset of his career, where he became a sought-after teacher of young people and for lecturing found his footing — in a literal sense, because public speaking involved distinct choreography.
Eastman's talk will be a hybrid virtual and live event with limited seating for VMHC members and livestreaming on Facebook and YouTube.
Richmond magazine: What was the significance of the time James Ogilvie spent in Richmond?
Carolyn Eastman: This period of five years in Richmond is when he forged the intellectual connections and contacts for going forward. His lecturing in public made a huge impact on the direction of his life. The schoolhouse in Richmond stood at Grace and Second streets and was apparently at least two floors. Ogilvie probably lived in the building with some of the students who weren’t local. He almost always shared lodgings with some of the students. His Richmond experience cemented Ogilvie’s reputation as a teacher. He’s under the aegis of Thomas Jefferson and his circle, and this brings in students from far away. While here he marries Sally Wilkinson of New Kent, and it’s one of the singular frustrations of this book is that there’s almost nothing about her. They were married roughly a year, and then she died. I found so much about his opium habit, but nothing about their courtship or why her father objected, or the details of her final illness. Ogilvie never spoke or wrote about her afterward.
RM: You make the point of how Ogilvie addressed a variety of complex subjects: the value of educating women and the place of women in society, the fate of democracy, even the concept of suicide. But he never addressed the issue of slavery.
Eastman: Ogilvie is in the early period of the anti-slavery movement and a generation or more distant from the aggressive abolitionist rhetoric of the 1830s. The white people who could afford the ticket for the lectures weren’t that exercised about slavery. Whether the subject didn’t resonate with him or if he guessed the subject wouldn’t resonate with his listeners comes down to his needing to attract audiences.
RM: He's a bit of a Zelig, isn't he, if I may borrow from an auteur whose place in the cultural firmament is also dislodged? I say this because he ends up next to or in acquaintanceship with Thomas Jefferson, Washington Irving, Dr. Benjamin Rush, the young Ralph Waldo Emerson — to name a few.
Eastman: I’ll take a little bit of an issue with the Zelig reference, only because Zelig was the master of shaping himself into whatever situation he was in and physically changed appearance. Ogilvie’s always himself. I would suggest that he may never have had the wealth and standing and family background that all those people did, but he nonetheless raised himself to the level of the great luminaries with whom he associated. He seems to have been a charming dinner guest, a riveting character, especially early on when he needed to make nice with rich people to build rapport. By time he’s speaking at the U.S. Capitol, he’s raised himself to a remarkable place in society. He’s having dinner with President James Madison and his family at the White House, this former school teacher and poor vagabond lecturer.
RM: There's really no sex scandal with Mr. O, though.
Eastman: I find this interesting. You’d think that there would be. He spent considerable time in the company of socially prominent women in intimate settings, around their dinner tables, in their parlors. These ladies were quite impressed with him. Ogilvie must’ve had an incredible amount of anxiety about preserving his reputation. It’s notable that he avoided the slightest mention, that I’ve found, of that kind of misbehavior. That’s not to say that he didn’t have other misbehaviors, but that apparently wasn’t one of them.
RM: There are compelling similarities with today’s celebrity culture in Ogilvie’s great efforts at combating his various internal demons — including drug addiction — basically before there existed descriptions or prescriptions for his afflictions.
Eastman: I took time in the book for explaining his struggle to keep it all together, and in that respect Ogilvie’s story possesses a particular modern resonance. How does a public figure maintain a reputation when any small false move can destroy it, and when you make that misstep, how do you recover? And how does a person negotiate the failures or, even more accurately, the lack of ongoing triumph? It’s really affecting to see this happening during an early period in the nature of celebrity, even though celebrity looks different in the past.
RM: Including Ogilvie, when onstage and lecturing, wearing a toga. And nobody seemed to think that strange.
Eastman: Because it wasn’t strange at the time — but now we think so. The people who attended his lectures venerated the Greek and Roman classics, those great orators, and public speakers were cognizant of that, too. Nobody really even comments on his wearing a toga. When you’re visiting the past, you have to understand the complexities. The past functions by its own logic and rules. You have to learn their language and how to count their money. The less you spend time thinking about them as stupid from our perspective, the more time you can spend on becoming acquainted with how they understood the world from their perspective.
