ARTS REVIEW: 'MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD'

'Uncle Tom’s Cabin' Revisited - The Novel, The Plays, Tomitudes, The Movies

By: Roslyn Bernstein

June 23, 2011

(W.W. Norton & Company) For most of us who lived through the 1960s, the character of Uncle Tom is associated with a sheepish, submissive fellow -- a spineless sell-out who betrays his race.

That understanding, says David Reynolds in his new book, Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, is a gross injustice to the real Uncle Tom, created by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her popular novel of 1852. Stowe’s Uncle Tom was a muscular, dignified man in his 40s, loyal to his family -- a man who was gentle but tough.  The soft old Tom, says Reynolds, “actually developed over time in plays and minstrel shows that appeared after the novel was published.”

In this thoughtful biography of a novel that sold over 300,000 copies during its first three months of publication, Reynolds traces the influences that shaped the characters and plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We look inside Harriet Beecher Stowe’s home, gaining understanding of the powerful influence that Calvinism and Puritanism had on all of the children in the Lyman Beecher family, including Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. While her father Lyman delivered “sermons on reform issues,” Stowe was a “path-blazer in integrating reform into popular fiction and essays.”

Reynolds calls the Beechers a “family of social crusaders,” and describes in detail how “doubt and faith” came to be interwoven with the themes of democracy and social equality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We learn that the book came to Stowe in visions, one after another; consequently, it was published in weekly installments over a 10-month period. “God wrote the book,” Harriet Beecher Stowe allegedly said. The book was Stowe’s direct response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which proclaimed that northerners had to return escaped slaves to the south.

The novel drew from real-life stories and slave narratives. But it also absorbed many images from popular culture: adventures, thrillers, and temperance. Stowe clearly felt the pain of slavery, and she converted countless readers to the abolitionist side. In the north, the novel was a force for unity and cohesion, and the book’s reputation spread quickly. There were plays based on the novel and merchandise (Tomitudes) too.  Characters from the novel appeared on tobacco, socks, and china, in toys and card games. In the south, however, the book created a huge pro-slavery literature with the publication of over 30 anti-Tom novels.

By the 1890s, stage versions dramatically transformed Uncle Tom. In hundreds of acting troupes, or Tommers, Tom was cast as an obedient old fool, and Stowe’s revolutionary ideas became increasingly sentimental. Although William E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes defended the novel, James Baldwin hated it. By the mid-20^th century, according to Reynolds in a New York Times op-ed piece, “Black musicians, sports figures, even establishment civil rights leaders were all tarred with the ‘Uncle Tom’ label, often by younger, more radical activists, as a way of demeaning them in the eyes of the African-American community.”

Between 1903 and 1927, there were nine silent films based on Stowe’s novel, including Uncle Toms Cabin, or Slavery Days, produced by Edwin S. Porter for Thomas Edison’s company, an expensive 15-minute film, and J. Stuart Blackton’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1910, which consisted of three 1,000-foot reels of 42 minutes apiece. In 1927, Harry A. Pollard released a version by Carl Laemmle’s Universal Pictures, which cost nearly $2 million, making it the third most expensive film of the silent era. The Tom films, Reynolds says, relied upon the same mixture of “sensational adventure, comedy, and piety that made both the novel and the plays such huge hits.”

In 1915, D.W. Griffith’s film, The Birth of a Nation, presented a white supremacist view of American history.

In the decades between 1930 and 1960, Uncle Tom’s Cabin fell out of favor, but it was rediscovered with the rise of cultural studies, and is now often read in many American history and American literature classes.

Ironically, says David Reynolds, many brave racial pioneers who were labeled as Uncle Toms during their lifetimes — Jackie Robinson, Louis Armstrong, Willie May, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — proved to be the very people whose strategies led to the greatest progress against segregation.

Published on the 200^th anniversary of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s birth, David Reynolds' Mightier Than the Sword is a provocative study that makes it clear that Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom “deserve our reconsideration -- and our respect.”

Top image: Poster for the Uncle Tom's Cabin Co. depicting Lawyer Marks -- a character in the book and play.