Essay--
The Fool as Biographer

(John Hendrix illustration)

John Brown was hated in his life time, especially by pro-slavery southerners and others who resented him for trying to uproot and destroy the status quo of black servitude and exploitation.  While widespread prejudice against Brown is familiar in U.S. culture today, I've become convinced that many of Brown’s critics actually “love” to hate him, which is to say that there is some kind of fascination with him that adheres to popular discourse.  Typically this fascination with Brown is negative—quite the opposite of the Jesse James legend, which is quite unworthily positive.   Meanwhile, the internet is full of random knuckleheads self-assuredly opining about John Brown despite knowing little or nothing about him.  This common contempt for Brown is shallow and reactionary, evidence that many people have been propagandized more than educated.

In contrast, a smaller number of people actually hate John Brown for reasons consciously grounded in an ideological, experiential, and existential commitment to the “values” that typified the advocates of slavery in the antebellum era.  In other words, these critics truly manifest the enmity of the historical white supremacist that John Brown faced in his own lifetime—the same mentality that ultimately required his death.  Such was his most vitriolic enemy of the late 20th century, whose contempt drove him to write a hostile biography.

Otto Scott was born Otto Joseph Scott-Estrella in 1919 and died in 2006, but his writings and videos are still quite influential.  He is widely known and loved by neo-Confederates and ultra right-wing Christians.  Although he is a hero of contemporary Confederate loyalists, Scott also labored greatly on behalf of the interests of the wealthy and powerful in the western world.  It was no exaggeration for the Southern Partisan, the premiere neo-Confederate magazine, to eulogize him as “one of the greatest” conservative writers and thinkers of the Cold War era.1  This was not a man who cared for the plight of the poor and the oppressed, especially in the non-white world, nor could he have cared for those who were their sworn allies like John Brown.

Background

Scott in younger days

Scott served in the United States Merchant Marines during World War II, afterward working in advertising and journalism, although a Wikipedia entry says he worked in journalism in Virginia and California prior to entering the Merchant Marines. Regardless, this path led him to embark on a long career as a published author of various themes as diverse as the histories of the Ashland Oil and Black & Decker Companies, and the stories of Robespierre, James I, and John Brown the abolitionist.  All told, Scott published ten books along with numerous articles in many publications including the Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union, San Diego Tribune, Salisbury Review (London), Conservative Digest, and Human Events.  However, among conservatives, Scott was known for his own monthly publication, Otto Scott’s Compass, a “journal of contemporary culture.”  The latter had a considerable run of fifteen years, ending the year before his death.  One of Scott’s relatives aptly observed that he was “one of a great many Americans who are well-known to a special audience, but unknown to the nation at large.”2  In Scott’s case, his “special audience” was predominantly one of ultra conservative “Caucasians” with interests in the maintenance of the present order of the western world.

Capitalist Ideologue

Throughout his professional life, Scott made a living as both a businessman and as the chronicler of big business.  The anonymous author of the article Wikipedia about Scott notes that between 1954 and 1963, he held three vice-president posts in Globaltronix de Venezuala, Mohr Associates, and Becker, Scott & Associates.  He was also “assistant to the chair” at Ashland Oil Incorporated in the year 1968-69.  Even Scott’s family member acknowledges that he largely made a living “from his corporate biographies.”3  As a bona fide gatekeeper of the status quo, Scott was extremely critical of any real or perceived radicalism and liberal or left-oriented ideas, and was also opposed to any liberation movement that challenged what he upheld as the supremacy of the Christian west.  He was highly critical of the anti-Apartheid movement in the 20^th century and bitterly attacked the abolitionist movement of the 19^th century in historical terms.

Although Scott became a major didactic figure for ultra-conservatives in later decades, he had already influenced the conservative movement as an ideologue by the later 1960s.  Most notably, he is credited for inventing the phrase, “The Silent Majority,” a term made popular by Republican President Richard Nixon.  According to Wikipedia, Nixon apparently appropriated this phrase from a speech that Scott wrote for the CEO of Ashland Oil entitled, "The Silent Majority" (which was delivered to the Chicago Men's Club on May 23, 1968). 

Alliance with Rousas J. Rushdoony

J. R. Rushdoony

No doubt, Scott’s cachet was further enhanced when he allied himself with the ultra conservative Reformed theologian, Rousas J. Rushdoony, a marginal Calvinist intellectual who similarly influenced President Ronald Reagan’s political ideology.  The two ultra conservative thinkers chaired a radio program and Scott published regularly in Rushdoony’s magazine, The Chalcedon Report.4  Scott’s alliance with Rushdoony was significant for his future lionization among extreme Southern conservative Protestants, some of them neo-secessionists.  Scott, Rushdoony and their type despised the secular North as the vector of liberal abolitionist ideology, the forerunner—in their thinking—of present day liberalism and Left oriented politics and religion.  Scott is said to have had some kind of conversion experience after reading the four New Testament gospels in one night.  However, it is not clear if Scott ever had church affiliation until his final role as “scholar in residence" at the Tri-City Covenant Church in Somersworth, New Hampshire (1998-2004), “where he provided historical insight to the school and church staff and assisted in Sunday School instruction, high-school history, and Bible and economics courses.”5 

Scott and Reconstructionism

Tri-City Covenant Church is a congregation that follows the so-called Reconstructionist (also known as Theonomy or Dominionism) teachings of Rushdoony, Gary North, and others.6  Reconstructionists are like Libertarians with a Calvinistic theological and philosophical orientation, and are hostile toward liberal and Leftist politics.  Reconstructionists are generally distinguished by their belief that the Mosaic Law should be enforced as the law of the land.  For this reason, even conservative evangelicals find Reconstructionists problematic.  In 1996, the conservative Christian activist Ralph Reed wrote, "Reconstructionism is an authoritarian ideology that threatens the most basic civil liberties of a free and democratic society.”7  Richard J. Neuhaus thus appropriately describes Reconstructionism as a “bastard form of Calvinism contending that the American constitutional order must be replaced by a new order based on ‘Bible Law.’” Church historian Carl Trueman concludes that Rushdoony “was historically incompetent, probably racist” and—based upon his use of questionable sources, “probably unhinged” too.8

. . .one can understand why Scott was so embraced by Reconstructionists, especially since he shared their core white supremacist values.

In this light, one can understand why Scott was so embraced by Reconstructionists, especially since he shared their core white supremacist values.  Like Scott, Rushdoony and his colleagues have proven extremely sympathetic to the Confederacy in historical retrospect, just as they defended racist South Africa at the peak of the anti-Apartheid movement.  Anything that smacks of egalitarian or liberationist ideas is understood as rooted in godless ideology to Reconstructionists, and this was well suited to Otto Scott.  Rushdoony and his Chalcedon Foundation proved to be extremely supportive of white Southern nationalism, especially showing proud devotion to antebellum pro-slavery theology.  The Chalcedon Foundation allied with the Alabama-based League of the South in the 1990s, and Scott himself was the featured speaker at the League’s 1995 convention.  He even produced videos for the League dealing with their historical and political reinterpretations of the Civil War and slavery.9 According to the insightful Christian blog, Racist Churches, Scott allegedly pronounced regret over the increasing number of non-whites in congress and also supported racial profiling by authorities.  He uplifted the so-called Caucasian race as the most “essential to the continued progress of world humanity,” and disdained the removal of an interracial marriage ban in post-Apartheid South Africa.  It is also reported that Scott once stood at the grave of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in Virginia and declared that it marked “the end of southern civilization.”10 This depraved orientation clearly provides the basis for Scott’s malignant interpretation of John Brown.

A Word About Conservatives and John Brown

Whatever one’s political orientation, it is not a “given” of history that conservatives have categorically despised John Brown.  In fact, he has always had admirers along a range of conservative views.  Certainly John Brown studies was largely carried in the 20^th century by two conservative researchers, Boyd Stutler and the Rev. Clarence Gee.  While Gee was probably the more socially thoughtful of the two, Stutler was a hard-nosed right-winger who disparaged the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s as being too extreme.   Notwithstanding this backwards view, Stutler recognized the essential rightness of Brown’s antislavery effort and admired his willingness to die to end human bondage in the United States.  Even “tricky” Richard Nixon, coming from a Quaker background, apparently held a soft spot in his heart for Old Brown. At the time of the United States Bicentennial in 1976, Nixon even made reference to Brown’s words.11  My point is not that the politics of men like Stutler were correct, or that their brand of conservatism was identical to Brown’s political outlook.  However, when it comes to John Brown, conservatism has never been represented by one opinion, and certainly not the opinion of right-wing neo-Confederates.  Furthermore, Stutler would hardly have approved of Scott’s narrative, so replete with political contempt and mean-spirited accusations of Brown and the abolitionist movement.

Scott, Malin, and John Brown

James C. Malin
(Kansas State Historical
Society)

Scott’s primary source in his own writing is the work of James C. Malin, a Kansas scholar whose book, John Brown and the Legend of ’56, was probably the last significant scholarly effort to flagrantly discredit Brown. Louis Ruchames, editor of the quintessential collection, A John Brown Reader, called Malin “the foremost anti-Brown historian, who seems unable to forgive the North for having used force against Southern secession, or the Abolitionists for having taught that the abolition of slavery would be a step forward for American society, or the Negro for having believed that his welfare would be furthered by the forceful elimination of slavery.”12  Ruchames’ evaluation of Malin sounds quite similar to Otto Scott:

To Malin, minor errors of date or place committed by writers who have a high regard for Brown are frequently labeled deliberate falsehoods, while the errors of Brown-haters are simply unintentional blunders.  Very few anti-slavery leaders and writers emerge unscathed under Malin’s furious onslaught.  Typical of his method are his comments on Emerson, Thoreau, Parker and the other leaders of New England opinion, whom he contemptuously refers to as the “New England Transcendental Hierarchy, the self-appointed keepers not only of New England culture, but, according to their own estimates, of national civilization.”13

In retrospect, Scott not only appropriated Malin’s prejudiced hypothesis, but sought to extend it beyond Brown’s story in antebellum Kansas.  Meanwhile, serious scholars across the board, from conservative Stutler to left-leaning Louis Ruchames, had exposed Malin’s book as flawed and untrustworthy. While Malin’s effort had general value in presenting the hellish mayhem of the Kansas territory, his one-sided, ham-handed treatment of Brown and the anti-slavery side was warped and untrustworthy.14   Yet Scott saw Malin only as “a truly great American historian” and uncritically accepted his problematic book—which he lauded as “a classic of historic investigation and analysis”—because it suited his base politics.  Retrospectively, Scott continued to praised Malin for portraying Brown simply as a “multiple murderer and robber in the Kansas Territory,” even though these allegations were intentionally based upon a selective reading of pro-slavery sources.  In the short term, Malin’s John Brown and the Legend of ’56 gave ammunition to anti-Brown scholars, but soon the author was exposed, his work was discredited, and his scholarly reputation was duly diminished. Scott whined about this too, claiming that Malin’s only crime was that he had “outraged the Academy”—a ridiculous assertion, particularly because prominent historians in the mid-20^th century were hardly warm toward abolitionism and John Brown.  To Otto Scott, Malin and his fetid book were the victims of academic “obloquy.”15  In reality, Malin’s work simply was too tainted and biased to be trustworthy.   To this day, no credible historian would use it without exercising extreme care—something that Scott definitely did not do.  In fact, he went on quite uncritically to make the greatest use of Malin’s propaganda for his own anti-Brown screed, The Secret Six: The Fool as Martyr.16  The identity of the “fool,” in Scott’s mind, is easy to surmise.

Scott’s “Sacred Fool Quartet”

Scott’s own treatment of John Brown the “fool as martyr” actually was third in his series known as “The Sacred Fool Quartet”—critical biographies about “extraordinary fools whose follies influenced the course of all our lives,” goes Scott’s claim.  “Without them, history would have been different, and our lives would today be lived along patterns beyond our powers to imagine.”17    Besides John Brown, Scott’s historical fool hunt targeted King James I of England, Maximilien Robespierre and the French Revolution, and President Woodrow Wilson.  Scott thought these historical figures were “sacred” in that society had supposedly conferred a “form of immortality” upon them “irrespective of character.”18  Having fed from Malin’s poisoned plate, Scott’s anti-Brown work thus extended the theme in blanket condemnation of the abolitionist movement, with the particular intention of blaming them for the ruin that befell the South in the Civil War.  Scott thus opined: “The costs of Abolitionist virtue ran high.  Officially the record is 621,000 dead,” he concluded of the Civil War death toll.19 It is difficult to imagine anyone attributing the expansive deaths resulting from the Civil War to the abolition movement without thinking the writer must be a revivified slave master.  But this represents the kind of mind and spirit that animated Otto Scott.

A Publishing Disappointment

Interestingly, the first edition of Scott’s anti-Brown book was published by Times Books, the publishing arm of the New York Times, in 1979.  Although the book was smuggled to press, Scott’s Secret Six nearly proved a Trojan horse to the “Old Gray Lady.”  Certainly, Times Books was an unlikely home for Otto Scott’s anti-liberal screed, except that he had an inside connection with Tom Lipscomb, a business associate who had become the head of the press.  The book was hesitantly published, but it grated upon the legendary Times executive, Sidney Gruson, who rightly observed that it “lowered the tone” of the company.  Fearing that his opus would get buried, Scott pulled the rights of his book, bought back the remaining copies, and donated them to his friend Rushdoony.  Fortunately for Scott, there was sufficient interest and money in the South, and the book was republished eight years later by the Foundation for American Education in South Carolina, possibly a Klan-related organization.  Although Scott lamented that his book had nearly been “murdered” by the “Establishment,” The Secret Six was much more viable than he portrayed.20  Scott may not have had liberal money behind him, but he had right-wing support, especially in a willing audience among neo-Confederates and Reconstructionists.  The book was finally published under another label in 1993, which seems to have been Scott’s own imprint.21

The Legacy of Scott’s Secret Six

Otto Scott died in 2006, but his book continues to feed the same counter-establishment of radical right-wingers, neo-Confederates, and Reconstructionists.  For this audience, The Secret Six is taken as definitive and quoted by unknowing bigots as if it were the last word in historical terms.  Scott undoubtedly knew that he had made a niche for himself with his anti-Brown book; his other “fool” books are extant but rarely mentioned.  In The Secret Six, Scott took the Southern screed to a sophisticated and polished level of argument.  By cynically portraying Brown as a deluded killer in collaboration with liberal New England elites and other subversive figures, Scott affirms the foundational sentiments of neo-Confederates and ultra-conservatives who deeply despise liberalism in government and society, and who resent the national and global changes that are challenging traditional white supremacy in state and church.

It is not my intention to do a book review and in this piece I have preferred to use Scott’s subsequent reflections as published in Southern Partisan, which present his essential argument about Brown and abolitionism as well as background to his research and the publication of the book.  However, there are a couple of points that need to be made in highlighting the fundamental errors of his interpretation. 

Scott demonizes Brown over against the opinion of every credible biographer over the past century.

First, Scott’s bibliography belies the lack of fairness that defines his work, particularly regarding Brown.  Scott demonizes Brown over against the opinion of every credible biographer over the past century.  His narrative not only impugns Brown, but inherently accuses every scholar (including myself) of being a liar and false propagandist by our presentations vis a vis the historical record.  If Scott is correct in his profile of Brown, then Villard, Oates, Stavis, Boyer, Yours Truly, Reynolds, Carton, McGlone, and Horwitz have misread the facts to a significant degree.  Not that all of us agree on every point, and some of us have considerable differences about the Old Man.  Yet none of us have presented Brown and the abolitionist movement in the manner insisted upon by Otto Scott. 

Equally important if not more so, Scott’s work is both selective and derivative.  Like Robert Penn Warren before him, Scott only mined the most negative assertions of Oswald Villard, and otherwise ignored the more positive and balanced aspects of biographers like Villard, Boyer, and Oates.  Otherwise, his work offers nothing new, original, or based on primary research.  From Stutler, Gee, Edwin Cotter, and Tom Vince to Jean Libby, Scott Wolfe, and others (including me), those who have studied Brown extensively over time and in great depth simply do not recognize the John Brown of Scott’s rendering.   Far from being a historical portrayal, Scott’s “fool” is a straw man, a self-serving caricature that suits his prejudices and privileges his political agenda.

Third, Scott diminishes people of integrity who were Brown’s allies and supporters during and after his death.  Besides his obvious criticisms of the “Secret Six” and other “liberal” abolitionist clergymen, Scott essentially calls Frederick Douglass a liar—“disingenuous”—in his testimony about Brown.22

Fourth, Scott’s argument paints the crisis between abolitionists and the South with such broad brushstrokes that he obscures the fact that Christians across the theological spectrum were opposed to chattel slavery and saw it as a great sin.  While it is true that many leading abolitionists were “liberal” clergymen, there was no lack of stridently evangelical and even Calvinistic anti-slavery people in the North too.  The abolition movement may have had a preponderance of “liberals” in Scott’s terms, but the anti-slavery and abolitionist premises were not essentially based upon heterodoxy.  For instance, the counterparts of Reformed Presbyterian slaveholders in the South were the Covenanted Reformed Presbyterians, a movement descended from the Scottish Protestant Reformation.  The “Covenanters” were fervent antislavery people and argued against slavery explicitly from the Bible and the Calvinist tradition.  John Brown himself was a traditional Calvinist, a point that Scott never properly or fairly assessed because his only interest was in presenting him as a murderous “fool” in cahoots with Northern liberal heretics. Brown was “religious,” Scott says, but certainly not Christian.  Even in his death, Brown died like every dark pagan “selected for holy execution” in places like the “Orient, Pacific, Africa, India and other parts, because the gods demanded sacrifices—for the good of the majority.”23

Finally, Scott’s viewpoint necessarily plays down and denies the evil of chattel slavery and makes the slaveholding South a victim of Northern aggression.  In his understanding, it was antislavery people who were acting out “with raging demonstrations against the Fugitive Slave Act” in the North, just as it was the “initial exertions of old John Brown” that caused Kansas rhetoric to shift into violence.  The Northern heresy “led to the Civil War” while noble Christian Southerners “watched the Northern paroxysms with fear and horror,” increasingly convinced they were to be massacred.24  There is no sense of the aggression and determination of the South to expand slavery by any means necessary.  There is no admission that Southern terrorism was already underway in Kansas before John Brown came in answer to a distress call from his family in the territory.  There is no acknowledgment that black people in the North, free and fugitive, were outraged and terrorized by the Fugitive Slave Law, and that many patient Northerners felt violated and abused by its requirements.  Nor is there any sense of the guilt and hypocrisy of the Christian South, feeding off the sweat and blood of their hapless black chattel.  All Scott understood of the antebellum drama of abolition was that it was a grand liberal heresy foisted upon the South that “resulted in a long, terrible [and avoidable] war and punitive peace.”  All that mattered to him was that abolitionists had so skewed the world by their doctrines that even future whites, such as white Afrikaners during South African Apartheid, would suffer as a result, just as anti-white terrorism was descending upon the world because of the “boomeranging back” of the abolitionist heresy.25

Epilogue: “Eternal Reality”?

After Scott’s death, one of his family members recalled that although “his work has proceeded without fanfare, it had not gone unnoticed.” This is true enough.  His influence remains real in the marginal subcultures of neo-Confederacy and reactionary right-wing Christianity.  His work on John Brown has not gone unnoticed either, since it remains authoritative and usable for these audiences.  However, Scott’s work lacks the substance of truth and integrity.  He not only writes from a standpoint of error, but also from one of tragic self-deception.  Scott was a man who gave the whole of his life to twisting history to benefit corporations, slaveholders, and alleged white racial superiority.  Gifted with doubtless ability and intelligence, yet his intelligence was wasted on the pride of a fallen slave empire, and every gesture of accusation he pointed at others will come back to rest upon his legacy. 

Otto Scott lived on the wrong side of history and left a legacy of white racist pride and denial.

Otto Scott lived on the wrong side of history and left a legacy of white racist pride and denial. As a historian, he had real ability and sensibility, even a sense of obligation to time and eternity.  Yet often these make the worst kinds of people when they align themselves to the side of oppression.  Were he merely a stupid reactionary or a paid literary assassin, Scott would have been easy to ignore.  He once remarked, “I do not regard the past as dead. On the contrary, I regard the past and the present and even the future as part of an eternal reality.”  He concluded that his generation faced the same tests encountered by former generations.  “All I do is remind my contemporaries that Eternity watches us forever,” Scott concluded.26  It is unfortunate that a man with such a broad scope did not learn from the failure of preceding generations.  John Brown was himself quite aware of that “eternal reality,” and could have taught Otto Scott a few lessons had he been willing to learn from history.  But instead of deploring those sins, he personified them as an apologist, and even magnified them by making wrong into right, and right into wrong.  Like Haman of old, the fool who erects a gallows for the just may find himself hanged on a scaffold of his own error. 

So hangs Otto Scott, the fool as biographer.

* I would like to thank the scholar Edward H. Sebesta, who provided me with some copies of Scott’s contributions to neo-Confederate publications, especially the Southern Partisan.  Sebesta’s blog, Anti-Neo-Confederate is found on the web at: http://newtknight.blogspot.com/.  He is also the co-editor of Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction (University of Texas Press, 2008) http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exhagneo.html and co-editor of The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (University of Mississippi Press) http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1338.

Notes

     1 “A Giant is Gone,” Southern Partisan xxv:i (May 2006): 11.

     2 “Otto Joseph Scott,” Wikipedia.  Retrieved on 12 Mar. 2012 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Scott#cite_note-1; Phillipa Scott-Girardi, “Otto Scott,1919–2006,” Sobran’s Forum on line [originally published in Sobran’s, Apr.-May 2012, p. 12].  Retrieved on 12 Mar. 2012 from: http://www.sobran.com/articles/forum/otto_scott.shtml.  Also see “Otto Joseph Scott, May 26, 1918 – May 5, 2006” (Obituary).  Bonney-Watson (Seattle, Wash.).  Retrieved on 12 Mar. 2012 from: http://bonneywatson.com/obituaries/detail.html?id=1857.

     3 Ibid.

     4 “Otto Joseph Scott”; “A Giant is Gone.” Also see, Scott-Girardi, “Otto Scott, 1919-2006.”

     5 Scott-Girardi, “Otto Scott,1919–2006.”

     6 See Tri-City Covenant Church website (Somersworth, NH) at: http://www.tccc-tcca.org/.  Note that the sources of the church’s position paper on “Dominion & Work” are all renowned Reconstructionist scholars.

     7 Richard John Neuhaus, “Ralph Reed’s Real Agenda,” First Things (Oct. 1996).  Retrieved on 12 Mar. 2012 from: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/11/006-ralph-reeds-real-agenda-5.

     8 Neuhaus, “Ralph Reed’s Real Agenda”; Carl Trueman, “Rushdoony once again—for the last time,” Reformation 21 blog [Alliance for Confessing Evangelicals], 31 Dec. 2006.  Retrieved on 15 Mar. 2012 from: http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2006/12/rushdoony-once-again-for-the-l.php.

     9 Edward H. Sebesta and Euan Hague, “The U.S. Civil War as a Theological War: Confederate Christian Nationalism and the League of the South,” Canadian Review of American Studies 32:3 (2002).

     10 “Otto Scott,” Racist Churches blog.  Retrieved on 12 Mar. 2012 from: http://racistchurches.wordpress.com/2007/06/13/otto-scott/.

     11  See Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., John Brown: The Man Who Lived; Essays in Honor of the Harper’s Ferry Raid Sesquicentennial 1859-2009 (New York: Lulu, 2009), pp. 15-16.

     12  Louis Ruchames, ed.  A John Brown Reader (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1959), pp. 14-15.

     13  Ibid.

     14 “Malin took much of his source material from the anti-Brown papers and records.”  Boyd B. Stutler to Clarence S. Gee, 10 July 1953, p. 2, in Stutler-Gee correspondence, Hudson Library and Historical Society, Hudson, Ohio; “The book contains a lot of good material—but it also contains too much of biased opinion. . . .  I think [Malin] violated every rule of historical method in his zeal to establish his legend, and that there are strained interpretations of some of the material he used.” Stutler to Gee, 25 Aug. 1951, p. 1, idem. 

     15 Otto Scott, “The Return of John Brown and the Secret Six,” Southern Partisan (Spring 1988), pp. 21 and 23.

     16 The final version of the book is published under the title, The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement. See note 20 below.

     17 Per the book’s description on Amazon.com.  Retrieved on 16 Mar. 2012 from: http://www.amazon.com/James-I-Fool-as-King/dp/0884051234.

     18 Scott, “The Return of John Brown and the Secret Six,” p. 23.

     19 Ibid., 22.

     20 Ibid., 23-24.

     21 A routine search on the internet for Uncommon Books shows no other author or book published by Uncommon Books, except for another essay by Scott called “The Church and Modern Culture” (1992).

     22 Scott, The Secret Six, n. 10, p. 345.

     23 Otto J. Scott, “Transcendentalism: The New England Heresy,” Southern Partisan (Spring 1982), p. 20.

     24 Ibid., 19 and 20.

     25 Ibid., 21.

     26 Scott-Girardi, “Otto Scott, 1919-2006.”

Back By Popular Demand: The Fool as Biographer

Essay--
The Fool as Biographer

(John Hendrix illustration)

John Brown was hated in his life time, especially by pro-slavery southerners and others who resented him for trying to uproot and destroy the status quo of black servitude and exploitation.  While widespread prejudice against Brown is familiar in U.S. culture today, I've become convinced that many of Brown’s critics actually “love” to hate him, which is to say that there is some kind of fascination with him that adheres to popular discourse.  Typically this fascination with Brown is negative—quite the opposite of the Jesse James legend, which is quite unworthily positive.   Meanwhile, the internet is full of random knuckleheads self-assuredly opining about John Brown despite knowing little or nothing about him.  This common contempt for Brown is shallow and reactionary, evidence that many people have been propagandized more than educated.

In contrast, a smaller number of people actually hate John Brown for reasons consciously grounded in an ideological, experiential, and existential commitment to the “values” that typified the advocates of slavery in the antebellum era.  In other words, these critics truly manifest the enmity of the historical white supremacist that John Brown faced in his own lifetime—the same mentality that ultimately required his death.  Such was his most vitriolic enemy of the late 20th century, whose contempt drove him to write a hostile biography.

Otto Scott was born Otto Joseph Scott-Estrella in 1919 and died in 2006, but his writings and videos are still quite influential.  He is widely known and loved by neo-Confederates and ultra right-wing Christians.  Although he is a hero of contemporary Confederate loyalists, Scott also labored greatly on behalf of the interests of the wealthy and powerful in the western world.  It was no exaggeration for the Southern Partisan, the premiere neo-Confederate magazine, to eulogize him as “one of the greatest” conservative writers and thinkers of the Cold War era.1  This was not a man who cared for the plight of the poor and the oppressed, especially in the non-white world, nor could he have cared for those who were their sworn allies like John Brown.

Background

Scott in younger days

Scott served in the United States Merchant Marines during World War II, afterward working in advertising and journalism, although a Wikipedia entry says he worked in journalism in Virginia and California prior to entering the Merchant Marines. Regardless, this path led him to embark on a long career as a published author of various themes as diverse as the histories of the Ashland Oil and Black & Decker Companies, and the stories of Robespierre, James I, and John Brown the abolitionist.  All told, Scott published ten books along with numerous articles in many publications including the Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union, San Diego Tribune, Salisbury Review (London), Conservative Digest, and Human Events.  However, among conservatives, Scott was known for his own monthly publication, Otto Scott’s Compass, a “journal of contemporary culture.”  The latter had a considerable run of fifteen years, ending the year before his death.  One of Scott’s relatives aptly observed that he was “one of a great many Americans who are well-known to a special audience, but unknown to the nation at large.”2  In Scott’s case, his “special audience” was predominantly one of ultra conservative “Caucasians” with interests in the maintenance of the present order of the western world.

Capitalist Ideologue

Throughout his professional life, Scott made a living as both a businessman and as the chronicler of big business.  The anonymous author of the article Wikipedia about Scott notes that between 1954 and 1963, he held three vice-president posts in Globaltronix de Venezuala, Mohr Associates, and Becker, Scott & Associates.  He was also “assistant to the chair” at Ashland Oil Incorporated in the year 1968-69.  Even Scott’s family member acknowledges that he largely made a living “from his corporate biographies.”3  As a bona fide gatekeeper of the status quo, Scott was extremely critical of any real or perceived radicalism and liberal or left-oriented ideas, and was also opposed to any liberation movement that challenged what he upheld as the supremacy of the Christian west.  He was highly critical of the anti-Apartheid movement in the 20^th century and bitterly attacked the abolitionist movement of the 19^th century in historical terms.

Although Scott became a major didactic figure for ultra-conservatives in later decades, he had already influenced the conservative movement as an ideologue by the later 1960s.  Most notably, he is credited for inventing the phrase, “The Silent Majority,” a term made popular by Republican President Richard Nixon.  According to Wikipedia, Nixon apparently appropriated this phrase from a speech that Scott wrote for the CEO of Ashland Oil entitled, "The Silent Majority" (which was delivered to the Chicago Men's Club on May 23, 1968). 

Alliance with Rousas J. Rushdoony

J. R. Rushdoony

No doubt, Scott’s cachet was further enhanced when he allied himself with the ultra conservative Reformed theologian, Rousas J. Rushdoony, a marginal Calvinist intellectual who similarly influenced President Ronald Reagan’s political ideology.  The two ultra conservative thinkers chaired a radio program and Scott published regularly in Rushdoony’s magazine, The Chalcedon Report.4  Scott’s alliance with Rushdoony was significant for his future lionization among extreme Southern conservative Protestants, some of them neo-secessionists.  Scott, Rushdoony and their type despised the secular North as the vector of liberal abolitionist ideology, the forerunner—in their thinking—of present day liberalism and Left oriented politics and religion.  Scott is said to have had some kind of conversion experience after reading the four New Testament gospels in one night.  However, it is not clear if Scott ever had church affiliation until his final role as “scholar in residence" at the Tri-City Covenant Church in Somersworth, New Hampshire (1998-2004), “where he provided historical insight to the school and church staff and assisted in Sunday School instruction, high-school history, and Bible and economics courses.”5 

Scott and Reconstructionism

Tri-City Covenant Church is a congregation that follows the so-called Reconstructionist (also known as Theonomy or Dominionism) teachings of Rushdoony, Gary North, and others.6  Reconstructionists are like Libertarians with a Calvinistic theological and philosophical orientation, and are hostile toward liberal and Leftist politics.  Reconstructionists are generally distinguished by their belief that the Mosaic Law should be enforced as the law of the land.  For this reason, even conservative evangelicals find Reconstructionists problematic.  In 1996, the conservative Christian activist Ralph Reed wrote, "Reconstructionism is an authoritarian ideology that threatens the most basic civil liberties of a free and democratic society.”7  Richard J. Neuhaus thus appropriately describes Reconstructionism as a “bastard form of Calvinism contending that the American constitutional order must be replaced by a new order based on ‘Bible Law.’” Church historian Carl Trueman concludes that Rushdoony “was historically incompetent, probably racist” and—based upon his use of questionable sources, “probably unhinged” too.8

. . .one can understand why Scott was so embraced by Reconstructionists, especially since he shared their core white supremacist values.

In this light, one can understand why Scott was so embraced by Reconstructionists, especially since he shared their core white supremacist values.  Like Scott, Rushdoony and his colleagues have proven extremely sympathetic to the Confederacy in historical retrospect, just as they defended racist South Africa at the peak of the anti-Apartheid movement.  Anything that smacks of egalitarian or liberationist ideas is understood as rooted in godless ideology to Reconstructionists, and this was well suited to Otto Scott.  Rushdoony and his Chalcedon Foundation proved to be extremely supportive of white Southern nationalism, especially showing proud devotion to antebellum pro-slavery theology.  The Chalcedon Foundation allied with the Alabama-based League of the South in the 1990s, and Scott himself was the featured speaker at the League’s 1995 convention.  He even produced videos for the League dealing with their historical and political reinterpretations of the Civil War and slavery.9 According to the insightful Christian blog, Racist Churches, Scott allegedly pronounced regret over the increasing number of non-whites in congress and also supported racial profiling by authorities.  He uplifted the so-called Caucasian race as the most “essential to the continued progress of world humanity,” and disdained the removal of an interracial marriage ban in post-Apartheid South Africa.  It is also reported that Scott once stood at the grave of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in Virginia and declared that it marked “the end of southern civilization.”10 This depraved orientation clearly provides the basis for Scott’s malignant interpretation of John Brown.

A Word About Conservatives and John Brown

Whatever one’s political orientation, it is not a “given” of history that conservatives have categorically despised John Brown.  In fact, he has always had admirers along a range of conservative views.  Certainly John Brown studies was largely carried in the 20^th century by two conservative researchers, Boyd Stutler and the Rev. Clarence Gee.  While Gee was probably the more socially thoughtful of the two, Stutler was a hard-nosed right-winger who disparaged the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s as being too extreme.   Notwithstanding this backwards view, Stutler recognized the essential rightness of Brown’s antislavery effort and admired his willingness to die to end human bondage in the United States.  Even “tricky” Richard Nixon, coming from a Quaker background, apparently held a soft spot in his heart for Old Brown. At the time of the United States Bicentennial in 1976, Nixon even made reference to Brown’s words.11  My point is not that the politics of men like Stutler were correct, or that their brand of conservatism was identical to Brown’s political outlook.  However, when it comes to John Brown, conservatism has never been represented by one opinion, and certainly not the opinion of right-wing neo-Confederates.  Furthermore, Stutler would hardly have approved of Scott’s narrative, so replete with political contempt and mean-spirited accusations of Brown and the abolitionist movement.

Scott, Malin, and John Brown

James C. Malin
(Kansas State Historical
Society)

Scott’s primary source in his own writing is the work of James C. Malin, a Kansas scholar whose book, John Brown and the Legend of ’56, was probably the last significant scholarly effort to flagrantly discredit Brown. Louis Ruchames, editor of the quintessential collection, A John Brown Reader, called Malin “the foremost anti-Brown historian, who seems unable to forgive the North for having used force against Southern secession, or the Abolitionists for having taught that the abolition of slavery would be a step forward for American society, or the Negro for having believed that his welfare would be furthered by the forceful elimination of slavery.”12  Ruchames’ evaluation of Malin sounds quite similar to Otto Scott:

To Malin, minor errors of date or place committed by writers who have a high regard for Brown are frequently labeled deliberate falsehoods, while the errors of Brown-haters are simply unintentional blunders.  Very few anti-slavery leaders and writers emerge unscathed under Malin’s furious onslaught.  Typical of his method are his comments on Emerson, Thoreau, Parker and the other leaders of New England opinion, whom he contemptuously refers to as the “New England Transcendental Hierarchy, the self-appointed keepers not only of New England culture, but, according to their own estimates, of national civilization.”13

In retrospect, Scott not only appropriated Malin’s prejudiced hypothesis, but sought to extend it beyond Brown’s story in antebellum Kansas.  Meanwhile, serious scholars across the board, from conservative Stutler to left-leaning Louis Ruchames, had exposed Malin’s book as flawed and untrustworthy. While Malin’s effort had general value in presenting the hellish mayhem of the Kansas territory, his one-sided, ham-handed treatment of Brown and the anti-slavery side was warped and untrustworthy.14   Yet Scott saw Malin only as “a truly great American historian” and uncritically accepted his problematic book—which he lauded as “a classic of historic investigation and analysis”—because it suited his base politics.  Retrospectively, Scott continued to praised Malin for portraying Brown simply as a “multiple murderer and robber in the Kansas Territory,” even though these allegations were intentionally based upon a selective reading of pro-slavery sources.  In the short term, Malin’s John Brown and the Legend of ’56 gave ammunition to anti-Brown scholars, but soon the author was exposed, his work was discredited, and his scholarly reputation was duly diminished. Scott whined about this too, claiming that Malin’s only crime was that he had “outraged the Academy”—a ridiculous assertion, particularly because prominent historians in the mid-20^th century were hardly warm toward abolitionism and John Brown.  To Otto Scott, Malin and his fetid book were the victims of academic “obloquy.”15  In reality, Malin’s work simply was too tainted and biased to be trustworthy.   To this day, no credible historian would use it without exercising extreme care—something that Scott definitely did not do.  In fact, he went on quite uncritically to make the greatest use of Malin’s propaganda for his own anti-Brown screed, The Secret Six: The Fool as Martyr.16  The identity of the “fool,” in Scott’s mind, is easy to surmise.

Scott’s “Sacred Fool Quartet”

Scott’s own treatment of John Brown the “fool as martyr” actually was third in his series known as “The Sacred Fool Quartet”—critical biographies about “extraordinary fools whose follies influenced the course of all our lives,” goes Scott’s claim.  “Without them, history would have been different, and our lives would today be lived along patterns beyond our powers to imagine.”17    Besides John Brown, Scott’s historical fool hunt targeted King James I of England, Maximilien Robespierre and the French Revolution, and President Woodrow Wilson.  Scott thought these historical figures were “sacred” in that society had supposedly conferred a “form of immortality” upon them “irrespective of character.”18  Having fed from Malin’s poisoned plate, Scott’s anti-Brown work thus extended the theme in blanket condemnation of the abolitionist movement, with the particular intention of blaming them for the ruin that befell the South in the Civil War.  Scott thus opined: “The costs of Abolitionist virtue ran high.  Officially the record is 621,000 dead,” he concluded of the Civil War death toll.19 It is difficult to imagine anyone attributing the expansive deaths resulting from the Civil War to the abolition movement without thinking the writer must be a revivified slave master.  But this represents the kind of mind and spirit that animated Otto Scott.

A Publishing Disappointment

Interestingly, the first edition of Scott’s anti-Brown book was published by Times Books, the publishing arm of the New York Times, in 1979.  Although the book was smuggled to press, Scott’s Secret Six nearly proved a Trojan horse to the “Old Gray Lady.”  Certainly, Times Books was an unlikely home for Otto Scott’s anti-liberal screed, except that he had an inside connection with Tom Lipscomb, a business associate who had become the head of the press.  The book was hesitantly published, but it grated upon the legendary Times executive, Sidney Gruson, who rightly observed that it “lowered the tone” of the company.  Fearing that his opus would get buried, Scott pulled the rights of his book, bought back the remaining copies, and donated them to his friend Rushdoony.  Fortunately for Scott, there was sufficient interest and money in the South, and the book was republished eight years later by the Foundation for American Education in South Carolina, possibly a Klan-related organization.  Although Scott lamented that his book had nearly been “murdered” by the “Establishment,” The Secret Six was much more viable than he portrayed.20  Scott may not have had liberal money behind him, but he had right-wing support, especially in a willing audience among neo-Confederates and Reconstructionists.  The book was finally published under another label in 1993, which seems to have been Scott’s own imprint.21

The Legacy of Scott’s Secret Six

Otto Scott died in 2006, but his book continues to feed the same counter-establishment of radical right-wingers, neo-Confederates, and Reconstructionists.  For this audience, The Secret Six is taken as definitive and quoted by unknowing bigots as if it were the last word in historical terms.  Scott undoubtedly knew that he had made a niche for himself with his anti-Brown book; his other “fool” books are extant but rarely mentioned.  In The Secret Six, Scott took the Southern screed to a sophisticated and polished level of argument.  By cynically portraying Brown as a deluded killer in collaboration with liberal New England elites and other subversive figures, Scott affirms the foundational sentiments of neo-Confederates and ultra-conservatives who deeply despise liberalism in government and society, and who resent the national and global changes that are challenging traditional white supremacy in state and church.

It is not my intention to do a book review and in this piece I have preferred to use Scott’s subsequent reflections as published in Southern Partisan, which present his essential argument about Brown and abolitionism as well as background to his research and the publication of the book.  However, there are a couple of points that need to be made in highlighting the fundamental errors of his interpretation. 

Scott demonizes Brown over against the opinion of every credible biographer over the past century.

First, Scott’s bibliography belies the lack of fairness that defines his work, particularly regarding Brown.  Scott demonizes Brown over against the opinion of every credible biographer over the past century.  His narrative not only impugns Brown, but inherently accuses every scholar (including myself) of being a liar and false propagandist by our presentations vis a vis the historical record.  If Scott is correct in his profile of Brown, then Villard, Oates, Stavis, Boyer, Yours Truly, Reynolds, Carton, McGlone, and Horwitz have misread the facts to a significant degree.  Not that all of us agree on every point, and some of us have considerable differences about the Old Man.  Yet none of us have presented Brown and the abolitionist movement in the manner insisted upon by Otto Scott. 

Equally important if not more so, Scott’s work is both selective and derivative.  Like Robert Penn Warren before him, Scott only mined the most negative assertions of Oswald Villard, and otherwise ignored the more positive and balanced aspects of biographers like Villard, Boyer, and Oates.  Otherwise, his work offers nothing new, original, or based on primary research.  From Stutler, Gee, Edwin Cotter, and Tom Vince to Jean Libby, Scott Wolfe, and others (including me), those who have studied Brown extensively over time and in great depth simply do not recognize the John Brown of Scott’s rendering.   Far from being a historical portrayal, Scott’s “fool” is a straw man, a self-serving caricature that suits his prejudices and privileges his political agenda.

Third, Scott diminishes people of integrity who were Brown’s allies and supporters during and after his death.  Besides his obvious criticisms of the “Secret Six” and other “liberal” abolitionist clergymen, Scott essentially calls Frederick Douglass a liar—“disingenuous”—in his testimony about Brown.22

Fourth, Scott’s argument paints the crisis between abolitionists and the South with such broad brushstrokes that he obscures the fact that Christians across the theological spectrum were opposed to chattel slavery and saw it as a great sin.  While it is true that many leading abolitionists were “liberal” clergymen, there was no lack of stridently evangelical and even Calvinistic anti-slavery people in the North too.  The abolition movement may have had a preponderance of “liberals” in Scott’s terms, but the anti-slavery and abolitionist premises were not essentially based upon heterodoxy.  For instance, the counterparts of Reformed Presbyterian slaveholders in the South were the Covenanted Reformed Presbyterians, a movement descended from the Scottish Protestant Reformation.  The “Covenanters” were fervent antislavery people and argued against slavery explicitly from the Bible and the Calvinist tradition.  John Brown himself was a traditional Calvinist, a point that Scott never properly or fairly assessed because his only interest was in presenting him as a murderous “fool” in cahoots with Northern liberal heretics. Brown was “religious,” Scott says, but certainly not Christian.  Even in his death, Brown died like every dark pagan “selected for holy execution” in places like the “Orient, Pacific, Africa, India and other parts, because the gods demanded sacrifices—for the good of the majority.”23

Finally, Scott’s viewpoint necessarily plays down and denies the evil of chattel slavery and makes the slaveholding South a victim of Northern aggression.  In his understanding, it was antislavery people who were acting out “with raging demonstrations against the Fugitive Slave Act” in the North, just as it was the “initial exertions of old John Brown” that caused Kansas rhetoric to shift into violence.  The Northern heresy “led to the Civil War” while noble Christian Southerners “watched the Northern paroxysms with fear and horror,” increasingly convinced they were to be massacred.24  There is no sense of the aggression and determination of the South to expand slavery by any means necessary.  There is no admission that Southern terrorism was already underway in Kansas before John Brown came in answer to a distress call from his family in the territory.  There is no acknowledgment that black people in the North, free and fugitive, were outraged and terrorized by the Fugitive Slave Law, and that many patient Northerners felt violated and abused by its requirements.  Nor is there any sense of the guilt and hypocrisy of the Christian South, feeding off the sweat and blood of their hapless black chattel.  All Scott understood of the antebellum drama of abolition was that it was a grand liberal heresy foisted upon the South that “resulted in a long, terrible [and avoidable] war and punitive peace.”  All that mattered to him was that abolitionists had so skewed the world by their doctrines that even future whites, such as white Afrikaners during South African Apartheid, would suffer as a result, just as anti-white terrorism was descending upon the world because of the “boomeranging back” of the abolitionist heresy.25

Epilogue: “Eternal Reality”?

After Scott’s death, one of his family members recalled that although “his work has proceeded without fanfare, it had not gone unnoticed.” This is true enough.  His influence remains real in the marginal subcultures of neo-Confederacy and reactionary right-wing Christianity.  His work on John Brown has not gone unnoticed either, since it remains authoritative and usable for these audiences.  However, Scott’s work lacks the substance of truth and integrity.  He not only writes from a standpoint of error, but also from one of tragic self-deception.  Scott was a man who gave the whole of his life to twisting history to benefit corporations, slaveholders, and alleged white racial superiority.  Gifted with doubtless ability and intelligence, yet his intelligence was wasted on the pride of a fallen slave empire, and every gesture of accusation he pointed at others will come back to rest upon his legacy. 

Otto Scott lived on the wrong side of history and left a legacy of white racist pride and denial.

Otto Scott lived on the wrong side of history and left a legacy of white racist pride and denial. As a historian, he had real ability and sensibility, even a sense of obligation to time and eternity.  Yet often these make the worst kinds of people when they align themselves to the side of oppression.  Were he merely a stupid reactionary or a paid literary assassin, Scott would have been easy to ignore.  He once remarked, “I do not regard the past as dead. On the contrary, I regard the past and the present and even the future as part of an eternal reality.”  He concluded that his generation faced the same tests encountered by former generations.  “All I do is remind my contemporaries that Eternity watches us forever,” Scott concluded.26  It is unfortunate that a man with such a broad scope did not learn from the failure of preceding generations.  John Brown was himself quite aware of that “eternal reality,” and could have taught Otto Scott a few lessons had he been willing to learn from history.  But instead of deploring those sins, he personified them as an apologist, and even magnified them by making wrong into right, and right into wrong.  Like Haman of old, the fool who erects a gallows for the just may find himself hanged on a scaffold of his own error. 

So hangs Otto Scott, the fool as biographer.

* I would like to thank the scholar Edward H. Sebesta, who provided me with some copies of Scott’s contributions to neo-Confederate publications, especially the Southern Partisan.  Sebesta’s blog, Anti-Neo-Confederate is found on the web at: http://newtknight.blogspot.com/.  He is also the co-editor of Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction (University of Texas Press, 2008) http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exhagneo.html and co-editor of The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (University of Mississippi Press) http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1338.

Original publication date, Apr. 7, 2012

Notes

     1 “A Giant is Gone,” Southern Partisan xxv:i (May 2006): 11.

     2 “Otto Joseph Scott,” Wikipedia.  Retrieved on 12 Mar. 2012 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Scott#cite_note-1; Phillipa Scott-Girardi, “Otto Scott,1919–2006,” Sobran’s Forum on line [originally published in Sobran’s, Apr.-May 2012, p. 12].  Retrieved on 12 Mar. 2012 from: http://www.sobran.com/articles/forum/otto_scott.shtml.  Also see “Otto Joseph Scott, May 26, 1918 – May 5, 2006” (Obituary).  Bonney-Watson (Seattle, Wash.).  Retrieved on 12 Mar. 2012 from: http://bonneywatson.com/obituaries/detail.html?id=1857.

     3 Ibid.

     4 “Otto Joseph Scott”; “A Giant is Gone.” Also see, Scott-Girardi, “Otto Scott, 1919-2006.”

     5 Scott-Girardi, “Otto Scott,1919–2006.”

     6 See Tri-City Covenant Church website (Somersworth, NH) at: http://www.tccc-tcca.org/.  Note that the sources of the church’s position paper on “Dominion & Work” are all renowned Reconstructionist scholars.

     7 Richard John Neuhaus, “Ralph Reed’s Real Agenda,” First Things (Oct. 1996).  Retrieved on 12 Mar. 2012 from: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/11/006-ralph-reeds-real-agenda-5.

     8 Neuhaus, “Ralph Reed’s Real Agenda”; Carl Trueman, “Rushdoony once again—for the last time,” Reformation 21 blog [Alliance for Confessing Evangelicals], 31 Dec. 2006.  Retrieved on 15 Mar. 2012 from: http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2006/12/rushdoony-once-again-for-the-l.php.

     9 Edward H. Sebesta and Euan Hague, “The U.S. Civil War as a Theological War: Confederate Christian Nationalism and the League of the South,” Canadian Review of American Studies 32:3 (2002).

     10 “Otto Scott,” Racist Churches blog.  Retrieved on 12 Mar. 2012 from: http://racistchurches.wordpress.com/2007/06/13/otto-scott/.

     11  See Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., John Brown: The Man Who Lived; Essays in Honor of the Harper’s Ferry Raid Sesquicentennial 1859-2009 (New York: Lulu, 2009), pp. 15-16.

     12  Louis Ruchames, ed.  A John Brown Reader (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1959), pp. 14-15.

     13  Ibid.

     14 “Malin took much of his source material from the anti-Brown papers and records.”  Boyd B. Stutler to Clarence S. Gee, 10 July 1953, p. 2, in Stutler-Gee correspondence, Hudson Library and Historical Society, Hudson, Ohio; “The book contains a lot of good material—but it also contains too much of biased opinion. . . .  I think [Malin] violated every rule of historical method in his zeal to establish his legend, and that there are strained interpretations of some of the material he used.” Stutler to Gee, 25 Aug. 1951, p. 1, idem. 

     15 Otto Scott, “The Return of John Brown and the Secret Six,” Southern Partisan (Spring 1988), pp. 21 and 23.

     16 The final version of the book is published under the title, The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement. See note 20 below.

     17 Per the book’s description on Amazon.com.  Retrieved on 16 Mar. 2012 from: http://www.amazon.com/James-I-Fool-as-King/dp/0884051234.

     18 Scott, “The Return of John Brown and the Secret Six,” p. 23.

     19 Ibid., 22.

     20 Ibid., 23-24.

     21 A routine search on the internet for Uncommon Books shows no other author or book published by Uncommon Books, except for another essay by Scott called “The Church and Modern Culture” (1992).

     22 Scott, The Secret Six, n. 10, p. 345.

     23 Otto J. Scott, “Transcendentalism: The New England Heresy,” Southern Partisan (Spring 1982), p. 20.

     24 Ibid., 19 and 20.

     25 Ibid., 21.

     26 Scott-Girardi, “Otto Scott, 1919-2006.”

A recent discussion thread on a Calvinist website, The Puritan Board, fairly well demonstrates how the Abolitionist is viewed from within his own religious community. Though relatively brief as discussions go, this thread has a handful of interesting contributors, having been initiated by a student at The Southern Baptist Seminary named Tripp Spangler, who has become somewhat conversant in John Brown biography, and was reading David Reynolds’ biography. His question pertains to whether Brown can properly be referred to as a Puritan. The question elicits several responses as to the historical usage of “Puritan” and then, perhaps inevitably, the bitter input from an anti-Brown contributor whose main influence seems to be the poisonous biographical work of the late Otto Scott, a “Christian” historian who labored faithfully (if not maliciously) in the service of the Neo-Confederate movement.

According to scholar Edward Sebesta, who is an authority on the rise of the Christian neo-Confederate movement, Scott was a regular contributor to the Southern Partisan and co-produced a set of videos outlining neo-Confederate political, social, and theological interpretations in conjunction with the League of the South, a neo-Confederate organization. In short, a revival of Confederate idolatry, fused with conservative Calvinism, is taking place in the South. Scott acted as the faithful servant to this movement by attacking the legacy of the abolitionist movement, and especially John Brown, as both a political and religious apostasy.1 Considering that Otto Scott was opposed to the Civil Rights and the anti-apartheid movements as “detrimental” to society, it is no wonder that he so hated John Brown.

At any rate, the reader may find the following discussion thread of interest.2 In addition, I have placed my own comments in brackets following the individual entries.

-------------------
1See Edward H. Sebesta and Euan Hague, “The US Civil War as a Theological War: Confederate Christian Nationalism and the League of the South,” Canadian Review of American Studies 32, no. 3 (2002): 267.

2Retrieved on Aug. 22, 2008 from The Puritan Board
-------------------
The Thread: Calvinists on John Brown

Tripp Spangler, M. Div. student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:

So, I've been reading the latest biography on John Brown: John Brown: Abolitionist by David S. Reynolds. Early on, Reynolds makes the assertion that Brown was a Puritan and that his Puritanism was what helped formed his views on slavery and how to eradicate it. I found this to be very interesting. I always knew Brown was raised in a strong Calvinistic tradition and even appeared to be Calvinistic. However, to place the label of "Puritan" on him is rather new for me. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

[Well, Tripp, I’m glad that you’ve read David Reynolds’ biography. David’s work has done more to put John Brown back into the popular historical discourse than any other writer since Stephen Oates in 1970. Reynolds is a literary scholar, not a theologian, and in referring to Brown as a Puritan, he is only following Brown’s earliest 19th century biographers, especially Franklin B. Sanborn, who clearly linked Brown with the Puritans in theology and politics. Sanborn made this connection even after his first encounter with Brown, referring to him as a kind of Puritan revisitation in a speech made in 1857. As your respondents recognize, it is historically inaccurate to label Brown as a Puritan, although it might literally be correct to refer to him as neo-Puritan, and certainly “Puritanesque.” Brown consciously harked to Puritan theologians and preachers like Richard Baxter, and Puritan warriors like Oliver Cromwell. This is a matter of record. Theologically, Brown was no creature of the New Divinity (contrary to what creative historians like John Stauffer and Allen Guelzo claim); his theological readings, besides the Bible, were decidedly Puritan. Even his friendly biographers, like Sanborn, lovingly chided his views as being archaic. So referring to Brown as a Puritan might be technically incorrect, but he certainly embraced and emulated his Puritan roots. Incidentally, according to both Brown super-scholars, Clarence Gee and Boyd Stutler, John Brown’s roots were almost certainly linked to the Mayflower emigrants through a second marriage of Peter Brown.]
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Seth Stark, Communion Presbyterian Church, Irvine, Calif.:

I suppose it depends on the definition of "Puritan". I always thought Jonathan Edwards was the last of the Puritans.
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Virginia Huguenot, Puritan Board Librarian:

John Brown the Abolitionist was not a Puritan. He was influenced at various times in his life by the Calvinist tradition, including Presbyterian and Congregational ministries. But in his later life he had no church membership, if I recall correctly. There are a number of John Browns in the Scottish Presbyterian/Puritan tradition, and it is easy to conflate them, but John Brown the Abolitionist is entirely different, both in historical terms (the Puritan label should not be applied to some in the 19th century, and he was not even Puritan-minded) and in moral character.

[Virginia, my dear, you may be the Librarian, but you need to hit the books. Your reading of Brown is only half correct. For you to write that John Brown the abolitionist “was not even Puritan-minded” and that he was not of “moral character” is simply reflective of your bias and ignorance. By all accounts, Brown was a strongly Christian and biblically-minded man with deep roots in the writings of the Puritan writers. Apart from his controversial counter-terrorist action in Kansas in 1856, no scholar has ever found Brown’s record to be anything less than squeaky clean as far as Puritan morals go. Your statement is unfounded and even ridiculous in light of the primary evidence. As far as the Kansas episode is concerned, perhaps you can add my biographies to your library and thereby obtain a fair and balanced view of this theme.]
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Don Kistler, Puritan Board Freshman, Orlando, Fla.:

Technically speaking, a Puritan was a member of the Church of England who wanted to purify that church from its corruptions. And the time is pretty much limited to the late 1500's to the early-to-mid 1700's. John Brown, the abolitionist, could not meet those qualifications. Careless historians often confuse someone with Calvinistic leanings to be a Puritan. But we often refer to men like Edwards as Puritans, simply because we don't know where else to put them.

[Yes, Don, you have a point. But you may not realize that in the later 19th century, when many of the descendants of the Puritans of New England had become theologically liberal, they looked at John Brown, however warmly, as being too much a part of the theological tradition that they had jettisoned. You are correct that Brown was not a Puritan of the Puritan time period. But at least credit him for being a neo-Puritan. His heart and mind were strongly so inclined.]
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Tim Vaughan, Presbyterian Church of America member currently attending The Evangelical Free Church in San Luis Obispo County, California:

. . . .Otto Scott has written the best bio of him called The Fool As Martyr. He had his own personal cult he built around his family and in laws. A notorious and ghoulish murderer, it was actually Robert E. Lee who in his youth led the bayonet charge that finally led to his removal from this earthly plane.

[Well, Tim, as Tripp soundly corrects you below, calling the work of Otto Scott as “the best bio” of John Brown is quite erroneous. You are obviously ignorant of the scholarly research and writing on Brown, as well as the historiography of Brown studies itself. Scott’s work is not even good secondary biographical material. To no surprise, he relied most heavily on anti-Brown biographers of an earlier era whose work has long been discredited, even by the ultra-conservative “godfather” of John Brown studies, Boyd B. Stutler. Your brief comment is almost purely comprised of baseless rhetoric (“personal cult,” “notorious and ghoulish murderer”) that reflects Scott’s malignant interpretation. Scott was an ally of The League of the South and a “hit-man” for “radical” Southern-based Calvinists who are seen as marginal fanatics by the mainstream of Reformed pastors and theologians today, particularly those who have linked Reformed orthodoxy with the political interests of the neo-Confederacy. Scott was a capable scholar and journalist, but he was an ideologue first, not a historian, and certainly was prejudiced in his work. If his bio was the first thing you’ve read on Brown, then unfortunately you started at the bottom. Incidentally, Robert E. Lee was not “in his youth” when he led the marines who stormed the engine house at Harper’s Ferry, defeating and capturing John Brown in 1859, which was about two years before he betrayed his government and joined the rebellion, leading its forces, ostensibly because he was a “state’s rights man,” and a noble man of conscience. The bottom line is that John Brown attacked slavery and by his own writings and intentions, we know that he had no intention of rebelling against the federal government except insofar as the issue of slavery was concerned. His constitution and plans declared himself and his followers as otherwise loyal to the federal government. Lee, the good Christian, thought so little of his nation as to lead myriads of rebel soldiers against his government. Yet Brown is a villain, and Lee is the perennial hero! By the way, Lee “lead” that bayonet charge as the presiding officer, but he did not lead the actual charge–the marine who lead the charge was killed by one of Brown’s raiders. Lee was afterward sent to “hold” Harper’s Ferry with a command of a few hundred soldiers due to the paranoia that swept pro-slavery leadership in the days following the Harper’s Ferry raid.]
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Tripp Spangler [in response to Tim Vaughan, above]:

Wow, with all due respect Tim . . .Scott's biography of John Brown is not the best. Scott was very bias in his biography of Brown because his goal was to paint the abolitionist movement in a negative light. Most biographies of Brown tend to either be very pro-Brown or very anti-Brown. There isn’t much in-between when it comes to one’s opinion of John Brown. Scott was very anti-Brown and it showed in his work. I wouldn't recommend that biography to anyone because the author clearly had an ax to grind with Brown. The most neutral biography I have read on Brown was by Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood: Biography of John Brown. I believe Oates is about as neutral on the subject as one can get and that is the one I would recommend for one seeking a fair presentation of Brown. The current biography by Reynolds seems to be more in the pro-Brown category, but I have yet to finish the entire book.

[Yes, Tripp, there really isn’t much in-between when it comes to Brown; choosing sides is what John Brown studies is all about. Contrary to what some people think, he was neither complex nor deceptive. With Brown, you see what you get, and you get what you see. However, people invariably line up according to their preconceived notions of the man, and those notions have a lot more to do with slavery and racism than most realize. Strongly anti-slavery people have always been sympathetic toward Brown at the least. Of course, pacifist critics of Brown may be sympathetic, but they are ruled by their one abiding presupposition. Otherwise, I find that most people who dislike John Brown are decided and determined in their hatred, although most of them know very little about him and seem to have inherited a skewed sense of his role in history. The kind of vile blasting of words, for instance, coming from your correspondent Tim Vaughan reflect this kind of misinformed prejudice. Lots of people reason the same way because they have simply been misinformed, and because they deal in a problematic view of their own nation’s history. While such ignorance and bigotry is annoying and as common as curbside weeds, the worst violators of history are the smart, sniping writers like the late Otto Scott, whose ideology set him against any kind of liberation movement concerning black people. Naturally, Scott had to despise John Brown and tried very hard to undermine his legacy with a skillfully-wielded poison pen. Fortunately, Scott’s work will not increase posthumously, and will be circulated only among those who think like him. Brown scholars, from conservatives to socialists do not take his work seriously because it is fairly useless in light of all the in depth that we have been doing in recent years. As a John Brown scholar and author of two biographies of the man, I’ve never found Scott’s work of any value or substance and would not even work up a critique unless I really felt it necessary–I would rather concentrate my efforts on important and current works that are shaping and impacting the discourse on John Brown. Scott’s reading may be pleasing for the followers of Rushdoony and the neo-Confederates, but it has no value otherwise. In other words, John Brown’s–not Otto Scott’s--soul is marching on.]

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Don Kistler:

Technically speaking, a Puritan was a member of the Church of England who wanted to purify that church from its corruptions. And the time is pretty much limited to the late 1500's to the early-to-mid 1700's. John Brown, the abolitionist, could not meet those qualifications. Careless historians often confuse someone with Calvinistic leanings to be a Puritan.

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Tripp Spangler [in response to Kistler, above]:

Perhaps I misspoke. I believe the main argument that Reynolds is trying to make is that Puritan thought had a greater influence on men like John Brown and on the Civil War then we currently realize. Here is a quote from Reynolds:

Normally, Puritanism does not factor in histories of the Civil War. A wider held view is that Puritanism, far from stirring up warlike emotions, had by the nineteenth century softened into a benign faith in America's millennial promise. Supposedly, it buttressed mainstream culture values fostering consensus and conformity. For many in the Civil War era, however, Puritanism meant radical individualism and subversive social agitation. In 1863, the Democratic congressman Samuel Cox typically blamed the Civil War on disruptive New England reform movements that he said were rooted in Puritanism. He insisted that fanatical Abolitionism caused the war, and, in his words, "Abolition is the offspring of Puritanism.". . . Charles Chauncey Burr, another defender of the South, bewailed "this terrible Puritan war."

This is line of reasoning is very new for me. As many of you have said, I am well familiar with the Puritanism of the 16 & 17th century, and even its inroads into the early 18th century. However, Reynolds is claiming that Puritan thought had a huge role to play in the Abolitionist movement (also its leaders, i.e. John Brown) and the start of the Civil War. Indeed, he is claiming that this seemed to be recognized during the Civil War itself. He goes on to say that Brown saw himself as an American Cromwell, and that many after his death agreed with this view....because, as Reynolds claims, Brown could be seen "both as a bloodthirsty terrorist and as a saintly liberator," just like Cromwell. To me, this is a very interesting new claim that Reynolds is putting forth, if it is indeed new. However, like I said, I haven't came across this view before. Any more thoughts?

[Tripp, I have already noted above that I think Reynolds is using “Puritan” in a manner more cultural and “retro” than in the classic sense. The whole “American Cromwell” thing is pretty true. One of Brown’s favorite battle mottos was “Trust in God and keep your powder dry,” which is alleged to have been Cromwell’s words. Sanborn, Brown’s most indefatigable biographer and friend, really waved the Puritan flag over Brown’s legacy during and after his death, and this is what Reynolds is speaking of. But where Reynolds talks about “faith in America's millennial promise,” I think that’s flourish. The whole theme of millenialism and John Brown tends to get muddled by scholars in “American studies,” such as Reynolds, or John Stauffer (The Black Hearts of Men). Brown had no evident belief in “America’s millenial promise,” although he was a fairly conventional post-millenarian in keeping with the Reformed tradition.

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Tim Vaughan [responds to Tripp Spangler]:

He was against racial slavery. He detailed the history of Brown, and it came out negative. You don't mutilate people to make political points and have an impartial historian make you come out like a hero. Lee considered it an honor to take the swine down, and he was right. Nothing to do with slavery, which Lee didn't approve of as I think you know.

[Tim, once more, Scott deliberately wrote his biography to slander Brown. It’s not like he started out on a fair-footing and found the evidence so negative that he had no choice but to condemn the abolitionist. You don’t assume that other scholars are “neutral” or “objective,” but you seem to naively accept that Scott’s reading is “impartial” and resulted from the facts. Keep it up and I’ll be writing a book in your honor called The Reader as Fool. Similarly, your point about Brown mutilating people “to make political points” is as stinky as Gen. Lee’s stockings. Brown led a group of men, sons and neighbors, in a preemptive strike of pro-slavery terrorists, who were the real swine in the Kansas story of 1856. The five men who were killed were terrorist collaborators and would happily have seen the Browns killed in their beds, except that the Browns got the upper hand. Keep in mind that this was a territory with no “law and order” to speak of, and certainly no protection for outspoken abolitionist (pro-black) settlers like the Browns. Frankly, I think the Pottawatomie killings were needful and the men who died at the Browns’ swords were low-life racists and criminals caught in a trap of their own making. Basically they deserved what they got and they got what they deserved. As for Gen. Lee, there is no record that he “considered it an honor” to take Brown down. To my knowledge we have no record of Lee’s sentiments regarding Brown. Lee himself proved to be the worst of traitors, because he was a good man who turned his abilities against his government, and did so–not for the freedom of human beings, but for the “dignity” of the Old Dominion in its conspiracy with other slave-powered states in the South. Lee is covered in flowers by historians and the North chose to placate the defeated white Southerner by allowing history to be revised in romanticizing the South and its plantation culture. But the reality is that Lee was at best a puppet of the rich slave master class that drove the poor Southern boys into a bloody and fruitless war. Either Robert E. Lee was a villain and an oppressor, or he was a good man and fool. Take your pick.

The bottom line is that if you were living in the 19th century, the question was to godly men, what will you do about a racist system that enslaves, steals labor and reduces human beings to property, including making black women the property of their white “masters”? John Brown, more than most, tried to do something. Perhaps you would be like most of your Calvinist predecessors, like General Lee, and stand by while this oppression took place, assuring yourself that the Bible sanctioned such criminality and that, “in time,” when “the slave was ready,” he would be freed by a noble and magnanimous white race. That sounds about your speed. Personally, I’ll take one John Brown over a truckload of your kind of “Calvinist.”]
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Tripp Spangler [responds to Tim Vaughan]:

I never said that Scott wasn't against racial slavery. What I said was that it was clear Scott had an ax to grind with abolitionism and he CLEARLY was not impartial. Scott's biography painted Brown in a negative light...just like Richard Boyer's painted him in a very positive light. It all depends on how you approach Brown when writing about him, because there is enough there about Brown for you to go either way. For example, one can write that "Lee considered it an honor to take the swine down, and he was right." Or one could write, "Frederick Douglass considered John Brown to be one of the greatest men to ever live." It is all about perspective when it comes to John Brown. That is why I appreciate Oates' biography. He tried real hard to be neutral, unlike Scott.

[Tripp, I have to disagree with your closing points, although your illustration about Frederick Douglass was excellent. First, there really isn’t “enough there about Brown for you to go either way.” I totally disagree. The evidence in favor of Brown’s character, commitment, and goals far outweighs the criticisms of the man. After all, whose opinion would you trust more–Frederick Douglass or “Stonewall” Jackson? It’s not enough to study John Brown and draw “objective” conclusions. One must study the nature of slavery and the historical and political context of the nation in Brown’s time. Then one must certainly study the history of John Brown’s biography against the backdrop of U.S. history. When one does that, one will find that there is really not much debate about which side to take. In fact, the more time passes, the more John Brown continues to look better and better, and the more provincial, narrow-minded, and racialist do most of this nation’s “white” heroes. As a good friend of mine says, “John Brown is not a man of the past. He is a man of the future."  Robert E. Lee is a man of the past. He will remain “great” only as long as the myth of the noble Christian South is foisted upon us. Finally, as far as Oates is concerned, his work is undoubtedly the most important biography of the 20th century in terms of the research that he utilized. This is natural–as time passes, scattered resources are gathered, sources coalesce and are located by scholars. Oates had advantages that even Villard did not have in 1910. But as far as “neutrality,” Oates’ work is sometimes more sterile than objective. He under appreciates and deemphasizes the realities of slavery; he concludes that the Pottawatomie killings were led according to a “spell” that John Brown cast upon his men; and the only real “neutral” aspect of his work is that he neither praised nor bashed the man. But the best single work on John Brown is a little out-of-print work by the late Barrie Stavis called, John Brown: The Sword and the Word. I’d advise you to get a used copy if possible. Best wishes. Glad that a seminary student is reading about John Brown. Brown has a long line of clergy students and admirers.–LD]