John Brown Action Figure? Not!


Alice Keesey Mecoy, my esteemed friend and the great (3x) granddaughter of the real "Great Emancipator," John Brown (not that tall, bearded pretender with his own personal temple in Washington, D.C.), told me about this one folks:


eBay is currently featuring a John Brown action figure for sale under the title, "John Brown abolitionist Civil War custom 12" figure." Now get this, first of all the thing is going for $50.  It's a 12-inch G.I. Joe for goodness sakes with a bathroom, for goodness sake. This so-called John Brown comes with a little rifle that looks like something that fell out of a G.I. Joe set, a gun and holster, pants, boots, and something that Alice aptly describes as an outfit from Star Wars. The folks selling it have the audacity to have it posed near a print of John Steuart Curry's famous painting of Brown--but the worst part is that the figure doesn't even resemble a young John Brown, let alone John Brown in the late 1850s. It's got brown hair and beard, but JB's hair was darker and streaked with gray by the time he got to Kansas in 1855, and virtually gray when he was there in 1858-59. Of course, Brown never wore a beard trimmed that close, and even his trademark long, white beard was actually cropped much shorter at the time of the Harper's Ferry raid.


At any rate, this has got to be the worst popular representation I've seen of JB in any medium and one cannot help but get the impression that somebody had a bright idea to make a "John Brown action figure" based on a lot of leftover pieces lying here and there in the toy factory.


Oh yeah, there's one other thing that's missing from this bogus John Brown action figure. Can you guess what it is? (No, not a noose. Look at a complete version of the Curry painting and you'll figure it out.)