Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Gorgeous Hussies and Parlor Politics

Joseph Yannielli*

One of the advantages of digital history is that it allows its practitioners to comment on public events in real time and achieve a potentially broader and more immediate impact. And what event could be more gripping than a big old scandal? Scandals tap into a seemingly universal appetite for tawdry drama. In times of great crisis or division, they serve an important cultural function. Brimming with prurient details, amplified by politicians and the media, public scandals are manufactured distractions. Really good scandals also have the capacity to shake revered institutions to their core—to disturb and expose powerful elements that are normally obscure or hidden.

Of all the endless varieties of public embarrassment, the sex scandal holds a special place for its ability to shed light on subterranean social anxieties. The latest example offers up a juicy blend of the military, politicians, the CIA, and the FBI (and the East Tuscaloosa Junior Marching Band, and Kevin Bacon, and your mom, and who knows how many others by the time the investigation is concluded). But the story is as old as America . . . or at least as old as Old Hickory.

The Petticoat Affair that almost derailed Andrew Jackson's first term as President was perhaps the first major American sex scandal. And like the still-unraveling Petraeus Affair, it disgorged fascinating information about the inner workings of power in what would become the world's mightiest military machine.

A 19th century cigar label depicting
the scandalous Peggy (O'Neal) Eaton
In her groundbreaking book Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government, historian Catherine Allgor points to the crucial role of elite women in the political culture of the federal government. Long before winning the right to vote powerful women, Allgor says, hosted influential social events, followed political debates, and conferred with their husbands. In doing so, they created the vibrant intellectual and social spaces necessary for democratic politics to function. Of course, plenty of ordinary women also made a political splash during this same period (check out marvelous new books by Stacey Robertson and Carol Faulkner, for example). These women tended to be less conservative, or from different religious backgrounds, or less economically privileged than the Washington elite. Among them may be counted Margaret "Peggy" Eaton.

Without delving into a complicated biography, it will suffice to say that Eaton was an intelligent and ambitious young women who attracted the attention of politicians and military officials in the nation's capital (Senator Andrew Jackson was an early admirer). When her first husband, a naval officer, died at sea, rumors circulated that he had killed himself as a result of his wife's alleged infidelities. Her marriage to Senator John Eaton shortly thereafter added further grist to the gossip mill, and when Jackson appointed Senator Eaton as his Secretary of War in 1829, Washington erupted. Floride Calhoun, wife of Vice President John C. Calhoun, led a campaign to ostracize the Eatons from important social and political gatherings. The
President became involved and eventually his entire cabinet split into factions. After an excruciating media circus, Secretary Eaton and the rest of the cabinet resigned and the government persevered. And Peggy Eaton lived in infamy, later immortalized by Hollywood as The Gorgeous Hussy (oh, Hollywood).

The Petticoat Affair, as it came to be known, says a lot about class, gender, and sexuality in the Early Republic. But it also says a great deal about American political culture. Compared to other other sex scandals involving 19th-century politicians, it was unusually potent and destructive. The connection between the Jefferson and Hemings families, which rivals the Petticoat Affair for media-fueled speculation, did not significantly impair Thomas Jefferson's presidency. Indeed it took almost 200 years, Annette Gordon-Reed, and DNA evidence for historians to take the relationship seriously. Richard Mentor Johnson, a Jacksonian Democrat and Vice President under Martin Van Buren, made no secret of his relationship with the enslaved Julia Chinn. Although it damaged his career, and opponents published racist, sexually-charged cartoons, it did not have a lasting impact on the government. James Henry Hammond's omnivorous sexual appetite, which ranged from his college friends to his teenage nieces, resulted in a minor setback for his political ambitions, but it did not derail his career as a pro-slavery pamphleteer or his appointment to the Senate in 1857. And yet a dispute between Floride Calhoun and Peggy Eaton spiraled into a moral panic that almost brought the Jackson administration to its knees. Why did the coercive and brutal actions of slaveholders matter less than the hasty marriage of a widow?

James Akin, Newburyport, MA, c. 1804
The recent Petraeus scandal differs significantly from the original Petticoat Affair. For one thing, the sexual infidelities attributed to the Eatons were based on rumor and innuendo, while Petraeus's indiscretions have been amply and authoritatively confirmed by Google and the FBI. It may be more useful to compare Petraeus to his CIA predecessor, Allan Dulles, "a serial adulterer" whose rampant womanizing did nothing to impede his career. Although President Obama has been drawn into the controversy, making for an inauspicious start to his second term in office, it does not seem likely to destabilize his administration. At the same time, this latest scandal points to a hidden world of power and influence. Paula Broadwell, Petraeus's alleged paramour, is an ambitious scholar-soldier who earned unprecedented access to the General. Jill Kelley, the object of Broadwell's jealousy, is a wealthy volunteer ambassador with routine access to the highest ranking leaders of the United States military. Broadwell seems to have developed a relationship with Petraeus based on mutual respect and admiration. She followed him to Afghanistan, wrote his biography, and offered sympathy and companionship. She is a proud athlete and a public intellectual who performed 60 pushups on stage in front of a live studio audience. Kelley, in contrast, appears to be a classic parlor politician, operating behind the scenes, facilitating social events for the military elite, and building influential contacts. When confronted with allegedly harassing messages from Broadwell, she did not hesitate to mention the matter to a personal friend in the FBI, who then passed the information to Washington politicians, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

It may be too soon to attempt to draw conclusions from this unfolding drama. But a few things are evident, even at this early stage. The media, which eagerly pounced on the story, has presented a narrative that might be described as Gorgeous Hussies: The Sequel. Major news outlets are scrambling for any scrap of information about Broadwell and Kelley, despite their own painfully obvious desire to stay out of the spotlight. Like the public commentators who fretted over Peggy Eaton's polluting influence on the Jackson administration, there has been much hand-ringing about the "pillow talk" between Broadwell and Petraeus. Interestingly, according to Allgor, contemporaries depicted Peggy Eaton in similar terms, as a dangerously powerful "courtesan." The coverage of Kelley has been especially severe, if not voyeuristic. A feature article on CNN focuses on her "smart canary yellow dress" and "hot pink handbag," and quotes "a senior official" describing her as a "bored, rich socialite." There is a point in every scandal, perhaps, when the coverage passes from the real to the absurd. The Daily Show, mocking the media descent into tabloid gossip, has suggested that the military institute a ban on heterosexuals.

Even so, it might be worth asking why this scandal, like the Petticoat Affair, has caused so much consternation. Generals Petraeus and Allen, the establishment figures at the center of the controversy, have presided over a military-intelligence complex responsible for funneling over $1 trillion in tax revenue into wars that have cost countless lives. No senior military or intelligence official resigned over the disgrace of Abu Ghraib. Yet marital infidelity (admittedly sleezy and reprehensible) is career suicide. That could be the biggest scandal of them all.

______________

* Joseph Yannielli is a doctoral student in History and contributes to the blog Digital Histories at Yale.

6 comments:

hcr said...

This is fascinating! I have worked hard not to know anything about the Petraeus scandal, but this puts it in the kind of historical perspective that makes me sit up and take notice. My students have asked me to teach a course on American political scandals and while I knew I wanted to start with the Petticoat affair, I had certainly not thought to include this recent mess. It seemed to me less about politics than about culture. But now you've got me seeing it as an extension of Movement Conservative promotion of military force at the same time they insisted on traditional social values. I might have to grit my teeth and learn more about it.

This is way cool. Thanks for writing it.

Joseph Yannielli said...

A course on American political scandals is such a fantastic idea. There are so many of them, and most reveal important themes and anxieties. A scandalous take on the typical history survey...I would take that class!

hcr said...

You know, it never occurred to me to develop one-- truly never occurred to me-- but when the students suggested it, based on all the asides I deal out in class, it seemed a no-brainer. Thinking it through, I have been shocked by how many scandals seem linked to the period from Grant to Harding, though. Your Petticoat affair is an early outlier, and of course there's Watergate, but the period from Grant to Harding gives us Credit Mobilier, the Whiskey Ring, the Tweed Ring, the election of 1876, and Teapot Dome, and that's just the biggies. Any thoughts on why that might be?

Lisa Clark Diller said...

How specifically "American" are these sexual scandals? Not being an Americanist and not doing modern history, I have less of a sense about this. I wonder what sorts of "moments" in our history allow these to be so much on our radar and which don't...

And it seems that some scandals have more significance in the long run than others in the sense that they might have actually resulted in something like corruption.... Other scandals seem to be mostly voyeuristic. And can/should we evaluate such things as historians or merely look at the fact that they did happen and what their results were rather than whether or not they were worth all the fuss?

Just out of curiosity, Heather, would your class focus on specifically sexual scandals? As opposed to including things like Iran-Contra, etc?

Lisa Clark Diller said...

oops, Heather, just saw your second post and see the wider range of options you'd like to include.

Really interesting all those late-nineteenth century scandals..... Wonder what was going on there.... Somebody should write a dissertation....

Joseph Yannielli said...

Were Reconstruction administrations more corrupt, I wonder, or were the political stakes especially high? I suspect the greater degree of government centralization after the Civil War has something to do with it as well.

It may all depend on how you define a scandal, as opposed to mere corruption. Wikipedia's "list of federal political scandals" offers an impressionistic mishmash of events that seem to build momentum over time. It dwells on the XYZ Affair, but ignores the Eatons, who are relegated to a separate list of sex scandals. I think a syllabus that combined both types would be tremendously interesting.