Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650-1950.

Morgan, David

Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650-1950. By James Emmett Ryan. Studies in American Thought and Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. xii+285 pp. $26.95 paper; $19.95 e-book.

Quakers are many things in the history of the American imagination. For the first half-century and more of their American career, Quakers were odd and menacing, or so the Puritan dominant culture of New England considered them. Suffering death, exile, corporal punishment, imprisonment, public humiliation, and suspicion, Quakers were an iconically victimized outsider in Puritan America. Their countercultural speech, clothing, manner, and refusal to observe social hierarchies, not to mention taking oaths or taking up arms, made them an object of orthodox scorn. And their religious commitments were regarded as antinomian and therefore a direct threat to the public wellbeing. As symbols in the public mind, Quakers were an early instance of the visibility of religious and cultural nonconformity. Indeed, as James Emmett Ryan shows, the Quaker body was a preeminent focus from early colonial America to twentieth-century American film. One might say that Quakers helped visualize American culture, lending difference an especially corporeal and ocular register by virtue of their distinctive appearance--both by their own choice and by the engines of cultural representation, which Ryan very nicely surveys over the course of three centuries.

A preeminent symbol of the early colonial reception of Quakerism was Mary Dyer on the grim march to Boston gallows. But by the late seventeenth century, a new generation of Quaker leaders, most famously William Penn, came to constitute a different cultural currency, one stressing tolerance, a legacy celebrated by Voltaire and later French proponents of Enlightenment. By the eighteenth century, when Puritanism had subsided, the image of Quakers had shifted from pathetic religious outsider to progressive moral force in education, philanthropy, and especially in opposition to slavery. Quakers were increasingly recognized for their kindness to other outsiders--Native Americans, slaves, children, and the poor. Quaker John Woolman's pamphlet, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754) was among the very first publications to oppose slavery. Other works such as A Plea for the Poor (1763) eventually made Woolman a key figure in the public sphere of progressive social criticism during the Revolutionary generation, laying the groundwork for nineteenth-century social reform of many different kinds. Fellow Quaker Anthony Benezet was an innovative educator in Philadelphia, where he founded a school for girls and established two schools for African Americans. Benezet was an abolitionist and helped identify that cause with American Quakerism. While the association certainly did not endear Quakers to the far larger number of indifferent or pro-slavery American Christians who resented abolitionists as troublesome, the image of the Quaker had taken a dramatic turn from bumpkin and outsider.

Yet no group is uniformly constructed in the marketplace of culture. If Quakers were associated in the later eighteenth century with radical social causes, they were also seen in other ways. Ryan helpfully scrutinizes Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) to demonstrate the generally overlooked Quaker dimension of the book. "Crevecoeur, like other European intellectuals," Ryan argues, "focused on Quakers as exemplary American types who serve as a screen upon which to project fantasies of new political arrangements and new modes of racial harmony" (82-83). Liberal French thinkers saw in American Quakers a rustic alternative to British colonialism and the European ancien regime generally, a cultural ideal of tolerance and progressive social practice whose communitarian experiment might proceed in the wilderness of the New World.

Nineteenth-century social activism, poetry, and fiction contributed to an expanding iconography of Quakerism in the United States. In the work of Herman Melville, for example, we encounter another kind of Quaker, the robustly this-worldly sort who excels at commerce, shipping, and civic respectability, as if to compensate for two centuries of marginalization. But there is also the idealized image of the pure Quaker, an angel of goodness on the earth such as the nameless Quaker lady who suddenly appears at the end of Rebecca Harding Davis's grim narration of the American underclass in the powerful but stubbornly problematic novella, Life in the Iron Mills (1861).

Ryan closes his authoritative survey of constructions of the American Quaker by examining an even wider palette of cultural forms. Poetry, music, stage productions, and films expanded the American reception of Quakerism by morphing it into thoroughly mythical tropes for ethical idealism, purity, traditional folkways, and the redemptive power of beautiful young women. In the mix, the Quaker symbol was all but severed from its historical referent, resulting in that pearly cheeked fellow on twentieth-century oatmeal containers. Painted by Haddon Sundblom in the 1950s, the commercial illustrator best remembered for his Coca-Cola Santa Claus from the 1930s, the Quaker Oats man quickly became a signifier of authenticity, of simplicity, and of wholesome, old values. The face engages viewers with a benevolent smile that preserves several features of an iconographic tradition that was largely produced during the nineteenth century. The image conveniently masked mass-produced food, a hallmark of commercial and industrial modernity, with the look of bona fide goodness. The company, Quaker Oats, was not tied to the Society of Friends, but the image was a shrewd mid-century marketing project that came to dominate popular American imagination in a way comparable to Sundblom's Santa Claus and Warner Sallman's Head of Christ.

Ryan's book is an estimable example of sturdy literary history, happily free of the cumbersome jargon and excessive theorization. His prose is clear and his account well organized and informative. This erudite study will be of interest to historians, Americanists, religion scholars, and the growing number of cultural studies scholars who recognize the value of studying religion as a key element of American cultural history.

doi: 10.1017/S0009640710000375

David Morgan

Duke University