How Did 'Uncle Tom' Go from Hero to Traitor?

In the 1850s, the abolitionist novel 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' was America's first bestseller, and its enslaved character Uncle Tom was a heroic martyr. Learn how 'Uncle Tom' later became a biting insult in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/arts/literature/uncle-toms-cabin.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff. Lauren
Vogelbaum here. Uncle Tom's Cabin was America's first bestseller after
being published in eighteen fifty two. This anti slavery novel
by Harriet Beecher Stowe sold some three hundred and ten

(00:22):
thousand copies in the United States and at least one
and a half million more abroad, where it was translated
into sixteen languages. But the greatest impact of Uncle Tom's
Cabin was to awaken its mostly white Northern US readers
to the horrors and immorality of chattel slavery. Before the
article this episode is based on How Stuff Work. Spoke

(00:43):
with Patricia Turner, a professor of African American Studies at UCLA.
She said Stowe was an abolitionist who tapped into the
historical moment. She thought, really strategically, what do I have
to write that will move the people to understand that
it's impossible to be a Christian and to hold slaves.
She knew exactly what kind of hero to create in

(01:05):
Uncle Tom, what kind of situations to put him in,
and how to characterize the slave owners in the book,
which may strike modern readers as overly sentimental. Uncle Tom
is a deeply faithful Christian, a courageous and selfless family
man who first risks his life to save a young
white girl and later gives his life rather than divulge

(01:27):
the location of two enslaved women who have escaped. Uncle
Tom is beaten to death by his cruel enslaver, but
not before Tom forgives his tormentor a much like Jesus
Christ in the story of his crucifixion. The book and
its hero deserve credit for popularizing the cause of abolition

(01:48):
in the lead up to the Civil War. According to
a well worn but unconfirmed legend, when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe,
he said, so you are the little woman who wrote
the book that stars did this great war. But here's
where the story of Uncle Tom takes an unexpected turn.

(02:09):
Uncle Tom was the heroic martyr of one of the
best selling books of the eighteen hundreds, but his name
got twisted into a modern day insult. In this sense,
it's most traditionally used by black people to accuse a
black person of being a trader to their people. So
how did this happen? Turner believes the transformation of Uncle

(02:31):
Tom from hero to trader began during the thousands of
wildly popular stage productions of Uncle Tom's Cabin that toured
the US and the globe from the eighteen fifties through
the nineteen thirties. Many of these were minstrel shows featuring
white actors wearing blackface, and Uncle Tom's character and the
book's storyline were changed to suit the mostly white working

(02:54):
class audiences. Stowe's novel was an earnest tragedy, but Turner
said in order to sell tickets, the producers needed to
come up with stage shows that would have music, comedy,
and a happy ending, and Uncle Tom was portrayed as
this extremely deferential, subservient, poorly spoken black man who would
give the white slave owners or any other white person

(03:16):
what they wanted, which was nothing like the book. The
stage productions also aged Tom into a feeble, white haired
old man rather than the hard working forty something who
the book character was. Turner says that nineteenth century white
audiences didn't want to see a strong black man on
stage unless he was demonized. Some scholars believe that the

(03:40):
Uncle Tom insult began when post emancipation black Americans were
trying to distance themselves from these subservant and pathetic caricatures
for this new generation struggling for true freedom from oppression,
not just in law, but in life. A black person
who played into the Uncle Tom stereotypes of the minstrel
show would indeed have been a traitor. But as per

(04:05):
the usual with history, the story isn't that simple. When
literary historian Adinas Spingarn first read Uncle Tom's Cabin in
graduate school at Harvard, she was struck by the obvious
discrepancy between Uncle Tom's christlike character in the book and
Uncle Tom the racialized slur. After hearing about the transformation

(04:28):
of Tom's character in minstrel shows, Spingarn tracked down hundreds
of newspaper reviews of the many stage productions of Uncle
Tom's Cabin. It turns out he wasn't described in contemporary
reviews as a subservient buffoon. How Stuff Works also spoke
with Spingarn, She said, in both white and black newspapers,

(04:49):
the character of Uncle Tom was described as virtuous and dignified.
In fact, the objections to him by some conservative white
critics was that he spoke too intelligently and too wisely,
and was too perfect a Christian. These were some of
the same conservative objections to the novel. Furthermore, the stage
productions were still seen as dangerous in former Confederate states

(05:12):
like Kentucky, which banned all touring shows of Uncle Tom's
Cabin as late as nineteen oh six. Spingarn published a
book about all of this in twenty eighteen, a titled
Uncle Tom From Martyr to Trader. In it, she argues
that the character and his name have been a quote
shaped by fundamental debates within the black community over who

(05:33):
should represent the race and how it should be represented.
It's hard for us twenty first century multimedia humans to
grasp the impact and influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin in
the nineteenth century imagination and how this character became the
very image and emblem of enslaved black Americans. One of

(05:55):
Thomas Edison's first fictional movies was a film version of
Uncle Tom's Cabin, released in nine two oh three, the
same year that he shot The Great Train Robbery. Spingarne
said Uncle Tom was so ubiquitously understood a stand in
for American slavery that both white and black Americans called
the days of slavery the days of Uncle Tom. The

(06:18):
sheer association of Uncle Tom with the violence and any
humanity of enslavement would have understandably engendered negative connotations, which
were then picked up by a rising tide of black
political leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Spingarn says the term uncle Tom first took on a
pejorative meeting in the community as early as the eighteen eighties,

(06:39):
when a black lawyer decried what he called a subservient
Uncle Tom type of manhood, adding I despise that as
heartily as anyone. The term gained power as a potent
political epithet in the nineteen teens, was slung by people
like Reverend George Alexander Maguire, an acolyte of the Black
nationalist Marcus Garfie. Through the nineteen sixties, it remained a

(07:03):
choice insult. Malcolm X lobbed it at Martin Luther King Junior,
and Stokely Carmichael, a leader in the Black Power movement,
used it against Roy Wilkins, then the executive director of
the NAACP. More recently, the term has been wielded against
Black conservatives like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and black
supporters of Donald Trump. The Spingarn seas the long and

(07:28):
strange history of Uncle Tom as part and parcel of
America's ongoing struggle with its original sin of slavery and
the ongoing reality of racism. She said, the figure of
Uncle Tom has changed because we've always used him to
talk about race. What is authentic blackness? What is the
right protest strategy? What should the black image be? As

(07:52):
long as Americans keep grappling with these questions and with racism,
both overt and systemic, Uncle Tom will be right there
with us. Today's episode is based on the article the
Journey of Uncle Tom from abolitionist hero to ultimate sellout
on HowStuffWorks dot com, written by Dave Ruse. Brain Stuff

(08:14):
is production by Heart Radio in partnership with howsdiffworks dot
Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts
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