"From a libertarian point of view, Otto Scott is America’s most exciting contemporary historian and biographer." -- John Chamberlain, The Freeman (April 1979)
Thus did John Chamberlain begin his review of Otto Scott's book, The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Conspiracy.
He was in a position to make this assessment. He reviewed books every month in The Freeman for 30 years. He had been a journalist since 1932. He was a mainstay of the conservative intellectual movement after World War II, when he completely abandoned his early Leftism. He wrote for Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and other business magazines. He wrote books, including a fine history of American business, The Enterprising Americans.
Scott was a kindred spirit. He had been in journalism since the age of 16, when his father announced to him that he would not leave Scott anything for an inheritance. Decades later, Scott told me that this probably saved him from a wasted life.
He never achieved the fame of Chamberlain. He was one of those remarkable figures in history who never had a lot of impact in their lifetimes, but who deserved to.
He joined the Merchant Marines when World War II broke out. He spent the war as a sitting duck for German U-boats.
The Wikipedia entry on Scott says this:
After the war, Scott worked in the advertising industry, then became editor of a manufacturing trade journal, Rubber World. In the course of his assignments, he interviewed Paul Blazer, the chairman of Ashland Oil, in Ashland, Kentucky, and was invited to write the history of the company. "He changed my life because he gave me a new trade," Scott says of the company chairman. "I didn't know I could write a book." From this beginning he worked on books in his later years detailing the corporate histories of Raytheon, Black & Decker and Arch Mineral Corporation.
THE SECRET SIX
His book on the Secret Six gained positive reviews from a few people, but it enraged the Left. The book is a detailed account of the terrorist and the six New England abolitionists who financed him after he savagely murdered an innocent family in Kansas. They knew what he had done. They did not care.
Scott's contribution was unique. As a journalist, he understood the power of the press. He showed how parts of the Northern press elevated Brown to a saint. This persuaded the South that the North was ready to invade. Brown self-consciously was trying to foment a slave rebellion at Harper's Ferry in 1859. The South became paranoid. Scott said the power of the American press to support revolution began in 1859. Chamberlain wrote:
To Mr. Scott, the real scandal of the whole Brown story was the behavior of the Massachusetts intellectuals. The Concord group was particularly blameworthy for making Brown a hero. Ralph Waldo Emerson excused the Kansas violence by saying "better that a whole generation of men, women and children should pass away by a violent death, than that one word" of the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence "should be violated in this country." Henry David Thoreau agreed with Emerson that Brown was a "transcendentalist saint."
This image of Brown as a messiah figure was exactly what Brown had created. His final words to the court before he was hanged were masterful in their rhetoric, an astounding performance from a man without formal education or previous literary experience. His "last will and testament" was reprinted all over the North.
This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!
This was all a pose for public relations purposes. There had been no trace of Christianity in his life, yet Northen radicals, then and now, have presented him as a pious Christian seeking justice.
More than any man in American history, John Brown was a wolf in sheep's clothing. Northern abolitionists accepted his own self-assessment as gospel. This is what frightened the South. It made the leaders ready for secession after Lincoln's election less than a year later. This led to the deaths of 750,000 men and the abolition of slavery in 1865. Brown got what he wanted: social revolution.
Scott told me a wonderful story about his book. It was published by Times Books, which is the book publishing arm of the New York Times. In his book, he would refer to Thomas Wentworth Higgenson and Theodore Parker as "Rev." That is because they were Unitarian ministers. When he got the page proofs, he found that a copy editor had eliminated this designation in every case. So, he put them back in by hand in the margins. When the book appeared, every "Rev." was missing.
MALIN'S LEGACY
Brown is beloved by the Left. This is why Scott's book outraged those Leftists who read it. Some Leftist hack inserted this into the Wikipedia article.
Scott's hostility toward the abolitionist John Brown is particularly evident in his work, The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolition Movement. While Scott was clearly a capable scholar, this work shows no primary research and a naked dependence upon the earlier anti-Brown biography by James C. Malin, a work that has long been discredited by Brown scholars.
When I read this, I was reminded of how much I detest the academic Left. That some anonymous ideological hack would say this about Malin is indicative of just how bad academia is today.
Malin was a professor of history at the University of Kansas. He was one of the most skilled historians ever to sit down at a typewriter. His two-volume work, John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-Six, is close to definitive.
Malin is even less known than Scott. He was a regional historian of the Midwest and specifically Kansas. He was one of the great regional historians in American academic history. He wrote voluminously: books and regional scholarly historical journals. He knew the primary sources of the Midwest, and especially Kansas, as no other historian before him or since. He was highly respected by historians of the Midwest. If you have doubts, read this tribute by one of his academic peers. Any historian who is "nakedly dependent" on James C. Malin is a cut above the typical historian, who is fully clothed and has never heard of Malin.
Malin simply told the truth about this murderer, based on the historical record. His dispassionate two volumes are a lasting testament to the extraordinary evil career of John Brown. This is why liberals hate the book, at least those few liberals who have actually read it. Unfortunately, Malin is not well known within the conservative movement. His book, The Grassland of North America, is a classic. His history of American inventiveness, The Contriving Brain and the Skillful Hand in the United States, is indispensable in understanding American economic history. His book on American nationalism and populism in the Progressive era had a memorable title: Confounded Rot About Napoleon.
A STORY TELLER
Scott was not a trained historian. He was a self-taught reporter, and when it gets right down to it, reporters are basically historians on a tight deadline. He wrote his books the way a reporter would write them. He told stories. He would also use the technique of telling several stories at the same time. As you read through the book, you realized that these stories were necessarily interconnected, but in order to show this, he told each story separately. It was a literary technique that had been pioneered by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Tarzan novels. I recognized at the age of 11 and 12, when I read several of these novels. It is certainly a valid way of telling a historical story.
He told me that he didn't like my use of italics. He thought that readers should come to their own conclusions based on the author's text. But I had been influenced early in my writing career by Murray Rothbard, who was a great believer in italicized words and phrases that he wanted to emphasize. Reporters never use italics except when citing a book or publication. For that matter, neither do professional historians. While I have written my share of historical articles and books, I certainly did not conform to this requirement of the guild.
Scott was a man of enormous erudition, but he did not wear this on his sleeve. He had read a great deal, and he had seen a great deal in his life. He was a wise man.
A CURMUDGEON'S CURMUDGEON
He spoke his mind. This got him in trouble all his life, as he told me.
My favorite story on his willingness to speak his mind is this. He was in an informal gathering of reporters during the third week of July in 1964. The week-long riot in Harlem was in progress. It began two weeks after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.
One of the reporters defended the rioters. Scott was contemptuous of them, and he said so. According to Scott, the following exchange took place.
Reporter: "You think you're better than they are, don't you?"Scott: "Yes, I do. But you're not."
The man stormed out of the room. One of the other reporters said this: "Spoken for us all, Otto."
A MAN OF HIS ERA
He was a man of his era. He once lamented to me that the conservative movement was sadly lacking because it did not have a national newspaper. This would have been sometime around 1988. It was before the Internet. Today, newspapers are going out of business. Their influence is declining. Few people below the age of 50 read printed newspapers anymore. Scott could not have imagined this in the 1980's or early 1990's. Then again, neither could anybody else.
He was also a man of his profession. He wrote corporate biographies. He believed in tariffs for economic protection of industries. He was also adamant that advertising expenses should not be deductible as legitimate business expenses. He was convinced that tax-free money gave too much power over the media to Left-wing businesses. He did not understand the centrality of advertising to the production and distribution system. It has to do with persuasion: making the sale. It is as important as any factor of production. He would not have understood Mac Ross's aphorism: "If you build a better mousetrap, but you have no marketing program, you will die alone and broke with a garage full of mousetraps."
HIS LATE CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY
Late in life, he was converted to Christianity. It happened as a result of his reading of all four of the Gospels one evening. Not many people are ever converted based on a reading of the original sources rather than hearing a sermon or hearing personal testimony from somebody else. He later shared this observation with me. He said that he was impressed by the differences in the four Gospels. He said that he had learned as a reporter that if several eyewitnesses told the same story, there had to be collusion.
Rushdoony read his trilogy, biographies of Robespierre, James I, and John Brown. Scott told me that Rushdoony's review indicated that Rushdoony was the only reviewer who understood what the trilogy was about: holy fools. These were not simply fools. They were men who believed that political power can beneficially reform the world. Scott was skeptical. This alienated him from the conservative political movement, whose goal is salvation by politics, especially by getting "our man" elected as President. Scott understood the outlook of another great political skeptic, the literary figure Ambrose Bierce. In his masterpiece, The Devils's Dictionary, Bierce offered this definition:
PRESIDENCY, n. The greased pig in the field game of American politics.
He planned to write a book on a fourth holy fool: Woodrow Wilson, but it never became a book. He published chapters in his newsletter.
Scott later was hired by Rushdoony at the Chalcedon Foundation. The two of them would exchange erudite comments after one of Rushdoony's audio presentations.
Scott later wrote an excellent book on the Reformation, The Great Christian Revolution: How Christianity Transformed the World (1995).
A dedicated follower, Chuck Wagoner, published a monthly newsletter written by Scott, Otto Scott's Compass. This helped support him in his declining years. I have never read a more insightful, wide-ranging, and lucid newsletter. His movie reviews were marvelous. One of my treasured possessions is my marked-up collection of Compass. I also own a CD-ROM of all of the letters, which is searchable.
I heard him speak twice, once at a meeting of the Council for National Policy, and again at a church that was holding a memorial service for Rushdoony in 2001. He was a fine speaker. At the end of his life, he had an audio interview service like my FireStorm Chats tapes.
I knew him fairly well. We attended conferences together. We were both disciples of R. J. Rushdoony. We had long conversations on occasion, but not often enough. I'm not sure when I met him, but was probably sometime around 1980. I kept in contact with him until his death.
CONCLUSION
He died in 2006, a victim of that terrible scourge, Alzheimer's disease. His daughter had put him in a memory care unit which was locked. I called him only once. He complained that he was effectively in prison. He was correct. But that is one of the burdens of Alzheimer's disease.
He was a journalist who knew how to ask questions, and he knew how to tell stories. He was also a good enough historian to recognize that James C. Malin was a giant, and Malin's critics were pygmies.
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