Uncle Tom
The long-suffering eponymous hero of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–1852) has survived, but as a name of contempt. Initial critical responses to the novel were sharply divided, but the character of Uncle Tom was generally praised for his piety and stoic loyalty. The way that his name has become a label of opprobrium, now referring to “a Black man who is submissively loyal or servile to White men” ( Oxford English Dictionary ) is a remarkable study of stereotyping, racial identification, and the supplanting of religious values by political loyalties.
Several contemporary reviews found Uncle Tom “a paragon of virtue” (unsigned, London Times , September 18, 1852) impervious to temptation: “No insult, no outrage, no suffering, could ruffle the Christ-like meekness of his spirit, and shake the steadfastness of his faith. It triumphantly exemplifies the nature, tendency and results of CHRISTIAN NONRESISTANCE” (William Lloyd Garrison, Liberator Review , Boston March 26, 1852). On this point the critics divided, some claiming a sentimental exaggeration which was incredible, others an unseemly pusillanimous subservience. Both critical positions had a racial underpinning. “In attributing perfection to this Negro character Mrs. Stowe not only ’o’ersteps the modesty of nature,’ but places in a strong light the absurdity of the whole story” (unsigned, Southern Literary Messenger Review , Richmond, October 1852). William G. Allen in the Frederick Douglass Paper (Rochester, May 20, 1852) was more militant: “Indeed if any man has too much piety, Uncle Tom was that man.” Overtly racism suffused George Graham’s review under the scornful title of “Black Letters; Or Uncle-Tom-Foolery,” scorning “Sambo’s woes” in aggressive terms: “A plague of these black faces! We hate this niggerism,” this “woolly-headed literature.” For Graham, “Uncle Tom is an exaggeration, a monster of perfection” ( Graham’s Magazine Review , Philadelphia, February 1853). Even the London Times protested against the “imbalance of idealised Blacks and blackened whites.”
Hugh Rawson notes that among whites “Tom’s name was being used within a year of [the novel’s] publication in such forms as Uncle Tomitude, Uncle Tomitized and Uncle Tomific .” (1989, 400). The first recorded usage of Uncle Tom as a pejorative label among blacks appears seventy years later, in speeches given by Marcus Garvey in 1921. This considerable time lag reveals how long it took for a “submissively loyal or servile Black man” to be criticized. There is a cross-reference in 1922 to New Negro (originally a euphemism for a slave) in the new emancipated sense of one working for black rights: “It does not occur to the Old South, that there is a ‘New Negro’; that ‘Uncle Toms’ are passing” (Alan Dundes, Mother Wit 1973, 400-401).
Since then the name has taken on a strong sense of racial loyalty. Clarence Major’s definition stresses this point: “a black person who is culturally disloyal; a black person who does not practice racial or cultural loyalty; a pejorative term for any African American who is perceived by other African Americans to be ‘middle-class,’ to own property, and to have money in the bank” (1994, 492). In Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice the assassination of Malcolm X provokes the question: “Why’n’t they kill some of those Uncle-Tomming m.f.’s?” (1968, 51). Although the earliest references are naturally to American blacks, the term has since been used generally for one who is politically pusillanimous, especially not loyal to his group- ing; for example: “Arafat was always attacked by Marxist-oriented militants as being a Palestinian ‘Uncle Tom,’ neither sufficiently radical or violent” ( Guardian , July 15, 1971).
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