lightning rod salesman and tetzel and herman melville and arwen mohun

There are a series of terms floating in the collective unconscious of the American psyche which describe the unsavory and fraudulent nature of sales practices in the 19th century. We have hucksters and drummers, peddlers and hawkers, jugglers and mountebanks, snake-oil and patent-medicine salesmen, canvassers and masters of the grip. Those were the days of manifest destiny, of making a quick buck, of bribing legislatures and puffing claims, of rubes being gulled by quick-talking salesmen, of cape-wearing men blowing into town and leaving as quickly as possible after consummating sales. But one character who has dropped out of the modern consciousness was a person who actually assumed a significant cultural role as a fraudulent salesman, and that was the lightning-rod salesman. His significance arose from the fact that he not only sold a product that claimed to be useful (i.e., his rod rightly installed would protect all the buyer's buildings from the threat of lightning-induced fire) but one that had the most revered scientific pedigree (hadn't Ben Franklin himself invented it?). In an age where science and technology were coming to the fore in American culture (the second half of the nineteenth century), the lightning-rod salesman was a figure who drew upon and exploited public eagerness for new scientific devices which would solve the perennial problem of lightning-caused fires. This and the next essay tell some of that story, first through introducing a short story of Herman Melville, and then by reviewing two legal cases from the 1890s.*

[*Friedman's book on the Birth of the Salesman mentions the lightning-rod salesman in a number of places (see index, p. 344). Professor Arwen P. Mohun of the University of Delaware delivered a paper on "Lightning Rods and the Commodification of Risk in 19th Century America" at a conference on the history of the lightning rod in 2002. Professor Mohun is interested in the social history of technology, and argues in the paper (according to the online abstract), among other things, that the market for lightning rods grew in the 1850s as rods were changed from homemade devices to commodities manufactured by lightning rod companies and sold by traveling salesmen.]

Herman Melville and "The Lightning-Rod Man"

After spending the summer of 1853 in the Berkshire Mountains, where he supposedly had a real life encounter with a lightning-rod salesman (no doubt one of the early ones of this ilk), Melville published a short story entitled "The Lightning-Rod Man" in the August 1854 edition of Putnam's Magazine. The story is available online, but Melville's language is always worth capturing anew. During a blustery summer storm in the "Acroceraunian hills" [i.e., the "thunder-smitten hills"--the term appears in Shelley and other romantic writers of the early 19th century] of Western MA, the narrator was disturbed by a persistent knocking at his door. The visitor didn't have the courtesy to use the knocker, but instead made that "doleful undertaker's clatter" with his fist against the hollow panel. The insistence of the knock was indicative of the insistence of the message the visitor had to give.

Melville's description of the man is worth noting.

"A lean, gloomy figure. Hair dark and lank, mattedly streaked over his brow. His sunken pitfalls of eyes were ringed by indigo halos, and played with an innocuous sort of lightning: the gleam without the bolt. The whole man was dripping. He stood in a puddle on the bare oak floor: his strange walking-stick vertically resting at his side."

The visitor was carrying a polished copper rod attached to a wooden staff--in short, a lightning rod. Taking the measure of his dripping visitor, the narrator bowed politely and said, "Have I the honor of a visit from that illustrious god, Jupiter Tonans? So stood he in the Greek statue of old, grasping the lightning-bolt. If you are he, or his viceroy, I have to thank you for the noble storm you have brewed among our mountains."

But the visitor was not Zeus, nor was the host Baucis or Philemon. Instead of wanting to demonstrate meteorological wonders, the visitor issued stark warnings. He declined to be seated on the hearth with the host, but said, "Sir, excuse me; but instead of my accepting your invitation to be seated on the hearth there, I solemnly warn you, that you had best accept mine, and stand with me in the middle of the room. Good Heavens!...there is another of those awful crashes. I warn you, sir, quit the hearth."

The story then proceeds with the lightning-rod man issuing dire warnings about the dangers that the house presents without a lightning-rod. Everything is a conductor of current. Soot and stones and chimneys and even the earth itself are dangers. By creating the climate of fear, the man hopes to close the deal. But then the narrator decides to probe the visitor. He learns that lightning-rod man had set up several in the town of "Criggan" the previous month. But, the host inquires, 'wasn't there a fire in Criggan since then? 'Of what use is your rod, then?' The salesman hastily adds that his workman was heedless, having set up the rod at the top of a church steeple but allowing a part of the metal to graze the tin sheeting. Thus, the fault was not in the lightning rod or the salesman but in that dumb workman.

The host presses on in his criticism, while the salesman shrieks ever louder about the danger of the approaching storm. Dire warnings fill the air. Don't shutter the window, because the metal brace is a conductor. Get out a rug and stand on the rug in the middle of the room. That is the only way things will be safe. Finally, the salesman makes his pitch.

"Only one rod, sir; cost, only twenty dollars. Hark! There go all the granite Taconics and Hoosics [local hills] dashed together like pebbles. By the sound, they must have struck something...Only twenty dollars, sir--a dollar a foot. Hark! Dreadful! Will you order? Will you buy? Shall I put down your name? Think of being a heap of charred offal, like a haltered horse burned in his stall; and all in one flash!"

Concluding the Story

The host loses all patience with the charlatan salesman and unceremoniously throws him out of the cottage. In an interesting appeal to the Reformed theology of Melville's youth, Melviille then has his host say:

"Do you think that because you can strike a bit of green light from the Leyden jar, that you can thoroughly avert the supernal bolt? Your rod rusts, or breaks, and where are you? Who has empowered you, you Tetzel [i.e., the hawker of indulgences for the Roman Catholic Church, whom Luther opposed], to peddle round your indulgences from divine ordinations? The hairs of our heads are numbered, and the days of our lives. In thunder as in sunshine, I stand at ease in the hands of my God. False negotiator, away! See, the scroll of the storm is rolled back; the house is unharmed; and in the blue heavens I read in the rainbow, that the Deity will not, of purpose, make war on man's earth."

And so the lightning-rod salesman is exposed for the fraud that he is. But that will not keep his successors from fanning out to the Middle West, where lightning storms abound and farmers were gullible. Let's turn now to two legal cases from the 1890s from KS and MO, where farmers were duped by such salesmen.

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