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The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin & Public Confession in America
by Susan Wise Bauer
Princeton: Princeton University Press, September 2008
352 pp., $26.95

Former presidential candidate John Edwards knows how to make a confession. As the story of his 2006 affair broke, he went on ABC News to answer for his actions. He was contrite, humble, and ready to take full responsibility for his behavior. He had asked God for forgiveness and apologized to the public. Despite his misdeeds, he positioned himself with the righteous as a crusader battling the demons of narcissism. Equally important, he made clear that he had no further aspirations for power. Always the populist, he told reporter Bob Woodruff that he wasn't sure he would ever return to politics. While putting the future of his career into the hands of the people, he left the door open for a rebound.

Edwards's profession meets all of the criteria for a perfect confession, according to Susan Wise Bauer's engaging The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America. Although the Edwards scandal broke after Bauer had finished her book, it provides a fitting epilogue. Bauer is interested in the ways men and women in the national spotlight have dealt with their own sexual sins once those sins go public. She argues that over the last 150 years, the ritual of confession underwent a "massive shift."

"Americans increasingly expected their erring leaders to publicly admit to their sin and to ask for forgiveness," she explains, while leaders engaged in a "ceremonial laying down of power, made so that followers can pick that power up and hand it back." Who did they learn this from? According to Bauer, they learned it from American evangelicals. "Even as evangelicals complained about their diminishing influence in America," she writes, "the evangelical ritual of public confession assumed center stage in secular American culture."

To make these arguments, Bauer takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the most famous (and often infamous) sex scandals of the late-19th and 20th centuries. By the end of the book, readers are left with a complete scorecard of winners and losers in the ritual of public confession, along with an outline of the Bauer formula for successful groveling.

If her formula was accurate, this book would be a must-read for every minister who lusts in his heart or in a hotel room, every politician who text messages strapping young Congressional pages, and every priest who molests children or covers up another's crimes. But it is not. While there is no doubt that the ritual of public confession has evolved over time and now parallels evangelical models, there is no prescription for success. Bauer's argument required that she read evidence selectively and interpret it based on arbitrary and changing criteria. Like Bill Clinton, she had to play fast and loose with the past.

Bauer's first case study focuses on Grover Cleveland, a winner in Bauer's confession game who was elected President despite having fathered a child with a mistress. Republicans taunted the Democrat during the 1884 election with "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?" Nevertheless, the scandal had little impact on his career. Bauer argues that he survived for two reasons. First, he was living in an era when confession was still a private matter; second, he reassured voters that he would not take advantage of people's weaknesses, especially when entrusted with the presidency.

But Bauer ignores the even bigger sex scandal of the era, that of Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton. Beecher, the most famous minister in post-Civil War America, had engaged in an affair with Tilton, a married member of his congregation. When she confessed the affair and her feminist friends publicized it, a national scandal broke. Beecher denied everything and was exonerated. He displayed no sense of humility at all, made no confessions, and suffered very little as a result.

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October (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52