On the homepage today, we publish a piece from our current issue: “Uncles, Fruits, and Nuts: A look at some American slurs.” These include “Uncle Tom,” “Uncle Tomahawk,” “Aunt Tom,” “apple,” “coconut,” “banana” — the rotten litany continues.

A little excerpt:

Now and again, someone will protest that “Uncle Tom” ought not to be a put-down, because the character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s momentous novel of 1852 is noble. . . .
Well, too late: Just as “decimate” can never mean one in ten, and “awful” can never mean “inspiring awe,” “Uncle Tom” can never mean anything but a self-denigrating, toadying black.

I got to thinking about Harriet Beecher Stowe, who came up in my researches into the Nobel Peace Prize, believe it or not. I’ve rummaged through my book. Let me relate a couple of things:

The first peace prize (1901) was shared by Frédéric Passy, a famous French pacifist, and Henry Dunant, the Swiss gentleman who founded the Red Cross. Dunant lived for a while in North Africa, and published a book called “Slavery among the Muslims and in the United States.” He got interested in American slavery when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe in his hometown, Geneva.

Flash forward to 1889: Bertha von Suttner, an Austrian lady who was a great friend of Alfred Nobel, published her novel Die Waffen nieder! (known in English as Lay Down Your Arms!). This was an anti-war novel, and a sensation in its day. Tolstoy compared it in its impact to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In other words, Suttner’s novel was doing for war what Stowe’s did for slavery.

That was an exaggeration, but Die Waffen nieder! was still a big deal, for a while. And, in 1905, its author won her friend’s peace prize.

One last comment, before I Stowe it (sorry): I’m told that the story about Lincoln and Stowe — he greets her by saying, “So you’re the little woman who made this great war” — is apocryphal. Too bad. It deserves to be true, and I bet something like it is.

P.S. One more comment, though it’s not about Stowe — it’s about Frédéric Passy, the French pacifist. He was a great free-marketeer, a disciple of Bastiat and Cobden. The relationship between pacifism and classical-liberal economics is an interesting subject, one that many have written about (although perhaps not lately).