George W(ilbur) Peck | Biography

George Wilbur Peck, a politician and journalist, is known primarily for his creation of the character Hennery, Peck's Bad Boy. Though the Bad Boy books were written for a popular audience, the readers of a weekly humor newspaper, they were read by children, and when Peck wrote Peck's Uncle Ike and the Red Headed Boy (1899), he acknowledged his juvenile readership in his dedication of the book to "bad boys who will later become pillars of society."

Born in Henderson, New York, to David B. and Alzina Peck, Peck moved to Cold Spring, Wisconsin, when he was three, and later to Whitewater, where he was educated in public schools. In 1855 he became a printer's devil on the Whitewater Register, thus beginning a career in journalism which he pursued throughout his life. He was also an apprentice at other local newspapers, finally becoming a foreman for the Watertown Republican . In 1860 he purchased a half-interest in the Jefferson County Republican, just after his marriage in the same year to Francena Rowley, with whom he eventually had two sons. In 1863 he enlisted in the Fourth Wisconsin Cavalry, serving as private, sergeant, and finally second lieutenant until the unit disbanded in 1866. He returned to Ripon, Wisconsin, where he founded the Ripon Representative , in which his first humorous articles appeared. The articles, based roughly on his Civil War experiences, attracted the attention of former Wisconsin publisher Marcus M. Pomeroy, who invited Peck to be a columnist for his New York City newspaper, the Democrat.

In 1871 Peck returned to Wisconsin, having purchased Pomeroy's newspaper the La Crosse Democrat; with a partner he edited and published the Democrat for three years. In 1874 Peck founded the La Crosse Sun, a weekly which, after four difficult years, he moved to Milwaukee under the title Peck's Sun. In the Sun in 1882 the first Bad Boy stories appeared. In 1883 the first volume of the collected stories, Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, was published followed by Peck's Bad Boy, No.2 in the same year. These were the most popular of Peck's works; his other Bad Boy books followed the same formula of a boy playing tricks on the stupid, hypocritical, deceitful grown-ups around him, especially his father.

Peck's stories about Hennery, the Bad Boy, are set in a Midwestern town. In one tale Hennery succeeds in burning his father by inserting matches into his shoes; in others he tricks his father into an assignation and then tips off his mother and embarrasses the family in front of their fellow parishioners at church. Hennery convinces any and all who will listen to go along with his preposterous schemes. He remains unashamed and unremorseful as he recounts his exploits to the local grocery man, who provides the appreciative audience for Hennery's embellished tales. As a Bad Boy, Hennery is more outrageous than his literary predecessors Tom Bailey, Tom Sawyer, or Huck Finn. The violence and sneakiness of his actions, the raucous obscenity of many of his jokes, and the racial and ethnic stereotypes that Peck presents in the stories no longer appeal to readers, nor would modern critics allow their appropriateness for children, but they were popular at the time. Perhaps these practical jokes were approved of not only because prankstering was in vogue at the time but also because Peck aimed them at popular targets: through Hennery he attacks social and political institutions, the sacred cows of the era, and he makes fun of ethnic groups, especially the Irish, who were accepted as inferiors and therefore considered just recipients of pranks.

Six collections of Bad Boy tales were published from 1899 to 1908. Uncle Ike and the boy have a battle of wits and stunts in Peck's Uncle Ike and the Red Headed Boy (1899); the stunts continue with other relatives and acquaintances in Peck's Red-Headed Boy (1901); the Bad Boy leaves home to explore the world in Peck's Bad Boy Abroad (1904), Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus (1906), Peck's Bad Boy with the Cowboys (1907), and Peck's Bad Boy in an Airship (1908). The books as a group are characterized by Peck's use of vigorous, racy dialect and by his unfailing inventiveness in the creation of the Bad Boy's pranks. Hennery carries with him wherever he goes his irreverence for local custom and authority and his parochial conviction that the way things are done in Milwaukee is the clearly superior way. The later books were not as popular as the earlier ones. Peck seems to have lost some of the creativity and energy that went into the first two volumes, but the books made him financially comfortable throughout his life.

In 1908, the year of the last Bad Boy volume, Peck was one of the best known people in Wisconsin because of his appearances in print. He was elected mayor of Milwaukee in May; in November he was elected governor of the state by the widest plurality recorded to that date. His platform included opposition to the Bennett Law, which prohibited the teaching of foreign languages in schools. Many considered the law a result of Wisconsin xenophobia of Roman Catholic and Lutheran immigrants, who offered instruction in Latin or German in their schools. Though he made fun of such immigrants in his newspapers, Peck was not unsympathetic to them. He was reelected governor in 1892 but lost a third bid in 1894 and returned to writing. In 1904 he ran for governor a fourth time, but he was defeated by Robert M. LaFollette. Peck died in Milwaukee a famous and admired man.

Though Hennery would seem to the modern reader an anarchist of sorts, a juvenile delinquent running nearly out of control, he was perceived at the time as, above all, a free individual operating in a society where all behavior, so long as it was successful, was permissible, and where gentility, presumed authority, and sentimentality had no place. The influence of Peck's Bad Boy is most clearly seen in the Penrod stories of Booth Tarkington and in twentieth-century comic strips which require compactness and outrageousness of action to present single episodes. This kind of rough humor still appeals to children, and though it does not appear very frequently in their literature, it has been made available to them on television in cartoons and in such programs as The Three Stooges.