What is a "cracker-barrel sage"?

What is a cracker-barrel sage?

Context:

The influence of many years spent in America talking to (and often down to) Americans also gave his performance a kind of Barnum quality: Hitchens the cracker-barrel sage selling snake oil dressed up as urgent verity.

Does it originate in the article The Cracker-Barrel Sage by F.P. Wortman or does it pre-date that?

And what actually is a cracker barrel, for that matter?

Solution 1:

By calling Hitchens a "cracker-barrel sage", the writer is (for some reason) connecting naturalized-American Hitchens to the American tradition of small-town, post-Civil-War authors and humorists, most famously Mark Twain but also (now almost forgot) writers like Bill Nye (no, not the Science Guy, the other one) and Artimus Ward.

Although cultured Americans aware of the phrase's origins might interpret it that way, I think these days most people treat it as synonymous with barstool philosophy, a generally disparaging phrase meaning simply home-spun commonplace wisdom, without the depth and non-intuitive subtlety one might expect from more informed and considered arguments.

Solution 2:

Best as I can tell, a cracker barrel is exactly what it sounds a like: a barrel of crackers (although I imagine it was more of a crate than a true barrel). As a foodstuff that was easy to manufacture in bulk, difficult to make at home, and nonperishable, it would have been one of the few commercially produced edibles in rural homes between the Civil War and WWI. The empty barrel was (at least proverbially) used as the desk and platform for the town-squares in small towns of the American Mid-West and South and became something of a metonym for them and their way of life.

By calling Hitchens a "cracker-barrel sage", the writer is (for some reason) connecting naturalized-American Hitchens to the American tradition of small-town, post-Civil-War authors and humorists, most famously Mark Twain but also (now almost forgotten) writers like Bill Nye (no, not the Science Guy, the other one) and Artimus Ward.