The Art of Manliness - The World of the Transcendentalists and the Rise of Modern Individualism

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.380 The town of Concord, Massachusetts has been famous twice in history.

00:00:14.520 First, as the location of the shot heard around the world, which kickstarted the American

00:00:18.100 Revolution in the 18th century, and second, as the home of several famous writers and

00:00:22.100 thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the 19th.

00:00:25.920 My guest today, Professor of History Robert A. Gross, has written landmark books on both

00:00:30.060 these periods in Concord's history.

00:00:31.800 The first, called The Minute Men in the World, was published in 1976.

00:00:35.440 Now, nearly 50 years later, he's published a new volume called The Transcendentalist in

00:00:39.940 the World.

00:00:40.600 In both books, Bob delves into the details of everyday life in Concord in order to illuminate

00:00:44.880 broader trends and forces in American culture.

00:00:47.300 In the case of his second book, he does so to explore how the communal, hierarchical nature

00:00:51.440 of life in America during the Revolutionary Period shifted to a more autonomous and bottom-up

00:00:55.900 ethos during the time of Transcendentalism, a movement which prized individuality over

00:01:00.040 conformity and intuition over logic, believed divinity exists in each person and throughout

00:01:04.560 nature, and celebrated the authority of the individual over the authority of institutions.

00:01:08.700 In today's episode, Bob and I discuss how changing forces in commerce and religion, as

00:01:12.760 well as a fervent, emerging interest in self-improvement, led to this shift, and how thinkers like Emerson

00:01:17.500 and Thoreau set a new course for what it means to live a life of integrity.

00:01:21.320 We end our conversation with what the world of the Transcendentalist has to tell us in our

00:01:24.740 own time period, which, like theirs, is marked by the widespread rejection of top-down gatekeepers.

00:01:30.100 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash Concord.

00:01:47.360 Bob Gross, welcome to the show.

00:01:49.480 No, thank you.

00:01:50.140 So, back in 1976, you wrote a book called The Minutemen and Their World, which focused

00:01:55.760 on life, you know, the details of life in Concord, Massachusetts, as a way to help people

00:02:01.320 understand the forces that created the American Revolution.

00:02:05.140 You spent the next 50 years continuing to research about Concord, and you've written another

00:02:09.700 book about Concord.

00:02:10.920 It's called The Transcendentalist and Their World, which uses the same town as a way of

00:02:16.160 understanding how American culture shifted from being about duty and interdependence in

00:02:22.200 the 18th century to being more individualistic and self-reliant in the 19th century.

00:02:28.080 And we're going to talk about The Transcendentalist today.

00:02:30.400 But I think to understand The Transcendentalist and Their World, you need to have kind of a basic

00:02:35.420 understanding of what the Minutemen in their world was like, you know, what was it like

00:02:40.280 before the Transcendentalists were born and came of age? 0.94

00:02:43.280 So, broadly speaking, what was the cultural ethos of colonial and revolutionary Concord,

00:02:49.680 you know, and the rest of New England, too, in the late 18th century?

00:02:54.040 It's a way of life that's centered on families and shaped by communal values.

00:02:58.000 Fathers aspired in the 17th and 18th century to maintain their families on the land and

00:03:04.040 pass on the homestead to their sons and place their daughters with husbands, who also would 0.98

00:03:09.820 be local and would be landowners.

00:03:12.400 There was an idea of the family as a line that should persist over time.

00:03:18.320 Parents named children for themselves, and if a child died, they frequently gave the name

00:03:24.080 to the next one of the same sex to arrive. 0.95

00:03:26.940 Now, imagine, you know, if your child, you know, got to age five years old and sadly

00:03:32.860 died, and you had another child of the same sex come along, and you said, oh, let's give

00:03:38.140 the same name to the child.

00:03:40.160 How do you think that would go over today?

00:03:42.060 Yeah, like, that's weird.

00:03:43.460 What are you doing?

00:03:44.300 People would say, how could you ruin the memory of your unique child by taking any, are you trying

00:03:51.500 to replace that child?

00:03:53.040 Well, in fact, in a sense, they were.

00:03:54.960 The child was not viewed so much as unique.

00:03:58.460 And the really stunning thing is that the older the child was before dying, the more

00:04:03.660 likely they were to replace the name.

00:04:06.400 And now take this, when they worshipped in the meeting house, which was established by

00:04:12.620 law and funded by taxes, they didn't sit wherever they wanted.

00:04:17.380 People took assigned seats.

00:04:19.020 And the seating plan was actually designed by a committee of the town, which presented

00:04:25.580 the plan to the entire town meeting, which had a vote on it.

00:04:28.660 And the seating was done according to hierarchical rules, by age and then public service and

00:04:36.640 wealth.

00:04:37.400 Men on one side, women on the other. 0.98

00:04:40.080 If you were under 30, you had to climb up the stairs to the galleries.

00:04:44.260 If you were black, you didn't have an assigned seating, assigned seat, but you were on the 0.97

00:04:49.260 margins of the galleries.

00:04:51.020 This is a world that's both homogeneous in large part, but also hierarchical.

00:04:59.200 People had a place, but they were expected to know their place.

00:05:04.440 There is that hierarchy, but I imagine it gave people a sense of, like, they knew where they

00:05:08.520 belonged in the world.

00:05:09.420 They weren't having anxiety about, what am I supposed to do with my life?

00:05:13.900 It was just like, you're born into this world, and you didn't think about that.

00:05:16.900 You just, that wasn't even on the table.

00:05:18.680 Your father's a farmer, you're going to be a farmer.

00:05:22.220 Your father's a merchant, you'll be put out to a county house.

00:05:26.260 There was a very small set of institutions that made up the New England way.

00:05:31.540 Town government, which was a combination of the town meeting, and then they elected selectmen

00:05:37.880 and other officers of the town.

00:05:39.720 You've got the church, and the ideal is one town, one church.

00:05:43.820 You've got the militia, where most able-bodied men were expected to train a few people.

00:05:48.680 And you've got the schools paid for by local taxes, combining the districts that taught

00:05:55.800 elementary literacy, and then the grammar school that trained a select few to go on,

00:06:02.820 a few men, to be students at Harvard and enter the ministry.

00:06:06.460 While Boston and other port towns had a variety of voluntary associations, Concord really had

00:06:13.180 very few organizations.

00:06:14.860 In that sense, it was not pluralistic.

00:06:20.160 Okay, so the Concord before the Transcendentalists, so in the late 18th century, very communal,

00:06:27.280 very hierarchical.

00:06:28.500 Other people's business was often your business.

00:06:30.920 What they were doing, you might have a say in that.

00:06:33.800 It's like, well, you can't do that because that's not what we do around here.

00:06:35.840 But then you start seeing, after the revolution, the start of the 19th century, you start to

00:06:41.440 see fissures in this communal ethos manifest themselves in different parts of Concord life.

00:06:47.560 How did that start happening?

00:06:49.380 The ideals of the 18th century Concord were communal.

00:06:54.240 They were familial.

00:06:56.000 They were inclusive.

00:06:57.460 But they were also increasingly not being achieved.

00:07:00.960 Why weren't they being achieved?

00:07:02.020 Well, for one thing, Concord, founded in 1635, had lots of land to provide for families.

00:07:09.560 But by the 1720s, there were so many sons and daughters and such a fixed amount of land

00:07:16.760 that a good many of Concord's young were having to go settle elsewhere if they wanted to be

00:07:21.500 farmers.

00:07:22.380 By the eve of the revolution, it was accelerating.

00:07:25.960 And the exodus of the young from the town put real strains on familial relationships.

00:07:32.760 A father had been accustomed to keep his son on the farm, you know, until mid to late

00:07:38.200 20s.

00:07:39.240 And you can imagine that there could be real tensions.

00:07:43.260 Here's a young man, reaches physical maturity, is ready to go out into the world to marry.

00:07:49.300 And a father says, well, I'll give you a land, but I need you here one more season or one

00:07:53.980 more year.

00:07:54.540 And what you see before the revolution, and then it continued after, is increasing difficulty

00:08:01.880 in passing on this older way of life to the young.

00:08:06.160 Now we jump to the 19th century, and we find that pretty much the expectation of emigration

00:08:12.400 has now built into local life.

00:08:15.680 It's going to be the case that at best, one son is going to be able to take over the family

00:08:21.640 farm.

00:08:22.380 And that son will not only have to take over the family farm, but probably if that son

00:08:28.080 is the eldest, have to post bond to provide for younger brothers and sisters.

00:08:34.600 This is when, if the parent is now gone and the will is stated that this is going to happen.

00:08:41.020 So sons who inherit the farms are often doing so with a burden of debt to take care of their

00:08:48.160 siblings.

00:08:49.540 Or it's the youngest child who takes over the farm and is now going to have to care for

00:08:55.060 the aging parents.

00:08:56.440 So, I mean, it sounds like there's some generational conflict driven by economics because of how

00:09:02.020 they did things in Concord at the time.

00:09:04.240 Yeah.

00:09:04.760 There's a considerable tension now.

00:09:07.000 I mean, it's not as if, well, in the revolutionary period, the tension was about young people

00:09:12.900 who wanted to reproduce the way of life in which they've been raised and unable to do

00:09:18.440 so in Concord.

00:09:19.580 And so they move away.

00:09:21.180 In the 19th century, it's increasingly the case to the young people are pressing not to

00:09:27.560 be like their parents, but to do something different.

00:09:30.320 So you have Concord is becoming, it's becoming increasingly connected to the wider world,

00:09:36.340 to the rest of the country and the rest of the world.

00:09:38.820 You see an increase in consumerism in Concord.

00:09:42.260 So people buying goods just because they want something, not necessarily out of necessity,

00:09:46.520 but because they want to look, they want a dress that looks nice.

00:09:49.540 They want a clock that looks nice in their house.

00:09:51.240 How did this increasing consumerism change Concord, or at least its communal ethos that

00:09:58.340 it had before the Revolutionary War?

00:10:01.260 Well, it leads people to deepen their engagement in market transactions ever more than they had

00:10:09.420 done in the colonial period.

00:10:11.500 It's certainly the case that in the 18th century, people were buying imported goods from England

00:10:18.020 and via England from lots of parts of the world.

00:10:21.160 We wouldn't have had a controversy over the Tea Act.

00:10:24.060 People hadn't been importing tea.

00:10:26.420 And they were importing a lot of other fine goods and textiles and like.

00:10:30.500 The difference is that people were importing fine textiles, and this would be true in the

00:10:36.320 early 19th century, from Europe for going to visit in the parlor or going to Sunday meeting

00:10:43.100 for worship, their everyday clothes were the mixture of linen and wool known as Lindsay Woolsey.

00:10:52.880 So your everyday work clothes you could make on the farm, your fancy clothes you would buy at the store.

00:10:59.340 But once the Industrial Revolution and textiles got going, and once Concord had its own mills,

00:11:04.920 and then you had the Waltham and the Lowell mills, it made ever less sense to make even your work clothes at home.

00:11:13.100 But if you're not going to be making your work clothes at home, then your daughters and your wives and widows 0.99

00:11:20.880 are not going to be spending so much of their time by spinning wheels and looms coming up with clothing.

00:11:27.980 What's going to fill their time?

00:11:31.000 And how are you going to pay for the goods?

00:11:32.960 So you're a farmer.

00:11:34.840 You're going to deepen your involvement in the marketplace in order to pay for your imported goods.

00:11:41.180 But in addition, as part of the involvement in the market, we need to emphasize that commercial incentives were coming,

00:11:50.240 particularly in the form of merchants and banks to induce people to engage ever more deeply in market production.

00:11:59.060 The new set of merchants running what were called cheap stores, were maybe the dollar stores of the early 19th century,

00:12:07.580 were opening up in the countryside, selling goods at a discount for cash.

00:12:13.140 Typically, stores in the 18th and early 19th century had operated on a credit basis in which you went in and you bought imported goods

00:12:22.260 and you paid your bills by bringing in commodities that you raised on your farm.

00:12:27.320 And you didn't have to sell your accounts often for long periods of time.

00:12:31.940 Only if you did a formal acknowledgement in a note would you have to pay interest if you didn't pay your bills on time.

00:12:39.820 Once you move to a cash basis in sales, you can eliminate the need for credit and for possibilities of paying interest.

00:12:50.140 You'll get a discount, you'll pay in cash.

00:12:52.620 And here's the key thing.

00:12:54.440 Buying and selling at the country store in the 18th and early 19th century could be as much a social occasion as an economic one.

00:13:02.480 There were not necessarily fixed prices and people would haggle over what they would get in payment for the butter they brought into the store or other goods.

00:13:12.820 When they finally got done with all the haggling, the merchant would typically provide a free glass of toddy or another rum drink.

00:13:20.560 So sociability and sales were linked together.

00:13:24.780 But once you move to cash basis, you don't need that.

00:13:28.340 A lot less haggling, but a lot less social connection.

00:13:33.180 And that carried over to just the ethos.

00:13:35.760 People became more individualistic.

00:13:37.420 They weren't.

00:13:38.980 I mean, so yeah, like you were saying before the Revolutionary War and shortly after, the way you traded, it was very communal based.

00:13:45.260 Your reputation was on the line because you bought on credit.

00:13:48.400 And so you had to know everyone in the town, whether they were credit worthy or not.

00:13:53.480 And as you said, there's that haggling, there's that social aspect.

00:13:55.760 But as soon as you bring in cash, that stuff stopped mattering.

00:13:59.500 Like you didn't really, well, if you got cash, I'll take it.

00:14:01.740 That's all we need.

00:14:02.480 I don't really care about your reputation as a man.

00:14:06.120 Another area you explore is the world of religion.

00:14:08.620 What was going on in the world of religion and Concord at the start of the 19th century that you saw more of these fissures in the communal ethos that they once had?

00:14:18.100 Yeah. So in the 17th century, you will recall, Massachusetts Bay expected there to be an established religion, and that was not unusual in most of the colonies.

00:14:31.340 And in every town, locals would get together and choose their Protestant faith.

00:14:36.960 It was invariably congregationalist.

00:14:39.220 By the early 19th century, Massachusetts continued to have a religious establishment that most of the other states of the new republic had abandoned.

00:14:52.180 Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 provides that every town should support a public Protestant teacher of piety, religion, and morality.

00:15:03.800 The minister's being supported here, not so much because he has a sacred role, but he has a kind of, he's a higher schoolmaster who's teaching the rules of piety, morality.

00:15:16.360 So Ezra Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson's step-grandfather, comes to Concord in 1778, succeeding William Emerson, the actual blood grandfather of Ralph Emerson, who was a patriot preacher in the revolution and died in 1776 as chaplain on an expedition to Ticonderoga.

00:15:39.020 Ripley comes in, Ripley comes in, and he not only succeeds Emerson in the pulpit, he also succeeds him as the new husband of Emerson's widow, who's 10 years older than he, and he comes to occupy and then to own the old manse that was built by Reverend William Emerson.

00:16:00.060 And from Ripley's point of view, he stands for continuity, because through Emerson's, he is linked all the way back to the founding ministers of Concord, founding minister Peter Buckley.

00:16:12.520 His greatest desire, Ezra Ripley, was to view the entire community as his parish.

00:16:20.460 He always referred to them as my people.

00:16:23.140 Ripley's sermons and his practices of church government really emphasized people's behavior socially and ethically towards one another.

00:16:34.060 He preached what I call in the book, an ethic of interdependence.

00:16:38.000 They were all really bound to one another, that who could live alone and independent, he once asked.

00:16:43.460 Who was some bitter hermit or some half-crazed enthusiast who would say to society, I have no need of thee.

00:16:49.180 In his view, religion was about community, and I think his idea was really to be something like an English country vicar, you know, where when people came to the Sunday meeting, they embodied community.

00:17:02.480 But it came at a great cost.

00:17:04.700 Because the cost was for many people that there was little in the way of spiritual intensity in his faith.

00:17:10.720 And people who grew up in the Calvinist and New England Congregationalist tradition also inherited desire for intense relation to divinity.

00:17:22.960 And some of them were not happy with Ripley's endless preaching of morality and the rational way to be in the world.

00:17:31.280 Ripley's own stepdaughter, Mary Moody Emerson, the aunt of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Muse of Transcendentalism,

00:17:38.120 She used to parody Ripley as Dr. Reason. 0.86

00:17:43.260 He had no sense of the divine and the intensity in his faith.

00:17:47.680 He also used the church to uphold not just interdependency, but hierarchy.

00:17:55.940 And there are two key things to mention here.

00:18:00.040 One is that in the church membership, men were infrequently seen.

00:18:05.140 70 to 75% of church members in Congress in the 18th and first part of the 19th century were women.

00:18:13.180 Men didn't join typically until their mid-40s or even later.

00:18:17.080 By the early 18th period before 1820, they were not joined until about age 50.

00:18:23.740 And Ripley was having a hard time drawing young people into his congregation.

00:18:29.000 One reason, and we learned this from people, young people who left, is that he seemed to convey the impression that you're too young to have any independent thoughts of your own about religion.

00:18:42.740 Nobody really cares what you think.

00:18:45.080 Follow your elders.

00:18:46.040 And by the mid-1820s, young people, especially young people who come to Concord as newcomers and who weren't going to be in Concord for all that long, they could see no reason why to join a congregation dominated by old folks, maybe old fogies would have been their term, that had little to offer them other than more lessons in behaving ethically, you know, sub-deferring to your elders. 0.83

00:19:14.500 Well, and also you make the point that another reason that young people were leaving the Ripley's church was that, again, is that his lack of religious fervor or sentiment, like there wasn't that intensity.

00:19:26.900 Like what was going on?

00:19:27.840 Like why were the young people attracted to that in a church?

00:19:31.480 Well, so in 1825-26, there's a breakaway from Ezra Ripley's parish, and people interested in a much more intense but also more Calvinistic form of congregationalist faith start a congregation of their own.

00:19:49.240 They're led by Henry David Thoreau's aunts, who are in the forefront of demanding a new way of worshiping.

00:19:58.820 They view themselves as a little band of poor but faithful Christians who start out on their own.

00:20:07.360 And it may be that they wanted both greater Calvinist orthodoxy as well as greater spiritual intensity.

00:20:18.720 Henry David Thoreau's step-grandmother had actually, in 1810, helped to play a role in creating a mini-revival in Concord.

00:20:28.260 And in her home, Rebecca Thoreau hosted her neighbors who engaged in their own prayer services.

00:20:36.540 Ezra Ripley was quite alarmed by this.

00:20:39.240 He worried that it would be a repeat of the Great Awakening of the mid-18th century when people were rejecting established ministers and claiming that you could be born again in a minute when they were having, you know, profoundly emotional experiences of conversion.

00:20:56.680 And to those who looked on that Great Awakening with distrust, they were aghast at the sense that the social order was collapsing when learned authorities were being set aside for someone who came off the farm, was a sinner one day, and the next day said,

00:21:15.300 Oh, I'm born again, I can now judge you.

00:21:18.180 So you have a combination of people wanting to break away from learned authority, from the rule by the elders, and a desire for a more intense spiritual experience.

00:21:31.640 I don't think it was the case that the majority of young people went to the evangelical church, but more went to the evangelical church that never chose voluntarily to worship with Ezra Ripley.

00:21:44.220 So we've talked about there's changes going on in religious life, that's in flux.

00:21:49.760 There's changes going on in trade, in farming, in economic life.

00:21:53.460 Everything's kind of, you're seeing a transition from the old way to something else.

00:21:57.520 We're kind of in a liminal period right now.

00:22:00.040 The other thing you start seeing around the same time, the beginning of the 19th century, is this really fervent interest in self-improvement or cultural improvement in Concord.

00:22:10.940 So you're seeing these voluntary associations forming, like lyceums, libraries, debating clubs.

00:22:18.700 What was going on?

00:22:19.900 Why were young people in particular interested in self-improvement at the time?

00:22:24.900 Not just young people, but their elders who were eager to see the progress of commerce, of manufacturing,

00:22:32.680 and the expansion of minds and spirits throughout the new republic.

00:22:40.240 You had the start of agricultural societies in the 1820s.

00:22:45.200 Concord was the host for the Society of Middlesex, husbandmen and manufacturers.

00:22:50.320 And their aim was to promote improved farming through scientific methods, by tending to the best practices of the day.

00:23:00.500 And their endless message to farmers was, don't do what your fathers did just out of unthinking inheritance.

00:23:09.080 Don't follow superstitions, like timing your farming operations by the phases of the moon.

00:23:15.780 Pay attention to science.

00:23:17.420 Be empirical.

00:23:18.220 Reject the past when it's not useful.

00:23:21.940 And do so in order to make more money off your farm and be able to stay on the homestead that you might otherwise have to give up.

00:23:32.140 That message, pay attention to the best practices of the day.

00:23:37.480 Keep up with current knowledge.

00:23:39.080 It's also being promoted for the schools of Concord.

00:23:43.160 Don't just use the school books, Noah Webster's Speller and Jedediah Morse's Geography that your parents used in the 1790s.

00:23:52.880 Use the new textbooks of the day that are incorporating the latest knowledge.

00:23:57.740 So, when you have the promotion of this break with the past, you then have the central question.

00:24:06.420 So, what are the young people to learn and to do?

00:24:10.080 And what are they going to do if you ask them to find their own way in the world and not just inherit the farm or be in an apprenticeship and do what your father did as a master mechanic?

00:24:23.300 And you'll do the same.

00:24:25.620 Everything is changing.

00:24:27.720 And you have a couple of movements for social and cultural improvement, some of which originate in England, like the Lyceum Movement, which goes out of efforts by reform-minded manufacturers in Britain to reach their workers.

00:24:45.640 Some in Britain, the deeply conservative, thought the working class never needed an education.

00:24:51.300 If you educate the working class, all you'll do is make them unhappy. 1.00

00:24:55.140 They won't get any richer.

00:24:56.460 They'll just know that they could have lived better but don't.

00:24:59.700 And that would be politically dangerous and invite radicalism and revolution.

00:25:04.460 The reformers in Britain, and then their counterpart in America, said, no, let's educate the working man so that the working man can learn about science and technology and come to be a participant with his boss in the Industrial Revolution.

00:25:22.460 That idea makes its way over to the United States.

00:25:26.880 A man named Josiah Holbrook in Derby, Connecticut, outside New Haven, a graduate of Yale, who is trying to run an agricultural school on his family's farm for young men.

00:25:39.960 And when he learns about the British movement and he gets really excited and he thinks, I'll start the American Lyceum, where young people can learn and educate one another by getting scientific apparatus to participate, to do experiments and learn the new science, by hearing lectures, by studying up themselves and giving lectures to their neighbors,

00:26:05.160 and by buying a certain number of books that they can consult as reference works.

00:26:10.540 Why would young men want to do this? 1.00

00:26:12.260 Well, he thinks he can appeal to young men in their 20s to join the Lyceum and improve their lives.

00:26:20.580 He also recommends the sponsorship of Lyceum by their bosses by arguing that young people left on their own in cities are going to be prone to doing a lot of drinking

00:26:33.560 and to hanging out and going to places of amusement, and who knows what trouble they'll get into.

00:26:39.940 Lyceums could serve as an instrument of temperance and abstinence.

00:26:44.820 Get the young people to improve their minds, not release and relax their spirits. 0.86

00:26:50.600 Go to lectures and the like.

00:26:52.960 Go to debating clubs.

00:26:54.660 Then do this under the sponsorship of their elders, the merchants and manufacturers who employ them.

00:27:00.860 Concord starts the Lyceum in 1829, and very quickly, the Lyceum becomes less of a place to offer improvement and, if you will, moral discipline for young men,

00:27:14.420 but rather a community institution where young women, as well as their mothers and wives of merchants and manufacturers, all come together for shared education.

00:27:27.400 A lot of the lectures are given by locals in Concord.

00:27:31.580 I should add that a lot of young people go to the Lyceum, less for the so-called learned lecturers, but more for young men, some of whom I quote in the book,

00:27:43.320 who want to ogle and meet young women at the lectures.

00:27:46.940 It will look as if they want to improve themselves, and maybe there'll be good prospects.

00:27:52.000 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:27:56.560 And now back to the show.

00:27:58.260 So this was like in the 1820s.

00:28:00.300 Did any of the transcendentalists go?

00:28:01.520 Like, did Emerson go to Lyceums or debate clubs or things like that?

00:28:04.760 What I'm describing is really Lyceum from the 1820s to the 1840s.

00:28:09.280 Emerson, starting in the early 1830s, witnesses the movement and says, hey, I'd like to make my career as a lecturer.

00:28:22.120 This is as he's feeling ever more discontent with his position as the minister of Boston Second Church, a really prestigious pulpit to occupy.

00:28:34.340 And here he is, his father, the Reverend William Emerson, who died when he was a boy, had been the minister of Boston's first congregational church, the most prestigious in town.

00:28:45.200 His grandfather, Reverend William Emerson, the senior, had been the minister of Concord.

00:28:51.180 And there's Waldo.

00:28:52.420 Everybody in his family had been proud and counting on him to carry on the clerical lineage of the family.

00:28:59.500 He doesn't want to do that.

00:29:01.020 And he's feeling increasingly unhappy with his role as the minister, representing the entire community and presiding over rituals that are essential to Congregationalist worship, in particular, the communal service.

00:29:19.620 And he feels like it's a ritual that has become empty for him.

00:29:25.040 And if he can't perform it, the communion service for the members, he can't, with any integrity, remain the minister of the town.

00:29:35.280 So he resigns, goes to Europe, and then comes back to the United States with a view to being a freelance preacher, someone who won't have to represent any community, but can give sermons and become a lecturer.

00:29:51.060 And he can lecture at lyceums.

00:29:54.280 And that's what he says how to do.

00:29:55.740 He views the lyceum as his secular pulpit.

00:30:00.960 And he vows that he will not say anything to an audience at a lyceum that he hasn't thought about and felt deeply about and considered, not just to please an audience, but to express the truths as he knows them most deeply.

00:30:17.160 And in particular, those truths will be the truths of what comes to be known as transcendentalism.

00:30:23.920 Yeah, I mean, this feels like this is one of those shifts in an individual's life that points to a larger cultural trend.

00:30:31.920 Because, you know, previously, if you wanted to talk about self-improvement, you had to do it over the pulpit at church through the lens of faith.

00:30:39.400 But now you have, you know, this emerging possibility of lecturing about self-improvement outside of church.

00:30:46.340 So there's an emerging culture and message of self-improvement that's not attached to religion.

00:30:53.420 And Emerson saw that and he started taking that on.

00:30:56.600 But do we know why Emerson felt he had to resign from being a pastor?

00:31:00.560 I mean, what was it?

00:31:02.340 I mean, why didn't he feel committed to congregationalism?

00:31:05.380 And I mean, was there anything going on in his personal life or maybe the wider world that was influencing his ideas of what it meant to have a religious life?

00:31:15.040 Well, for one thing, he's married and his wife dies in 1832.

00:31:21.540 And then here he is, a widower after having a relatively short marriage of a year and a half.

00:31:28.880 And as now a widower in the pulpit, he's feeling increasingly restive.

00:31:35.860 He's been reading, thanks to the tutelage of his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, he's been reading Coleridge.

00:31:42.100 He's read Wordsworth and he's aware of new views of religion that are coming from German thinkers.

00:31:50.260 And those views of religion cast considerable doubt on the inherited faith, whether it's Orthodox Calvinism or the liberal form of Protestantism that comes to be known as Unitarianism.

00:32:04.980 The higher criticism of the Bible in Germany suggests that neither the Old nor the New Testament are the revealed word of God, but texts written by human beings, maybe through some kind of revelation to prophets, but they're texts that should be studied like any other text.

00:32:22.140 In addition, as Emerson comes to understand the currents of Romanticism from Germany, he comes to realize that religion is not a creed, it's not a form of church discipline.

00:32:37.520 It's not a subjection to community.

00:32:40.680 It's something else.

00:32:42.020 And he comes to believe, as do other Unitarian ministers in the Boston area in the early to mid-1830s.

00:32:50.340 Religion is really a spirit that runs through all things, and especially through nature.

00:32:57.120 And the human beings are part and parcel of that.

00:33:01.020 We all have within us, we all incarnate some part of divinity.

00:33:05.360 We might say today that we all share a common human nature.

00:33:09.140 We would say back, if we were going along with Emerson, that we all share a common divine nature.

00:33:15.660 Common humanity becomes a common divinity.

00:33:18.520 And that spirit of divinity runs through all things.

00:33:22.040 And it means that you can worship God on a hilltop as well as in a cathedral.

00:33:27.860 It doesn't really matter whether you believe in total immersion is baptism or a sprinkling of a little bit of water on an infant.

00:33:37.240 It doesn't matter whether you subject yourself to church discipline and scrutiny or whether you just in private say, I have faith in God.

00:33:47.560 All of Emerson's faith in this new version that will be called transcendentalism means essentially that religion is an individual experience and a profession.

00:34:02.940 And religion then will shift from the communal dimensions and framework that I've described to a far more individualistic one.

00:34:12.080 In this sense, Emerson and other transcendentalists are challenging the authority and the institution of the New England way.

00:34:23.620 The church, Emerson says, is not going to reach anyone unless it really conveys an intense spiritual experience from the pulpit by the minister in sermons to the members of the congregation.

00:34:35.780 And the institutions of authority don't matter so much as the authority of the individual experiencing faith through experiences in nature.

00:34:48.760 So again, you're seeing this theme of a transition from communal way of life to a more independent, individualistic way of life.

00:34:57.000 Right. And Emerson comes to see that when you take this vision of religion and you merge it with the currents that are going on in politics and society, you can come up with a faith that is egalitarian as well as freeing individuals and democratic.

00:35:19.680 There are a couple of things to say first.

00:35:22.240 This vision of religion that I've described provides a strategy that the Unitarian reformers have in mind for what to do in a world when there's no longer a religious establishment.

00:35:35.780 1825 in Concord, the Trinitarians set off in 26, form their own congregation and worship on their own, build their own meeting house, and you have a collapse of the ideal one town, one church.

00:35:50.820 In 1834, Massachusetts gets rid of the establishment altogether.

00:35:56.860 It's the last state in the union to do so.

00:35:59.120 And now all these different religious sects, Congregationalists, Unitarians, Universalists, Baptists, Methodists, and still others, are going to have to compete with one another for members.

00:36:10.960 Emerson, I think, and the other early Transcendentalists, have in mind that this new view of faith, that it's a spirit that runs through everything, is the strategy by which you can compete for souls and members.

00:36:25.220 But in addition, this will broaden into a way of viewing life in America and judging its practices and its institutions.

00:36:37.080 In Emerson's mind, the highest form of nature is not the discovery of the laws of nature to come up with technological improvements that will advance trade and commerce and promote materialism and consumerism.

00:36:52.460 The highest uses of nature are through as a conduit to the spirit that runs through all things, and two, the experience of divinity and the experience, the aesthetic beauty of nature.

00:37:07.480 So that for Emerson, this vision of the world anew through the spirit, running through everything, becomes the basis for a critique of the institutions and way of life in New England and Concord as a whole.

00:37:23.680 And from this perspective, Emerson comes to see himself as a spokesman for all the young people, and particularly young men, who can feel within themselves the universal soul, the connection to something higher, to a larger purpose.

00:37:42.440 And yet, when they look out in the world that they're about to enter, what do they find?

00:37:47.880 They find demands for conformity, demands to harness yourself to the demands of the marketplace, to the counting house, to your boss as the manufacturer.

00:37:59.280 And from Emerson's point of view, he looks out and finds young college graduates like Henry David Thoreau, who say, am I really going to give up my divine spirit, my potential for perfectibility, just to make a living?

00:38:17.740 I can't do that, say, as Emerson views young men at the time saying, I have to do something higher, or I will wait to join the society as a whole.

00:38:28.220 That becomes the radicalism of transcendentalism, to provide a space for young men and young women to say, I'm not going to conform, I'm going to discover myself, I will serve society, but not through answering to Ezra Ripley, but by answering to my inner potential, cultivating that.

00:38:50.120 And when I do that, then I will serve the community.

00:38:53.340 So, what you're seeing, it's almost anti-institutional.

00:38:56.980 So, you see them rejecting church, not joining churches, because they feel like you don't need a church, you can just go and be a part of nature, and you can experience God that way individually.

00:39:06.760 But then also, another institution you saw a lot of young men reject that their fathers and grandfathers were a part of was Freemasonry.

00:39:13.400 During this time, in the 1820s, Freemasons were having a hard time getting young men to join.

00:39:17.780 Was it for that same reason, they just didn't want to conform to another institution?

00:39:20.460 Well, I think it's a little more complicated.

00:39:23.220 So, remember, first to describe colonial Concord is not having much in the way of voluntary associations.

00:39:28.740 Well, Concord does start to get voluntary associations in the 1790s, but they were a particular sort, like the Masonic Lodges.

00:39:37.000 They're top-down institutions in which, if you're going to start a lodge, you have to get permission from a higher lodge.

00:39:44.960 The Masons were offering place to young men in their mid to late 20s who would go, in an increasingly fluid world, needed to build attachments as they moved from one place to another.

00:39:58.280 And so, to join Masonic Lodges, if you were an aspiring young merchant or a mechanic or a lawyer or a doctor, and you knew that you might grow up in one place, get trained in another, and try to make a living in another place.

00:40:14.500 If you were a Mason, you could, in a sense, carry a letter of recommendation from one town to another, show it to the new lodge, and people would welcome you.

00:40:25.280 What do the Masons have to offer?

00:40:26.840 Well, the Freemasons, as they took shape in the mid-18th century and after, claimed to be in possession of the secrets of nature, which could be rationally understood as they've been passed on from the architects of King Solomon's Temple all the way down to the present.

00:40:46.580 In fact, it was a group organized in the late 17th century whose knowledge didn't descend from time immemorial, but was relatively recent.

00:40:57.000 But that knowledge would be passed on to the members through secret ceremonies of initiation.

00:41:04.100 The Masons actually professed to embody reason in science, but their reason in science wasn't simply transparent to all readers.

00:41:13.060 It had to be passed on as a secret knowledge within rituals that nobody else could know.

00:41:21.500 And once you were initiated into Freemasonry, you were duty-bound, sworn to never, ever reveal those secrets to anyone else.

00:41:32.920 And there were various levels of Masonry that you could take.

00:41:36.060 You could become a Master Mason and then pursue your knowledge to ever higher levels.

00:41:40.820 So there's a kind of curious contradiction in Freemasonry.

00:41:43.900 It's an inner circle that you're admitted to. 0.89

00:41:47.340 And I should add, one black ball could kill your application for membership. 0.99

00:41:52.060 And so you could apply.

00:41:53.840 If you're accepted, you could have access to this, a recondite knowledge that nobody else had.

00:42:00.560 And yet, as a Mason, you would frequently participate in public ceremonies.

00:42:05.700 The Masons had rituals to dedicate and consecrate cornerstones of buildings and monuments when they were laid in the early American Republic.

00:42:14.480 So they're conducting public ceremonies, and they're suggesting that their knowledge will foster virtue and the public good in the new American Republic.

00:42:25.220 But they'll do so through private meetings and initiations that nobody has access.

00:42:32.620 By the mid-1820s, what you have is an institution that's growing in influence and power in the new Republic, but in fact invisible and untransparent to people who aren't members.

00:42:46.720 When in 1826, a man named William Morgan in Western New York reveals the secrets of Masonry, he's a disgruntled Mason who wants to get even with his former fraternity brothers.

00:43:00.680 When he reveals the secrets of Masonry with a friendly printer, he's whisked away by hostile members of the Masonic fraternity and never seen again until his body washes up in Western New York.

00:43:13.220 That sets off what's called the anti-Masonic crusade.

00:43:17.780 That doesn't come to Concord until 1833, and I won't go into the reasons why the delayed response.

00:43:24.740 But what you now have is an attack on an institution that claims to operate in the name of virtue, that's top-down and undemocratic and utterly untransparent, and yet exercising seemingly extraordinary influence over the course of town and county and state and nation.

00:43:48.280 It's that that promotes the rebellion.

00:43:50.280 But just something else, Masonry claims to offer knowledge of science and nature.

00:43:56.440 Well, you don't have to join the Masons to get that.

00:43:59.800 The Lycea movement will now make that available either for free or for maybe a quarter to go to a lecture, whereas it could cost you some 20 bucks to join the Masons.

00:44:09.880 So you don't need to get knowledge through Masons.

00:44:12.880 If you're worried about your virtue and you need to be careful and not drink too much, well, join a temperance society.

00:44:20.720 So you don't have to be a Mason for that.

00:44:23.560 And what if, it turns out, you want to make your way as a future husband and father?

00:44:30.340 Well, Masons come under a lot of suspicion for their all-male ceremonies where it's rumored there's ribaldry and obscenity and too much drinking. 0.74

00:44:40.040 Instead, stay at home with your wife and your children. 0.86

00:44:45.240 There's a new ideal of domesticity now that is at odds with the earlier practices of heavy drinking, not just in the Masons, but in the town, and practices of all-male groups. 0.56

00:45:00.200 When a new ideal of domesticity is taking shape, Freemasonry goes into abeyance.

00:45:06.920 Okay, so you're seeing here again, you're this, I'm going to say a rebellion, maybe it's kind of a rebellion, against older institutions.

00:45:14.560 These older institutions, whether it's church, Freemasonry, they have competition now in the form of lyceums, debate clubs, libraries.

00:45:24.120 Family life is becoming a source of competition for attention.

00:45:26.600 And then you also have transcendentalism saying, yeah, you can just do this stuff on your own because you are connected to nature and you're connected to the divine on your own.

00:45:34.940 You don't need to be along to another institution to do this stuff.

00:45:39.160 Exactly.

00:45:39.600 So, that transcendentalism becomes the most radical of the rejections of the older institutional world.

00:45:50.640 Remember, Emerson is famous as one saying is, an institution is but the lengthened shadow of a man.

00:45:57.940 Institutions, in effect, are transient and insubstantial.

00:46:01.600 The only thing that's enduring and substantial is the spirit and soul of the individual.

00:46:07.760 We also, at this time, Emerson is, you know, he's doing the Lyceum circuit, he's becoming influential outside of Concord, transcendentalism spreading.

00:46:18.540 Emerson takes on a student, we call him, who's a friend, Henry David Thoreau.

00:46:23.700 They have an interesting relationship because on the one hand, Emerson saw a lot of potential in Thoreau and admired him, but there's also a tension between the two because they both embraced transcendentalism, but it was different.

00:46:35.160 How would you describe the difference between Thoreau's approach to transcendentalism from Emerson's?

00:46:41.940 Emerson is the theorist and philosopher.

00:46:45.480 Thoreau is a guy who insists on how do you put it in practice.

00:46:50.060 So, Thoreau and Emerson don't meet until the fall of 1837, when Thoreau, having graduated from Harvard at the end of August, takes over as the master of the village grammar school in the center of town, the very school that he had attended for a time before going to the private academy in Concord.

00:47:09.520 Emerson has now been living in Concord, married and starting to have children in 1835, so he's new to the town.

00:47:19.040 The two of them meet, Emerson's been aware of Thoreau as a really talented young man, they meet and they become fast friends.

00:47:27.300 And Emerson begins to refer in his journal and letters to his Scottish friend Thomas Carlyle, he refers to Thoreau as my Henry Thoreau.

00:47:37.700 So, Thoreau is the protege of Emerson, and Emerson is just thrilled at the way in which he says, my ideas are given expression by Thoreau in incredibly sharp and clever ways.

00:47:51.580 And Thoreau has, in 1836, read Emerson's little book, Nature, and been quite taken with Waldo's ideas.

00:47:59.240 They're ever more closely connected to each other in the next few years.

00:48:03.660 Thoreau will come to live in Emerson's house, be a babysitter for the kids, be a handyman who helps around the house.

00:48:12.020 He's incredibly adept at all kinds of physical tasks, from farming to fixing things in the house, tasks at which Emerson's pretty incompetent.

00:48:21.100 So, Thoreau is close to Emerson, so much so, that when some of Thoreau's classmates from Harvard come out to visit Concord, they see him and Emerson together.

00:48:33.400 And one says, if I close my eyes, I could not tell which one was speaking, who was Emerson, who was Thoreau.

00:48:39.840 That Thoreau had taken to imitating Emerson so closely, not just in the tone of voice, but the way he spoke and the measuredness of his speech.

00:48:52.040 And so much so, that James Russell Lowell parodied Thoreau as basically stealing his apples from Emerson's orchard.

00:49:00.820 No one wants to be lambasted and satirized as imitative, but think about what it's like when what you're imitating is the philosophy of authentic individuality.

00:49:13.460 And the person who is coming to be identified with that philosophy is Ralph Waldo Emerson.

00:49:18.340 You're dependent on Emerson, who's hiring you, he's giving you literary opportunities, he's giving you access to his friends in his library, and you are seen by people as less the genius in your own right than the knockoff, the imitative knockoff of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

00:49:37.440 So, and you're trying to build your own career, you decide you're going to make letters your profession, literature your way of earning a living.

00:49:46.500 How do you do that when every time you're introduced, you're introduced on terms that are already set by Emerson?

00:49:55.160 That's going to be the case when Emerson finds Thoreau an opportunity to live near Manhattan and be a tutor for Emerson's nephews on Staten Island, where Emerson's brother William is a lawyer.

00:50:09.400 And it'll be the case even when you live at Walden, because you're squatting rent-free on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

00:50:16.500 So, Thoreau is having to feel acutely the tension between his own authentic individual genius and the dependence upon someone who essentially needs to wish away that dependence that is Emerson, but saying everyone has to be an individual, even though I'm encouraging you to be an individual dependent on me.

00:50:42.480 And as you said, Emerson was, he's the more theoretical guy.

00:50:45.860 He was the guy out there describing the big idea of transcendentalism.

00:50:49.540 And Thoreau decided, you know what, I'm actually going to do this.

00:50:51.780 And the way he did it, his famous experiment at Walden, where he built this little house.

00:50:55.940 And you make the point that a lot of people make fun of Thoreau's Walden experiment because, like, well, you know, he was still by his family.

00:51:03.320 He'd go visit his family.

00:51:04.720 But you point out the fact, the reason why it was so weird for Thoreau to do that was that no one lived by themselves in Concord, except for maybe a few widows who were doing really poorly economically.

00:51:19.480 Everyone else lived with somebody, and that's what made Thoreau's experiment of building a house just so he can live in it, such a radical expression of transcendentalism.

00:51:30.080 Yeah, when I taught my courses at Delwood with Concord in the first part of the 19th century, I would always come in class and say, you know, we talk about this period from 1800 to 1850.

00:51:46.180 There's a period when so many Americans are going west, going to the so-called frontier and carving out farmsteads for themselves.

00:51:53.320 And I would always ask the question, so how unusual was it to say man lives alone in woods?

00:52:00.740 There must have been a common phenomenon, but not in eastern long-settled New England.

00:52:06.900 Maybe it was true on the frontier of the West, but in Concord in 1837, no more than a dozen people lived alone.

00:52:16.340 And as you said, they were almost all widows and one or two solitary men.

00:52:21.700 In 1850, there were only about three or four people who lived alone.

00:52:28.040 Nobody lived alone, and I quoted a passage from Ezra Ripley.

00:52:31.760 That grew out of his ethic of interdependence.

00:52:35.200 We need society.

00:52:37.260 We need one another to get by.

00:52:39.920 But Thoreau's doing something different.

00:52:41.340 Thoreau's experiment at Walden is an attempt to provide an answer to the question of how you can get a living in this society and cultivate and express your higher self in the very process.

00:52:57.160 Let's analogize to the present.

00:52:59.940 And a lot of people hold jobs Monday through Friday in which they don't like what they're doing, but can't wait till the weekend or vacations when they take them to really express themselves.

00:53:14.940 Thoreau means to challenge that dichotomy, to say, you ought to be able to express your higher self through the very way you get a living.

00:53:25.620 So Thoreau wants to live a life of integrity, even as he's working.

00:53:32.560 And the experiment at Walden is an attempt to show that you can live with integrity, realize your higher self in the very course of making a living.

00:53:42.780 His emphasis is always practical.

00:53:45.740 It's whatever you believe, how do you put it into practice and make it authentic?

00:53:50.440 That's why the apocryphal story is that when Thoreau went to jail for a night to protest the Mexican War, Emerson supposedly came, looked through the jail door and say, Henry, what are you doing inside?

00:54:05.000 And supposedly Thoreau says, Walden, why are you outside?

00:54:08.360 That is probably apocryphal, but it brings out the fundamental difference that Thoreau is always about how do we lead a life of integrity in society that opposes us at every turn.

00:54:24.140 So as I was reading your book, I couldn't help but to make connections between the world of the transcendentalist in our own day.

00:54:30.120 So the way the world you've described here in our conversation in the book is a world in flux for the transcendentalists.

00:54:36.420 You have people rejecting institutions, leaving churches, organizations that were once a staple of life or no longer, they no longer have sway.

00:54:45.500 And I think you can see that today.

00:54:47.020 I mean, churches like mainline Protestantism is on the decline, but you're seeing the rise of different evangelical non-denominational churches.

00:54:54.700 You're seeing old organizations that had a prominent part in American life wither away and not have that influence.

00:55:02.360 I'm curious, do you think there are any lessons we can take from the transcendentalists in navigating our own time of flux and transition?

00:55:11.180 Well, I need one to acknowledge our condition.

00:55:13.580 I mean, the decline of the mainline Protestant churches, as well as the falling attendance of Catholic churches, points to, you know, this distrust of inherited institutions.

00:55:25.620 Whether people are on the right politically or on the left, look at how much Americans have been rejecting the gatekeepers of old, the authorities of the past, the institutions that at once had so much influence in guiding our lives.

00:55:40.360 But think also of Thoreau's fundamental question.

00:55:43.900 How do we lead a life of integrity in a world where the economic choices seem to militate against it?

00:55:49.680 Thoreau talks about the curse of trade.

00:55:52.020 Lots and lots of young people today are talking about the curse of conformity and trade and the way in which technology dominates their lives.

00:56:01.360 We need two things at once.

00:56:02.980 We need to get renewed from the transcendentalists to face an individual possibility.

00:56:08.240 And we need to also renew from Ezra Ripley the faith that we're all bound together in this work as fellow human beings and fellow Americans.

00:56:19.120 That seems to me fundamental challenges that in the world of the 18th and early 19th century, interdependence went along with hierarchy and homogeneity.

00:56:31.060 We've got to find a way toward interdependence that goes with democracy, pluralism, and equality.

00:56:39.660 Well, Bob, is there some place people can go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:56:42.660 Well, they can find the transcendentalists and their worlds for sale at Bookshop.org, I think it is, at the Thoreau Society's online bookstore, and obviously at all the major bookstores that distribute through the internet.

00:56:58.940 Well, Bob Gross, thanks for your time.

00:57:00.940 It's been a pleasure.

00:57:01.980 Well, thank you so much.

00:57:03.380 It's really been fun to answer your great questions.

00:57:07.300 My guest there is Bob Gross.

00:57:08.540 He's the author of the book, The Transcendentalists and Their World.

00:57:11.120 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:57:13.340 Make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is slash concord, where you can find links to resources, re-delve deeper into this topic.

00:57:18.880 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

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The Art of Manliness - February 16, 2022

The World of the Transcendentalists and the Rise of Modern Individualism

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