Editor's Note
This is one in a series of posts examining The American Intellectual Tradition, 7th edition, a primary source anthology edited by David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper. You can find all posts in this series via this keyword/tag: Hollinger and Capper.
This post examines some of the texts included in Volume I, Part Four: Romantic Intellect and Cultural Reform. Here are all the texts included in this section:
A. Bronson Alcott, selection from Conversations with Children on the Gospels, (1836-1837)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address” (1838) and “Self-Reliance” (1841)
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “Plan of the West Roxbury Community” (1842)
Margaret Fuller, selection from Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849)
Horace Bushnell, “Christian Nurture” (1847)
Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850)
We all have our favorites. Emerson has long been mine – ever since 10thgrade, when we were assigned “The American Scholar” in English class.
I don’t know how they teach English in California these days, but at my high school, even into the 1980s, they had what they called A-track (college-bound) and B-track (vocational) curriculum plans. You got slotted into one track or the other, and your next four years of core courses unfolded before you in pretty much unvarying sequence. Sorting started early – much earlier than high school – and it was awkwardly visible to everyone. Now it’s less visible, but no less effective for all that.
The A-track students generally took AP English as freshmen, the American literature survey as sophomores, the British literature survey as juniors, and AP English again as seniors. And those topical courses really were surveys – we had ratty old school-issued anthologies that had been in use a good decade before we passed through and we started at the beginning and went through to the end, with additional/supplemental reading besides.
Setting aside for a moment the problematic practice of deciding for high school freshmen what coursework they might be capable of as seniors, it was a good curriculum, and I had a good teacher. She had us read “The American Scholar” for homework and write out our answers to the discussion questions that followed the essay.
I can tell you right where I was sitting when I did that reading at about 4:00 on a dark, crisp autumn morning. Can’t remember what I wrote, can’t remember how the discussion unfolded in class. But I remember reading Emerson for the first time, with the whole house quiet, and the sound of me turning the pages, and the sound in my head of his voice on the page turning my breastbone into a tuning fork.
And that’s not even his best essay, though it’s certainly an important one, and useful as an apologia for the whole notion of a survey of American literature – or, for that matter, a survey of American thought. There’s an exceptionalism, or at least a nationalism, latent in that idea, and American intellectual history (like American studies) owes much of its first and lasting shape as a field or a subdiscipline to the conflicts of World War II and the Cold War. It was both fortuitous and far-seeing for Tim to name this blog “United States Intellectual History” – because “American” pertains to the whole hemisphere, though we treat it as our own peculiar descriptor, and what we American intellectual historians do and cover in classrooms may often tend to the more particular, provincial meaning of the word. I suppose they kept having ideas in Canada and Bermuda after 1776, but one has to draw the line somewhere, and our field has been shaped to a great degree by the lines on a political map.
Ideas don’t necessarily work that way, even if disciplines do.
So what is Emerson’s best essay? This is the kind of question one asks in order to get academics talking, so please feel free to make your case for “Self-Reliance” or “Nature” or “The American Scholar” or whatever you please in the comments.
But for my money, Emerson’s best essay is “The Divinity School Address,” as we call it, “Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening, 15 July, 1838.”
Sometimes I assign this essay to my U.S. history survey students, though more often I assign Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience. More often I assign neither of these readings, but simply talk aboutthem in lecture. Am I conceding to the exigencies of teaching non-majors who don’t expect to do a lot of close reading of longer texts, or am I peremptorily deciding ahead of time what is possible for my students? Well, probably a little of both.
Nevertheless, the week I spend on Romantics and Reformers is my favorite week of either half of the survey. And every time I teach this period and these ideas, I read aloud excerpts from various works to give the students a passing glimpse of the style and substance of each thinker. (The whole survey probably feels to them like a landscape viewed through the window of a fast-moving train – mostly blurred, with here and there a remarkable image or thought that catches their attention before it disappears from view and we are on to the next thing.)
When I teach about Emerson, I set up the circumstances behind his address – who he’s talking to, where he is, what he is supposedto be doing in a commencement address for seminarians, and what he actually does: indict the very enterprise of a seminary education as a spirit-deadening affair. I summarize most of his argument, and then I read this:
Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,–cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Be to them a man. Look to it first an only, that you are such; that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money are nothing to you,–are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see,–but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all families and each family in your parish connexion,–when you meet one of these men or women, be to them a divine man; be to them thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted, and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own soul, you shall gain a greater confidence in other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted, that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men do value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we inly were. Discharge to men the priestly office, and, present or absent, you shall be followed with their love as by an angel.
And then it’s on to Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau and the Brook Farm community, then the Oneida community, the Fourierists, and the rise of Mormonism – but also Hawthorne and Melville and a little Walt Whitman, the hippie to Thoreau’s hipster. (I’m sorry, but I just cannotwith Thoreau.) Just glimpses from a moving train barreling through to semester’s end. We still have to cover the annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico, the ’49ers, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and “popular sovereignty,” Dred Scott, John Brown, secession, Civil War. And, though the survey in Texas divides at 1865, I have started teaching Reconstruction in both halves of the course, which means we must fly all the faster through the terrain of the past as it all blurs together.
Only once has a student answering my customary final exam option selected the lecture on the Transcendentalists as the most important thing we covered that they did not already know. The student, a creative writing major, happened to be taking a course on 19thcentury American literature concurrently with my class, and though the literature survey and the history survey probably follow a different pace, for a week or two the other professor and I were traveling along the track of time in parallel. So the student heard my take on Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman while reading them for their other class, a happy coincidence that deepened their appreciation for writers and works “covered” in both courses, while magnifying the significance of one thinker discussed in my course alone. Here is a small snippet of what the student wrote:
Unfortunately, I had never even heard of Margaret Fuller, and getting the opportunity to learn about such a powerful and intelligent woman was a valuable experience in and of itself. It was so enlightening and empowering to hear that she edited Henry David Thoreau’s work! This completely changed my reading of “Walden,” which I read immediately after that class. The very fact that in the early 1800s a woman was able to carve out a place in society for scholarly women speaks to her amazing skill and intellect. Of all of the things I learned about Margaret Fuller, the most moving was that when she died at sea, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I’ve lost my audience.” Emerson wrote for her first and foremost. I had never even heard of the name Margaret Fuller, yet she was so impactful and amazing. I am so glad I had the opportunity to learn about her in this class.
I didn’t assign so much as a sentence of Margaret Fuller’s writing, nor read a single paragraph of her work aloud. I won’t make that mistake again. Even in that mixed multitude that is the U.S. History survey – perhaps especially there, where seniors and freshmen and engineers and business majors and computer scientists and biologists and the occasional literature major are all gathered together for a 15-week journey through the American past — that’s the time to assign the long texts for close reading. If not then, when?
I should have a greater confidence in my students–and in myself.
Thankfully, the same student who had never heard of Margaret Fuller also wrote this: “I hope Professor Burnett continues to read out loud for her classes in the future.”
May we all so give each other leave to be what we inly are.
6 Thoughts on this Post
S-USIH Comment Policy
We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.
Thank you for this. I had a similar experience, at the same time of the morning (although I was a sophomore in college) when I read Emerson’s “The American Scholar”. I’ve experienced that feeling on two other occasions. The first occurred in my high school library on a snowy Colorado afternoon, when I first read the “Dialogues of Plato”; they were, for me, almost a religious experience, and Socrates became my intellectual hero. The second time was in my first semester as a college freshman when, again in the library but at 7:30 in the morning, I read Book I of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. I became a willing devotee of Satan and individual freedom! 🙂 I graduated from high school in 1975, and college four years later, and, while I continue to read avidly (obsessively, my wife would say), I haven’t had the same “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” experience since.
Lora, you’ve inspired me to seek to actively read aloud this fall, in class. I used to see it as an inefficient use of time. But I know it gives us a chance to demonstrate deep, slow reading—and to effect emotion in ways that we control. Thanks for the inspiration! – TL
Thanks for the comments. There’s something wonderful about encountering just the right text at just the right time, however we come to it.
There are a couple of directions I thought of taking in this post and then decided against — one would be to follow the path of American studies / American intellectual history as twin disciplines, maybe of the Jacob and Esau variety. One of the criteria of selection for this anthology is that the texts be in some way formal arguments making propositional truth claims of some kind, and in the Preface our editors make a case for why texts that contain explicit “arguments” are preferable to those that simply “express ‘attitudes’ and embody ‘ideas'” — though I’m not quite sure what the scare quotes are doing around those words. But it occurs to me that another key reason for hewing to the line of “explicit argument” is that otherwise the sourcebook would read very much like an anthology / sourcebook for American studies. Melville’s “Benito Cereno” would fit in just fine here, as would Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. To include texts like that would not present the reader with any fewer ideas. But it would present the field with a real problem that is, I think, always bubbling beneath the surface: how is the history of American thought so different from the history of American culture (especially the history of American “high culture”)?
So that’s one stone left unturned.
Here’s a different path: the irony of the form of Emerson’s address, as well as the irony of our studying it as a written text.
Emerson the orator prepared a carefully-written speech in which he attacked the stultifying effect of a seminary training that turns students’ minds to the intricacies of texts rather than the exigencies of life in the round. And I’m sure Emerson the orator read these prepared remarks in the illustrious style of his era. And we know his remarks had a powerful effect, for the faculty were so insulted they didn’t invite him back to Harvard for decades.
But of course there is nothing of spontaneity in the prepared words on the page — just as there is nothing spontaneous about a “homily,” a sermonic form to which it is extraordinarily difficult for these Baptist-bred ears to adjust. And I think sometimes about those young men, those seminarians, who heard Emerson call them each “a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,” and I wonder how many of them, moved and inspired by Emerson’s call to exegetical and pastoral self-reliance, spent the rest of their careers trying to craft stirringly-written sermons that would ignite the hearts of their hearers the way Emerson’s sermon lit a fire in them. I would guess probably all of them, because a sermon, like a speech, was also and first a written thing — though the Second Great Awakening saw elsewhere the spread of a different style of preaching: extemporaneous, or, if rehashed, made always to sound like it wasn’t.
So I suppose, in a way, by reading Emerson’s phrases out loud to my students (and he wrote them as he did not only for what they would mean, but for how they would sound), I am getting my students closer to “the original text” than if I had assigned them to read the whole thing on their own — except that I am a woman, a member of the faculty of the university, standing at the podium of a lecture hall, reading aloud.
What might Margaret Fuller have become had she safely reached the shore?
If the integrity/identity of intellectual history depends on maintaining the distinction between “thought” and “culture” [and, like Patrick, some might wonder why it should, and, more modestly, why Emerson should be in and Poe out], part of the problem may be that, as you allow, the endlessly mushy notion of “ideas” is the unproblematic currency of both. They sure do “matter,” as we continually affirm, but little else is certain.
Democracy and anthropology concur: everyone has them, and qualitative distinctions such as complexity and explicitness are nearly impossible. This is great for intellectual historians drawn to Whitman’s endless road of “experience”; on the flip, who can’t claim expertise, if that’s even relevant, since all our subjectivities are inaccessible anyhow. “Explicit argument” pushes us back toward Lovejoy, or even the history of philosophy, though nowadays that’s little help either, considering the likes of John Kaag’s recent weaving of “American philosophy” into and out of “a love story.” [And Kaag has no difficulty considering that literature is idea-rich, and often “spiritual” to boot.]
I don’t have the anthology preface in front of me, but the terms and distinctions of Hollinger’s “What is Our Canon,” 2012, still echo:
The decision was to make the Sourcebook frankly “intellectual” as opposed to “cultural” in the sense that we focus on actual argumentation, on the efforts of historical actors to employ evidence and reasoning for the purpose of convincing a reader of the truth or wisdom of a given claim or cluster of assertions. The texts we reprint are, of course, repositories of attitudes and unarticulated assumptions that the historian (and indeed the student) will interrogate, but our point has never been to provide access to popular values except insofar as these values are present in the writings of people who “made history” by arguing (“intellectuals,” as such people began to be called about a century ago). Hence The American Intellectual Tradition has taken for granted that intellectual life in America has been embedded in the intellectual life of the larger, north Atlantic West. This orientation has kept the Sourcebook somewhat removed from “cultural history,” which, as practiced by specialists in the study of the United States, has tended to be more Americo-centric. The bulk of the authors found in both volumes have done their thinking and writing within a transnational frame, drawing upon an inventory of ideas common to philosophers, political theorists, writers, social critics, scientists, theologians, and other intellectuals in the Europe-centered West. … 186-7.
I neglected to include the following nice pragmatic distinction from the last page of Hollinger’s essay:
The young scholars who write about philosophy, social science, and literary culture struggle for acceptance among social and political historians who too often suppose that cultural history is a successor field to intellectual history, rather than a fraternal field with some overlap. A vital reason to hang on to the concept of “intellectual” as opposed to “cultural” history is that without the former, the history profession is much less likely to pursue studies of natural science, of the social-scientific disciplines, of literary culture, of theology, of political theory, and of philosophy. 200.
“it occurs to me that another key reason for hewing to the line of “explicit argument” is that otherwise the sourcebook would read very much like an anthology / sourcebook for American studies.” This is a fascinating insight that I had not considered before. I wonder how much pressure those terms “explicit” and “argument” can bear when used as criteria to exclude “literary” works by others writing in this period (say, Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Melville, etc.). Is “Self-Reliance” any more “explicit” or “argumentative” than a murder detective story like “Murders in the Rue Morgue” or “The Purloined Letter,” both of which seek to elucidate the criteria for legitimate deductions? Arguably, Poe’s stories of the 1840s are more argumentative (concerned with consistent, logical reasoning) and more explicit than are Emerson’s speeches and essays, which abound in metaphors, flights of fancy, and logical contradictions. Certainly many literary scholars would recognize Poe under the label of “romantic intellect” (if not “cultural reform”), esp. if one acknowledges the historical relations between romanticism and skepticism as characterized, for example, by Stanley Cavell. (See his chapter on Poe, “Being Odd, Getting Even” in _In Quest of the Ordinary_).
In any case, I’m intrigued by why the editors of AIT would _want_ to distance themselves from American Studies approaches. Is it merely a boundary dispute between competing disciplines, a niche marketing strategy for a popular anthology, or is there something more substantive (more intellectual or methodological) at stake? What is so scary about regarding “the history of American thought” as virtually indistinct from “the history of American culture (especially the history of American “high culture”)? Is there any real danger in collapsing that distinction?