American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  As the years passed, Emerson forged his doctrine of man into a compelling doctrine of transcendental individualism. True divinity lay in the soul of a person. “Every man had his magnetic needle,” as Van Wyck Brooks summed up his views, “which always pointed to his proper path, with more or less variation from other men’s. He was never happy or strong until he found it, and he could only find it by trusting himself, by listening to the whisper of the voice within him.” Emerson wrote on self-reliance: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.…Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.… Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. …Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. …on yourself; never imitate.” Within the divine whole of the universal, and in congruence with nature, each man was his own center, life-giving and life-receiving.

  A circle of Transcendentalist thinkers formed around Emerson. The most unworldly of these was Amos Bronson Alcott. Born in a log cabin in Connecticut, meagerly educated, he went South to teach school but with little success. To Virginia planters, it was said, he owed a later courtliness of manner that never left him, and to North Carolina Quakers a faith in individual aspiration and transcendence that became the foundation of his life’s work. Returning North, Bronson taught school in a number of towns; an inveterate reformer, he introduced children’s libraries and the honor system, beautified the schoolrooms, and restricted the use of corporal punishment. In a Boston school he tried to draw rational ethical thoughts from his children instead of imposing doctrine on them. For these acts, and for his own extreme transcendental and mystical idealism, he attracted the wrath of Boston press and intelligentsia alike. His move to Concord in 1840, with his wife and growing family, brought him closer to Emerson, whom he both revered and criticized.

  Equally controversial was the Transcendentalist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. Grandson of the celebrated Captain John Parker who had fought the British at Lexington, young Theodore was largely self-taught in botany and astronomy until he walked to Harvard from Lexington, passed the entrance examination, and, too poor to enroll, was allowed to take the examinations. He had largely or wholly mastered twenty languages by the time he graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1836, but he was denied their pulpits by certain Boston ministers because of his demand that “we worship, as Jesus did, with no mediator, with nothing between us and the father of all.” Some of his sharpening social views, on slavery, war, divorce, education, and the like, made him as unpopular as did his call for a new creed of the perfection of God and the perfectibility of man.

  The most remarkable member of the Transcendentalist circle was Margaret Fuller. Born in Cambridgeport near Boston, force-fed on Ovid at the age of eight, she came to be regarded by friends as a brilliant conversationalist, by a later Bostonian as “an unsexed version of Plato’s Socrates”—and by all as a critic and rebel. For a course of “conversations” she brought together a large group of intellectual Boston women—“gorgeous pedants,” Harriet Martineau called them—in Elizabeth Peabody’s room in West Street. With Emerson and others she founded The Dial, the organ of the New England Transcendentalists, thus enlarging Emerson’s circle even more. A passionate lover of women in general and in particular, Margaret Fuller brought out in 1844 Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in which she demanded sexual equality and spoke frankly about marriage, divorce, and physical passion, to the distress of Boston bluestockings. The Dial died in a few years, when she left Boston for New York.

  All through the 1840s Emerson wrote, lectured, edited, corresponded—and as he developed in the fullness of his moral and intellectual powers, he gained fame throughout the United States—even in remote western towns—and Europe. His call for an enriching, fulfilling individualism lifted the hearts of his readers and listeners everywhere. Yet Emerson’s popularity magnified the impact of the ambiguities and ambivalences in his moral philosophy. His faith in individual self-realization could easily be twisted, during a period of rising entrepreneurship, into a defense of ruthless, dog-eat-dog competitiveness. Like Jefferson earlier in the century, his doctrines could be expropriated by leftists, centrists, rightists, by believers in collective political action and by philosophical anarchists. He left open the question: Is man to be fulfilled only to liberate himself from government, the church, society, or is he to be fulfilled in order to help liberate others—women, slaves, immigrants, Indians—and not merely liberate but help?

  Emerson would not be dismayed by his ambivalences. It was, after all, the seer of Concord who wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Still, it was disconcerting to some that the Panegyrist of Nature could accept so exuberantly the impact of technology, especially the railroad. Man “paves the road with iron bars,” he rhapsodized, “and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow, through the air.…” He saw inventions as proof of man’s power to impose his will upon history. Yet, in the end, Emerson seemed ambivalent about this too:

  “Tis the day of the chattel,

  Web to weave, and corn to grind;

  Things are in the saddle,

  And ride mankind.

  There are two laws discrete,

  Not reconciled,—

  Law for man, and law for thing;

  The last builds town and fleet,

  But it runs wild,

  And doth the man unking.

  As Henry Thoreau was sitting in his hut one summer afternoon, looking out at Walden Pond, he could see hawks circling around his clearing, pigeons darting about and perching restlessly on the boughs of the white pines behind his hut, a fish hawk “dimpling” the glassy surface of the pond and bringing up a fish, the sedge bending under the weight of the reed birds as they flitted about. Here he could listen for sounds too, or remember them—the faint, sweet melody of the bells of Concord and Bedford, the distant lowing of a cow, the whippoorwills “chanting their vespers,” the hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo of owls, the trump of bullfrogs, the distant rumbling of wagons over bridges.

  Thoreau could hear something else too: the rattle of railroad cars about a quarter mile away, and above the rattle the whistle of the locomotive, “like the scream of a hawk.”

  In his rustic setting Thoreau pondered the sound of this railroad. He used its causeway so often to go into town that the railroad workers would “bow to me as to an old acquaintance,” taking him for “an employee; and so I am.” The whistle informed him that restless city merchants were coming into town, shouting their warning to get off the track.

  “Here come your groceries, country; your rations, country-men!…And here’s your pay for them! screams the country-man’s whistle; timber like long battering rams going twenty miles an hour against the city’s walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy laden that dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woolen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.…”

  Thoreau cries out against the thundering “iron horse,” the defiantly snorting “fire-steed,” shaking the earth with his feet, breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils. Yet he is also enticed by it, as in the very use of the horse metaphor—by the engine’s “steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths,” by the electrifying atmosphere of the depot, by the precision of the passing of the cars, so that farmers set their clocks by them. It almost seemed as if a new race was arising worthy of this technology. But in the end the man of Walden drew back. All these were arresting means—but to what ends? The steam clouds were rising higher and higher toward heaven—while the cars were going to Boston. If the pastoral life was being whirled away, he m
ust “get off the track and let the cars go by”—

  What’s the railroad to me?

  I never go to see

  Where it ends.…

  Thoreau was not so much against tools as he was opposed to people, becoming the “tools of their tools.” Implicit in his essays and journals, in Max Lerner’s summary, “is a devastating attack upon every dominant aspect of American life in its first flush of industrial advance—the factory system, the corporations, business enterprise, acquisitiveness, the vandalism of natural resources, the vested commercial and intellectual interests, the cry for expansion, the clannishness and theocratic smugness of New England society, the herd-mindedness of the people, the unthinking civic allegiance they paid to an opportunist and imperialist government.” Thoreau did not pretend that technology could be stopped. “We have constructed a fate,” he said of the railroad, “an Atropos, that never turns aside.” Rather he would escape it.

  The way in which he escaped it was audacious and, in the long run, enormously effective. He turned a retreat—his retreat to Walden—into a mighty intellectual advance. When Thoreau borrowed an ax late in March 1845, cut down some tall young white pines on Emerson’s land at the edge of Walden Pond, bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman working on the railroad, for its boards, and put up his “tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trapdoors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite,” as he described it, he wanted to embrace nature, to front only the essential facts of a simple existence, “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” But he wanted to do much more. He desired to conduct an “experiment in human ecology” that, if successful, he would publicize in every way he could—in his writings, in his travels, in his dramatic and unconventional behavior. And that is just what he did.

  The Concord gentry muttered that the Walden Pond hermit was not that much of a hermit. He sometimes stayed with his mother in town, he often dined at the Emersons’, he had a stream of visitors from the town and outside. He was eccentric; he could be seen gazing at clouds chasing clouds at two-thirty on a moonlit morning. Possibly he was dangerous; he had set off a woods fire by accident—or was it an accident? James Russell Lowell bluntly attacked Thoreau’s claim to solitude and autonomy. The “experiment” presupposed, Lowell complained, “all that complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He squatted on another man’s land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fishhooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state’s evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all.” But this was to miss the point—that Thoreau was an artificer in dramatizing his rebellion against industrialism through his return to nature.

  Thoreau had always been different, something of a rebel. He was Concord-born, to be sure, and of course went to Harvard, but on graduating in 1837 had returned to teach in the town school, only to shock parents by trying to instill discipline not through the ferule but through moral suasion. When a member of the school committee protested, Thoreau suddenly whipped several pupils—to dramatize the absurdity of whipping—and that evening quit the school. To Concord farmers, Thoreau, with his usually unkempt whiskers, large sloping nose, rough, weather-beaten face, rustic, ill-fitting dress coat, hardly looked like—well, like Emerson. Concord suspicions came to a pitch the day that Henry went to jail.

  That act of civil disobedience was almost comical in nature but it became the stuff of legend, influencing even Tolstoi and Gandhi. He had “declared war on the State” by refusing to pay his poll tax. The “State” waited some years but finally, one day when Thoreau was on his way to the cobbler, the State in the person of neighbor Sam Staples, the jail keeper, led him to the lockup. A veiled woman—it turned out to be Thoreau’s aunt, fearful that he might catch sight of her—rapped at the jail door and quietly paid the tax, but by that time Sam had got his boots off and was “sittin’ by the fire, and I wasn’t goin’ to take the trouble to unlock after I got the boys all fixed for the night.”

  Thoreau had a pleasant and interesting night in jail, but the legends sprouted. The best of these was that Emerson came along and said, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” And Thoreau replied, “Waldo, what are you doing out there?”

  By such symbolic acts—retreating to Walden, refusing to pay a tax—Thoreau would arouse men to consciousness of nature, of their place in nature, of the possibilities of a simple, natural existence and autonomy, of their capacity to take control of their lives, of their need for a spiritual awakening. And to arouse others to such consciousness, he had to arouse himself. Even the “economy” sustaining his life at Walden, like his withdrawal to nature, Sherman Paul observed, “was not an ultimate abdication from social life; it was only the means of the self-emancipation, which many, accepting social bondage as the inevitable condition of life, did not find necessary.” Walden, rather than a renunciation of society, was an affirmation of social responsibility. After two years on the pond he returned to his parents’ house, his experiment concluded.

  He returned also—though he had never really left it—to the tight intellectual world of the Concord literati, and to the wider world of the town, almost as tight. Concord had its Lyceum, Social Library, its cracker-barrel philosophers, its temperance and antislavery societies. All the famous of Concord, including Emerson and Thoreau, lectured at the Lyceum, along with such visiting celebrities as Theodore Parker, Horace Greeley, and George Bancroft, the historian. But mostly the Concord greats talked to one another—and to themselves. They kept enormous diaries and journals, filled with profundities and trivia. They walked and dined with one another, criticized one another’s work—Margaret Fuller actually rejected an essay of Thoreau’s—and corresponded with one another during travels out of town. Thoreau’s relationship with Emerson, half disciple, half critic, continued to be close. Under an oak on the riverbank, Thoreau read Emerson chapters from a new work, “Excursions on Concord & Merrimack Rivers.” Emerson found the work invigorating, broad and deep, “pastoral as Isaak Walton, spicy as flagroot.”

  Thoreau stayed at the Emersons’ after Walden, occupying a small room at the head of the stairs. A young writer named Nathaniel Hawthorne resided in the Manse with his bride. Bronson Alcott, with a houseful of lively and restless daughters, lived down the street. Margaret Fuller was in and out of town. Emerson liked having literary guests, provided they did not interrupt his inviolate mornings, when he wrote. He pleaded with a younger friend to visit him. “I cannot communicate with you across seventeen miles of woods and cornfields.”

  A year or so before Thoreau at Walden had heard the locomotive’s whistle like a hawk’s scream, Nathaniel Hawthorne had walked out to Concord woods not far away called “Sleepy Hollow.” In his notebook he recorded meticulously what he could observe around him—a thriving field of Indian corn, a pathway “strewn over with little bits of dry twigs and decayed branches,” the sunshine glimmering through shadow and the shadow effacing sunshine. His ear was alert to rustic sounds too—mowers whetting their scythes, the village clock striking, a cowbell tinkling. “But hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive—the long shriek, harsh.…”

  An eerie presaging of Thoreau’s experience—yet Hawthorne’s reaction was different from his friend’s. The whistle, he wrote, “tells a story of busy men, citizens from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in a country village; men of business.…” Hawthorne seemed to welcome the “startling shriek…in the midst of our slumbrous peace.” His reaction to such events would usually be different from Thoreau’s and Emerson’s. His background was different.

  Hawthorne was born not in Boston or Cambridge or Concord but in Salem, and he attended not Harvard but Bowdoin. Like Emerson, he grew up in a bereaved family—his father, a shipmaster, had died of yellow fever on a dis
tant trip—but unlike Emerson, in a depressed city stricken by the embargo and by the War of 1812. With his mother immobilized for years in her bedroom, Hawthorne lived for a time amid a “cursed” solitude. He had ample leisure to explore the port, with its old wharves and custom house, its drays and longboats smelling of tarred ropes and briny bilge water, its decaying, often deserted mansions behind. Salem was already an old town, full of ghosts and legends from the days “of the magistrates who awoke each morning to the prospect of cropping an ear or slitting a nostril, stripping and whipping a woman at the tail of a cart, or giving her a stout hemp necklace or a brooch in the form of a scarlet letter,” Van Wyck Brooks wrote. Young Hawthorne could ignore none of this: his great-great-grandfather had been a judge at the witchcraft trials. Out of the shadowy world of Salem, Hawthorne later formed his most powerful novel, The Scarlet Letter.

  After years of solitary writing in Salem and restless travel, Hawthorne managed to land a job in the Boston Custom House and then, hoping to work close to nature but in an orderly, creative environment, he joined the Brook Farm community, the experiment in communal life in Roxbury.

  Hawthorne had come to know the celebrated Peabody sisters, who had ancestral roots in Salem—Elizabeth, variously friend and aide to Channing and Alcott and the painter Washington Allston; Mary, engaged to Horace Mann; and the witty, artistic, charming linguist, Sophia, who became Nathaniel’s love. He married her and took her to live in Concord. There followed doubtless the happiest years of his life but Hawthorne, still restless and searching, and badgered by landlord and creditors, moved his family back to Salem, where he took a job in the custom house there. Here he wrote about Hester Prynne and the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth, about sin and guilt and justice, in the novel that made him famous. But Salem and success were not enough—or perhaps too much. Soon he moved to Lenox in the Berkshires, where he wrote The House of the Seven Gables and came to know Herman Melville, who was working nearby on a long, philosophical saga about a great white whale.