Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). The most widely known intellectual of the period, Emerson began his career by stirring up a great deal of controversy in an 1832 address to the Harvard Divinity School in which he reinterpreted Christ’s claim to be divine as implying that all people:
One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, he speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.”[586]
Although relatively individualistic by the standards of Transcendentalism, Emerson proposed that by believing in their own divine purpose, people would have the courage to stand up for social justice. The divinely powered individual was thus linked to disrupting the social order.
Theodore Parker (1810–1860). Parker was a Unitarian minister, writer, public intellectual, and model for religiously motivated liberal activism. Similar to Emerson, he wrote that “God is alive and in every person.”[587] He was also a social activist, concerned about crime and poverty, and he was deeply opposed to the Mexican war and to slavery. He blamed social conditions for crime and poverty, and condemned merchants in terms of moral universalism: “We are all brothers, rich and poor, American and foreign, put here by the same God, for the same end, and journeying towards the same heaven, and owing mutual help.”[588] In Parker’s view, slavery is “the blight of this nation” and was the real reason for the Mexican war, because it was aimed at expanding the slave states. Parker was far more socially active than Emerson, becoming one of the most prominent abolitionists and a secret financial supporter of John Brown.
When Parker looked back on the history of the Puritans, he saw them as standing for moral principles. He approved of John Eliot in particular because he preached to the Indians and attempted to convert them to Christianity.
Nevertheless, Parker is a bit of an enigma because, despite being a prominent abolitionist and favoring racial integration of schools and churches, he was also prone to making condescending and disparaging comments about the potential of Africans for progress, while claiming that the Anglo-Saxon race was “more progressive” than all others,[589] He listed five racial traits, including a talent for administration, “intense materialism,” “love of individual liberty,” practicality (i.e., “unideal, unpoetic character”), and (surprisingly) “hostility to other tribes of men.”[590]
William Henry Channing (1810–1884). Channing was a Transcendentalist writer and Christian socialist. He wrote that “Christian love, and labor in its spirit, would initiate a more egalitarian society,”[591] including for immigrants, the poor, slaves, prisoners, and the mentally ill. He worked tirelessly on behalf of the cause of emancipation and on behalf of the Freedman’s Bureau which was designed to provide social services for former slaves.
Transcendentalist Activism on Behalf of Social Justice
In the 1840s there was division between relatively individualist Transcendentalists like Emerson who “valued individual spiritual growth and self-expression,” and “social reformers like Brownson, Ripley, and increasingly, Parker.”[592] In 1844 Emerson joined a group of speakers that included abolitionists, but many Transcendentalists questioned his emphasis on self-reliance given the Mexican war, upheaval in Europe, and slavery. They saw self-reliance as ineffectual in combating the huge aggregation of interests these represented. Elizabeth Peabody lamented Emerson’s insistence that a Transcendentalist should not labor “for small objects, such as Abolition, Temperance, Political Reforms, &c.”[593] (She herself was an advocate of the movement to add Kindergarten to school systems as well as Native American causes.)
But Emerson did oppose slavery. An 1844 speech praised Caribbean Blacks for rising to high occupations after slavery: “This was not the case in the United States, where descendants of Africans were precluded any opportunity to be a white person’s equal. This only reflected on the moral bankruptcy of American white society, however, for ‘the civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.’”[594]
Emerson and other Transcendentalists were outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Gura notes that for Emerson, “the very landscape seemed robbed of its beauty, and he even had trouble breathing because of the ‘infamy’ in the air.”[595] After the John Brown debacle, Emerson was “glad to see that the terror at disunion and anarchy is disappearing,” for the price of slaves’ freedom might demand it.[596] Both Emerson and Henry David Thoreau commented on Brown’s New England Puritan heritage. Emerson lobbied Abraham Lincoln on slavery, and when Lincoln emancipated the slaves, he wrote “Our hurts are healed; the health of the nation is repaired.”[597] The war was worth fighting because of it.
It is worth noting here that Lincoln was of New England stock and is a good example of the millenarian spirit that pervaded nineteenth-century thought. Central to Transcendentalism was the idea that the creative powers of the human mind would be able to create the ideal society. Conservative theorist M. E. Bradford emphasizes this aspect of Lincoln’s thought, describing Lincoln’s “secular Puritanism” that “must replace Church with State.”[598] Millennialism is thus not entirely individualistic: “God must operate through cohesive bodies of men; there must be children of light and children of darkness geographically.”[599] In the event, this cohesive body of men was the Union army marching to the strains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
This emphasis on reforming and seizing power in a state marks a departure from the early Transcendentalists’ concern with shoring up the intellectual basis of religion. However, it continues to mirror these early transcendentalists’ moral and egalitarian intuitions in their efforts to create a utopian society on the basis of reason. Because of this moral imperative, even apocalyptic force should be used to attain it in a Manichean struggle between good and evil. Bradford comments on Lincoln rejecting compromise in his Peoria speech of October 16, 1854 in wording that is strikingly similar to political rhetoric in our own times.
The great difficulty with Lincoln’s Peoria presentation is that it finally refuses accommodation, the sacrosanct principle of Clay and of the Founders, and in its place threatens apocalypse if the alternate principle of exclusion is not applied to all Western territories of the Republic [i.e., that slavery could be excluded from new states by federal mandate as opposed to popular attitudes, as required by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 but repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854]. To accept the notion that there is any policy superior to these alternatives is called both “monstrous” and “worthy of hate.” We are now returned to the false dilemma. Ordinary persuasion is forsworn. A new political religion is implied. And though Lincoln still pretends civility and claims not “to question the patriotism or to assail the motives of any man, or class of men,” we are well on our way to a full-fledged Puritan rhetoric of perpetual war against the “powers of darkness”: “to universal armed camps, engaged in a death struggle against each other.”[600]
Note particularly Lincoln’s claim that rejecting the ability of the federal government to exclude slavery from new states is “monstrous” and “worthy of hate”—phrases that are common among the contemporary left in the United States in condemning policy proposals of the right, especially those related to race.
Ultimately, it is a moral struggle, as Lincoln stated in his 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas:
It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle.[601]
Lincoln fit into the millenarian trends of the nineteenth century, combining a belief in inevitable progress heading toward a utopian society of the future but wrapped in a religious framework. These trends are described by Ernest Lee Tuveson in his Redeemer Nation: “it is startling to realize how widespread was this religious version of the belief in
progress. Especially in the United States, the millennialist interpretation of God’s Word did much to shape attitudes toward contemporary problems.”[602] And because of the religious overlay, these ideas were highly influential with relatively uneducated people who would never have read the Transcendentalists or Herbert Spencer.
These ideas were widely disseminated in the mass culture of the period. A good example is Julia Ward Howe, whose “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was published in 1862. She was a Bostonian and a parishioner of Theodore Parker, and she and her husband were friends of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her hymn epitomizes the messianic idea of the cosmic struggle between good and evil, replete with images of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelations: “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.”
Transcendentalism: A Summing Up
It is easy to sympathize with the optimism and belief in progress that was so characteristic of the nineteenth-century intellectuals and religious writers. Material progress was obvious, and the century saw great strides in science and technology—the railroads, sewing machines, telegraph, rubber vulcanization, the internal combustion engine, photography, the phonograph, telephone, and many more. As noted by many millennialist writers, life was getting better, standards of living were improving. In 1814 a religious writer, Joel Barlow, anticipated a world of “longer lifespan in the holy utopia, population will be increased, millions of acres now barren will be fruitful.”[603] A cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Emerson, a minister and theologian writing in 1818, anticipated a world of easier travel and accelerated accretion of knowledge.[604]
These improvements in the secular world were then combined by the religious descendants of Puritans into a world view that saw progress not just in the material world but also in the spiritual world, the “holy utopia.” Humanity was thus heading toward a spiritual and material utopia—a golden age of peace, harmony, righteous behavior and material comfort—ideas that were often combined with the idea that this golden age would follow upon an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. Such thinking may well have been the lens through which many in the North saw the Civil War; as indicated above, it appears to characterize how Lincoln saw his role as an agent of God fighting an apocalyptic battle against evil.
Indeed, many of these thinkers believed that the utopia could only come about as a result of a military campaign. Thus Joseph Bellamy, a prominent late nineteenth-century Congregationalist preacher and theologian, identified “the whole process of redemption with a long military operation in which, eventually, superior generalship will prevail.” Bellamy wrote that “the time of the last general battle draws on, when a glorious victory is to be won.”
Similarly, in the nineteenth century it was entirely reasonable for Europeans, and especially northwest Europeans, to think that they were a special people given that they had essentially conquered the world, and Americans in particular had carved out a huge continental land mass for themselves. Moreover, all of those inventions and all the progress in science was coming from Europeans. It was quite natural, then to think that there was something special and unique about Europeans and their culture—as indeed there is.
Early on, these ideas of peoplehood were not based on sophisticated theories of race, and they were typically bound up with various religious ideas (see following section). But as the century wore on, and particularly after Darwin’s naturalistic, empirically based perspective became influential, racial conceptions of Anglo-Saxons, the Germanic peoples, and Europeans generally were shorn of their theological overtones by more secular-minded intellectuals who ultimately came to dominate the high culture of the United States. These latter racial ideas then became the basis for creating the intellectual milieu in which the ethnically defensive 1924 immigration law was enacted.
After the Civil War, the idealism of the Transcendentalists lost its preeminence, and American intellectuals increasingly embraced materialism and science. Whereas Locke had been the main inspiration for materialism earlier in the century, it was now exemplified by Charles Darwin, Auguste Comte, and William Graham Sumner. After the Civil War, the Transcendentalists’ contributions to American intellectual discourse “remained vital, if less remarked, particularly among those who kept alive a dream of a common humanity based in the irreducible equality of all souls,”[605] a comment that illustrates the profound egalitarian universalism—the dream of a common humanity—at the heart of transcendentalism. One of the last Transcendentalists, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, wrote that Transcendentalism was being “suppressed by the philosophy of experience, which, under different names” was taking possession of the speculative world.”[606] He described the enemies of Transcendentalism as “positivists.”[607] After Emerson’s death, George Santayana commented that he “was a cheery, child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil.”[608]
By the early twentieth century, then, Transcendentalism was a distant memory and the new materialists had won the day. The early part of the twentieth century was the high-water mark of Darwinism in the social sciences. It was common at that time to think there were important differences between the races in both intelligence and moral qualities. Not only did races differ, they were in competition with each other for supremacy. For example, Sumner, a social Darwinist, thought that social class and racial divisions as well as competition were part of the natural order of things. Writing in 1903, he noted that “the two races live more independently of each other now than they did” during the slave era.[609] Racialist ideas had become part of the furniture of intellectual life—commonplace among intellectuals of all stripes, including a significant number of Jewish racial nationalists concerned about the racial purity and political power of the Jewish people. Many of them were Zionists.[610]
The Uneasy Association between Anglo-Saxon
Individualism and Ethnic Identification in the
Nineteenth Century
“Surely, to be a Christian and an Anglo-Saxon, and an American in this generation is to stand on the very mountain-top of privilege.”
Josiah Strong, 1893[611]
Americans like myself who are distressed at the decline and displacement of Whites, the rise of multiculturalism, and massive non-White immigration must acknowledge the strong strands of American culture that have facilitated these phenomena. On one hand, individualism and its cluster of related traits (moral universalism, science, the Faustian spirit of exploration and conquest) are the basic features of Western modernization—the features that have allowed Western cultures to dominate the world and to colonize areas far away from their European homelands.
On the other hand, because of its relative lack of ethnocentrism and its tendencies toward assimilation rather than erecting ingroup/outgroup barriers, an important strand of American individualism has been to develop wildly optimistic and idealistic theories of the American future. Liberal theorists of the nineteenth century saw a future America as dominated by people who looked and thought like themselves: Even people from different races would ultimately become White Anglo-Saxon and Protestant no matter what their racial background.
However, despite their Enlightenment values (which at their heart are individualist), it was common among the U.S. Founding Fathers to think of themselves in ethnic terms. In his The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, Eric Kaufmann shows that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Anglo-Americans had a strong sense that they were the biological descendants of freedom-loving Anglo-Saxon tribes: “The New England town meeting was likened to the Anglo-Saxon tribal council, and the statements of Tacitus regarding the free, egalitarian qualities of the Anglo-Saxons were given an American interpretation.” For example, Tacitus: “The king or the chief, according to age, birth, distinction in war, or eloquence, is heard, more because he has influence to persuade than because he has power to command. If his sentiments displease them, they reject them with murmurs; if they are satisfied, they brandish their spears.”[612]
The “Yeom
an farmer” was considered the ethnic prototype. After drafting the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson stated that Americans are “the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; and on the other side, Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honour of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.”[613] An early version of the Declaration of Independence referred to affronts to the “common blood.”[614]
Similar statements of ethnic confidence were common among intellectuals and politicians in the period preceding the Mexican-American war. For example, in 1846 Walt Whitman wrote, “What has miserable, inefficient Mexico … to do … with the mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?”[615] This was the period when Samuel George Morton published his data on the cranial capacity of different races, showing that Europeans had larger cranial capacity than other racial groups, with Africans having the lowest average capacity.[616]
Later in the century, Protestant writer Josiah Strong noted:
[Revelation teaches us] that the world is evidently about to enter a new era, that in this new era mankind is to come more and more under Anglo-Saxon influence, and that Anglo-Saxon civilization is more favorable to the spread of those principles whose universal triumph is necessary to that perfection of the race to which it is destined; the entire realization of which will be the kingdom of heaven fully come on earth.[617]
Indeed, this conviction that Englishmen as a race held a special place in God’s favor “was by no means limited to the Puritan factions, nor did it end with the Civil Wars. There is ample evidence that it continued as a presiding idea in English-speaking countries down into the twentieth century.”[618]
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