The leading transcendentalist thinker was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Born in 1803 and educated at Harvard, Emerson became a minister, but in 1832 he gave up his pulpit, deciding that “the profession is antiquated.” After traveling in Europe he settled in Concord, Massachusetts, where he had a long career as an essayist, lecturer, and sage.
Emerson’s philosophy was at once buoyantly optimistic, rigorously intellectual, self-confident, and conscientious. In “The American Scholar,” a notable address he delivered at Harvard in 1837, he urged Americans to put aside their devotion to things
European and seek inspiration in their immediate surroundings. Emerson saw himself as pitting “spiritual powers” against “the mechanical powers and the mechanical philosophy of this time.” The new industrial society of New England disturbed him profoundly.
Because he put so much emphasis on selfreliance, Emerson disliked powerful governments. “The less government we have the better,” he said. In a sense he was the prototype of some modern alienated intellectuals, so repelled by the world as it was that he would not actively try to change it. Nevertheless he thought strong leadership essential. Emerson also had a strong practical streak. He made his living by lecturing, tracking tirelessly across the country, talking before every type of audience for fees ranging from $50 to several hundreds.
Closely identified with Emerson was his Concord neighbor Henry David Thoreau. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau taught school for a time and helped out in a small pencil-making business run by his family. He was a strange man, gentle, a dreamer, content to absorb the beauties of nature almost intuitively, yet stubborn and individualistic to the point of selfishness. The hectic scramble for wealth that Thoreau saw all about him he found disgusting and alarming, for he believed it was destroying both the natural and the human resources of the country.
Like Emerson, Thoreau objected to many of society’s restrictions on the individual. “That government is best which governs not at all,” he said, going both Emerson and the Jeffersonians one better. He was perfectly prepared to see himself as a majority of one. “When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?” Thoreau asked. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions,” he wrote on another occasion, “perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”
Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau lived from 1845 to 1847: ”1 went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived.”
In 1845 Thoreau decided to put to the test his theory that a person need not depend on society for a satisfying existence. He built a cabin at Walden Pond on some property owned by Emerson and lived there alone for two years. The best fruit of this period was that extraordinary book Walden (1854). Superficially, Walden is the story of Thoreau’s experiment, movingly and beautifully written. It is also an acid indictment of the social behavior of the average American, an attack on unthinking conformity, on subordinating one’s own judgment to that of the herd.
The most graphic illustration of Thoreau’s confidence in his own values occurred while he was living at Walden. At that time the Mexican War was raging. Thoreau considered the war immoral because it advanced the cause of slavery. To protest, he refused to pay his Massachusetts poll tax. For this he was arrested and lodged in jail, although only for one night because an aunt promptly paid the tax for him. His essay “Civil Disobedience,” explaining his view of the proper relation between the individual and the state, resulted from this experience. Like Emerson, however, Thoreau refused to participate in practical reform movements. “I love Henry,” one of his friends said, “but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm tree.”
•••-[Read the Document Emerson, The Concord Hymn at myhistorylab. com
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