A History of the American People

vague, and cloudy. It appealed to some fellow intellectuals but to very few ordinary people-even
the educated found it hard to get the hang of it. All the same, they approved. They thought it
grand that America had got its own proper intellectual at last. It was said his appeal rested not on the ground that people understand him, but that they think such men ought to be encouraged.’ A year after he published Nature, he delivered a Harvard lecture,The American Scholar,' which
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94) was to call our intellectual declaration of independence.' The patriotic press loved it. The most influential newspaper, the New York Tribune of Horace Greeley (1811-72), promoted Emerson's Transcendentalism as a new kind of national asset, an all- American phenomenon, like Niagara Falls. There was something a bit too good to be true about Emerson. The Scots critic Thomas Carlyle, who became a dear friend, described him aslike an angel, with his beautiful,
transparent soul.' Henry James later wrote of him, his ripe unconsciousness of evil ... is one of the most beautiful signs by which we know him'-though he added, cruelly:We get the
impression of a conscience gasping in the void, panting for sensations, with something of the
movements of the gills of a landed fish.' He astonished English intellectuals by insisting that
Young America was sexually pure: I assured [Carlyle and Dickens] that, for the most part, young men of good standing and good education with us, go virgins to their nuptual bed, as truly as their brides.' His own sexual drive seems to have been weak. His first wife called him Grandpa.' His second wife's criticism of his lack of marital attentions were naively recorded in
his journals. His poem Give All to Love' was thought daring but there is no evidence he gave himself. His own great extramarital friendship with a woman, Margaret Fuller, was platonic, or maybe neo-platonic, and not by her desire. His unconsciously revealing journal records a dream, in 1840-1, in which he attended a debate on marriage. One of the speakers, he recorded, suddenly turned on the audiencethe spout of an Engine which was copiously supplied ... with water, and
whisking it vigorous about,' drenched everyone, including Emerson: I woke up relieved to find myself quite dry.’ But it is too easy to poke fun at Emerson. He was a good, decent man and his views, on the whole, made excellent sense. He married both his wives for prudential reasons and their property made him independent. Soundly invested, it also brought him an affinity with America's burgeoning enterprise system. He made what eventually became an unrivaled, and never repeated, reputation as a national sage and prophet, not so much by his books as through the lecture circuit. Almost from the earliest days of the century, public lectures became a key feature of American cultural life. As part of Washington Irving's cultural cringing he proposed that the British poet Thomas Campbell be hired to lecture in America to givean impulse to American
literaform of entertainment in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia from 1815 but it was only
from 1826, when Josiah Holbrook (1788-1854) founded the Lyceum Movement, that the habit
spread everywhere. Holbrook had dabbled in industrial schools and agricultural colleges before
he hit upon the lecture form as the best way to educate the expanding nation. Lyceums were
opened in Cincinnati in 1830, in Cleveland in 1832, in Columbus in 1835, and then throughout
the expanding Midwest and Mississippi Valley. By the end of the 1830s almost every
considerable town had one. They had their own weekly newspaper, the Family Lyceum (1832),
their Young Men's Mercantile Libraries, and they sponsored debating societies, aiming
especially at young, unmarried men-bank clerks, salesmen, bookkeepers, and so forth-who then
made up an astonishingly high proportion of the population of the new towns. The Movement
aimed to keep them off the streets and out of the saloons, and to promote simultaneously their
commercial careers and their moral welfare.