The Romantic View of Life 285Reform. Their leaders, however, were persevering types,
most of them extraordinarily long-lived. Their major
efforts lay in the future.
Despite the aggressiveness of many reformers and
the extremity of some of their proposals, little social
conflict blighted these years. Most citizens readily
accepted the need for improving society and showed a
healthy tolerance for even the most harebrained
schemes for doing so. When Sylvester Graham, inven-
tor of the graham cracker, traveled up and down the
land praising the virtues of hard mattresses, cold
showers, and homemade bread, he was mobbed by
professional bakers, but otherwise, as his biographer
says, “he was the subject of jokes, lampoons, and
caustic editorials” rather than violence. Americans
argued about everything from prison reform to vege-
tarianism, from women’s rights to phrenology (a
pseudoscience much occupied with developing the
diagnostic possibilities of measuring the bumps on
people’s heads). But they seldom came to blows. Even
the abolitionist movement might not have caused
serious social strife if the territorial expansion of the
late 1840s had not dragged the slavery issue back into
politics. When that happened, politics again assumed
center stage, public discourse grew embittered, and
the first great Age of Reform came to an end.
Stanton,Declaration of Sentimentsat
myhistorylab.comThe Women’s Rights Movement in Nineteenth-
Century Americaatmyhistorylab.comThe Romantic View of Life
The spreading belief that human institutions were
improving had a profound effect on the arts and litera-
ture. In the Western world, it gave rise toromanticism,
a revolt against the bloodless logic of the Age of
Reason. It was a noticeable if unnamed point of view in
Germany, France, and England as early as the 1780s
and in America a generation later; by the second quarter
of the nineteenth century, few intellectuals were
unmarked by it. “Romantics” believed that change and
growth were the essence of life, for individuals and for
institutions. They valued feeling and intuition over pure
thought, and they stressed the differences between indi-
viduals and societies rather than the similarities. Ardent
love of country characterized the movement; individu-
alism, optimism, ingenuousness, and emotion were its
bywords. Romanticism, too, drew much from the reli-
gious sensibilities of mothers. Children were innately
good; pernicious influences led to their corruption.WatchtheVideoReadtheDocumentFrederic Edwin Church conveyed the romantic sensibility in Twilight in the Wilderness(1860). The clouds glow with religious portent, and their
reflected light pervades Nature.