European and seek inspiration in their immediate sur-
roundings. Emerson saw himself as pitting “spiritual
powers” against “the mechanical powers and the
mechanical philosophy of this time.” The new indus-
trial society of New England disturbed him profoundly.
Because he put so much emphasis on self-
reliance, Emerson disliked powerful governments.
“The less government we have the better,” he said. In
a sense he was the prototype of some modern alien-
ated 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 gov-
ernment is best which governs not at all,” he said,
going both Emerson and the Jeffersonians one bet-
ter. 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.”286 Chapter 10 The Making of Middle-Class America
The romantic way of thinking found its greatest
American expression in transcendentalism, a New
England creation that is difficult to describe because it
emphasized the indefinable and the unknowable. It was
a mystical, intuitive way of looking at life that subordi-
nated facts to feelings. Its literal meaning was “to go
beyond the world of the senses,” by which the transcen-
dentalists meant the material and observable world. To
the transcendentalists, human beings were truly divine
because they were part of nature, itself the essence of
divinity. Peoples’ intellectual capacities did not define
their capabilities, for they could “transcend” reason by
having faith in themselves and in the fundamental
benevolence of the universe. Transcendentalists were
complete individualists, seeing the social whole as no
more than the sum of its parts. Organized religion,
indeed all institutions, were unimportant if not counter-
productive; what mattered was the single person and
that people aspire, stretch beyondtheir known capabili-
ties. Failure resulted only from lack of effort. The
expression “Hitch your wagon to a star” is of transcen-
dentalist origin.
Emerson and Thoreau
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 opti-
mistic, rigorously intellectual, self-confident, and con-
scientious. In “The American Scholar,” a notable
address he delivered at Harvard in 1837, he urged
Americans to put aside their devotion to things
Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau lived from 1845 to 1847: “I 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.”