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Lexie Lehmann

Emerging Cities

Professor Gergely Baics, TA Joshua Schwartz

12/12/2017

Rethinking ​The Intellectual versus the City​:

A History of Urban Transcendentalism and Transcendental Urbanism

Transcendentalism was a religious, social, literary, and philosophical movement

with roots in 1820s and 1830s New England. Most histories of the movement focus on

its ideology, emphasizing the individual and the conditions it claims are most suitable to

augment the human experience. These histories, however, understate the importance

of the movement’s localization in 19​th century New England. Most of the movement’s

most prominent figures lived, or spent a lot of time in, Concord, Massachusetts and its

surrounding towns. Additionally, this time period aligned with the second wave of the

Industrial Revolution, which initiated the spread of urbanism that directly influenced the

development of the area. Therefore, because transcendentalism was necessarily linked

to its New England context, a context that was irrefutably shaped by 19th century

urbanization, urbanization in turn had a discernible effect on the evolution of the

transcendentalist movement.
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While strands of Transcendentalist philosophy were present in Germany and

France, the movement’s flavor in New England was born from its consolidated locale.

Octavius Frothingham’s 1886 biographical history of New England transcendentalism

profiles the movement as “local in activity, limited in scope, brief in duration”, and one

that was consequentially able to create “a new social order for itself, or rather showed

what sort of social order it would create under favoring conditions” (Frothingham 105).

The social order created by the Transcendentalists was mostly confined to suburbs like

Concord, a town with a population of under 2,500 that “readily play[ed] its part within the

long standing American opposition between country and city, serving as the timeless

small town, the symbolic guardian of rural simplicity, and love of liberty” (Gross 361). In

other words, the constriction and reinforcement afforded by a smaller suburb allowed

the transcendentalist philosophy to emerge from a space that facilitated

self-consciousness and reflection.

Transcendentalism’s confinement in the suburbs supports a convenient

argument that the transcendentalist ideology was a firm resistance to early 19​th century

urbanization. This is the claim of Morton and Lucia White’s ​The Intellectual Versus The

City,​ which states that the Transcendentalist movement was an attack on urbanization

and a manifesto against the city as a pinnacle of civilization. The Whites’ cite Emerson’s

first philosophical work, ​Nature,​ as a protest piece against nature’s “most palpable

opposite”: the growing American city (White 24). It is convenient to put these two at

odds because the means to reconcile 19​th century urbanization, which saw an
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eleven-fold increase in urban population and the vast expansion of national

transportation systems, with a movement grounded in individualism and

self-consciousness, are not entirely evident. While transcendentalism advocated for a

return to contemplation and selfishness, urbanization required mixing and repeated

exposure to diversity and density. However, an intellectual movement grounded in

self-reliance does not require confinement in a suburb, nor does it necessitate that

suburb’s separation from the city.

In line with the argument that transcendentalism need not be confined to

suburban New England, most transcendentalism historians argue that to impose such a

hard boundary would be problematic and incorrect. In an article titled “Cosmopolitanism

in Concord: The Transcendentalists and Their Neighbors,” Robert Gross questions what

circumstances, “beyond ancestry and birth” linked the transcendentalists to this

community where they lived and wrote (Gross 1). Gross goes on to argue that it was not

Concord itself that cultivated an environment for transcendentalism, but moreso

Concord’s attachment to the broader movement of liberal Protestants in the greater

Boston-Cambridge region, “extending from Groton and Lancaster in the west to Bangor

and Hallowell in Maine to Providence in the southeast” (Gross 1). Therefore,

transcendentalism was not bounded to Concord, and instead was a product of “constant

shuffling of people” which “eroded local allegiances, widened horizons, and fostered

cosmopolitan views” (Gross 1). Furthermore, this insight about transcendentalism’s

localization (or lack thereof) in Concord ultimately backs up the argument that
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transcendentalism itself was shaped by urbanization’s growing interconnectivity. As

Gross explains,

… Out of the social upheaval of New England from the 1820s to the 1840s
emerged a generation accustomed to thinking beyond the confines of
neighborhood and town and seeing their lives in regional, section, even
international terms. The transcendentalists paved the way in this embrace of the
wider world, scouring new realms of the mind like Salem merchants opening the
China trade and bringing home radical and disturbing ideas that would at once
unsettle and assist their countrymen in adjusting to the enlarged circumstances
of their lives (Gross 2).

In other words, Gross reconciles transcendentalism’s purposeful self-consciousness

with an urbanizing America that insists upon viewing the self as a member of a broader

urban system. Accordingly, an individual grasping with their individual identity does not

require that individual constrain him or herself to local terms. The transcendentalists

themselves, after all, did not even uphold this standard (more on this later).

Additionally, many urbanists would argue that the city and country are inevitably

intertwined, eliminating the need for any boundary-drawing whatsoever. This

perspective on urban and suburban connectivity is the logic behind Central Place

Theory, a model that explains how larger cities and smaller towns create an

interconnected system of “central places” in order to distribute services to surrounding

areas (Encyclopedia Britannica). The theory assumes that central places exert control

through population density and purchasing power, allowing some settlements to

become larger cities while others with smaller markets remain villages and towns. In

addition, the network’s infrastructure facilitates movement between cities and towns,

creating a mechanism to transport goods, people, and ideas between its markets. In the
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same way, the town of Concord is necessarily linked to Boston by way of railroad

systems and interacting marketplaces1. The market model, additionally, is entirely

conducive to an intellectual movement grounded in perpetual self-questioning; a

marketplace of ideas provides ample material for contemplation.

In this way, Concord, Massachusetts was not an anti-city utopia for the

transcendentalists, but rather a city-country hybrid that could access the benefits of a

suburban and urban environment. To demonstrate, Concord possessed a strategic

location on the Massachusetts road network that made the town a hub of

communication, and therefore a popular convergence point for the same intellectuals

that were trying to develop their own individual insight. Concord was part of the new

movement of urban development in the post-Revolutionary War era, where small towns

began to acquire qualities of a commercial village through increased trade,

manufacturing, and consolidation of a population separate from its outlying farms

(Gross 369). This process was aided by the expansion of the railroad in the 1830s,

which in turn produced conflicts between towns and cities and facilitated the

development of independent villages that saw themselves as isolated but were actually

physically linked to a larger metropolis.

1
​The
railroad that played the most significant role in the development of Concord was
the Fitchburg Railroad, originally titled the “Charlestown Branch Railroad”. Once it was
incorporated to run from Boston to Fitchburg, Massachusetts in 1842, construction
began to expand the railroad’s stops into sections of Concord, Acton, and Shirley. The
Concord section was finished by 1844, just 10 years before Henry David Thoreau would
settle in his Walden Pond cabin (Karr, 107-139).
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This hybrid space of Concord, Massachusetts was an ideal environment for

many of the New England transcendentalists, who in turn recognized and came to terms

with its city-country synthesis. Historian Michael Crowan identifies this in the

relationship between Ralph Waldo Emerson and the city movement. According to his

own journals, Emerson saw himself as existing within an “Age of Cities” (Cowan 2). To

Emerson, this was a historical label that spoke to the influence of urbanization in

America and the modern world. Further, this was an era that Emerson himself was very

familiar with. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, and spent the first 30

years of his life there. As a minister in Boston’s Second Church, one of his earliest

sermons in 1829 pointed out the ease with which the morning sun that shines over the

city is “apt to forget” the “victims of great suffering, poor men and women reduced by

consumptions… worn with fruitless labors to meet demands the quarter day” (Young

Emerson Speaks, 242). While these words, in addition to many other examples of

Emerson’s anti-city rhetoric, seem to suggest an incompatible disdain between

transcendentalism and the urban movement, Cowan resolves these conflicts by

understanding Emerson to be a participant in the urban “in a way not uniquely but

characteristically American” (Cowan 4-5). In this way, Emerson’s engagement with the

urban was born from experiences typical to many Americans at the time, in this case a

grievance with the urban environment’s ability to fulfill his aspirations for a “richer and

more perfect inner life” (Cowan 5).

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Regardless of his grievances, Emerson learned to accept and engage with the

proto-urban qualities of Concord, such as a governing structure that prioritized civic

participation and democracy. In his essay titled “Historical Discourse at Concord”,

Emerson expressed that he believed the city of Concord had unlocked “the great secret

of political science… how to give every individual his fair weight in the government,

without any disorder from numbers” (Emerson, Historical Discourse at Concord). The

government system of Concord consisted of meetings among the town’s adult male

citizens, who gathered periodically to debate and vote on common concerns. In this

system, citizens learned to “govern themselves” by determining tax measures,

establishing schools, and providing for the poor all among this small governing body

(Bessette 6). This practice of local self-government, or “open democracy” as Emerson

called it, followed a broader democratic trend throughout New England. In essence, it

was a model that paralleled that of an urban, municipal representative system, brought

it down to a smaller scale for the town of Concord.

In addition, Emerson’s direct interactions with Boston illustrates that he fully

embraced some of the benefits of urbanization. For example, Emerson was a

particularly favorable towards the railroad system, which be believed served to “unite

the advantages of town and country life, neither of which we can spare” (Emerson,

Culture). In the 1850s, Emerson explicitly benefitted from the railroad system by

participating in a national lecture circuit that featured many members of the

transcendentalist intelligentsia. Through this circuit, Emerson spent 20 winters on the

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road, crisscrossing the country from city to city (Scott 791). Were it not for the urban

system of interconnectivity, Emerson’s tour would not have been possible. Therefore,

the “anti-city” intellectual has the urban system to thank for spreading his publicity

outside of the local sphere.

Although Emerson spent the first years of his life in Boston, he moved to

Concord in 1834 where “there weren’t so many eyes” (Gross 368). Various forces,

however, kept compelling him back to the city of his birth, illustrating the impossibility of

separating oneself from the urban system. In May 1861, one month after President

Lincoln’s announcement of the civil war, Emerson was invited back to Boston to “Who

lives one year in Boston”, Emerson writes, “ranges through all the climates of the globe.

And if the character of the people has a larger range and greater versatility, causing

them to exhibit equal dexterity in what are elsewhere reckoned incompatible works,

perhaps they may thank their climate of extremes” (Emerson, Boston). Once again,

Emerson’s words illuminate a tension between rejecting the city for its turmoil and

emotional burden, and embracing it for the depth and diversity of experience it provides.

Another transcendentalist that reaped the benefits of the urban system was

William David Thoreau, who is most famously known for his independent social

experiment to spend two years and two months in a cabin near Walden Pond in

Concord. This experiment is often popularly cited as an example of transcendentalism’s

resistance of the urban movement, and from the outset, it certainly looks that way. Yet
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the ways in which the city of Concord interacted with the larger urban system were not

immune to Thoreau’s Walden. An incisive analysis of this intersection can be found in

Robert Fanuzzi’s essay titled “Thoreau’s Urban Imagination”. Fanuzzi argues that there

is both a practical and metaphorical relationship between urbanism and

transcendentalism. “A second look at Walden”, Fanuzzi begins, “suggests that Thoreau

went to the country to find the city” (Fanuzzi 321). Fanuzzi points to Thoreau’s project to

find a “good port” from which to conduct “private business”, and a railroad line to link a

“citizen of the world” to national and international marketplaces (Fanuzzi 321). These

characteristically urban frames of reference indicate to Fanuzzi that “a historic

association of the city was present at Walden pond”, even if the city itself was not

(Fanuzzi 321).

For the purposes of this essay, it is perhaps best to focus on the practical

relationship rather than to dwell on Fanuzzi’s more literary inclined urban metaphor.2

Luckily, Fanuzzi does this well in his discussion of Walden as existing within its own

economic system that mimics the urban network. Thoreau buys his own personal cabin

to contrast with the homes of the Concord townspeople, most of which are bought

through central lending institutions. Thoreau is critical of this fact, writing that “on

applying to the assessors, I am surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a

dozen in the town who owns their farms free and clear” (Thoreau, 21). As Fanuzzi

explains, Thoreau’s commentary poignantly critiques out the financial instruments of

2
That said, those interested in metaphysics and literary criticism of this time period should be sure to
check it out. It honestly blew my mind.
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urbanization that would ultimately lead to increased urbanization. However, as hard as

Thoreau tried to escape the metropolis, the Walden Woods on which Thoreau’s cabin

was built was part of a larger estate surrounding a residential and commercial center,

itself resembling a “distinctly urban spatial arrangement” (Fanuzzi 335-6). As Robert

Gross clarifies, the land and economy of Concord were urbanizing just as thinkers like

Emerson and Thoreau developed their careers. The two movements were inextricably

in sync.

Emerson and Thoreau’s parallelism to the city was not unique to these two, but

rather can be seen in throughout the broader transcendentalist movement. This is

contrary to the argument espoused by Cowan, who believed that Emerson’s “continuing

attempt to find a way to ‘have both’ [urban and rural life]” distinguishes Emerson from

the wider transcendentalist movement (Cowan 215). In actuality, many of

transcendentalism’s more practical components were in line with the same motivations

that inspired urbanism.

Another transcendentalist, minister Orestes Brownson, did not retreat to the

comfort of the suburbs and rather used his location in Boston to practically mobilize his

ideology. Brownson was a fiery individual, best explained in Frothingham’s

Transcendentalism in New England as a man without a rational stability of principle and

a man who was “completely at the mercy of every novelty in speculation… an

experimenter in systems, a taster of speculations” (Frothingham 128-9). Brownson is

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best known for his self-edited publication, ​the Boston Quarterly,​ wherein he declares

that he as writer “has no creed, no distinct doctrines to support whatever;” and that he

“aimed to startle, and made it a point to be as paradoxical and extravagant as he could,

without doing violence to his own reason or consciousness” (Frothingham 128).

Brownson defied transcendentalists who moved away from the city and into the

suburbs; in 1836, he did the opposite and moved from Canton, Massachusetts to

Boston. In Canton, Brownson was forced to directly confront the Industrial Revolution,

because Canton was a factory town and the majority of people he preached to were in

the laboring class.

Brownson philosophized that a religiously-centered transcendentalism could

elevate exploited individuals in the laboring class; in this way, his interpretation of

transcendentalism directly engaged with the problems he saw produced by the

Industrial Revolution. Through transcendentalism, he believed the laboring class could

be elevated morally and intellectually, eventually lifting them “as a class to equality with

other classes” (Marshall 12-13). Brownson carried these ideations with him to Chelsea,

Massachusetts, just across the Charles River from Boston. Here, Brownson found his

synthesis of city and country: spending Sundays preaching in the city while occupying

the rest of his time with reading and writing.

Further, Brownson used his transcendentalist philosophy to organize around

labor reform in the city. During the week, he would speak out for manual labor schools
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for the poor via articles in the ​Boston Reformer and the ​Christian Examiner,​ while every

Sunday he would preach to his Society for Christian Union and Progress, a

congregation of about five hundred poor working men (Marshall 19). Upon receiving

criticism that he was an idealist and an ideologue, and following frustration at

censorship of his articles from his editors, Brownson created his own review paper to

espouse his reform movement. The first issue of his ​Boston Quarterly Review was

printed in December 1837. The ​Review continued for five years and received a lot of

traction among the Boston intelligentsia (Marshall 19). Overall, Brownson’s experience

illustrates how urban systems of connectivity -- such as the publication infrastructures

that allowed him to create his own journal -- were essential to the mobilization of

transcendentalist ideology. The same can be said of the transportation technologies that

propelled Emerson’s lecture circuit. Clearly, there were more practical considerations of

urbanism and its affordances that did not entirely conflict with transcendentalist ideals.

On a more philosophical level, Octavius Frothingham’s ​Transcendentalism in

New England devotes an entire chapter to the more practical tendencies of

transcendentalism. Frothingham’s argument was in direct response to a common

criticism of the movement, which was that it was too concerned with idealism and a

false equation of man as God. As Frothingham writes, “transcendentalism certainly did

produce its share of idle, dreamy, useless people… But its legitimate fruit was earnest,

aspiration, and enthusiastic energy” (Frothingham, 143). This perspective justifies

Frothingham’s earlier argument that “the transcendentalists were the most strenuous
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workers of their day, and at the problems with which the day flung down before them.

The most strenuous, and the most successful workers too” (Frothingham 140-1).

Frothingham’s testimony reflects the perspective of a notable cleric who is processing

the movement and evaluating its effects shortly after the movement had actually

transpired. His work, therefore, provides evidence to support just how interrelated the

transcendentalist movement was with the competitive and progressive spirit that drove

19th century urbanization.

Frothingham’s example of transcendentalism in practice, a practice that

intertwines urban experience and transcendentalist philosophy, is the utopian

community of Brook Farm. Brook Farm, formally titled the Brook Farm Institute of

Agriculture and Education, was a communal living experiment on a 175-acre farm

located in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. The experiment was led by George Ripley, a

leader in the Transcendentalist Social Club, an exclusive social group for Boston

intellectuals (Encyclopedia Britannica). The Farm was a joint-stock company that

considered labor and skill as an equivalent for capital. The impetus for the Farm’s

creation was a belief that in order to live a religious and moral life in sincerity, it was

necessary to leave the world of institutions and to reconstruct a social order from new

beginnings (Frothingham 164). In essence, the Brook Farm Experiment was an attempt

to establish a city-like settlement within the parameters of transcendentalist ideology.

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The Brook Farm community interacted with the outside world, mainly the nearby

city of Boston, by way of exchanges and barters. For example, surplus produce sold, as

were books, works of art, scientific collections, and decorations. Through this bartering

system, the “principle of cooperation was substituted for the principle of competition;

self-development for selfishness” (165-66). This self-centered mindset was the primary

target of internal grievance within the community. One of the community members,

author Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote in his diary of the experience:

I read no newspapers, and hardly remember who is President, and feel as if I

had no more concern with what other people trouble themselves about, than if I
dwelt in another planet… I should take this to be one proof that my life there was
unnatural and unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one” (Frothingham 173-4).

Hawthorne’s sentiments, as well as Brook Farm’s inevitable collapse, elucidate the

impossibility for an idealist transcendentalist community to exist outside of an urban

framework. If a community explicitly constructed to uphold the tenets of

transcendentalism was not able to sustain itself in isolation, than neither can the

ideology itself.

Hence, the Whites are wrong to draw such a firm binary in their paradigm of “The

Intellectual versus The City”. The two movements are not at odds with one another, but

rather, urban processes helped shape the movement’s hub in Concord, Massachusetts

by providing a foundational environment from which the intelligentsia drew inspiration,

as well as an inseparable economic and social framework from which it was impossible

to escape. The transcendentalist experience as a parallel to urbanism is part of a critical

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discourse surrounding what sorts of environments are most conducive to activating

human potential. The process of activating human potential is one that is both inherently

self-reflective and inherently a collective experience that depends on interconnectivity.

Innovation cannot occur in isolation, nor can it survive without individual agency.

Innovation is but a small factor of urbanization, but one that cannot be underscored

enough. Thus, students of American intellectual and social history must pay attention to

simplistic binaries that pit contrasting movements against each other, when these

movements are necessarily linked. While it is absolutely the case that

transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson had valid criticisms of the city, those

criticisms emerge within a framework that uses urban systems as a frame of reference

for establishing new social orders.

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Works Cited

Bender, Thomas. ​Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century

America.​ Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

Bessette, Joseph M., and John J. Pitney. ​American Government and Politics:

Deliberation, Democracy and Citizenship​. Cengage Learning, 2010.

“Brook Farm | Communal Experiment, West Roxbury, Massachusetts, United States.”

Encyclopedia Britannica​, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Brook-Farm. Accessed

14 Dec. 2017.

“Central-Place Theory | Economics and Geography.” ​Encyclopedia Britannica,​

https://www.britannica.com/topic/central-place-theory. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Cowan, Michael H. ​City of the West: Emerson, America, and Urban Metaphor​. Yale

University Press, 1967.

Fanuzzi, Robert. “Thoreau’s Urban Imagination.” ​American Literature,​ vol. 68, no. 2,

1996, pp. 321–46. ​JSTOR​, doi:10.2307/2928300.

Frothingham, Octavius Brooks. ​Transcendentalism in New England: A History​. 2012.

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Neighbors.” ​The Thoreau Society Bulletin,​ no. 261, 2008, pp. 1–4.

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of American Studies,​ vol. 18, no. 3, Dec. 1984, pp. 361–81. ​Cambridge Core,​

doi:10.1017/S0021875800016844.
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Karr, Ronald Dale. ​Lost Railroads of New England, 3rd Edition.​ 3rd edition, Branch Line

Press, 2010.

Mantel, Howard N. “The Intellectual versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank

Lloyd Wright. By Morton and Lucia White. Harvard University Press and MIT Press,

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no. 2, Feb. 1963, pp. 116–17. ​Wiley Online Library,​ doi:10.1002/ncr.4100520215.

Marshall, Hugh. ​Orestes Brownson and the American Republic: An Historical

Perspective.​ Catholic University of America Press, 1971.

Scott, Donald M. “The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in

Mid-Nineteenth-Century America.” ​The Journal of American History,​ vol. 66, no. 4,

1980, pp. 791–809. ​JSTOR,​ doi:10.2307/1887637.

The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 1 (Nature, Addresses, and Lectures) - Online

Library of Liberty​.

http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/emerson-the-works-of-ralph-waldo-emerson-vol-1-natu

re-addresses-and-lectures. Accessed 8 Nov. 2017.

Thoreau, Henry David. ​Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience​. 1995. ​Project

Gutenberg,​

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/205?msg=welcome_stranger#linkCONC.