Transcendentalism/Urbanism Essay
Transcendentalism/Urbanism Essay
Transcendentalism/Urbanism Essay
Lexie Lehmann
Emerging Cities
12/12/2017
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 19th 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
to its New England context, a context that was irrefutably shaped by 19th century
transcendentalist movement.
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France, the movement’s flavor in New England was born from its consolidated locale.
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
argument that the transcendentalist ideology was a firm resistance to early 19th 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 19th century urbanization, which saw an
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self-reliance does not require confinement in a suburb, nor does it necessitate that
suburban New England, most transcendentalism historians argue that to impose such a
in Concord: The Transcendentalists and Their Neighbors,” Robert Gross questions what
community where they lived and wrote (Gross 1). Gross goes on to argue that it was not
Boston-Cambridge region, “extending from Groton and Lancaster in the west to Bangor
transcendentalism was not bounded to Concord, and instead was a product of “constant
shuffling of people” which “eroded local allegiances, widened horizons, and fostered
localization (or lack thereof) in Concord ultimately backs up the argument that
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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).
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
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
areas (Encyclopedia Britannica). The theory assumes that central places exert control
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
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
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
(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
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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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
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
Regardless of his grievances, Emerson learned to accept and engage with the
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
establishing schools, and providing for the poor all among this small governing body
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
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
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
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
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
Robert Fanuzzi’s essay titled “Thoreau’s Urban Imagination”. Fanuzzi argues that there
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
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
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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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,
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
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
transcendentalism’s more practical components were in line with the same motivations
comfort of the suburbs and rather used his location in Boston to practically mobilize his
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
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
elevate exploited individuals in the laboring class; in this way, his interpretation of
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
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
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
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.
criticism of the movement, which was that it was too concerned with idealism and a
produce its share of idle, dreamy, useless people… But its legitimate fruit was earnest,
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).
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
community of Brook Farm. Brook Farm, formally titled the Brook Farm Institute of
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
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
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,
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
as well as an inseparable economic and social framework from which it was impossible
human potential. The process of activating human potential is one that is both inherently
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
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
Works Cited
Bessette, Joseph M., and John J. Pitney. American Government and Politics:
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Cowan, Michael H. City of the West: Emerson, America, and Urban Metaphor. Yale
Fanuzzi, Robert. “Thoreau’s Urban Imagination.” American Literature, vol. 68, no. 2,
Neighbors.” The Thoreau Society Bulletin, no. 261, 2008, pp. 1–4.
---. “Transcendentalism and Urbanism: Concord, Boston, and the Wider World.” Journal
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,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962. 270 Pp. $5.50.” National Civic Review, vol. 52,
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
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience. 1995. Project
Gutenberg,
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/205?msg=welcome_stranger#linkCONC.