New Thoughts Content in this assignment is from American History: From Pre-Columbian to the New Millennium by the Independence Hall Association, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. An Explosion of New Thought What did it mean to think like an American? Once the colonists had thrown off the burdens and controls of England, the possibilities for political, social and artistic creativity and experimentation seemed limitless. People felt optimistic and determined that a new order would be brought to bear, not just on government but on all institutions of social interaction. So, from the beginning of the 1800s until the first gunshot of the Civil War, the American experiment unfolded like an epic. Opportunity, heightened by political freedom and a surge of nationalism, caused most citizens to believe that the experiment might actually work. Thus, a uniquely American tradition in literature, art, thought, and social reform emerged. Religion was renewed through a Second Great Awakening. Evangelists on a “divine mission” believed that churches were the proper agents of change, not violence or political movements. Ardent believers in the perfectibility of society tried communal living with distinctly utopian goals, convinced that ultimately their small fellowships would grow into larger, more influential gatherings for the common good of all. Women began to explore the possibility of individual rights and equality with men. Their agenda was quite vast and included not only the right to vote but also such diverse problems as prohibition and world peace. Reformers, sure that the dire human conditions in prisons, workhouses, and asylums were the result of bad institutions and not bad people, made gallant efforts to alleviate pain and suffering. Hopes were high that cures for social disorders in America caused by rapid expansion, population growth, and industrialization would work. In addition, a new school of artists sought to depict a love of nature and the feeling for our place in it by painting the grandeur and panorama of an unspoiled American landscape. And the new American thinkers? They exhorted each citizen to: “Hitch your wagon to a star!” The Transcendentalists and literary lights wanted to remind everyone who he or she was and might become. Their philosophy celebrated individualism, the goodness of humankind, and the benevolence of the universe. It was an exciting era to live in. But, like any other, it inevitably developed problems for which neither optimism nor expansion, religion nor reform could provide answers. The tragic flaw in the American experiment would slowly reveal itself in the widening breach between the North and the South over the issue of slavery. As the tone of the abolitionist cause became more and more shrill, it began to drown out moderation, compromise and good feelings. Americans had previously been willing to argue about everything from women’s rights to the virtues of homemade bread, yet rarely did they lose sight of another American’s right to disagree. But the unprecedented divisiveness of the institution of slavery and the resultant catastrophe of the Civil War brought down the curtain, in the words of Abraham Lincoln: on “the better angels of our Nature.” Religious Revival Standing on a hilltop in upstate New York, with the breeze blowing lightly through his hair, the Reverend Charles Grandison Finney surveys his audience. He is about to say something startling. In his grand baritone, he begins by exhorting them to listen carefully; he is about to change their lives. The message delivered by Finney focused on salvation. It stated that salvation is the beginning of a life of good works here on earth. Finney believed man can, therefore, achieve his own salvation. He preached about a merciful and loving God. Finney encouraged his audience to go forth, and do as well as believe. His flock was duly astounded. This was a unique and welcome message coming from the mouths of Reverend Finney and other American evangelists who began spreading the news of the Second Great Awakening from New England to the West from approximately 1795 to 1835. This was a message of hope and opportunity. Religion wasn’t only revived it was being transformed. Gone were the warnings that man was totally depraved; that he was “predestined” to salvation or damnation; that God was angry and full of vengeance. The amazing assurance that life on earth had its own rewards and was not just a way station on the road to heaven (or hell) touched people’s hearts. And they rushed to hear it. Thus, the revolt against Jonathan Edwards’s strict Calvinism produced many new sects. The area around central New York and along the Erie Canal was a fertile ground for Pentecostal fervor and conversion so intense it was referred to as the “burned-over district.” William Miller founded the Adventist sect based on the notion that he could pinpoint the exact day when the Messiah would return to earth. After having a series of religious visions, Joseph Smith, a young man from Palmyra, New York, published the Book of Mormon and established the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1830. The church was plagued with persecution from the very beginning because of its evangelizing, its separation from surrounding communities, and its radical ideas, including polygamy. Its members, commonly referred to as Mormons, were constantly on the move to avoid harassment. After Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum, were killed by an angry mob in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1844, the church members headed West under the leadership of Brigham Young. After a long, difficult trek, 140,000 Mormons settled in Salt Lake City, Utah. Ultimately, many of these groups as well as established Protestant churches like Baptists, Methodists, and Congregationalists moved to the West, carrying their message of revival and redemption with them. Since danger and uncertainty abounded on the frontier, evangelists discovered that the promise of salvation could be delivered with even more zeal. James McCready made his name preaching: “Hellfire and brimstone.” Peter Cartwright traveled across the frontier and brought religious services to countless remote Americans as one of the premier Methodist circuit riders. Sin and repentance dominated the camp meeting, a gathering that often lasted for days and attracted thousands of shrieking, sobbing, fainting converts. The message was simple: Repent your vices and God will forgive you. The movement was perfectly in tune with Jacksonian America. Methodists and Baptists made the greatest gains in numbers of members. With a less formal clergy and the notion that anyone could be saved, these groups meshed nicely with Jacksonian Democracy. Women became more involved than men, and preachers soon used the revival to promote “women’s sphere.” Soon reform movements designed to improve the worst evils of industrial society emerged from the churches America. At the same time the Second Awakening was freeing men and women in the North and West, churches in the South began adopting a more authoritarian, paternalistic tone and didn’t encourage thinking about or questioning of social institutions, since such probing might have an undesired effect. The idea that all men have a spark of divinity and are therefore to be treated equally and benevolently didn’t mesh well with the existence of slavery. But everywhere else in America, the church and the clergy became, at least in spirit, a champion for the common man, his individual dignity and salvation, and the betterment of his condition. Experiments with Utopia As nineteenth-century America grew larger, richer, and more diverse, it was also trying to achieve a culture that was distinct and not imitative of any in Europe. At the same time, the thirst for individual improvement had local communities creating debating clubs, library societies, and literary associations for the purpose of sharing interesting and provocative ideas. Maybe, people speculated, if any society were completely reorganized, it could be regenerated and, ultimately, perfected. Utopia, originally a Greek word for an imaginary place where everyone and everything is perfect, was sought in America through the creation of model communities within the greater society. Most of the original utopias were created for religious purposes. One of the earliest was devised by George Rapp, a German zealot, who took 600 followers to western Pennsylvania in 1804. Using shared funds to purchase land, the Rappites created a commune where they isolated themselves from others while waiting for the Revelation. Because of their extreme views on sex and marriage, and their strict, literal interpretation of the Bible, they failed to spread goodwill or gain converts. More hospitable to their neighbors and able to attract about 6,000 members by the 1830s, 20 successful Shaker communities flourished. They followed the principles of simplicity, celibacy, common property, equal labor, and reward espoused by their founder Mother Ann Lee. Gradually, Utopian communities came to reflect social perfectibility rather than religious purity. Robert Owen, for example, believed in economic and political equality. Those principles, plus the absence of a particular religious creed, were the 1825 founding principles of his New Harmony, Indiana, cooperative that lasted for only two years before economic failure. Charles Fourier, a French reformer and philosopher, set out the goal of social harmony through voluntary “phalanxes” that would be free of government interference and ultimately arise, unite, and become a universal perfect society. John Humphrey Noyes designed Oneida Community in upstate New York. Oneidans experimented with group marriage, communal child rearing, group discipline, and attempts to improve the genetic composition of their offspring. New Harmony, a Utopian Attempt; Depicted as Proposed by Robert Owen (Image drawn and engraved by F. Bate. Published by “The Association of all Classes of all Nations”, at their institution, 69, Great Queen Street. Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, 1838. New Harmony, a Utopian Attempt; Depicted as Proposed by Robert Owen (Image drawn and engraved by F. Bate. Published by “The Association of all Classes of all Nations”, at their institution, 69, Great Queen Street. Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, 1838. [PD-US], via Wikimedia Commons) Self-reliance, optimism, individualism, and a disregard for external authority and tradition characterized one of the most famous of all the American communal experiments. Brook Farm, near Roxbury, Massachusetts, was founded to promote human culture and brotherly cooperation. It was supposed to bestow the highest benefits of intellectual, physical, and moral education to all its members. Through hard work and simplicity, those who joined the fellowship of George Ripley’s farm were supposed to understand and live in social harmony, free of government, free to perfect themselves. However, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote about his stay here in The Blithedale Romance, left this utopia disillusioned. Finally, it was romantic thinker and strict vegetarian Amos Bronson Alcott, father of author Louisa May Alcott, who devoted himself to tilling the soil at Fruitlands from June 1844 to January 1845 in the hope that love, education, and mutual labor would bring him and his small following peace. He was later ridiculed as “a man bent on saving the world by a return to acorns.” The 1840s marked the height of the utopian trials. The belief that man was “naturally” good and that human institutions were perfectible had raised tremendous expectations about the possibilities of reform and renewal. These experiments ultimately disintegrated but, for a while, tried to be ideal places where a brotherhood of followers shared equally in the goods of their labor and lived in peace. It seemed that within the great American experiment, searching for utopia required only the commitment of people who found it easy to believe that nothing was impossible. Women’s Rights Although women had many moral obligations and duties in the home, church, and community, they had few political and legal rights in the new republic. When Abigail Adams reminded her husband John during the Constitutional Convention to “Remember the ladies!” her warning went unheeded. Women were pushed to the sidelines as dependents of men, without the power to bring suit, make contracts, own property, or vote. During the era of the “cult of domesticity,” a woman was seen merely as a way of enhancing the social status of her husband. By the 1830s and 40s, however, the climate began to change when a number of bold, outspoken women championed diverse social reforms of prostitution, capital punishment, prisons, war, alcohol, and, most significantly, slavery. Activists began to question women’s subservience to men and called for rallying around the abolitionist movement as a way of calling attention to all human rights. Two influential Southern sisters, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, called for women to “participate in the freeing and educating of slaves.” Harriet Wilson became the first African American to publish a novel sounding the theme of racism. The heart and voice of the movement, nevertheless, was in New England. Lucretia Mott, an educated Bostonian, was one of the most powerful advocates of reform, who acted as a bridge between the feminist and the abolitionist movement and endured fierce criticism wherever she spoke. Margaret Fuller wrote Women in the Nineteenth Century, the first mature consideration of feminism and edited The Dial for the Transcendental Club. Around 1840 the abolitionist movement was split over the acceptance of female speakers and officers. Ultimately snubbed as a delegate to a World Anti-slavery Convention in London, Elizabeth Cady Stanton returned to America in 1848 and organized the first convention for women’s rights in Seneca Falls, New York. Under the leadership of Stanton, Mott, and Susan B. Anthony, the convention demanded improved laws regarding child custody, divorce, and property rights. They argued that women deserved equal wages and career opportunities in law, medicine, education and the ministry. First and foremost among their demands was suffrage—the right to vote. The women’s rights movement in America had begun in earnest. Amelia Bloomer began publishing The Lily, which also advocated “the emancipation of women from temperance, intemperance, injustice, prejudice, and bigotry.” She also advocated the wearing of pantaloons for women that would allow for greater mobility than the expected Victorian costume—now these garments are called bloomers. As with the Civil War, the seeds of the quest for women’s rights were sown in the Declaration of Independence, claiming that: “all men are created equal.” Sarah Grimke wrote in 1837 that “men and women were created equal ... whatever is right for men to do is right for women.” That language was mirrored in the Seneca Falls Declaration. Thus, in this era of reform and renewal women realized that if they were going to push for equality, they needed to ignore criticism and what was then considered acceptable social behavior. The new republic’s experiment in government was going to need all of its citizens to have “every path laid open” to them. However, the ardent feminists discovered that many people felt women neither should nor could be equal to men. The nation soon became distracted by sectional tension and the climate for reform evaporated. This important struggle would continue for many generations to come. Prison and Asylum Reform The pretty woman who stood before the all-male audience seemed unlikely to provoke controversy. Tiny and timid, she rose to the platform of the Massachusetts Legislature to speak. Those who had underestimated the determination and dedication of Dorothea Dix, however, were brought to attention when they heard her say that the sick and insane were: “confined in this Commonwealth in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, beaten with rods, lashed into obedience.” Thus, her crusade for humane hospitals for the insane, which she began in 1841, was reaching a climax. After touring prisons, workhouses, almshouses, and private homes to gather evidence of appalling abuses, she made her case for state-supported care. Ultimately, she not only helped establish five hospitals in America, but also went to Europe where she successfully pleaded for human rights to Queen Victoria and the Pope. The year 1841 also marked the beginning of the superintendence of Dr. John Galt at Eastern Lunatic Asylum, in Williamsburg, Virginia, the first publicly supported psychiatric hospital in America. Warehousing of the sick was primary; their care wasn’t. Dr. Galt had many revolutionary ideas about treating the insane, based on his conviction that they had dignity. Among his enlightened approaches were the use of drugs, the introduction of “talk therapy” and advocating outplacement rather than lifelong stays. In addition to the problems in asylums, prisons were filled to overflowing with everyone who gave offense to society from committing murder to spitting on the street. Men, women, children were thrown together in the most atrocious conditions. Something needed to be done—but what? After the War of 1812, reformers from Boston and New York began a crusade to remove children from jails into juvenile detention centers. But the larger controversy continued over the purpose of prison—was it for punishment or penitence? In 1821, a disaster occurred in Auburn Prison that shocked even the governor into pardoning hardened criminals. After being locked down in solitary, many of the 80 men committed suicide or had mental breakdowns. Auburn reverted to a strict disciplinary approach. The champion of discipline and first national figure in prison reform was Louis Dwight. Founder of the Boston Prison Discipline Society, he spread the Auburn system throughout America’s jails and added salvation and Sabbath School to further penitence. After several bad starts, America finally enjoyed about a decade of real reform. Idealism, plus hope in the perfectibility of institutions, spurred a new generation of leaders including Francis Lieber, Samuel Gridley Howe, and the peerless Dix. Their goals were prison libraries, basic literacy (for Bible reading), reduction of whipping and beating, commutation of sentences, and separation of women, children and the sick. By 1835, America was considered to have two of the “best” prisons in the world in Pennsylvania. Astonishingly, reformers from Europe looked to the new nation as a model for building, utilizing and improving their own systems. Advocates for prisoners believed that deviants could change and that a prison stay could have a positive effect. It was a revolutionary idea in the beginning of the nineteenth century that society rather than individuals had the responsibility for criminal activity and had the duty to treat neglected children and rehabilitate alcoholics. Eastern State Penitentiary’s radial plan served as the model for hundreds of later prisons. Eastern State Penitentiary’s radial plan served as the model for hundreds of later prisons. (Image by Mike Graham from Portland, USA (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons) In reality it became clear that, despite intervention by outsiders, prisoners were often no better off, and often worse off, for their incarceration. Yet, in keeping with the optimistic spirit of the era, these early reformers had only begun a crusade to alleviate human suffering that continues today. Hudson River School Artists If you have a painting on the wall of your home today, it may be because of the influence of a group of painters known as the Hudson River Artists. While not as individually famous as many other American painters of the nineteenth century, as a group they had an important contribution to make. Before the 1800’s most artists were successful only if they could attract the notice of a wealthy family who could afford to have portraits painted. Artists not engaged in painting likenesses could be commissioned to recreate famous historical scenes to hang in the homes of the rich. But with the invention of the Daguerreotype, a precursor to the photograph, it absorbed much of the demand for portrait painting. However, a new American school of landscape painting was about to emerge along with a new form of public entertainment—the art museum. Middle-class people were about to become excited about art. Before 1830, there was no such thing as an art museum open to the public. Artists began to create work for the enjoyment of the middle class. Soon, it became as common to see a painting over the fireplace of a home as to find a Bible on the kitchen table. In 1839, the American Art Union was created to raise money for artists’ salaries. At first, 814 members paid $5 apiece to join the union; a decade later, there were 19,000 members and $40,000 in payments to artists in a single year. One of these artists was the landscape painter, Thomas Cole. Cole had no formal training as an artist. He couldn’t draw a likeness, or any real figure for that matter. But he understood something his peers did not. While artists had been painting Americans for over a century, no one had painted America before—the mountains, streams, vistas, valleys, and the limitless frontier. So nature became the subject of his canvas as America’s national myth and new identity developed. Cole became the spiritual father of the wilderness landscape artists. His early subjects were the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Mountains, full of beautiful scenery, waterfalls, and primal mists. Thus was a bold style of “native” American art created. Other landscape painters such as Asher Brown Durand and Fitzhugh Lane, and the panoramists Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt put on canvas not just the areas around upper New York State, but also the diversity of beauty found in the far west, the Sierra Mountains, the Rockies, Latin America, and Mexico. They tried to express a love of nature and a feeling for man’s place in it. At the same time, culture was becoming the province of all people, not just a wealthy elite. Thus, as foreigners looked on in amazement, the Hudson River artists left European tastes behind and began to paint the magical beauty and awesome power of nature in America with extraordinary success. Transcendentalism, An American Philosophy Transcendentalism is a formal word that describes a very simple idea. People, men, and women equally, have knowledge about themselves and the world around them that “transcends” or goes beyond what they can see, hear, taste, touch, or feel. This knowledge comes through intuition and imagination, not through logic or the senses. People can trust themselves to be their own authority on what is right. A transcendentalist is a person who accepts these ideas not as religious beliefs but as a way of understanding life relationships. The individuals most closely associated with this new way of thinking were connected loosely through a group known as the Transcendental Club, which met in the Boston home of George Ripley. Their chief publication was a periodical called The Dial, edited by Margaret Fuller, a political radical and feminist whose book, Women of the Nineteenth Century, was among the most famous of its time. The club had many extraordinary thinkers, but accorded the leadership position to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was a Harvard-educated essayist and lecturer and is recognized as our first truly “American” thinker. In his most famous essay, “The American Scholar,” he urged Americans to stop looking to Europe for inspiration and imitation and be themselves. He believed that people were naturally good and that everyone’s potential was limitless. He inspired his colleagues to look into themselves, into nature, into art, and through work for answers to life’s most perplexing questions. His intellectual contributions to the philosophy of transcendentalism inspired a uniquely American idealism and spirit of reform. The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing. —Excerpt from The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson The Transcendental Club was associated with colorful members between 1836 and 1860. Among these were literary figures Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman. But the most interesting character by far was Henry David Thoreau, who tried to put transcendentalism into practice. A great admirer of Emerson, Thoreau nevertheless was his own man—described variously as strange, gentle, fanatic, selfish, a dreamer, a stubborn individualist. For two years Thoreau carried out the most famous experiment in self-reliance when he went to Walden Pond, built a hut, and tried to live self-sufficiently without the trappings or interference of society. Later, when he wrote about the simplicity and unity of all things in nature, his faith in humanity, and his sturdy individualism, Thoreau reminded everyone that life is wasted pursuing wealth and following social customs. Nature can show that “all good things are wild and free.” Excerpt from Walden “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, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” “Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.” —from Walden (1854), by Henry David Thoreau As a group, the transcendentalists led the celebration of the American experiment as one of individualism and self-reliance. They took progressive stands on women’s rights, abolition, reform, and education. They criticized government, organized religion, laws, social institutions, and creeping industrialization. They created an American “state of mind” in which imagination was better than reason, creativity was better than theory, and action was better than contemplation. And they had faith that all would be well because humans could transcend limits and reach astonishing heights.