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The Concord School of Philosophy and the Legacy of Transcendentalism

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The Concord School of Philosophy and the Legacy of Transcendentalism The Concord School of Philosophy and the Legacy of Transcendentalism bruce ronda N 1879, the newly established Concord School of Philosophy I welcomed approximately four hundred paying customers. On each day of the school’s summer session, an average of forty people crowded into the parlor of Bronson Alcott’s Orchard House to hear aging transcendentalists and up-and-coming ed- ucators lecture on philosophy, art history, aesthetics, and com- parative religion. Central to the school’s success was William Torrey Harris, a Connecticut native, Yale undergraduate from 1856 to 1858, and leader in the Philosophical Society in St. Louis, Missouri. Rising quickly through the ranks of public ed- ucation, Harris became Superintendent of the St. Louis schools 1 in 1868, a position he held until he moved to Concord in 1880. Active in the Concord School throughout its existence, Harris gathered materials relating not only to its administration but to its reception as well, the latter of which, mostly newspaper clip- pings, he collected into scrapbooks now held by the Concord 2 Free Public Library. 1 Biographical information on Harris here and elsewhere is drawn from Kurt Lei- decker, Yankee Teacher: The Life of William Torrey Harris (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), and Bruce Ronda, “William Torrey Harris,” Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism, ed. Wesley Mott (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996), pp. 127–28. 2 I am grateful to Special Collections at Concord Free Public Library and its cura- tor, Leslie Perrin Wilson, for access to the Harris papers. According to Ms. Wilson, Harris kept clippings for the years 1879–82 and 1884–87, and within those limits his collection is considered more complete than any other. Harris did not, however, keep all journalistic accounts of the Concord School of Philosophy, only those he thought were accurate. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXII, no. 4 (December 2009). C 2009 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 575 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 576 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY The news reports that Harris preserved express a wide range of opinions about the school. Commenting that a practical education must precede a philosophical one, a writer for the New York Graphic mocked the esotericism of the program’s instructors. It is doubtful if a single one of the Concord School of Philosophers could run a hotel, make a mint julep, roll a cigarette, dig a square hole, tie a bowline knot, set a hen properly, boss an engine at a fire, find out the hole in a leaky roof, pack a mule, tell which direction is north when lost in the woods, or take off a lady’s gaiters in a graceful and perfectly respectful manner; yet all these and many more are the things necessary and indispensable to be known before human affairs 3 generally can be considered and judged philosophically. A competitor at the crosstown Brooklyn Eagle made the same point more playfully. An escaped inmate of the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, finding himself at large, fled west and lectured in Cheyenne on the exceeding “Beanfulness of the Bean.” “Simple psychological phenom- ena,” he said, “the intellectual activities of the mental faculties, as distinguished from inanimate forces of nature[,] of the irrational im- pulses of—” and here the audience arose and drove him forth. They were a plain, simple folk, they said, but no man could come down 4 from Boston and use such language as those in a room full of ladies. On the other hand, writing for the Cincinnati Commercial, journalist Calista Halsey recognized that the Concord School in particular, and other venues like it, filled a particular niche. This summer school is something unique in its way; new in its meth- ods and in the quality of the people whom it has brought together, and the subjects which they will consider. The summer school in itself has become an institution, and finds its reason for being in the fact that the brain-working people of the world, those who really need a vacation, would find absolute idleness stagnatious. And so they 3 New York Graphic, n.d. [ca. 1885], “Concord School of Philosophy Scrapbook, 1879–1887,” vault 35, W. T. Harris, unit 2, Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Mass. Clippings from this scrapbook are hereafter cited as Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 4 Brooklyn Eagle, n.d. [ca. 1884], Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY 577 compromise on a summer institute which strikes the golden mean between rest and work, and betake themselves to some seaside or lake where, between lessons, they can hear what the wild waves are 5 saying, and where sunsets put a gilt edge on somber lectures. In its coverage of the school’s nine summer sessions, the print media never firmly settled the question of whether the Concord School adhered to an honorable tradition of liberal education or whether it was a quaint throwback ridicu- lously irrelevant in a materialistic, results-oriented era. More specifically, critics asked whether the school had advanced or rewritten the transcendentalists’ agenda or whether it had merely exploited their fame. In 1977 Bruce Kuklick seemed to decide the matter for the present age when he observed that the Concord School rep- resented “the last gasp of non-professorial philosophy in the 6 Transcendentalist style.” For Kuklick and other critics, the school’s founders and speakers steered away from controversial topics, filled the humid summer air with summaries of Hegel and Plato, and worshiped their antebellum ancestors, some of whom were still clinging to life. It is little wonder that the school has not seemed a promising topic for further research and reflection, and it has, in fact, generated little scholarship beyond Austin Warren’s 1929 New England Quarterly essay, Henry Pochmann’s New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism in 1948, and a handful of articles, book 7 chapters, and references in biographies and encyclopedias. As 5 Calista Halsey, from the Cincinnati Commercial, rpt. in Boston Commonwealth, n.d. [probably August 1879], Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 6 Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860– 1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 58. 7 Austin Warren, “The Concord School of Philosophy,” New England Quarterly 2 (April 1929): 199–233; Henry Pochmann, New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism: Phases in the History of American Idealism (Philadelphia: Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, 1948). See also Therese B. Dykeman, “The Philosophy of Halfness and the Philosophy of Duality: Julia Ward Howe and Ednah Dow Cheney,” Hypatia 19 (Spring 2004): 17–34; Kurt Leidecker, “Amos Bronson Alcott and the Concord School of Philosophy,” Personalist 33 (1952): 242–56; Frederick J. Down Scott, “William James and the Concord School of Philosophy,” San Jose Studies 9 (Winter 1983): 34–40; and contemporary accounts in Franklin B. Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years, 2 vols. (Boston: Richard Badger, 1909), 2:485–513, and Sanborn and Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 578 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY an early instance of the ways in which transcendentalism was institutionalized and how it came to enter the nation’s histori- cal memory, however, the Concord School of Philosophy repays further investigation, and William Torrey Harris’s papers pro- vide a crucial means for doing so. The Concord School and the Transcendentalists’ Educational Experiments The origins of the Concord School date to 1842, when tran- scendentalist educator Bronson Alcott visited England to meet with fellow philosophers and reformers. Envisioning a school based on his understanding of Platonic idealism, he began to assemble books for the prospective institution’s library, a number of which were bequeathed by his English friend James Pierrepont Greaves, a disciple of Heinrich Pestalozzi. Once back in Concord, Alcott installed shelves in Orchard 8 House to accommodate the collection. A decade later, Alcott met Franklin Sanborn at Harvard Divinity School. A group of students had prevailed upon him to conduct a “conversation,” and they had invited Sanborn, then an undergraduate, to join them. Alcott was impressed with Sanborn, calling him “a 9 youth of fine genius and great promise.” In 1855 Sanborn became master of Concord’s one-room schoolhouse, and as his biographer Benjamin Hickok writes, he insisted that Alcott 10 “fill the newly created office of Superintendent of Schools.” William Torrey Harris, A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy, 2 vols. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), 2:506–10. 8 George Bartlett, Concord: Historic, Literary and Picturesque (Boston: Lothrop, 1895), pp. 155–56, 159. Both Harris (A. Bronson Alcott, 2:507–8) and Sanborn (Rec- ollections, 2:454–55) quote from an 1840 letter from Emerson to Margaret Fuller. In it Emerson sketches out a lecture series for young men to be delivered by Ripley, Hedge, Parker, Alcott, and himself during winter months in “some country town,” and he invites her to join them. In light of the last sentence: “we shall sleep no more, and we shall concert better houses, economies, and social modes than any we have seen,” and Emerson’s refusal to participate in Brook Farm, this letter seems more a light-hearted effort to imagine a utopian university than a serious invitation to shape a new institution. 9 Bronson Alcott, Journals, 13 April 1853, quoted in Benjamin Blakely Hickok, “The Political and Literary Careers of F. B. Sanborn” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1953), p.
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