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.

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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. 268. 10 Hickok,“TheCareersofF.B.Sanborn,”p.102.

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 579 By 1860 Sanborn, together with Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Ellery Channing, and David Wasson, had formed the Concord Club. Many of these figures came together again in 1876 to found the Fortnightly Club, another reading and discussion circle, and even later, in 1882, William Torrey Harris joined Sanborn, Alcott, and others in the Mystic Club to study the work of Jakob Boehme. “In Alcott’s mind,” concludes Hickok, “all of these groups pointed hopefully toward a school 11 of philosophy in Concord.” Concord was, of course, an obvious site from which to launch an educational experiment. Alcott had moved there in 1840 af- ter holding and losing a series of posts as a public or private schoolteacher in Connecticut and Pennsylvania and, most fa- mously, at Boston’s Temple School. Elizabeth Peabody, herself a teacher and product of a female academy conducted by her mother and her mentor William Ellery Channing, had can- vassed their friends and gathered a group of children from prominent liberal families to study with Alcott. Temple School, which opened in 1834, sported an innovative curriculum that dedicated a block of time to physical activity and supplemented the usual lecture format with conversations that directly en- gaged the children, an interactive approach that sprang from Alcott’s radical and controversial insistence that education is not simply an imparting of truth and fact but also (and perhaps primarily) a means to “lead out” and develop the insights that children already possess. Temple School closed in June 1838. In conversing with his students about the gospels’ birth narratives, Alcott had violated Victorian decorum, and in response shocked parents withdrew their children from his care. Extending beyond Temple School, transcendentalism’s influence on children’s education was ev- ident at the popular school at Brook Farm and, later, in the postbellum kindergarten movement championed by Elizabeth Peabody and first publicly and permanently instituted in 1873 12 at St. Louis by Harris and Susan E. Blow. The notion Alcott

11 Hickok,“TheCareersofF.B.Sanborn,”p.114. 12 See Ronda, “William Torrey Harris,” p. 127.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 580 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY had applied to children, that education is about fostering the in- dividual’s critical and expressive abilities as much as it is about conveying information, he and others applied to adults as well. Peabody had already conducted a women’s class on historical 13 and literary topics in the spring of 1833. In 1839,Margaret Fuller, who had taught at the Temple School in its last year, opened a series of far-reaching conversations intended primar- ily for women at Peabody’s West Street bookshop. Fuller’s goal was to encourage the same self-trust in women, unaccustomed to speaking in public spaces, that Emerson promoted in his es- says and addresses. Alcott, whose failed communal experiment at Fruitlands fell on the heels of the Temple School debacle, also began to conduct guided conversations as a form of adult continuing education. Conversations close by Concord, such as the one Sanborn attended at Harvard, were followed in the 1850sand1860s by conversations throughout the Northeast 14 and Midwest. Harris, who had met Alcott in the winter of 1856–57 when the philosopher was conducting a conversation for Yale undergraduates, engineered such a visit to St. Louis in 1866. Alcott’s encounters with members of the Philosophical Society, especially Denton Snider and Henry Brokmeyer, who relished the bruising dialectic of philosophical debate and were contemptuous of their visitor’s oracular and unchallengeable pronouncements, were disastrous. But still loyal to his New England roots, Harris maintained a dialogue with Alcott, who 15 encouraged him to consider moving back east.

13 See my Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 93–94. 14 The sources on transcendentalism and education are considerable. See, e.g., Martin Bickman, Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of Ac- tive Learning (New York: Columbia Teachers College Press, 2003), pp. 38–74;my Elizabeth Palmer Peabody; Anne Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); and recent biographies of Alcott (Frederick Dahlstrand, Amos Bronson Alcott: An Intellectual Biography [Rutherford, N.J.: Fair- leigh Dickinson University Press, 1982]), Fuller (Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, 2 vols. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 2007]), and Peabody (Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters [Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 2005]). 15 For Harris’s connections with the New England transcendentalists and Alcott’s en- counters with the St. Louis Hegelians, see Pochmann, New England Transcendentalism

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 581 The Concord-based summer lecture series for adults began to take shape in 1878 as Alcott, Sanborn, and Hiram Jones, an amateur philosopher from Illinois then visiting in Concord, imagined a nonsectarian school devoted to “speculative philoso- phy,” illustrated by references to poetry and “higher literature,” as George Bartlett phrased it, and using some of the resources 16 Alcott had collected in England more than thirty years earlier. In January 1879 Sanborn wrote to Harris, at the time still hold- ing his post at St. Louis, to ask him if he would teach in the coming summer session. Sanborn then named the others he had invited to participate: Ednah Dow Cheney, Jones, David Wasson, Cyrus Bartol, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Wendell Phillips. “I am to be Dean of the Faculty—what think you of a scheme like this?” Sanborn con- 17 cluded. Harris quickly agreed, and he and Sanborn set about constructing a program for the first summer. Although Sanborn considered himself the champion of the transcendentalists’ rep- utations and chief editor of their writings, he could not match Harris in organizational abilities. Harris had, after all, system- atized an entire city’s public school system in the face of years of sectional and ethnic divisiveness. He had taken a leadership role in the city’s Philosophical Society and recruited several of its members for the emerging school in Concord. In short order, Harris had become the intellectual leader of the school, Alcott assumed the honorary title of Dean, and Sanborn took on the role of Secretary. The school’s prospectus announced that classes will be conducted by five Professors, who will each give ten Lectures or Conversations. . . . The regular Professors will be.— A. Bronson Alcott, on Christian Theism William T. Harris, on Speculative Philosophy H. K. Jones, on Platonic Philosophy David Wasson, on Political Philosophy

and St. Louis Hegelianism, pp. 34–65, and Denton Snider, A Writer of Books in His Genesis (St. Louis: Sigma Publishing Company, 1910), pp. 308–43. 16 Bartlett, Concord: Historic, Literary and Picturesque, p. 159. 17 Franklin Sanborn to William Torrey Harris, 12 January 1879, in Hickok, “The Careers of F. B. Sanborn,” p. 116.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 582 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney, on The History and Moral of Art —with special presentations by F. B. Sanborn, T. W. Higginson, Thomas Davidson, [and] George H. Howison. The prospectus went on to specify that “no preliminary exami- nations are required, and no limitation of age, sex, or residence in Concord will be prescribed; but it is recommended that per- sons under eighteen years should not present themselves as students, and that those who take all the courses should reside 18 in the town during the term.” The hedges Harris and Sanborn felt compelled to set around the school’s irregular form of education reflected a national debate dating from well before the Civil War over what histo- 19 rian Joseph Kett has called “intermittent education.” While some politicians, educators, and intellectuals welcomed the in- novations that had emerged over the intervening years, others harbored considerable reservations about the kind and depth 20 of learning offered in unconventional settings. The Concord School of Philosophy refocused that national debate on a site that for decades had been associated with the transcendental- ists’ often controversial educational experiments.

The Concord School and a U.S. Tradition of Intermittent Education At the opening of the nineteenth century, the new republic’s educational institutions embodied a muddle of influences—

18 “Concord School of Philosophy Summer 1879 Prospectus,” Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 19 Kett’s phrase appears throughout The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1900 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994). 20 Indeed, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, listed as a special lecturer for the first session of the Concord School, was very skeptical about the venture: “I confess that such exercises as those at Concord last summer, for instance, seemed to me likely to be only an injury to untrained and crude minds, however pleasant or profitable they might be to those already disciplined. American men and women are already too willing to believe that they can take in the most difficult study at a glance, or develop it out of their own internal consciousness, or by listening to ‘conversation’—what we need is to begin with mental discipline, always softened and enriched of course by intellectual enthusiasm” (The Woman’s Journal, 1 November 1879, 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 583 regional histories, religious preferences, gender differences, and divergent theories. State-supported institutions were slow to take hold in a rapidly expanding nation whose citizens fa- vored local initiatives and resisted governmental mandates, par- ticularly those requiring funding. For an education beyond the few years of primary school, many educators, parents, and young people seemed to prefer academies, which sprang up by the hundreds in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- turies to offer “intermittent education.” By 1855, as estimated by nineteenth-century educator Henry Barnard, there were over six thousand academies in the United States. Often funded through a mix of public and private monies, academies offered classes in reading, writing, English grammar, arithmetic, ge- ography, languages both classical and modern, rhetoric, and other subjects. As Kett summarizes, academies had a uniquely American character insofar as they arranged subject matter 21 into useful, short, digestible, and readily applicable portions. Moreover, the academies’ appeal lay not only in their short terms and lack of systematic curricula but also in the option each offered for those desiring either a coeducational or single- gendered experience. Of special note was the rise of academies exclusively for young women, such as those the Peabody sisters maintained in the early nineteenth century. Whereas academies drew their clientele from an emerging middle class eager for a taste of culture and from young women hungry for the kind of academic instruction long available to their brothers but denied to them, another early-nineteenth- century educational initiative, mechanics’ institutes, was intro- duced to teach the working classes the principles and methods of various applied sciences. As Kett points out, “the conviction that knowledge of science would make artisans more inventive was the most potent and widespread intellectual impulse be- hind the institutes,” but in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia,

21 Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge, pp. 90, 93. The summaries in this paragraph and below of early- to mid-nineteenth-century education in the U.S. are based on Wayne Urban and Jennings Wagoner, American Education: A History (2nd ed., Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000), pp. 57–61, 94–110, and Joel Spring, The American School: From the Puritans to No Child Left Behind (7th ed., Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008), pp. 78–89.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 584 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY mechanics’ institutes also extended their roles to become mu- tual aid organizations that established schools for members’ children, opened libraries and reading rooms, and sponsored 22 lecture series. While mechanics’ institutes pursued their mission of bet- tering their patrons’ employment opportunities and female academies alternated instruction in the liberal and the do- mestic arts, another model of education was emerging in mid-nineteenth-century New England, at least. There Uni- tarian religious and intellectual leaders closely associated with Whig politics argued that furthering education in a broad range of subjects would advance the nation’s cultural goals as well as the personal goals of individual learners. William Ellery Chan- ning articulated this position in his 1838 lecture “Self-Culture” as well as in two 1840 lectures devoted to the “Elevation of the Laboring Classes.” Channing made it clear that in using the term “elevation,” he did not seek “to dismiss [the laborer] from his workshop and farm, to take the spade and axe from his hand, and to make his life a long holiday” but rather to develop in him the “force of thought” that encourages the learner to “look beneath the surface of things, to look beyond particular facts and events to their causes and effects, to their reasons and end, their mutual influences, their diversities and resemblances, their proportions and harmonies, and the general laws which 23 bind them together. This is what I mean by thinking.” Com- peting with Second Great Awakening preachers like Charles Finney, who used vivid imagery to convince his auditors of the reality of sin, the imminence of eternal punishment, and the gift of salvation, Channing and others, Kett claims, encouraged clerks and laborers to read history and philosophy to “dispel the morbid absorption with inner emotional states that they asso- ciated with fire-breathing revivalism, while elevating the mind 24 and soul beyond the low and commonplace.” Moreover, the

22 Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge, pp. 112, 110. 23 William Ellery Channing, On the Elevation of the Laboring Classes (rpt., Hobo- ken: BiblioBytes, 1999), n.p. 24 Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge, p. 82.

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 585 New Englanders asserted, individual or small-group reading would quell the rancor of partisan politics and soften the bois- terous bustle of the marketplace. The studied irrelevance of the Unitarian approach lim- ited its appeal. Most adult white Americans wanted useful knowledge as well as moral uplift and preferred venues that packaged the two together. The lyceum movement did so, and during the first decades of the nineteenth century, it spread from New England throughout the Northeast and into the upper Midwest. Under its auspices, adults heard lectures on mesmerism, balloons, and railroad technology, and they absorbed the musings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott and the poetry of Jones Very. But the efforts of lyceum managers in the post–Civil War era to mix practical and instructive presentations with “cultural” ones (that is, having no apparent immediate application) brought upon them the same criticism that had besieged antebellum academies. “True learning” had become coarsened and oversimplified but also sugarcoated and therefore easily swallowed. American culture was, in the words of E. L. Godkin, a “chromo-civilization,” characterized by “lyceums, small colleges, cheap newspapers, and pretentious periodicals, all of which diffused among the multitude the conviction that labor and self-denial were 25 unnecessary components of true learning.” In addition to the self-culture and lyceum movements, the Concord School of Philosophy was organized against the back- drop of the Chautauqua Institution, founded in 1874 on the shores of Lake Chautauqua in upstate New York in an effort to improve Sunday School teaching. Determined to keep their experiment from turning into another form of revivalist camp meeting, founders John Vincent and Lewis Miller sought to 26 impart “culture” in a simple resort setting. For Chautauqua as for the Concord School, “culture” largely referred to a set

25 E. L. Godkin, quoted in Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge, p. 148. 26 Background on Chautauqua here and below is drawn from Theodore Morrison, Chautauqua: A Center for Education, Religion, and the Arts in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), esp. “Origins and Early Development,” pp. 3– 73, and Andrew C. Rieser, The Chautauqua Movement: Protestants, Progressives, and

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 586 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of preexisting behavioral qualities or values that were embod- ied in “great” works of art, literature, history, and philosophy and were amenable to systematic study and acquisition. In an era of social disorder—as the electorate was expanding, young people and immigrants were flocking to cities or nearby indus- trial centers, and politics and religion were growing increas- ingly partisan and combative—such an idealist view of culture had clear social significance, but as Chautauqua’s lecturers and study guides made clear, it also had personal significance, for a well-read and well-spoken person was much more likely to succeed in business or a profession than a culturally illiterate individual. To continue to attract middle-class families seeking both summer recreation and modest intellectual stimulation, Chau- tauqua soon expanded its cultural offerings beyond the oral and written to include band and orchestra concerts, music lessons, and theatre. In contrast, the curriculum of the Concord School remained steadfastly academic and collegiate, with a few excep- tions of reminiscence, memorial, or extended readings of jour- nal entries. In this way, the Concord School, which could offer neither seaside nor lake as inducement (except Walden Pond, which was suffering from an unwanted popularity), echoed Channing’s insistence on “self-culture” as mental elevation. In sum, the Concord School grew out of a desire to extend educa- tion beyond established institutions, it reflected the Unitarian bias toward liberal arts rather than vocational topics, and it maintained an elevated, austere, and rigorous attitude toward the acquisition of knowledge. How it would negotiate its com- plex relationship with the difficult heritage of transcendentalism had yet to be seen.

Transcendental Fire in a New Place? Nineteenth-century lyceums and academies often foundered for lack of funds, but enough fee-paying adults signed up for

the Culture of Modern Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), esp. chap. 3, “Canopy of Culture: Democracy under the Big Tent of Prosperity,” pp. 86–127.

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 587 the first season of the Concord School to assure its success and ensure its continuation. In early August, when nearly 160 persons crowded into Orchard House in expectation of hearing Emerson deliver an address on memory, the event had to be moved to the vestry of the Unitarian Church, back up the Lex- ington Road. Hour after hour throughout the stifling days of July and August, those first attendees, many of them women, listened patiently to highly abstract lectures. On one “parboil- ing dog-day,” a group of about seventy-five, who had paid to hear the peripatetic Scottish-American philosopher and clas- sics scholar Thomas Davidson lecture on Greek architecture with glass-slide illustrations, crammed into the Alcotts’ parlor, “with blankets at the windows and every door remorselessly shut while Mr. Davidson from a rear room projected the pic- tures down the aisle against a sheet.” One can only imagine, a reporter commented, with what desperate amusement the group chuckled at seeing images projected against somebody’s 27 knee or against a “young woman’s white waist.” Judging from the newspaper clippings Harris chose to save, the central question on reporters’ minds was not the heat or the number of attendees but the Concord School’s connection with its controversial past. In the opinion of many Americans, the hometown of Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, and transcenden- talism bred a bizarre form of mental disturbance at best and dangerous social and religious radicalism at worst, and they wondered if the Concord School might revive that troubling strangeness at the inopportune moment when the nation was wrestling with the specter of railroad strikes and the rise of a militant labor movement. In the school’s first year, however, most reporters seem to have been reassured by the line laid down by the founders: the emphasis would be on ideas only, not on social issues or controversial topics. The Boston Her- ald’s reporter observed that although “nothing can be done in any new direction without bringing together the mongrel tribe of free-lovers, new lights and persons half insane, who prowl

27 “Philosophers in Concord,” Springfield Republican, 2 August 1879, Harris Scrap- book, CFPL.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 588 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY around every movement that holds out the least promise of giv- ing them an entering wedge[, t]he Concord school is notably free of all this. The persons in attendance, whether men or 28 women, all belong to the regular orders of society.” Another reporter more pointedly reassured an audience worried about foreign or domestic radicalism: “Destructive theories have had no place here, but the prevailing spirit has been markedly con- servative. Nor have there been present as listeners any of the communistic sort of people. No attractions were offered to them, and though they could have come if they chose, yet the 29 atmosphere was evidently too unsympathetic.” A number of commentators disregarded Concord’s radical heritage to focus on its sacred atmosphere of high-mindedness, which, they insisted, contrasted favorably with the nation’s com- mercialism and working-class assertiveness. Walden Pond had now become “a mere vulgar picnic and camp-meeting resort, with boats and bathing facilities for hire where Thoreau’s hut stood,” lamented Reverend Julius H. Ward. Native Concor- dians, on the other hand, delighted in their “distinguished visitors,” whose “summer evenings are enlivened by the re- newal of the conversations which have been a feature of the intellectual society of the town for many years.” Ward spoke from first-hand experience; he was staying that first summer of the school’s existence in the tower at Wayside, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne’s last home in Concord, up the Lexington Road from Alcott’s Orchard House and currently occupied by Hawthorne’s daughter Rose and her husband George Parsons 30 Lathrop. This claim, that the school was conducted in a dignified, even reverent, manner, with no room for rabble either in the lecture hall or in Concord itself—despite their unnerving pres- ence at Walden Pond—did much to quell both the anxiety and the amusement of reporters, onlookers, and Concordians.

28 “The Science of Things,” Boston Herald, 3 August 1879, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 29 Boston Advertiser, 18 August 1879, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 30 “Philosophers in Concord,” Springfield Republican, 2 August 1879, Harris Scrap- book, 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 589 That fall, speaking from his “Editor’s Easy Chair” at Harper’s, William Dean Howells took a genially avuncular tone toward the School: “the project [of a summer school of philosophy] seemed to many an attempted transcendental revival which was sure to fail, and perhaps a little ridiculously.” But the project did not fail. He went on, “The good people of Concord did not laugh or pity, but saw with pleasure another leaf added to the laurel of their fame. The conversations recalled the colloquial encounters of Margaret Fuller and Emerson, and Parker and Lowell and Frederika Bremer, and the brilliant ‘transcendental’ circle of thirty or forty years ago. The lectures were profound and satisfactory.” In addition to the support of Concordians, the school project succeeded for other reasons as well, and How- ells readily identified one of them: “it was not thought best to admit teachers of the so-called positive, or cosmic, or evolu- tional philosophy. This way of thinking was thought to find its refutation and solution in the more spiritual philosophy taught by Mr. Alcott, Dr. Jones, Professor Harris, etc., and it was not deemed best to introduce a refuted or a warmly disputed 31 proposition into the course of instruction.” In other words, the school followed a conservative intellectual course, adhering to the content, although not to the probing, investigative, and thus radical method of transcendentalism. In the years to come, this choice would be subject to increasing scrutiny. Encouraged by the interest in and attendance at the school’s first season, Alcott, Harris, and Sanborn planned a second one, to run from 12 July to 14 August 1880. Added to the first session’s roster were new presenters William Henry Channing, Julia Ward Howe, John Albee, Denton Snider, Elisha Mulford, Harrison Gray Otis Blake, Benjamin Peirce, Cyrus Bartol, An- drew Preston Peabody, and Frederick Henry Hedge (although not all of them actually appeared). During the second session’s first meeting, a new assembly space, a “chapel” built adjacent to Orchard House with funds provided by Elizabeth Thomp- son of New York City, was dedicated. It was not a big group

31 William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s Magazine, 3 October 1879, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 590 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY that gathered, observed the Boston Herald, and it was “largely composed of cultivated women.” Still, “that a hundred or [sic] fifty men and women from various parts of the country are will- ing to meet in a fair and historic village, the Academe of New England, to converse on these topics . . . is in itself an honor to them and a source of satisfaction to the country,” determined a 32 reporter for the Boston Advertiser. That the Advertiser, “the mouthpiece of New England respectability,” should adopt such a respectful tone toward the school was itself a sign that it had 33 arrived, observed a reporter for the New York Times. Closer to home, respect gave way to sarcasm as the daughter of the school’s Dean privately registered her own opinion. “The town swarms with budding philosophers,” wrote Louisa May Alcott, “and they roost on our steps like hens waiting for corn. Father revels in it, so we keep the hotel going, and try to look as if we liked it. If they were philanthropists, I should enjoy it; but speculation seems a waste of time when there is so much real work crying to be done. Why discuss the ‘unknowable’ till our 34 poor are fed and the wicked saved?” It was a view that others of a utilitarian bent would increasingly come to share. On a more positive note, however, many skeptics took the school’s second season as proof that serious, sustained intellec- tual reflection was still valued in the United States. The Con- cord School’s most consistent champion, the Boston Herald, wrote that “it would be hard to find anywhere better lectures, more thoughtful, more practical, more concerned with the great subjects which interest the foremost minds of the nation, than are being given at Concord. They bear the marks of original thinking and strike down to the roots of things; they are listened to and sought for because they are live discussions of topics 35 which are always living.” Even the Times, rarely enamored of

32 Boston Herald, 13 July 1880,andBoston Advertiser, 13 July 1880, Harris Scrap- book, CFPL. 33 “The Athenian Academy,” New York Times, 14 July 1880, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 34 Ednah Dow Cheney, ed., Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals (Boston: Roberts, 1889), p. 68. 35 Boston Herald, 25 July 1880, 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 591 New England culture, observed that “people who believed the old transcendental movement dead in New-England will be- gin to think their opinion stands in need of revision, if they notice the revival of philosophy which has taken place at Con- cord.” What is being taught at Concord, in other words, is not transcendentalism as it was but “the breaking out of the tran- scendental fire in a new place, intellectually speaking.” The school’s approach is not only contemplative but practical, the writer insists, for it can be applied to America’s most pressing 36 social questions, including that of race. A few commentators praised the school for educating a younger generation about the original transcendentalists’ dif- ficulties. At first, transcendentalism was received as little more than bookish enthusiasm, wrote one sympathetic reviewer, pos- sibly for the Boston Herald, but “this was the springtime of transcendentalism, before it had aroused enemies and united itself with social, political and religious movements, which ex- cited the most violent hostility. The mild weather of spring soon turned to fierce storms and cold east winds, under which the ‘apostles of newness’ shivered and struggled for years. Poverty, neglect, contempt, misrepresentation were their lot; but they 37 had a good cause and good courage.”

The Old Religion, the New Science, and the Concord School To other observers remarking on the school’s second year, however, the Concord School of Philosophy was successful only because it had abandoned the vision of the founders of transcendentalism. A critic for the Protestant Episcopal pub- lication the Churchman, favorably inclined toward the Con- cord School but not old-school transcendentalism, suggested in a July 1880 column entitled “The Concord Symposium” that “the present tendencies of Transcendentalism [apparently those promulgated by the Concord School] are hopeful rather than

36 “The Concord Revival,” New York Times, 18 July 1880, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 37 “The School of Philosophy,” Boston Herald[?], 8 July 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 592 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY discouraging. Mr. Emerson, who was once more than suspected of Pantheism, declares himself a Theist. . . . Let us be patient with the errors and shortcomings of the reverent disciples of Cudworth and More [seventeenth-century English Neoplaton- ists, influential in English Unitarianism] as long as we have to hear the blasphemous bellowing of [atheists] Ingersoll and 38 Bradlaugh.” The most sustained attack on antebellum transcendentalism was unleashed by Episcopal leader Frederick Dan Huntington. In a long article entitled “The ‘Summer School’ at Concord,” reminiscent of Andrews Norton’s mudslinging assault on Emer- son’s Divinity School address in 1838, Huntington mocked the Dial for its “execrable, half-intelligible, affected, Germanized English.” He saved his most vicious invective, though, for the Brook Farm communitarian experiment:

So the experiment went on, hastening to dissolution and moribund from the start. If there were affinities, so were there antipathies and repulsions. Queer people, impracticable people, disagreeable people, in short, bores and dunces, always attach themselves to novel com- binationsofthatsporadicsort....Theweeds grew rank while the unanxious husbandmen discussed the Vedas, recited Schiller . . . or pondered the problems of the universe.

Huntington was pleased to note, however, that the leaders and speakers of the Concord School pursued a much more orthodox line. Even the surviving transcendentalists had mellowed and now apparently embraced received Christian doctrine.

Mr. Emerson, as we understand him, can no longer be counted among pantheists. Taking his public and private utterances together we make no doubt that he is a believer in one personal God, and wishes so to be understood. . . . All this and more may be said of Bronson Alcott. He has allowed it to be stated to the world that he is a Trinitarian, if he has not so declared for himself. His sympathies are distinctly on 39 the side of faith.

38 “The Concord Symposium,” Churchman, 24 July 1880, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 39 Frederic Dan Huntington, “The ‘Summer School’ at Concord,” Sunday School[?], 7[?] August 1880, 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 593 In his zeal for the “side of faith,” Huntington was undoubt- edly pleased to find what he was looking for, but other, less partisan observers saw similar trends at the Concord School. The reporter for the Boston Traveller wrote that “it is indeed a fact much remarked, and a matter of great surprise to many, that there is so much religious and Christian tone about the Philosophy School. The most staunch and orthodox believer in revelation, in the Deity, in miracles and the supernatural, has found much of the strongest and most pronounced Chris- 40 tian faith and teaching in many of the lectures.” On the other hand, some critics were not convinced that the Concord School embraced Christianity in any traditional, recognizable sense. Weighing in a year after Huntington had issued his pronounce- ments, A. N. Alcott argued that Dr. Jones reads from the Bible concerning the Logos; but his is not the Church’s Logos. Mr. Alcott accepts the Trinity; but his definition of it would utterly evacuate of all meaning any formula ever framed of this doctrine by a Trinitarian, and overwhelm with astonishment any theologian who should look beyond the word, and its jingle, into the sense. Seemingly, one might as well identify length, breadth, and thickness with the Trinity, because they are three. Observers of various persuasions were, evidently, hearing what they wanted to hear and seeing what they wanted to see. Writ- ing for the Free Religious Index, Alcott had only praise for the enduring liberalism on display at the Concord School: “The church itself, at large, could not do better than wholly to lay aside its dry, dead, fixed formulas, and adopt in their place some 41 such living, mobile philosophy as that taught at Concord.” Whereas one set of critics turned to religion to assess the Concord School’s fidelity to or deviation from its transcenden- tal origins, another group took science to be the appropriate litmus test. In the midst of the school’s second season, a series of damning articles threatened to diffuse the goodwill that had surrounded the educational experiment. In July 1880,Edwin

40 Boston Traveler, 21 July 1880, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 41 A. N. Alcott, “Some Impressions of the Concord School of Philosophy,” Free Religious Index, 5 September 1881, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 594 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Mead, a member of the emerging generation of New England social democrats and reformers who would eventually become late-century Progressives, charged that the school’s stance to- ward modern science was “dogmatic,” a reactive antagonism he contrasted with antebellum transcendentalism’s intellectual rigor. “By dogmatic I mean, for instance, the habit of con- temptuous reference unsupported by evidence. . . . One in- stinctively doubts the substantial greatness of any system of philosophy which has bad names for its neighbors.” More to be admired, Mead went on, was the “animating and . . . illustrative opposition” transcendentalism had demonstrated forty years 42 ago. A month later, writing in the pages of the Christian Register, George Willis Cooke, one of transcendentalism’s first bibliog- raphers, took up the accusation of dogmatism. “A dogmatic materialism cannot be cured by a dogmatic spiritualism,” he insisted; “and the attitude of the Concord School is one of dog- matism...[which]denies,rejects,andcondemns the scientific methods and results [and] utterly fails to take science up into its own methods, and to make it an aid to its own conclusions.” The Concord School was, Cooke concluded, propagandistic and, therefore, unable to tolerate genuine debate. “The real dangers which beset the School of Philosophy,” he warned, “are that it will forget how wide and important and all- 43 comprehensive is the domain of philosophic thought.” Fred May Holland agreed. Writing in 1886, he quoted from a re- cent guidebook to Concord (possibly Bartlett’s), which observed that

it has been thought best to make the school distinctively one of phi- losophy, using literature only as its vehicle or adjunct, and dispensing with science, as commonly understood. A few lectures, perhaps will be given to show the relation which natural science bears to philosophy,

42 Edwin D. Mead, “Philosophy at Concord,” Nation, 29 July 1880, Harris Scrap- book, CFPL. 43 George Willis Cooke, “The Concord School of Philosophy,” Christian Register, 28 August 1880, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL.

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but the whole field of empirical and phenomenal investigation will be left for those who have a taste for it. Holland’s verdict was succinct: “This is simply saying, ‘we are 44 not going to listen to objections.’” For Harriette Shattuck, on the other hand, the Concord School’s avoidance of modern science and emphasis on philosophy was thoroughly in keeping with the transcendentalists’ interest in religious reform, since philosophy “is only another name for religion, and those who scoff at this philosophy must also scoff at true religion.” Science is all very well, she went on, but philosophy aims at the pursuit 45 of “absolute truth and goodness.” The school’s designers and presenters had their own view of the matter. In response to Cooke’s claim of dogmatism, Eliz- abeth Peabody argued that the faculty were trying to explain the underlying unity beneath the material diversity, “spiritual 46 unity with phenomenal variety.” Although such an explana- tion was common among those who, like John Fiske, wanted to reconcile modern science with religious claims, it did lit- tle to foster debate at the school. Hiram Jones echoed the standard defense in 1882 when he argued for a “theistic sci- ence” that would demonstrate the fundamental unity of cre- ation, that the structure of the universe was identical with that of the divine mind. “The undevout scientist,” Jones proposed, 47 “is a lunatic.” The Concord School’s refusal to grapple with contemporary science certainly demonstrated the conveners’ shared preference for philosophical idealism and their dislike of anything that bore even a hint of materialism, as Shattuck argued. But Cooke’s point, that in betraying its transcendental antecedents the Concord School had hardened into dogmatism and incuriosity, could not be escaped.

44 “The Concord School of Philosophy,” Index, 17 June 1886, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 45 “Philosophy at Concord,” Boston Transcript, 18 July 1881, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 46 Elizabeth Peabody, paraphrased in Cooke, “The Concord School of Philosophy,” Christian Register, 28 August 1880, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 47 “Concord Philosophy,” Boston Advertiser, 26 July 1882, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 596 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Old Ladies, Old Men, and Transcendentalism in a New Age While commentators debated the merits of the Concord School’s neglecting science, or not, and embracing religion, or not, most casual observers were more interested in learn- ing about the institution’s leaders and participants. The school marched on through the first half of the 1880swithfew 48 changes. The 1884 session was shortened to two weeks and devoted to speeches and readings in honor of Emerson, who had died in 1882. Lectures on Plato, Aristotle, Goethe, Dante, and Shakespeare followed annually. In response to a Chautauqua-like suggestion by Fred Holland, who recom- mended that the school prepare and circulate advance reading lists to “give members some preliminary guidance in studying the authors taken up,” the organizers issued a detailed outline 49 of the 1887 session’s forthcoming lectures on Aristotle. After a stroke in1882, Bronson Alcott was perceptibly more fragile. A Boston Herald reporter wrote that the aging transcendentalist “has to some little extent the use of his paralyzed limbs; walks slowly about the house . . . but can take very little exercise, and does not improve in his power of conversation, which has been 50 greatly impaired.” For those who questioned the practicality of abstract and high-minded discourse in the machine age, it was precisely such news about the great men and women of transcenden- talism that bridged the gap between a past remote and un- approachable and one that felt near to hand and evocative. Anecdote portrayed for a younger generation precisely the kind of eccentric, rebellious, often cranky character and be- havior that, in the systematized, disciplined postwar years, the

48 Pochmann argues that the increasing number of presentations that focused on literary topics destroyed the philosophical character of the school (New England Tran- scendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism, p. 106). 49 “Concord Summer School of Philosophy, Hints to Students for the Course of 1887,” in Kenneth Walter Cameron, ed., Concord Harvest: The Later Transcendental- ists, 2 vols. (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1970), 2:311–20. 50 “The School of Philosophy,” Boston Herald, 8 July 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 597 Concord School organizers sought to dispel or, at least, con- trol. The transcendentalists may have been passing from the historical and cultural stage, but there was Emerson, suffering from aphasia, delivering a heart-breaking lecture on memory to a standing-room-only crowd of 160. Here was an edgy ex- change between Elizabeth Peabody and Frank Sanborn, who praised Roger Williams as being in advance of his age and yet who also persecuted Quakers. “Miss Peabody interjected, ‘It is very plain you never read that book yourself, or you would not say that Roger Williams persecuted the Quak- ers.’ Mr. Sanborn: ‘I did not mean that he persecuted them with secular weapons.’ Miss Peabody: ‘He did not persecute them in any way, and there is nothing of the kind in that 51 book.”’ Surely no story from the Concord School archives can match that of Abby Pratt for its mix of humor and high-mindedness and for its reminder of the intensity that transcendentalism con- tinued to inspire among its aging followers. Elizabeth Peabody had met Mrs. Pratt, then eighty-two years old, in 1886,when the Woburn resident traveled to Concord to attend the school’s lectures. Peabody had loaned some money to a “poor woman,” she wrote to Mrs. William Torrey Harris, and now had too lit- tle money to pay for her upcoming season’s housing expenses. Ever the patron saint of lost causes, Peabody hoped that Mrs. Harris might help in finding some inexpensive place for Mrs. 52 Pratt to stay. But in 1887 Pratt faced a far greater challenge than find- ing affordable lodging. After the morning lecture, she went into the woods above the school’s Hillside Chapel to await the afternoon session, telling her sister to look for her there, but when her sister did so, Pratt was nowhere to be found. A search party was organized and roamed the woods into the evening hours: “Lanterns are flashing through the woods on the height

51 “Irenaeus” (pseud.), “Wise Men of the East, Observer, 5 August 1882, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 52 Elizabeth Peabody to Mrs. William Torrey Harris, 23 May 1887, “Letters to William Torrey Harris [1864]–1909,” CFPL; quoted here by permission.

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Fig. 1.—William Torrey Harris and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody by the Concord School of Philosophy. Photograph by Alfred Winslow Homer. Image courtesy The Concord Free Public Library.

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 599 above Hillside Chapel tonight. The men who bear them are tramping hither and thither, looking to find a prostrate, an un- conscious, perhaps a lifeless body; and the shadow of a probable calamity, a possible tragedy, hangs above the School of Philos- ophy.” Frank Sanborn interrupted William Partridge’s evening lecture on the supernatural in Julius Caesar to ask if anyone had seen Mrs. Pratt. No one had. “Shall I resume now?” Par- tridge asked, and he did. Gradually the audience forgot their shock at Mrs. Pratt’s disappearance “and fell again to listen- ing.” In the aftermath of the near-tragedy, the Boston Post’s reporter cheekily commented, “Old ladies may come, and old ladies may go, but philosophy goes on forever.” C. F. Watts, driver of the “barge,” the large wagon that car- ried scholars back and forth between Concord center and Hill- side Chapel (and about whose expense Pratt had complained the year before), refused to abandon the search. Along the ridge west of the Alcott property and directly above Hawthorne’s Wayside, Watts found Pratt, unconscious and near death. “A dose of brandy and milk was promptly administered, and in a short time was followed by her restoration to consciousness.” She told her story: she had all along wanted to meet her sister above Wayside rather than Hillside but somehow had misspo- ken. About two in the afternoon she became hungry, ate a bread roll she had with her, and then consumed a large mushroom, which was in fact a toadstool. “Almost immediately she felt an overpowering desire to lie down,” after which she remembered nothing until the brandy and milk restored her. “Her spirits were buoyant and her love of philosophy revived in all its pris- tine vigor. She wished to attend the morning lecture, and was 53 only prevented by the stern prohibition of her sister.” After the school closed in 1888, reminiscences tumbled from presenters and guests. Lilian Whiting recalled Cyrus Bartol, whose chanting tone and swaying body invariably put Bronson Alcott to sleep. Occasionally Elizabeth Peabody succumbed too;

53 Boston Post, 28 and 29 July 1887, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. This story is also retold in Leslie Perrin Wilson, In History’s Embrace: Past and Present in Concord, Massachusetts (Hollis, N.H.: Hollis Publishers, 2007), pp. 91–94.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 600 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY then, “she would suddenly arouse herself with a movement that sent flying in various directions her bag, handkerchief, note-books, pencil, and all her various belongings which those of the younger and non-distinguished persons sitting near her 54 considered it an honor to scramble about and pick up for her.” Kate Douglas Wiggin offered an extensive remembrance in My Garden of Memory, including a touching account of walking with Emerson, Alcott, Ellery Channing, and Elizabeth Peabody through Sleepy Hollow cemetery: I never shall forget it: the sight of the four aged, benignant heads (three of them white with the snows of almost eighty winters) on which the mellow August sunshine poured its flood of light. There was no thought of time in the minds of these geniuses. They paused in their leisurely gait, sat down on a flat gravestone to discuss high themes, moved to another, always forgetting their hats or sticks or portfolios, which I gathered up in safety and retained until the proper 55 moment when they might remember their next engagement. Although anecdote tended to humanize aging transcenden- talists, thus making them seem more neighborly and less in- tellectually grand, anecdote also occasionally captured their relevance, usually covertly, for the social and cultural condi- tions of the present moment, the late nineteenth century. This was especially the case with reminiscences about women’s roles as presenters and commentators at the Concord School of Phi- losophy. Elizabeth Peabody, too ill to participate in 1882, often appeared to doze or wander during other years’ sessions. Still, Wiggin recalled, Peabody’s “mind was a complete storehouse of 56 fascinating and varied knowledge, and her memory endless.” Often in the thick of discussions following the presentations of others, Peabody offered talks on “Childhood” and “Emerson as Preacher” and a lecture on Paradise Lost that prompted “a severe tournament” of debate. In Philosophiae Quaestor; or, Days in Concord, Julia Agagnos lightly fictionalizes Peabody as

54 Lilian Whiting, Boston Days (Boston: Little, Brown, 1902), pp. 169–70. 55 Kate Douglas Wiggin, My Garden of Memory: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1923), pp. 153–54. 56 Wiggin, My Garden of Memory, p. 154.

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 601 Nestoria, “the embodiment of Memory.” In that guise, Peabody “contained within herself . . . the various ages of New England’s truth and beauty” and “recalled the mighty generation in whose van Emerson stood.” Surprisingly, given the slender quality of her book, Anagnos then addresses a key question absent in many of the other reminiscences about the school: what is the connection between the monumental figures and controversies of the past and the present moment? Giving a collective spin to the democratic selfhood celebrated in Emerson’s Nature, whose language she echoes, Anagnos challenges the present generation: “Thou art not, shalt not be, a dwarf among the eras...though thou art an age of the development of the 57 many, in contradistinction to the time of the few.” Despite Anagnos’s noble effort to draw a meaningful rela- tionship between transcendentalism, as she understood it to be proffered by the Concord School, and her own age, others were not convinced. At most, Edwin Mead concluded, the Concord School’s link to transcendentalism was “local, biographical, and reminiscent.” It made for a fine summer pastime “to sit in an audience of which Emerson is one, to see and hear men who knew Thoreau and Hawthorne and John Brown and the young man Alcott in the days of the Dial.” Insofar as transcendental- ism was now only “reminiscent” and its intense spirit of inquiry

57 Julia Agagnos, Philosophiae Quaestor; or, Days in Concord, in Cameron, Concord Harvest, 2:406. In explicitly connecting their insights to the work of Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe and Ednah Dow Cheney also sought to bring transcendentalism into the late nineteenth century. For Fuller, the transcendentalist ideal of self-culture functioned in a gendered world in which women were largely barred or discouraged from advanced learning, careers, and fulfillment of their promise. The transformation of society, Fuller believed, required the emancipation of half of its members. Howe and Cheney imagined that emancipation in different ways, Therese Dykeman shows (“The Philosophy of Halfness and the Philosophy of Duality,” passim): Howe arguing that, the sexes being inherently incomplete, individuals seek fulfillment in others; Cheney seeing each individual as possessing the potential of completion and stifled by gender assumptions and limitations. Even though these two speakers presented frequently at the Concord School, they were often, according to Tiffany K. Wayne (Woman Thinking: Feminism and Transcendentalism in Nineteenth-Century America [New York: Lexington Books, 2005], p. 116), left off lists of “permanent and active” faculty, excluded from journalistic accounts of the sessions, and relegated to “Women’s Day at Concord.” It would take a new generation of reformers, including women like Jane Addams, to carry transcendentalism’s legacy of individual uniqueness and utopian idealism into a new century and a new urban environment.

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Transcendentalism Memorialized and Institutionalized While commentators debated whether or not the Concord School of Philosophy had abandoned the social and religious radicalism and investigative character of its generative transcen- dentalism, and while others celebrated the school for providing the ultimate forum, close to home, in which the aging transcen- dentalists could utter their final words and be celebrated after they died, the founders groaned under the burden that their ostensible legacy imposed. Frank Sanborn argued that from the outset the school had been only partially indebted to transcen- dentalism and so should not be seen in light of the earlier move- ment. In response to a column in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, apparently written shortly after the close of the School, he composed a long account of the school’s origins and philoso- phy. The Missouri journalist had made a number of mistakes— attributing both the founding of the school and the reason for its closing to Emerson, for example—and Sanborn took pains to correct him. Sanborn was especially concerned to counter the journalist’s claim that the school had mostly taught “unadul- terated transcendentalism.” “The School never ‘taught unadul- terated transcendentalism,’ whatever that might be,” Sanborn insisted, “but from the first three quite distinct currents of phi- losophy flowed together in its teachings—of which only one was 59 what is usually termed ‘New England Transcendentalism.’” What the other two were, Sanborn did not specify, but in “The Concord School of Philosophy,” Warren speculates that they were almost surely Hegelianism and Platonism. According to Warren, Sanborn had it right (as did Mead, for quite differ- ent reasons): the school’s attachment to transcendentalism was

58 Mead, “Philosophy at Concord.” 59 Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years, 2:497.

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 603 merely retrospective and nostalgic. The veterans of the antebel- lum movement, Warren concluded, had “played no significant 60 part in the intellectual life of the school.” That state of affairs was, it appears from the vantage point of historic hindsight, not by accident but by design. Although the Concord School seemed to gesture toward transcendentalism, it did so only honorifically, for the school’s prime mover, William Torrey Harris, espoused a philosophy that was diametrically op- posed to transcendentalism’s core values. There is considerable irony in this claim: despite his long attachment to St. Louis, Harris considered himself a transplanted New Englander. In- deed, his fellow Hegelians of the Philosophical Society were convinced, after Bronson Alcott’s traumatic visit in 1866,that Harris’s real purpose was to reconstruct New England transcen- dentalism on firmer—that is, Hegelian—grounds. Even more, Harris was quickly persuaded to leave behind his post in St. Louis and move back east among the Concordians, first rent- ing Orchard House in the summer of 1879 and then buying 61 the entire house and grounds in 1880. Outstripping Alcott’s irenic but disorganized approach and Sanborn’s defensive and archival manner, Harris, with his powerful administrative skills, quickly assumed leadership of the school. For all these affinities, however, Harris’s mind and energy moved in a very different direction from the transcendentalists’. For him, the great need in postwar society was for system— system in thought, organization, and behavior—and the answer to that need lay in the philosophy of Hegel. Harris saw Hegel’s dialectic as providing both method and answer to a host of pressing national problems—industrialization, education, post- war reconstruction. Every problem could be restated as thesis and antithesis, and its solution as a synthesis. By the time Harris became superintendent of schools, he exerted what Martin Bickman has called “a conservative force, emphasizing the value

60 Warren, “The Concord School of Philosophy,” p. 230. 61 The Alcotts had moved to the Thoreau family house on Main Street, which Anna Alcott Pratt had bought for her sons and her parents, in 1877. Orchard House then stood empty until summer 1879, when Harris rented second-floor rooms and the ground floor was used for School of Philosophy sessions.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 604 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of textbooks and the differentiated curriculum against innova- tions that tried to make education more experiential and holis- tic.” Harris’s philosophical idealism “had become a rationale for existing educational practices and served a defensive stance to- ward new weather in the intellectual climate such as Darwinism 62 and pragmatic instrumentalism.” The sheer force and energy by which Harris and his fellow Hegelians applied the dialectic to every issue were at odds with the experimental and im- provisatory approach of the transcendentalists, whose radical- ism lay precisely in their rejection of deductive method. In St. Louis, Harris and the Hegelians found other forms of radicalism equally suspect. Their celebration of German culture and phi- losophy did not extend to socialists and anarchists, nor to “the 63 immigrant laborer, the untutored, the boorish.” By extension, Harris would not have welcomed any suggestion that antebel- lum transcendentalism and its embrace of communitarianism might speak to the pressing postwar issues of capital and labor. Having relocated to the East, Harris clarified the conser- vative implications of his Hegelianism, arguing that humanity expresses itself best through institutions, rarely through the witness of eccentric or visionary individuals. “All institutions of man;—and it cannot be repeated too often that human nature is revealed in and by means of institutions alone—are combi- nations or organizations of man, united under the direction of 64 an ideal.” Summaries of Harris’s lectures nearly always re- marked on his insistence on structure, organization, discipline, that is, that institutions were an essential component of mod- ern life. As for Emerson’s notion of self-reliance, or versions of self-culture as different as Channing’s and Fuller’s, Harris dis- missed them all in a lecture entitled “Philosophy and Religion.”

62 Bickman, Minding American Education, p. 60. A fair-minded assessment of the spread of Hegelian thought in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century United States can be found in “Introduction: The American Hegelians,” in The American Hegelians: An Intellectual Episode in the History of Western America, ed. William H. Goetzmann (New York: Knopf, 1973), pp. 3–18. 63 Pochmann, New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism, p. 17. 64 Harris, “The Place of Latin and Greek in Modern Education,” lecture to the American Institute of Education, 10 August 1879, summary in 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 605 George Parsons Lathrop, Hawthorne’s son-in-law, reported to the Boston Sunday Herald that Harris argued that

the affirmation of the individual reason as ultimate measure of all things is an utter negation of the universal and absolute reason, until step by step the individual widens his syntheses and . . . sees that his own rationality rests upon infinite mediation. . . . The puny individual, at his weakest because most ignorant stage, cuts loose from the world of realized reason and its institutions, and in his grim loneliness turns 65 to reconstruct a new world.

Likewise, it soon became evident that, in contrast to the challenge some of the original transcendentalists had mounted against theism, Harris would defend it. At the close of the school’s first session, the Boston Advertiser put it this way: “the cardinal doctrine of the Concord philosophy has been to estab- lish the first principle of the universe as a conscious personal- ity. . . . [A]ll the teaching of the school has been subordinated to this, and the result has been that the outgoing influence has 66 been brave, conservative, and helpful.” The following year, another reporter made the point even more explicitly: “Profes- sor Harris strongly combats pantheism in all its forms and ma- terialism, and his religious views are, substantially, those of the 67 Congregational denomination of which body he is a member.” The judgment of George Cooke, also writing in 1880,was emphatic: “the School of Philosophy does not occupy the ground of the old Transcendentalism. Emerson and his co- workers laid so much stress on the ability of the soul to testify to the truths of religion that they ignored the real claims of his- 68 torical Christianity.” Harris, on the other hand, did not ignore those claims but, in fact, upheld them, as in an 1881 lecture in which he demonstrated the reasonableness of believing in the

65 George Parsons Lathrop, “William Torrey Harris,” Boston Sunday Herald, 1 Au- gust 1880, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 66 Boston Advertiser, 18 August 1879, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 67 “The Concord Philosophers,” Boston Traveler, 16 July 1880, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL. 68 Cooke, “The Concord School of Philosophy,” Christian Register, 28 August 1880, Harris Scrapbook, CFPL.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.575 by guest on 02 October 2021 606 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY miracles as described in the New Testament. In so arguing, he had allied himself, ironically, with conservative apologists like Andrews Norton, who in 1836 had fought to preserve Unitarian theism and Lockean empiricism against the gathering criticisms of transcendentalists like George Ripley. As historians and psychologists propose from their differing perspectives, both individual and collective memory can be un- derstood as the re-presentation and re-interpretation of past events and emotions in the present moment, shaped by the needs and perspective of the present. Jan Assman, for exam- ple, has defined “cultural memory” as “that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image. Upon such collective knowledge, for the most part (but not exclusively) of the past, each group bases its aware- 69 ness of unity and particularity.” Many late-nineteenth-century middle-class Americans seemed bent on articulating a “remem- brance culture,” David Blight and Ben Railton have observed, that celebrated a heroic past and projected a unitary vision of 70 progress. Directed by his personal disposition and influenced by his era’s cultural agenda to stabilize values and behavior in the midst of dramatic social change, William Torrey Harris was most definitely among those remembrancers. And so, evidently, was Sanborn. In organizing the Concord School of Philosophy with Bron- son Alcott, Sanborn and Harris had sought to benefit from their acquaintance with the aging transcendentalists, but as the two men looked back on the experience, they argued that they had pursued an independent course. In practice, the transcen- dentalism officially remembered at the Concord School had largely been stripped of its radical dimensions. The school did

69 Jan Assman, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 132–33. On memory as social activity, see Maurice Halbwachs, On Collec- tive Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), passim, and Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 120–24. 70 David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), and Ben Railton, Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876– 1893 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007).

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 607 celebrate the transcendentalists—in reminiscences, memorials, and readings—but it did so by sealing them off in the past or by viewing them as they were in the 1880s, elders respected but no longer influential. The Concord School chose to re-present transcendentalism in this way so as not to disrupt its own con- ventionality or call attention to its unwillingness to engage the challenges of post–Civil War America. Still, journalists and auditors alike understood, if the founders did not, that by locating the school in Concord and involv- ing the veterans of the transcendentalist movement, the school would inevitably be linked to it. And so it was. Despite Harris’s and Sanborn’s efforts to immunize the Concord School against the radical implications of transcendentalism, those associations clung to the school as closely as the long summer days’ humid- ity clung to the brows of its participants. Indeed, the school and transcendentalism were bound together until the very end. On 3 March 1888, Frank Sanborn wrote to William Harris that “Mr. Alcott is slowly dying and may be dead before this 71 reaches you.” In fact, Alcott died the very next day. The Con- cord School’s only gathering in 1888 was on 16 June, Alcott’s memorial service. It was the school’s final meeting.

71 Sanborn to Harris, 3 March 1888, “Letters to William Torrey Harris, [1864]– 1909,” CFPL; quoted here by permission.

Bruce Ronda is Professor and Chair of the English Depart- ment at Colorado State University. His publications include The Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, American Renaissance Woman (Wesleyan University Press, 1984), In- tellect and Spirit: The Life and Work of Robert Coles (Crossroads/Continuum, 1989), Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1999), and Reading the Old Man: John Brown in American Culture (University of Tennessee Press, 2008). He is currently working on a study of the influ- ence of transcendentalism on American thought and expression in the century after 1860.

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