transcendentalists - 1987 - Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution

Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution

Paula Blanchard

Addison-Wesley Publishing

1987

371 pages

Paula Blanchard wrote a highly detailed biography of Margaret Fuller, a member of the literary, philosophical, and spiritual Transcendentalist movement of mid-19th century New England. The movement is best remembered as the group which counted America’s best loved philosophers of nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as members. Fuller is a less remembered member of the group probably because her involvement was, according to Blanchard, oriented around conversation rather than writing. Emerson and Thoreau had not only attained a certain status as American philosophers, but also their writings did much to found a uniquely American literature.  Fuller's own writings were often relatively short pieces of social criticism, many of which were revolutionary calls for increased rights for women.

Fuller's output was lighter on textual production than some of the other transcendentalist, although she was editor of one of the major organs of the movement’s thought, The Dial, a periodical where she published much of her own writing. Blanchard's text is a very detailed account of Fuller's life discussing her strict upbringing, oriented around her education, by her politician father, Timothy Fuller. her background directed her into an adult career as a strict schoolteacher who was nevertheless loved by her students.  She then went on to enter the Transcendentalist circle in which she formed non-conformist beliefs and developed a strain of social commentary which blossomed into the fight for equal rights for women in America.  Fuller’s story as told by Blanchard ends with the great woman embarking on a European tour with little money, and ending up with a family - to her death on the shoals the American east coast upon her return to her homeland.

Fuller seems entrenched in the Transcendentalist movement, which led her to the cause of women’s rights and to become a pioneering mind in early American feminism.  I don’t know much about this volume’s author, Paula Blanchard, aside from that she has written biographies of other great women, such as the Canadian painter Emily Carr and American author Sarah Orne Jewett.

pacifism - book - 1966 - Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History

Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History
Staughton Lynd (ed)
Bobbs-Merrill
1966
530 pages

Nonviolence in America is a large anthology of texts that all share the advocacy of non-violent resistance as a means of effecting social change. The book is edited by Staughton Lynd, an American dissident and historian who, over the course of his life as an activist, has taken on a variety of social causes and deployed an equally diverse number of strategies to raise awareness of them. Nonviolence in America is one of the first publications in a fairly lengthy and impressive bibliography that has continued up until 2011.

Lynd’s anthology of writings by American authors espousing techniques of nonviolent civil disobedience was published in the mid-1960s and it was likely compiled, in part, as an inspiration to the burgeoning anti-war movement and the new left, to show a long history of such forms of activism in American society. The earliest writings include late 18th century texts written by Quaker abolitionists, and proceeds from there to the contemporary-to-publication Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the United States.  The anthology is great for including items such as Henry David Thoreau’s classic essay Civil Disobedience in their entirety rather than reducing such an important piece to excerpts or key passages.  Furthermore, the book also includes pieces from seemingly unlikely sources such as anarchists like Voltairine De Cleyre and labour leaders describing auto-worker sit-down strikes during the most dramatic period of organized labour history in America.

The anthology never waivers from its focus and demonstrates a strong history of effective non-violent direct action activism in a society that appears obsessed with violence. It is a testament to the historical repetition of the enormous moral power of enduring violence without returning it. The book was published in the year before the Black Panthers formed their first chapter in Oakland and fingered the trigger of revolutionary violence in 1960s America. The emergence of the BPP produced an already forming schism in the American Civil Rights movement and inspired other groups such as the SDS splinter group, The Weathermen, to pursue violent action. Lynd’s anthology was published again in 1995, when the anti-globalization movement was building, and the debates of the merits of violent vs non-violent protest tactics were renewed and continue today.

Transcendentalism, Henry David Thoreau - book - 1864 - The Maine Woods

The Maine Woods
Henry David Thoreau
Quality Paperback Book Club
1864 (1994)
423 pages

The Maine Woods is an account of a trip taken in the Summer of 1846 by Henry David Thoreau, the great Transcendentalist philosopher, through Maine to the Mount Katahdin. The book, published after Thoreau’s death (like most of his writing), primarily gives the details of the plant and animal life of the wilderness he crosses by foot or by canoe. The descriptions of these natural features, I would say, make up most of the book and demonstrate a very focused attention on the natural world.  This particular edition of the book also includes lengthy appendices that list the life Thoreau encountered.  

Aside from noting all of the different forms of plant and animal life, The Maine Woods is filled with Thoreau’s musings on human activities in its interaction with nature, focusing both on American development and treatment of the land, and on the Indian interactions with the land.  A particularly noteworthy passage was where Thoreau lamented the killing of a moose by a white hunter, just for fun.  Thoreau was very critical of such activity which is, in essence, cowardly, stupid, and wasteful. He was also critical of some Indian (to use Thoreau’s term) practices as well, noting that they could be equally wasteful of natural resources at times, although he certainly also showed a great respect for Indian culture and the final section of the book is a list of words from the languages of the American northeast, and their English translations.

transcendentalism - book - 1981 - Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850

Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850
Anne C. Rose
Yale University Press
1981
269 pages


A good day to you.  I purchased Transcendentalism as a Social Movement from Seekers Books in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood.


There are scores of books about the American Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.  The Transcendentalists were a group of poets and thinkers that orbited around Ralph Waldo Emmerson, the essayist son of a Unitarian minister who combined socialist political ideals with pantheistic spirituality.  The Transcendentalists included Margaret Fuller, a proto-feminist journalist, and Henry David Thoreau, one of the best known American philosophers whose book Walden, the author’s edited journal about the experience of living simply and close to nature, is still cited by all varieties of social drop-outs (it’s mentioned as a favorite book of one of Jennifer Toth’s Mole People, for example) while his essay Civil Disobedience continues to be quoted by political dissidents on all points of the left-right spectrum.  Most of the existing books on the Transcendentalists approach the movement as a literary or philosophical school.  In Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, historian Anne C. Rose takes the much less common approach to the group as a social movement that was intent on developing new ways of living.


Anne C. Rose is currently a distinguished professor at Penn State University (America’s #1 party school according to a 2009 episode of This American Life).  She is a historian of American culture who works in Penn State’s Department of History and Religious studies, and although she has a long and varied publishing record, most of her research has focused on the history of psychiatry or on American religious practice.  Transcendentalism as a Social Movement was Rose’s first book, and according to her preface, it began as her doctoral dissertation.  Rose thus focuses on Transcendentalism as a spiritual and socialist movement in the American context, emerging from a milieu of progressive churches and religious communities operating in and nearby to Boston Massachusetts, during the early-to-mid 19th century.


Rose’s book begins with a discussion of these churches, and in particular the emergence of Unitarianism in Boston during the late 18th century.  Unitarianism is a belief system that became popular in Boston during the early 19th century that considers God to be a single entity, thereby denying the divinity of Jesus.  Christ is an exemplar of moral behavior but is not a divine authority, and individuals may exercise their free will, ideally in emulation of Christ’s model.  Unitarianism also resists the idea that any church may claim authority over interpreting the Bible.  Rose discusses in depth the fluctuations in popularity of the Unitarian Churches in Boston that provided citizens with a greater spiritual freedom than the Protestant churches that dominated the region.


Rose discusses Unitarianism as a means of introducing the cultural climate that Transcendentalism developed in.  While Unitarianism never claimed a majority of worshippers, its popularity did give rise to a number of spiritual debates at the time, plus it demonstrated the possibility for alternatives to the Protestant church.  Transcendentalism developed as the most radical of all the alternatives, as a mixture of Romantic poetry, pantheistic Christianity, and pre-Marxist political socialism vis-a-vis the ideas of Charles Fourier.  Because Rose’s text is focused on the group as a social, rather than literary or spiritual, movement, many of the chapters are about those members who were most socially active (and therefore not Henry David Thoreau).  Rose includes profiles of the most socially significant Transcendentalists, including men like George Ripley, who left little writing but was a unique Unitarian minister whose involvement with the Transcendentalists led him to found Brook Farm (a Transcendentalist farm collective that Rose discussed at length) with his wife Sophia Ripley.  Elizabeth Peabody is another of the Transcendentalists discussed at length by Rose, whose work was primarily focused on new ideas in education and the domestic sphere.  These individuals were engaged with reforming the social sphere in accordance with recently emergent ideas about liberal spirituality.  Much of the book is about the social activism of these figures and their fight against slavery or the subjugation of women.
 

Rose’s book is a comprehensive look at the Transcendentalists on an axis other than the literary.  Rose’s analysis of the cultural milieu that the Transcendentalists grew out of as social activists is fascinating.  The historical analysis of Brook Farm brings the Transcendentalists onto similar spiritual-social ground as the religious groups discussed in The Communistic Societies of the United States by Charles Nordhoff.  Rose’s book also contains appendices which provide tabled details about Unitarian churches in Boston, and about the Brook Farm collective.  Finally, Rose contains a comprehensive bibliography which organizes texts by Transcendentalists according to their activist causes, which is a useful tool for further research on the Transcendentalists or on the activist rhetoric of certain subjects.