The following post is part of a series on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.
The discussion of the self-made man in
this series has been dominated by political figures. In large measure, that’s
because I see the predominant vision of the self-made man in this era of U.S.
history as a decisively civic one, and politicians are typically in the
business of making, and acting upon, public-sector arguments. But other
versions of the self-made man were thriving, much in the way that there were
alternatives to the largely religious vision of the seventeenth century, or the
agrarian ones of the eighteenth. (Remember that Benjamin Franklin played the
role of a politician – among many others – over the course of his eighteenth
century life.) But one of the truly striking aspects of the self-made man in
the early nineteenth century was the way it led people working in arenas that
were not necessarily in the public sector to cast their work in such terms.
Take artists and intellectuals. In an
important sense, self-making is a credential for such people: whatever their
backgrounds, they don’t gain recognition unless they can somehow carve out a
space (aesthetic, ideological, or otherwise) they can call their own. Until the
middle decades of the nineteenth century, they operated in the shadow of
British and European models. After that, though, they became American. Which, to a great extent,
involved the paradoxical assertion of individualism – a term coined by
Frenchman Alexis de Tocquville after a visit to the United States in 1831-32 –
as a national trait.
There’s no better illustration of this
cultural development than Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was the to nineteenth
century was Bob Dylan was to the twentieth: a celebrity rock star whose
elliptical words were dissected with passionate enthusiasm by generations of
devotees. Today Emerson is remembered principally as an essayist, but in his
own day he was celebrated as a poet, and his periodic tours packed houses and
allowed him to make a living on the basis of his writings.
Which is not to say he ever saw himself
as a man who earned a paycheck. Born in 1803 as the descendant of generations
of Puritan ministers (his grandfather was a chaplain for the rebels during the
American Revolution), Emerson was educated at the elite Boston Latin School and
Harvard and ordained as a Unitarian minister. He took over the pulpit of the
Second Church of Boston, which dated back to the early seventeenth century, and
commanded a princely salary. But following the death of his first wife in 1831,
he grew increasingly disaffected with his church, and with organized religion
generally. His first major essay, “Nature” (1836), published anonymously,
became the manifesto of the Transcendentalist movement in the United States,
part of a broader cultural movement (including the painters of the Hudson River
School, for example), placing primacy on the natural world as a source of inspiration.
Emerson’s declaration of independence is widely considered his Harvard
commencement address of 1837, “The American Scholar,” in which he exhorted his
audience to forge an original relationship to the world. “Books are fine for a
scholar’s idle times,” he asserted. “When he can read God directly, the hour is
too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.” (Bold
as this was, it carried with it echoes of the Puritans, who revered the Bible
but nevertheless placed primacy on the individual conscience.)
Emerson’s signature statement on the
importance of the self-made man in its broadest formulations was
“Self-Reliance,” a text he delivered in lectures before its first publication
in 1841. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string,” he
exhorted. Other lines resound through history like song lyrics: “Whoso would be
a man, must be a non-comformist”: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds”; “Your goodness must have some edge to it.” Insofar as self-making
is an act of discipline, Emerson asserts, it’s less one of preparation or
diligence than a sheer force of will to cut through the Gordian knot of
tradition and duty. There’s something thrilling about this, but something
mystifying, too: how does one will oneself to will? Emerson’s critics at the
time and ever since have wondered whether there was less to his pronouncements
than met his (transcendental) eyeball.
Such suspicions were reinforced by
Emerson’s tendency to sidestep the raging political disputes of the time. “If
an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with
the latest news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy
infant; love thy woodchopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never
varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for
black folk a thousand miles off,” he asks in “Self-Reliance.” Over a century
and a half later, we recognize the type Emerson criticizes – crusaders for
social justice who have a curious blindspot for the quotidian realities of
their lives and ours. But it requires a real squint to see abolitionists as
bigots, particularly since many of the outrages of Emerson’s time were a good
deal closer than a thousand miles away. He would eventually come around the
cause, but a strong vein of what seems like caution seemed to mark his
politics.
Some of his acolytes were less cautious.
His cranky young friend Henry David Thoreau rented land from Emerson, putting
up the small cheap cabin that allowed him to write Walden (1854). Like Emerson, there was a curiously insistent public
thrust to Thoreau’s private life, typified by his more militant variety of
antislavery as expressed in the famous essay (now known as “Civil
Disobedience”) that landed him in jail for refusing to pay his taxes in protest
over the Mexican War, as well as his 1854 essay “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in
which he excoriated the complacency of his fellow New Englanders on the issue.
Thoreau’s insistence on living a simple life had an important component of
self-made ideology embedded in it; he regarded relying on others as a
compromise of an essential American freedom (even if he relied on his mother
and sister to do his laundry for him).
Next: Walt Whitman, self-made everyman
