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Review
| Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His Struggle For Self-Reliance, by Kenneth Sacks. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003. 199 pages. $29.95, cloth.
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| "The American Scholar," Emerson's celebrated Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard College in 1837, ranks among the great performances in American cultural history. On the one hand, the stature of the address is iconic. "Man Thinking," or the secular scholar as cultural spokesperson, has served as the inspired prototype of the pragmatic idealist, the philosopher of democracy, and the public intellectual (including the public historian) in American civic life. Recent works by Lawrence Buell, Laura Walls, Peter S. Field, Charles E. Mitchell, Robert D. Richardson, and George Kateb continue a long tradition of exposition upon Emerson's exemplary but elusive meanings. On the other hand, critical historical perspectives on the temporality and limits of Emerson's problematic creation have been slow in coming. Mary Cayton, for one, raised tough questions about the viability of the Emersonian-inspired public intellectual when the rubber of the individualistic scholar's idealism attempted to straddle the road of public acceptance and majority opinion in a democratic polity. There may be good reasons why the text of the oration has neither been assigned often in schools nor dramatized on audio, why educated readers seem to prefer the celebrity of this great performance to the substance itself. |
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In a new book, Kenneth Sacks accelerates an historical understanding of the troubled origins of the seminal oration. Concentrating on the man, his oration, his audience, and his friends, Sacks takes little for granted, and cautions against a-historical readings by literary scholars, culture critics, and philosophers. The inquiry focuses on the period around 1837 when Emerson prepared and delivered the oration. Sacks interrogates all the usual suspects in seven succinct and well-written chapters: the Boston background, Emerson's intimate family history and his Harvard education, his vocational fate as a Unitarian minister, the Unitarian cabal in control of the leading college in America, the Transcendentalist dissenters (especially Bronson Alcott), the tradition of the Phi Beta Kappa oration, and the emerging lyceum circuit where Emerson graduated to a secular calling. For a reader's reference, the primary text of the oration is reproduced in an appendix. |
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In Sacks' drama, center stage belongs to the distinguished members of the orator's audience, and the speaker's multilayered emotional, social, and intellectual relationships to key players. The unfolding scenes intensify as Emerson—feeling marginal and profoundly unsure of himself psychologically, socially, culturally, and intellectually—needs quickly to produce an oration that will honor, not desecrate, the formal occasion at which his father once spoke. The invited speaker was a torn man and an unlikely rebel. Bred in a refined culture of self-restraint, needing to please both his Brahmin patrons and his romantic friends, he strove to declare his individual self-reliance by fixing it within the realm of intuitive insight in popular vernacular experience. |
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By and large, Emerson succeeded in placating the distinguished audience by eluding the concerns which rubbed Harvard Unitarian nerves raw. For instance, in the American Scholar was precious little that could be called American and a great deal European. Emerson invoked rhetorically the slang and vulgarity of ordinary language experience, but nevertheless spoke in the refined language of his peers. The staccato pace of the poet of democracy defied the common sense philosopher's ability to recognize and analyze a systematic argument. And the claim for a correspondence of all minds in one transcendent intuitive understanding of Nature only served to mystify partisan interests advocating different and conflicting courses of action. Emerson did not have an unpublished thought in his voluminous journals and letters. Both the emotionally precarious private man and the culturally inspired public one were nurtured to live, think and muse on paper, notwithstanding the American Scholar's soaring sentiment, "Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times." |
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Who was this idealistic Scholar anyway, prepared to go the final mile, court public disfavor, and threaten position and livelihood by being purely authentic to self? According to Sacks, it was not Emerson. The founding father for the legacy of the public intellectual had a firm stake in the present arrangements of affairs, emotionally as well as materially. Emerson's subsequent livelihood and reputation were secured on the professional lecture circuit by reading essays in which the fashionable speaker neither challenged his middle-class audiences paying to hear benign messages of self-reliant uplift nor courted unpopularity that would detract from his celebrity as "seer" and prophet. Typically he spurned the practices of Jacksonian lowercase democracy while spiraling cosmically in the poetic ideal of uppercase Democracy. |
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Sacks has produced a very good book, one that should provoke further critical analysis of the American Scholar. He would have strengthened the argument by considerations of national trends in the 1830s beyond the close Harvard circle. Emerson was acutely aware of the times—for instance, the Panic of 1837, which permanently shook his confidence in his material security in a capital economy. Moreover, he was alert to innovations and opportunities for print and cheap publications in the rapidly expanding national marketplace. The reading audience of the future did not belong to the high style of Boston's cautious Unitarian literati. At Harvard in 1837, Emerson's American Scholar appeared to be a caged tiger. The question for us is: has the Emersonian legacy of the public intellectual and public historian—the philosopher of democracy—been toothless as well? |
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| University of Illinois at Chicago |
Burton J. Bledstein |
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