The People of Concord: American Intellectuals and Their Timeless Ideas, by Paul Brooks. I've sometimes thought that Concord, Massachusetts would be a remarkable place to visit. It seems like a place full of history and natural beauty. I doubt that time, distance, and financial concerns will ever permit it--I do live an awful long way off--but I can dream.
Anyway, Brooks certainly makes mid-19th-century Concord seem like a fascinating place. It seems to have been a prosperous and bucolic community in the days before the railroads set runaway economic development on fast-forward. It already had 200 years of recorded history behind it. And there were notable, little-remembered local citizens like lawyer Samuel Hoar, who seems to have been an admirable fellow in some ways.
Of course most of the attention goes to Concord's more famous inhabitants and neighbors. There was the Brook Farm commune, for example, one of the very best-remembered of hundreds of experiments in communal living in 19th-century America. They made a go of it for several years until they fell under the spell of the madman Fourier. If you study 19th-century utopias you'll notice that Fouriest communities were invariably the shortest-lived of them. Sure enough, within a year of their adoption Fourier's lunatic notions had killed the Brook Farm dead. Meanwhile Bronson Alcott had been hard at work with his Fruitlands community, which made the Brook Farmers look like the most hardheaded and worldly of Yankee entrepreneurs by comparison.
There were the Alcott women, struggling to deal with would-be intellectual and reformer Bronson's decades-long midlife crisis. There was Emerson, the great guru, whose lectures and essays Sarah Ripley, "probably the best-educated woman in Concord," admitted she couldn't always get. Never mind, Emerson has always had plenty of admirers who lacked her honesty.... There was Thoreau, the sociable semi-recluse and worshiper at the shrine of Nature, who in his youth goofed around and started a forest fire that incinerated hundreds of acres. Brooks' account of Thoreau's uphill struggle to get Sam Staples, Concord's amiable town jailer, to lock him up long enough to enable him to present himself as a martyr for the cause of Civil Disobedience is more than a little amusing.
Brooks obviously admires these figures from the Flowering of New England. In some ways, most especially their faithful espousal of abolitionism, they are admirable. The only figure of the bunch whose works I've ever really gotten into, though, is odd man out Hawthorne. Hawthorne was the one who refused to drink the Transcendentalist Kool-Aid about the divinity and perfectability of human nature. He recognized that, like it or not, the fundamental fallenness of human nature couldn't simply be wished away. To me, Hawthorne's work still has more relevance than all the rest of them put together.
