Emerson: The Greatest Liberal In American History

By Michael Hooper

Ralph Waldo Emerson is perhaps the greatest liberal in early American history.

In the 1830s, Emerson wrote letters and gave speeches against the movement of Cherokee Indians from their lands in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina.

Emerson was an activist against slavery for many years, long before the Civil War. Emerson was part of a group of people from Massachusetts who sought to make Kansas a free state. In 1857, Emerson gave a speech to raise funds at a Kansas Relief Meeting in Cambridge, Mass. 

Emerson supported women authors and educators like Margaret Fuller. Emerson, perhaps more than any other thinker, influenced religion, poetry and literature and scholarship in America.

I have been reading "Emerson: The Mind On Fire" by Robert D. Richardson Jr." I also pulled out copies of his essays.

Emerson devoted his life to studying the Classics and modern thought in philosophy, religion and literature. He was obsessed with connecting to Nature, the divine, the universe, the eternal. He loved biography. He mastered the art of writing of an Essay and delivering a Speech. He craved knowledge from all cultures including the Persians, the French and the English. He learned languages so he could read books in their original texts. 

Emerson believed there was here in America a voice of its own, separate from Europe, a dynamic place of achievable greatness. Oliver Wendell Holmes was inspired from hearing Emerson's speech, The American Scholar, in 1837.

Emerson studied the common sense Scottish philosophers and Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe and many religious texts. In religion he sought to strip away third parties between man and God and to promote a direct personal link with Nature. Indeed he believed all of humanity is in your soul, the answers to living are already inside of you, the knowledge to achieve a better life is there if we can only listen to it and extract it and apply it to our daily lives.

He invited many people to come to his home in Concord and share ideas for days, sometimes weeks.

I'm impressed with his handling of Jones Very, a zealous poet who had a Dante like religious experience with God and hell. Emerson saw in him some talent to express these joys he had experienced and helped publish a book of his poetry.

Emerson was part of a group of authors, educators and religious people who discussed and promoted Transcendentalism. The Transcendental Club's ideas were  published in The Dial.

Emerson led the literary salon of Concord and New England. Authors like Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Caroline Sturgis, and so many others communicated with him often and sometimes lived with him.

The daily walks to Walden Pond would have been a joy to participate with Ralph Waldo Emerson. He knew the name of every plant and tree, he can recognize a bird with its sound, he cherished the sunlight in the trees. He built a large garden of fruit trees.

Emerson teaches us to connect with nature. Go to the forest and listen to the sounds of nature, and so many things disappear, the politics of the day, The Madness of the crowds, all disappear. And we are left with the Majesty of nature. And somehow in that cool repose, nature lifts us up, calms and inspires us.

Emerson had his share of struggles and tragedies. The loss of his son caused a deep sense of grief that never went away. He said that grief did not make him wiser or closer to nature.

But oh he was a wise man for sure. He had great capacity for joy.

Emerson said "it is better that Joy should be spread over all the day in the form of strength, than that it should be concentrated into ecstasies full of danger and followed by reactions."

Emerson is the ultimate rational mind, the stoic with an inner burning fire, held in reserve, ready to accomplish multiple things in one day. He wrote over 120 journals. He indexed his journals so he could find material for his essays and lectures and sermons.

Emerson is sublime. His wording is beautiful. He writes as if he is talking to the gods. The words are part of the divine, part of humanity and philosophy and the universe. He is the ultimate transcendentalist because his ideas are always rising to the highest of levels, influencing for good, transcending mediocrity to greatness.

He lived a transcendental life because he was focused on the divine and looking for good in all people and all things.

In some ways it did not matter what he read because he was able to dig into the material and create new material in his own brain. I think the way he read was like a highly-skilled athlete or gymnast, somebody who is hyper alert to understand and analyze the words of the book.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is a hyper conscious individual who is connected to the universe grounded in the Earth. He saw injustice and was willing to speak out against it. He was widely respected in his day, so when he spoke out against slavery in Cambridge on Aug. 1, 1844, people listened. His Emancipation Address was a fiery emotional speech that called for the abolition of slavery. He had always opposed slavery but now he was ready to work actively and openly against slavery, wrote Richardson in The Mind on Fire.

Emerson spoke in favor of raising funds to help Kansas become a free state. He spoke in 1857 at the Kansas Relief Meeting in Cambridge, Mass. He said, "In these calamities under which they suffer, and the worse which threaten them, the people of Kansas ask for bread, clothes, arms and men, to save them alive, and enable them to stand against these enemies of the human race. They have a right to be helped, for they have helped themselves. This aid must be sent, and this is not to be doled out as an ordinary charity; but bestowed up to the magnitude of the want, and, as has been elsewhere said, “on the scale of a national action.” I think we are to give largely, lavishly, to these men. And we must prepare to do it. We must learn to do with less, live in a smaller tenement, sell our apple-trees, our acres, our pleasant houses. I know people who are making haste to reduce their expenses and pay their debts, not with a view to new accumulations, but in preparation to save and earn for the benefit of the Kansas emigrants."

Emerson was truly a man ahead of his times. There are descendants of Emerson living today. Kansas and America and the world are the beneficiaries of this great man.