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One of the most visible social experiments of the period was initiated by Albert Brisbane, who returned in 1834 from France full of the utopian socialist doctrines of Charles Fourier. Fourier's writings, fabular as they were, centered on three important concepts: 1)"Association," the principle of forming large communities in which economies of scale could be applied to domestic arrangements; 2) "attractive industry," the idea of organizing labor around thepropensities and abilities of individual community-members in order to make it pleasant; and 3) equality of compensation for manual andintellectual labor (Brisbane).In 1839, Brisbane began publishing these ideas to a wide and receptive audience. Horace Greeley took up the banner and gave Brisbane a front page column in his New York Tribune. In the years after 1842, almost thirty Fourierist phalanxes were founded in the U.S. The most famous of these, Brook Farm, was started by George Ripley, a Boston Unitarian minister who left his congregation in order to build a new city on a hill in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a dozen or so miles from Concord (Guarneri).
The Transcendentalists, centered on Emerson, also spent the forties dabbling in social experimentation. Margaret Fuller established her famous conversations in Boston in 1839. Orestes Brownson toyed with a Christian-workerist politics, before finally converting to Catholicism. Emerson tinkered with household economy, attempting to ameliorate the working conditions of his hired help. Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Peabody, after working together on educational reform at the Temple School in Boston, became immersed in enthusiastic communitarian projects after the Panic. Alcott started his Fruitlands Community.Peabody, as well as Hawthorne, spent considerable time at Brook Farm.Fuller and Brownson also made short, sympathetic visits (Rose).
The degree of intermixing here suggests that there is no clean line between Fourierist Associationism and Transcendental Individualism. They are varieties of a species: U. S. Romanticism. Both are ideological experiments driven by the contradictions between, on one hand, a strong vision of a benevolent society and, on the other, the grinding immiseration of the depression and the bleak prospects for change under the current system. They agreed on the effects of the present system: too much work deadened people to the things of the mind and spirit. And they agreed on the goal of reform: to make possible and encourageself-culture. Examining the degree of ideological correspondence between these two formations sheds considerable light on some of the major texts of Transcendentalism.
In the case of Thoreau, it has been frequently said that in moving to Walden Pond, he established an experimental community of one, analogous in its impulse to the larger community down the road at Brook Farm. But the observation has, most often, stopped there. This is partly because of his proverbial hostility to Association. In the Journal for March 1841, he writes, infamously: "As for these communities--I think I had rather keep a batchelor's hall in hell than go to board in heaven" (231-2). Thoreau's contempt for Association has been largely recapitulated by his biographers and critics, who have tended to use Brook Farm as little more than a foil to set off Thoreau's brilliance. But, of course, the people we most pointedly ignore are often those who are closest to us. With that in mind I would like to look briefly at some of the habits of thought that Thoreau held in common with the Associationists. More particularly, I will offer a short series of readings of passages from Walden and from a selection of articles published by members of Brook Farm, in which they explain their reasons for withdrawal.
It would have been impossible, even in Concord, certainly in Boston, to avoid daily confrontation with the brutal immiseration of thousands that was the direct result of the Panic of 1837. Yet both Thoreau and the Associationists are mostly quiet on the issue. There are occasional passages indicating awareness, but even these are curiously elliptical. Charles Anderson Dana, for instance, in a lecture delivered before the New England Fourier Society in Boston, gestures briefly at the people his auditors had probably stepped over on the way into the hall:
No one who has had any experience in our cities, where, within the sound of music and gay company, with half frantic eyes lighted only by gleams from luxurious halls, hunger and painlie gasping...could fail of regarding [Association] with peculiar gratitude, [for it is] a method of escape from such fearful evils, which, in offering abundance to all, invades the established rights of none... (25)
Dana aesthetizes and abstracts Boston's paupers almost to the point of invisibility before a crowd of potentially reform-minded burghers. The truly poor were, significantly, beyond the intellectual reach of most Associationists. Dana points to the spectacle of misery alongside opulence, not to harness his audience's energies to ameliorating the condition of the poor, but to encourage that audience to come out of such a noxious tableau. The poor occupy the same place rhetorically in Association that they do politically; they are little more than soft-focused markers of an old order that will disappear with it.
Similarly, Thoreau's interest in involuntary poverty is limited largely to its potential rhetorical uses. In Walden, he is mostly concerned to borrow the reflection that the poor cast on society: "It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages.... " (31). This passage comes as part of the discussion of Shelter in "Economy," throughout which Thoreau assails civilization for having lost touch with the true necessaries of life, for its degeneration into a greedy scramble. Occasionally, he raises the issue of the equitable distribution of wealth as part of this argument. But his point, despite off-the-cuff comments about who does the work of society, is not to encourage redistribution, but to attack the immorality of a society that, among other failings, has become rather too forthright in its disregard of the poor. Thoreau's paramount concern about the state of the society around him is that it breeds, not material, but spiritual, poverty.
George Ripley settles on the same moralistic emphasis in a brief article, titled "Life in Association." He describes how experience with society soon teaches people "to calculate on selfishness, more or less disguised, on falsehood, however glossed over with the appearance of truth, on fraud, which though in fear of public opinion, is always ready to entrap the heedless." He offers a thumbnail sketch of the problem's cause: "the man who is so devoted to gaining wealth, that he appears on `Change like a walking money-bag, with no ideas beyond his ledger and cash-book, with no hope but that of becoming a millionaire..." (32). Thoreau, similarly, directs his critique quite specifically at what he sees as the degenerative influence of new money.The audience he claims for Walden is partly made up of poor students and "the mass of men who are discontented" (14). But he also addresses, considerably more censoriously, "that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters" (15). Here is the true enemy of both Association and of Thoreau: the bounding, new bourgeoisie, whose single-minded pursuit of wealth and disregard of the noblesse oblige by which the old patrician order defended its status, present a dire threat to the moral character of society (Charvat). The real conflict is the one Thoreau stages wryly as an "internecine war" of ants, between "the red republicans on the one hand and the black imperialists on the other" (206). And the chip at stake is effective ideological control of the rapidly changing capitalist democracy of the northeast.
Given their diagnosis of the depression as being the result of a newly-virulent, moral pathogen, Thoreau and the Associationists focus on the importance of autodidactic spiritual regeneration. The problem, though, is to steal enough time away from work in order to pursue self-culture. Here is one description of Brook Farm's aims:
The hours redeemed from labor by community, will not be reapplied to the acquisition of wealth, but to the production of intellectual goods. This community aims to be rich, not in the metallic representative of wealth, but in the wealth itself, which money should represent; namely, THE LEISURE TO LIVE IN ALL THEFACULTIES OF THE SOUL. (Peabody, 363)
Acquisitive labor impinges on higher pursuits, not only by corrupting the laborer, but also by the more mundane mechanism of requiring too much time.This should not be confused with a call for the ten-hour day. The object of concern here is not the working class, but the potentially salvageable entrepreneur who is the slave-driver of himself: "Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be picked by them." (6) It's a curious formulation. The production and consumption of intellectual goods, the finer fruits, is limited to a special kind of time, leisure-time, that is directly opposed to labor-time. For many of those concerned, it was, to be sure, a commonsensical idea. Thoreau and most of the Brook Farmers were, after all, producers of intellectual goods--writers, editors, artists, ministers who had come out of their churches to devote themselves to wholesale reform. For many of them, getting a living, while also getting to the activities on which they had staked their identities and their class's right to ascendancy, had become a problem that occupied a great deal of hard thought.
But what about the idea that integrity and character are formed in the crucible of work? That too is present. The young Hawthorne, in his whimsical way, caricatures the process in one of his first letters to Sophia Peabody from Brook Farm:
At the first glimpse of fair weather, Mr. Ripley summoned us into the cowyard, and introduced me to an instrument with four prongs, commonly called a dung-fork. With this tool, I have already assisted to load twenty or thirty carts of manure, and shall take part in loading nearly three hundred more.... I have gained strength wonderfully--grown quite a giant, in fact, and can do a day's work without the slightest inconvenience. In short, I am transformed into a complete farmer. (Sams, 15)
He signs the letter "Nath Hawthorne, Ploughman." This is partly a matter of applying old ideas to a new situation--a new twist on Jeffersonian agrarianism, with its opposition between, on one hand, an independent, virtuous yeomanry who produce for their own use and, on the other, parasitic tradesmen and merchants who profit from the needs of others. It is a way of establishing an ideal form of valuable labor from which other forms may be invidiously distinguished. The office-bound labor of the new bourgeoisie produces wealth indirectly and is morally damaging, whereas manual agricultural labor directly produces value--immediately consumable goods that are free of the curse of trade(Newbury).
Most importantly, though, farm-work seems to solve the problem of time, for its produce is both material and spiritual. Ripley writes, in a passage that immediately follows his description of the walking money-bag on the `Change:
We cannot believe that the selfishness, the cold-heartedness, the indifference to truth, the insane devotion to wealth, the fierce antagonisms, the painted hypocrisies, the inward weariness, discontent, apathy, which are everywhere a characteristic of the present order of society, have any permanent basis in the nature of man;they are the poisonous weeds that a false system of culture has produced; change the system and you will see riches of the soil; a golden fruitage will rejoice your eye; but persist in the mode, which the experience of a thousand years has proved defective, and you can anticipate no better results. (32)
The extended metaphorical use of farming to frame the relation between human nature and nurture is no accident. Ripley understood the litany of moral failings, with which he begins the passage,to be the consequence of poor human culture. A fundamentally benign human nature has been deformed by the unnatural moral pressures of civilization. The solution to the problem of such pressures was to rediscover the originallineaments of human nature, which were to be found, of course, in the pre-civil state of nature. Through a familiar reduction, nature in the sense of prior laws and realities was located in the nature of rural settings. Finally, farm work was isolated as the ideal means of discovery, for it put one in productive, direct contact with nature, the better to apprehend its laws, which were the laws of one's own nature, of one's own spiritual perfectibility. This is why Thoreau says, "I came to love my rows, my beans,though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus" (140). Farm work is a form of moral regeneration, part of a campaign to relocate the battle of the ants. In effect, Thoreau and the Brook Farmers proposed to evacuate the field of material conquest and entrench themselves on the moral and cultural high-ground.
In "The Bean-Field," Thoreau writes:"A very agricola laboriosuswas I to travellers bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; I the home-staying,laborious native of the soil."(142) There is a degree of coy overstance here, the tense pose of a tableau vivant. As cultural performance, his farm work is most meaningful when observed, and especially when observed by the right audience. He is anxious to point out that the travelers, of whose gaze he is so aware, ride in gigs, not wagons. They are wealthy tourists, headed nowhere in particular, stereotypically at loose ends, not even bothering to steer towards their unimportant destination. He, on the other hand, belongs here because he is laborious and his labor, unlike that from which they are vacationing, roots him in the soil.
The Associationists, too, were deeply concerned that they should be observed at their farm work. A letter from Brisbane to Ripley, in which he brushes off requests for a campaign to raise further capital,makes clear the reasons for their anxiety:
We have a great work to accomplish, that of organizing an Association, and to do it we must have means adequate to the task, and to get these means we must make the most persevering and Herculean efforts.... Fifteen thousand dollars might do a great deal at Brook Farm, but would it do the thing effectually--would it make a trial that would impress the public? And for anything short of that, none of us,I suppose, would labor. (Sams, 155)
It was far more important that one of the U.S.phalanxes succeed publicly, than that any one of them survive. The Associationists believed in a kind of germ theory of revolution, whereby the clear advantages of life underAssociation in a well-publicized experiment would convince increasing numbers of people to come out of their lives of individual toil. Association would exist alongside the larger society, growing ever stronger, until it finally supplanted its former rival.
But problems, like weeds, were soon to crop up. Both because it demanded rural retreat and because it was surprisingly time-consuming, farm work conflicted with the need for its own display. Moreover, while hoeing beans is honest, it is also numbing drudgery. Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the rest, were interested, in the long run, in growing into giants, not of the body, but of the mind. They were not after a merger with the residual agricultural yeomanry.
To make matters worse, farming insisted on becoming abusiness. Alcott took Brook Farm to task for the enslavement of draught animals, and for polluting their fields with manure, but he was most contemptuous of their decision to carry their produce to market in Boston. Thoreau was clearly aware of the ways in which the market had invaded the countryside:
Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely.... By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmerleads the meanest of lives. (149-50)
After that first season of producing for market, Thoreau scaled back to planting a few rows for personal consumption, limiting himself to keeping his fields in a "half-cultivated" state, saying to himself, grandly, "I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds...as sincerity,truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like..." (148). The Brook Farmers, rather more practically, developed a de factodivision of labor, designating a number of full-time propagandists whose spiritual labors were subsidized by the work of their comrades in the fields. In early 1846, the Brook Farm phalanstery--its central structure and center stage for its performance of the cultural politics of communal farm work--burned down.Brisbane pulled the plug and redirected the flow of venture capital to more promising communities.
Thoreau, in the end, concluded his experiment by decidingto go elsewhere for redemptive contact with nature. At the end of "The Bean-Field," he writes:
We are wont to forget that the sunlooks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction.... This broad field which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the principle cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These beanshave results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? (W, 150)
This is the heart of the change from agricolalaboriosus to natural historian contemplating a railroad cut-bank. This is the motive for Thoreau's final investiture of moralauthority in the laws of wild, rather than cultivated, nature.
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