American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  The community needed new and different blood. In August 1843 Ripley, who had heard much about the “Associationist” movement touted by Greeley and others, attended a convention in Albany, New York, where interested parties supported the recently announced North American Phalanx, planned for Red Bank, New Jersey. When he returned to Brook Farm, Brisbane came with him and in Boston delivered two lectures on Association. The poet Walt Whitman (himself interested in Fourier’s ideas) provides a memorable portrait of Brisbane in these years. He was “a tall, slender man,” Whitman recalled, “round-shouldered, chin stuck out, deep set eyes, sack-coat.” Somehow or other, he concluded, Brisbane always looked as if he were attempting “to think out some problem a little too hard for him.”28 But his audiences sought to follow his cerebration. His first lecture, at the Marlborough Street Chapel in Boston, drew three hundred people, and his second talk two days later filled the building.

  Pleased with his success on the platform, Brisbane also was excited by what he saw at West Roxbury. In subsequent Tribune columns he touted Brook Farm and encouraged artisans of all types to cast their lot with Ripley, who already had established one industry, shoemaking, to boost Brook Farm’s financial resources. In the fall, two new journals committed to the Associationist movement, William Henry Channing’s The Present and Brisbane’s The Phalanx, included Brook Farm among the experimental communities they praised, prompting Ripley to consider more formal association with the New York Fourierist wing, particularly so that he could solicit its wealthy backers.

  Matters came to a head in late December, when Brook Farm sent representatives to a four-day convention of Friends of Social Reform at the Tremont Temple in Boston. Joining delegates from Ballou’s Hopedale enterprise, the Northampton (Massachusetts) Association of Education and Industry (established by radical abolitionists), and the Skaneateles Community from rural New York (also founded by abolitionists but distinctive in prohibiting private property) were most of New England’s prominent reformers: Alcott, Garrison, Brownson, and the recently escaped slave Frederick Douglass (now lecturing for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society), among others. Sensing that the time was right to win converts in New England, New York–based reformers like Brisbane, Greeley, Parke Godwin, and William Henry Channing also attended. Ripley and others in the Brook Farm contingent returned to West Roxbury convinced that the community’s success depended on its adoption of Fourier’s economic principles, a transition they did not think would be that difficult. Shortly after the New Year, Ripley met with Brook Farm’s shareholders to win approval for the plan. His task did not prove difficult, for the membership, whether or not they approved of the shift to Fourierism, understood the necessity of a change of direction.

  In early January 1844 the community heard and approved a revised constitution and articles of agreement for what from that point on was called the Brook Farm Association for Industry and Education. The change reflected Ripley’s decision to diversify the community’s economy by taking in more craftsmen and laborers, which Greeley and Brisbane thought necessary but which irrevocably changed its membership. The new constitution reflected Fourier’s scheme for the reorganization of work: a General Direction (that is, a committee of oversight), a Direction of Finance, a Direction of Education, and a Direction of Industry, with the old units of Domestic Economy and Agriculture now subsumed into this last and termed merely a “Series,” another shift in the community’s priorities. With this reorganization of labor into “Series” and “Groups” (Fourier’s terminology), the Brook Farmers demonstrated their commitment to Fourier’s notion of “Attractive Industry.” In the Agricultural Series, for example, there were groups for plowing, planting, weeding, hoeing, and so on; and Brook Farm also instituted a Domestic Series and a Mechanical Series. One wit among them even proposed the “R. L. S. G.,” the “rejected lover’s sympathizing group.”29 But other of the basic organizing principles did not change. Interest on one’s investment remained at 5 percent, and all members were still guaranteed the necessities of life and the rights to personal property and to live in family units.

  No American phalanx ever grew to anything near the size Fourier envisioned. Here the Brook Farmers, like other pioneer phalansterians, followed Brisbane’s suggestion—in a series of articles in the Democratic Review in 1842—that Fourier’s principles could be put into operation in a four-hundred-member community. 30 Brook Farm, which already had a division of and reward for labor similar to what Fourier counseled, was ideally situated and suited for such an experiment. When Ripley announced the reorganization and put out a call for more participants, applications for membership soared. Six months after the publication of the new constitution, eighty-seven applicants had joined the community; and after the two-month trial stipulated in the bylaws, fifty-eight, primarily laborers and artisans rather than farmers or intellectuals, were admitted as members and accommodated into new Groups and Series. Between May 1 and September 30, 1844, Brook Farm received one hundred more applications. Clearly, the switch to Association brought new attention to the West Roxbury experiment.

  The presence of a new cadre of residents and workers necessitated new physical space. By early spring, Brook Farmers had begun work on a 60’ by 28’ “Workshop,” to house new industries; and, more ambitiously, a 175’ by 40’ “Phalanstery,” just below the Eyrey, that would serve as the community’s primary living quarters. The Workshop, behind and to the north of the Hive, comprised a carpenters’ shop on the first floor, where craftsmen made sashes and blinds, while printers and artisans who made Britannia ware (silver-plated pewter) and shoes shared the second story. The community even invested in a thousand-dollar steam engine installed beneath the building to power its machinery, replacing a horsedriven mill used to turn various belt drives.

  During this period of expansion, financed by loans, Ripley, Charles A. Dana, and John Sullivan Dwight continued to attend Associationist meetings throughout the Northeast and frequently held important offices, solidifying Brook Farm’s position as one of the chief Associationist communities. Its prominence only increased when, after the demise of Channing’s The Present and the increasing financial difficulties of The Phalanx, plans were made to transfer the organ of the American Union of Associationists from New York to Brook Farm. The Harbinger, as the new journal was called (in part as a pun on the French word “fourrier,” harbinger), was first published on June 14, 1845.31 Ripley’s editorial notice spelled out its mission: “the advancement and happiness of the masses” and war “against all exclusive privilege in legislation, political arrangements, and social customs” as it strove to “promote the triumph of the high democratic faith.”32

  Encouraged by the national attention focused on his experiment, in the spring of 1845 Ripley urged and received approval for a further revision of the community’s principles, and he renamed the enterprise the Brook Farm Phalanx. Not everyone approved. Amelia Russell complained that, from that point, the “poetry of our lives” vanished.33 She recalled, among other things, how, beginning in the fall of 1845, the community fell prey to increased bickering and tension over religious services held on the premises, discussions that were exacerbated by William Henry Channing’s insistence that Brook Farm stand on a solidly Christian foundation. Social friction also increased as new artisans and laborers resented what they viewed as the patronizing attitudes of the original Farmers. Complicating matters, more of Brook Farm’s creditors pressed for payment or return of their original investments. Hawthorne, now living in Concord, even brought suit against his old associates. Ripley and Dana asked for financial assistance from the New York Associationists, but were rebuffed. The organization instead funneled money to the more promising North American Phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey.

  The Brook Farm Phalanx’s fate was sealed on March 3, 1846, when sparks from a stove carelessly left burning in the nearly completed Phalanstery spread and within a couple of hours burned the immense building to the ground. This edifice had been started a year an
d a half earlier and already had consumed seven thousand dollars of Brook Farm’s labor and supplies. Three stories tall, with a dining hall for several hundred people and a large lecture room on the first floor, and more than one hundred dormitory rooms and a chapel on the next two, it had become the symbol of the community’s conversion to Fourier’s ideas. Though members stayed on in the immediate aftermath of this tragedy, by spring they began to trickle away, some to the North American Phalanx or other experimental communities, others back to the corrupt world. Although several of the wealthier individuals who owned shares in the enterprise wrote off their losses, by summer it was clear that Brook Farm’s days were numbered.

  A few score of the dedicated stayed on with the Ripleys through the fall and winter, but only twelve remained the following September. In November, Ripley sold his entire library of American and foreign books to pay off creditors, a sale in its way as important for what it records of New England’s intellectual life as the liquidation of the Reverend Joseph Buckminster’s library thirty years earlier.34 After this melancholy event, Ripley was reported to have told Parker (who bought many of the books) that now he knew what it was like to attend one’s own funeral.35 The Ripleys and a few others lingered in West Roxbury until October 1847, when they finally left to rejoin the world they had tried so hard to reform. Ripley went to New York, where he continued to edit The Harbinger, and began another career as a book reviewer for Greeley’s Tribune. In so doing, he effectively relinquished his leadership role among New England Transcendentalists.

  In 1845, with the publication of Fourier’s Oeuvres complètes, his entire system, material and spiritual, was available to any who could read the language. Many Transcendentalists could, and their exposure to Fourier’s other ideas initiated a renewed and more wide-ranging engagement with his thought, if not a rush for membership in phalanxes. Many were struck by the similarity of his spiritual ruminations to the Transcendentalists’ own pronouncements on the spiritual life. Brownson, by this time disaffected from the movement and a recent convert to Roman Catholicism, observed that “Fourierism is simply an attempt to realize in society the leading principles of Transcendentalism.”36

  Despite Emerson’s adamant resistance to the Brook Farm experiment, he remained genuinely interested in Fourier’s worldview. In his old age, when he reviewed the important phases through which New England had moved during his lifetime, he spoke at length of Fourier and the Associationists. He was still not above lampooning some of the Frenchman’s more exotic speculations—many of his contemporaries, Emerson noted dryly, had cast “sheep’s-eyes” on Fourier and “his houris” (beautiful virgins who await faithful Muslim men in the afterlife) and looked forward to the time, in the reign of Attractive Industry, when all men would “speak in blank verse.” But he also allowed that Fourier “carried a whole French Revolution in his head” and particularly admired his understanding of the relation of nature to spirit. “The value of Fourier’s system,” Emerson wrote, “is that it is a statement of such [a spiritual] order externized [sic], or carried outward into its correspondence in facts.” Its drawback was Fourier’s insistence that he himself had cracked the divine code. He left no room, Emerson lamented, for “private light.”37

  Another unusual component of Fourier’s thought struck his American readers: his searching criticism of monogamous marriage. Fourier envisioned a “new amorous world,” realized in the next stage of human development beyond the current “Civilization,” in which men and women would stand in new relation. This speculation was of most interest to women in the Transcendentalist movement, specifically Margaret Fuller, whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) illustrates Fourier’s strong influence, and Caroline Sturgis, another of Fuller’s protégées and Emerson’s good friend.

  Fourier not only condemned the economic wastefulness of the isolated household but also described how destructive the individual family unit was to the physical, psychological, and sexual happiness of both men and women. In the unrepressed world of the phalanstery, all were guaranteed what Fourier termed a “sexual minimum,” that is, promise of erotic fulfillment according to their inclinations and desires, a continuum that ranged from virginity or celibacy to full promiscuity. Fourier dissected and categorized love as much as any other human activity. In his brave new world, women thus had equal access not only to education and varieties of work and equal pay for it, but also to psychological and sexual gratification, freeing them from the double standard that made them repress amorous desire. Indeed, in the state of Harmony, homosexuality, polygamy, and even incest were permissible.

  Careful readers of Brisbane’s and Godwin’s redactions understood the implication for gender relations of Fourier’s elaborate taxonomy of “Passions,” particularly the “Butterfly,” which denoted a love of variety and change. As word got around of these more speculative parts of his system, critics were quick to paint the phalanstery as a den of iniquity. “This creature of corruption,” one wrote hysterically, “which first began to crawl, lizard-like, in the filthiest dregs of Parisian infidelity, and which has never since left any thing, but its slime and venom in the track of its crawling,” was now going to pollute the United States. “Human passions are to have universal, sole and undivided sway—human passions and animal appetites,” he continued. “This is the nucleus of the whole system—the centre in which all its lines meet—the pivot on which all its apparatus turns.”38 Even those sympathetic to Fourier’s vision could not resist a dig. Emerson was particularly severe. He opined that in the phalanstery even Saint Paul and Saint John “would be riotous.” He also rather prudishly observed that to Fourier, marriage “was a calculation how to secure the greatest amount of kissing that the infirmity of human constitution admitted.”39 Clearly uncomfortable with a system based on such untrammeled freedom, Emerson predicted that the new amorous world would only be as virtuous as those who inhabited it.

  Others were less skeptical. Of all Fourier’s American disciples, Henry James, Sr., a Swedenborgian and devotee of Association, was least troubled by these radical views of marital reform and endorsed them publicly through a translation of the French Fourierist Victor Hennequin’s Les amours au phalanstère, which James issued as Love in the Phalanstery (1849). In his preface James explained that he published the tract because contemporary sexual relations clearly demanded reform. Rather than a call to immorality, Fourier’s “passional philosophy” sounded the “death-knell of our profuse prostitution and licentiousness.”40 In Harmony, men and women, unafraid of Eros, would have a newfound respect for each other.

  Hennequin’s tract is as remarkable a piece of reform literature as any published in the United States at that time, abjuring any explanation of Fourier’s industrial and “cosmogonal” systems—the first already had its explicators and the second, although much of it “unverified by experience,” Hennequin believed would eventually be verified by science—to focus on “questions of love.”41 Critics quickly condemned Love in the Phalanstery, however, as more evidence of the immorality toward which Association tended. One, in the New York Observer, wrote sarcastically that he was delighted to find someone brave enough openly to present what always was there in Fourier’s voluminous works, only to go on to point out that no reader could get through the tract without being convinced that “Fourierism is just another name for promiscuity, and the doctrines of association the most corrupt and corrupting that ever were promulgated under the guise of virtue and reform.”42 In the pages of The Harbinger, James vigorously defended himself against such scurrilous charges and thus brought more attention to and prolonged a controversy that his fellow Associationists had long hoped to avoid.

  Emerson thought to pose the important query. What, he asked, “will the women say to the theory?”43 Some of them, he was surprised to learn, welcomed it. Such a powerful yet in so many ways commonsensical notion of gender relations could not but influence others beginning to speak out about women’s restricted sphere. Among the Transcendentalis
ts most affected was Margaret Fuller, who by 1843 had found her voice on the subject.

  Fuller’s chief contribution to the “woman question” appeared in the July 1843 issue of The Dial as “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” which she reworked and published in 1845 as Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the first extended treatment of women’s rights in the United States.44 In the interim she read parts of Fourier’s Le Nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire, and her revision and extension of the essay reveals an increasing knowledge of Fourier’s works.45 “A new manifestation is at hand,” she wrote, “a new hour in the day of Man.”46 Fuller linked that glorious day to the expansion of women’s economic and psychological spheres. When such a change occurred, when “every arbitrary barrier” was thrown down and “every path … open to Woman as freely as to Man,” the world would see “crystallizations more pure and of more various beauty.” Then, she continued, “the divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of former ages” and “no discordant collision, but a ravishing harmony of the spheres, would ensue”—Fourierist prophecy pure and simple. 47

  Fuller noted a “throng of symptoms” that denoted a contemporary “crisis in the life of Woman,” that is, a time of transition between a lower and higher order, symptoms epitomized for her in the thought of three individuals. First was Swedenborg, who interpreted the past revelation and unfolded a new, and thus “approximated to that harmony between the scientific, and poetic lives of mind, which we hope from the perfect man.” Swedenborg’s view of woman, Fuller wrote, was “large and noble,” for in his system man and woman “share an angelic ministry.” The union is of “one to one, permanent and pure.”48 Her second example was Fourier. Even if some aspects of his system proved false, she observed, he still placed “Woman on an entire equality with Man” and sought to give both a sexual freedom that was the natural result of their mutual intellectual and “practical” development in the phalanstery.49 Fuller’s third inspiration was the German writer Wolfgang von Goethe, “the great apostle of individual culture,” long important to her as well as to Emerson and other of their friends. If Swedenborg had made “organization and union the necessary results of solitary thought,” and Fourier had prophesied that “better institutions … will make better men,” Goethe encouraged and embodied the primacy of individual self-expression. His maxim was, “As the man, so the institutions,” an apothegm that could have been Emerson’s or, at this point, Fuller’s. Swedenborg, Fourier, and Goethe thus each moved people “to a clearer consciousness of what Man needs, what Man can be, and [that a] better life must ensue.”50