After declaring independence, Americans faced a vital question: what would our culture truly look like? For years, our new nation’s art and stories often borrowed from Europe, leading some critics to wonder if America could ever create anything truly original. While pioneering American authors like James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe began to explore unique themes, many felt it was time for a second revolution—not with bullets, but with words and ideas—to forge a distinctly American identity in literature and thought.
A powerful shift began to emerge, sparked partly by the Romantic Movement and blossoming in the quiet town of Concord, Massachusetts. Here, brilliant minds like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau gathered, championing a new American philosophy called Transcendentalism. This movement emphasized nature, individualism, and the vast, hopeful potential of the American spirit, encouraging people to look inward and discover a uniquely American voice. It was a cultural awakening that profoundly shaped our nation’s literature and inspired generations to come.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
00:00:51 Speaker 2: As Americans went about the business of building new political institutions, radical new political institutions, the question remained: what would American culture look like? Was there a culture of democracy?
00:01:12 Speaker 3: What would it look like?
00:01:14 Speaker 2: Could Americans on native grounds replicate the artistic genius of America’s European competitors? Could we produce a Shakespeare of our own, a Michelangelo, a Voltaire, a Mozart? Would it be something that reflected the new nation’s
00:01:34 Speaker 3: people, its land?
00:01:35 Speaker 2: Would it be of the highest caliber, or would it be mediocre? Many critics, like the British literary critic Sidney Smith, were skeptical.
00:01:52 Speaker 3: Smith, in an essay in The Edinburgh Review, put forward this rhetorical
00:01:57 Speaker 2: question, a series of questions: “In the four corners of the globe, who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?”
00:02:13 Speaker 3: Well, he wasn’t entirely wrong about that. Not many did.
00:02:17 Speaker 2: The early part of the nineteenth century saw the gradual formation of what could be called a cadre of distinctly American writers, but there were not many of them: James Fenimore Cooper, his writing about the Frontier, his invention of marvelous characters like the half-white, half-Indian Natty Bumppo; and there was Edgar Allan Poe, whose strange, brooding, psychological tales were far ahead of their time. There was also Washington Irving, who penned popular fables like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.” These were popular both at home and abroad, but up until really the 1850s, it would be safe to say that America was not exactly a beacon of culture or literary talent. This began to change in the 1830s, and the change came from Europe, thanks to the Romantic Movement. The Romantic Movement was an artistic movement born out of rebellion, rebellion against the Enlightenment and rebellion against the Industrial Revolution.
00:03:43 Speaker 3: In its extreme manifestations,
00:03:46 Speaker 2: it emphasized the individual, nature, creativity and imagination, fantasy and mystery, more emphasis, in short, on the emotional and intuitive aspects of life, of love and loss, and the fate of the soul. This turning point in America’s cultural life happened in a specific time and place, one small town just outside Boston called Concord, Massachusetts. Individuals such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others all were living there at one time or another, and all were buried there on Author’s Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. What was it that drew these writers together? It was a patchwork of ideas, some of which fell under the name Transcendentalism, with the glories and mysteries of nature serving as a backdrop, and some of it coming simply from the enormous and unsearched potential of America. Americans that turned out were prepared at this moment of history to challenge and reconsider almost every aspect of their lives, and not always in a careless or nihilistic way, but usually in a hopeful and expansive way. Transcendentalism was not interested in the way things were done in the past. They established social elites of the day, and, let’s be clear, Transcendentalism was born out of frustration with the religion of the dominant religion
00:05:36 Speaker 3: of the time in New England among elite classes, and that was Unitarianism.
00:05:42 Speaker 2: Unitarianism, which itself was a product of a sort of liberal rebellion against Calvinism. Emerson himself, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was the product of a family filled with ministers, including his own father. As was Emerson, following in his father’s footsteps, and he’d followed and followed until he no longer could. As a relatively young man, he resigned his post at a leading Boston church and left the ministry without any substantive plans for the future, none but to become a writer and speaker. I would say that Emerson could be considered the first example of a freelance intellectual in American history. There’s a freelance in the sense that he had no connection to any institutions, academic or ecclesiastical. He was a free intellectual, and he made his living addressing the general public, which is something that was possible to do in those days because books and other printed publications were widely available. Americans were very literate people. They liked to read, and they liked gathering for lectures on subjects of interest. Every town had a lyceum and needed a steady stream of lecturers to fill out their schedule, and so Ralph, although Emerson, became an itinerant speaker, much of his life on the road.
00:07:26 Speaker 1: When we come back, more of the remarkable Story of Us. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and all of our history stories are brought to us by our generous sponsors, including Hillsdale College, where students go to learn all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that matter in life. If you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu. That’s Hillsdale.edu. And we continue with Our American Stories in The Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor and author of Land of Hope, Bill Maclay. When we last left off, Bill was telling us about Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former Unitarian pastor who became America’s first independent, traveling intellectual. Let’s return to the story. Here again is Professor Maclay.
00:08:43 Speaker 2: Emerson’s career-altering moment occurred with an address he gave at Harvard in 1837. Now, Emerson was himself a product of Harvard. He’d got in his education at Harvard College, which was a seminary in those days, and at the Harvard Divinity School, and he was invited to give the Phi Data Kamp As speech at the beginning of the academic year because he was a distinguished graduate. Little did those who invited him know that he was going to pour out, not quite contempt, but certainly criticism of everything that Harvard and Harvard Divinity School stood for. His speech challenged the rationalism, the dry rationalism of Harvard and its academicism.
00:09:35 Speaker 3: The speech was a rallying
00:09:37 Speaker 2: cry for creative types, for thinkers and artists who worked outside the box, who really were interested in forging a cultural independence and originality,
00:09:49 Speaker 3: something that was distinctly American. So for anyone who was listening
00:09:56 Speaker 2: and interested in cutting through the old establishment or the oxes and the imitative streak in American culture—that is, the desire to be just like the English, only American—this speech was a call to action. And here’s how Emerson ended the speech at Harvard: “Mr. President and gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all modings, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to
00:10:27 Speaker 3: The American Scholar.
00:10:30 Speaker 2: We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman’s already suspected to be timid, imitative, and tame. No, not so, brothers and friends! Please God, ours shall not be so.
00:10:46 Speaker 3: We will walk on our own feet.
00:10:49 Speaker 2: We will work with our own hands. We will speak with our own mind.”
00:10:54 Speaker 3: A “na” should have been “will.”
00:10:56 Speaker 2: “For the first time exist because each himself inspired by the divine soul, which also inspires all men.”
00:11:08 Speaker 3: Wow.
00:11:11 Speaker 2: A nation of men will for the first time exist because a nation will exist that has absorbed these notions: the unsearched.
00:11:22 Speaker 3: To might of man, of the enormous and really
00:11:25 Speaker 2: infinite potential in each individual. And notice how he connects that to being imitative. He says, “We have listened too
00:11:35 Speaker 3: long to the courtly muses of Europe.”
00:11:39 Speaker 2: Courtly muses. That implies, first of all, the court of a king. We’re not that kind of place. We’re a republic, so we don’t need courtly muses. The courtly muses also, they’re genteel. They’re nice, they’re refined, they’re oh so careful. And we’ve
00:12:00 Speaker 3: listened too long to that kind of thing.
00:12:02 Speaker 2: We need to break out and speak with our own voice, work with our own hands, walk on our own feet. So, for many, this speech, then and now and in the years in between, has been seen as America’s declaration of intellectual independence, to follow on from the declaration of political independence in 1776. And Emerson viewed the American Revolution as a great, great event, a beacon of hope for all of humanity. He admired the farmers, tradesmen, and shopkeepers, the common people who fought for American independence. His patriotic poem “Concord Hymn” contains the most well-known verses he’d ever write, and he believed these words with every fiber of his being: “By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. The foe, long since, in silence, slept; Alike the conqueror silently sleeps; And Time, the rooted bridge has swept Down the dark stream, which seaward creeps. On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set today a votive still, That memory made their deed redeem, When,
00:13:35 Speaker 3: like our sires, our sons are gone.
00:13:39 Speaker 2: Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and leave.” Emerson was calling for us, America, to follow our own muse rather than Europe’s, because we were worthy, we had our own stories to tell, and we had our own ways of telling them. He was calling for Americans to develop and discover their own voices, their own art and culture, their own form of worship, all befitting a beast and bold new nation. And recon also believed the same principle should apply to the individual lives of Americans as well. His essays “Self Re Lives” drove that point home. Here’s an excerpt from that essay: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue at most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
00:15:07 Speaker 3: Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
00:15:12 Speaker 2: He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness,
00:15:18 Speaker 3: but must explore if it be goodness.
00:15:22 Speaker 2: Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulated to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual effects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital and speak the rude truths
00:15:46 Speaker 3: in all ways.”
00:15:49 Speaker 2: These are words that are just as useful, just as applicable, just as transgressive justice threatening today to entrench establish as they were in the 1830s. Here’s one last passage of Emerson that reflects his fierce dedication to the sanctity of the individual,
00:16:09 Speaker 3: person above all.
00:16:12 Speaker 2: You may not like what he’s saying, or you may like it a lot, but it is an American voice above all. Else, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency, a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though would contradict everything you said today. Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood. Well, is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates and Jesus and Lutheran Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, in every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. To be great has to be misunderstood.” What ever since was after them was an abandonment of the refined, elite culture of Europe, transplanted in a rather dead way to America, at least to the Northeastern part of America, and a celebration of the common people of his country.
00:17:42 Speaker 1: The Story of America, The Story of Us, brought to us by Bill McLay. The story continues here on Our American Stories, and we return to Our American Stories in The Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor and author of Land of Hope, Bill Maclay. When we last left off, Bill was telling us about the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wanted a more real, more emotional form of art than that found in Europe, something we Americans could call our own. This influenced many other authors and creative types. Let’s get back to the story.
00:18:41 Speaker 2: Emerson would go on to influence others in his orbit, including a neighbor named Henry David Thoreau, who tried his best to put some of Emerson’s ideas into practice. The result was a two-year stint living alone in a cabin on Walden Pond, where he spent his time writing and reflecting on nature and his surroundings. From that time, alone in the woods, sprang one of the great pieces of American literature. Walden, the book, was the first of its kind anywhere, part spiritual journey, part nature reporting, part social critique, and part first-person adventure storytelling.
00:19:24 Speaker 3: Here’s how Thoreau explained the
00:19:26 Speaker 2: decision to take up such a challenge, again in very American words: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die discover that I had not lived.
00:19:53 Speaker 3: I did not wish to live what was not life,
00:19:56 Speaker 2: living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.
00:20:02 Speaker 3: I wanted to
00:20:03 Speaker 2: live deep and suck all the marrow out of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to route all that was not life, to cut a broad swath as shave close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest term. 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 fucked by them. Their fingers from excessive toil are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring men has not leisure for a true integrity. Day by day, he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men. His life-labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance, which his growth requires, who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom and the fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves, nor one another, thus tendered.” Here is Thoreau describes the relationship between government and the individual: “The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to democracy, is a progress towardinate true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. As a democracy such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of men? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it might, would prepare the way for a still more and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.” Another great American writer of this period was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who also did Diamond Concord. He was born in Salem and very influenced by Salem, by the Salem Witchcraft Trials in which one of his ancestors participated, but ended up spending time in Concord as well. He had been influenced in college. He had gone to college at Bowdoin College in Maine. Still there, still thri
Discover more real American voices.
