Thoreau, Emerson and the Town Where Their Thoughts Took Root

THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS AND THEIR WORLD
By Robert A. Gross

The “great man” theory of history has been deeply out of fashion for some time, but Robert A. Gross’s “The Transcendentalists and Their World” might inspire one to defend it, at least on readerly grounds. In the 1970s, Gross was a young member of the “new social history” movement, studying and recapturing the past through the lives of everyday people, most of whom had been previously neglected in our popular narratives. This requires combing through personal and municipal documents — diaries, letters, tax records — to recreate times and places on a more granular level. The pioneering idea, now a common practice, was to replace (or at least balance) the great man theory with the “thousand little men and women” theory.

Gross has spent a good part of his estimable career as an author and academic studying Concord, Mass., a town (during the time of which he writes) with about 2,000 residents that had far more than its proportional share of historical import. Gross’s first book, “The Minutemen and Their World,” appeared in 1976 and won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for American history. It told the story of the town leading up to the shots fired at the North Bridge on April 19, 1775, which sparked the American Revolution. He has written and edited scholarly things since, but “The Transcendentalists and Their World,” 45 years later, is very much a long-gestating follow-up.

The first half of this book covers the post-Revolution changes that paved the way for the individualism preached by Emerson and Thoreau. “As Concord grew more diversified and differentiated,” Gross writes, “as inhabitants came and went with little attachment to its institutions, as new interests competed with older commitments, the bonds of community frayed still more, and the inherited ideology of interdependence underwent further strain.” Emerson would put one element of that tension succinctly: “No community or institution is so great as a single man.”

In this belief, Emerson was contradicting his step-grandfather, the Concord pastor Ezra Ripley. “In the gospel according to Ripley, the fundamental value was community,” Gross writes. “‘Who could live alone and independent?’ he asked the congregation. ‘Who but some disgusted hermit or half crazy enthusiast will say to society, I have no need of thee; I am under no obligation to my fellow-men?’”

Ripley is a primary figure in the early chapters, keeping his church together in the face of widening schisms between more liberal and orthodox followers. The shifting allegiances of Thoreau’s mother and aunts reflected those battles. The story of Ripley does some work to hold this material together, but the minutiae of the church’s ideological tides are an early signal that this book — its endnotes run to nearly as many pages as the entire text of “Minutemen” — will have pacing issues. It’s structured in two parts of equal length: 300 pages each. The first 300 pages sometimes feel like 3,000.

Thoreau’s father was a pencil maker, and Gross includes a lot of detail about this trade, some of it perhaps more basic than necessary. Humor is subjective, but the inclusion of this line about graphite elicited a laugh: “The crucial ingredient in lead pencils, the mineral made possible the development of a writing implement that over the next two and a half centuries gained widespread use in everyday life.”

Following that are several pages of specifics about the pencil practices of Thoreau’s competitors. The phrase “lost in the weeds” is only an insult when it assumes one doesn’t want to be there. Gross appears to be perfectly content in them. When he and the reader reach a clearing in those weeds, he’s good at saying why they matter (in the case of pencils and other commerce, it’s the world being reshaped by capitalism and the Industrial Revolution), but those clearings can be achingly far apart.

The approach to history that Gross helped bring to prominence requires and rewards patience. But it’s not exempt from the laws of aerodynamics. In “Minutemen,” Gross sculpted his research into more or less episodic chapters that moved toward a singular one-time event of great interest. The arrival and influence of the Transcendentalists lacks such a clear endgame — which is fine, but it seems perverse that Emerson and Thoreau rarely appear in the first, long half of a book with this title.

Somewhere during that first half, I thought of Borges’s famous short-short story about maps and territory: “The Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” You sometimes sense that Gross’s Concord is somehow more detailed than the place itself was. This is, in a purely industrious way, inarguably impressive. It is also, for long stretches, not easy to read.

The book becomes more inviting when Gross finally plants Emerson and Thoreau in his extensively tilled soil. Of course, in the case of history writing, “great man” or “great woman” is applied without moral judgment in one direction or the other; great has to do with influence, not character. Gross makes clear, for instance, the very slow development of Emerson’s thinking about abolition. While the women of Concord made inroads for the movement, “racism narrowed his sights and blinded him to the latent divinity of every human soul,” Gross writes. “At times he seemed to resent the claims of Black people on his compassion.”

Gross’s treatment of a subject like abolition moves far out from Emerson and Thoreau (who was a more decisive actor in this regard), but by anchoring it in the two men’s stories we’re given a sense that is both more focused and more usefully fluid — so that Emerson’s slow progress toward passionate commitment simultaneously fleshes out our idea of him and allows us to more clearly follow the broader developments of his times.

To judge Gross’s book this way — to prefer it when some of the research is pruned, and when it rewards our pre-existing interest in its central characters — is only to stand in for the general reader. As a historian, as a researcher, he earns an A. This capstone to his work on Concord will likely be cherished by future scholars.

One learns a great deal in this book — about religious history, the railroad’s influence on smaller-town living, changing theories of education, tensions between individualism and collectivism that still bedevil the country today. But despite the benefits of Gross’s low-flying genre, which has spawned shelves of excellent books, it’s hard not to wish he had spent just a bit more time in this one at 30,000 feet.