Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

‘These people had highly distinctive personalities, and they did not always agree with one another, but their careers intersected at many points, and together they were more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world . . . Their ideas changed the way Americans thought – and continue to think – about education, democracy, liberty, justice and tolerance. As a consequence, they changed the way Americans live – the way they learn, the way they express their views, the way they understand themselves, and the way they treat people who are different from themselves . . . We can say that what these thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea – an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not “out there” waiting to be discovered, but are tools – like forks and knives and microchips – that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves . . . And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability . . . They taught a kind of scepticism that helped people cope with life in a heterogeneous, industrialised, mass-market society, a society in which older human bonds of custom and community seemed to have become attenuated . . . There is also, though, implicit in what they wrote, a recognition of the limits of what thought can do in the struggle to increase human happiness.’⁴ Along the way we shall be concerned with the creation of some major intellectual centres in America – the Universities of Yale, Princeton, Chicago and Johns Hopkins, and of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

One founding father of this American tradition was Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior. He was well-connected, numbering the Cabots, the Quincys and the Jacksons – old, landowning families – among his friends; but he was himself a professor who had studied medicine in Paris. It was Holmes Sr who invented the term ‘Boston Brahmin’, to include those who were both well-born and scholars at the same time. It was Holmes Sr, in his guise as a doctor, who discovered the causes of puerperal (childbed) fever, demonstrating conclusively that the disease was transmitted from childbirth to childbirth by doctors themselves. This hardly made him popular among his medical colleagues, but it was an important advance in the development of the germ theory of disease and antisepsis.⁵

His academic career culminated as dean of Harvard Medical School, though he became just as widely known for being what many people regarded as the greatest talker they had ever heard, and for his role in founding the Metaphysical Club, also known as the ‘Saturday Club’, where literary matters were discussed over dinner and whose other members included Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton. Holmes also helped establish the Atlantic Monthly; he himself conceived the title to reflect the link between the New World and the Old.

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The other founding father of the American intellectual tradition was Emerson. Holmes Sr and he were good friends, mutual influences on one another. Holmes Sr was in the audience when Emerson gave his famous Phi Beta Kappa address on ‘The American Scholar’ at Harvard in 1837. This address was the first of several in which Emerson declared a literary independence for America, urging his fellow citizens to a writing style all their own, away from the familiarities of Europe (although among his ‘great men’ there were no Americans). A year later, in a no less notorious speech, to Harvard Divinity School, Emerson reported how he had been ‘bored to distraction’ by a sermon, and had contrasted its artificiality to the wild snow storm then raging outside the church. This (plus many other musings) had caused him, he said, to renounce his belief in a supernatural Jesus, and organised Christianity, in favour of a more personal revelation. Partly as a result of this, Harvard – then a Calvinist institution – turned its back on Emerson for thirty years.⁷

Holmes Sr, however, remained true to his friend. Above all, he shared Emerson’s belief in an American literature, which is why he was so involved in the Atlantic Monthly.⁸