Evolution and Self-Reliance; Or, it's all about the gemmules

Enjoy! and if you know something about Darwin, correct my errors! Also, this section is rather circular at times....silly arguments that I can’t seem to make straight...

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        Brace, I argue, builds on Emerson’s understanding of self-reliance and particularly on the trope of the orphan as possibility. The orphan exists in the American imagination as a metaphor for how to create one’s own identity. As Emerson shows us, the orphan exists with no past at his or her back: she is free to form whatever identity she likes, but she must form it in relation to other human beings. With no kin, the orphan must depend on friends. And the orphan literalizes the way in which the “quest for identity hinges upon and understanding of the Self not as an essence formed in the past but as a dynamic, interactive process that takes place in the present and projects into the future” (Pazicky xii). Orphans, as Diana Pazicky has argued, “incarnate this [relational and temporal] aspect of the human condition” (xii). To want to help orphans, as Brace does, is a way to make active the possibilities of Emersonian democratic friendship. It is to ask just what would happen if the orphan were not only a trope for possibility, but a living example and presence.

        Brace’s desire to put into practice the guiding theories of the nineteenth century was not limited to Emersonianism, but it is my contention that his allegiance to Emerson and to self-reliance is primary: all other influences, save perhaps Christianity, are subservient to that of Emerson. And this is despite the fact that one of the things that makes Brace such an interesting figure is his broad involvement with many of the pressing moral and cultural issues in, and many of the formative thinkers of the nineteenth century. For instance, Brace was a committed abolitionist, who even attempted to volunteer to help his friend Frederick Law Olmstead run the Union hospitals during the Civil War. While his time in jail in Hungary was mostly a misunderstanding, he was sympathetic with the European revolutions of 1848, and he advocated for that spirit of revolution in Europe in his writing. And while his work contains other travelogues (including The New West; or, California in 1861), Brace also wrote works of science, or as he understood it, “natural theology” such as his “manual of ethnology” (The Races of the Old World, 1863) and works of purely religious theology, such as Gesta Christi (1882) and The Unknown God (1890), a study of “pre-Christian” religion. Brace’s science and theology were, as O’Connor puts it, “hamstrung by his utter inability to question the moral and metaphysical superiority of Christ,” but Brace also deliberately situated his writing at many of the most productive intellectual and political cross-roads of his time, often taking positions controversial to others with his same commitment to Christianity but in keeping with his commitment to inquiry and, perhaps, consistent with his transcendental theology (249).

        Consider, for instance, Brace’s reception of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and here I take it as my task to explain how Brace interacted with Darwin’s ideas and tried to make them consistent with Emersonian democratic friendship. Specifically, I want to show how Brace adapts Darwinian ideas of inheritance to work within a robust framework of self-reliance. Brace’s first exposure to Darwin’s work came through his uncle Asa Gray. Gray, America’s foremost botanist and a lifelong correspondent with Darwin, was crucial in shaping the reception of The Origin of Species in America. Brace read On the Origin of Species early and often; O’Connor claims that Brace “read The Origin of Species thirteen times during his life” and Brace was constantly writing letters considering the meanings of Darwin’s ideas in the mid 1860s (O’Connor 80; Life 285-6). Brace would meet and stay with Darwin for a few days during a European trip in 1872, two years before publishing The Dangerous Classes, a copy of which he would later send to Darwin. The two men would remain correspondents until Darwin’s death in 1882, exchanging letters and publications. Brace would later send Darwin a copy of his ethnographic study, The Races of the Old World.

        In 1866, Brace wrote to the Lady Lyell, explaining that he thought that “Mr. Darwin’s name will go down for many ages with this great Law [of Natural Selection].... I think it furnishes what historians and philosophers have so long sought for, a law of progress, and Darwin states the glorious point to which mankind shall eventually advance” (Life 285). Brace here begins to tease out an application of Darwin to his own work, beginning with applying his faith that “evil seems...destructive--good preservative” to the law of natural selection (285). Within a moral framework of Christian progress, Brace sees even natural selection as a positive moral force which will lead mankind “so that ultimately a race may appear in which the highest inspiration and capacity of nobleness shall be embodied and transmitted and perpetuated” (285).

        While Brace’s effort to understand natural selection within a ruggedly Christian framework is fascinating and reveals just how broad were the possible responses to Darwin’s work in the second-half of the nineteenth century, what should engage us here is how Brace sees Darwin’s understanding of inheritance working to embody, transmit, and perpetuate “nobleness” only insofar as self-reliance is active as well. Darwin, who did not have an understanding of genetics, argued instead that inheritance worked through “gemmules,” a sort of particle of inheritance, which were dropped from the various organs of the body and then congealed in the sexual organs, forming up into the gametes. Gemmules provide a mechanism for inheritance, but also for the inheritance of acquired characteristics, although within certain limits. The belief was that the more a certain organ was used, the more gemmules it would shed and the more likely was that characteristic to be passed on from parent to child. This blend of environmental effects on inheritance along with what Brace would call the “biological” effects would help provide Brace with a way of thinking about the possibilities of reform on inheritance. That is, if we can improve a child’s moral actions, get them to be more virtuous through a change in circumstance, then we would expect for that improvement to be inherited by their children, and thus we can sort of engineer better people in the future through improving today’s children’s circumstances.

        We can see this in The Dangerous Classes of New York, when, writing about the “Child-Vagrant,” Brace depends on a sort of Darwinian code. He “use[s] the phrase ‘struggle for existence,’” as O’Connor notes, many times, and in other moments Brace is still writing within that framework: “‘Life is a strife‘ with [the child-vagrant], and money its reward..., if only he can earn enough to keep him above water” (98). The echo of Darwin here, and other sorts of evolutionary metaphors lead O’Connor to conclude that “like many Victorians, [Brace] was an instinctive Darwinist, unconsciously understanding the genetic ramifications of competition and hardship” (79). And yet Brace is not a pessimistic Darwinist, because his understanding of inheritance through gemmules allows for redemption not just over generations, but even within a person’s lifetime. Brace, that is, is no “social Darwinist,” instead he is clearly a social reformer who is motivated by Darwin to notice and address commonalities among all “classes” and to develop systems of intervention that address the better sorts of common qualities.

        Consider his discussion of “roving” within the poor and himself. “There is without doubt in the blood of most children,” he writes, “as an inheritance, perhaps, from some remote barbarian ancestor--a passion for roving” (339). Brace then connects this “passion” with his own practice “now in manhood” of trying to lead, from time to time, a “wild life in the woods” (339). Brace is able to see the desire to wander as a common human urge, inherited, perhaps, but present in all. Now, the trick is to establish a system that doesn’t ignore that urge, but uses it as part of the reform process. Again, this leads Brace to suggest emigration from the city to the country, where roving is a necessary part of the farmer’s work, as a way to improve the young rover, the child-vagrants, and also their progeny.

        Drawing again on metaphors of blood and inheritance, Brace argues that his system of out-placement can succeed in “cooling the fire in the blood in the city rover, and [in] making him contented” because it substitutes positive activities--farming, family, and country life primarily--for the “indulgences” of the city (342). The interplay here between what we might today consider nature and nurture, between environment and biology, leads Brace to end this section by arguing that these city boys, while “wild” and almost uncontrollable, are still the possessors of a native or natural sort of virtue: “Possibly, by a process of ‘Natural Selection,’ only the sharpest and brightest lads get through the intense ‘struggle for existence’ which belongs to the most crowded portions of the city, while the duller are driven to the up-town wards” (345).

        This claim is in keeping with Brace’s belief that “the action of the great law of ‘Natural Selection,’ in regard to the human race, is always towards temperance and virtue” (44). This is true, Brace claims, because “vice and extreme indulgence weaken the physical powers and undermine the constitution; they impair the faculties by which man struggles with adverse conditions and gets beyond the reach of poverty and want” (44). Struggle, for Brace, leads not to nature red in tooth and claw but to virtue and nobility, and this is true not just or even primarily for the middle and upper classes, but, provocatively, Brace claims that the poor themselves are innately noble or else how to explain their survival? Rather bluntly, Brace claims that among the poor “the vicious and sensual and drunken die earlier, or they have fewer children, or their children are carried off by diseases more frequently, or they themselves are unable to resist or prevent poverty and suffering. As a consequence, in the lowest class, the more self-controlled and virtuous tend constantly to survive, and to prevail in ‘the struggle for existence’ [] and to transmit their progeny. The natural drift among the poor is towards virtue” (emphasis added 45). Darwin teaches Brace that the work of his agency should be to activate a more robust notion of self-reliance, of self-control and virtue, among the poor, thus encouraging not just an improvement in circumstances today, but for posterity as well. Furthermore, Brace argues that the poor are well-suited to learn this form of self-reliance because it is already theirs--they are “the more self-controlled and virtuous.”

        Brace takes this “provisional hypothesis” of inheritance as passed through the generations by gemmules and reads this it through the framework of Emersonian self-reliance--“good” gemmules are developed and strengthened in self-reliant individuals, and poor or “wicked” gemmules are strengthened by those lacking self-reliance. Brace argues that if encouraged in methods of self-reliance, the “dangerous classes” will naturally become less dangerous and they will begin to express their innate virtue because such encouragement will activate, as he writes, “the ‘gemmules,’ or latent tendencies, or forces, or cells” present in the “blood” of the poor (43). Meanwhile, if left to their own devices, “the transmitted tendencies and qualities of [the dangerous classes’] parents, or of several generations of ancestors” will “end[] in insanity or cretinism or the wildest crime” (43-45).

        Brace, echoing a critique present in Emerson’s Self-Reliance, argues that true reform must not be simply the giving of charity to whomever the reformer addresses, but rather it must be a response to those who are taking risks and seeking a way out of their poverty. In a sort of post-Calvinist calculus, Brace argues that charity must respond to virtue, and, in order to demonstrate one’s innate virtue, one must struggle to find a way out of poverty. Thus the struggle demonstrates the presence of virtue, and the reformer works with those who have demonstrated virtue through struggle. Brace takes the presence of a desire to resist circumstances as a promise that this particular individual can and will develop morally. So it becomes a key feature of Brace’s theories and work that the boys he places out be willing to go, and if they themselves offer to go without prompting, then all the better. They must demonstrate a desire, as Emerson puts it, towards “self-trust” over and above a “foolish consistency.” Or, these boys must be willing to say, as Emerson claims that the self-reliant man will say, “O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances, hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s” (145).

        In many of Brace’s stories about “reformed” boys, he praises their decision to leave mother and father and follow the truth of a life in the west. In these narratives, the decision to leave the family becomes a central moment of change because it is the moment when the child trusts wholly in him (or her) self. Furthermore, Brace believes that as much as inheritance affects individuals, it is not itself predictive. What is more predictive is the situation in which an individual is placed, and the best situations are those that push individuals who have demonstrated a tendency towards struggle further towards self-reliance. “Thus,” Brace concludes, “is explained the extraordinary improvement of the children of crime and poverty in our Industrial Schools; and the reforms and happy changes seen in the boys and girls of our dangerous classes when placed in kind Western homes” (45).

Emerson and Self-Reliance

I wrote the following section on its own a few months back, and I want to slide it in to the chapter here. I’d like to go, then, from the biography, to the connections between RWE and CLB, then into this bit about the essay “Self-Reliance”. Still, I’ll need to add a bit and work on some transitions and linkages. Saving that for later, though.

In other news, I won’t have anything new tomorrow, but I should have a couple of more posts later in the week or over the weekend. Then, I might take a week off from posting to prepare the next few and spend my days at the seminar for the first-time teachers of composition. I’ll resume broadcasting every few days until it’s done when the semester starts on the 30th. Probably just another week after that, with the end goal of having the entire chapter posted up here and in a draft format in my hands by the week of September 6th.

THIS little break is because Amber went back to college today (loaded up the cars this morning and dropped her off around lunch time. She managed to remember everything except blankets!), India starts middle-school tomorrow, and Holden starts high-school tomorrow, too. I’m a little overwhelmed by all of these changes, all of this movement, and all of this growth by my kids.

I am also feeling pretty damn proud of what my kids have been able to do and what I’ve accomplished with these three kids. Just to be where we are at the moment, as a family, after everything that we’ve been through the last few years--well, the very proud papa that I am is also feeling pretty darn self-satisfied, too.

oh, yeah, Darwin stuff still to come....

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1. The Trope of Boys in “Self-Reliance” and Emerson

        Bantling: “A young or small child, a brat. (Often used depreciatively, and formerly as a synonym of bastard.)” OED

        Cast the bantling on the rocks,

        Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat,

        Wintered with the hawk and fox,

        Power and speed be hands and feet.

                --Ralph Waldo Emerson, prologue to “Self-Reliance”

        In 1849 the New York City Almshouse cared for 514 orphaned or abandoned children. Of these children, 50 were adopted and 97 were “discharged to parents or ‘friends’” (Miller 57). 109 were “at nurse” at the end of the year, and 258 died in the almshouse. Those 258 deaths were mostly of children under 12 months of age; Infants admitted to the almshouse, who were mostly foundlings, did not often live through the year. During the 1840s and 1850s, New York City was facing a crisis of abandoned children and infants. From 1849 to 1859, the almshouse received approximately 3,232 infants, a rate of almost one infant per day. 2,045 of these infants died within one year of being received. The mortality rate for infants left at the New York City Almshouse over the decade of the 1850s was 63%. This eclipsed the national and regional rates, which hovered at around 21%, arguing for something more simply “neglect” in the high mortality rate of the foundlings (##). According to Julie Miller, this something more is the “taint of illegitimacy” (21). That is, foundling mortality outstripped infant mortality as such because their family, their caregivers and society as a whole saw them as tainted by their mothers’ sins. As products of what were regarded as immoral relations, these infants were themselves held in contempt, believed to be as tainted by that original sin as their parents. As Miller notes, at the time “the London Foundling Hospital considered changing its name to Orphan Hospital because of “the general notions of the common people that the name Foundling carries with it the Idea of contempt, and that of Orphan of compassion”” (21). Foundlings were, she writes, “associated with the stigma created by illegitimacy” and many believed that it were best that they die rather than live with their mother’s shame (21). A common attitude at the time was that the foundling hospitals were not meant to be places where these abandoned infants were reared or raised, but where they came to die in more comfort than could be provided by their mothers (Miller ##).

        These grave statistics reveal the power of a cultural discourse about family, legitimacy, and illegitimacy in the middle decades of the nineteenth century--a discourse whose power was written on the bodies of those 2,045 dead infants. Given the murderous power of this discourse, it is remarkable to hear Emerson begin his essay “Self-Reliance” by making the “bantling”--the abandoned bastard, the foundling--the key image of the self-reliant individual. This is remarkable not simply because Emerson’s use of the discourse of foundlings is shocking--certainly it would bring to his contemporary reader’s mind the rising crisis of infant abandonment, but it is also remarkable because Emerson attacks the “taint of illegitimacy” in a effort to turn the bantling’s bastard status from a weakness to a rhetorical strength.

        Calling forth histories and mythologies of feral children, Emerson’s trope works to construct self-reliance as a concept independent of family, society, and even civilization. The foundling’s “taint of illegitimacy” becomes, in fact, a virtue. It is the source of the bantling’s power. The “bantling on the rocks” is, like Romulus and Remus, suckled by a she-wolf, and, like Enkidu, the bantling becomes strong and swift through his contact with the “hawk and fox.” These associations of the bantling with the mythological feral child echo in “Self-Reliance’s” closing sections when Emerson compares the “civilized man,” who has “build a coach but...lost the use of his feet,” with the “naked New Zealander, whose property is a club a spear and a mat” (151). But, says Emerson, “compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength” (151). Emerson’s easy racialism might disturb the modern reader, but that should not prevent us from seeing how deeply indebted self-reliance is to the working metaphor of the bantling, the foundling, and the young boy as well as to that of the savage or the primitive. The boy and the bantling are closer to nature, closer to the “Aboriginal self,” and become in the essay a vessel through which self-reliance expresses its content. Furthermore, this trope of the boy-savage appears time and again in the discourse of juvenile delinquency and boyology, as we shall see later. Emerson’s careful deployment of this trope is meant to challenge a cultural preference for legitimacy and meant to motivate the virtue of self-reliance--of reliance on the self (and on nature) irregardless of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and the whole social system of family.

        The trope of the boy is not only used in “Self-Reliance,” but it is a constant presence in Emerson’s writing, particularly in the early works that would have been influential on Brace at the time of the CAS’s founding and development. Emerson had early on allied himself with sons over fathers. Nature opens by saying that “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers” (3), and his first few public lectures outside of the church-house, such as the “Divinity School Address” and “The American Scholar,” were directed at and presented before young scholars. While it is Thoreau who claims that his work is “more particularly addressed to poor students,” it is Emerson who, in “The American Scholar,” calls the scholar a “schoolboy under the bending dome of day” (Walden ##; 45). The “Divinity School Address” similarly opens with the image of a man standing under the “transparent darkness” of the evening absorbing the “spiritual rays” of the stars. “Under them,” Emerson writes, man “seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy” (63). Or later, when giving advice on what to do with this new creed, Emerson advises his audience to view themselves as “a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost” (76). Nature, as we have seen, opens by positioning the reader and the writer as children who “build the sepulchres of the fathers” (3), but Nature then goes on to use the child (and, yes, the “savage”) to express a privileged position (outside of family, outside of civilization) from which to see and understand Nature, if only negatively: “To speak truly,” Emerson says, “few adult persons can see nature” (5). Children (and savages) can “see” what their older selves might have learned to overlook because they are less inured in the habits of mind destructive of really “seeing.”

        Throughout Emerson’s early work, then, we see a constant trope of the boy as the self-reliant individual because the boy is able to think confidently without being adversely affected by habit and tradition--to trust fully in his own experience alone. Recall how Brace admires the self-reliance of the street-boys. Brace believes that the “best quality of this class” is their “sturdy independence” (100). And now in “Self-Reliance” Emerson starts to use the bantling and not just the boy as a trope of the self-reliant individual, heightening the discourse of self-reliance not simply as a matter of overcoming the past, of overcoming one’s father, but of being able to stand outside of family structures entirely. The bantling, because of its “taint of illegitimacy,” must be outside of the family, the traditional method of making democratic subjects, and here becomes not just a trope for the ideal self-made man but for the citizen as such. The first few sentences of “Self-Reliance” praise Plato and Milton but also the most famous foundling in western literature, Moses, as men who “spoke not what men, but what they thought” (132). Emerson works to convince the reader that “geniuses” like Moses are just like the reader only more so because of their self-trust or self-reliance, a feature of their characters earned from their positions outside of families. Instead of rejecting his best self, Moses embraced those thoughts that we “recognize” in “every work of genius” as “our own rejected thoughts” (132).

        “Great men [like Moses] have always...confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age,” Emerson writes, further aligning self-reliance with childhood and beginning in “Self-Reliance” a sustained consideration of childhood’s relationship with self-reliance. In the next few paragraphs, “Self-Reliance” works through numerous metaphors of childhood (“What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text [this text of self-reliance] in the face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes!”, “Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it,” “the nonchalance of boys...is the healthy attitude of human nature,” etc.) which culminate in Emerson’s declaration that “no law can be sacred to me but that of my own nature” (132-5). Presumably the argument is that one’s own nature is possible to apprehend and comprehend without other influences, so that it depends less on education, culture, and indoctrination than on self-trust and self-possession, qualities available, perhaps only so, outside of rigid family and social structures and strictures. When Emerson declares, “if I am the Devil’s child, I will live with the Devil,” then the trope of the self-reliant individual standing outside of family is taken to the furthest extreme: the “bantling” is not just without family, but is also cast out from family as such, from religion, and even from social relations altogether and thus becomes “devilish” (135). Who is left for this “Devil’s child” to depend on but his (or her) own self?

        Emerson uses this trope of the abandoned infant and the “young boy” to reveal just what it is that he means when he calls forth the “Aboriginal self,” which is a self that, because it is metaphorically so young, can know the “highest truth” since it is able to “remember[] the intuition” that the “man” has, through experience, forgotten (141, 143). This requires that Emerson establish the contrast of intuition and knowing. Intuition is a form of knowledge that Emerson compares with a more mature sort of knowing, of knowledge from experience. Experience, he argues, too often devolves into habit, making individuals “bad” children who “repeat by rote the sentences” of their elders. Instead, Emerson wants to produce “good” children who write their own verse; the production of which he tries to do through another metaphor of youth, by reminding his readers of the child within: “Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the past?” (142). The metaphor of the acorn, and later the roses that “make no reference to former roses or to better ones,” but which “are for what they are; they exist with God to-day” (143), is a metaphor that establishes the true power of the trope of the bantling--his possibility, his existence not as familial legacy but as pure potentiality in the process of becoming. Without a family to burden him, without parents to limit him, but with his senses and his unfettered self-trust the bantling is able to become whatsoever he wishes. Thus he is the Devil’s child because he is the most hated of things for he is no thing. Or, as Emerson puts it, “this one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside” (144). This one thing the world hates: the bastard child, the self-reliant boy, the acorn that is always only becoming an oak.

Biography section

I’m done with making excuses for the poor quality and transitions among sections. The point of this is to get them up and in public so that I can move on to the next section. Then I will clean them all up afterwards. (altho, I will mention that a few cites and footnotes are not present)

Today I have for you a brief biographical sketch of Charles Loring Brace (CLB) and a few comments on Brace, Emerson, and the founding of the Children’s Aid Society. I think my point was to connect the two but to not argue that some profound biographical link exists. They are not best friends, not even close. Rather, and I may need to strengthen this argument either here or in other parts of the dissertation (like ye olde introductione), I wish to show CLB as part of the way in which Emersonianism has infected and inflected other areas of life, particularly of reform, and to ask what it looks like there. In otherwords, the point about Emerson’s influence on Brace probably will stand or fall not on the biographical argument but on my reading of Brace’s writing. If you don’t believe me after that, then I’ve got a problem.

I also feel like I need to say more about a number of things--the CAS’s organization and founding, how I’m using The Dangerous Classes of New York as my main text for this chapter, and more about Brace’s connections with Transcendentalism more generally (ie the Olmsteads, Beechers, etc). As I said, though, I’ll leave those concerns for the revisions. For now, forward we go...

Oh, and coming soon: a few words about Darwin and self-reliance.

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        Daniel Aaron could have had Charles Loring Brace in mind when he claims in Men of Good Hope that “the men and women who made up th[e] transcendental corps [of second generation transcendentalist reformers] were mostly of New England origin.... It was this group that, disgusted by the prevailing materialism of the day, turned to culture and to reform” (15). Brace turned to a career in reform, like Emerson to his own career, only after turning away from an education and a position as a minister. But, first, Brace came to New York City and to the work of “child-saving” in good transcendentalist fashion--his family, his life, and his intellectual development all directed him towards a life embracing and activating Emersonian ideas. Charles Loring Brace was born on June 19, 1826 in Litchfield, Connecticut to a family steeped in transcendental circles. Charles’ mother, Lucy Porter, was Lyman Beecher’s sister-in-law, and the Beechers would continue to affect and be influenced by the Braces througout Charles’ life: his parents lived in the home of Lyman Beecher from their marriage in 1820 until 1822, when they built a house nearby after John Brace took on a position at the Litchfield Academy. At Litchfield, John Brace would teach Harriet Beecher, including assigning her her first essays, and introduce more rigorous academic subjects to the curriculum of the female school, including “science, higher mathematics, logic, and Latin” (O’Connor 8). In 1833, the family moved to Hartford, where John Brace, Charles’ father, became the principle at the Hartford Female Seminary, which was founded by Catharine Beecher in 1823.

         Brace’s exposure to Transcendental ideas came in an important way through his father, who was not just an educator but also the editor of the Hartford Courant. After Lucy passed away in 1840, leaving Brace what he would later call an “half-orphan,” John Brace, was left to raise his children alone. Charles grew up “very much under his father’s eye,” according to his daughter Emma’s comments in her 1894 memoir of her father, The Life of Charles Loring Brace (4). John Brace encouraged Charles’ intellectual curiosity, sometimes even seeming to “neglect his seminary students” to devote more time to his own son (O’Connor 17). O’Connor notes how, “for two hours every day, until Charles was 14, John read to [Charles] from the classic works of Greek, Roman, European, and American history, interspersing them with selections from Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott” (17). John Brace was himself a well-educated and liberal teacher, and at the Female Seminary, John Brace implemented a decidely feminist “educational agenda” (O’Connor 8).

        Charles grew into a precocious child in this intellectual and “Transcendental hothouse” (PHRASE TAKEN FROM SOMEWHERE, FIND IT CITE). He was known for asking his father so many questions over dinner that the roast would often “grow cold” while John Brace answered his son’s questions. The students of the female seminary, after a number of dinners with more than enough questions and not enough warm food, once threatened Charles that “if he did not stay away with his questions, he should be kissed” (Life 4). The terrors of young affection aside, Marilyn Holt concludes that Brace’s “family was comfortable in its financial and social status” (41). Charles Brace later recalled that he was himself happiest in Hartford during “my trouting, my ramblings over mountains and by willow-fringed brooks, all my ecstasies over fresh green meadows and waving woods and bright flowers and trout streams” (17). It was, again, his father, who took Charles on many of these “trouting” expeditions, but the love of nature was to be a sustaining force in Charles Brace’s often city-bound life. As an older man, he would routinely vacation by taking long trips in the various wildernesses (EXPAND), and when he moved, in 1848, to New York City to study at Union Theological Seminary, the 22 year-old Brace, who had lived his entire life in that small Connecticut town, wrote that he would not “enjoy studying in New York for [more than] a year.... The novelty must wear way then” (58). In fact, Brace survived his early years in New York City Brace by spending almost every weekend recuperating on his friend Frederick Law Olmstead’s nearby farm on Staten Island, which Olmstead had named “South Side”.

        Given Brace’s love of nature and his growth in Connecticut, it should come as no surprise that as a young man he became enamored of Horace Bushnell’s work, particularly after he left home for Yale College in 1842. This connection was established early in both Bushnell’s career and Brace’s life. As O’Connor explains, the 15 year-old Brace attended a delivery of the sermon “Unconscious Influence” “at North Congregational Church on February 20, 1842” (19). This sermon contains the “core ideas” for Bushnell’s most famous work, Christian Nurture, a text that discusses Christian childrearing, a life-long concern for Charles Brace (19). When published in 1847, Christian Nurture earned Bushnell the condemnation of many Congregationalists, though he avoided an official sanction for his claims that rigorous Calvinist doctrines led to overly negative view of children and thus to poor childrearing. In Bushnell we can see a broad base for Brace’s lifelong concern with children and his fundamental belief that the family is the best image of God’s love for humanity. As Brace put it in a letter to a “Miss Blake” (“one of his circle,” as Emma describes her), “It does seem to me the government of a State does not present the best type of God’s government.... But there is a government on earth which much more nearly, in my opinion, corresponds to God’s--...I mean Family Government. A father governs by love,” Brace concludes. This focus on a love, Brace argues, leads a father to make decisions that might be against a law (by, say, suspending a deserved punishment) but with the more moral aim of improving the child (when the father knows that the “repentence is sincere”) (Life 42-46).

        Brace continued at Yale and then at Yale Divinity School until 1848, when he tranferred to the more liberal Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In New York, Brace took on a series of teaching and writing jobs. “He taught Latin at the Rutgers Institute” and wrote for the New York Daily Times and the Independent, which was a “Congregationalist newspaper associated with Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn,” continuing Brace’s connection with the Beecher family and solidifying his credentials within the Congregationalist establishment in New York (39). Then, in 1849, Brace began his first serious missionary work when he became the minister to residents of the New York Charity Hospital on Blackwell’s Island. The hospital had men’s and women’s wards, as well as a separate ward for children, and while Brace’s work was primarily with the terminally ill patients in the women’s wards, he still became concerned about the children he saw there. He wrote, to his own terminally ill sister Emma, with a keen sense of both his coming purpose and his typical sympathy for nature and natural observation: “The sky is uncommonly beautiful this season with us, and we have towards night a peculiar cold gray tint which I have not often seen described.... New York is whirling on as usual. You have no idea, Emma, what an immense vat of misery and crime and filth much of this great city is! I realize it more and more. Think of ten thousand children growing up almost sure to be prostitutes and rogues!” (82).

        This was to be the last time that Brace would write to his sister Emma, who passed away in February of 1850, but it was not the last time that he would connect the children of New York with those in Connecticut. Brace’s own childhood constantly mingled with his observations of the children around him. In the Seventh Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society, Brace opens by saying that “there is something about childish poverty that touches almost everyone... We recall our own childhood; how keenly even a harsh look or word was felt; how sensitive we were to kindness and affection; how easily moulded to evil or to good” (3). After Emma’s death, Brace took leave of New York and the United States and went on a trip to Europe with his friends Frederick and John Olmstead. When Brace returned to new York in 1851, he would take up what he called “practical work,” and enter into a career as a “city missionary” (154).

BRACE AND EMERSON AND THE FOUNDING OF THE CAS

        In Men of Good Hope, Daniel Aaron claims that “[Theodore] Parker is the link between Emerson and the post-war reformers,” and Parker, a member of the Transcendental Club and a fiery Unitarian minister, reveals a direct line between Emerson and Brace (22). Brace was a committed abolitionist, and he had been so from the youngest age when both his father and Bushnell influenced him in the direction of abolition. In fact, he would later marry Robert Neill’s daughter Letitia. Robert Neill was “a passionate opponent of American slavery who had played host [in Blefast] to many abolitionists on European speaking tours” (50). So when Brace met Parker at Yale, the two made common cause in both their theology and their politics. Brace would serve the Union cause during the war with his pen, contributing articles to many New York and New England papers, but in the years before the coming storm, he corresponded with Parker frequently and at length during his studies, travels, and later work with the CAS.

        In a letter, from 1853, the year in which Brace would accept his appointment as Secretary of the CAS, Brace asks Parker to thank Emerson for “what he has done” for Brace’s life and work (Life 176). Brace continues by claiming that he “can scarcely think of a teacher to whom [he] owe[s] more” than Emerson (177). Emerson mostly “taught” Brace though print, but they also corresponded and they met on many occasions. Brace traveled to Concord and visited with Emerson, but more often he played host during Emerson’s frequent trips to New York to lecture. Emerson’s first trip to New York, in 1842, predated Brace’s arrival, but his frequent lecture tours in the 1840s and 1850s covered much of New England and often included New York City. Brace even established a sort of transcendental breakfast club of his own at his New York home, gathering together many of the visiting reformers and lecturers for conversation and food. Emma Brace writes that “Mr. Emerson was ever faithful [to join her father for breakfast] when on visits to New York” (211).

        Nevertheless, it would be wrong to conclude that Emerson and Brace were good friends. They were acquaintances in their personal lives, but there was something stronger connecting them. Even someone as charismatic and self-assured as Theodore Parker was quick to point to Emerson as a sort of oracle or inspiration. As Daniel Aaron writes, “Parker was only speaking the truth when he wrote to Emerson in 1851: “Much of the little I do now is the result of seed of your own sowing.’” (21) Emerson sowed the seeds, and he sowed them widely during his lecture tours and due to the success of his publications and his ideas. During Brace’s time in Berlin in 1851, John Olmstead wrote to Brace: “We want ten thousand such apostles of ideas as you to come and work [here in New York City], and work against the material tendency that is swamping us. That will be your exact post when you return, to direct the fierce energies here, to lead toward divine things, to join Emerson in his work, [but] in a different way, to speak a word, and never cease speaking a word, for ideas” (Life 109).

        While Brace would speak a word for ideas often in his writings and correspondence, which would range over numerous diverse and idiosyncratic subjects, his work would become uniquely Emersonian. But he would not be entirely alone. A group of these like-minded men and women, these transcendental reformers, came together in New York City in January of 1853 to discuss the terrifying situation of the poor and orphaned children of their city. This group chose Brace to hold the first year-long appointment as secretary of the Children’s Aid Society of New York, a position he would continue to hold until his death in 1890. At the time Brace, not even two years returned from his travels, was a “rapidly rising literary and political figure on the New York scene,” according to Stephen O’Conner (82). Brace had written two monographs in the preceding year, Home-Life in Germany, which would be published later in 1853, and Hungary in 1851, which had come out the previous year in 1852. Hungary in 1851 details Brace’s month-long imprisonment in Hungary under chages that he was supporting democratic revolutionaries like Lajos Kossuth. In truth, Brace simply had a couple of pamphlets written in English in his posession, including one that “had a picture of Kossuth as a frontispiece” (O’Connor 61). Brace eventually won his release through the intervention of a Catholic priest and the American consul, but upon his return to New York, the publication of his travelogue burnished his credentials as an activist and writer. It was his second book that would solidify Brace as an expert on working with children.

        In Home-Life in Germany Brace again wrote of his experiences traveling in Europe, but rather than politics he focuses on the institution of the German “Rauhe Haus,” or the Rough House, “a residential school for vagrant children outside of Hamburg” (O’Connor 52). Brace, who preferred to call the Rauhe Haus “A Home among the Flowers” because of its rural setting, was affected by the way in which this German institution “attempt[ed] to approximate natural home life” of a family (54). The man who had earlier written that a family was the best metaphor for a system of government based on Christian principles, now found a way to implement that system for saving children. Children were raised not in large orphanages with all of the stony coldness of what Brace called the institutional “Asylum interest,” but in smaller groups centered around a farm that the children helped to work. Two things that would later become very influential on the CAS became clear to Brace here in Germany: first, that children could be given useable farming skills in the rural setting of the Rauhe Haus, thus increasing their self-reliance in later life, and, second, there were salutory effects brought about by the effort to approximate a normal home life for orphaned children. O’Connor concludes that “what most appealed to Brace [about the Rauhe Haus] was that [it] required the poor to make some contribution toward the benefits they received, so that their character was not destroyed by becoming dependent on mere charity” (55). In otherwords, Brace admired the ways in which the Rauhe Haus required and developed something quite like Emersonian self-reliance.

        So Brace came to the organizational meeting of the Children’s Aid Society of New York as a repected author on children’s charity work with a demonstrated preference to put into action Emerson’s ideal of self-reliance, an ideal that Brace developed both in practice and through contact with many of the Transcendentalists of his day. What was more, Brace was a young, active man with a keen sense of Christian purpose and a firm understanding that “working with children was ‘prevention’ because they had not yet been infected by the evils of their environment...[and that they] were also more malleable than their parents” (76). Under Brace’s leadership, according to Clay Gish, the CAS became “the pre-eminent child-saving organization of the nineteenth century” and its emigration program of “Orphan Trains” became “one of the most influential, far-reaching, and controversial programs in the child-saving movement (121). “Like [Emerson],” Aaron continues, “they [the next generation of “middle-class reformers”] made the flowering of the individual personality their ultimate goal and estimated all political and social ideologies, whether conservative or radical, by this single test” (18). It is my contention that Brace and the CAS implemented Emersonian notions of self-reliance and friendship in their child-saving efforts, thus constructing children (primarily “boys”) as self-reliant individuals who needed training and love to be able to play their role as citizen in this new democratic moment. Brace and the CAS clearly depended on other prominent discourses, but nonetheless, Emersonian democratic friendship was importantly at work in their efforts. As Aaron says, Brace had, as we shall see, a “single test” for success--whether the children he saved were better able to be self-reliant.

Second Section

To be honest, I am not entirely happy with this section. It has a simple goal: to set the work that comes in the context of the fluctuating nature of family and of children in the nineteenth century. I feel like I need either some evidence or some further discussions of other writers (literature review). But I don’t want to turn this section into something too big either. Anyway, pointers, advice, criticism, reassurance, whatever you think--post it up in the comments. The third section will be up soon, and it is probably more fun to read, since it’s mostly a biography of Brace...

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        I have argued that self-reliance is the way in which Emersonian democratic friendship tries to break down the divides of like, which we can define as ways in which one person is like another and yet divided from still others, and where the line of demarcation is often based on some affective connection. These could be divides of race and ethnicity, of class, of gender, or, as is the focus in this chapter, of kinship, of family, and they are policed--enforced and established--by the possibility of emotional connections. I feel my obligation to my sister, and so we are alike. I see you, says Whitman, “face to face,” but the reality, for Whitman as much as for most nineteenth century Americans is that there are some faces that are seen and some that are occluded. Emersonian democratic friendship attempts to break down these divides of like by focusing on how a self-reliant individual is not solely swayed by affective ties of intimacy but is able to maintain the broad-ranging affiliations necessary for a national, heterogeneous democracy. Entering, as it did, into a world full of some kinds of affiliations and hostile to others, Emersonian democratic friendship sought a way to educate and train Americans to be truly self-reliant and thus truly able to establish relationships, friendships, across that which held Americans apart. This chapter’s focus is both on the work of Charles Loring Brace and the CAS to teaching and training children, particularly boys, in a manner consistent with Emersonian democratic friendship and on how Brace and the CAS performed that work through a reconstruction of the notion of family--by breaking down one divide of like: kinship.

        We will look shortly at Brace’s life and the specific tasks of the Children’s Aid Society of New York City, but for now I want to think about how Brace’s efforts in New York City are part of a larger movement to produce citizens of a certain kind in the nineteenth century. We could call this effort to produce the citizen the problem of democratic subjectivity, and it was powerfully felt by a republic with both expanding national boundaries and expanding internal constituencies from immigration, abolition, and expanding suffrage. Recently democratic subjectivity has received broad scholarly interest, often through the lenses of masculinity and whiteness studies. This twin focus on whiteness and masculinity conceives of modern citizenship “as a quality of relation: as an affect or attachment, a feeling of mutual belonging that somehow transpires between strangers,” as Coviello puts it. Much recent work on democratic subjectivity is done so in the effort to explain just how Melville can say that the post-war nation is a unified through what he calls in Battle-Pieces a “natural brotherood” of white northern and southern men. These men, according to Melville, are brothers despite being strangers, and natural brothers at that--there is no coercion in their affective affiliation for they are family.

(needs work. Not sure what else needs to go here, if anything. Feel like this section is both necessary and full of unnecessary junk)

        Charles Loring Brace and the CAS used Emersonian democratic friendship, particularly notions of self-reliance, to participate in the larger discourse of democratic subjectivity, not only by producing a particular notion of white manhood, nor entirely by producing a particular notion of capitalist citizenship, but by establishing, promulgating, and shepherding a notion of what it is to be a boy. The concept of the boy, as proto-citizen, has a long history in American letters. Dana Nelson, in National Manhood, her study of democratic subjectivity, draws her readers attention to Benjamin Rush’s 1798 treatise, “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” both to underscore the historical connection between educating boys and democratic subjectivity and to demonstrate how “Rush’s plan works structurally to reroute anxieties about national unity and sameness into the psychological interior of the American boy/man,” who must come to synthesize the competing and contradictory demands of “self, family, market, and national interest in his own person” (12). The role of education, according to Rush, is to “convert men into republican machines,” and Nelson is disturbed by the unintended consequences of producing these republican machines (92). This work builds off of Nelson’s by considering the way that Rush’s plan is modified over the course of the nineteenth century through contact with sentimental notions of childhood. That is, as national manhood becomes professionalized, it might move away from the area of the boy, leaving open a space for a new sort of democratic subjectivity to take root.

        Consider how 38 years after Rush published his essay, in 1836, Massachusetts passed the first state child labor law, dramatically refiguring notions of childhood, labor, and professionalization. By the time that the CAS formed in 1853, social reformers were promoting a “right to childhood” across the nation and motivating depictions of overworked and exploited children to reform local and national laws. This work culminated in two events early in the twentieth century. In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt called the first White House Conference on Children, which ratified Charles Brace’s conclusion in the 1850s that “home life” is the best place for dependent children. Then, in 1912 the Children’s Bureau was formed by Congress to enforce the Sheppard-Towner act, which granted funds that states could use to support children’s health and welfare. “According to [the historian K.] Lindenmeyer, establishment of the Children’s Bureau meant that: ‘the effort to protect a right to childhood was now elevated from sentimentalized local charity work to national policy’” (Kahan 58).

        The work of Charles Loring Brace and the CAS took place in the midst of this shift in the conception of childhood. This shift moved from considering young boys (Rush refers to them as simply “men”) as proto-republican machines to defending a romantic view of the unencumbered state of childhood. Brace clearly considered the targets of his charity work as future citizens (and current workers, as we shall see), but his work was also involved in the similar work of sentimental literatures that participate in a discourse that Kenneth Kidd has identified as that of “boy farming” or “boyology.” “Boyology” is, according to Kidd, more than just the study of “boy education and management” that “flourished from the 1860s through the 1920s,” but is also the science of producing a certain kind of citizen, where citizenship is figured through the trope of the boy (148). For Emerson, Brace, and other “boyologists” like Rush the boy is father to the man, but another poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson figures importantly in both the work of the CAS and that of other boyologists. Kidd argues that “the cornerstone of boy farming is the Emersonian program of self-reliance,” and with the work of the CAS we have a unique window through which to view the workings of the discourse of self-reliance in specific and general efforts to produce the new subjects of the republic (151). Furthermore, boyology is connected with a larger sentimental literature that includes the “bad boy” books of the late nineteenth century and their depictions of idealized rural childhoods, and even works like Huckleberry Finn, a book that we should remember as contemporaneous with the orphan trains. When Huck made his way out to the “territory,” he might have encountered a few orphan train riders newly arrived from New York City.

        For most of the history of the republic, the production of democratic subjects was the function of the family, aided and restricted in certain ways by various extra-familial apparatuses, certainly, but the production of citizens was quite literally a “family” matter. In fact, Rush suggests that boys will be better educated at home in a family setting than in a school with their peers because the family will teach them about the proper organization of a smoothly functioning society (or should we say a smoothly functioning patriarchy) while too much contact with their peers will tend to produce bad habits. And yet, we know that Rush lost that particular battle first to the movement towards the common school system and then with the movement towards compulsory education, which became a national obligation by 1918. Boy farming, however, reflects the development in the mid to late nineteenth century of a whole host of extra-familial influences on the production of citizens. Processes of industrialization and standardization that are affecting the economic and social life of Americans are reaching down into the family and fracturing and reconfiguring its nature.

         There is, then, a newfound willingness on the part of nineteenth century Americans to allow extra-familial influences on the production of their young citizens. But there is also a new willingness to reconfigure family. Brace and the CAS are best known for the “orphan trains” that sent children like Charley Miller to live with adoptive families, and it is adoption that unleashes the power of friendship to modify the family. In 1851, just two years before the CAS began operations, Massachussets passed The Adoption of Children Act, the first modern adoption law. This statute required judges to consider the child’s welfare, making the interests of the child a concern for the child’s legal status for the first time. This development of the institution of adoption and its codification in statute had profound affects on the American family. Writing about Maria Cummins’ The Lamplighter, an 1854 novel centered around the serial informal adoptions of a young girl named Gerty, Cindy Weinstein argues that the novel “produces a paradigm of family based on chosen affections rather than biologically determined ones” (45). Weinstein identifies the middle part of the nineteenth century as a “cultural moment in which the language, procedures, and meanings of adoption are being negotiated, in which the outlines of the family are being questioned and reestablished” (65).

        Gerty found more happiness than did Charley Miller, but they both were engaged in efforts to reconstruct the discourse of family in the United States, to make possible true “adoptions.” Brace, the CAS, and Cummins were thinking through the many and multiple ways in which subjects are produced outside of the biological family. As we will see, Brace even tried to go around the family by appealing directly to children as self-reliant individuals, but the CAS, though its emigration programs and the orphan trains, primarily hoped, as Brace writes, to “touch habits of life and the inner forces which form character” by refiguring the “families” in which these poor children lived and the manner in which they lived (The Dangerous Classes 23). During these efforts, they took some of the first steps towards establishing full legal adoption in the United States, thus connecting, through a rhetoric of self-reliance, the wider discourse of democratic subjectivity with this discourse of family and individuality. This chapter is an effort to pull apart those various discourses and how they affected the work and writing of Charles Loring Brace and the CAS. My hope is that an examination of the ways in which Emersonian democratic friendship here presented itself through a discourse of self-reliance will illuminate Brace and the CAS’s efforts to modify and rework American understandings of family and democratic subjectivity. As part of the larger project of Emersonian democratic friendship, Brace tried to create a new kind of democratic subject--in this particular case, a subject who can stand both outside and within traditional discourses of kinship and citizenship.

Introduction

First, a few words of explanation and, perhaps, expiation.

1) I’m trying to use MacJournal to update this blog. This is new for me, so let’s hope it uploads as smoothly and easily as it is supposed to upload. The software is rather nice and full-featured for a journaling/blogging application. Apparently I can really easily insert and upload video and audio! Luckily for you I have no need to do that for a written dissertation, so you won’t have to actually look at my face in low-res video-cam glory or listen to my dulcet tones (aside: I have never used the word dulcet except as an adjective for “tones”). But who knows, maybe I’ll read one section aloud for you.

2) Teaching is over for the summer for me. I’ll be turning in grades on Tuesday, and turning my full attention to this chapter. As Christoph once told me to do, I’ll be writing with both hands. My general plan is to go through the sucker methodically and deliberately, posting up what is ready when it’s ready. Ideally I’ll be able to start at the beginning and move on through til the end, but realistically I anticipate a couple of skips and jumps in the middle over the two places that I don’t know what to do with just yet. If I keep to my schedule, this project will conclude round about the beginning of September. It would be earlier, but I’ll lose a week on August 23rd to the W131 “boot-camp” seminar week. Forty-something first-time teachers for the five ADs and Christine to train and mentor, complete with all-day meetings for 5 days!

3) So, look for something every few days, at least for the next two weeks--well, barring another gift from the summer that has so far blessed me with multiple reasons to look forward to 2011 (and, honestly, multiple reasons to look back fondly on 2010, but right now my knee hurts, so it’s on to 2011!!). Oh, the latest update on my Grade 3 MCL and Grade 2 PCL tears is that my knee does not need surgery just now--unless it stays as loose as it is or gets worse, which I can hardly see how that would happen. Without my brace on, I feel like I’m walking on a stilt with my right leg. For now, I am working on getting my range of motion back and the swelling down, and next month I can start doing some strengthening exercises. Until then, I am under medical orders to be lazy--no basketball, no soccer, no running, no lower-body weight lifting. I can ride the exercise bike, but even then I can’t use any resistance and I’m not supposed to stay on it for very long.

Ok, back to the post. What follows is the introduction to the chapter. Since it is the introduction, if it needs any introduction, then I’ve not done my job very well. I should come up with a clever title...

Introduction.

        Out on the “high prairie of eastern Wyoming,” on September 27th of 1890, eighteen year-old Waldo Emerson, traveling for the first time away from his home in Missouri, was shot to death in an empty freight-train car (O’Connor 258). For reasons that have and will continue to remain unclear, a fifteen year-old boy, who called himself “Kansas Charley,” placed a thirty-two caliber nickel-plated revolver up to Waldo’s temple and killed him while he slept. Then, “Kansas” Charley, who had never been to Kansas, having grown up in New York City, and whose real name was Charles Miller, shot Waldo’s traveling companion, Ross Fishbaugh. The two older boys bled from bullet wounds in each of their temples where moments earlier they dozed peacefully to the rocking of the train. “Kansas Charley” then stowed his $1.25 nickel-plated revolver under the pile of straw serving as Waldo’s pillow, and while Fishbaugh “writhed and foamed at the mouth,” Kansas Charley rifled through the older boys’ pockets and took their money. Then, Kansas Charley went back to sleep, waking only two hours later when the train stopped in Hillsdale, Wyoming. Charley then walked across town, begged lunch from a local farmer, and hopped on another train before the bodies of the two older boys could be found. 18 days and nearly 600 miles later, on October 15th, Charley Miller and his older brother Fred Miller told the story of what the Cheyenne Daily Leader had already called “the most dastardly crime ever committed in the west” to another newspaper editor, Albert Stewart, of the weekly paper the Republic in Manhattan, Kansas (261). A long way from the Manhattan, the “island of many hills,” of his childhood, Charley Miller came to the end of his travels in a town with a familiar name to the boy from New York City.

        Nearly eight and a half years earlier, on April 27th of 1882, another Waldo Emerson (no one ever called him Ralph) passed away a month shy of his 79th birthday. Death came unexpectedly but less suddenly to the older Waldo, who caught cold after a soft rain fell on his evening walk down the lanes of Concord, Massachusetts on April 25th. Waldo’s cold turned into pneumonia, and he passed away, also in his sleep, two days later. What follows in these pages is in the story of how the lifes and deaths of these two Waldo Emersons are connected. This story is bound up with changing American understandings of family, friendship, and individuality, but as we come to understand the links between these two Waldos, I hope that we might also gain some perspective on those changing understandings and the tragic circumstances that led young Charley Miller to the same train car as the younger Waldo Emerson.

        An obvious connection between these two Waldo Emersons is, of course, their names. While it is tempting to argue that this simple confluence does not reveal much, I think it rather important to admit the cultural importance of the elder Waldo Emerson even in the post-bellum United States. The younger Waldo, born in 1872 in the young midwestern state of Missouri, had little in common with the “sage of Concord.” His father was a factory foreman who had paid for Waldo’s travel to Denver, where he and his companion were hoping to find work (260). But for all of their differences, the fact that that they shared a name shows the national reach of the older Emerson’s legacy in the now-not-so-young republic. The younger Waldo’s father, a “relatively well-educated” industrialist on the midwestern prairie, seems to have been living out one version of the ideal of the rugged individual in the West (260). His decision to name his son “Waldo” must have been a conscious choice.

        But it is through Charley Miller that the two are also connected. “Kansas” Charley had only been living in the New York Orphan Asylum for three years when the older Ralph Waldo Emerson passed away, but he was uniquely a part of Emerson’s legacy because of his contact--through another confluence of names--with another man named “Charles:” Charles Loring Brace. Brace was leader of the foremost charity in what we have come to call the child saving movement: the Chidren’s Aid Society of New York City (CAS). The CAS began operation in 1853, and was best known for its series of schools and lodging houses (of which the Newsboys Lodging House is most famous) and for popularizing the orphan trains, which ideally took orphan, abandoned, and often “found” children from New York City and “emigrated” them to families in the country. Charles Loring Brace, one of the elder Emerson’s correspondents and acquaintances, tried to bring Emersonian democratic friendship and specifically Emerson’s cherished ideal of self-reliance to bear on child poverty in New York City. It is this effort to apply Emersonian democratic friendship that primarily connects our two Waldos. Without Brace, Charley Miller would never have been in Wyoming; six years after the older Emerson’s death, Charley Miller left the New York City in one of the Children’s Aid Society’s “orphan trains,” heading west for work and a new family.

        We will return to what happened to Charley Miller both in New York City and once he arrived at his new home in Minnesota. His experiences will illuminate the difficulties faced by Brace in adapting and implementing Emersonian democratic friendship. Those difficulties lay at the intersection of two very American values and their changing natures in the nineteenth century: the self-reliant individual and the sacred unit of the family. The questions before us are, first, how Emersonian democratic friendship negotiated the differences between those two values within the particular context of social work in post-bellum New York City, and, second, what were the results of a specific attempt to put into practice Emersonian democratic friendship?

        Charley Miller was on the train with Waldo Emerson and Ross Fishbaugh in part because of Emersonian democratic friendship. The double murder of of those two young men was a tragedy. It was the work of a troubled young man, who was executed himself on April 22, 1892. But this chapter is not a murder mystery. It is an investigation into the swirling vortex of discourses surrounding Charley Miller and how one man, Charles Loring Brace, tried to control and contain the explosive potential of those discourses by recourse to Emersonian democratic friendship and its key principle of self-reliance. Ultimately, Brace’s efforts may have failed as much as they succeeded, but they were a part of a new era in America’s understanding of family and individuality, an era that challenged the “naturalness” affect and intimacy as the basis for relationships, even a relationship as natural as that between parent and child. Looking at how the CAS and Brace saw self-reliance figuring in their work with poor children in New York City will help us understand much about the changing attitudes about family, childhood, and individuality in the post-bellum nation.

Introduction

So, I'm struggling to actually WRITE my dissertation.  I've decided, therefore, to blog it.

In part, I want to give voice to all of those things that I write that are not going in to the dissertation, or that I don't really see how they fit yet, but which I can't stop writing (today's post is one of those) until they are somewhat finished.  In part, I want to get a place to try out a few things and see what they look like somewhere other than just on my laptop.  In part, I want some accountability for writing something, at least.  And, in part, I'm overly-aggrandizing my own position and hoping that someone somewhere might find this interesting and worth reading.

My goal is to post up pieces occasionally as I'm working on and through them, or as I finish and want someone to get a look at them.  So, without any further ado, here's a few words that I think might make it into the opening chapter that I'm not writing just now but that I got caught up in this week.

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On my refrigerator I have a number of magnets—a double-decker bus magnet brought back  from England by Heather, a magnet that my son loves because it lists the local pizza place’s number and specials, a large magnet reminding everyone who enters my kitchen to be nice or leave, and a magnet with a quotation about success attributed to Emerson.  


I'm sure you've encountered the Emerson "quotation" before.  Here it is--or here is one version of it (for there are many):


To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.


This Emerson magnet is special for a number of reasons.  It reminds me how quotable Emerson is, and how easily we extract his sentences from their contexts, often missing their actual meaning in the excerption.  Emerson quotations appear often like fragments of poetry found on papyrus--devoid of associations, standing alone, full of questions and assumed meanings. 


I also happen to rather like this quotation; the single parent in me particularly loves the part about how success comes from winning the affection of children.  So I like both something specific to me in this quotation and something general about Emerson’s quotations, but I like this magnet not least because the quotation attributed to Emerson is not his. And we have known that it is not his for decades now. Oh, how stubbornly we hold on to "truths" that just aren't true.  I bought the magnet in April of 2010 after it made me smile and laugh when I saw both the magnet and a notecard bearing the quotation for sale in the grocery store.


The debunking of this quotation is almost something of an repetitive industry, reminding me of nothing so much as when the same joke is "written" a few years apart by about a dozen different comedians.  In March of 2009, the New York Times  "Freakonomics Blog" "traced" the origins of the quotation using the Yale Book of Quotations, finding out that it wasn't written by Emerson but by Bessie Anderson Stanley in 1904. Almost a decade earlier, in 2000, Joel Myerson debunked the attribution in The Emerson Society Papers, repeating the story told another decade earlier, in 1992, by Dear Abby when she had to publish a retraction after attributing the quotation to Emerson in a column in 1990.  As the Emerson Society link above shows, the story probably comes down to an "eyeskip." Emerson's name on one side of the page; Stanley's quotation on the other.


But I want to suggest that there is something very Emersonian in having a quotation mis-identified as Emerson's, repeatedly for over a hundred years until it has all but become "Emerson's" (he may as well have said it, at this point--with apologies to the Stanleys) and then having that mistaken attribution reproduced on magnets, coffee mugs, gift cards, and every sort of tchotcke imaginable, and all of that done DESPITE the fact that the attribution has been debunked in Dear Abby, in the New York Times, and in the Emerson Society Papers.  It is as if the Emerson in our minds must take on certain roles; he has specific parts to play. And one of them is to be the paragon prophet of success, and so if there is a quotation, vaguely poetic and memorable, about "success," then, by necessity, it must be Emerson's.


This is additionally ironic because Emerson did write quite a lot about success, but it would not be entirely comforting to our ears today to hear what he did in fact say.  In 1870 in his last major book, Society and Solitude, Emerson included an essay entitled "Success," based on a lecture that he frequently gave over the many years before.  The essay is vintage late Emerson with its share of echoed wisdoms from his past work: Writing about the success that is part of being a love, he writes, "What was on his lips to say is uttered by his friend," echoing  the classic line from "Self-Reliance" about how we see our own "rejected thoughts" in every "work of genius."  And it includes the late Emerson's praise of power and of the common man ("Every man has a history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from him."


But it also includes a number of things that would make us uncomfortable to hear today, if we were to attribute them to the paragon prophet of success.  Emerson writes, "I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship, or the sale of goods through pretending that they sell, or power through making believe you are powerful, or through a packed jury or caucus, bribery and "repeating" votes, or wealth by fraud."  In many ways, that's an indictment of the contemporary political and cultural situation of the 1870s.  In many ways, it is still an indictment of the contemporary political and cultural situation.  Not as easy to read as the truism about being kind to children, small animals, and other things that aren't entirely all that demanding.


Oh, don't get me wrong. There is still the classic easy to read, easy to quote Emerson here.  For instance, he tells us, rather predictably, that self-reliance is the meaning of success: "Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief that, if you are here, the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so long as you work at that you are well and successful."


But this returns me to a point I made earlier, about how Emerson is so quotable because we take him out of context and treat the context-less quotation as some sort of oracle of truth about whatever issue or domain we have given over to Emerson.  So Emerson, the careful and deliberate essayist, becomes the purveyor of pocket-sized wisdoms, safely quotable and safely cut-off from all context.  All you have to do is leave the world a little bit better, and you will have succeeded.  All you have to do is trust yourself, and you will have succeeded.  But that isn't nearly half the story, and we would do well to heed the whole, instead of subscribing only to the part.


In "Success," Emerson works to distinguish "self-trust" from "the disease to which it is allied,--the exaggeration of the part which we can play.... He only who comes into this central intelligence, in which no egotism or exaggeration can be, comes into self-possession."  This is a much harder truth to understand because it requires us to activate our own humility.  Sure, they may be some part for me to play in this crazy play, but I'm not the main actor--I'm no Lincoln or Emerson, and real self-trust, real success, comes from being honest about my own insignificance.  Emerson does go on to give some consolation--he prefers what he calls "sensibility" to "talent" because sensibility lets one live in harmony, while talent tends to confine us to one activity or area.  Thus, living "in the happy sufficing present, and find[ing] the day and its cheap means contenting," well, that's the kind of success most of us can attain.  


The essay goes on to engage with that perplexing concept of Power, but I don't want to give a full reading of the essay here.  My point was simply that reading the whole essay tends to give a different flavor to the specific quotation from the essay.  We probably still want to live and perform our "task strictly appointed," but we now realize that Emerson thinks most of our tasks are, well, rather humble.  And the best we can do is have a good sensibility and be, well, happy with our lot in life, however meager.  Rather belittling, isn't it?


Or is it? Isn't the mis-attributed quotation aiming at the same sort of modest statement about what it is that one must do to be successful?  I think that it is. In other words, this isn't Emerson, isn't even close, but it seems to me closer than it might have first appeared.  Of course, there is much in it that is anti-Emersonian.  The quotation seems more concerned with how others view you than with how you view yourself. It's probably more truly Emersonian to say that success is earning your own respect and being affectionate towards yourself, including the past selves that you were as a child.  But as far as that modesty about what it is that is appointed to you goes, this quotation speaks with a slight Emersonian accent.


And, perhaps, this is why the quotation is so committed to being misattributed--it just wants to be part of Emerson's oeuvre, no matter how many times we prove its misattribution.  And so it sits on my refrigerator, reminding me how far it is from Emerson's definition of success and how close it is, even still, to his definition.