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).