Fundamentally, America in 1860 and in 2003 are little different.
The sage of Concord
Philosopher, poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson helped define US identity in the 19th century. Today, 200 years after his birth, his views on power, rejection of Old Europe and belief in a personal god are even more influential, pervading American culture and politics, argues Harold Bloom
Nothing is more American, whether catastrophic or amiable, than that Emersonian formula concerning power: "it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of a gulf, in the darting to an aim". Throughout his own lifetime, Emerson was ambiguously on the left, but then the crusade against slavery, and the south, over-determined his political choices. Much as I love Emerson, it is important to remember always that he valued power for its own sake. If he is a moral essayist, the morality involved is not primarily either humane or humanistic.
As I grow older, I find Emerson to be strongest in The Conduct of Life , published in December 1860, four months after the south began the Civil war by firing upon Fort Sumter. Something vital in Emerson began slowly to burn out in the emotional stress of the war, perhaps because his hatred of the south intensified - he said that John Brown's execution had made the gallows as "glorious as the cross". Society and Solitude (1870) manifests a falling-off, even more apparent in Letters and Social Aims (1875). His last five years, from 1877 on, saw an end to his memory and his cognitive abilities. But in The Conduct of Life , written in his mid-50s, he establishes a crucial last work for Americans, in particular through a grand triad of essays: "Fate", "Power", "Illusions". "Power" is the centre, and might have been composed last week, in its shrewd sense of Americans, so little changed a century-and-a-half later: "The rough and ready style which belongs to a people of sailors, foresters, farmers, and mechanics, has its advantages. Power educates the potentate. As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions. The very word 'commerce' has only an English meaning, and is pinched to the cramp exigencies of English experience. The commerce of rivers, the commerce of railroads, and who knows but the commerce of air-balloons, must add an American extension to the pond-hole of admiralty. As long as our people quote English standards, they will miss the sovereignty of power; but let these rough riders - legislators in shirt-sleeves - Hoosier, Sucker, Wolverine, Badger - or whatever hard head Arkansas, Oregon, or Utah sends, half orator, half assassin, to represent its wrath and cupidity at Washington - let these drive as they may; and the disposition of territories and public lands, the necessity of balancing and keeping at bay the snarling majorities of German, Irish, and of native millions, will bestow promptness, address, and reason, at last, on our buffalo-hunter, and authority and majesty of manners. The instinct of the people is right. Men expect from good whigs, put into office by the respectability of the country, much less skill to deal with Mexico, Spain, Britain, or with our own malcontent members, than from some strong transgressor, like Jefferson, or Jackson, who first conquers his own government, and then uses the same genius to conquer the foreigner. "
I have quoted this long paragraph partly for its perpetual relevance, and partly for its Emersonian self-revelation, and exuberant amoralism. This cultural nationalism, invariably directed against the English, has no illusions as to what Emerson will go on to call (quite cheerfully) "the power of lynch law, of soldiers and pirates", of bullies of every variety. These roughs represent the power of violence, only a slightly lower order, for Emerson, of the violence of power: "Those who have most of this coarse energy - the 'bruisers', who have run the gauntlet of caucus and tavern through the county or the state, have their own vices, but they have the good nature of strength and courage. Fierce and unscrupulous, they are usually frank and direct, and above falsehood. Our politics fall into bad hands, and churchmen and men of refinement, it seems agreed, are not fit persons to send to Congress. Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts. Men in power have no opinions, but may be had cheap for any opinion, for any purpose - and if it be only a question between the most civil and the most forcible, I lean to the last. These Hoosiers and Suckers are really better than the snivelling opposition. Their wrath is at least of a bold and manly cast. They see, against the unanimous declarations of the people, how much crime the people will bear; they proceed from step to step, and they have calculated but too justly upon their Excellencies, the New England governors, and upon their Honours, the New England legislators. The messages of the governors and the resolutions of the legislatures are a proverb for expressing a sham virtuous indignation, which, in the course of events, is sure to be belied."
Fundamentally, America in 1860 and in 2003 are little different. Our current bruisers (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al) are distinctly not "frank and direct, and above falsehood", because they come from the corporate world, but certainly they know "how much crime the people will bear", and much of the opposition we can muster is, alas "snivelling". An uncanny ironist, as a prophet must be, Emerson is archetypically American in his appreciation of power: "In history, the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty - and you have Pericles and Phidias - not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity."
The "moment of transition" again is emphasised: power is always at the cross ing. Americans can read Emerson without reading him: that includes everyone in Washington DC pressing for power in the Persian Gulf. I return to the paradox of Emerson's influence: Peace Marchers and Bushians alike are Emerson's heirs in his dialectics of power.
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