But as English spread in the nineteenth century, with the British empire, to Australia, the West Indies, to Africa and many areas of the Middle East, it became what Arabic, Latin and French had once been, the common currency of international communication, a position it has held ever since. Gandhi felt enslaved by English, or said that he did, but the excellence and popularity of Indian novelists writing in English belies this sentiment. The triumph of English across the world may reflect earlier notions of nationalism and imperialism but it has gone well beyond them. English is the language not only of empire, but of science, capitalism, democracy – and the Internet.
34
The American Mind and the Modern University
The high point of empire in the Old World coincided more or less with the American Civil War. In a way, therefore, each continent faced a similar predicament – how different peoples, different races, should live together. The Civil War was a watershed in all ways for America. Although not many people realised it at the time, her dilemma over slavery had kept the country back and the war at last allowed the full forces of capitalism and industrialism to flex their muscles. Only after the war was the country fully free to fulfil its early promise.
The population in 1865 was upwards of 31 million, and therefore, relatively speaking, still small compared with the major European states. Intellectual life was – like everything else – still in the process of formation and expansion.1 After the triumphs of 1776, and the glories of the Constitution, which many Europeans had found so stimulating, Americans did not want for lack of confidence. But there was, even so, much uncertainty: the frontier was continuing to open up (raising questions about how to deal with the Plains Indians), and the pattern of immigration was changing. Louisiana was purchased from the French in 1803. On all sides, therefore, questions of race, tribe, nationality, religious affiliation and ethnic identity were ever-present. In this context, America had to fashion itself, devising new ideas where they were needed, and using ideas from the Old World where they were available and relevant.2
The gradual assimilation of European ideas into an American context has been chronicled both by Richard Hofstadter and, more recently and more fully, by Louis Menand, professor of English at Harvard, by means of biographical accounts of a small number of nineteenth-century individuals, all New Englanders, who knew each other and who between them invented what we may call the characteristically American tradition of modern thought, the American mind. The first part of this chapter relies heavily on Menand’s work.3 The specialities of these few individuals included philosophy, jurisprudence, psychology, biology, geology, mathematics, economics and religion. In particular we are talking of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Benjamin and Charles Peirce, Louis Agassiz and John Dewey.
‘These people had highly distinctive personalities, and they did not always agree with one another, but their careers intersected at many points, and together they were more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world . . . Their ideas changed the way Americans thought – and continue to think – about education, democracy, liberty, justice and tolerance. As a consequence, they changed the way Americans live – the way they learn, the way they express their views, the way they understand themselves, and the way they treat people who are different from themselves . . . We can say that what these thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea – an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not “out there” waiting to be discovered, but are tools – like forks and knives and microchips – that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves . . . And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability . . . They taught a kind of scepticism that helped people cope with life in a heterogeneous, industrialised, mass-market society, a society in which older human bonds of custom and community seemed to have become attenuated . . . There is also, though, implicit in what they wrote, a recognition of the limits of what thought can do in the struggle to increase human happiness.’4 Along the way we shall be concerned with the creation of some major intellectual centres in America – the Universities of Yale, Princeton, Chicago and Johns Hopkins, and of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
One founding father of this American tradition was Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior. He was well-connected, numbering the Cabots, the Quincys and the Jacksons – old, landowning families – among his friends; but he was himself a professor who had studied medicine in Paris. It was Holmes Sr who invented the term ‘Boston Brahmin’, to include those who were both well-born and scholars at the same time. It was Holmes Sr, in his guise as a doctor, who discovered the causes of puerperal (childbed) fever, demonstrating conclusively that the disease was transmitted from childbirth to childbirth by doctors themselves. This hardly made him popular among his medical colleagues, but it was an important advance in the development of the germ theory of disease and antisepsis.5 His academic career culminated as dean of Harvard Medical School, though he became just as widely known for being what many people regarded as the greatest talker they had ever heard, and for his role in founding the Metaphysical Club, also known as the ‘Saturday Club’, where literary matters were discussed over dinner and whose other members included Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton. Holmes also helped establish the Atlantic Monthly; he himself conceived the title to reflect the link between the New World and the Old.6
The other founding father of the American intellectual tradition was Emerson. Holmes Sr and he were good friends, mutual influences on one another. Holmes Sr was in the audience when Emerson gave his famous Phi Beta Kappa address on ‘The American Scholar’ at Harvard in 1837. This address was the first of several in which Emerson declared a literary independence for America, urging his fellow citizens to a writing style all their own, away from the familiarities of Europe (although among his ‘great men’ there were no Americans). A year later, in a no less notorious speech, to Harvard Divinity School, Emerson reported how he had been ‘bored to distraction’ by a sermon, and had contrasted its artificiality to the wild snow storm then raging outside the church. This (plus many other musings) had caused him, he said, to renounce his belief in a supernatural Jesus, and organised Christianity, in favour of a more personal revelation. Partly as a result of this, Harvard – then a Calvinist institution – turned its back on Emerson for thirty years.7 Holmes Sr, however, remained true to his friend. Above all, he shared Emerson’s belief in an American literature, which is why he was so involved in the Atlantic Monthly.8
Holmes Junior was as impressed with Emerson as his father had been. As a freshman at Harvard in 1858, he said many years later, Emerson ‘set me on fire’. But Holmes Jr was not in exactly the same mould as his father. Though Holmes Sr had been an abolitionist on religious grounds, he never had much direct involvement with blacks. Holmes Jr, on the other hand, felt the situation rather more keenly. He found The Pickwick Papers distasteful because of its treatment of West Indians and he likewise detested minstrel shows – they were, he said, ‘demeaning’.9 He agreed with Emerson, that a scientific world view did not preclude a moral life, or that it was possible to live in a better relation with one’s fellow men outside organised religion than within it.