Transcript Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Background: •Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)
Background:
•Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
•Born in Boston, son of a minister
•Studied at Harvard
•Crisis of faith - Proclaimed that while
Jesus was a great man, he was not God –
denounced as an atheist
•Prominent Transcendentalist
•Considered one of the great orators of the
time
•Poet
•Emerson emphasized individualism and
rejected traditional authority.
Quotes from Emerson’s Self-Reliance:
•…To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in
your private hears, is true for all men,--that is genius.
•A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which
flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the
firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his
thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our
own rejected thought: they come back to us with a certain alienated
majesty.
•Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
•Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every
one of its members.
•Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
•I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls
me.
•What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
•Do your thing, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall
reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind-man-bluff is
this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your
argument.
•For non-conformity the world whips you with its displeasure.
•A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little
statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great
soul has simply nothing to do.
•To be great is to be misunderstood.
•The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks….
See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the
average tendency.
•The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is
profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God
spaketh, he should communicate not one thing, but all things; should
fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time,
souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new
create the whole.
• …in the universal miracle petty and particular miracles
disappear.
•Man is timid and apologetic. He is no longer upright. He
dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage.
•…man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the
present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless
of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee
the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives
with nature in the present, above time….
•Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the
instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a
past to a new state….
•He who has more soul than I, masters me, though he should
not raise his finger.
•I like the silent church before the service begins, better than
any preaching.
•…you isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is,
must be elevation.
•It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all
the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in
their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in
their speculative views.
•Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of
view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of
God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a
private end, is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in
nature and consciousness.
•The soul is no traveler: the wise man stays at home….
•Insist on yourself; never imitate.
•Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the
other.
•The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
•Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is
composed does not.
•And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments
which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.
•Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace
but the triumph of principles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Young American (1844)
The Young American was a lecture that Emerson read before the Mercantile Library Association, Boston, February 7,
1844.
Main Points:
1. Americans are split: they want everything that is British, yet want to live in America.
“It is remarkable that our people have their intellectual culture from one country and their duties from another…”
2. The railroad will alleviate this split by making natural resources readily known and available. The railroad will
also hasten the settlement and development of the rest of the country.
“An unlooked consequence of the railroad is the increased acquaintance it has given the American people with the
boundless resources of their own soil.”
“…It (the railroad) has given a new celerity to time, or anticipated by fifty years the planting of tracts of land, the
choice of water privileges, the working of mines, and other natural advantages.”
“Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of the land and water.”
3. The most important consideration at this time is commerce because it will bring about means to build up America.
“…commerce is the political fact of most significance to the American at this hour.”
“Trade is an instrument in the hands of that friendly Power which works for us in our own despite. We design it thus
and thus; it turns out otherwise and far better”
4. The young American is building a foundation for generations to come in order to enable their descendants to do far
better.
“We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges and
hospitals, for remote generations. We should be mortified to learn that the little benefit we chanced in out own
persons to receive was the utmost they would yield.”
5. Trade is the key to America’s success.
“Trade goes to make the governments insignificant and to bring every kind of faculty of every individual that can in
any manner serve any person, on sale…”
Gentlemen, the development of our American internal resources, the extension to the utmost of the commercial
system, and the appearance of new moral causes which are to modify the state, are hiving an aspect of greatness to
the Future, which the imagination fears to open.”
Henry David Thoreau,
Civil Disobedience
(1848)
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
IT IS MAN’S DUTY TO WASH HIS HAND OF WRONG.
It is not man’s duty, as a matter of course, to
devote himself to the eradication of any…wrong; he
may still properly have other concern to engage
him; but it is his duty at least, to wash his hands of
it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it
practically his support. If I devote myself to other
pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at
least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon
another man’s shoulders. I must get off him fist,
that he may pursue his contemplations too.
DEMOCRACY SOMETIMES PREVENTS PEOPLE
FROM DOING THE RIGHT THING. In a democracy,
there are unjust laws, but people “think that they
ought to wait until they have persuaded the
majority to alter them.”
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
ANY MAN MORE RIGHT THAN HIS NEIGHBORS CONSTITUTES A
MAJORITY BECAUSE HE HAS GOD ON HIS SIDE, AND HE
SHOULD ACT IMMEDIATELY TO WASH HIS HAND OF WRONG. If a
government is maintaining unjust laws, people should at once
effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property,
from the government. They should “not wait till they constitute a
majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through
them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side,
without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right
than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”
ONE HONEST MAN CAN CHANGE THE STATE. For it matters not
how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done
is done forever. But we love better to talk about it: that we say is
our mission.
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true
place for a just man is also a prison…. Cast your whole vote, not
a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
“A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even
a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.”
IT IS GOOD TO BE A MARTYR RATHER THAN A SINNER. Suppose blood
should flow when standing up to the government or the majority in
refusal to consent to unjust laws. “Is there not a sort of blood shed
when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real
manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting
death.”
THE STATE SHOULD HAVE TRUE RESPECT FOR THE INDIVIDUAL. The
progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited
monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the
individual…. There will never be a really free and enlightened State until
the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent
power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and
treats him accordingly. I please myself with imaging a State at least
which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with
respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with
its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it,
nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellowmen.”
The Mexican View of the War (1850)
Ramon Alvarez Et Al.
Main Points
• Mexican political disarray allowed US to
take its territory.
“Emancipated from the parent country, the country offered an easy
conquest to any who might desire to employ against her a respectable
force.”
“…it is sufficient to say that the insatiable ambition of the US, favored
by our weakness, caused it.”
“…political inexperience of our national governors converted into a
fountain of evil a benevolent and purely Christian principle.”
The Mexican View of the War (1850)
Ramon Alvarez Et Al.
Main Points
• American Expansionism was dangerous and
at fault for the war.
“From the days of their independence they adopted a project of
extending their dominions, and since then, that line of policy has not
been deviated in the slightest degree…”
“The [US] has already absorbed territories pertaining to Great Britain,
France, Spain and Mexico.”
“While the US [acted in a peaceful way], their acts of hostility
manifested very evidently what were their true intentions.”
“…it was the spirit of aggrandizement of the United States of the
North.”
The Mexican View of the War (1850)
Ramon Alvarez Et Al.
Main Points
• US added insult to injury by blaming
Mexico for the war.
“Thus, violence and insult were united: thus at the very
time they usurped part of our territory, they offered to us
the hand of treachery, to have soon the audacity to say that
our obstinacy and arrogance were the real causes of the
war…”
George Bancroft
The Progress of Mankind (1854)
Main Points:
 Americans and their political system have discovered how to
bring to bear the Divine mind, and thus we are destined for
greatness:
“…the condition of our race is one of growth or of decay. It is
the glory of man that he is conscious of this law of his existence. (We
great Americans choose growth.)
“The progress of man consists in this, that he himself arrives at
the perception of truth. The Divine mind, which is its source, left it to
be discovered, appropriated and developed by finite creatures.”
 All men should be able to participate in government:
“Every man is in substance equal to his fellowman.”
George Bancroft
The Progress of Mankind (1854)
Main Points (continued):
 In order to progress, each individual must contribute to the whole, and the whole of
society is more intelligent than the wisest individual:
“COMMEN SENSE implies by its very name, that each individual is to contribute some share
toward the general intelligence. The many are wiser than the few; the multitude than the
philosopher; the race than the individual; and each successive generation than its predecessor.”
 Women can influence politics, not in public, but by talking to their men in their own
home:
“Yet the progress of liberty, while it has made her less conspicuous, has redeemed her into the
possession of the full dignity of her nature, has made her not man’s slave, but his companion, his
counselor, and fellow-martyr; and, for an occasional ascendancy in political affairs, has
substituted the uniform enjoyment of domestic equality.”
 Democracy is marching forward and the frontier is an opportunity; a symbol of
freedom:
“Our Land extends far into the wilderness, and beyond the wilderness; and while on
this side of the great mountains it gives the Western nations of Europe a theatre for the renewal of
their youth, on the transmontane side, the hoary civilization of the farthest antiquity leans
forward from Asia to receive the glad tidings of the messenger of freedom. The islands of the
Pacific entreat our protection, and at our suit the Empire of Japan breaks down its wall of
exclusion…”
Frederick Douglass, What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July? (1852)
Main Points
• The Fourth of July is important to the white American
people, but a mockery to the black people.
– You high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance,
between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not
enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty,
prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is
shared by you, not me. The sunlight that brought sunlight and
healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me.
– A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the
gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To
him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, and unholy
license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of
rejoicing are empty and heartless: you denunciations of tyrants,
brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality,
hollow mockery; are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception,
impiety, and hypocrisy
Frederick Douglass, What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July? (1852)
Main Points
• It is obvious that slaves are human, and not
just property.
– On what branch of the subject do the people of
this country need light? Must I undertake to
prove that the slave is a man? That point is
conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The
slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the
enactment of laws for their government.
Frederick Douglass, What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July? (1852)
Main Points.
• There is not a nation on earth more
barbarous or hypocritical than America
is at this very moment.
– Go where you may, search where you will, roam
through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old
world, travel through South American, search out every
abuse, and when you have found the last, lay the facts
side by side, and you will say with me, that, for
barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America Reigns
with out a rival.
My Bondage and My Freedom
Fredrick Douglass (1855)
Main Points
•
Slaves do not have family because they are considered chattel
–
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–
•
“A person of some consequence here in the north, sometimes designated father, is literally
abolished in slave law and slave practice.”
“They keep no family records with marriages, births, and deaths.”
“It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of
the sacredness of the family, as an institution.”
Fathers are nonexistent in slavery
–
–
–
–
–
“Its laws do not recognize their existence in the social arrangements of the plantation.”
“He may be a freeman; and yet his child may be a chattel.”
“Indeed, he may be, and often is, master and father to the same child.”
“by the laws of slavery, children, in all cases, are reduced to the condition of their mothers.”
“Men do not love those who remind them of their sins unless thy have a mind re repent – and
the mulatto child’s face is a standing accusation against him who is master and father to the
child.”
My Bondage and My Freedom
Fredrick Douglass (1855)
Main Points
• Ignorance is a high virtue in the slave system
– “Ignorance is a high virtue in a human chattel; and as the master studies to
keep the slave ignorant, the slave is cunning enough to make the master
think he succeeds…”
• Necessary rules of slavery, thought by masters, to manage their human
chattel
– Teaching slaves to read “was unlawful, that it was also unsafe, and could
only lead to mischief.”
– “he should know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it.”
“If you teach that nigger how to read the bible, there will be no keeping
him,” “it would forever unfit him for the duties of a slave…. If you learn
him now to read, he’ll want to know how to write; and this accomplished,
he’ll be running away with himself.”
Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Main Points
Slavery was harmful to the stability and structure of many
Southern families, and therefore destabilized the Southern society
and culture as a whole.
•Slaves were thought to be property disregarded as a person with no
emotions or thought, even the life of a child could escape the
oppression of slavery.
“He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will
in all things. My soul revolted against the mean tyranny.”
•Slavery damaged family values.
•The white children were brought up to think slavery was right
but saw the tensions that it caused within their family.
•The white women took their frustration out on the slave girl
because they were more vulnerable to attack than their husbands
were.
“The mistress, who ought to protect the helpless victim, has no
other feelings toward her but those of jealousy and rage.”
Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897),
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
•The master would go to the slave girl for his guilty
pleasure because she would be at his disposal.
“My master met me at every turn, reminding me
that I belong to him, and swearing by heaven and
earth that he would compel me to submit to him.”
•Southern women knew that their men had fathered
slave children and saw them as property.
“…Southern women often marry a man knowing
that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not
trouble themselves about it. They regard such
children as property, as marketable as the pigs on
the plantation…”
Alexander Stephens
Slavery and the Confederacy (1861)
1. With the Independence of the Confederate States of America, the
South will no longer suffer from the oppressive tariffs of the United
States’ federal government.
2. The foundations of the Confederacy rest “upon the great truth that
the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination
to the superior race is his natural and moral condition.”
3. “The negro by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for
that condition which he occupies in our system [(i.e. slavery)].”
4. The truth of the Negro’s inferiority “has been slow in the process of
its development, like all other truths in the various departments of
science.”
5. Whites teach Blacks how to work, as well as how to feed and clothe
themselves.
6. “Our object is Peace, not only with the North, but with the world…
The ideal of coercing us, or subjugating us, is utterly preposterous.”
Reverend Benjamin Morgan Palmer
Slavery a Divine Trust: Duty of the South to Preserve and
Perpetuate it
1. The South’s providential trust “is to conserve and to perpetuate
the institution of slavery as now existing….”
2. The South needs slavery to support its material interests.
3. White slave owners act as guardians of their black slaves.
Blacks are like helpless children who the slave owner protects.
4. “Freedom would be their doom.”
5. Slaves “form parts of our households, even as our children….”
6. The world should FEAR abolition. The world is more dependent
on slavery for its wealth than ever, and if slavery ends, the world
economy will totter.
7. The South defends the cause of God and religion, since the
“Abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic….”
Rabbi Morris J. Raphall
POINT 1:
The Bible does not condemn slavery.
However, it does condemn coveting
another’s property, including
another’s slaves.
POINT 2:
Abolitionists, such as Reverend
Henry Ward Beecher, are inventing
new sins when they claim that
slavery is evil. By doing this they are
insulting and exasperating
“thousands of God-fearing, lawabiding citizens” and have pushed
the country toward civil war.
Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
POINT 1: “…The whole nation is
guilty [regarding slavery]….”
POINT 2: “Our civilization has
not begotten humanity and
respect for others’ rights, nor a
spirit of protection to the
weak….”
Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address (1863)
Main Points
• It is time we talk about the promise of equality.
– “…a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal”
• We honor the soldiers sacrifice.
– “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,
but it can never forget what they did here.”
– “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us”
• The Union is worth fighting for. It is not a confederation
but a federal government.
– “—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom
and that government of the people, by the people, for the people
shall not parish from the earth.”
Gettysburg Address
• About a 2 minute speech given by President
Lincoln at the dedication of the Soldier’s
National Cemetery.
– Given 4 months after the costliest battle of the
Civil War.
• Total casualties of the War to this time 472,154
• This battle alone had 54,707 casualties
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893)
Main Points:
● Until now, American history has been the history of the colonization of the Great West
▪ “The wilderness masters the colonist.”
▪ “Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American.”
● Expansion = Independence
▪ “…the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the
influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.”
● To be an American is to tame the wild and gain both strength and individuality from it as
well as unification
▪ “…to study this advance … is to study the really American part of our history…”
▪ “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American
people.”
● The spirit and success of the United States is directly tied to it’s westward expansion
▪ “The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and
played the largest part in its
activity, was conditioned on the frontier.”
▪ “The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were
dependent on the advance of
the frontier…”
● The frontier creates individualism which encourages democracy
▪ “…the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy
here and in Europe.”
▪ “… the frontier is productive of individualism.”
▪ “The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy.”
● Americans will never stop their expansion or development
▪ “From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance…”
▪ “Since the days…of Columbus…America has been another name for opportunity…”
▪ “Movement has been its dominant fact, and…the American energy will continually
demand a wider field for its
exercise.”
Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life
POINT 1: DO NOT LIVE A LIFE OF IDELNESS; A STRENUOUS
LIFE IS MUCH MORE REWARDING AND NOBLE.
• I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous
life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of
success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who
does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these
wins the splendid ultimate triumph.
• We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies
victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a
friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual
life.
• A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life
which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.
• The man must be glad to do a man's work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep
himself, and those dependent on him. The woman must be the housewife, the
helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children.
POINT 2: ONLY THROUGH STRIFE AND STRENUOUS AND
DARING EFFORT WILL WE ACHIEVE NATIONAL GREATNESS.
• …it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor,
that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.
Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life
POINT 3: WEAKNESS IS THE GREATEST OF CRIMES. OUR NATION
HAS A RESPONSIBILTY TO BRING THE HALF-CAST NATIONS OF
THE WORLD GOOD GOVERNMENT. IF WE DO THIS WE WILL BE
GREAT, AND IF WE DO NOT WE WILL CEDE THE OPPORTUNITY TO
“BOLDER AND STRONGER PEOPLES.”
• We cannot, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease
within our borders, taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in scrambling
commercialism; heedless of higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying ourselves
only with the wants of our bodies for the day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow of
question, what China has already found, that in this world the nation that has trained itself into
a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations
which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities. If we are to be a really great people,
we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world.
• The guns that thundered off Manila and Santiago left us echoes of glory, but they also left us a
legacy of duty. If we drove out a mediaeval tyranny only to make room for savage anarchy, we
had better not begun the task at all. It is worse than idle to say that we have no duty to perform,
and can leave to their fates the islands we have conquered. Such a course would be a course of
infamy. It would be followed at once by utter chaos in the wretched islands themselves. Some
stronger, manlier power would have to step in and do the work, and we would have shown
ourselves weaklings, unable to carry to successful completion the labors that great and highspirited nations are eager to undertake.
Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life
POINT 3 (CONTINUED): WEAKNESS IS THE GREATEST OF
CRIMES. OUR NATION HAS A RESPONSIBILTY TO BRING THE HALFCAST NATIONS OF THE WORLD GOOD GOVERNMENT. IF WE DO THIS
WE WILL BE GREAT, AND IF WE DO NOT WE WILL CEDE THE
OPPORTUNITY TO “BOLDER AND STRONGER PEOPLES.”
• The Philippines offer a yet graver problem. Their population includes halfcaste and native Christians, warlike Moslems, and wild pagans. Many of their
people are utterly unfit for self-government and show no signs of becoming fit.
• Resistance [in the Philippines] must be stamped out. The first and allimportant work to be done is to establish the supremacy of our flag. We must
put down armed resistance before we can accomplish anything else, and there
should be no parleying, no faltering, in dealing with our foe. As for those in our
own country who encourage the foe, we can afford contemptuously to disregard
them; but it must be remembered that their utterances are not saved from being
treasonable merely by the fact that they are despicable.
• [We must send out there only good and able men.... [They] must show the
utmost tact and firmness, remembering that, we such people as those with
whom we are to deal, weakness is the greatest of crimes, and that next to
weakness comes lace of consideration for their principles and prejudices.
William Graham Sumner,
Main Points
What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883)
Only the select few can solve society’s problems and create
problems.
“Those who are bound to solve problems are the rich, comfortable,
prosperous, virtuous, respectable, educated and healthy; those
whose right it is to set the problems are those who have been less
fortunate or less successful in the struggle for existence.”
It is not your fault in society that you are better than me, and it is
not your responsibility to help me become like you and be your
burden.
“A man who is present as a consumer, yet who does not contribute
either by land, labor, or capital to the work of society, is a burden.
On no sound political theory ought such a person to share in the
political power of the state.”
The crumbling of a society by a social class.
“Those whom humanitarians and philanthropists call weak are the
ones through whom the productive and conservative forces of
society are wasted. They constantly neutralize and destroy the
finest efforts of the wise and industrious, and are a dead-weight on
the society in all its struggles to realize better things.”
William Graham Sumner,
What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883)
Take care of your own business and not everyone else’s.
“Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is, to take care of his or her
own self. This is a social duty.”
“the legislation are kept constantly busy, by the people who have made up their minds
that it is wise and conducive to happiness to live in a certain way, and who want to
compel everybody else to live in their way.”
The government gets its money from you to help reform society. It gives it to me to help
make me like you.
“the right to claim and the duty to give one man’s efforts for another man’s satisfaction.
We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.”
“prejudice that a man who gives a dollar to a beggar is generous and kind-hearted, but
that a man who refuses the beggar and puts the dollar in a savings-bank is stingy and
mean. The former is putting the capital where it is very sure to be wasted, and where it
will be a kind of seed for a long succession of future dollars, which must be wasted to
ward off a greater strain of the sympathies than would have been occasioned by a
refusal in the first place. Inasmuch as the dollar might have been turned into capital and
given to a laborer who, while earning it, would have reproduced it, it must be regarded
as taken from the latter.”
I have as much right as you to have as much success as you do, but I expect to have it
handed to me without the sacrifices that you have made.
“We each owe it to the other to guarantee rights. Rights do not pertain to results, but
only to chances. They pertain to the conditions of the struggle for existence, not to any
of the results of it; to the pursuit of happiness, not to the possession of happiness.”
“The men who have not done their duty in this world never can be equal to those who
have done their duty more or less well.”
Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899)
Veblen was the son of Norwegian immigrants, and he
grew up in rural Minnesota.
He did not learn to speak English until he was a
teenager.
He received a B.A. from Carleton College in 1880 and
a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale in 1884. At Yale, he
developed a friendship with his sociology professor,
William Graham Sumner, and wrote his doctoral thesis
on Immanuel Kant in the area of Moral Philosophy.
In 1882, he started to teach political economy at the
University of Chicago. He became known as a brilliant
and eccentric thinker and an unconventional teacher.
At the University of Chicago he gained a reputation as
an insightful social critic, and it was during his years in
Chicago that he wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class.
He taught political economy and later became editor
of the Journal of Political Thought.
He taught at Stanford from 1906-1909 and at the
University of Missouri from 1911-1918.
In 1919 he became a founding member of the New
School for Social Research in New York.
He died in 1929 of heart disease.
Main Point 1: The leisure class is conservative, finding no
reason to support changes, because they enjoy the status
quo and are little affected by economic pressures.
The exigencies of the struggle for means of life are less
exacting for [the leisure] class than for any other; and as a
consequence of this privilege position we should expect to
find it one of the least responsive of the classes of society
to the demands which the situation makes for a further
growth of institutions and a readjustment to an altered
industrial situation. The leisure class is the conservative
class.
…exigencies do not readily produce in the members of this
class, that degree of uneasiness with the existing order
which alone can lead any body of men to give up views and
methods of life that have become habitual to them. The
office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard
the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent….
Main Point 2: Conservatism is decorous and respectable. Innovation is
vulgar.
•This conservatism of the wealthy class is so obvious a feature that it has
even come to be recognized as a mark of respectability. Since
conservatism is a characteristic of the wealthier and therefore more
reputable portion of the community, it has acquired a certain honorific or
decorative value. It has become prescriptive to such an extent that an
adherence to conservative views is comprised as a matter of course in our
notions of respectability; and it is imperatively incumbent on all who would
lead a blameless life in point of social repute. Conservatism, being an
upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a
lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar.
•…progress is hindered by underfeeding and excessive physical hardship,
no less effectually than by such a luxurious life as will shut out discontent
by cutting off the occasion for it. The abjectly poor, and all those persons
whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance,
are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought
for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative
because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as
it stands today.
•From this proposition it follows that the institution of a leisure class acts
to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much
as it may of the means of sustenance, and so reducing their consumption,
and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them
incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits
of thought.
Main Points 3: The example of the leisure class fosters conspicuous
consumption, which diverts resources away from sustenance of the
lower classes.
•The prevalence of conspicuous consumption as one of the main
elements in the standard of decency among all classes is of course
not traceable wholly to the example of the wealthy leisure class, but
the practice and the insistence on it are no doubt strengthened by
the example of the leisure class. The requirements of decency in this
matter are very considerable and very imperative; so that even
among classes whose pecuniary position is sufficiently strong to
admit a consumption of goods considerably in excess of the
subsistence minimum, the disposable surplus left over after the more
imperative physical needs are satisfied is not infrequently diverted to
the purpose of a conspicuous decency, rather than to added physical
comfort and fullness of life. Moreover, such surplus energy as is
available is also likely to be expended in the acquisition of goods for
conspicuous consumption or conspicuous boarding. The result is that
the requirements of pecuniary reputability tend (1) to leave but a
scanty subsistence minimum available for other than conspicuous
consumption, and (2) to absorb any surplus energy which may be
available after the bare physical necessities of life have been
provided for.
Main Point 4: Since the leisure class discourages change, it hinders
evolutionary progress.
…the leisure class, in the nature of things, consistently acts to retard
that adjustment to the environment which is called social advance or
development. The characteristic attitude of the class may be
summed up in the maxim: "Whatever is, is right" whereas the law of
natural selection, as applied to human institutions, gives the axiom:
"Whatever is, is wrong." Not that the institutions of today are wholly
wrong for the purposes of the life of today, but they are, always and
in the nature of things, wrong to some extent. They are the result of
a more or less inadequate adjustment of the methods of living to a
situation which prevailed at some point in the past development
The institution of a leisure class, by force or class interest and
instinct, and by precept and prescriptive example, makes for the
perpetuation of the existing maladjustment of institutions, and even
favors a reversion to a somewhat more archaic scheme of life; a
scheme which would be still farther out of adjustment with the
exigencies of life under the existing situation even than the
accredited, obsolescent scheme that has come down from the
immediate past.
Seneca Falls Convention, Declaration of Sentiments (1848)
Main Points
Women declared their independence and
inalienable Rights: Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of Happiness.
• “We insist that [women] have immediate admission to the
rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of
the United States.”
• “…Such has been the patient sufferance of the women
under this government, and such is now the necessity
which constrains them to demand the equal station to
which they are entitled.”
Seneca Falls Convention, Declaration of Sentiments (1848)
Main Points
Men have created a social and political tyranny over
women by not recognizing their civil liberties.
“He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her
confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make
her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.”
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
“He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.”
“He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.”
“He has withheld from her rights which are given the most ignorant and degraded men- both
natives and foreigners.”
“He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.”
“He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.”
“In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he
becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master.”
…if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which
recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.” 1
The Origins of Insanity in Women, Horatio Storer (1865)
Main Points
1. His propositions:
Mental disease (insanity) in women is due to their reproductive systems.
Mental disease is made worse by menstruation
To treat mental disease (insanity) in women, you must believe the above theories.
2. Storer wanted to cure insane women.
“The necessity of removing a cause to prevent or to cure its effect is as decided in
mental pathology as in physical. We recognize it everywhere else; we must
recognize it in the treatment of insane women…”
3. Storer’s view of women was preconceived and warped.
“…they have become habitually thievish, profane, or obscene, despondent
or self-indulgent, shrewish or fatuous…”
Storer felt like women needed to be sheltered and protected. For them to have their
own views and feelings was wrong. Being passionate or sexually aggressive was
something that needed to be taken care of. Nymphomania was a term used only
to describe obsessive sexual desires in women.
4. As the weaker sex, women are more vulnerable to their passions.
“The attacks of this (sexual desire) were clearly coincident with the menstrual
period, and so extreme that the patient could with difficulty restrain herself from
soliciting the approach of the other sex.”
Upon treatment (removal of the ovaries, menstrual pain, potassium monoxide), the
“morbid desires” stopped.
The sexual desires for men were normal, sexual desires in women had to be treated.
Why?
Bradwell v. The State of Illinois
(1873), U.S. Supreme Court
Main Point #1:
Citizenship does not give one
the right, under the
fourteenth amendment, to
practice law in the courts of
a state.
“We agree with [counsel] that there are
privileges and immunities belonging to
citizens of the United States, in that
relation and character, and that it is
these and these alone which a State is
forbidden to abridge. But the right to
admission to practice in the courts of a
State is not one of them. This right in no
sense depends on citizenship of the
United States.” pp. 67-68.
Justice Bradley
Myra Bradwell
Main Point #2: Men and women are very different. Women are naturally timid and
delicate and there are many occupations for which they are unfit. Man is woman’s
protector and defender.
…The civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in
the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be,
woman's protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which
belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.
p. 69.
Main Point #3: Women belong to the domestic sphere, and should not adopt a career
distinct and independent from that of her husband.
The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance,
as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which
properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to
say identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family
institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent
career from that of her husband. p. 69.
Main Point #4: God has given women the role of wives and mothers. This is a natural
law to which we must adapt, and not be persuaded by exception cases.
The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign
offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil
society must be adapted to the general constitution of things, and cannot be based
upon exceptional cases. p. 69.
Historical Significance
•
About a hundred years later, the Court began employing the Fourteenth
Amendment as a way of overturning gender-discriminatory state laws.
In doing so, however, it would typically use the "equal protection"
clause, rather than the clause cited in Bradwell, "privileges and
immunities."
•
In 1882, however, the Illinois legislature passed a law guaranteeing all
persons, regardless of sex, the right to select a profession as they
wished. Although Bradwell never reapplied for admission to the bar, the
Illinois Supreme Court informed her that her original application had
been accepted. As a result, she became the first woman member of the
Illinois State Bar Association; she was also the first woman member of
the Illinois Press Association. On March 28, 1892, she was admitted to
practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.
•
In addition to her efforts to win admission to the bar, Bradwell played a
role in the broader women's rights movement. She was active in the
Illinois Woman Suffrage Association and helped form the American
Woman Suffrage Association. She was also influential in the passage of
laws by the Illinois legislature that gave married women the right to
keep wages they earned and protected the rights of widows.
•
Bradwell died February 14, 1894, in Chicago, Illinois.
Main Point 1: Much of humankind’s misery can be attributed to women’s ignorance about
reproductivity, women’s acceptance of inferior status, and women’s willingness to
unthinkingly submit to the will of their men and have numerous children. The result has
been the cheapening of life through over-population.
• Whether it was the tyranny of monarchy, an oligarchy or a republic, the one indispensable factor of its
existence was, as it is now, hordes of human beings—human beings so plentiful as to be cheap, and so cheap
that ignorance was their natural lot. Upon the rock of an unenlightened, submissive maternity have these been
founded; upon the product of such a maternity have they flourished.
• No period of low wages or of idleness with their want among the workers, no peonage or sweatshop, no childlabor factory, ever came into being, save from the same source. Nor have famine and plague been as much
“acts of God” as acts of too prolific mothers.
Margaret Sanger,
• Unknowingly, women replenish the
Women and the New
• poor
Race (1920)
• insane
• criminal
• hungry
• ranks of prostitutes
• legions of soldiers to die in foreign conquests (due to pressures of overpopulation)
• [In the mass, women] went on breeding with staggering rapidity those numberless, undesired children who
become the clogs and the destroyers of civilizations.
• In her submission lies her error and her guilt. By her failure to withhold the multitudes of children who have
made inevitable the most flagrant of our social evils, she incurred a debt to society.
• War, famine, poverty, and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will
cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.
Main Point 2. Through sex education and birth control, women will gain
free motherhood and become liberated. They will also be remaking the
world into a more humane and less miserable place.
• The most important force in the remaking of the world is a free motherhood.
• ...she may, by controlling birth, lift motherhood to the plane of a voluntary, intelligent
function, and remake the world.
• Millions of women are asserting their right to voluntary motherhood. They are determined
to decide for themselves whether they shall become mothers, under what conditions and when.
This is the fundamental revolt referred to. It is for women the key to the temple of liberty.
Even as birth control is the means by which woman attains basic freedom, so it is the
means by which she must and will uproot the evil she has wrought through her submission.
• …she must emerge from her ignorance and assume her responsibility.
• She can do this only when she has awakened to a knowledge of herself and of the
consequences of her ignorance. The first step is birth control. Through birth control she will
attain to voluntary motherhood. Having attained this, the basic freedom of her sex, she will
cease to enslave herself and the mass of humanity
• Birth control is woman’s problem. The quicker she accepts it as hers and hers alone, the
quicker will society respect motherhood. The quicker, too, will the world be made a fit place
for her children to live.
Main Point 3: Women need to value themselves for
who they are. They also need to educate themselves
(know thyself).
• The problem of birth control has arisen directly from the effort
of the feminine spirit to free itself from bondage. Woman herself
has wrought that bondage through her reproductive powers and
while enslaving herself she enslaved the world.
• Her mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to
express the feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world,
but to create a human world by the infusion of the feminine
element into all of its activities.
• She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is
born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her
into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure
it. That right to decide imposes upon her the duty of clearing the
way to knowledge by which she may make and carry out the
decision.
IDA B. Wells, A Red Record (1895)
Main Points
• Ida Wells documented extralegal lynchings to expose their illegality
and barbarity.
• The real condition of the child was not as brutal as claimed
– “the father and his friends, at once shamefully exaggerated the
facts and declared that the babe had been ruthlessly assaulted and
then killed.
– “the white people of the community made it a point to exaggerate
every detail of the awful affair, and to inflame the public mind so
that nothing less than immediate and violent death would satisfy
the populace.”
– “Person’s who saw the after its death, have stated, under the most
solemn pledge to truth, that there was no evidence of such an
assault as was published at the time, only a slight abrasion and
discoloration was noticeable and that mostly about the neck.
IDA B. Wells, A Red Record (1895)
Main Points
• The authorities made an example out of
Smith.
– “They determined to make an example of him
and proceeded to carry out their purpose with
unspeakably greater ferocity than that which
characterized the half crazy object of their
revenge…”
• People from various parts of Texas and
Arkansas came to see the lynching.
Thousands gathered in Paris, Texas, for the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
Spectacle lynching. The Burning and Lynching of
Jesse Washington, Waco Texas 1916.
Although accurate figures on the lynching of blacks are
lacking, one study estimates that in Texas between 1870
and 1900, extralegal justice was responsible for the
murder of about 500 blacks—only Georgia and Mississippi
exceeded Texas’s numbers in this grisly record. Between
1900 and 1910, Texas mobs murdered more than 100
black people. In 1916 at Waco, approximately 10,000
whites turned out in holiday-like atmosphere to watch a
mob mutilate and burn a black man named Jesse
Washington. (Source: Calvert, De Leon and Cantrell, The
History of Texas, pp. 189, 261-262.)
Main Point: We should concentrate on
work and progress. Blacks and whites
need stop fighting, agitating and
relocating. The South will progress if
we work together. We only hurt
ourselves by fighting.
Brooker T. Washington,
Atlantic Exposition Address
(1895)
THE MESSAGE FOR BLACKS: Work hard, and do not agitate for
equality. Start at the bottom and work your way up.
Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic
service, and in the professions. …when it comes to business…, it is
in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the
commercial world…. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap
from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of
us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in
mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and
glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common
occupations of life…. No race can prosper till it learns that there is
as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the
bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.
The wisest among my race understand
that the agitation of questions of social
equality is the extremist folly, and that
progress in the enjoyment of all the
privileges that will come to us must be
the result of severe and constant
struggle rather than of artificial forcing.
However, working together does not
necessary include socializing together.
THE MESSAGE FOR WHITES: We are a loyal and humble people
who serve you well if you treat us well. It is in your interest to
encourage and help black people.
Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you
know, whose fidelity and love you have tested….. Cast down your
bucket among these people who have without strikes and labor wars
tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and
cities, brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, just to
make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the
South. Casting down bucket among my people, helping and
encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to
education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy
your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and
run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as
in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most
patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world
has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing
your children, watching by the sickbed of your mothers and fathers,
and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in
the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion
that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives,….
[We will interlace ] our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life
with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one.
THE MESSAGE FOR WHITES: If white people insist on keeping
the Negro down, they will only be hurting themselves.
Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward,
or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute
one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or onethird its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the
business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a
veritable body, of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort
to advance the body politic.
Stamp commemorating Booker T.
Washington
Issue Date: April 7, 1940
SIGNIFICANT FINE POINT FOR BOTH RACES: We do not have to
socialize together, but we should work together for the common
cause of development.
In all things that are purely social we call be as separate as the
fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
W.E.B. Du Bois, Strivings of the Negro People
(1897)
Main Points:
1. Being a problem [i.e. being an black person in
19th c. America] is a strange experience.
[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a
veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American
world,--a world which yields him no selfconsciousness, but only lets him see himself
through the revelation of the other world. It is a
peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this
sense of always looking at one’s self through the
eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape
of a world that looks on in amused contempt and
pity. (p. 88)
2. The African American feels his duality of being both African
and American.
One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two
souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring
ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps
it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro
is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain selfconscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better
and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older
selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for
America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does
not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white
Americanism, for he believes — foolishly, perhaps, but
fervently — that Negro blood has yet a message for the world.
He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a
Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon
by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of selfdevelopment. (p. 88)
3. Prejudice and discrimination keep the freedman oppressed.
The freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
Whatever of lesser good may have come in these years of
change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the
Negro people…. (p. 88)
4. Americans, including white Americans, should appreciate
the Negro race.
Work, culture, and liberty,--all these we need, not singly, but
together; for to-day these ideals among the Negro people are
gradually coalescing, and finding a higher meaning in the
unifying ideal of race,--the ideal of fostering the traits and
talents of the Negro, not in opposition to, but in conformity
with, the greater ideals of the American republic, in order
that some day, on American soil, two world races may give
each to each those characteristics which both so sadly lack.
(p. 88)
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Niagara Movement, (1905)
1. We should meet, despite the existence of other
organizations for Negroes.
2. We must complain about common wrongs
toward blacks.
We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint,
ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of
dishonesty and wrong—this is the ancient,
unerring way to liberty, and we must follow it. (p.
100)
3. In not a single instance has the justice of our
demands been denied, but then come the excuses.
Joseph Lochner
U.S. Supreme Court,
Lochner v. New York (1905)
Mr. Justice Peckham delivers
the Court Opinion:
1. The New York statute limiting the number of hours a baker can work
in a week interferes with the right of contract between the employer
and the employees.
2. No State can deprive any person of life, liberty or property without
due process of law. The right to purchase or to sell labor is part of
the liberty protected by this amendment.
3. There is a limit to the valid exercise of the police power of the
state.
4. There is no reasonable ground for interfering with the liberty of
person or the right of free contract, by determining the hours of
labor, in the occupation of a baker.
5. There must be more than the mere fact of the possible existence of
some small amount of unhealthiness to warrant legislative
interference with liberty.
Mr. Justice Harlan…dissenting.
The decision violates states rights.
“Let the State alone I the management of its
purely domestic affairs, so long as it does
not appear beyond all question that it has
violated the Federal Constitution. This view
necessarily results from the principle that
the health and safety of the people of a
State are primarily for the State to guard and
protect.”
Mr. Justice Holmes dissenting
The majority has a right to embody their
opinions in law.
“The constitution is not intended to embody a
particular economic theory, wither of
paternalism and the organic relation of the
citizen to the State or of laissez faire. The
Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr.
Herbert Spencer’s Social Statistics.”