MISCHKE: Birth of the American Soul (ep. 120)

Summary

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Garage Logic - MISCHKE: Birth of the American Soul (Ep. 120)

Host: Tommy ("Mischke")
Guest: Bruce Nichols (author of The Emerson Circle: The Concord Radicals Who Reinvented the World)
Date: June 17, 2026
Duration (core content): 01:32–51:15

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Tommy (Mischke) sits down with author Bruce Nichols to explore the intellectual renaissance of Concord, Massachusetts in the 1840s—a period Nichols calls “the feverish 40s.” Centering on the transcendentalists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—Nichols and Tommy examine how these thinkers catalyzed a uniquely American philosophy of self-reliance, radical individualism, and the pursuit of new ideas, with rippling influence into future generations and movements. The discussion reflects on their enduring impact, their relationships, and the optimism—and limits—of their era.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Magic of Concord in the 1840s

• A unique moment in American thought: Tommy and Nichols evoke the intellectual ferment in Concord as comparable to Florence in the 1480s, Paris in the 1920s, and the American 1960s.

  “That was one of those moments. America was young back then, young and restless, deeply confused about what it was supposed to be … and then, in the quiet of a New England town, a handful of people decided to stop asking [Europe what to do].” —Tommy, [01:32]

• A forgotten ‘feverish 40s’: Nichols explains how this era of radical experimentation—utopian communities, abolitionism, women’s rights—has been overshadowed by the Civil War and deserves rediscovery.

  “That decade was this sort of crazy period of utopian experiments... It was a time when utopian communities were springing up all over.” —Nichols, [06:57]

2. The Emerson Circle: Center and Spokes

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Intellectual Nucleus

• From minister to “rock star” public intellectual: Emerson left the church to shape public discourse, gathering crowds and influencing a remarkably broad audience.

  “He was our first public intellectual. And because he was saying, why should we be bound by tradition? … He inspired so many others to try their own thought experiments and then actual experiments.” —Nichols, [11:01]

• Permission to imagine anew: Emerson’s message to think independently catalyzed generations of American writers and activists.

  “There's this sense that he's giving people permission...to give birth to a new American way of thought.” —Tommy, [17:18]

Margaret Fuller: A Trailblazing Feminist

• America’s first female public intellectual: Self-educated with her father’s help, Fuller created “conversations” for women, was a renowned journalist, and influenced and mentored many.

  “She was better educated than just about anyone… She became quite famous.” —Nichols, [20:05]

• A profound loss: When Fuller died, Emerson deeply mourned her as his truest audience.

  “The sentence that stuck with me the most [from Emerson] is, ‘I have lost in her my audience.’ It's as if everything he wrote, he was actually writing for her.” —Nichols, [23:33]

Henry David Thoreau: Radical Individualist

• From protégé to peer: Thoreau began as Emerson's mentee but ultimately charted his own course, especially on abolitionism and living deliberately.

  “When Thoreau died, Emerson gave the eulogy... he criticized him for not having more ambition... But then after that, Emerson went back and started reading Thoreau's journals and he wrote, I have to admit, he went far beyond what I did.” —Nichols, [28:45]

• Civic resistance and conscience: Thoreau championed independent conscience over obedience to unjust laws—laying groundwork for future civil disobedience movements.

  “He suggested that true patriots were not those who blindly followed their administration. They were those who followed their own consciences.” —Narrator, [29:40]

Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott

• An educational radical: Bronson Alcott pioneered child-centered, Socratic teaching methods—seen as scandalous in his day and foundational now.

  “He came to believe that every human has a spark of the divine in them, and the job of a teacher is to bring that out. … He just started teaching this way. And job after job, he got fired...” —Nichols, [31:32]

• Louisa May Alcott: Drawing directly from family life, Louisa embodied the era’s creative possibilities and overcame both gender barriers and poverty through relentless literary work.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Shadow

• The skeptic in their midst: Hawthorne’s fascination and wariness brought critical contrast to the group’s optimism.

  “He was just the opposite. He was a guy who believed that the human heart can have evil in it, and there's no way around that.” —Nichols, [30:22]

3. The Pulse of ‘Newness’ and Experimentation

• A period of bold trial and innovation: Utopian communities, experimental diets, gender equality, and even avant-garde education all blossomed.

  “When people talked about the newness, they meant all these people coming up with all these new ideas... It was a moment where people thought, anything is possible.” —Nichols, [18:39]

• Conversation as an engine of creativity: In-person intellectual debates and the original Transcendental Club drove the movement’s dynamism.

  “The only rule they had was that you can join us as long as you are willing to talk about anything.” —Nichols, [47:47]

4. Influence and Legacy

• Waves through American and world culture: The guest and host trace the seeds these thinkers planted, influencing Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, John Muir, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy.

  “All the powerful people who then are influenced, who influence more people themselves….the ripples … go out for decades and decades and decades.” —Tommy, [25:28]

• The American voice emerges: The discussion highlights how this period freed American literature and thought from European models, birthing the distinct “American voice.”

  “With Whitman… an American voice is being born, one that's a very different voice than the European voice.” —Tommy, [41:05]

5. The Shadow of the Civil War

• A turn from hope to disillusion: Tommy and Nichols reflect on how the cataclysm of civil war abruptly ended this era’s idealism, shifting to cynicism and capitalism.

  “There's this sincerity and this innocence and this wonder… in the 1840s, which not only will be shattered by a Civil War … The contrast pre Civil War to post Civil war is something a lot of Americans don't think about.” —Tommy, [23:50] "The Civil War erased our memory of this moment." —Nichols, [24:34]

6. Lessons for Today

• Need for a “new renaissance”: Both hope their discussion and Nichols’s book can inspire contemporary listeners to think originally and optimistically.

  “It seems like we're ready for brand new ideas. There's so much talk today from certain quadrants of going back to something, but that's not what Emerson would have talked about … We go forward into [new ideas]." —Tommy, [46:51]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Emerson:

  “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson (narrated), [12:59]

• On Margaret Fuller:

  “Margaret Fuller once said that she had a man's ambition and a woman's heart...” —Margaret Fuller Enthusiast, [22:34] “I have lost in her my audience.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson about Fuller (via Nichols), [23:33]

• On Thoreau and activism:

  “I was seized and put into jail because I did not pay a tax to the state which buys and sells men, women and children like cattle.” —Thoreau (paraphrased/narrated), [29:23]

• On education (Alcott):

  “He believed that every human has a spark of the divine in them, and the job of a teacher is to bring that out.” —Bruce Nichols, [31:32]

• On optimism:

  “They are optimists who do think we could build a better world right now. They believed that the arc of the universe is bending toward justice.” —Bruce Nichols, [30:22]

• On American originality:

  “There was a wild quality that seemed to push the envelope in a way that the more state and conservative Europeans wouldn't have been comfortable with … We're doing things differently.” —Tommy, [41:05]

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Timeline of Notable Segments

| Time | Segment/Topic | |------|--------------| | 01:32 | Introduction to the “magical period” of Concord in the 1840s | | 06:57 | Defining the “feverish 40s” and why it’s forgotten | | 11:01 | Emerson as the original American public intellectual | | 17:18 | Emerson’s influence on originality, birth of the American mindset | | 20:05 | The radicalism of Margaret Fuller and her legacy | | 23:33 | Fuller’s loss and Emerson’s tribute | | 26:47 | Emerson-Thoreau mentor relationship dynamics | | 28:55 | Thoreau’s uncompromising activism vs. Emerson’s caution | | 31:32 | Bronson Alcott’s educational revolutionary ideas | | 37:19 | Louisa May Alcott’s literary emergence and impact | | 41:05 | The new American voice: Whitman, the American Renaissance | | 43:49 | The Civil War: shattered dreams and muted transcendentalist response | | 45:00 | Myth-busting Walden’s isolation: Thoreau’s integration in Concord | | 46:51 | The hope for new ideas and inspiration for today | | 47:47 | The irreplaceable value of in-person conversation and experimentation | | 48:32 | Openness to world religions and intellectual cross-pollination | | 49:54 | Emerson’s enduring grief for his wife—human dimension of genius | | 51:04 | Conclusion—remembering and yearning for cultural rebirth |

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Tone & Takeaways

• The conversation is warm, intellectual, and inviting, blending reverence for history with a yearning for contemporary renewal.
• The hosts and guest underscore the critical importance of group conversation, experimentation, and optimistic thinking for societal progress.
• There is a clear call to look to history’s forgotten periods of creative explosion as inspiration for America’s future.

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For listeners new to the topic, this episode is both an accessible introduction to transcendentalist thought and a moving argument for why these long-ago debates and dreams still matter—especially for anyone hungry for optimism, originality, and reinvention today.

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Transcript

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[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Volume up. Sending it to switcher control. Check the controls on the comm PC9D2 fire coming back on the remote sensor. Pick it up and go. My name's Mishke. Thresholds look good. Out filter on The RON Good VP12 processor 6, 5, 4, 321 equalizing separate frequency 8, 8, 7 and network 2 on. There are moments in history when the air itself seems to change, when something invisible but unmistakable moves through a place and a time, and the people living in it can feel it. Concord, Massachusetts, in the 1840s. That was one of those moments. America was young back then, young and restless, deeply confused about what it was supposed to be. The country had won its political independence, but that was political independence. Intellectually, philosophically, in its literature, in its sense of self. It still tended to look toward Europe, still borrowed its ideas from across the ocean, still asked the old world, what should we think? And then, in the quiet of a New England town, a handful of people decided to stop asking that. Ralph Waldo Emerson had lit the fuse with his essays. Bold essays, almost reckless essays, declaring that the individual human soul was its own authority, that nature wasn't scenery, nature was scripture, that intuition could carry you further than any institution could carry you. And his neighbor, a fella named Henry David Thoreau, took those ideas and he lived them. A woman named Margaret Fuller, one of the most brilliant minds to breathe on this planet in the 1840s was rewriting what it meant to be a woman of intellect in a country barely ready for the question. Bronson Alcott was running schools that looked nothing like any schools anyone had ever seen. In fact, they looked a lot like schools that we have today. But he was just another guy ahead of his time in a town filled with people ahead of their time. And Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was watching all of it with a novelist's eye, both skeptical and intrigued. They all argued, they all wrote, and they all went for walks. Lordy, did they go for walks. Miles and miles through the Massachusetts woods, talking about everything, the soul, society, work, freedom, self reliance, the divine, the wild, the possible. It lasted about a decade before something kicked in, a slow roll toward harder and darker questions, a gathering storm. But what happened in Concord, Massachusetts? What those thinkers set loose into the American imagination never stopped moving. And those ideas went all over the world. That stubborn American conviction that the individual standing alone against convention might just be right. The book is the Emerson Circle, the Concord Radicals who reinvented the world. Bruce Nichols is the author and my guest this hour. And I have been a fan, Bruce, of Mr. Emerson, Thoreau, the transcendentalists, and those wild folks that sprouted out of that movement in the 1800s for many years. This is an area I love to swim in, and I'm delighted you decided to dive into it. Looks like it took you quite a while. This is no small book, and it's no small topic.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

No. Thank you so much, Tommy. They are fascinating people, and they left behind millions of pages to read, and every single one of them is worth reading.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

The thing that the average person in America doesn't realize is that there was this magical period in the 1800s, and it's as magical a period as the 1960s were in America. The 1920s in Paris, 1480s in Florence. And if you say that to people, they say, I don't get it. What was going on in the 1840s? And you must have sensed yourself that there was a vacuum here and that there was something you had to say about that time that people needed to hear.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

That's exactly right. That decade was this sort of crazy period of utopian experiments. It's as if Americans had had this new form of government for a couple generations, and all of a sudden they looked at each other and said, what else should be new? Do we need marriage? We don't want slavery. Should we give women equal rights? Should we eat meat? They thought about all kinds of things. And historians have tried to give a label to that decade. It needs better branding. We have the swinging 60s and the roaring 20s, but somebody once tried the mad 40s. That didn't really take off. I think of it as the feverish 40s. It was a time when utopian communities were springing up all over the place. And all these new thinkers were looking to Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular. He was the fountainhead for the whole thing. And they would troop to his house to get his blessing, and they would try to convince him to join their communities they were forming, which he never did. He was not a utopian community kind of guy. But that whole period got lost because what followed with the coming of the Civil War and the crisis between north and south subsumed it. So we've forgotten all about it. And it's a great time to go back and look at it.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

There was a waking up to ideas and an excitement about new ways of seeing things and thinking. And this ground of Concord, Massachusetts, was its wonderful hub. And I often, when I read a book like yours, want to put myself there. Want to lie in bed at night and imagine myself in the thick of it.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

I do, too. And if I could jump in a time machine and go back there, the two things I'd want to do, one is take a walk in the woods with Thoreau, because that guy knew more about the Concord woods and observed more about it than anybody ever. But the other is to sit in Emerson's living room and listen to him have a conversation with Margaret Fuller, who was the most educated person in America, male or female, and also, by all accounts, incredibly charismatic. So we can read her articles, we can read her books, but we've lost her conversation. So I would love to do that. What you can do, you can go to Concord and visit some of these houses, including Emerson's. You can stroll from Emerson's house to Thoreau's house. Doesn't take long. You can get a sense of it. And even at Walden Pond, there's a facsimile of Thoreau's cabin you can go into. But in terms of what it was like to actually talk to these guys, all we have are their journals, which there's lots of them, but the conversations

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

are lost, I think, of this title. You must have read the book years and years ago. I interviewed the author of a biography on Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it had the most delightful title. I believe it was Emerson, the Mind on Fire.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Yeah, it's an intellectual biography. It talks about everything he read, which he recorded in his journal. So we know. And he kept most of them in his library, which survives year by year. He was always reading and always thinking about what he was reading and writing about his journals. So that book sort of takes you through his intellectual evolution from a young, wildly optimistic, anything is possible kind of guy to eventually a much more sober person who realized things are possible. But there's lots of reasons why we don't get what we want.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Let's start with Emerson, since he's the centerpiece. You do call the book the Emerson Circle. So he's the hub. And there are spokes, and the spokes are actually extraordinarily fascinating. I guess I knew more about Emerson, but some of these people you wrote about, who I knew less about just shot to the top of the list for me in terms of being wholly unique and interesting and fascinating intellects. But let's start with Emerson. The Mind on Fire, the title of that intellectual biography. That's a great description of his mind. It's on fire with thoughts, with ideas, with interests.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

He was from many generations of ministers, of clergy, and he went to Harvard Divinity School and began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston. But he just kept reading and traveling and seeing things, and it made him quit his church. And when he did that, many people around him, including someone in his family, were horrified. But he had a new option, which was to be a professional lecturer. Lots of people would come and pay for a ticket to go hear a lecture. He did them all around Boston and Cambridge, but then all around New England and then all around what's now the Midwest and eventually the west coast and Europe. And more people heard him in person than read his essays or his books. People that would come to hear him weren't just fellow sort of college graduate educated people. They were all kinds of people. So he was our first public intellectual. And because he was saying, why should we be bound by tradition? Why should we be bound by the institutions and the books that we inherit? Let's think things from scratch. He inspired so many others to try their own thought experiments and then actual experiments.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

We have to think of him as being in a time when there aren't concerts all over the place to go to, there aren't radio shows, there aren't television shows. The idea of giving a lecture then is a very different notion. I sometimes think of him as kind of a rock star of his time.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

He was, as celebrities go, we didn't have sports celebrities, we didn't have actors and actress celebrities. But you could go hear him Speak maybe several times a year. And you couldn't go hear that many other people. He was huge. And that I think a lot of us have just forgotten.

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To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate. To have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.

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[Inspirational Quote Narrator]

Always do what you are afraid to do. The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

There's this sense that he's giving people permission, artists, writers, thinkers, intellects, to give birth to a new American way of thought. Years and years and years of America being, in essence, Europe light, suddenly meeting somebody who is at the vanguard of an original kind of thought that would have an American electricity to it. And he would help give birth to people who would also be described that way. Certainly Walt Whitman was utterly new and fresh and different as a writer. Something you would not have seen in Europe nor in America up till then. You talk about all the different new ways of thinking during this time that included new ways of educating kids, new ways of thinking about women and their roles, new ways of thinking about how to be an individual, new ways of thinking about civil disobedience, how to think about what role you're playing by supporting a government that supports slavery, thinking about the environment differently, thinking about spirituality differently. I don't know if there's an area he didn't touch.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

You're right. And I think a lot of people that just focus on the word transcendentalist are only focusing on pretty narrow slice of his thinking. And Thoreau's thinking, that's a almost metaphysical concept that there's a sort of higher spiritual truth that expresses itself in the world and you can connect directly to it. And they did believe that and they did talk about that. But there was a much broader term at the time. It was called the newness. When people talked about the newness, they meant all these people coming up with all these new ideas, including these utopian communities. There were men that came to have a meal with Emerson who didn't believe in money, and men who came who didn't believe in wearing shoes or wearing leather or cutting their hair. You name it. People were thinking, what else can we try that's new? So the newness was this great term that encompassed many, many different people and ideas. And you know, some of them are wacky. And most of the utopian communities that formed died pretty quickly. But it was a moment where people thought, anything is possible.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

If someone were just tuning in, if this were a radio show and they just got in their car and tuned in, they'd say, oh, he's talking about the 60s in the US and in fact, the tethers and tentacles from this period of the 1840s stretch right to the American 1960s.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

They certainly do. And Margaret Fuller, who is my favorite character out of all the people in the book, she was one of our first feminist thinkers. She was self educated and educated by her father. She was better educated than just about anyone. And she created professional conversations for women where she would get 10 or 12 or so women to come once a week and they would talk about what is women's role in the world. Because Fuller had read so much more than most of the women in the room, she could lead the conversation very intelligently. She became quite famous. She was a journalist for the biggest newspaper in the country, the New York Tribune. And then she died prematurely when she was only 40 in a shipwreck. But she was forgotten. Over the next couple of decades, her books started to trail off in sales and they were all out of print. And she was mostly forgotten until 1960s and 70s. She was rediscovered. Thoreau, Walden was out of print just briefly before he died. It immediately came back in print and never went out again. But his cultural resonance goes up and down and it boomed in the 60s and 70s and it's still huge.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Fuller is the one I knew the least about and the one who shot to the top of my list in terms of someone I would have loved to have sat down and talked to. There is something so depressing to me about reading of an intellect this powerful, this alive, knowing she was in an era when women were not going to be given much of an opportunity to let that flag fully fly. I mean, all the contributions that a mind like hers could have brought, and obviously she contributed plenty of. But she had one hand tied behind her back, as all the women did then. Her father raises her with the same kind of education he would have with a son, which wasn't typical. That means at a young age she's reading Latin, she's reading Greek, serious literature, other Women are learning needlework at that time, domestic arts. But she is developing a powerful intellect.

[Margaret Fuller Enthusiast]

Margaret Fuller is inspiring.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

She's a leader, thinker, woman of ideas.

[Margaret Fuller Enthusiast]

She's original, she's independent, a genius. But she also really saw to the heart of the matter.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

She was a professional conversationalist.

[Margaret Fuller Enthusiast]

She was a woman ahead of her times. Margaret Fuller once said that she had a man's ambition and a woman's heart and found herself as a teenager in a circle of friends, mostly male, who were Harvard students. She was really every bit their equal as an intellectual. She would attend the salons and coffee parties at the professors houses along with them and debate with them. She enjoyed very much this kind of, you know, sword play and besting them at it. They could be intimidated by her. She was kind of a creature that they didn't understand, they didn't know, and they were drawn to her, drawn like moths to the flame.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

And she became her first female war correspondent. So she pushed way beyond the boundaries that every woman faced. But in that same circle, there were a number of others who cheered her on and tried to be like her in many ways, especially younger women. They flocked to her as a beacon.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Would you have called her Emerson's intellectual equal?

[Narrator/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

And when she died, as I mentioned, it was in a shipwreck. She was only 40 years old. Emerson poured out thoughts and tributes in his journal. The sentence that stuck with me the most is, I have lost in her my audience. It's as if everything he wrote, he was actually writing for her.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Wow. There's this sincerity and this innocence and this wonder and this joy and this optimism in the 1840s, which not only will be shattered by a Civil War where 600,000 people die, but by the period that follows, which will be a period of cynicism and corruption. The Gilded Age, a period all about intense capitalism and get the money any way you can. Doesn't matter. The contrast pre Civil War to post Civil war is something a lot of Americans don't think about. I don't think that's emphasized. What people think about is slavery then. No slavery.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

I completely agree. I think the Civil War erased our memory of this moment. And these moments don't come along very often. I think the 1960s is a parallel. One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is that A, that moment's been forgotten, and B, these times when a small group of people come together at the right place in the right time and they push each other and they compete, but they sort of draw out each Other's best work. That's really rare. I mean, I think the Harlem Renaissance is a parallel.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Yeah, 1920s.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Yeah, in the Harlem Renaissance. I mean, it happened because of the great migration of blacks leaving the south, but they went to many places besides New York. It could have happened in Chicago, but it happened in New York because of a few key personalities. I feel like these small groups where their interactions matter enormously. It's just a fascinating thing to look at.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Yeah. And it's the big picture where you see how important it is to have a handful of powerful minds working together, interacting with one another, centered in a certain area because of the ripples that go out for decades and decades and decades. And just all the powerful people who then are influenced, who influence more people themselves. I mean, a Frederick Douglass, for instance, or Walt Whitman, or a Susan B. Anthony, or a Herman Melville or John Muir, the nature writer, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, all influenced by these people. So something powerful is churning there in Concord. The connection between Emerson and Thoreau, to me, by itself, just those two guys. There's enough firepower between those two. And the relationship is very interesting and complicated. There's a sense with those two guys that they're having this classic mentor relationship that you see all over, where the guy being mentored eventually becomes a powerhouse, maybe more powerful, and decides to go a different way. And the mentor feels betrayed or feels insulted or feels somehow wronged, and there's this tension. What do you have to say about their relationship?

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

I think that's a very apt characterization. Thoreau was more than a decade younger. And when he graduated Harvard and came back to Concord, Emerson had just recently moved there. So when he met Emerson, he was just sort of blown away by him. They took walks together. Emerson said to him, you should keep a journal. And so immediately he did. He didn't live a long, full life. He died in his 40s. But between that year, after college and when he died, he wrote 2 million words in his journal. It became the greatest work of his life. And yet initially, Emerson would dismiss him privately, you know, in his journal as saying, he doesn't have any new ideas. He's just rewriting my ideas. And then later, Thoreau published his first book, A Week on the Concord Merrimack Rivers. And then he was distraught when the book didn't do well and wasn't received well. And he writes this tough passage in his journal about how I had a friend and I asked for his help, and he didn't give me anything. And then when the book came out, he made it clear what was wrong with it, and I'm done with him. But over the years, they were constantly brought together. Emerson kept helping him out financially. And yet in the journals, you see these pages where one day he's like, I. I can't stand him anymore. We're done, we're done. And then the next day he says, I ran into him again. And we have so many ties, I can't break them. I'm still, you know, completely attached to him. When Thoreau died, Emerson gave the eulogy. But Emerson always would write in his essays about the pluses and the minuses of whatever he was talking about. And he did that with Thoreau in the eulogy. So he criticized him for not having more ambition. And Louisa May Alcott wrote in her journal, it was a good speech, but not appropriate. But then after that, Emerson went back and started reading Thoreau's journals and he wrote. I have to admit, he went far beyond what I did.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Yeah. And of course, he was wrong, ultimately, in terms of ambition, because Thoreau would influence more people, ultimately.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Oh, yeah, I think it's true. And on the question of abolitionism, which drew all these people into the arena at one time or another, Emerson's wife was all over it and his brother was. And his aunt was. But Emerson was quiet and careful about what he said about it for quite a while. Thoreau jumped right in and gave fiery, fiery speeches about it. So I think Emerson was always careful, and Thoreau was always whatever's right. That's what I'm going to do. I was seized and put into jail because I did not pay a tax to the state which buys and sells men, women and children like cattle.

[Narrator/Commentator]

He suggested that true patriots were not those who blindly followed their administration. They were those who followed their own consciences and in particular, the principles of reason. Thoreau wished to redistribute prestige away from blinkered obedience towards independent thought. What marked out a noble citizen of the republic, a real American, was not, in Thoreau's view, that they respectfully shut up, but that they thought for themselves every day of an administration's life.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Would you say that across the board with these transcendentalists? They were optimists. The universe is ultimately on your side.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

They were definitely optimists. I like to contrast Emerson and his key circle with Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was just the opposite. He was a guy who believed that the human heart can have evil in it, and there's no way around that. And yet he was fascinated by them. So he wrote story after story where he was either satirizing them or was grappling with them. And he wanted to live with them. And he did go for lots of walks with them and spend time with them. The core circle, the Emersonians, are optimists who do think we could build a better world right now. They believed that the arc of the universe is bending toward justice. And let's get there in a hurry.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Bronson Alcott. He also, for me, became a fascinating figure because today you can find schools all over America where children are being treated and taught in a way that dovetails nicely with his thinking on how it should be done. But he was way, way, way ahead of his time. There were not people teaching children in that manner back then. Talk about him.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Yeah, he is a fascinating character. And he and Emerson were opposites in terms of their upbringing. Alcott grew up on a farm in Connecticut, had very little formal education. He read lots of books. He was a voracious reader. But Emerson grew up in Boston and went to Harvard and went to Harvard Divinity School. And yet Alcott came to some of the same beliefs and philosophy as Emerson did. He came to believe that every human has a spark of the divine in them, and the job of a teacher is to bring that out. He just believed he was always right and the truth would always win out. So he just started teaching this way. And job after job, he got fired, or the school closed, or people were like, this is crazy. What's he doing? But he was this eternal optimist who was sure that the right ideas will find their reward in the long run. He didn't care that he wasn't making any money for many years and his wife was killing herself to take in borders or take jobs that she could. He's a fascinating character. He would have been frustrating, I think, to be married to or to be dependent on. But he was also right about a lot of things. And when it came to abolitionism, opposing slavery, he was one of the first men in the group to be. Of course, we have to oppose this and we have to do something about it. He was quite active.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

He treated kids as thinking, feeling, moral beings with inner lives that as adults we need to respect. He would ask them questions more than lecture them. He thought kids were closer to the divine truth than adults were because they hadn't been corrupted yet. He really had this view of childhood that was very 20th century, would not at all be something you'd find in the 19th century, I don't think. And what he was doing treating kids this way was considered scandalous by A lot of people. It was just utterly radical.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Yeah. And with him, there were a couple of books published. He wrote one of them himself and his chief assistant, a woman named Elizabeth, with Palmer Peabody wrote the first one. But in those books, you can actually see transcripts of the conversations and you can see how he taught. You would call it today Socratic method or pure learning, because he's asking a question and he's making the kids come up with an answer, and he's making other kids critique the answer. He would pick one kid per day to be in charge of punishments. So if somebody was misbehaving, it was that kid's job to decide, what do we do with this unruly student? And since they all knew that tomorrow it's going to be somebody else, it made them think really hard about how to punish. He did not believe in physical punishment at all. Matter of fact, he made, at one point, one of the misbehaving kids hit his palm with that ruler because he knew the kid would feel so guilty about having to hurt his own teacher that it would have much bigger impact.

[Twin Cities Savers Auction Announcer]

Yeah.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

He was firmly convinced that children have as much access to divine truth as anybody, and the teacher's job is just to help them find it.

[Literary Quote Narrator]

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[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

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[Literary Quote Narrator]

Repair of books in our time, the variety is so voluminous and they follow so fast from the press that one must be a swift reader to acquaint himself even with their titles, and wise to discern what are worth reading.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

And then he has this extraordinary daughter.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

He does. Louisa is also one of my favorite characters. Everyone that is a fan of Little Women, most of those fans know that it was based quite closely on her family, her real life. She was the second daughter. She was a rebellious girl. She had a gift and she was creative and she wanted to write. She wrote plays for the family to put on for themselves. She wrote stories from a very early age and she managed to get some of them published at first under pseudonyms or with anonymously. Some of the places she was publishing would only pay her $5 or $10. And yet the family needed every penny. They were very poor. So she became a workaholic, writing and writing and writing and writing. She went to serve in the Civil War as a nurse, which made her very sick. Typhus. And after that she took a long time to recover. And as soon as she was well enough, she just started cranking out more stories. It took until the book Little Women for her to have a whole lot of success and be able to pay off the family's debts. But she was just a workaholic and a born writer.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

I sometimes think about women in writing in the 19th century and I think, well, a lot of doors were closed to women, but there was a pen and a piece of paper and in someone like Emily Dickinson's case, a bedroom. And there was this ability to put something down. Now, of course, you still have to get someone to want to read it, but it seemed like there often could be an audience. There certainly was for Louisa. And I wonder how that is viewed as an outlet if you don't want to be a teacher, a nurse, a homemaker. Was that where the gates opened?

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

That was a booming business. There were big, best selling women novelists in the 1840s, and the percent of the country that was literate and could read was very high, higher than in Great Britain. And as today, women were the biggest consumers of novels. And they're the biggest producers of them. Hawthorne despaired. At one point, he wrote a very famous cranky letter to his publisher about all these damn scribbling women.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Oh, God. That's what I'm going to say to the next woman I interview, the next author. You one of these damn scribbling women.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Some people quote me,

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

I did not know we had a higher percentage of people reading than you would have found in England. That's extraordinary.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Yeah. And the newspaper culture exploded. I mean, that's how Walt Whitman made his living for many years. He was a journalist and there were so many newspapers. As a matter of fact, he wrote three reviews of his own book, Leaves of Grass, that he got friendly editors to publish under various names or no name.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

He sends his work early on to Emerson. Right. And we get that famous quote that Emerson supposedly passed back his way. I greet you at the start of a great career.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Yeah, he did the first edition, the Leaves of Grass. He sent a copy to Emerson. Emerson did not think he was writing something for the public. He thought he was responding privately to Whitman. And he said, yes, I reached you at the start of great career and praised him. And Whitman, being the self promoter, immediately did a second edition, put Emerson's entire letter in the back, took quotes, including that quote, and stamped them on the COVID and then wrote a public response to Emerson that he published in the back. Emerson was annoyed. He's like, I wouldn't have written this if it was for the public. But that was Whitman's promotional skill.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

And with Whitman, as I mentioned early, an American voice is being born, one that's a very different voice than the European voice. And it took America a while to become America and not part of that old world. And this is what's so extraordinary, reading about the 1840s and then into the 1850s, is that America we have today being born, you just say the word self reliance, something attached to Emerson forever. That is what we would come to celebrate for decades and decades to come. And with Whitman, I don't even know how to describe it, his voice, there was a. There was a wild quality that seemed to push the envelope in a way that the more state and conservative Europeans wouldn't have been comfortable with. There was a sense of, with all of these people, a sense of, we're not going to play it safe here. This is the United States. We're doing things differently. That's the vibe I got anyway.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Absolutely true. And Whitman's a fascinating case because his early poems were very conventional. They had conventional rhyme schemes and topics and Then a switch flipped, partly inspired by Emerson. Also an essay that Fuller herself wrote and published in the New York Tribune about the state of American letters, where she said, we're just beginning to see original voices. They should come any minute now. I have one chapter in the book on the American Renaissance, where I look at these four great works. Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Walden and Leaves of Grass. And one of the things I try to do in that chapter, without expecting readers to necessarily have read those books, is to understand how they were created and how they were received. And I quote reviews from Europe because the British reviewers got it and said, everything they've published over there up till now has been things that could have been published here. And now these are truly original voices.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

I'm trying to get in my head the despondency or the letdown of the Civil War. With these kind of people, you have them talking about abolishing slavery as though the way it's going to happen is with new thinking. It's going to happen with new thinking, and we're going to just change people's minds and we're going to wake them up and enlighten them to a different way of looking at all this. Not thinking that, no, the way it's going to happen is through people's guts hanging out of their bellies. That's how it's going to happen.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

It's a fascinating story of how they engaged with the abolitionism movement and then how they reacted to the war itself. The Thoreau family, their house was a important stop on the Underground Railroad. When the Alcotts were living in Concord, which wasn't always the case, they came and left. Their house was a stop. And yet when the war actually started, Thoreau barely commented on it. He had one letter he wrote to a correspondent saying, these Southern states that have seceded, let them go. We don't need them. We're better off without them. And that's it. It's like the war started. And where was Thoreau? Emerson, on the other hand, he did write an essay about the Emancipation Proclamation that was admiring it as. As highly as one can and saying, look, some people think it's too slow and too little, and some people think it's too fast. It's perfect. Lincoln is a genius.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

I've always been curious about Thoreau and Walden. I didn't learn until your book that he was living on Emerson's property. I have visited Walden. And what is the distance to Concord, to Emerson's house?

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

It's like a mile and a half. Maybe two miles at the most. His cabin was within sight of a major road that lots of people walked on or rode their horses, carriages on. And I think a lot of people have this idea that he was a hermit, he was a local celebrity. He became, he was already well known in the town, but he became this sort of famous eccentric because no one lived alone. That was just a weird thing to do.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

No one lived alone.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Yeah, you lived with your family, you raised kids and kept your parents in your house. And so for a guy to go and live in a tiny little one room cabin, it was just weird. And yet he had visitors and he was walking into town all the time. He was not a hermit at all. He was woven into the town.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Do you feel that in reading this book, is there a hope we may be inspired to arrive at a, a new version of this? Somewhere in this country where we begin to think differently, our minds get on fire with new approaches, new thoughts, things that haven't been brought up before, novel ways of operating in society. Because it certainly seems we're ready for something like that. Was that at all on your mind?

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Certainly not in the pages of the book. Going to say, okay, therefore, here's what we should do now. But yeah, I found it so inspiring to, to spend all this time in this optimistic upsurge seeing these people push themselves and each other. And I think we are so desperate for anything optimistic and getting out of the big fights that seem to define every last aspect of our public discourse. Things do change, I think, going back to the most inspiring people in our past who said, forget about the stuff you've inherited, think originally. That's the way to get there.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Yeah, it seems like we're ready for brand new ideas. There's so much talk today from certain quadrants of going back to something, but that's not what Emerson would have talked about. He would have talked about going forward into something and that we're here to create those new ideas that we, that we go forward into. And that feels more right for our times to me.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Yeah, I completely agree.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

One of the things that I think of when I read a book like yours is anytime you have wonderful ideas and fascinating ideas and new insights, you also have crazy ones. They don't magically all become the best approach. It was a period with everything being thrown on the table and let's see what works, let's see what other people say. Throwing it out. And what do you think? And what do you think and what's your take on this? The love of conversation.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Yeah, And I do think that's hard to replicate if your life is entirely online. I do think in person group conversations do things that you can't get any other way. That Emerson helped found what became known as the Transcendental Club. And the only rule they had was that you can join us as long as you are willing to talk about anything.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Emerson didn't care for the term transcendentalist, did he?

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

No, it was used at the time. But I also think it's, it's too limiting. That's a sort of way of describing their metaphysics. But they were interested in so many other things besides what lies behind the physical world. They were interested in reinventing the world.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

What I do find refreshing about them is who in America before them was interested in exploring Hinduism, Buddhism, who wanted to read the Bhagavad Gita? I mean, that just didn't seem on anyone's radar, was it?

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

No. In both Emerson and Thoreau, they were among America's first comparative religionists. And Thoreau was fascinated by those texts.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

I mean, that would get a few evenings of conversation going right there. And again, these are ways of thinking foreign to the United States, but wonderfully insightful and fascinating and coming from great intellects. So that ability to think outside the shores of the United States and see what other people have thought about. And again, the waves from this period in American history going out to people like Tolstoy and Nietzsche, people who credit these guys for altering their thinking. It's almost a shame sometimes to realize so many people never know how far out those ripples go because they're long gone. And speaking of long gone, the thing that's always stuck with me with Emerson, that relationship he had with his wife where he was so distraught up to a year or more after she died that he just desperately had to see her and had her dug up.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

He didn't have to have her dug up because she was in a above ground crypt. He was walking every day between his home and the church he was working at. And he would walk through the cemetery where she was. And one day he moved the lid and took a look. And it's as if biographers have all talked about this and he didn't write much about it. So we're speculating why did he do it. But many of them say it's as if he couldn't quite believe that she was gone. She died within two years of their wedding. It was a very early death, so it was a huge blow. Something about her passing. He just could not let go of

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

the book is the Emerson Circle, the Concord radicals, who reinvented the world and reinvented the world. I mean, that's an extraordinary claim, a period that reinvents the world we sure as hell ought to know about and understand. Thank you for spending all this time with me. It's been wonderful to read this, and I am left afterward hoping for a new renaissance and thought in this country, something that mirrors 1840. It at least left me hoping.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Well, thanks, Tommy. It's been great to have your time and attention, and I hope others will feel the same.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Good luck to you going forward.

[Bruce Nichols (Author/Guest)]

Thank you so much, Tommy. It's been great to talk to you.

[Tommy (Interviewer/Host)]

Sam.