Why I Hate Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perhaps I'm being a philistine, but I can't get past him bragging about stiffing paupers.

One of the projects I’ve set aside for when I eventually retire is to give Ralph Waldo Emerson another chance. I gave up on him my junior year at Harvard after reading “Self-Reliance” (1841). The passage that stopped me is a famous one:

Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies;—though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked Dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Oh, fuck you, I thought to myself. If this is transcendentalism, you can keep it. Ronald Reagan, who carried on about welfare queens, was preparing to run for president the following year, and when he did I changed my party registration to Republican so I could vote against the Gipper in the Massachusetts primary. I didn’t care whether Ted Kennedy or Jimmy Carter got the Democratic nomination, but I was very afraid, for good reason it turned out, that Reagan would get the Republican nomination, so I pulled the lever for John Anderson.

If Reagan was bad, Emerson was worse, because Emerson didn’t stop at just denigrating the needy; the schmuck actually congratulated himself for stiffing them. The notion that it took “manhood” to withhold the “wicked Dollar” from charities and indigent individuals was, to me, repulsive. I remember raising this point at a section meeting of my American literature survey class in the basement of Lehman Hall, a mere stone’s throw from the yellow clapboard house, still standing, where Emerson had roomed as an undergraduate. I don’t remember any reply. (Maybe David Edelstein does. He was my future Slate colleague and a fellow student in that section who always said something worth listening to.)

Maybe I was too being self-righteous and “presentist.” It’s been known to happen. I’m older and wiser now. On the other hand, maybe what the world could use right now is an essay in answer to Emerson titled “Self-Pity.”

While I ponder these options, you can read my latest New Republic piece, on the etiquette and ethics of “guilt-tipping” in the age of digital payment.