“Have Courage!” (February 1969 | Volume: 20, Issue: 2)

“Have Courage!”

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Authors: Lewis Mumford

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February 1969 | Volume 20, Issue 2

Lewis Mumford, one of the true savants of the twentieth century, is best known as a critic of modern culture against the background of Western social history. Among his many notable books are The City in History (1961), which won a National Book Award, The Conduct of Life (1951), and The Myth of the Machine (1967). For a new edition of the essays and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson to be published soon by Doubleday, Mr.

 

Lewis Mumford, one of the true savants of the twentieth century, is best known as a critic of modern culture against the background of Western social history. Among his many notable books are The City in History (1961), which won a National Book Award, The Conduct of Life (1951), and The Myth of the Machine (1967). For a new edition of the essays and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson to be published soon by Doubleday, Mr. Mumford has written a surprising introduction emphasizing the relevance of Emerson’s life and thought to our own times. We are very pleased to present an adaptation of that introduction to A MERICAN H ERITAGE readers. —The Editors

The first twenty-five years of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s life—from 1803 to 1828—were a struggle for bodily survival. He was threatened with the lethal disease of his day, tuberculosis, which two of his three younger brothers finally succumbed to; and he was poor. His father, minister of Boston’s First Unitarian Church, died when he was eight, and the Emerson family lived in genteel penury, so poor that Emerson was forced to share a greatcoat with a brother during the grim Boston winters. Soon after marrying, his father had reported: “We are poor and cold and have little meal, and little wood, and little meat; but thank God, courage enough.”

Armed with this family fortitude, Emerson, like his younger brothers, managed to get a Harvard education; and in the end the discipline of poverty underwrote his independence. By merely external pressures he could not be bullied or bribed. The fact that the outer world gave him so little during his growing period fostered his habit of living from within. But there his widowed mother had set him a good example: even in their neediest days, she withdrew for an hour after breakfast from the cares of the household, to meditate behind a closed door.

“A man must thank his defects,” Emerson wrote in “Fate,” “and stand in some terror of his talents.” His original defects were a poor constitution, low vitality, shyness and awkwardness in company, a lack of outward warmth and responsiveness. It took him half a lifetime to compensate for these defects, if not entirely to overcome them, in acts of hospitality and friendly service and secret generosity. These acts touched not only those he loved, like Thomas Carlyle, Henry Thoreau, or Bronson Alcott, but passing strangers. Happily, Emerson’s courtly manners