The Ideas That Made America is a brief survey of some of the most compelling episodes and abiding preoccupations in American intellectual history. While I would like to imagine that a book on the history of American thought can be as straightforward as it is accessible, I have been teaching this material long enough to know that this is not always the case. With equal parts intrigue and skepticism, students often ask me: what is American intellectual history?
The official version of American intellectual history goes something like this: it is an approach to understanding the American past by way of ideas and the people who made or were moved by them. Intellectual history seeks to understand where certain persistent concerns in American thought have come from and why some ideas, which were important in the past, have faded from view. It can focus on the very particular: a single concept (say, “freedom” or “justice”) or a larger body of thought (“democratic theory” or “antislavery”). Histories of thought can also study a particular field of knowledge, such as philosophy, psychology, or sociology, and examine how those disciplines have changed over time. All of these angles into Americans’ ways of thinking are used with a careful attention to time and place: Why did they come to those conclusions? Why then? Why there? For an intellectual historian, the context of the idea is as important as the idea itself. Intellectual history also concerns itself with the myriad institutions that are sites of intellectual production (universities, publishing houses, and think tanks), as well as the various practices people have employed to engage ideas (reading, writing, discussing, experimenting, and so on).
Though ideas, intellectuals, and intellectual movements are the focus in the history of American thought, it is still first and foremost a historical pursuit that adopts all the habits of mind familiar to political, economic, and environmental historians. Intellectual history may even focus on politics, economics, and the environment. But instead of using political parties, an economic depression, or weather patterns to understand American history at a particular time and place, it would approach political history by examining the ideas in a political treatise or presidential address. Its approach to economic history might be to investigate how economists interpreted the cause of a financial downturn or how unemployed laborers made sense of their difficult circumstances. And its approach to the history of the environment might consider the arguments environmental activists used to try to protect endangered species or the way a poet drew symbols from nature in her or his work.
So that is something like the official version of American intellectual history, and, I think, an accurate description of the enterprise. But had it been described to me this way before I knew anything of the subject, I am not quite sure I would have chosen it as my life’s work.
The reason I became interested in American intellectual history, why it still holds my attention, why I love teaching it, and why my students seem to share the thrill of it is that it is a way to eavesdrop on the past. Its intent is not to spy on the inner thoughts of unsuspecting dead people. Rather, it is fueled by the desire to come into contact with interesting people we might not otherwise know but for the records of their minds they left behind. This historical sensibility gladly welcomes any source to use for eavesdropping: legal documents, novels, private letters, diaries, photographs, or a painting. No source need be too imposing—like a major tome of theological disputation. And no source is too insignificant—like marginalia in a text or an advertisement in a magazine. Though this book tends to rely on more traditional sources of intellectual history (works of philosophy, political and social theory, literature, and cultural criticism), it hopes to show that these are only some of the sources that can awaken us to all the ways Americans have constructed their realities and made meaning in their lives.
In trying to access the mental and moral worlds of people from the past, The Ideas That Made America asks questions about the possibilities for and limits on doing so. It raises questions such as the following: Is it possible to fully understand the intellectual motivations of historical actors? Can we apprehend how or why ideas have had the power to make Americans change their minds about—or take action on—a particular issue? How can we measure the influence of historical actors’ ideas on social, political, and economic conditions (and vice versa)? By posing such questions, this book invites thinking about thinking. But more important, it seeks to demonstrate that thinking is where so much of the historical action is.
This story opens with the first contacts between European explorers and Native Americans in the late fifteenth century and carries the narrative up to American intellectual life today. Professional thinkers, sophisticated arguments, and intellectual classics are present here, but so are lay Christians, simplistic arguments, and ephemera. They are all here because they reflect the richly varied sources and expressions of Americans’ intellects. These chapters attempt to portray some of the excitement of accessing American history through ideas and to interpret how Americans throughout history have understood themselves, their nation, and their world.
This book tells the story of developments in American intellectual life as a history of “crossings” in all of their varieties—between one cultural setting and another, text and context, secular analysis and sacred belief, and formal argument and emotional affirmation. Of all the types of intellectual transfer this book will focus on, three stand out as the most important.
The movement of ideas across national borders. American intellectual history is filled with expatriates, émigrés, and foreign texts, and so of prime importance here is how Americans’ intellectual and moral worlds have long been the products of transnational crossings. Therefore, some of this history takes place “off stage”: in early modern Europe at the time of Europeans’ first contacts with the indigenous peoples of the New World or on the Galápagos Islands in the nineteenth century when a young Charles Darwin first noticed something strange about the finches on the archipelago. Also crucial are intellectuals who moved off and on the American stage. Just one example is D. T. (Daisetsu Teitaro) Suzuki, who lived and worked with the philosopher Paul Carus in Illinois in the early twentieth century, learning everything he could about American religion and culture, before returning to the United States at mid century as the ambassador of Zen Buddhism to the West.
The movement of ideas across temporal borders. Ideas are products of their time and place, but they also go on to influence future intellectual movements. For example, late twentieth-century postcolonialist thought drew on turn-of-the-last-century Pan-African discourses, while second-wave feminists took their inspiration from their nineteenth-century American foremothers, who themselves got their inspiration from classical antiquity. In addition, major texts have afterlives. John Eliot, for example, remade the Bible—a text composed well over a millennium earlier—for seventeenth-century Algonquian Indians, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton took the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and turned it into the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848. Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet reveals both the concerns of an American immigrant in 1923 and those of American soldiers fighting abroad during World War II (who read the Armed Services Edition of his book).
The movement of ideas across borders within American culture. Ideas, patterns of thought, and rigorous modes of inquiry are not the provenance of “highbrow” thinkers only. They can be found in “popular” culture as well. True, some professional intellectuals worried about tiny logical distinctions and articulated the results of their inquiry in a highly technical language. But they also had their critics who complained that intellectual engagement demanded a widening of intellectual horizons and a more compelling way of communicating their findings to a broader public. A full appreciation of American intellectual life requires attention to debates among elites, as well as concerns expressed in what the great twentieth-century writer Ralph Ellison called our culture’s “lower frequencies.”1
This may seem like an awful lot of moving around, but that is what is required to capture a faithful picture of the ideas that made America. Intellectual history is invariably a history of other times and other places, because historical actors do not just think in their moment and in their tiny spot on planet Earth. They also live in an ideational realm where they are communing with thinkers or moral worlds from elsewhere. Take Martin Luther King Jr., for example. It is important to know that he was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, and that Gandhi was a fervent reader of Henry David Thoreau, and that Thoreau took a deep interest in fourteenth-century Buddhist texts. So to understand King’s theology, do we need to familiarize ourselves with ancient Buddhism? Not necessarily, although it would not hurt. The point here is simply that in order to capture the imaginations of thinkers from the past, we need to be as intellectually peripatetic as they were.
Ideas are never frozen in their time and place, nor are they vapors that float in some otherworldly, transcendent realm. Rather, they are historical forces that move—and thereby change—from one interlocutor to another, one place to another, and even one time period to another. To be sure, throughout our history, many Americans have exalted ideas like democracy, freedom, and equality, while others experienced them as fighting words meant to deny them their benefits. But these ideas have achieved their power not because their meanings are absolute but precisely because they are so fluid, so multivalent, and so prone to redefinition when they come into new conditions of possibility. The vibrancy of American thought lies in the movement of ideas as they have been enlisted to mean different things to different people throughout the American past.
With all of this talk of the past, it may seem that the present is far from view. Intellectual history does deal very much with America today. But it understands that our current political debates, economic fetishes, and moral commitments all have histories. And so, as a result, today’s America is the result neither of nature nor of necessity; it is the creation of historical circumstance, chance, accident, human folly, and wisdom, and sometimes all of these together. What most concerns us today might have seemed ludicrous to our ancestors. And what our ancestors perceived as having great urgency might have somehow become irrelevant for us. Why? That is what intellectual history tries to figure out. In seeking the answers, we achieve a little epistemic humility, which is indeed humbling, but also strangely energizing and ennobling.