"You can no more keep out of politics than you can keep out of frost"

American Digest linked to an article in Humanities by Danny Heitman. It is about Ralph Waldo Emerson, who sounds like he was a person I would have really looked up to, like I look up to Victor Davis Hanson, Daniel Greenfield, and so many others in the blogosphere.

Emerson scholar Donald McQuade has pointed out how easy it is to forget Emerson’s radical streak. “Faith in human potential, belief in self-reliant individualism, resolute optimism, moral idealism, worshipful return to nature—these are but a few of Emerson’s principles that remain central to the national ideology he helped articulate and popularize,” McQuade writes. “Repeated and adapted so often by scores of admirers and apprentices . . . Emerson’s terms now seem so familiar that it is hard to credit him with all of his originality. The challenge for today’s readers of Emerson is to recover the freshness of a creative thinker whose original ideas no longer sound unique.”

Emerson’s challenge to the ecclesiastical and intellectual status quo coincided with equally vigorous activism on the political scene. Because Emerson “rose to national prominence in one of the most turbulent and formative periods in the United States,” scholar David M. Robinson has observed, “political questions grew in importance for him, becoming by the 1850s and 1860s one of his chief concerns as a public intellectual.”

In 1938 Emerson

wrote a letter to President Martin Van Buren, protesting the removal of the Cherokee people to Oklahoma, the forced march that resulted in the infamous Trail of Tears in which thousands died. Emerson was also an active abolitionist and champion of women’s rights. Not always eager to enter political frays, he often found this kind of engagement inevitable for a public figure of his stature. “You can no more keep out of politics,” Emerson said, “than you can keep out of the frost.”

Writer Scott Russell Sanders, a contemporary nature essayist in the best Emersonian tradition, suggests that in a close reading of Emerson, “we can see that the greatest of his essays were those he wrote not to proclaim certainties but to overcome uncertainties.”