Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War by Philip F. Gura (review)

Philip F. Gura's book concerns a cluster of antebellum reform movements that seem disparate to modern readers but were felt in their own time to be tightly interwoven if eccentric. These movements connected the utopian dreams of the Transcendentalists and the Fourierists and the mystical union of science and religion in the poetic speculations of Emanuel Swedenborg with notions such as Grahamite dietary reform, homeopathic medicine, phrenology, mesmerism, currency reform, and sexual liberation. These movements were also tied together as a response to the crash of 1837 and by a common picture of human possibility. By providing searching, sympathetic biographies of the leading projectors of these reforms, Gura brings into high relief their common values, the inner logic of their ideas, and the nobility of their ambitions, making clear their gullible attraction to pseudoscience and their deeper limitations without portraying them as cranks and hucksters.

Recognizing the attractiveness of this vision of reform, to make possible a humane restructuring of economic and political life, Gura sees it as hampered by its inward and individualized turn, which made private changes of heart the necessary precondition and the limit of public social reforms. The reformers' insistence on inward purity made them incapable of entering the political world and led them to choose an increasingly severe ethos of impatient separation. Gura also faults many of these reformers for failing to trace many of the ills of their society to slavery, although some embraced abolition and others endorsed John Brown's revolutionary violence.

Gura's biography of George Ripley provides the main themes. Shocked by the destitution of his working-class congregation brought on by the collapse of 1837, Ripley sought in Brook Farm a model for a new economic order in which labor was not exploited, work and life were not alienated, and all persons could simultaneously enlarge their capacities for enjoyment and meaningful endeavor. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, unlike Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, joined the commune, captured the sad comedy of its failure in The Blithedale Romance (1852). But Gura is right not to reduce Brook Farm to a caricature. Its founding ideals were noble, and its cultural critique was accurate. If Ripley's measures were inadequate, he at least saw, in the inward moral dignity of all people, what Emerson called "'the infinitude of the common man'" (p. 25).

Horace Greeley, who embraced Fourierism, phrenology, a Grahamite diet, abolition, and labor reform, connects almost every figure in this book. The progress of all of these proposals were featured in his New York Tribune. In Gura's view, Greeley made an accurate diagnosis of the chief social ills of his age, although his prescriptions often seem ineffective. Albert Brisbane, Henry James Sr., Orestes Brownson, and Theodore Parker also connect many of the book's subjects. Brownson, in particular, would seem to deserve a more extended treatment.

Gura gives a nuanced account of now mostly forgotten figures, including currency reformer William B. Greene and phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler. Gura's chapter on phrenology is of particular interest, since he sees it as something more than a peculiar enthusiasm, indeed as a way of connecting the body and the spirit, which in its own day had something of the cachet that psychoanalysis had in the mid-twentieth century. Also of particular interest is Gura's account of the feminist and sexual reformer Mary Gove Nichols. Many of her views on health reform and sexual passion only entered the mainstream a generation ago and are still contested. She and her husband, Thomas Nichols, maintained their arguments with a great deal of integrity and consistency. Nichols deserves to be remembered more widely and sympathetically, and Gura is capable of telling her story with insight.

The terminus of this model is the revolutionary violence of John Brown. The reader might have...