Some scholars may have been aware of it for a few years, but most of us have only begun to recognize that we are entering a new phase in the study of the American past. I am not thinking about the picture-magazine cult of the Civil War, or American Heritage, or the increasingly self-conscious, reverential tone taken (at all levels of culture) toward our national greatness. What I have in mind is no doubt related to all these, but it is something different: it is a recent development, a new emphasis—perhaps style is the right word—in the serious, academic study of our nation’s past. If I had to choose a single name for the emerging style it would be one of the following: documentary, objective, professional, organized, or official. Rather than fix it with a name, however, let me mention a few signs of its presence.

One of the more conspicuous signs is the current outpouring of fine, scholarly editions of American books. Step up to the “new book” shelf at the library and you are likely to find the latest volume—Volume XV—of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, or the first volume of The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1833—1836,¹ or a vast bibliography such as the impressive 1,193-page Guide to the Study of the United States of America, ² a descriptive list of books “reflecting the development of American life and thought” separated into 32 categories, viz., Literature, Religion, Sports and Recreation, Music, General History, Society, and so on. If this mammoth volume with a gold eagle on its binding has an even more official look than the other books I have in mind, that is because it is got out by the General Reference and Bibliographical Division of the Library of Congress.

The organized, programmatic character of the new scholarship was most fully revealed by Dr. Philip M. Hamer at the last meeting of the American Historical Association. Not having heard Dr. Hamer’s talk, I am relying upon a report that appeared on the first page of the New York Times, January 1, 1961, under the arresting headline: “All Records of Great Americans Are Being Unified for First Time.” (It is striking how many features of the emerging style this headline manages to convey.) In his speech Dr. Hamer described a plan, or interlocking series of plans, to collect and make generally available most of the significant documents of American history. It is a remarkable program and, as Emerson would say, a sign of the times—affluent, conservative, and nationalistic times.

Today, in libraries across the land, teams of experts are busy gathering, collating, and annotating manuscripts. The whole apparatus of American Studies is being modernized. For example, the first guide to the location of all unpublished manuscripts and records in the United States—that is to say, potentially useful records—is just out.³ Huge collections of documents are being published: the complete papers of the Continental Congress, all or almost all of our naval and maritime records, the papers related to the ratification of the Constitution, and one could go on. Other teams are busy putting the words of the fathers of the Republic in order. When their work is done we shall have monumental editions of a monumentality that is probably unmatched by any nation: 91 volumes of Adams Papers, 52 volumes of Jefferson Papers, 40 volumes of Franklin Papers, 22 volumes of Madison Papers, and, to be less specific, the collected papers of Hamilton, Jay, Calhoun, Clay, and Wilson. All told, hundreds of volumes are in preparation.

Nor is this all. A similar impulse has been at work on the humanistic and literary side of American Studies. As early as 1948 a distinguished “task force” of 55 scholars produced the 3-volume Literary History of the United States. Since then we have witnessed a veritable eruption of anthologies, bibliographies, compilations, guides, handbooks, and specialized journals aimed at the systematic study of American culture. New collected editions of the works of many American writers—Emily Dickinson, Jonathan Edwards, Emerson, Melville among others—recently have been or are about to be published. Under the imprint of the Belknap Press and the John Harvard Library of the Harvard University Press we are getting an unusual variety of scholarly editions of American books of every conceivable kind: aesthetic theory (J. J. Jarves’s The Art-Idea); biography (Parson Weems’s Washington); government reports (J. W. Powell’s Arid Region); journals (William Maclay’s); letters (Lyman Beecher’s); moral philosophy (Francis Wayland’s influential text); novels of importance in literary history (Harold Frederic’s Damnation of Theron Ware); political theory (Herbert Croly’s Promise of American Life); religious tracts (C. G. Finney’s Lectures on Revivals); scientific treatises (J. B. Stallo’s Modern Physics); travel memoirs (Timothy Dwight’s New England); and dozens of others. The list includes many fascinating, out-of-the-way products of the national genius such as Ignatius Donnely’s Caesar’s Column and Edmund Ruffin’s Essay on Calcareous Manures. It is obvious that a glorious new era in the documentation of our national culture has begun, and it would seem foolish to greet it with anything but gratitude.

And yet it is difficult to be consistent in our response to all this. To be sure, most of the documentary scholarship is first rate. Anyone concerned to have a more accurate and inclusive sense of America’s past will welcome it with enthusiasm. It is a disgrace that we have had to wait so long for an authoritative American edition of Melville. We need all of these books, and no doubt we need a lot more of them. But we also need to recall that having the documents is only a preliminary phase of our work. Indeed, given the cautious, narrowly empirical temper of so many scholars these days, one cannot help wondering what we are going to do with all these splendid volumes. Are we gathering materials for a time capsule?—a new Alexandrian library?—or are we preparing the ground for a richer, and by that I mean a more imaginatively relevant, historical literature? The answer will depend, needless to say, on the kinds of scholars we encourage and reward.

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Right here we come to what is most disquieting about the latest phase in American Studies: a suspicion that the scholar-editor is in fact the type we encourage and reward beyond all others. Is it possible that he embodies our highest intellectual aspirations? Of course I realize that some scholars who do editorial work also do other things, and that a few adventurous young men are fighting their way out of graduate school. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for thinking of the scholar-editor as the emerging ideal type among professional “Americanists.” Let me describe him and his work.

To begin with, he may well be a member of a team working on a large, expensive project subsidized by a private foundation or a philanthropically inclined corporation such as Time, Inc., or the New York Times. Often the government itself is in the background, in some obscure way directing and encouraging the project (I am paraphrasing Dr. Hamer) through the agency of the National Historical Publications Commission, a division of the federal General Services Administration. Although in recent years many scientists have become accustomed to working in this sort of institutional setting, it is something new for most humanists.

Indeed, the scientific aura surrounding our documentary scholarship may help to account for the vogue it enjoys. In many ways the scholar-editor’s work is the nearest equivalent, within the humanities and “soft” social sciences, to certain kinds of scientific work. It is precise, neutral, and impersonal—even bureaucratic. We admire this kind of scholar for his self-effacing rigor and discipline. He is a true professional. If James Gould Cozzens were to write a novel about the academic world, he would be the hero. No taint of self-expression mars his “research.” He keeps it as carefully insulated from his own vision of reality as any chemist.

It is easy to see why the scholar-editor enjoys the favor of foundation executives. Unlike many possible projects in history and the humanities, his sort of work is predictable, Safe, and sound. No one is likely to be disturbed by the results. Here is a point, incidentally, that C. P. Snow misses in his “two cultures” approach to these matters. By posing a more or less symmetrical opposition between the two, Snow tends to ignore how deeply the attitudes and methods of the scientific culture have penetrated and in fact transformed parts of the other, literary or humanistic, culture. Today, in the humanities, we are threatened by an overemphasis upon “solid,” empirical, or value-free research. It is especially important that we recognize this fact right now when the large private foundations, realizing that the sciences are amply supported by government funds, are turning their attention to the humanities.⁴

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But it would be wrong to take a caricature of the humanist-as-technician to support a simple view, either negative or affirmative, of our documentary scholarship. As soon as we consider a specific example—say the new edition of Emerson’s Journals ⁵—a number of complications arise. In fact, the case of Emerson is revealing in two ways. For one thing, the new edition exhibits all the genuine advantages of the impeccable editorial style. Besides, it was Emerson who gave us our most eloquent statement of the scholar’s duties in a democratic culture, and it is interesting to compare that ideal with current practice.

Anyone who examines this splendid first volume of Emerson’s Journals (there will be 16 eventually) surely will be impressed by the enormous competence of Messrs. Gilman, Clark, Ferguson, and Davis. They are men of industry, learning, and skill. It is impossible to imagine a higher standard of editorial precision. Nor can there be any doubt that the professional character of their work has meant a net gain for the truth. As a matter of fact, the chief reason we need a new edition of the Journals is that the editors of the first version, Emerson’s son and his nephew, were not trained professionals.

The difference between the two editions is instructive. Emerson’s relatives, who brought out the original 10-volume edition between 1900 and 1914, had little sense of scholarly objectivity. In selecting from the 230-odd manuscript volumes, they took as their criterion the prevailing notion of the way a genteel man of letters ought to appear in public print. To protect Emerson’s privacy and his reputation as an exemplar of “ideality,” they omitted his acid opinions on friends, women, Unitarians, Negroes, and the Irish. If nowadays many Americans still think of Emerson as the apple-cheeked sage of Concord, spiritual cousin of those Brattle Street worthies they met in school books, then Edward Waldo (Emerson) and Waldo Emerson Forbes should get some of the credit. “Throughout the ten volumes,” remark our editors about the work of their predecessors, “there floats the image of a nineteenth-century gentleman, consistently referred to, and virtually titled ‘Mr. Emerson.’”

Now, in place of that illusory figure, Professor Gilman and his colleagues offer us the real Emerson. By printing almost all of the journals and notebooks, roughly three times as many words as before, they escape the distortion that came of having to make selections. Thus the first volume, covering Waldo’s undergraduate years, includes his notes on college lectures, lists of titles, jokes, and petty cash records as well as journal entries. This high standard of comprehensiveness is characteristic of the new scholarship. The Jefferson Papers, for example, include letters to as well as from Jefferson. And wherever they find it necessary, Emerson’s editors, like Jefferson’s, provide elaborate notes illuminating obscure references.

Completeness and exactness are the twin ideals. No detail, as the saying goes, is too trivial for patient scrutiny. When the editors do not actually reproduce Waldo’s doodling in the margins, they take great pain to describe it in words: “The hand sign points to the figure of a grim-faced man with feet like a trifid fish tail. Beside the man are the amputated feet in the mouth of a great fish, and the words, ‘My feet . . . a fish!’ Below the fish is some arithmetic in pencil.” Where ink blots or deliberate cancellations obscure a passage of the Harvard sophomore’s jottings, the editors resort to magnifying devices and high contrast photography. The result, they assure us, will be a “richer, deeper and earthier” image of Emerson.

They may be right, but it would be foolish to assume that the documentary truth, however complete or precise, will lead directly to a usable truth. My impression is that we have not yet assimilated the Emerson of factual record, so to speak, who has been available during most of this century. What is Emerson’s present reputation among students of American culture? A check on the view of Emerson held by professors in our leading colleges and universities would, I am sure, reveal the wildest discrepancies. To some he is another woolly-headed Words-worthian idealist; to others a profound forerunner of the symbolic philosophy of Cassirer and Langer; and all told there are probably a dozen more or less respectable Emersons in circulation right now. Not that such differences necessarily are a bad thing; they might be a good thing if they were argued, clarified, and defined. But that sort of exchange requires scholars who are more than experts, minds that meet on real issues and, in short, something like an intellectual community. Meanwhile, when a European scholar asks me to recommend a study of Emerson (as one did recently), I can give him a quick answer. What he wanted was a single, sound, all-around critical biography, one that would pull together the illuminating special studies by Matthiessen, Arvin, Whicher, Feidelson and others, hence reveal current thinking about a leading American writer, and all I could say was: no such book exists.

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The point is that we are in danger of mistaking possession of the documents for possession of the past. This is where Emerson’s own “theory of the scholar” comes in, for it turns upon the difference between facts and ideas. Indeed, he begins his career by repudiating a provincial culture that is timid, uncommitted, and on the whole excessively deferential toward the past, tradition, facts, whatever is given, especially the printed word. Here are the opening sentences of Nature, his first published work of significance:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. . ., Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?

A year after Nature was published (1836), Emerson went back to Harvard to deliver his Phi Beta Kappa oration on “The American Scholar.” In this address his chief concern is the loss we suffer with the increasing specialization of mental labor. It is predicated on a distinction between two modes of knowing. One we should call empirical—the gathering, classifying, and ordering of data within a carefully limited field. Nowhere does Emerson deprecate this kind of truth. But recognizing its growing ascendancy in an age of science and technology, he addresses himself to the need for the other kind. What worries him is the fate of ideas, ideas that embrace the whole man, or rather the whole of living, as we go on parceling out the responsibility for thought to teams of specialists. How can we maintain anything like a total vision of reality if we each devote ourselves to a minute portion of the whole? Who will put the pieces together?

That responsibility, says Emerson, belongs to the true scholar, the “delegated intellect” of the community. (By now, of course, we use the word “scholar” almost exclusively to refer to the professional academic man, so that if Emerson were to give his talk today he doubtless would call it “The American Intellectual.”) The scholar begins work where the expert stops. Seizing the data in his field, he endows it with meaning and value by framing it within the largest context, the most inclusive definition of reality, he can master. To do this, of course, he must know a great deal more than he can learn from books. His ideas will be shaped by his sense of man’s place in the natural order, and by his activities as a citizen. The ideal Emersonian scholar, in today’s idiom, would be the fully engaged intellectual.

If a good book is to be written about Emerson, it will have to be written by this kind of scholar. Only a man who is willing to range widely among general ideas—in philosophy, history, and literary criticism—could possibly write it. To be sure, he will rely on the work of our able documentary scholars. But no such book can be written from the bland, disengaged, “objective” point of view in academic favor. If the writer is to help us make up our minds about Emerson, he will have to make up his own mind on many complicated, controversial issues. He will set out to prove something. He will risk being wrong and perhaps even seeming a fool. Like Emerson himself. “Let us call him a fool,” said Herman Melville after hearing Emerson speak, “then had I rather be a fool than a wise man.—I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go downstairs five miles or more. . . .”

But then, someone is sure to ask, what happens to scholarly objectivity? On this delicate question Emerson is absolutely firm. So far as objectivity implies an escape from the issues of our own culture, or the possibility of a complete and dispassionate description of any facet of reality, it is a sterile ideal. “No man,” he said in his essay on “Art,” “can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages and arts of his times shall have no share.” As soon as we move beyond the establishment of brute matters of fact, the desire for objectivity, like the desire for total originality, becomes a trap. In this Emerson anticipates our pragmatists. His knower is a man who establishes truth by surrounding an aspect of experience with a context—with ideas, and he forms the ideas in response to the choices offered by the age. Even if he wanted to he could not “wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew,” and in any event, Emerson shrewdly observes, the “very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids.”

To possess the past, in other words, the true scholar should attack it with questions arising from his sense of present realities—including political realities. Today there are some scholars, not many, who attempt historical explanations in this way. Among those working in American Studies, the most distinguished are Richard Chase, Richard Hofstadter, Perry Miller, David Potter, Henry Nash Smith, and G. Vann Woodward. In a recent article Professor Woodward reminds his fellow historians that the American past might look different if examined with an awareness of events in our time. He mentions, among other things, the revolution in military technology and the sudden disappearance of the free military security which this nation has taken for granted during most of its history (American Historical Review, October 1960). Emerson would have been sympathetic. In 1837 he invited American scholars to relate their thinking to the revolutionary spirit then rising in Europe. “If there is any period one would desire to be born in,” he said, “is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?”

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But then, of course, we feel quite differently about our own age of revolution. How much our political anxieties have to do with the curious inwardness of so many academic disciplines these days it is impossible to say. But in a number of fields one senses a turning away from the world, an effort to make each subject as self-contained as possible. The literary critic insists that we read the poem as a poem, by which he means an almost autonomous structure of sounds and words. Is the econometrician doing the same sort of thing when he builds a hypothetical model? Or the analytic philosopher when he takes apart a statement which, he assures us, has a purely philosophical import? Or the abstract expressionist when he displays a canvas that refers to nothing but itself? Perhaps the fate of the human image in 20th-century art—first its fragmentation, then its obliteration—is our most vivid expression of the pervasive impulse to eliminate norms. It is as if we all wanted our work to be untranslatable—to have as little relevance as possible to that totality of consciousness we call culture.

How far can we go in this direction without hazard? This is essentially what was worrying Emerson in “The American Scholar,” and the reason he began with the Platonic fable of One Man. According to the fable, as he tells it, a sense of the totality is the real fountain of a culture’s power. In our industrial society, however, there is a danger that the power will be “so minutely subdivided and peddled out” that it will spill into drops that cannot be gathered. This is not to repudiate specialization, which is necessary and in fact desirable so long as society also preserves a conception of One Man, man as a whole, that is to say, a sense of community. To possess himself, Emerson asserts, the individual must now and then “return from his own labor to embrace all other laborers.” Only the scholar, the true intellectual, can make this possible. It is his chief responsibility. If he fails, the culture dies.

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¹ Edited by Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 545 pp., $10.00.

² By Donald H. Mugridge and Blanche P. Mc-Crum (prepared under the direction of Roy P. Basler). General Reference and Bibliography Division, Reference Department, Library of Congress, 1193 pp., $17.00.

³ A Guide to Archives and Manuscripts in the United States. Edited by Philip M. Hamer. Yale University Press, 775 pp., $12.50.

⁴ In December, 1960, the Ford Foundation announced two grants to the American Council of Learned Societies: (1) a grant of $2,500,000 to strengthen teaching of American Studies in European universities; (2) a grant of $5,670,000 for research in the humanities.

⁵ The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume I, 1819—1822. Edited by William H. Gilman, George P. Clark, Alfred R. Ferguson, Merrell R. Davis. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 430 pp. (illustrated), $10.00.