The Transcendentalists and Their Influence on the Creation of Public Land in America
Many are aware of the influence Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir had on the creation of public land but few discuss the earlier roots and the influence the Transcendentalists had on the movement...
The Roosevelt Arch at the North Entrance of Yellowstone National Park, which reads “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People.” Author’s Photo, 2014.
Currently, there are about 640 million acres of public land in the United States – roughly one quarter of the country’s entire acreage. This land is available to all Americans for various forms of outdoor recreation, hiking, fishing, hunting, mountain biking, rock climbing, camping, and foraging to name a few. Often referred to as “America’s best idea,” public land systems have been emulated in numerous countries around the world. Although many are aware of the influence Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir had on the creation of the public land system, few discuss the earlier roots and the influence the Transcendentalists had on this uniquely American movement.
Shifting Perceptions of Wilderness
Although today the outdoors and wild places are often seen as redemptive or possessing an innate goodness and peace, early settler narratives and Puritan perceptions of the wilderness were often negative. Many colonists, especially in New England, found their survival at odds with the wilderness. To them, nature was a source of fear of the unknown, uncertainty, and in many cases, even associated with the devil, witchcraft, or the perceived “savagery” of Indigenous people. The hard New England winters and short growing seasons helped cement this view. In the 19th century, the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne often focused on this time period and these perceptions of wilderness, and can be found in such works as The Scarlet Letter and “Young Goodman Brown.”
By the 19th century, this perception had changed. Many trapping narratives, coupled with ideological shifts towards Manifest Destiny, or the belief that settlers were destined and even chosen by God to expand across North America, portrayed the wilderness and Indigenous people as something to be tamed, conquered, and subdued rather than feared. Indigenous people were forced from their ancestral lands by any means necessary, usually using extreme violence, legislated on both the state and federal level.
The Romantic movement brought about a change in perception of the wilderness from the aforementioned to something that could be redemptive or even restorative. The movement began in Europe and made it overseas to America, affecting many different spheres of discourse. For the Romantics, the natural world was one way to experience the “sublime,” or a “realm of experience beyond the measurable.” The Hudson River School of painters painted beautiful landscape paintings depicting the natural world in the 1820s. John James Audubon began his Birds of America during the same period. These thinkers, coupled with the rapid colonial and industrial expansion of the time period greatly influenced the Transcendentalists.
The Transcendentalists
The Transcendentalists, often regarded as the first uniquely American literary movement, believed that society and institutions had corrupted the spirit of the individual. To be uncorrupted, the individual must become more self-reliant, and spend more time observing the divinity of the natural world. Thomas Cole, who had spent significant time in Europe and was disturbed by the lack of wilderness there, wrote extensively about, "the wilderness passing away, and the necessity of saving and perpetuating its features." Thinkers and writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau were at the forefront of the ideology. Coupled with newfound concerns that due to rapid colonial expansion, the wilderness may vanish completely, by the mid-19th century, early ideas about preserving the wilderness, rather than conquering and taming it, began to emerge.
In Massachusetts, Thoreau had witnessed the destruction of the wilderness first-hand as logging in the area had increased drastically during his lifetime. By 1858, in an article for The Atlantic Monthly, Thoreau made a call for preserving the wilderness, and wrote, "why should not we... have our national preserves...in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be 'civilized off the face of the earth'—our forests...not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation?" By the next year, he began advocating that every township in Massachusetts, “should have a park or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres,” that belonged to the public. Soon after, small parks began to pop up throughout New England.
Forging a New Identity and Yellowstone
By the 1860s, these ideas had worked their way throughout intellectual circles, into the public eye, and eventually made it to the desk of legislators. In 1864, in the midst of the Civil War and four years before John Muir had even visited the area, President Lincoln preserved a 10 square mile chunk of Yosemite. By 1871, after several key expeditions noting the peculiar wonders of Yellowstone, the concept of large-scale preservation for what would become Yellowstone National Park had went from something talked about by poets and dreamers to the floor of Congress.
Unsurprisingly, Congress was apprehensive to preserve major tracts of wilderness at the time. After-all, this was well before the science understood the importance of preserving such places, and the idea was in direct opposition with the needs of industry for a rapidly growing American economy. What did interest Congress though, was differentiating America from Europe. At the time, early Americans were still molding their identity from their European ancestors and influence. The over-development of Europe, where majority of its timber had been clear cut many times or large parcels were still owned by some aspect of the nobility or the crown, was cited time and time again in arguments for the preservation of wilderness.
Also at the forefront of the argument for preserving Yellowstone was it uselessness to industry. Supporters of the bill argued that because of all the strange geothermal features in the area, the difficulties reaching the region to begin with, the high elevation, and the cold weather, essentially, the land was useless for investors anyway, so preserving it would, “do no harm to the material interest of the people.”
To quote Roderick Nash from his Wilderness and the American Mind, “the strategy was not to justify the park positively as wilderness, but to demonstrate its uselessness to civilization.” The strategy also had little to do with wilderness preservation and more to do with creating Yellowstone as a sort of museum to see the, “freaks and strange phenomena of Nature.” One member of Congress argued that a nation whose population was expected to exceed 150,000,000 needed Yellowstone "as a great breathing-place for the national lungs." There was no rejoinder, and the Senate passed an appropriation of $40,000 for the park.
Soon after, Yellowstone National Park was preserved on March 1st 1872 when Ulysses S. Grant signed The Act of Dedication, setting into motion what would become a global movement, some fourteen years after Thoreau’s article calling for such had been published.
To read more about America’s shifting perceptions of wilderness, check out Roderick Frazier Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind.