Exploring American Histories: Printed Page 345
George Ripley was a Unitarian minister and an avid reformer. In 1840 he wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the well-known transcendentalist, inviting him to join his planned utopian community, Brook Farm. Although Emerson rejected the invitation, Brook Farm began operations in 1841 in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. The Brook Farmers lived and dined communally and divided their time between farm work and artistic and scholarly pursuits. The community could not sustain itself financially, however, and a year after a devastating fire in 1846, the experiment ended. In the following excerpt, Ripley explains his ideas about the importance of combining physical and mental labor.
Our objects, as you know, are to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest mental freedom, by providing all with labor, adapted to their tastes and talents, and securing to them the fruits of their industry; to do away [with] the necessity of menial services, by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions.
To accomplish these objects, we propose to take a small tract of land, which, under skillful husbandry, uniting the garden and the farm, will be adequate to the subsistence of the families; and to connect with this a school or college, in which the most complete instruction shall be given, from the first rudiments to the highest culture. Our farm would be a place for improving the race of men that lived on it; thought would preside over the operations of labor, and labor would contribute to the expansion of thought; we should have industry without drudgery, and true equality without its vulgarity.
Source: Octavius Brooks Frothingham, George Ripley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882), 307–8.
Interpret the Evidence
How does Ripley describe the benefits of combining physical and mental labor at Brook Farm?
Why might George Ripley be interested in persuading Ralph Waldo Emerson to join the Brook Farm community?
Put It in Context
How does Ripley’s plan for his utopian community fit with the visions of social reformers more generally in this period?