The Story of America's Declaration of Cultural Independence

Newsweek

08-07-2025

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America's declaration of political independence is a story Americans are familiar with. But few know the story of America's declaration of cultural independence, which took the form of a speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson at Harvard College in 1837.
By then, America's political institutions were taking shape, but a lingering question remained for Emerson: Could this new nation formed on the basis of government by the people create a culture and art that reflected our political ideals? In short, could America create our own Cervantes? Or our own Shakespeare? Or our own Michelangelo?
The British cultural critic Sidney Smith had his doubts—as did most of the cultural elites of London, Paris and Vienna.
"Who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue?" Smith opined.
Smith had a point.
The grave of the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (right) in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.
The grave of the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (right) in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.
Photo by Detroit Publishing Company/"There were a few American writers—James Fenimore Cooper and some early frontier writing, along with Edgar Allan Poe and Washington Irving. But America wasn't exactly a beacon of culture or literary talent," Hillsdale College professor and author of Land of Hope Wildred M. McClay said to Our American Stories."
The most impactful part of Emerson's speech came near the end. It was his call for America's separation from England's ruling elites—and Europe's, too—on the cultural front.
"We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe," Emerson declared.
And then came his challenge to American creatives that reverberated throughout the country.
"We will walk on our own feet, we will work with our own hands, we will speak our own minds," Emerson insisted. "A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believe himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."
Emerson rightly saw the American revolution as a turning point in world history and had great admiration for the civilian army—filled with volunteer merchants, farmers and tradesmen—that fought and defeated the professional British Army. He longed for that same animating spirit in our cultural class: A bottom-up movement filled with creatives that represented our bottom-up governing ideal.
Emerson's speech shook things up, with one small town outside Boston jump-starting America's cultural revolution: Concord. It played an outsized part in our military history and was about to become the center of America's literary and cultural universe, too. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne were all born in or close to Concord. All were buried there, too.
What drew these writers together was a spiritual movement that placed the sanctity of nature—and the sense of the divine that nature inspires—at the center of the world: transcendentalism.
"It was accompanied by a growing movement across the art world—The Romantic Movement—devoted to the sanctity of the individual," McClay noted. "In a nation whose organizing document began with the words 'We the People,' it made complete sense that the individual should be held in such high esteem by America's artists and writers. And the public, too."
Transcendentalism also shared a common denominator with America's evangelical Christianity of the time.
"Neither were interested in how things were done in the past: the established social elites of the day were the problem," McClay explained. "Transcendentalism was birthed alongside the rising strain of anti-authoritarianism in a new nation seeking to find its own way. Its own voice."
From Emerson's speech would spring the work of Herman Melville, who was born in New York City but was profoundly influenced by what was happening in Concord. Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, and Melville sent a copy to Emerson, who responded with a letter of his own.
"I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed," Emerson wrote back to Melville, who'd never attended college.
Leaves of Grass was a big publishing sensation, and Whitman became the unofficial poet laureate of America's common man.
"There was Whitman himself, in the iconic photo that graced the books cover, dressed in common worker's clothing," McClay explained. "Writing in open, free unrhymed verse, his writing reflected the city and country he loved. And its democratic ideals."
No one better understood the significance of Whitman's work than British literary legend D.H. Lawrence—and the artistic talent about to be unleashed by this new Democracy.
"Whitman's essential message was the Open Road," Lawrence wrote. "The leaving of the soul free unto herself, the leaving of his fate to her and to the loom of the open road. Which is the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself. The true democracy where soul meets soul, in the open road."
McClay concluded: "That's what Concorde produced: A body of American literature—and a soon to be developed body of American culture—that reflected the nation's values and virtues. Created by the people and for the people. America had found her muse. Had found her voice."
What did Concord lead to? To distinctive American voices too many to name, like Mark Twain, Flannery O'Conner, Harper Lee, Earnest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Tennessee Williams and August Wilson.
Concord unleashed to the world America's musical contributions, which sprang from our universal appeal as a nation, and our multi-ethnic, multi-racial citizenry, and produced a mash-up of musical styles and influences that could only have been possible in America.
From Tin Pan Alley to Broadway musicals, from American blues to country, bluegrass and our own unique varieties of Gospel, too, and our homegrown rock and roll, itself a mashup of America's many unique musical genres. And from Concord we produced our own classical music, too, best epitomized by George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.
Concord led to our own brand of movies, forged not by old American wealth but by entrepreneurial immigrants from Eastern Europe, many of them Jews escaping pogroms throughout that part of the world: Louis B. Meyer (MGM), Adolph Zukor (Paramount), The Warner Brothers and more. And directors (movies being a director's medium) who were themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants: Frank Capra, who came to America from Italy with his Catholic parents at the age of 6. Billy Wilder (German and Jewish), John Ford (first-generation Irish Catholic), George Cukor (Hungarian and not religious) and more.
Concord led to our own brand of cartoons and animated content: EB White, Walt Disney, Dr. Suess, Mel Blanc and Pixar. And even our own brand of superheroes, which started with comic books that would become the biggest movie franchises in the world.
Concord also led to the birth of America's own brand of sports. Baseball, which sprang from our rural roots, was our version of cricket. American football was our own more militaristic and exciting version of European football: soccer. Basketball was created from scratch a mere 60 miles from Concord as an evangelizing tool by a young Christian gym teacher named James Naismith. We even created our own brand of motorsport, which sprang from the American South's moonshining past: NASCAR.
Would American art, culture and sport have come into its own without Emerson's speech? More than likely. But his Harvard speech kick-started a revolution in one small city, Concord, that helped launch a revolution in American culture. One that still reverberates today.
If reread by artists and creatives across our nation, Emerson's Harvard speech might just kick-start another revolution today, and a new declaration of independence from the two cities—New York and Los Angeles—that have for far too long dominated the creation, curation and distribution of content in our vast nation.
Those two cities—as big as they are—don't represent the breadth, depth and soul of America's people any more than the cities of London and Paris and Vienna did when Emerson wrote his clarion call to American creatives back in 1837. Or the aspirations and ideals of the people of our vast nation.