What Ralph Waldo Emerson Knew About Money

The great American thinker was able to write his shimmering essays thanks to a healthy income from dividends and speaking fees

By James Marcus. He is the author of the new biography Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Excerpts:

"Emerson, who made very little money from his books until the end of his career, was forced to seek other sources of income as a public speaker. “I am no very good economist,” he once lamented, yet he was certainly adept at packaging and promoting Transcendentalism for what was then a mass audience."

"Emerson’s interest in money extended far beyond the management of his personal finances. For one thing, he read the great economists of the era. He was familiar with Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”—which, he assured a Boston audience, was a “book of wisdom” on par with Paradise Lost. Since Emerson conceived of the universe as a vast, self-correcting mechanism, the laissez-faire arguments expressed in Smith’s book made perfect sense to him. “The basis of political economy is non-interference,” he wrote in a lecture titled “Wealth.” “The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply.”"

"The industrialists of the Gilded Age . . . seized on his gospel of self-reliance, which had not only shaped the American character but merged quite comfortably with the social Darwinism of the era."

"Its [money]  role as a symbolic system, a way of transforming one thing into another, seemed almost magical to him. “Money,” he declared in a famous passage, “which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.” Emerson’s greatest acolyte, Henry David Thoreau, wrestled endlessly with the dilemma of how to live without money. Emerson was interested in how to live with it, which soured his friendship with Thoreau"

In the early 1860s, for example, his Boston publisher contacted Emerson about one of his articles that had previously appeared in The Atlantic magazine. There was now a plan to publish the same piece in a book, and so a check had been cut for the Sage of Concord—which he refused. “I don’t believe it honest for me,” he insisted, “to take money twice for the same piece of work.” He had an old-fashioned work ethic, believing that he had been paid for an honest day’s labor and the accounts were thereby balanced.The publisher pleaded with him to accept the payment. Emerson, softening, wondered whether he should stick to the high road after all. Weren’t his principles simply gumming up the sacred machinery of supply and demand? “We cannot live in obedience to the true poles of our being,” he allowed. “I vary from my highest self, and I have no disposition to play the evangelical peacock here.” To put it another way: he took the check."