NEW YORK INTELLECT by Thomas Bender

Author:Thomas Bender [Bender, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83152-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

Brace had come to New York to study theology at Union Theological Seminary, with the intention of a career of writing and preaching. But compared to the life of the city—the “flood of humanity” that “sweeps along” Broadway—theology seemed tame and ineffectual.111 His disillusionment with cloistered intellect was advanced when he spent the winter of 1850–51 in Berlin. There he came to appreciate American practicality, finding the “literary class” of Berlin highly cultivated but preoccupied with “a sort of vapor with shadows on it” rather than with the “solidity and stuff” of life. He returned to New York having decided to undertake “some course of work for the unfortunate in our city.”112

Brace became associated with various philanthropic groups in the city, while continuing to pursue his studies and his literary work. As a student at Yale a few years before, he had worried that his “heart is wrong and my tastes are all set against sympathizing with the low and vulgar.” He had so little “practical knowledge” that he thought he would have no skill for associating with “men of the lower class.” Once in New York, however, he seems to have developed a genuine sympathy for poor people. He was particularly moved by an experience in 1849, when he preached one Sunday in the Almshouse Chapel on Blackwells Island to an audience of paupers, vagrants, and “diseased prostitutes.” It was, he wrote to his father, “one of the most exciting and interesting days I ever spent.” It moved him deeply; “never had my whole nature so stirred up within me.”113

Still, if Brace had pretty much decided to devote himself to helping the poor and unfortunate, it was not yet clear that practical philanthropy, rather than literature, would become his vehicle. In 1852, after the success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he dreamed of writing a “grand work” of literature that would “do for the mechanics” what Stowe had done for the slaves.114 Within a year, however, he and a group of philanthropic New Yorkers had organized the Children’s Aid Society. He anticipated that after a year or so he would move on to “some wider and more intellectual field,” but in fact he stayed with it for forty years, continuing always to write and using his literary connections, as did Olmsted in respect to the park, to advance the interest of the Children’s Aid Society.115 Indeed, working at the intersection of literary life and practical reform allowed or enabled Brace to become, in the words of Paul Boyer, “an incisive, original social thinker,” a genuinely “innovative force in urban moral reform.”116

What remains most vital in Brace’s thought and work is his articulation of an alternative to institutional care for deviant and dependent children, an idea that—because of him—was identified specifically with New York City in the nineteenth century.§ Here I want to explore his sense of the city as a place of rich and poor, a place where, in his view, a shared moral, if not learned, culture was possible.

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