Brook Farm and Association

Abstract

By 1840, after three long years of economic stagnation, the sharpening reformist critique of capitalism as a social system that had marked the 1830s reached a crescendo.¹ People of all kinds had come to understand the ongoing depression as a refutation of the system’s claim to legitimacy, for it clearly could not keep its promises of prosperity and stability. The Workingmen’s Party had been undercut and absorbed by the Democrats who limited themselves to antimonopoly legislation. The labor movement was in full retreat. And the now consolidated Whig Party shocked all observers by beating the Democrats at their own game. They channeled working-class desperation into the infamously cynical Log Cabin and Hard Cider Campaign. The campaign was the apotheosis of a trend Brownson had identified two years previously in the pages of the Boston Quarterly Review: “The Whig party, which, whether right or wrong, we have been in the habit of regarding as the legitimate heir of the old Federal Party, [has] challenged success on the ground of being more democratic than the democratic party itself.” The Whigs ran William Henry Harrison for president under specific orders not to speak about policy or political ideas. Instead, they staged mass rallies, barbecues, clambakes, and parades designed to do no more than proclaim the candidate’s populist roots and military heroism.

In order to live a religious and moral life worthy the name, they feel it is necessary to come out in some degree from the world. … They have bought a farm in order to make agriculture the basis of their life, it being the most direct and simple in relation to nature.

A true life, although it aims beyond the highest star, is redolent of the healthy earth. The perfume of clover lingers about it. The lowing of cattle is the natural bass to the melody of human voices.

—Elizabeth Palmer Peabody