The novelist Henry James said that Ralph Waldo Emerson—who was once the country’s beloved essayist-laureate, author of the iconic American effusion called “Self-Reliance” and the semiofficial philosopher of entrepreneurial individualism—suffered from a fatal flaw. Emerson’s disabling defect, James thought, was innocence: He had no “sense of the dark, the foul, the base.” The novelist said of the essayist: “A ripe unconsciousness of evil is . . . one of the most beautiful signs by which we know him.”
James and Emerson were giants of American literature long ago, but they belonged to different generations. Emerson (1803-82) wrote his important essays (those sun-shot prose miracles of the country’s morning energy) in the years before the Civil War, before that catastrophic crack in American history. James (1843-1916) composed his elaborately shadowed novels well after Appomattox. It was the Civil War that introduced the naive country to its fallen self. The conflict ushered in, among other things, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, the Gilded Age and the robber barons, mass immigration from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe. James and Emerson came of age in two different Americas. No wonder, then, that they had different ideas about the country’s capacity for good or evil.
Emerson graduated with Harvard’s class of 1821. James studied at the law school 40 years later, during the Civil War. I mention them because those sons of Harvard framed the issue that haunts the great university now. The controversy that divides Harvard in the 21st century is rooted in the question of American theodicy: How can the country’s evils be reconciled with its core Emersonian ideal of excellence, individualism, freedom of thought and speech, and other foundational notions that—not always honored but always implicitly there—are essential to the country’s future?