George Ripley Biography

George Ripley (3 October 1802-4 July 1880), who first gained national prominence as a Transcendentalist and the founder of the Brook Farm community, had a secondary but significant journalistic career and his greatest fame during the last quarter century of his life. As the dean of literate journalism, known across the country for his book reviews, articles, and essays in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, Ripley became both the arbiter of taste for many educated Americans and an oracle of culture for a mass audience. Over the years between the 1850s and Ripley's death, millions of readers followed his ideas and opinions in the Tribune, in leading periodicals such as Putnam's Magazine and Harper's New Monthly Magazine, and in the most important reference work of the Civil War era, The New American Cyclopedia (16 vols., 1858-1863), coedited with Charles A. Dana.

The most significant work in Ripley's life, however, can be traced to the two decades between 1827 and 1847 when he served as a Unitarian minister, a Transcendentalist, a reformer, the founder of Brook Farm, and a Utopian socialist. A native of Greenfield, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School, Ripley served in his first career as Unitarian minister in Boston at the Purchase Street Church for fifteen years until his disillusionment and resignation in 1840. During the years in the pulpit he gained a considerable reputation among religious readers as a result of his theological pamphlets and his editing and writing for the Christian Register and the Christian Examiner . During the 1830s Ripley and his Boston Brahmin wife (born Sophia Dana) became increasingly involved in the exciting cultural life of Boston and Concord. A friend and an associate of Emerson, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, George Bancroft, Orestes A. Brownson, and other leading Massachusetts writers and intellectuals, Ripley played a role in the creation of Transcendentalism second only to that of Emerson and Thoreau. He served as a founder and a pillar of the Transcendental Club, an editor and contributor for the Dial, a major transmitter of contemporary European thought as the editor of the ambitious Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature (14 vols., 1830-1842) and the chief protagonist in the angry controversy with Andrews Norton of the Harvard Divinity School which marked the independence of the Transcendentalists from their Unitarian intellectual fathers.

By 1840, however, Ripley had broken with Emerson and Thoreau on the issue of ultra-individualism. The panic of 1837, the results of which could be seen in the misery of expanding slums around the Purchase Street Church, the arrogance of capitalist wealth, and the isolated irresponsibility of the intellectual, pulled him away from the Emersonian belief that "one man is stronger than a city" and toward the Brook Farm communal experiment (1841-1847) at West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Observers, who chose to see Ripley's enterprise as a high-minded but essentially escapist "room at the Astor House reserved for the Transcendentalists," stressed the diversions and the intellectual life of a community with residents and frequent visitors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Parker, Emerson, and Alcott. Nevertheless, Ripley began with "an authentic rage against poverty and injustice" and an interpretation of the communitarian ideal which proposed to alter American society through one shining example. The Brook Farmers wished to abolish both poverty and wealth, bridge the chasm between the social classes, end the alienating elements in modern factory work and commercial life, and unite the worker, the manager, and the thinker in every single person within the context of cooperative socialism rather than competitive capitalism. From the beginning the thought of the French Utopian socialist Charles Fourier influenced Ripley and his associates, and in 1843 the Brook Farm leaders reorganized the community as a Fourierist "Phalanx." As the communal president, the editor and a major contributor to the best radical journal in America, the Harbinger, an officer of the Fourierist "American Union of Associationists," and a New England labor leader, Ripley became one of the most influential radical reformers of the 1840s.

The economic collapse of Brook Farm in 1847 and the dramatic decline of the Fourierist movement in America left a drifting and impoverished man struggling in New York City for a new life and economic survival for himself and his wife. During the 1850s life under slum conditions, the violence of the street gangs, the need to produce large quantities of newspaper copy for pitifully small wages, the painful adjustments of a middle-aged man starting as a novice, and the growing disillusionment with radical and reform causes, all transformed Ripley. The radical and the ideologue perished, but the man survived and, in his own way, triumphed. Very slowly and painfully the starving hack became the successful, influential, and affluent leader of scholarly journalism in America. He died in New York City in 1880, a greatly respected man.

Looking back across Ripley's life, we can see him as a journalist with high intellectual standards and as an antebellum radical reformer of the first magnitude. If he does not belong to the rank of Emerson and Thoreau in literature, he did serve major and minor Transcendentalists extremely well as essayist, editor, translator, pamphleteer, organizer, intellectual gadfly, and useful companion.