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The common name given to a group of amateur philosophers
founded and led by William Torrey Harris (1835-1909) and Henry
Conrad Brokmeyer (1828-1906). Harris, a New Englander born in
Connecticut and educated at Yale, first became acquainted with
idealism through the Transcendentalists, mainly from his
attendance in 1857 at the Orphic Seer's Conversations of Amos
Bronson Alcott (1799-1888). The experience inspired Harris to
leave Yale before obtaining a degree, and set off west to St.
Louis to seek his vocation. Initially he took a position
teaching shorthand in the St. Louis Public Schools, but he
quickly advanced through the system, eventually becoming
Superintendent of Schools, a position he held from 1867 to 1880.
Brokmeyer was a Prussian immigrant who arrived in New York as a
young man of sixteen. Bold and restless in temperament, he made
his way westward, acquiring a small fortune by running a shoe
factory in Mississippi. Desiring to further his education, he
abandoned his business pursuits to enter Georgetown University in
Kentucky, but his quarrelsome character led to his departure for
Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, only to leave that
institution as well after a heated debate with President Wayland.
The venture to New England, however, did give him an exposure to
Transcendentalism, which inspired him, like Harris, once again to
head west--first to the back country of Warren County Missouri,
where he expended his energy in a close study of German thought,
particularly Hegel, and then, in 1856, to St. Louis.
It was there that Harris and Brokmeyer met in 1858 at the St.
Louis Mercantile Library, where Harris was offering a public
lecture. Brokmeyer convinced Harris of the significance of
Hegel's system, and its relevance to the historical trends of
American society. They immediately joined forces, attracting a
number of other youthful followers with intellectual ambitions,
many of whom were, like Harris, teachers in the public schools.
The nascent Hegelian movement was temporarily stalled when
Brokmeyer went off to serve as a Colonel in the Union Army during
the Civil War, but it rebounded in full force upon his return
with the formation of the St. Louis Philosophical Society in
1866, and the launching of the Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, the official organ of the Society, in 1867.
Brokmeyer was the acknowledged intellectual leader of the
movement. He published little, but his charismatic personality,
quixotic meliorism, and extraordinary skills in argument and
debate, consistently employed in the application of Hegelian
dialectical logic, established his status as the framer of the
ideals and aims of the movement. The manuscript of his
translation of Hegel's Logic, although never published,
became the theoretical text of the group, copied and distributed
not only in St. Louis, but to sympathetic thinkers in other parts
of the United States. Harris was, more than any other, the
movement's public voice and organizing genius. He edited the
Journal, contributing many of its articles himself. He
also orchestrated a number of attempts to bring about a
rapprochement between the western and New England idealists,
first by inviting Alcott, Harris's former mentor, and Ralph Waldo
Emerson to St. Louis, later by his participation in the formation
of the Concord School of Philosophy, a summer school headed by
Alcott that merged the two groups within its faculty. (Harris
taught for all nine of the sessions of the Concord School's
existence, from 1879 to 1887, and his disquisitions on Hegel
became the most popular of the faculty's offerings.) But
although these efforts furthered the influence of the St.
Louisians, they were not, because of philosophical differences,
wholly successful.
Even though Harris and Brokmeyer were first inspired to
philosophical pursuits by the Transcendentalists, the thought of
the St. Louis group was distinguished from the latter by its
greater concentration on philosophical understanding guided by
Hegelian method, without the literary and theological concerns of
the New England movement, and a greater stress on social
responsibility and reform. The emerging views of the various
members of the group varied somewhat in details, but they shared
a common conviction in the relevance of a Hegelian social
philosophy, inspired mainly by Hegel's The Philosophy of
Right and The Philosophy of History, to the problems
and challenges facing the American society of their day, and the
importance of education as a means of effecting necessary social
change. Brokmeyer insisted on the necessity that thought issue
in practical action directed to the social good, and the St.
Louisians took this imperative to heart. The emphasis on
education is evident in the pages of their journal, which were
largely dedicated to the dissemination of European idealism,
either through translations of Hegel and other German writers or
summations of their work. They also shared a common enthusiasm
for the prospects of their home city, divining by a clever but
highly questionable use of the Hegelian dialectic what they
believed to be historical forces that would propel St. Louis into
an era of cultural supremacy in American society.
Gradually the group dissolved during the 1870s and 1880s as
the core members of the group struck out on their own to pursue
separate interests and aims. Characteristically, education and
moral advancement were the themes of many of these individual
pursuits. Denton Snider (1841-1925), a central figure within the
movement who eventually became its historian, set upon a course
of freelance teaching and lecturing as well as pursuing literary
ambitions. In addition to offering lectures throughout the
eastern and midwestern United States, including the Concord
School, he founded or played a leading role in the operation of a
number of visionary educational projects, such as the Communal
University in Chicago and later St. Louis, the Chicago
Kindergarten College, and the Goethe School in Milwaukee. Thomas
Davidson (1840-1900), another key player in the original St.
Louis movement, established the Breadwinner's College in New York
City, a school devoted to the education of the working class, and
later established a summer school at his home in Glenmore, New
York.
The theme is echoed in the careers of the St. Louis
movement's founders, Harris and Brokmeyer, during and after the
dissipation of the movement itself. During his years as
Superintendent of Schools in St. Louis, Harris was a strong
proponent for the advancement of public education in Missouri.
After his involvement at the Concord School he was appointed the
United States Commissioner of Education in 1889. Brokmeyer
entered the political arena in Missouri, and played a key role in
the state's Constitutional Convention of 1875, which established
a legal guarantee of education for all between the ages of six
and twenty. Brokmeyer eventually served a term as Lieutenant
Governor of the state, and acting Governor during 1876 and 1877,
but when his political prospects turned against him, he returned
to the wilderness life in numerous sojourns to the west. For a
time he lived with the Creek Indians in Oklahoma. In 1896 he
settled back in St. Louis, returning to a quiet life of
scholarship and reflection until his death in 1906.
Despite the fact that the members of the group produced an
extraordinary output of published writing, both in their journal
and independently, the movement's ideas had little lasting
influence on American philosophy, due in large part to the
orthodoxy of their Hegelianism, which was soon overshadowed by
the emerging naturalism of American thought during the first
decades of the twentieth century. The one exception was George
H. Howison (1834-1916), who came under the influence of the group
while teaching mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis.
Howison later settled in Berkeley, California, and developed a
pluralistic form of idealism that survived as the twentieth
century school of thought known as Personalism. The most
significant contribution of the group to American thought was
their journal, which offered a much needed vehicle for the
publication of the early work of some of the most prominent
figures of the next generation of American philosophy, such as
John Dewey, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Josiah
Royce. In fact, Harris's encouragement when a young John Dewey
timidly submitted his first philosophical essay for publication
was crucial in the budding philosopher's decision to continue his
studies. Although the ideas of the movement had little enduring
influence, the St. Louis Hegelians represent an important chapter
in the history of American philosophical thought and the
developing relationship between intellectual and popular culture
in the nineteenth century.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphy, "The Absolute Immigrates
to America: The St. Louis Hegelians" in A History of
Philosophy in America, vol. 2 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons,
1977), pp. 463-514.
William H. Goetzmann, ed., The American Hegelians: An
Intellectual Episode in the History of Western America (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973).
Frances A. Harmon, The Social Philosophy of the St. Louis
Hegelians (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943).
Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America, Philosophical
and Literary Influences, 1600-1900 (Madison, WS: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1961).
Denton J. Snider, The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy,
Literature, Education, Psychology, with Chapters of
Autobiography (St. Louis: Sigma Publishing, 1920).
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