What Would Emerson Say?
    Richard G Geldard

    As an author of several books on the life and works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I find myself wondering, when American culture and politics shift and change dramatically, how the sage of Concord would respond. He was, after all, one of our founding thinkers, writing essays half the year on all matters public and private and during the other half traveling the country giving talks. His subjects were often the practical matters of getting on in life, how we are to cope with disaster, how to avoid financial ruin and how to find fitting work. 
    Generally, Emerson was conservative in matters of public policy, following his friend Henry Thoreau in saying that government is best that governs least. But he was also vehement on  guaranteeing basic human rights, urging the government to set firm policies on protecting native American tribes from forced removal from their lands and taking a firm stand on slavery, an issue he took up with President Lincoln as war loomed. Indeed, some of his most passionate writing after 1850 centered on slavery.
    Most often a rational writer not given to passionate utterance, he sometimes let loose the reins of his outrage and care for the human condition with language surprising for a retiring scholar and former Unitarian minister. One such outburst came in an essay entitled “Considerations On The Way,” from a series published in Conduct of Life in 1860. Here is the relevant passage:

    "If now in this connection of discourse, we should venture on laying down the first obvious rules of life, I will not here repeat the first rule of economy, already propounded once and again, that every man shall maintain himself, -- but I will say, get health. No labor, pains, temperance, poverty, nor exercise, that can gain it, must be grudged. For sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it can lay hold of, and absorbs its own sons and daughters. I figure it as a pale, wailing, distracted phantom, absolutely selfish, heedless of what is good and great, attentive to its sensations, losing its soul, and afflicting other souls with meanness and mopings, and with ministration to its voracity of trifles."

    Emerson would be as appalled as many of us are that America is the only developed country (there are 33 such countries) not to provide universal health care to its citizens. My believe is based on language like the passage above and on numerous entries in his private journals that focus on the destructive effects of ill health. 
    When he says “No labor, pains, temperance, poverty, nor exercise, that can gain it [health], must be grudged” he says to me that he would now support health care for all as a basic human right. Just as he believed that education was a basic right and must be free to all children through high school, so he would argue now, in this time, for guaranteed health care.
    No country in the world offered universal health care before 1912 when Norway was the first to provide a single payer system. But in the aftermath of flu epidemics and wars, most of 
Europe saw the wisdom and necessity of universal care. Now, as costs increase beyond most every person’s capacity to afford, it is a necessity for governments to step in and recognize that health is a right, not a privilege. Emerson, I believe, would agree. 
    You can read more of Emerson’s thought in a new book coming next month from Larson Publications entitled "Emerson and the Dream of America: Finding Our Way to a New And Exceptional Age."