ABSTRACT
In contrast to Boston, Philadelphia produced, in Alexis de Tocqueville's terms, a Privileged caste that has never given tone to the ideas of either the state of Pennsylvania or the nation. The history of ideas in America was greatly influenced from the days of the Mathers down to the death of Henry Ward Beecher in 1887 by the authority of the oral culture of the pulpit. The influence on the life of the mind in America of such giants as the Mathers, the Adamses, the Lowells, the Holmeses, and the James brothers, to say nothing of Emerson and Hawthorne, is well documented in history. Transcendentalism, the Dial, and Henry David Thoreau's two years at Walden Pond marked a turning point in the American mind in the direction of an anti-institutional individualism that emphasized individual rights almost to the exclusion of communal duties.
