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Jonathan Baxter Harrison (April 5, 1835 - June 17, 1907), Unitarian minister, journalist, environmentalist, and social critic. Born in a log cabin in Greene County, Ohio, he early showed a voracious appetite for reading, often studying beside the fire at night after a long day spent working in the fields. As a young man, he became a backwoods Methodist minister, and then worked for a Quaker-run abolitionist paper. Volunteering for service in the Union Army, he was soon given a medical discharge, became a Unitarian minister and active in Spiritualism, a religious movement that attracted many former abolitionists. Sometime in the 1860s he made the acquaintance of Charles Eliot Norton, arguably the most prominent cultural figure of the time, beginning a lifelong friendship. In Norton’s papers we see Harrison described as a figure much like Abraham Lincoln: an unaffected frontiersman, at once virtuous and wise (Turner 1999).

To be closer to Norton, Harrison moved east, obtaining a position as Unitarian minister 1870-1873 in Montclair, New Jersey , and then from 1879-1884 in Franklin, New Hampshire , where he lived until his death. He made the acquaintance of members of Norton’s circle, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect and social critic, and William Dean Howells, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. At the encouragement of Norton and his friends, Harrison began writing on some of the most important social issues of the day. These included the conditions in the South after the Civil War (11 articles in the Atlantic Monthly 1882-1883); working class culture and political life in New England (the 1880 book Certain Dangerous Tendencies in American Life); the condition of the American Indians (the 1887 book The Latest Studies on Indian Reservations); and the deforestation of the Northeast (a number of articles, at least one coauthored with Olmsted). During the 1882 campaign to preserve the natural environment around Niagara Falls, Harrison wrote a series of letters to newspapers in Boston and New York (collected in the 1882 pamphlet The Condition of Niagara Falls, and the Measures Needed to Preserve Them) that turned public opinion in favor of preservation .

Harrison was recognized by his friends as someone with a unique and perceptive view of American life (Sedgwick 1994). His work has an ethnographic feel, particularly his documentation of life in the post-bellum South, based on extensive travels and contact with ordinary people in the everyday business of life. One of his major concerns was to show the highly educated cultural elite how the rest of America lived, thought, and felt. Like Charles Eliot Norton, he was a conservative in the stamp of Matthew Arnold, worried that capitalism insidiously worked to degrade culture, and part of his intentions—particularly in documenting the life of the New England working class—was to make the cultured elite more aware and more concerned about the spiritual life of ordinary people. His work remains today as an important testimony of the conditions of life in the United States of the late nineteenth century.

References

Crimmins, Timothy J. 1979. "Frederick Law Olmsted and Jonathan Baxter Harrison: Two Generations of Social Critics in the American South," pages 137-151 in Dana F. White and Victor Kramer (eds.), Olmsted South: Old South Critic/New South Planner. Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Sedgwick, Ellery. 1994. The Atlantic Monthly 1857-1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Turner, James C. 1999. The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Selected Full Text Articles from the Atlantic Monthly

Certain Dangerous Tendencies in American Life. October, 1878 | 42(No. 252 ):385-403

The Nationals, their Origin and their Aims. November, 1878 | 42(253):521-530

Three Typical Workingmen. December, 1878 | 42(254):717-727

Workingmen's Wives. January, 1879 | 43(255):59-71

The Career of a Capitalist. February, 1879 | 43(256):129-135

Study of a New England Factory Town. June, 1879 | 43(260):689-705

Preaching. August, 1879 | 44(262):129-137

Sincere Demagogy. October, 1879 | 44(264):488-500

Studies in the South.: January, 1882 | 49(291):76-92; February, 1882 | 49(292):179-195; May, 1882 | 49(295):673-685; June, 1882 | 49(296):740-752; July, 1882 50(297):99- ; August, 1882 | 50(298):194-205; September, 1882 | 50(299):349-361; October, 1882 | 50(300):476-488; November, 1882 | 50(301):623-634; December, 1882 | 50(302):750-764; January, 1883 | 51(303):87-99