Thoreau: Voice of Environmentalists, Anti-War Radicals, Civil Rights Activists, and … Ronald Reagan?

Henry David Thoreau, an American Transcendentalist writer, philosopher, and activist, 1817 to 1862, lived his ideals of simplicity, self-reliance, and individualism. He lived for 2 years and 2 months on a cabin on the edge of Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He built the cabin himself on the estate of his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, using recycled materials. After leaving Walden Pond, he worked against slavery as an abolitionist and on the underground railroad. In the book, he describes his philosophy and his life, and asks two questions, which resonate today.

  1. How much is enough?
  2. How do I know what I want?

With these questions and with the existential facts of his life; his writings on civil disobedience, his work on the as an abolitionist and on underground railroad, and his writings on nature, Thoreau opened the doors for Walt Whitman, John Muir , Woody Guthrie , Jack Kerouac

, Rachel Carson, Gary Snyder, Abbie Hoffman, Anita Hoffman Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Phil Ochs, Bill McKibben and, thousands of other American writers, thinkers and community organizers. At the same time, with his focus on individualism and self-reliance, Thoreau lays a foundation for the American zeitgeist as exemplified by Teddy Roosevelt, as described by Ayn Rand, in John Wayne movies and in the Presidency and popular image of Ronald Reagan.

In the introduction to the 2004 edition, Bill McKibben compares Thoreau to Gandhi, St. Francis, Jesus and the Buddha,and describes him as “a crank” who criticized the status quo and changed the world. I would add Moses and Abraham.1 Abraham, it is commonly believed, broke the wood and stone statues his father sold and then explained “These gods fought over which was the strongest, and they destroyed each other.” Moses said “All, whether rich or poor, whether priest or worker, are equal in the eyes of the Law. All are entitled to one day of rest and contemplation each week.”

Thoreau would agree with Abraham that we worship false gods and with Moses that all are equal and should spend more time in contemplation. Thoreau tells us that we work too hard, that we are slaves to our stuff. “You could work all day to take a train and arrive tomorrow,” he says. “I will walk, and arrive today, enjoy the journey and see the world.”

Yet Thoreau also worked. He worked to build his cabin and furnish it with what he needed. Philosophically opposed to the voluntary servitude of the false yet de facto masters of security and desire, he worked to write a book in which he criticizes people for wasting time over useless labor. And he worked hard against the de jure masters of involuntary servitude of one human being to another. Thus he worked hard as an abolitionist to end slavery in the United States. He also spent a night in jail in protest over slavery.

His sense of humor comes thru in a discussion with a farmer, who “tells me that I can’t grow bones living on vegetables, yet he follows the ox who pulls his plow and who’s bones have grown on a diet of grass and water.” The transatlantic telegraph cable, Thoreau suggested, would be used for gossip about the British royals. “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

This sounds like Lenny Bruce arguing against racism by comparing Kate Smith and Lena Horne, and George Carlin defining a house as “a pile of stuff with a cover on it… a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”

Thoreau, like Lenny Bruce, and George Carlin is a quintessentially American. Henry Ford, who worked hard to build cars that anyone could afford, once observed that he could pay a college graduate to answer any question he needed to have answered. Thoreau doesn’t share this anti-intellectual materialism. He was the opposite; intellectual and anti-materialist. In the manner of Jerry Rubin who said “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Thoreau said:

  • “What old people say you cannot do young people try and find that you can.”
  • “Old people did not know enough once perchance to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going.”
  • “I have lived thirty some years on this planet and I have yet to hear the first syllable of value or even earnest guidance from my seniors.”
  • “One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vehicles.”
  • “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”
  • “Only those who go to soirees and legislative halls must have new coats to change as often as the man changes in them.”

This is relevant today – there is much in the established order that must change. As McKibben states, “The math is hard to argue with; business as usual and growth as usual spell an end to the world as usual.”

Our furniture is different, our toys are different today than they were in the first half of the 19th Century. The differences are dramatic. We have cell-phones that can be used all over the world to talk to anyone else with access to a phone. We have portable music entertainment widgets that can reproduce audio and video on two-inch screens and miniature ear-sized speakers. We have personal transportation devices that can travel 120 miles per hour – two miles per minute – 11,560 feet in one minute – 192.6 feet per second. We have race cars that can go much faster. Yet with these toys, we go nowhere fast. The race cars used in the Indy 500 and other races go 200 mph around and around in a 2.5 mile long rectangular oval.

What would he say to driving around a rectangular oval 200 times at speeds over 200 miles per hour, for close to two hours and 30 minutes, for a chance to to win some money and a bottle of milk? This, in a nutshell, is the Indianapolis 500.

The 1850 census measured the United States population at 23.2 million people, including about 4 million slaves. Today the population is about 300 million. The world population in 1850 was approximately 1.2 billion; today it is about 6.8 billion. The populations of America and the world have astonishing numbers since Thoreau published his book. However, our DNA hasn’t changed. And the quiet desperation in which most, whether rich or poor, live their lives, hasn’t changed for the better.

His book is part diary, part sermon, and part how-to manual. Thoreau has told us to figure out what we really need, and by the way, he says, we need a lot less “stuff” than we have been persuaded to believe. At the same time, Thoreau doesn’t understand that “dropping out” is a luxury that many can not afford. We don’t all have a rich friend and benefactor like Emerson who will allow us to build a shack on his lake. He doesn’t understand that for people like John Field – w
ho lack the benefits of a Harvard education – and people today who stand to lose all their possessions because of illness, or the inability to find work, taking two years to eke out a subsistence on a friend’s estate is not an option. I could easily give up my car, phone, and tv – especially the tv. However it would not be liberating for me to discard most of my clothing, abandon my house or to tell my children that they can not even think about an education, so I could quit my job and live in the woods. They would compare me more to Ted Kaczynski than to Henry David Thoreau.

This was true for Thoreau as well. He “went to the woods to live deliberately,” then returned to civilization.