The Routledge Guidebook to Thoreau's Civil Disobedience

Bob Pepperman Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415818605
• eBook ISBN: 9781317576525
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Since its publication in 1849, Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience has influenced protestors, activists and political thinkers all over the world. Including the full text of Thoreau's essay, The Routledge Guidebook to Thoreau's Civil Disobedience explores the context of his writing, analyses different interpretations of the text and considers how posthumous edits to Civil Disobedience have altered its intended meaning. It introduces the reader to:

• the context of Thoreau's work and the background to his writing
• the significance of the references and allusions
• the contemporary reception of Thoreau's essay
• the ongoing relevance of the work and a discussion of different perspectives on the work.

Providing a detailed analysis which closely examines Thoreau's original work, this is an essential introduction for students of politics, philosophy and history, and all those seeking a full appreciation of this classic work.

1

INTRODUCTION

In the summer of 1846, Henry David Thoreau was arrested in Concord, Massachusetts, for not paying his poll tax, a tax levied on each eligible voter in the state. He spent one night sharing a cell with one other inmate, an arson suspect, in the local jail. During the evening of his arrest, some unnamed individual paid Thoreau’s tax. In the morning he was released and resumed his normal affairs.

By any measure, this was not at the time a significant political event. Indeed, it looked more than anything else like an eccentric interaction between Thoreau and the constable, Sam Staples. Thoreau had come to Concord village from his cabin on the shore of Walden Pond. He was on an errand to pick up a repaired shoe from the cobbler when Staples confronted him about the unpaid tax. It is likely that Staples, who was responsible for collecting the local taxes, was personally liable for the $1.50 (and perhaps three or four years’ worth of unpaid tax as well) regardless of whether or not he collected what Thoreau owed. It appears, nonetheless, that Staples offered, as an act of friendship and neighborliness, either to loan Thoreau the money or just pay the tax himself in the event that Thoreau was short on funds. Thoreau rejected the offer (none too gently, we may infer) and suggested that he was ignoring the tax on principle, not because he was unable to pay. The exchange escalated, Staples threatened jail, Thoreau challenged him to make good on the threat, and Thoreau was taken into custody. The two men were clearly annoyed with one another. When Staples returned home that evening and removed his boots, he was told that someone (probably one of Thoreau’s many aunts) had paid the tax for Thoreau. Staples refused to put his boots back on and go out again that evening; Thoreau would have to wait until morning to be released. Thoreau, for his part, refused to leave when Staples arrived the next day, but Staples turned him out before Thoreau could make a bigger deal out of the event than he already had. Thoreau stomped off angrily, and there is every reason to think that Staples was none too happy either. But aside from this relatively small, almost comic confrontation between these two neighbors, and the inevitable village gossip growing from it, this was not the kind of incident one would have recognized at the time as being of great historical importance. In this spirit, one commentator has referred to Thoreau’s arrest as “this absurd event.”¹

In time, however, the story of Thoreau’s arrest has indeed taken on great historical significance. This significance would grow slowly, however, and as a result of Thoreau’s own crafting of our understanding of the event. Over the years, his account has come to speak powerfully to men and women struggling against what they believe to be unjust laws or tyrannical political orders. Such men and women have lived in very different times and places from Thoreau’s mid-century Concord, Massachusetts, but the historical and geographical distance between Thoreau and his audience has only served to increase the resonance of his ideas and values for these readers.

In early 1848, a year and a half after his arrest, Thoreau gave two lectures at the Concord Lyceum in which he discussed the details of his arrest and explained what he took to be the moral context in which it occurred. On January 26 he titled his lecture The Relation of the Individual to the State, and on February 16 his working title was The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to the State.² One year after this, in January 1849, he published a version of these lectures in a literary journal under the title Resistance to Civil Government. Very few people appear to have paid much attention to Thoreau’s contribution in Aesthetic Papers; a single notice came from a reviewer in The People’s Review in London.³ The essay had no appreciable impact on the reading public or political thinkers during the remainder of Thoreau’s lifetime.

Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862 at age 44. Four years later a friend, Ellery Channing, and Thoreau’s sister, Sophia, published a volume of Thoreau’s essays, including a slightly revised version of Resistance, now appearing under the title Civil Disobedience. The essay continued to attract very little attention.

Early in the twentieth century, however, Civil Disobedience began to gain traction among radicals and political activists in the United States and abroad. American socialists Upton Sinclair and Norman Thomas and anarchist Emma Goldman were all arrested at different times for reading Civil Disobedience during public protests.⁴ Russian authors Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov read the essay and recommended it to their friends.⁵ Mohandas Gandhi first read Civil Disobedience when he was a young lawyer in South Africa, and he claimed to have taken a copy of it with him to jail every time he was arrested over the course of his lifetime.⁶ “There is no doubt,” he wrote, “that Thoreau’s ideas greatly influence my movement in India.”⁷ During World War II, members of the Danish resistance movement struggling against Nazism claimed to have been influenced by Thoreau. British reformers and members of the Labour Party read and promoted Thoreau’s writings, and he reportedly influenced French authors Marcel Proust and André Gide.⁸ At least one anti-apartheid activist in South Africa suggested that Thoreau’s influence was “extremely important” for that movement.⁹ Even allowing for exaggeration, it is clear that over the course of the twentieth century Thoreau’s ideas, and his arguments in Civil Disobedience in particular, have been noted and exploited by political reformers and activists in many nations around the world. Two scholars who have studied the reach of Thoreau’s ideas suggest, “It is not unlikely that Thoreau is more widely known, particularly abroad, as the author of Civil Disobedience than of Walden.”¹⁰

Thoreau’s political influence would not fully blossom in his own country until the second half of the twentieth century. American radicals in the first half of the century occasionally referred to Thoreau and Civil Disobedience (as we have seen with the examples of Sinclair, Thomas, and Goldman), but the text did not become central to U.S. protest politics until the civil rights, anti-war, and student movements of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Martin Luther King Jr. reported that Civil Disobedience had been central to his own development as a leader in the civil rights struggle against American segregation and racial injustice:

During my early college days I read Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience for the first time. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I re-read it several times. I became convinced then that non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau.¹¹

Historian Staughton Lynd, in a 1963 essay, presented Thoreau as an “admirable radical” to be emulated, suggesting “Henry Thoreau has become the patron saint of new radicals and of all unadjusted Americans.”¹² Playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, in their popular 1970 “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail,” unapologetically present Thoreau as a 1960s-style counterculture hero: “The man imprisoned in our play belongs more to the 1970s than to the age in which he lived.”¹³ Like many others, Lawrence and Lee portray Thoreau as a pacifist hero who “sang out in nonviolent defiance” as an inspiration to the likes of Gandhi, Tolstoy, and King.¹⁴ Michael Meyer, who has studied Thoreau’s influence in the United States, notes not only that Thoreau’s reputation skyrocketed during the 1960s,¹⁵ but that “Thoreau has something of a promiscuous reputation; like ladies of easy virtue, his politics have comforted whomever has bothered to pick them up.”¹⁶ In the words of Walter Harding, perhaps the dean of Thoreau studies until his death in 1996, “There is hardly an ism in our times that has not attempted to adopt Thoreau.”¹⁷ The impulse to turn to Thoreau to legitimate acts of political rebelliousness continues in the twenty-first century. American Congressman John Lewis has recently praised Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower who exposed the massive NSA collection of personal data of individuals in the U.S. and abroad (including foreign leaders), as a practitioner of Thoreauvian civil disobedience.¹⁸

A significant piece of evidence for Thoreau’s influence in American protest politics is the fact that representatives of the government have from time to time felt the need to attack Thoreau’s influence and ideas. The notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy successfully insisted, in the 1950s, that the U.S. government remove a particular anthology of American literature from all U.S. Information Service libraries around the world because it contained Civil Disobedience.¹⁹ Thoreau’s influence was becoming so great among the government’s critics in the 1960s that a high-level official felt the need to address him directly: Eugene Rostow, the Under-secretary for Political Affairs in the United States Department of State felt compelled to use a July 4th speech in the late 1960s to criticize Thoreau’s political ideas.²⁰ Some political authorities continue to think of Thoreau’s essay as a threat to political order, patriotism, and stability. A school district in Tucson, Arizona, for example, has recently banned Civil Disobedience (along with many other texts) from the curriculum of a Mexican American Studies program. The fear is that Thoreau’s essay could encourage unpatriotic views and attitudes among these high school students.²¹

As trivial as it appeared in 1846, Thoreau’s arrest is the incident around which Thoreau constructed a political essay that has grown to become one of the most significant and influential political documents in the American political tradition.

If we were unaware of Thoreau’s importance as a political icon for later generations, there would be little in his biography to alert us to the likelihood of this development. He never held political office or joined political organizations. He was little known as a writer or a political figure outside his local community during his lifetime. He lived most of his days quietly in his hometown, rarely traveling beyond his familiar New England. For one who would become a political hero to many in later generations, the facts of his life appear at first glance decidedly provincial and unheroic.

To his contemporaries, in fact, Thoreau was not a figure of great moment or note. Indeed, for many, Thoreau was little more than a local eccentric. In 1844, just two years before his famous arrest, Thoreau and a friend were responsible for starting a forest fire that burned approximately 300 acres of woodlot and caused over $2,000 in damages. Thoreau and Edward Hoar had made a fire in an old stump to cook some freshly caught fish. The fire quickly spread out of their control. Hoar was a member of a prominent local family, and this is probably why Thoreau was never charged with a crime in the case.²² However, he was known by many in his own generation, and by later generations of Concord residents as well, as “the man who burned the woods.”²³

There was more to Thoreau, of course, than this one unfortunate episode. He was born to a middle-class family, although his father had significant financial setbacks during his childhood so the family was not without economic stress and strain. An uncle had a pencil-making business and eventually, in part because of technological innovations introduced by Henry, the whole family became more prosperous as Thoreau’s father was taken into the business. Despite economic improvements over time, his mother frequently took boarders into the household, and the family was only affluent enough to send one of the two sons – Henry, since he was more gifted academically – to college at Harvard.

Two other facts about the Thoreau family are worth noting, especially given the emphasis on “manhood” and the critical attitude toward abolitionists we find in Civil Disob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Reading Civil Disobedience
• 3 Contexts
• 4 Interpretations
• 5 Civil Disobedience and political philosophy
• 6 Postscript
• Appendix: Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
• Bibliography
• Index