On Walden Pond-With The Bicentennial (2017) Of The Birth Of Henry David Thoreau In Mind

By Fritz Taylor  

Henry David Thoreau would have flipped out or went wiggy or whatever word they used back in pre-Civil War (ante bellum okay) times in the Transcendental world around Brattle Street in Cambridge and the wilds of Concord to express bafflement at something weird. Now when you put Concord and Henry David Thoreau together what naturally comes to mind is his little year of living dangerously out on secluded, solitude-fraught Walden Pond far from the demons of civilization.

Here’s why he our boy H.D. would have flipped out. Once the moderator of this site, this American Left History blog, Peter Paul Markin asked me to make some comments on the bicentennial of Thoreau’s birth I decided since I only lived about twenty miles from Walden Pond to go visit the place in order to maybe soak up a little of what H.D. got out of that experience in solitude. Unfortunately I had to go on a weekend, on a hot get out of the city to the cool waters of anywhere weekend. Forget it, forget I ever even thought of going to that hallowed ground under such circumstances. The crowds, the cars hunkering down to get into the limited spaces available to park were so overwhelmingly huge that I never got to the pond that day. What I did get for my efforts was about two hours of waiting in Route 2 traffic trying to get away from the freaking place that I could never get into. So you can see what quiet as a mouse, be at one with nature, commune with the gods Thoreau would have freaked out, gone wiggy, whatever if he had had to tangle with that craziness. The boats, the rubber tubes, the shovels and pails, the twenty-seven varieties of picnic lunches made from processed materials would have driven him to McLean’s Hospital, the hot spot for those who could not face the real world after having been through some mill. If that oasis had been open during his time which I will check on. (Okay yes it was founded in 1811 so he could have deposited himself there.)            

      

Of course a guy like Thoreau, an old Brahmin, old Puritan stock guy was more than just a nature lover, a scientist, an artist a writer, a diarist and that is really what I want to talk about today, about that whole business of civil disobedience, of active political opposition to the wrongs of the day with which we also associate his name. And maybe just maybe make a point that might be germane today even for those who are clueless about what H.D. was trying to do back in the day, back in Jimmy Polk’s “little war” days with the brethren down in sunny Mexico when that benighted country was infinitely larger than it is today before the greedy United States made many Mexicans strangers in their own lands.     

As usual with acts of civil disobedience it is not the theory or philosophy behind your action that gets the play but that you have violated some law, have made yourself criminal before sober society whatever your motivation. And it is not always some great conscious deed (or misdeed) that creates your action. Thoreau had not paid his poll tax in a number of years (a tax which you had to pay in order to vote in whatever elections were upcoming. A tax which among other sources of revenue was used to keep up local government and was then used to keep the riffraff from being able to vote, even poor white males since women and blacks could not vote at the time in any case. The poll tax would be one of the devises that Mister James Crow’s hirelings would use down in the Southern United States after the Civil War and Reconstruction ran their courses in order to keep blacks from voting so it has a very long and discriminatory history).

Here is where chance comes into play. He ran into the poll tax collector who ordered him to pay up. H.D. refused citing the then current war with Mexico which he opposed (along with others like the young Abraham Lincoln) as just another grab by the politically dominant Southerners for more land to expand their land-hungry slavery system on. The war and his opposition to slavery landed him in jail for non-payment. He spent a night in the local jail before some sympathizer sprung him.    

Neither the actual law broken nor the criminal penalty which in H.D.’s case was minimal is what made his action the subject of future interest to people like me when I got “religion” on the questions of war and peace in my time after my military duty in Vietnam led me away from dumb-founded support for that damn war. The point was, is to take his example and that of plenty of others since most famously in my generation actions like the priest brothers, the Berrigans, Dan and Phil, and their co-thinkers in the anti-draft resistance movement of the 1960s and commit acts of resistance against injustice and unjust governments. No question it is a tough and agonizing dollar to contemplate such actions but may I be so bold as to argue that these benighted times we live in, these “cold civil war” times, have put Henry David Thoreau’s ideas on the front burner. Thanks H.D.         

(By the way on that writer aspect of his life mentioned above  the New York Review of Books through its publication house has just put out a one volume selection of his journals in honor of the bicentennial. Amazingly the whole work product was two million words so reducing to one volume at maybe 200,000 words was a real achievement. H.D. was a mad monk for words no question just like two million word Jack Kerouac was in the 20^th century.)