After Walden: Thoreau's Changing Views on Economic

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES COLLEGE LIBRARY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from LYRASIS Members and Sloan Foundation http://www.archive.org/details/afterwaldenthoreOOstol After Walden " LEO STOLLER After Walden Thoreau's Changing Views on Economic Man "Is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life ? HENRY DAVID THOREAU STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS " STANFORD, CALIFORNIA Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1957 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America Original edition 1957 Reprinted 1966 Published with the assistance of the Ford Foundation TO Louis T. Friedman PREFACE This book, as its title indicates, is a study of one aspect of a complex man, and that for only one part of his life. It was begun in the doctoral seminar of Professor Ralph L. Rusk at Columbia Uni- versity, interrupted, resumed in New York on an Advanced Graduate Fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies, interrupted once again, and finished at Wayne State University, in Detroit. That it was completed at all is owing in large part to the aid, encourage- ment, and patience of the ACLS, of Professor Rusk, of Professor Lewis Leary, and of Professors Joseph Dorfman, Joseph Blau, Oscar James Campbell, Emery NefT, and Frank Davidson. What other debt I owe to my wife and children all will understand who have themselves experienced the itinerant years in the life of an English teacher. Parts of the first and fourth chapters appeared in the New England Quarterly. Leo Stoller Wayne State University Detroit, Michigan September 7957 CONTENTS 1 Dissociation of Opposites 3 2 Morning Surveyor and Afternoon Seeder 48 3 The Union of Principle and Expediency 71 4 A Country to Fight For 108 5 Action and Inaction 128 Wor\s Cited 157 After Walden 1 Dissociation of Opposites Henry Thoreau is the man who lived alone in a hut by Walden Pond and went to jail rather than pay taxes. Such, at any rate, is the thumbnail sketch of him by an America eager to tolerate what it considers primitivism and oddity. But Thoreau abandoned his hut and spent fifteen years, most of them intensely active, in sociable Concord. And instead of resigning from government all that time, he became an advocate of social legislation and supported the Union in its war with secession and slavery. Moving to the pond and going to jail had been thoughtful solutions to serious problems. When they turned out to be ineffectual, Thoreau went ahead to look for others. This search is the subject of our book. It was an earlier quest, which we shall only glance at, that yielded the decision to farm a small plot and to live alone on it in a house of his own building. Thoreau had come home from Harvard College in 1837, age twenty, to a situation whose analogue was to be experienced by graduates almost a century later. America was enter- ing a major depression. Each person had his unique problem to solve, his own paths to choose among. But to the men and women called reformers the predicaments of the individual and of the nation seemed inseparable. Working from different axioms, they suggested a whole prism of ways out, unpragmatic ways such as religious perfection and ideal communities and the abolition of money. They 4 Dissociation of Opposites published their theories chiefly in New York and Boston and preached them everywhere, including Concord, where they sought the ear and the pen of Waldo Emerson. It was among these thinkers that young Thoreau moved, looking for his own way out. "Men are constandy dinging in my ears their fair theories and plausible solutions of the universe," he wrote in his journal in 1838, "but ever there is no help, and I return again to my shoreless, islandless ocean, and fathom un- ceasingly for a bottom that will hold an anchor, that it may not drag" (VII, 54) } The product of Thoreau's intellectual sounding was an outlook not unlike that of the other reformers. Its ideal was self-culture : life aimed at full realization of every man's and woman's innate capacities. Its embodiment was to be in one man standing opposed to the industrial order. But when Thoreau came to test this theory at Walden Pond, he found its major elements incompatible with two areas of actuality: the America to which they were being applied, and the aspect of his personality which spontaneously responded to this America. It was this incompatibility that returned him to Concord, to a maturity radically different from the youth of which the life by the pond had been the climax. I The immediate antecedent of Thoreau's ideal appears to have been the self-culture preached by the Unitarians and especially by William Ellery Channing. Channing transmitted to a later and a different age the faith in human perfectibility which he had learned of the Enlight- enment. "Let us not disparage that nature which is common to all men," he declared, "for no thought can measure its grandeur. It is the image of God, the image even of his infinity ... no limits can be set to its unfolding." He subsumed the whole virtue of individual life under the ideal of an integral perfection, in striving toward which "all the principles of our nature grow at once by joint, harmonious 2 action, just as all parts of the plant are unfolded together." The devotion of young Henry Thoreau to this ideal of self-culture 1 All references in this form are to The Writings of Henry David Tho- reau (20 vols., Boston and New York, 1906). 2 The Worlds of William E. Channing, D.D. (Boston, 1875), pp. 13, 15. Dissociation of Opposites 5 is amply attested by his writings. Elements of the doctrine are to be found scattered through the fragmentary journals of the late thirties and early forties, and a complete statement, as we shall see later, is in his early essay "The Service." But in adopting Channing's ideal, Thoreau grafted it onto an economic stock of anti-industrialism and onto a theory of social action suited to his own temperament. Thoreau's opposition to industrial society was already well estab- lished in 1839, when he and his older brother took the trip on the rivers whose incidents make the framework of his first book. Rowing down the sluggish Concord, they came before long to its juncture with the energetic, cascading Merrimack. Look up this "sparkling stream to its source," wrote Thoreau, "and behold a city on each suc- cessive plateau, a busy colony of human beaver around every fall. Not to mention Newburyport and Haverhill, see Lawrence, and Lowell, and Nashua, and Manchester, and Concord, gleaming one above the other" (I, 89). Here the early industrialists had raised their gray stone mills on the edges of the river. Proud of their life work, these pro- vincial giants boasted of it even in architecture, proclaiming in rigid, honest, and unadorned lines the straightforwardness of their search for profit. Thoreau and his brother rowed past these impassive but eloquent structures as quickly as possible, anxious to escape their con- tamination and reach the purity of the untouched forests in the north. They did indeed stop long enough to investigate meadow-bordered Salmon Brook and "learn its piscatorial history from a haymaker on its banks" (1, 167), but a mile and a half further upstream the mouth of the Nashua was "obstructed by falls and factories" and did not tempt them to explore it (1, 169). At Manchester too they made haste "to get past the village here collected, and out of hearing of the hammer which was laying the foundation of another Lowell on the banks" (I, 260). It seemed to Thoreau that the factory system, erecting a new world before his eyes, operated against the interests of both nature and man. In rhetoric which captures, if it also exaggerates, the violence that was one element in his temperament, he championed the shad whose pas- sage upstream was blocked by factory dams, exclaiming, "I for one am with thee, and who knows what may avail a crowbar against that Billerica dam?" (I, 36) More calmly he declared later: "I cannot 6 Dissociation of Opposites believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get their clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that man- kind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched" (II, 29). The persistence of this rejection of industrialism ultimately led Thoreau to seek a way of practicing self-culture outside the accepted social order. But during the years when he was turning such an alternative over in his mind, he tested the method suggested by Chan- ning and his adherents for men whose jobs could not add to their de- velopment. It premised that self-culture, being an individual matter, was possible despite the social system of machines and profit, and its key was the disciplined exploitation of spare time. Thus Frederic Henry Hedge, proclaiming that "the work of life" is "the perfect unfolding of our individual nature," went on to say that since the busi- ness of society "is not the highest culture, but the greatest comfort," the best which the aspirant might get from it was to be let alone after work. He must "expect nothing from Society, but may deem himself happy, if for the day-labor, which necessity imposes, Society will give him his hire, and beyond that leave him free to follow his proper calling, which he must either pursue," Hedge ironically concluded, "with exclusive devotion, or wholly abandon." 3 Testing this advice, Thoreau became increasingly convinced of an incompatibility between self-culture and a profit-centered civilization.

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