MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
The Wikipedia page on Henry David Thoreau makes the standard grandiloquent assertion that “Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.” It would be pointless to attempt to modify the page to point up the fact that although this is a standard assertion, it is a standard piece of puffery that happens to be entirely unsupported by anything except piety, because any such information would instantly be deleted, with extreme outrage. Nevertheless, the primary American influence upon Tolstòy –according to Tolstòy himself– was the Reverend Adin Ballou who lived in the Hopedale intentional Christian community outside Worcester during Thoreau’s lifetime and had once debated Thoreau about war. And, the primary influence upon Gandhi –according to Gandhi himself– was a Jain ascetic, Shrimad Rajchandra, who died during Gandhi’s early sojourn in South Africa. And, the primary influence upon the Reverend King was Friend Bayard Rustin, a black queer pacifist Quaker civil-rights activist. While it is accurate that all three of these now- adored leaders have attempted to explain themselves to American audiences familiar with Thoreau by affiliating themselves with Thoreau, “explaining yourself” by means of something familiar to the people with whom you are communicating, by the tactic of referring to some point-of-reference A with which they are familiar, is not the same animule as being “influenced by” that given point-of-reference A. In the case of Tolstòy, had he attempted to explain himself by reference to the Reverend Adin Ballou he would have encountered only blank stares or hostility — Americans know nothing whatever about the Reverend Ballou and, when they do learn something about him, in general they disdain people of his sort. Although Tolstoy’s beliefs were in some respects similar to those of Thoreau, we have been unable to specify any particular belief of Thoreau which induced Tolstòy, when he learned of it, to then adopt a similar belief. In the case of Gandhiji, had he attempted to explain himself by reference to this Jain ascetic, this would have decidedly hurt him politically, for he was an Indian politician whose primary field of influence lay among persons of the Hindu faith, people who would have been put off by this primary affiliation with HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Jainism. Again, although Gandhiji’s beliefs were in some respects similar to those of Thoreau, we are unable to specify any particular belief shared by Thoreau and Gandhi which Gandhi had not already held before he became familiar with the writings of Thoreau (also, he said to us point blank that it wasn’t so). In the case of the Reverend King, had he attempted to explain himself by reference to a black queer Quaker pacifist, this would have hurt him both in the black American community (which typically is disdainful of black queers as people whose very existence is harmful to their race cause), and in the white American community (which typically condescends to pacifists as people who don’t understand how the world works, or are so cowardly that they cannot bring themselves to play a proper manly role). In each of these three cases –Tolstòy, Gandhi, King– making reference to Thoreau had been useful, had been helpful — but had not really amounted to anything that one might usefully term “influence.”
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Projec HDT WHAT? INDEX
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551 BCE
Confucius was born in about this year into a family with pretensions to the nobility, in Ch’ü-fu in the small feudal state of Lu in what is now the Shandong province of China, during the 22d year of the reign of Duke Hsiang. Although an allegation that he was born on the 27th day of the 8th lunar month is regarded by historians as unsubstantiated, for our purposes one day will of course do quite as well as another and so he is widely honored in East Asia each September 28th. His tomb there in Ch’ü-fu has now been desecrated by the Red Guard. He would not have recognized this name “Confucius,” as it is merely our archaic pseudo-Latinate transliteration of the respectful form of address K’ung-fu-tzu, Master K’ung, his family’s name having been K’ung and his personal name Ch’iu. Throughout Chinese history he has been referred to affectionately as K’ung-tzu, Old K’ung, in precisely the same manner in which Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is being referred to affectionately throughout India as Gandhiji.1
1. There are not and there never have been and there never will be any Confucians in China. The 18th-Century terms “Confucian” and “Confucianism,” which have been coined on the basis of the Latinized name-form “Confucius,” have been entirely descriptive terms coined by outsiders, and nothing similar to this coinage has ever been used in the Chinese language, which relies upon the term Ruxue meaning very precisely “the teachings of the literati.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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273 BCE
From this year until 232 BCE, the reign of Asoka the Great over a major area of the Indian subcontinent. This was the emperor who erected the inspirational 40-foot columns inscribed with “Laws of Right Conduct and Nonviolence,” later to be remarked upon by Henry Thoreau, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1685
October 18, Sunday (Old Style): John Evelyn’s diary entry for this day was in part as follows:
Dr. Good-man [at Whitehall:] preached on 2:Cor:4:18: The King was now building all that range from East to west by the Court & Garden to the streete, & making a new Chapel for the Queene, whose Lodgings this new building was: as also a new Council Chamber & offices next the South end of the Banqueting-house: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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King Louis XIV of France commenced a merciless persecution of his Protestant subjects., by declaring the April 13, 1598 Edict of Nantes which had been issued by King Henry IV to be null and void and by removing all religious and civil liberties of any French citizens who were Huguenots. The eighth and largest mass out-migration of Huguenots began:2
WALDENSES In this year Pierre Thoreau, who at the time was approximately ten years of age, his two sisters Francoise and Marie, and their mother, fled from the Poitou-Charentes district of France, initially to Richmond near London and then to St. Hélier on the island of Jersey in the English Channel. Presumably this religio-political situation was what occasioned the flight, at penalty of being sent to row in the galleys had they been intercepted. (We can imagine the image above, which is of Huguenots arriving in this year on the shingle beach under the white cliffs at Dover, as an approximation of the group including the combined Thoreau and Guillet families disembarking in the harbor on the island of Jersey!) Presumably the Thoreau family fled from France to Jersey in the Channel Islands in about 1685, at roughly the same time that the Jacques Louis Guillet family fled to
2. This movement of refugees is said to have been the “largest forced migration of Europeans in the early modern period.” Refer to Jon Butler’s THE HUGUENOT IN AMERICA: A REFUGEE PEOPLE IN NEW WORLD SOCIETY. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1983. The English word “refugee” would come about due to reluctance to employ the term “diaspora” which seemed to be reserved for 1 the scattering of the Jews per JOHN 7:35. The Huguenots amounted to some /4th million out of France’s 20 million citizens, and during the years 1682-1690 were concentrated in the West and in the South. After some 50,000 had fled to England, they made up 5% of London town at a time when the London population was 10% of England. Genetically, the statistical probability that the next English person you meet in England will have at least some Huguenot ancestry is 75%. Refer to Bernard Cottret’s THE HUGUENOT IN ENGLAND and to Peter Steven Gannon’s volume on REFUGEES IN THE SETTLING OF COLONIAL AMERICA. In 1985 French President Mitterrand would issue an official apology, on behalf of the French government and the French people, for Louis XIV’s diktat revoking the Edict of Nantes, and a commemorative postage stamp would be issued characterizing this our modern era as under the suasion of “Tolerance, Pluralism, Brotherhood.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Jersey, because the two families were intermarried.
It would be Pierre’s grandson Philippe Thoreau who would become the ancestor of Henry David, but it would be his great-granddaughter Marie who would marry Charles William Guillet in 1796 and it would be their son John Guillet who would emigrate in 1832 to Cobourg on Lake Ontario east of Toronto, eventually producing Edwin Clarence Guillet, the Canadian historian. Since the American branch of the Thoreau family would come to an end with the unmarried generation of Helen Louisa Thoreau, John Thoreau, Jr., Henry David Thoreau, and Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau, this Edwin Clarence Guillet, who died in 1974, would be one of Henry David’s few modern American relatives (though Henry had a closer relative in England until 1949, a son of Sophia Thoreau Du Parcq who had risen to the status of Law Lord and been entitled, who was named at birth Herbert Du Parcq).
HENRY’S RELATIVES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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As you can see in the following footnote from page 230 of his THE PIONEER FARMER AND BACKWOODSMAN, Edwin was quite proud of Henry — although reluctant to brag about being a relative:
The period of the settlement of Upper Canada was too late for the inclusion of religious refugees among its settlers. But a large number of descendants of French Huguenots, driven from France in the sixteen-eighties, came to the United States and Canada, where they have tended to retain an independent and non-conformist attitude. The greatest of them all, of course, is Henry David Thoreau, whose philosophy and example have been so influential in shaping the career of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, British labour leaders, and broader loyalties of every type throughout the world.
In addition to the above revocation of religious liberty at home, Louis also proclaimed a Code Noir for his colonies in the Caribbean. First, all Jews get out, you are to be gone within three months. Second, Huguenots may not observe their religion in any way. There was to be no intermarriage of non-Catholics with Catholics. Products of such unions were declared bastards. Slaves of Huguenots were to be baptized as Catholics. When the news of this reached the Caribbean, many Huguenot families fled from French islands to English and Dutch islands.
Now I need to lay on you an analogy which you may consider, at first glimpse, to be severe. “Even with due allowance for exaggeration in contemporary accounts, one gets the impression of stark terrorism just as grim as the anti-Semitic nightmare in Nazi Germany.” Yet the opinion I just gave you is that of a reputable historian, Warren C. Scoville.3 As an example, the king of France had declared that if any “New Convert” from Protestantism to Catholicism should recant his conversion on his death bed, all his property was to be seized by the authorities, and they were to have his “naked body dragged through the streets and tossed on a public dump.” Of every six men captured in Huguenot worship meetings, one was to be executed and five condemned to serve as galley slaves, and in fact we know of at least 1,132 men who became galley slaves in this manner prior to the death of Louis XIV. Serving out one’s sentence as a galley slave was no guarantee of release, and in fact a number of Huguenots were kept at their seats on the rowing benches, in their chains, for the duration of their lives, in spite of the fact that they had long since completed their sentences.4
It was in the Languedoc-Dauphine area of southern France, so impacted by the Catholic extermination of the Cathar heresy, that Huguenots were most concentrated. Under persecution, there were visions, people claimed they had heard choirs of angels in the sky and so on and so forth, and a belief arose that the Christian millennium was coming in the year 1689.
A number of Huguenots would wind up in Charleston.
3. Scoville, Warren C. THE PERSECUTION OF HUGUENOTS AND FRENCH ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, 1680 TO 1720. Berkeley CA: U of California P, 1960, page 61. 4. During this period the Pope himself, in the Papal States, was holding galley slaves to row him to and fro. These slaves might be in one or another of the following categories: “convicted criminals condemned to a life sentence” — “captured non-Christian prisoners of war” — “bonavoglie, so-called ‘volunteers’ who through indigence had sold themselves into slavery, and could be released at the end of their contracted period of service in the galleys on condition of good conduct.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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I suppose Abraham D. Lavender to be the poet who wrote the following (since he did not attribute the poem and since the color lavender appears in it):
THE EXILE Your sunny shores, Your rugged peaks, Your vineyards, fields, and forests, Your flowery gardens in bloom, With red, yellow, lavender, pink, and blue, Your meandering rivers, Your flowing streams, Your roads that lead everywhere, Your humble hamlets, Your teeming towns, Your courtly cities ablaze, Your toiling farmers, Your masterful merchants, Your artful artisans and would-be scholars, Your poor, pious, pampered, and princely, Men and women of all nuances and shades, Your lives so colorful, Vivaciously vibrant, But oppressive, Struggling to be free, To break the shackles of an ancient age, Blood of my fathers, Tears of my mothers, Roots of my branches, All intertwined in your soil so deep, My mother earth, My father land, How my heart weeps for you, From whom I was so cruelly exiled, In leaking boats, Over frightful borders, Hurried journeys in the darkened nights, Leaving behind so much of me, Embittered, impoverished, but free, Angered by the fearful tyrant, The betraying countrymen, The yoke of intolerance, Saddened by the theft of freedom, The rupture of dreams, The hopeful hope of a speedy return, A new beginning, In a strange new land, Different, engulfing, demanding, But flexible, sensitive, and free, This land that welcomed me, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Exhausted, lonely, afraid, Sadder, but wiser, Stronger and prouder, Reaffirmed in honor, From a life torn asunder, This exile that became me, Days turned into years, And years into decades, And generations multiply and divide,
A new language, A new name, A new home, New loves to love, In this no longer strange new land, But, your sunny shores, Your rugged peaks, Your vineyards, fields, and forests, Your flowery gardens in bloom, With red, yellow, lavender, pink, and blue, My colorfully vibrant memories, That my mind cannot repress, My meandering gazes ablaze, That go with me everywhere, My mother earth, My father land, How my soul dreams of you, I am a part of you, And you are a part of me, The dreams, The hope, The faith, That neither tyranny, Nor time, Can ever erase. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1834
In St. Michaels, Maryland, Frederick Douglass was assigned by his owner to work for a white farmer, Edward “The Snake” Covey, who had the reputation of a “nigger-breaker,” on his 150-acre rented farm some seven miles to the northwest of St. Michaels, but Mr. Covey had a spot of difficulty with this particular nigger. We notice that at no point was Douglass trying to kill Covey, something reasonable and easy, for he was trying to do something considerably more fraught, get such a person’s attention and then talk turkey to him: “I seized Covey hard by the throat…. I told him….” Strange to relate, although in this struggle Douglass drew blood from Covey and could reasonably have anticipated that as soon as order and propriety had been restored he HDT WHAT? INDEX
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would be tortured to death by “The Snake” and his crowd — he found that instead he was no longer being
lashed. Douglass seems to have attributed this to his master’s economic need to obtain maximum work from him with minimum expenditure of effort. Consider this as bravado, in the face of the fact that the only difficulty Covey would have had in killing Douglass, other than in ordering the other laborers to dig a shallow hole in HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the field alongside the corpse, would have come when he had to reimburse Thomas Auld for his economic loss:
I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.
But one wonders whether this hopeless resistance may have inspired Thomas Covey to respect Frederick Douglass as a man and as a human. I offer that this fight in the fields of Maryland may well have been a turning-point not only in the individual life of Douglass, but also –unfortunately– in the ideology of nonresistance to evil as espoused by William Ladd, the Reverend Adin Ballou, the Reverend Henry C. Wright,
Abby Kelley, John A. Collins, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, Edmund Quincy, John Humphrey Noyes (!),
and William Lloyd Garrison. For later on Douglass would use this memory as fuel for his breach with other antislavery advocates over Garrison’s principled nonresistance to evil and as fuel for the encouragement, by the allies of John Brown, of an indigenous uprising of the black slaves of the South, when Douglass began in 1851 to find alternate funding from the “Liberty Party” created by the intemperate wealthy white man Gerrit Smith.
Richard Hildreth’s REPORT OF A PUBLIC DISCUSSION BETWEEN THE REVS. ADIN BALLOU AND DANIEL D. SMITH; ON THE QUESTION, “DO THE HOLY SCRIPTURES TEACH THE DOCTRINE, THAT MEN WILL BE PUNISHED AND REWARDED SUBSEQUENTLY TO THIS LIFE, OR AFTER DEATH, FOR THE DEEDS DONE IN THIS LIFE?” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Hildreth created a pamphlet defending Abner Kneeland against a charge of blasphemy, APPEAL TO COMMON SENSE AND THE CONSTITUTION ON BEHALF OF UNLIMITED FREEDOM OF DISCUSSION.
Suffering from tuberculosis, and clinically depressed, the author and editor sold his share in Boston’s The Atlas and sought the more healthful climate of Florida. He would find lodgings on a slave plantation. During 18 months of tropical sunshine he would create the 1st American antislavery novel, THE SLAVE, OR MEMOIRS OF A FUGITIVE, while laboring toward a description of the deleterious effects on our economic and political development of the South’s racist “peculiar institution,” that would see publication in 1840 as DESPOTISM IN AMERICA. His wife, his child, his toil, his blood, his life, and everything that gives his life a value, they are not his; he holds them all but at his master’s pleasure. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Because the Reverend Hosea Hildreth had been exchanging services with pastors of the new Unitarian persuasion, the Essex Association expelled him as Congregationalist minister over the First Parish Church of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Until his death in the following year, the Reverend Hildreth would be serving as minister of a Unitarian congregation in Westboro, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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We see that Frederick Douglass believed he had already put what would become the doctrine of ahimsa to the ultimate test, and that he had already discovered this doctrine to be ultimately wrongheaded — and was following the path of Nehru rather than the path of Gandhiji. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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January 1, Wednesday: A Zollverein or customs union among 18 German states, headed by Prussia, went into effect.
Frederick Douglass later reported that:
At daybreak I was ordered to get a load of wood from a forest about two miles from the house.... I had never driven oxen before.... Once the gate was opened in front of them, my oxen charged through full tilt. They caught the huge gate between the wheel and the cart body, crushing it into splinters and coming within a few inches of crushing me with it.... Covey told me that he would now teach me how to break gates and idle away my time.... [He] ordered me to take off my clothes.... “If you beat me,” I thought, “you shall do so over my clothes.” After many threats he rushed at me..., tore off the few thin clothes I had on, and proceeded to wear out on my back the heavy goads which he had cut from the gum tree.... [D]uring the first six months there I was whipped, either with sticks or a cowhide whip, every week.... I was sometimes tempted to take my life and that of Covey but was prevented by a combination of hope and fear.
“The morning of January 1, 1834, found me on the road to Covey’s. The chilling wind and pinching frost matched the winter of my own mind as I trudged along.... [Chesapeake Bay] was now white with foam raised by a heavy northwest wind.” Frederick Douglass the troublemaker who had attempted to set up a Sunday School for black children, had been contracted by his owner to Mr. Edward “The Snake” Covey’s on his 150-acre rented farm some seven miles to the northwest of St. Michaels, Maryland –where discipline was HDT WHAT? INDEX
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by whip– to work for the first time as field rather than house slave: Frederick Douglass’s NARRATIVE
In my new employment, I found myself even more awkward than a country boy appeared to be in a large city. I had been at my new home but one week before Mr. Covey gave me a very severe whipping, cutting my back, causing the blood to run, and raising ridges on my flesh as large as my little finger. The details of this affair are as follows: Mr. Covey sent me, very early in the morning of one of our coldest days in the month of January, to the woods, to get a load of wood. He gave me a team of unbroken oxen. He told me which was the in-hand ox, and which the off-hand one. He then tied the end of a large rope around the horns of the in-hand ox, and gave me the other end of it, and told me, if the oxen started to run, that I must hold on upon the rope. I had never driven oxen before, and of course I was very awkward. I, however, succeeded in getting to the edge of the woods with little difficulty; but I had got a very few rods into the woods, when the oxen took fright, and started full tilt, carrying the cart against trees, and over stumps, in the most frightful manner. I expected every moment that my brains would be dashed out against the trees. After running thus for a considerable distance, they finally upset the cart, dashing it with great force against a tree, and threw themselves into a dense thicket. How I escaped death, I do not know. There I was, entirely alone, in a thick wood, in a place new to me. My cart was upset and shattered, my oxen were entangled among the young trees, and there was none to help me. After a long spell of effort, I succeeded in getting my cart righted, my oxen disentangled, and again yoked to the cart. I now proceeded with my team to the place where I had, the day before, been chopping wood, and loaded my cart pretty heavily, thinking in this way to tame my oxen. I then proceeded on my way home. I had now consumed one half of the day. I got out of the woods safely, and now felt out of danger. I stopped my oxen to open the woods gate; and just as I did so, before I could get hold of my ox-rope, the oxen again started, rushed through the gate, catching it between the wheel and the body of the cart, tearing it to pieces, and coming within a few inches of crushing me against the gate-post. Thus twice, in one short day, I escaped death by the merest chance. On my return, I told Mr. Covey what had happened, and how it happened. He ordered me to return to the woods again immediately. I did so, and he followed on after me. Just as I got into the woods, he came up and told me to stop my cart, and that he would teach me how to trifle away my time, and break gates. He then went to a large gum-tree, and with his axe cut three large switches, and, after trimming them up neatly with his pocketknife, he ordered me to take off my clothes. I made him no answer, but stood with my clothes on. He repeated his order. I still made him no answer, nor did I move to strip myself. Upon this he rushed at me with the fierceness of a tiger, tore off my clothes, and lashed me till he had worn out his switches, cutting me so savagely as to leave the marks visible for a long time after. This whipping was the first of a number just like it, and for similar offences.
Mr. Covey had a reputation as a “nigger-breaker,” but was going to experience considerable difficulties, even a threat to his professional standing, in his attempts to break this particular nigger.
[We will notice, however, that at no point in the struggle would Douglass try to kill Edward Covey, something reasonable and easy, for he was trying to do something considerably more fraught, get such a person’s attention and then talk turkey to him: “I seized Covey hard by the throat.... I told him....” Strange to relate, although in this struggle Douglass had drawn blood from Covey and could reasonably have anticipated that as soon as order and propriety had been restored he would be tortured to death by “The Snake” and his Christian crowd HDT WHAT? INDEX
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— he would find that instead he was no longer being lashed. Douglass seems to have attributed this to his master’s economic need to obtain maximum work from him with minimum expenditure of effort. Consider this as bravado, in the face of the fact that the only difficulty Covey would have had in killing Douglass, other than in ordering the other laborers to dig a shallow hole in the field alongside the corpse, would have come when he had to reimburse Thomas Auld for his economic loss:
I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.
But one wonders whether it was not precisely this hopeless resistance which may have inspired Covey to respect Douglass as a man and as a human. I offer that these fights in the fields of Maryland may well have been a turning-point not only in the individual life of Douglass, but also –unfortunately– in the ideology of nonresistance to evil as espoused by William Ladd, the Reverend Adin Ballou, the Reverend Henry C. Wright, Abby Kelley, John A. Collins, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, Edmund Quincy, John Humphrey Noyes of the Perfectionist, and William Lloyd Garrison. For later on Douglass would use this memory as fuel for his breach with other antislavery advocates over Garrison’s principled nonresistance to evil and as fuel for the encouragement, by the allies of John Brown, of an indigenous uprising of the black slaves of the South, when Douglass began in 1851 to find alternate funding from the “Liberty Party” created by the intemperate wealthy white man Gerrit Smith. We see that Frederick Douglass believed he had already put what would become the doctrine of ahimsa to the ultimate test, and that he had already discovered this doctrine to be ultimately wrongheaded — and was following the path of Nehru rather than the path of Gandhiji.] SLAVERY
While this sturm-und-drang about becoming free from slavery was going on in Maryland, in Newport, Rhode Island, the quietist Friend Stephen Wanton Gould was writing in his journal about becoming free from sin: 4th day 1st of 1 M 1834 / I am thankful in being Able to insert today that is has been a day of some favour - a good day, wherein my soul has experienced some access to the fountain of good, & been enabled to cry in Secret Abba Father.—— Our Meeting which was silent was free from conflict which has often awaited me of late. —— I rejoice in it & most ardently have I desired for help & preservation.5 RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
5. Stephen Wanton Gould Diary, 1833-1836: The Gould family papers are stored under control number 2033 at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of Cornell University Library, Box 9 Folder 15: January 1, 1833-August 28, 1836; also on microfilm, see Series 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1838
September 18, Tuesday: 160 delegates attended the Peace Convention in the Marlboro Chapel of Boston.
This meeting creating the New England Non-Resistance Society is notable not only for creating a chain of influence that extends down through Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to us,6 but also for a feminist “first”: William Lloyd Garrison uttered, from the platform, the new locution “his or her” — a locution deliberately designed to de-privilege the male as the normative specimen of the human being.
There was a smile on the countenance of many abolition friends while others in the Convention looked grave.
However, the smiles lasted longer than the grave looks: immediately that Friend Abby Kelley called a minister to order for speaking out of turn, the “woman-contemners” marched out of the meeting.
6. Although the society put out a bimonthly publication named The Non-Resistant (until 1842), public newspapers quickly characterized this un-Christian attitude of nonresistance to evil as “No-Governmentism.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Garrison wrote the “Declaration of Sentiments” for this assembly:
We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government.... Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind.... As every human government is upheld by physical strength, and its laws are enforced virtually at the point of the bayonet, we cannot hold any office which imposes upon its incumbent the obligation to compel men to do right, on pain of imprisonment or death. We therefore voluntarily exclude ourselves from every legislative and judicial body, and repudiate all human politics, worldly honors, and stations of authority. If we cannot occupy a seat in the legislature or on the bench, neither can we elect others to act as our substitutes in any such capacity.... While we shall adhere to the doctrines of non-resistance and passive submission to enemies, we purpose to speak and act boldly in the cause of God, to assail iniquity in high places.... It will be our leading object to devise ways and means for effecting a radical change in the views, feelings and practices of society respecting the sinfulness of war, and the treatment of our enemies.
25 of the 160 delegates were able to commit their lives to the principle that
evil can be exterminated from the earth only by good; that it is not safe to rely on an arm of flesh, –upon man, whose breath is in his nostrils– ...we shall submit to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, obey all the requirements of government, except such as we deem contrary to the commands of the gospel, and in no wise resist the operation of law, except such as we deem contrary to the commands of the gospel; and in no wise resist the operation of law, except by meekly submitting to the penalty of disobedience. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1842
Due to lack of funds, the bimonthly publication of the New England Non-Resistance Society, The Non- Resistant, ceased publication. The future influence of this society would have to come to us via the lives and writings of Henry Thoreau and Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. At the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, William Lloyd Garrison first advocated the solution to the problem of evil that is explored in the Book of Job, that of “departing from evil,” and the manner in which the Jobean solution to the problem of evil applied in this case, the case of politics within the United States of America, amounted to: disunion, that is, disuniting with those states that refused to protect their own people from being held in slavery. The good North should depart from the evil South:
No Union with Slaveholders.
“It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1852
In this year Frederick Douglass had at least one Daguerreotype (presumably, many) made:7
According to Wendell Phillips, Douglass had been so influenced by John Brown that,
7. You will note that, since this is a Daguerreotype, it presents a mirror image and it would thus appear to us now, who have become accustomed to positive photographs made from negatives, as if the subject had parted his hair on the right. The photo was recently disposed of at a Sotheby’s auction upon an bid of $184,000 by an anonymous telephone participant.
“Everything in life is unusual until you get accustomed to it.” — The Scarecrow, in THE MARVELOUS LAND OF OZ (L. Frank Baum, 1904) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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at one point during a anti-slavery meeting in Boston’s toney Faneuil Hall,
he had advocated that the slaves of the South had
no possible hope except in their own right arms.
He was thus standing to commit the Biblical error of “trying to hold Eloah in one’s fist.” But Sojourner Truth was sitting in the front row listening to this. As Douglass was finishing, Truth called out
FREDERICK! IS GOD DEAD?
Debating Holding One’s God in One’s Fist HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
Frederick Douglass did not necessarily appreciate such treatment or benefit from this correction; he would refer to Sojourner Truth as one “who seemed to feel it her duty to trip me up in my speeches and to ridicule my efforts to speak and act like a person of cultivation and refinement.”
Was Truth seconding the puerile Nathaniel Hawthorne sentiment found in his biography of Franklin Pierce, that when it be God’s will, then will human slavery “vanish like a dream” without anybody needing to lift their little finger? Nope, Sojourner knew that slavery was not a dream that would vanish like a dream.
The interesting fact about these two apparently identical attitudes, that of Hawthorne and that of Truth, is that they are as diametrically opposed as black and white. Although the two might be made to appear similar in outline in poor light, on the basis of their shared vocabulary of God-talk, in fact were we to ask the powerful beneficiaries of injustice to trust in God to correct wrongs being done by them, this would be the opposite of our asking the powerless victims of injustice to trust in God to correct wrongs being done to them. The difference, which makes these two situations opposite, is that a powerful beneficiary of injustice has no basis for relying on his or her own judgment, since such a judgment is and must be inherently merely self-serving.
Note that Hawthorne’s position was compatible with the vengeance of the strong against the weak, merely enabling this vengeance to continue, whereas Sojourner Truth’s position was incompatible with the vengeance of the weak against the strong, preventing it from beginning. In the case of the powerful, what trusting in God to correct wrongs leads to is violence and more violence and the perpetuation of violence, whereas in the case of the powerless, this leads only to: decency and more decency.8
8. Ask yourself what Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi would have said to Hawthorne, and what he would have said to Truth. —What the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. would have said. —What Henry Thoreau would have said (had Hawthorne had enough respect for his neighbor to walk a mile and ask for advice). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1865
Volume I of Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy’s VOYNA I MIR (WAR AND PEACE), which would be completed in 1869.
Friend Pam Rider has made some comments about her continuing fascination with the novel WAR AND PEACE which have caused me to go back to that literary production for a fresh look. Very typically, Tolstòy’s life is said to have started anew after what is termed his “Arzamas terror,” in 1869 shortly after he had completed that massive novel VOYNA I MIR. This accounts for the more than a decade of what was for him relative silence, before he released in 1883 his V CHEM MOIA VERA?, or WHAT I BELIEVE. But was this a shift in essence, or was it a mere shift in tactics of presentation, from a masked didacticism to an in-your-face sermonizing? I now understand what Christ meant when he said, “You were told an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; and I tell you, Do not resist evil, and endure it. Use no violence, do not take part in violence, do no evil to anyone, even to those whom you call your enemies.
I now understand not only that in the proposition about nonresistance to evil Christ was telling what would immediately result for each man from nonresistance to evil, but that ... it was to be the foundation of the joint life of man and was to HDT WHAT? INDEX
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free humanity from the evil which it inflicted upon itself.
This is not utterly different from what has gone before. For instance, in Tolstòy’s 1847 diary he is already struggling, in an admittedly inchoate manner, with the general idea of becoming a more perfect human being by the possession of a useful mission: I would be the most unhappy of men if I did not find a goal for my life, a common and useful one, useful because the immortal soul, once it has developed, naturally turns into a being which is higher and corresponds to it. We may note that in WAR AND PEACE, the summons to resist not evil is already making its appearance. When Prince Andrei lies mortally wounded after the battle of Borodino, he perceives what his error has been: Sympathy, love for our brothers, for those who love us, love for those who hate us, love for our enemies; yes, the love that God preached upon earth, that Marie sought to teach me, and I did not understand.... It is the simple faith of the character Platon Karataev, his acceptance of everything that happens as somehow part of God’s universe, which effects a transformation in the character Pierre Bezukhov, who winds up explaining to himself that “If there were no suffering man would not know his limitations, not know himself.” Platon faces a French firing squad unresistingly, acceptingly, in a manner foreshadowing the Tolstòy of the later philosophizing about the redemptive power of Christian nonresistance. It was in 1886 that Tolstòy began to study the literary remainders of William Lloyd Garrison and the Reverend Adin Ballou of Massachusetts, which eventually resulted in 1893 in his TSARSTVO BOZHIE VNUTRI VAS (THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU). The activity of Garrison the father ... convinced me even more than my relations with the Quakers, that the departure of state Christianity from Christ’s law about nonresistance to evil is something that has been observed and pointed out long ago, and HDT WHAT? INDEX
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that men have ceasingly worked to arraign it.
It was also in this year that the Reverend Ballou began his reciprocal study of the Russian’s thought (this Universalist minister and Hopedale commune leader would not die until 1890). The material which had come to his attention at this point was the 1883 WHAT I BELIEVE, in English translation. However, he had “mellowed” in his approach over the years, and no longer thought of his earlier ideas as categorically correct in all applications, no longer thought of rigid non-resistance as the spell which would dissolve all the world’s evil. Specifically what happened was that Wendell Phillips Garrison, Garrison’s son, had read an 1885 English translation ON RELIGION, and sent the author of it a precis of his father’s similar attitudes (his father had died in 1879). Tolstòy was especially intrigued by the text of the 1838 DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS of the New England Non-Resistance Society. (The dates on the relevant still-extant letters of this period are March-April 15, 1886, May 5, 1886, May-December? 1886, November 10, 1888, November 12, 1888, October 12, 1889, January 1890?, July 28, 1890, August 22, 1890, September 17, 1890, October 15?, 1890, January 22/23, 1892, February 12, 1892, February 16, 1892, February 19, 1892, April 1, 1892, April 5, 1892, May 20, 1892, June 3, 1892.) As they were prepared, the son shipped out to Tolstòy the first two of the volumes he wrote about his father’s life, and so over the 1886-1889 period Tolstòy was studying this American pre-Civil War philosophy. The context of this was a struggle within the American Peace Society, founded in 1828, which had resulted in 1838 in the establishment of the New England Non-Resistance Society. One of the incidents which had hastened and illustrated this difference in philosophy had been the death in 1837 of the abolitionist printer Elijah Lovejoy, failed Quaker, gun in hand, attempting to defend his printing press against a pro-slavery Illinois mob. The American Peace Society had embraced the idea of the defensive war, the licit use of force to protect persons and property. The new society was to adhere firmly to the Peace Testimony and reject all coercion as illicit. We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government, because we recognize but one King and Lawgiver, one Judge and Ruler of mankind. We are bound by the laws of a kingdom which is not of this world; the subjects of which are forbidden to fight; in which Mercy and Truth are met together, and Righteousness and Peace have kissed each other; ... and which is destined to break in pieces and consume all other kingdoms. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
In June 1889 a neighbor of the Reverend Ballou, the Reverend Lewis G. Wilson, forwarded to Tolstòy a photograph of Ballou along with copies of his works NON-RESISTANCE IN RELATION TO HUMAN GOVERNMENTS (Boston MA: Non-Resistance Society, 1839), CHRISTIAN NON-RESISTANCE, IN ALL ITS IMPORTANT BEARINGS, ILLUSTRATED AND DEFENDED (Philadelphia PA: J.M. M’Kim, 1846), and Volume I of NON-RESISTANCE TO EVIL
the three volumes of PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS (Boston MA: Universalist Publishing House, 1870-1900). [Wilson did not send PRACTICAL CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM (NY: Fowlers and Wells, 1854).] Tolstòy was actually more impressed by Ballou, who at this point was dying, than Ballou had been earlier by him. Tell him, please, that his efforts have not been in vain. ... I cannot agree with the concessions that he makes for employing violence against drunkards and insane people. ... Please tell him that I deeply respect and love him, and that his work did great good to my soul. (The dates of the correspondences are June 22, 1889, June 23, 1889, August 1889, November 1, 1889, January 14, 1890, February 21-24, 1890, March 30?, 1890, June 30, 1890.) In November 1890 Tolstòy wrote of his bewilderment to a Russian friend: How could these ideas, the most important for humanity, ... how could such thoughts, so strongly expressed, printed, published, be so silenced that neither the son of Garrison, whom I asked, nor all those Americans I saw (ten persons, and all religious people) had ever heard anything about this and do not know the name of Ballou? In 1890 Tolstòy received the last two volumes of the son Wendell Phillips Garrison’s study of his father William Lloyd Garrison’s life and beliefs. It was as a result of his efforts to translate the DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS into Russian, along with one of the shorter works of the Universalist Reverend Adin Ballou of the commune Hopedale (established in 1841 near Worcester, Massachusetts), that Tolstòy began work on what eventually would become THE KINGDOM OF GOD. Tolstòy, and his daughter Tatyana, began to correspond also with Wendell Phillips Garrison’s brother Francis Garrison. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
It has been pointed out, however, that this is glossing over important differences between Garrison and Tolstòy. Garrison had been a triumphalist, that is to say, he had had the idea that if only a sufficient number of persons were to be induced to experience their inner moral revolutions, there would actually result a perfect society governed forever by the laws of Christ’s kingdom. Tolstòy, quite on the other hand, was a rationalist believer in razumnoe sozhanie with a quietist bent, who repudiated such triumphalist fantasizing. Garrison thought political action was the solution, Tolstòy thought it was the problem. Had Tolstòy inspected the life of Garrison with greater care, he would have detected disturbing compromises with violence — which the filial son had quite glossed over. I am not myself, for instance, convinced that Garrison was innocent of all knowledge of the raid being planned in Boston, on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859, before this raid took place, while the Sharps carbines to be use in the raid itself and the pikes to be used then by the revolting slaves were still being manufactured. Garrison would even tolerate a military encampment to be named in his honor, during our civil war. The idea of American nonviolence had become “We have to kill these people in order that the world will become safe for our nonviolence.” Tolstòy, when he came to see the reign of terror which resulted in the American South under Reconstruction, with its Christian white knights of the Ku Klux Klan, would need to call upon Americans to return to their own abandoned principle of nonviolence. It was the Reverend Adin Ballou, not Garrison, who had remained true to the principles the New England Non- Resistance Society had enunciated in 1838. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne edited Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notebooks for a series of articles in The Atlantic Monthly; they would in 1868 be collected under the title PASSAGES FROM THE AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS.
When Andrew Dickson White visited Tolstòy at Yasnaya Polyana shortly after publication of THE KINGDOM OF GOD, they discussed American literature and Tolstòy exhibited a familiarity with Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and the Reverend Theodore Parker. So White asked Tolstòy who he regarded as the foremost of American authors. The response White received astounded him: That greatest of all American writers was — Adin Ballou! Evidently, some of the philanthropic writings of the excellent Massachusetts country clergyman and religious communist had pleased him, and hence came the answer. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
Although it is most common in the circles in which I travel to see Tolstòy quoted as having confessed that he had been influenced by the “Civil Disobedience” of Henry Thoreau, along with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, I have been quite unable to discover any hard evidence in support of such a self-characterization. I have formed a hypothesis that Tolstòy was instead influenced by this less known nonresistant reverend who had founded a commune within walking distance of Concord and knew Thoreau, and of course by the organizer Garrison, and that Tolstòy had merely substituted the known name Thoreau for such names while discoursing with one or another of his American visitors. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
We should study the similarities between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Thoreau. In regard primarily to their handling of time and eternity, but also in regard to Thoreau being a type of Wittgenstein’s happy man in agreement with the world. May I ask you a question? Here we have Wittgenstein going around urging people to read Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy, in fact buying them copies of his stories, and before that we had Tolstòy going around urging people to read Thoreau. Here we have Wittgenstein, Tolstòy, and Thoreau all three vastly and obviously influenced by Matthew’s version of the sermon on the mount. Here we have Wittgenstein going off and doing a Thoreau thing in a cabin he builds on a fjord. As a topping on this banana split, we have an enormous amount of biography and influence study by people who do know a whole lot about English philosophers and a whole lot about Continental philosophers but who understand absolutely nothing whatever about Thoreau, people who still in fact buy into the old thing about Thoreau being merely an imitation or low- rent Emerson. Maybe a literary figure, maybe not, but certainly not a philosopher, why he never expressed an opinion about the existence of other minds! To name names, tentatively, subject to correction, I put McGuinness, with whom I have corresponded, and Anscombe, with whom I have talked, into that category. Can we be quite sure that Tolstòy/Thoreau/Wittgenstein derived essentially independent influences direct from the words in Matthew? Is there not a possibility that Wittgenstein was reading Thoreau on the fjord before the war, and was thus prepared to find the gospels in that bookshop in Silesia, but that none of his intellectual biographers have had the background to pick this out of the original materials which they have consulted, primary materials which are of course never seen by you and me? I am having difficulty imagining how otherwise to account for the fact that, of all the figures in Western philosophy down the ages, it is Thoreau in the 19th Century and Wittgenstein in the 20th Century who have alone elaborated virtually identical attitudes toward the relation between time and eternity — toward what I would myself describe as “the gift-givenness of the present presented.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1869
October 2, Saturday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born at Porbandar, Kathiawad, India. He would grow up in a family heavily influenced by Jainism, and would have as an especial friend the Jain layman Raychandrabhai Mehta — to whom he would attribute much influence in regard to the doctrine of ahimsa or “harmlessness.”
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Projec HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1886
As you are aware, there is a claim that Henry Thoreau has inspired Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., via Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy, in their use of nonviolent tactics of political confrontation. In this regard we may consider here an interesting exchange of correspondence between the retired Reverend Adin Ballou of the failed Hopedale Community of non-resistance to evil –a man who had
once lectured on nonviolence to Thoreau among others present at the Concord Lyceum– and Count Tolstòy of Russia, on the subject of nonviolent political tactics, and note that in this correspondence Thoreau’s name simply does not come up: HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
Upon the appearance in this country of the first of the translated writings of this Russian author and the consequent heralding of him as a new interpreter of the gospel of Christ and as a restorer of primitive Christianity as Jesus taught and exemplified it, Mr. Ballou availed himself of an early opportunity of becoming acquainted with the views and principles upon which such unusual representations were based. From what he learned incidentally through the public press, he hoped to find in this previously unknown author a man after his own heart — a consistent and radical advocate of peace, a friend of all true reform, and a wise counsellor in the work of inaugurating a new order of society from which all injurious force should be excluded and in which all things should be subordinated to and animated by the spirit of pure love to God and man. That his hopes in this direction were not realized — that he was seriously disappointed indeed in both the man and his teachings, the sequel clearly shows. The first mention of the new luminary in the religious firmament made by Mr. Ballou was in his journal of Feb. 16, 1886, as follows:
Commenced reading a lately purchased book, Count Tolstoi’s “My Religion.” Found many good things in it on ethics, with here and there an indiscriminating extremism in the application of Christ’s precepts against resisting evil with evil, and in his views of penal judgment and covetousness, or mammonism. But on theology found him wild, crude, and mystically absurd. His ideas concerning the divine nature, human nature, eternal life, Christ’s resurrection, humanity’s immortality, and the immortality of individuals, etc., are untrue, visionary, chaotic, and pitiably puerile. So it seems to me in this first perusal. But I will read further and think him out more thoroughly. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
Further reading and more thorough thinking, however, did not bring him to a more favorable conclusion. “The saying of Christ, ‘Resist not evil,’ Tolstoi interpreted in its most literal sense, making it inculcate complete passivity not only toward wrong-doers but toward persons rendered insane and dangerous by bad habits, inflamed passions, or unbalanced minds, to the exclusion of non-injurious and beneficent force under any and every circumstance of life.” To Mr. Ballou’s apprehension this was carrying the doctrine of Non-resistance to an illogical and extravagant extreme, warranted neither by the teachings of Jesus nor by a true regard for the welfare of the evil-doer, the irresponsible maniac, or society at large, which often required wholesome restraint and physical force exercised without accompanying harm or injury to any one. Moreover, the distinctively religious expositions and indoctrinations of Tolstoi, as expressed in the book specified and in subsequent works, met with little favor from Mr. Ballou, whose ideas of God, man, immortality, etc., were as definite and pronounced as his ethical principles, and in his estimation as essential to a high type of personal character or a true order of social life. Some three years after Mr. Ballou began to acquaint himself with the writings of Tolstoi, Rev. Lewis G. Wilson, then pastor of the Hopedale parish and an interested reader of the latter, sent him some of the former’s published works, with his photograph and an explanatory letter. On the 5th of July, 1889, he received a responsive communication in which the Count highly commended, in their principle features, the views contained in the publications forwarded to him, though subjecting some of their applications, especially the one relating to the rightful use of uninjurious force as mentioned above, to emphatic protest and denial. This communication Mr. Wilson handed to Mr. Ballou for perusal and a reply if he chose to make one. This he did in due time, taking up the more important points of Tolstoi’s dissent — those pertaining to the practical application of Non-resistant principles, the right to hold property, and no-governmentism particularly, and answering them by extended argument and illustration. Thereto were added also some comments upon certain theological positions assumed in “My Religion.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
On the 26th of March, 1890, the mail brought a rejoinder to this missive, of which the recipient writes: “It relates to some points of difference between us as expressed in a letter sent him some months ago. He declines to argue and refers me to one of his published works, yielding nothing of his extreme Non-resistance even against madmen, but saying, ‘I exposed all I think on those subjects.’ ‘I cannot now change my views without verifying them anew.’ The dictum with which the letter opened, ‘I will not argue with your objections,’ characterized its entire contents and put an end to all discussion. It closed, however, with the statement that ‘Two of your tracts are translated into Russian and propagated among believers and richly appreciated by them.’” Tolstoi’s communication was answered about two months afterward, but no acknowledgment ever came back, by reason, no doubt, of the writer’s death a few weeks later, — an account of which was sent by Mr. Wilson to the distinguished author, whose daughter responded, “Your tidings are very sad, and my father is deeply grieved.” Of the relation between Mr. Ballou and Count Tolstoi, nothing further need be said save that Mr. Wilson embodied the correspondence between them with collateral letters of his own in a sermon read to his congregation on Sunday, April 20, 1890, of which the diary says: “We were all deeply interested, pleased, and enlightened. I never was so much gratified with Brother Wilson’s performance. His scripture-reading, prayer, hymns, etc., were all in harmony with Christian Non-resistance, and he dropped not a word or hint that implied reserved dissent from my views.” It may be added that the substance of this discourse was subsequently rearranged by the author and published in the Arena for December 1890 — a portion of the last letter of Mr. Ballou to Tolstoi being omitted. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
Only in private correspondence, such as in a letter to Parker Pillsbury in April 1861, where he advised “Ignore Fort Sumter, and old Abe, and all that; for that is just the most fatal, and, indeed, the only fatal weapon you can direct against evil, ever,” did Thoreau embrace nonresistance to evil. It became almost an esoteric doctrine, almost for experts only: per Job, do shun evil, do depart from it; per Yehoshua, whatever we do we mustn’t attempt to resist it; per Thoreau, indeed we must successfully ignore it. Only as an afterthought to his journal on October 22, 1859, an afterthought which he omitted on October 30 when he read his jottings in three citizens’ meetings, can we see that, had it come to killing or being killed, Thoreau would have chose to be killed (October 22, 1859): “I do not wish to kill or nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both of these things would be by me unavoidable. In extremities I could even be killed” (strikethroughs indicate changes from journal to speech). Thoreau believed that, whether the sacrifice of others’ lives was legitimate or not (even the Brown slaughter of children of slaveowners in Kansas with modern expensive weapons the Thoreaus had helped purchase), nothing John Brown had ever done under the duress of his “leading” could overshadow his willingness to sacrifice his life on the gallows. And Thoreau, clearly toying with such a fate for himself, at this point was unwilling to cheapen Brown’s martyrdom by publicly re-raising a bypassed issue of “resist not evil.” He thus enabled Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to misunderstand him, and adopt nonresistance only as a tactic for attaining political ends in India and only for so long as this was the most effective tactic for attaining these political ends.9 I am sorry that this is so, but it is so. The utterly pure nonresistance attempted by Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy has had a respectful audience, but not an accepting audience, and Thoreau’s lack of public clarity on this point has had unfortunate consequences.
The “activist pacifist” still expects to win. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is a case in point, since he frankly acknowledged that had ahimsa no chance of succeeding against the British, he would have encouraged India to choose some other, more effective, tactic. As another case in point, consider the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who, converted to the ethics of nonresistance to evil, authored a DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS ADOPTED BY THE PEACE CONVENTION, HELD IN BOSTON IN 1838. In this declaration he stated “[W]e expect to prevail through the foolishness of preachings” and expressed a calm and meek reliance on “certain and universal triumph.” Wasn’t there some football coach who learned how to say “Winning’s not the thing, it’s the only thing”? And how does this differ from that?
9. Although Gandhi stated this many times to many people, he has been as thoroughly misunderstood by the wishfulness of American popular culture as has the liberator Lincoln, who stated many times to many people that if he could he would preserve the Union without freeing a single slave. Gandhi had more interest in the writings of Emerson than in those of Thoreau, saying that Emerson’s essays “to my mind contain the teaching of Indian wisdom in a western guru” (Louis Fischer, THE LIFE OF MAHATMA GANDHI, NY 1950, page 93). HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1906
September 11, Tuesday: In perhaps the initial event in the 20th Century’s history of nonviolent resistance, 3,000 Indians gathered in the Empire Theater of Johannesburg, South Africa for an indignation meeting, to oppose the Transvaal pass law newly enacted on August 22d. The final speaker of the approximately 20 speakers was the organizer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. A few hours later the theater was burned to the ground. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
November 8, Thursday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Haji Ojeer Ally appeared before Lord Elgin, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in London, to beg him to refuse assent to the Transvaal pass law of August 22d. On their return to South Africa, they would learn that he had agreed with them.
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Projec HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1907
Bubonic Plague killed 1,200,000 in India.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a British-educated Indian lawyer in prison in Pretoria, South Africa, read “RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”:
The Thoreau-Gandhi entente has ... become a straw for Indo-American amity for both nations to clutch at on appropriate occasion. The Thoreau Centennial provided such an occasion in 1962, and the Indian Ambassador to the United States made a whole log out of this straw when he delivered his address at the dedication of Malvina Hoffman’s bust of Thoreau in the Hall of Fame at New York University.
Thoreau’s essay titled “Civil Disobedience” was republished in a South African newspaper Indian Opinion which Gandhi was editing.
The leading anarchist journal in the US, Liberty, began to claim “Civil Disobedience” as an “anarchist classic.” However, these people were still focusing more upon Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman than upon Henry Thoreau. (And they were paying no attention at all to actual US legal enactment and precedent.)
Publication of the Reverend James Wood’s THE NUTTALL ENCYCLOPÆDIA BEING A CONCISE AND COMPREHENSIVE DICTIONARY OF GENERAL KNOWLEDGE CONSISTING OF OVER 16,000 TERSE AND ORIGINAL ARTICLES ON NEARLY ALL SUBJECTS DISCUSSED IN LARGER ENCYCLOPÆDIAS, AND SPECIALLY DEALING WITH SUCH AS COME UNDER THE CATEGORIES OF HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, GEOGRAPHY, LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SCIENCE, AND ART: THE SEVEN SAGES OF GREECE: • Solon of Athens, his motto “Know thyself” • Chilo of Sparta, his motto “Consider the end” • Thales of Miletus, his motto “Whoso hateth suretyship is sure” • Bias of Priene, his motto “Most men are bad” • Cleobulus of Lindos, his motto “Avoid extremes” HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
• Pittacus of Mitylene, his motto “Seize Time by the forelock” • Periander of Corinth, his motto “Nothing is impossible to industry.”
WILLIAM TELL, Swiss hero and patriot, a peasant, native of the canton of Uri, who flourished in the beginning of the 14th century; resisted the oppression of the Austrian governor Gessler, and was taken prisoner, but was promised his liberty if with his bow and arrow he could hit an apple on the head of his son, a feat he accomplished with one arrow, with the second arrow in his belt, which he told Gessler he had kept to shoot him with if he had failed. This so incensed the governor that he bound him to carry off to his castle; but as they crossed the lake a storm arose, and Tell had to be unbound to save them, when he leapt upon a rock and made off, to lie in ambush, whence he shot the oppressor through the heart as he passed him; a rising followed, which ended only with the emancipation of Switzerland from the yoke of Austria. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
(People still play around with this legend. For instance, on January 16, 2001, at a circus performance in Paris, Mme Cathy Jamet has been shot in the face by a crossbow arrow fired by her husband M Alain Jamet.)
July 18, Saturday: Having organized a successful campaign to overturn laws adverse to Indians in South Africa, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi sailed from Cape Town, South Africa to Great Britain, never to return to Africa.
Labor leader Joe Hill was convicted of murder by a Salt Lake City court and sentenced to death. Given the coincidence-evidence that convicted him, in a jury trial today he would almost certainly be found not guilty.
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Projec HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1915
January 9, Saturday: Germans counterattack at Soissons, shelling the cathedral. WORLD WAR I
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in Bombay by ship from England.
May 25, Tuesday: China acceded to 16 of the 21 Japanese demands for economic concessions.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi created his ashram at Sabarmati near Ahmedabad.
Armenian parliamentary deputies Zohrab and Vartkes were arrested in Constantinople (they would be murdered while in custody in Kara-Kopru). ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Projec HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1916
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi founded a religious school in Ahmedabad, India.
February 6, Sunday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi addressed an illustrious gathering at the opening of the Benares Hindu University. The platform included the Viceroy, many maharajas and maharanis, high officials and educators. Speaking without text, Gandhi assailed the imperialism of the English language, the tolerance for filth and degradation of the Hindus, accused the maharajas of stealing from the poor, seemed to suggest that a dead viceroy might be more useful than a live one, and honored anarchists. When he announced, “If we were to receive self-government we would have to take it,” many Indian officials left the platform as the uproar in the hall forced him to abandon his speech.
German forces in Kamerun began crossing the border into Spanish Guinea.
The Czechoslovak National Council began to function as a quasi-government in exile. Tomás G. Masaryk was president.
The revised version of Sergei Rakhmaninov’s Vocalise, for voice and piano, was performed for the initial time.
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Projec HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1917
April 18, Wednesday: British and colonial forces defeated Turks at the Shatt al Adhaim.
Germans counterattacked on the Aisne, but to no effect.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was tried in Motihari, Bihar, India for causing a public disturbance (he was conducting inquiries into the case of indigo growers in the province). He was released without bail while the magistrate awaited instructions from the Lieutenant-Governor.
April 21, Saturday: In India, on orders from the Lieutenant-Governor, the case against Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was dropped.
British and colonial troops attacked the Turks near Istabula, causing them to fall back.
October 3, Wednesday: A commission of inquiry in Bihar found in favor of the peasants against their British landlords. This was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s 1st victory in India.
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Projec HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1919
February 23, Sunday: In Italy, Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci italiani di Combattimento.
PROTO-NAZISM
In Ahmadabad, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi appealed for civil disobedience against the proposed Rowlatt Acts (these regulations allowed, in political cases, trial without jury and internment without trial; it was his initial public action against British rule in India).
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Projec HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1925
January 1, Thursday: Richard Bartlett Gregg had been a labor lawyer under contract with a railway union in Chicago when he had come across a book about a former lawyer, an anticolonial leader named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The approach to social conflict sponsored in this literature so fascinated him that on this day he embarked for India. He would teach school in an Indian village, and would spend months at Gandhi’s ashram in Sabarmati, making himself one of the mahatma’s 1st American disciples. He would author “The Economics of Khaddar.” He would spend some time also at the school of the poet Rabindranath Tagore.
At some point during this month Joseph Goebbels would first encounter Adolf Hitler (although he would not be joining the Nazi Party until 1928), and wrote of Der Führer in his dear diary in the following manner: “Shakes my hand. Like an old friend. And those big blue eyes. Like stars. He is glad to see me. I am in heaven. That man has everything to be king.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1929
September 10, Tuesday: Henry S. Salt wrote Professor Raymond Adams that “I am going to write to Gandhi to ask him if he was influenced by Thoreau.” MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
September 18, Wednesday: Henry S. Salt wrote to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi asking whether he had been HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
influenced by Henry Thoreau. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
October 12, Saturday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi responded to Henry S. Salt’s letter that: I was agreeably surprised to receive your letter. Yes, indeed your book which was the first English book I came across on vegetarianism was of immense help to me in steadying my faith in vegetarianism. My first introduction to Thoreau’s writings was, I think, in 1907, or late[r], when I was in the thick of passive resistance struggle. A friend sent me Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience. It left a deep impression on me. I translated a portion of that essay for the readers of Indian Opinion in South Africa which I was then editing, and I made copious extracts from that essay for that paper. That essay seemed to be so convincing and truthful that I felt the need of knowing more about Thoreau, and I came across your Life of him, his “Walden” and other short essays, all of which I read with great pleasure and equal profit.
RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1930
The Japanese American Citizens League was organized in the face of rising discrimination.
During the “Salt March,” Richard Bartlett Gregg returned to India as an observer and authored “Gandhiji’s Satyagraha or Non-Violent Resistance.” CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1931
January 26, Monday: As a gesture of conciliation, the British Viceroy of India released Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and other Congress leaders from prison.
February 17, Tuesday, 2:30PM: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi walked up the steps of the Viceroy’s palace for his first meeting with Lord Irwin, and negotiations. Of the scene, Winston Churchill would recollect how revolted he had been by “the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceroy’s palace, there to negotiate and to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”
March 4, Wednesday: After two weeks of personal talks, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and British Viceroy Lord Irwin reached an agreement which included the end of the campaign of civil disobedience, the release of political prisoners, and the representation of the Indian National Congress at the Second Round Table discussions.
August 29, Saturday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi sailed from Bombay for England and the Second Round Table Conference on India.
Heavy rains in Canada were holding up the grain harvest. To solve the problem of the current cotton glut and consequent disastrously low commodity prices, the Farm Board proposed that cotton farmers plow under every 3d row of their current crop. Meanwhile, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was considering issuing the largest mortgage ever, for the creation of Rockefeller City in Manhattan (MetLife’s loan for construction of the Empire State Building had been for $27,000,000 whereas this one would be for $65,000,000).
According to Helen E. Glutsch’s “Interesting Reminiscences” in the Saturday Review of Literature VIII, page 92, Howard Melvin of Concord had reported to her that: Thoreau taught me one thing: not to fill my bucket too full. Told me to fetch a bucket of water. When I found it was too heavy to lift out of the well, he wouldn’t help me. No, sir, he wouldn’t help me. I learned then not to fill my bucket too full. I was only a lad of six or seven then. He always said there were only two naturalists. He was the naturalist, and I was the other one. We used to talk about birds and eggs and things we found in the woods. THE MELVINS OF CONCORD
September 7, Monday: The Second Round Table Conference on India opened in London, attended by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress.
Olivier Messiaen was offered the position of organist at L’Eglise de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris. He would accept. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
December 5, Saturday: Margers Skujenieks replaced Karlis Ulmanis as Prime Minister of Latvia.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, sole Congress Party delegate to the Round Table Conference on India, departed London for home.
A funeral mass in memory of Vincent d’Indy took place in the parish church of Saint-François Xavier in Paris. Soldiers lined the entire Boulevard des Invalides for the procession. The mortal remains were laid to rest in the cemetery of Montparnasse.
The journal Physical Review received the article “A Hydrogen Isotope of Mass 2” by Harold Urey, Ferdinand G. Brickwedde, and G.M. Murphy, wherein they announced their discovery of deuterium. This would be published in the January 1932 issue.
Vier kleine Stücke for orchestra by Franz Schreker was performed for the initial time, in Krefeld.
December 28, Monday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, returning emptyhanded to India from London, met an enormous hero’s welcome in Bombay.
Land of Luthany op.87 for cello and piano by Arthur Farwell was performed for the first time. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1932
At this point Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi attempted to disabuse Thoreauvians of their supposition that he had derived his “idea of civil disobedience from the writings of Thoreau.” Such an interpretation would be “wrong,” he stressed, pointing to the fact that “The resistance to authority in South Africa was already well advanced before I got the essay of Thoreau on civil disobedience.” (In order to check this allegation Linck Johnson has analyzed Gandhi’s references to “Civil Disobedience” in his newspaper Indian Opinion and confirms that “rather than taking his ideas from the essay,” Gandhiji had merely “used it to promote his campaign.”)
Dean Elbert Russell’s and Cawthon Asbury Bowen’s THE MESSAGE OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL (Nashville, Tennessee: Cokesbury Press). Reprinting of Dean Russell’s POSSIBLE INFLUENCE OF THE MYSTERIES ON THE FORM AND INTERRELATION OF THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS (16 pages; Officin Haag-Drugulin). RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
Dr. David Tillerson Smith became a member of the Climatological Association. He became Professor and Chairman of the Department of Microbiology at Duke University (until 1958).
January 4, Monday: The Indian government was granted emergency powers for six months. They declared the Indian National Congress illegal and immediately arrested Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Over the following two months, 33,000 people would be arrested without trial on the whim of any police official.
Sonatine for piano by Karl Amadeus Hartmann was performed for the initial time, in München. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
September 20, Tuesday: In Yeravda Prison, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi began a “fast unto death,” demanding greater representation for untouchables in the Indian government and protesting different electorates for castes.
Harry Partch was arrested, probably for vagrancy, in San Luis Obispo, California. He would spend the night in jail, thus ending about six months of wandering.
September 26, Monday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi broke his week-old fast when the British government acceded to his demands. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1933
May 8, Monday: As Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi began a 21-day fast for self-purification, the British released him from jail.
The Czechoslovak government banned 334 newspapers for spreading Nazi propaganda.
Cantiga de roda for female chorus and orchestra was performed for the initial time, in Rio de Janeiro, with the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos conducting.
Richard M. Suinn was born. He would promote improvements in the education of psychologists, with special focus on recruitment and training of ethnic minorities. In 1993 he would receive the Distinguished Career Contribution to Education and Training in Psychology Award of the American Psychological Association.10
August 1, Tuesday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was once again arrested and sentenced to one year imprisonment in Yeravda Prison, Poona.
An orchestral suite from incidental music to Flecker’s play Hassan, by Frederick Delius, was performed for the first time, over the airwaves of the BBC.
August 16, Wednesday: When prison authorities refused to allow him to work for untouchables, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi began a fast unto death. “You want to play hardball? I know how to play hardball.”
August 21, Monday: Near death, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was taken to Sassoon Hospital.
August 23, Wednesday: After three weeks in jail Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was released unconditionally in Poona. He had begun a fast eight days earlier to protest his imprisonment and at his release weighed 40 kilos.
10. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1935
September 10, Tuesday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi wrote to P.K. Rao: The statement that I had derived my idea of Civil Disobedience from the writings of Thoreau is wrong. The resistance to authority in South Africa was well advanced before I got the essay.... When I saw the title of Thoreau’s great essay, I began to use his phrase to explain our struggle to the English readers. But I found that even “Civil Disobedience” failed to convey the full meaning of the struggle. I therefore adopted the phrase “Civil Resistance.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1938
Senator Harry S Truman helped draft the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938.
The 1st Volkswagen was assembled by hand with an air-cooled rear engine in Nazi Germany, and the cornerstone of a new factory was put into position. This people’s car would not go into production for another decade — but eventually, delayed somewhat by a major war, some 18,000,000 would be being driven around.
Time Magazine made Führer Adolf Hitler its “Man of the Year” and wrote an appreciative profile of Der Führer. There was a special performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in honor of Hitler’s birthday. In Britain, the editor of the London Times, Geoffrey Dawson, had no doubt that an Anglo/German deal was vital for world peace. Hitler was presenting his invasions as defensive and humanitarian operations that were being necessitated by the threat posed to the 3rd Reich at home or to ethnic Germans abroad by evil locals in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, etc. Gertrude Stein had been plumping for Hitler to be the recipient. “I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany,” she had written in the New York Times Magazine during May 1934. “By driving out the Jews and the democratic and left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.... By suppressing Jews ... he was ending struggle in Germany.” ANTISEMITISM
The Nobel Peace Prize committee’s “Short List” for the gold medal was headed by Führer Adolf Hitler as civilization’s bulwark against Bolshevism — and by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi as the East’s proper response to Western imperialism — but in the end the good folks in Norway would “chicken out” and award their humongous prize less controversially, to the Nansen International Office for Refugees (Office International Nansen pour les Réfugiés), a soon-to-be-dispensed-with agency of the League of Nations.
ALFRED NOBEL HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
Pearl “John Hedges” Sydenstricker Buck also received a Nobel. CHINA
Führer Hitler wasn’t the only guy who was doing national unity and the suppression of internal dissent during this period. When, a few years later, German troops would occupy the town of Vinnitsa in Russia, they would find any number of mass graves full of the corpses of Kulaks, small landowners, each one shot in the neck as an “enemy of the people” for not having embraced the collectivization policies of Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili, known as “Stalin.” Local Ukrainians would tell them that from 1938 until their arrival the trucks had been coming and going day and night, bringing these Kulaks from NKVD prisons.
Anne Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s LISTEN! THE WIND. Charles Lindbergh’s Grosskreuz Des Ordens Vom Deutschenadler, presented to him by Hermann Goering at the suggestion of Führer Hitler. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1939
March 3, Friday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi began a fast at Rajkot in favor of administrative reform. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1941
December 30, Tuesday: Japanese forces occupied Kuantan, Malaya, 280 kilometers north of Singapore.
United States and Philippine troops on Luzon fell back to the last defensive line before Bataan.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi resigned as leader of the All-India National Congress Party because he considered that the party’s committee had abandoned non-violence. Soviet troops captured Kaluga, 160 kilometers southwest of Moscow, Tula, 165 kilometers south of Moscow and Kozelsk, 220 kilometers southwest of Moscow from the German Army.
Admiral E.J. King assumed duties as Commander in Chief United States Fleet. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1942
July 14, Tuesday: Newsreel, in Five Shots for orchestra by William Schuman was performed for the initial time, in New York.
Accepting a proposal by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Indian National Congress resolved that the British must immediately “quit India.” WORLD WAR II
August 4, Tuesday: Great Britain charged that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s “All India Congress Party” favored “appeasement.” The US War Production Board prohibited the manufacture of typewriters for private use, beginning as of October 31st (if typewriters are outlawed, only bureaucrats will have typewriters).
United States Destroyer Tucker (DD-374) sank in a United State minefield in the Segond Channel, Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides. WORLD WAR II
August 9, Sunday: Several leaders of the All-India Congress Party were arrested in cities throughout India, including Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Gandhi was at this point being interned by the British in the Aga Khan’s palace at Poona. Rioting began in major cities causing hundreds of injuries and arrests.
German forces captured Maikop and Krasnodar in the foothills of the Caucasus, and the nearby oil fields — but the Soviets blew up these oil wells as they withdrew.
Symphony no.7 “Leningrad” by Dmitri Shostakovich was performed in the besieged city for which it was named. The score had been delivered to the front by a transport plane that was bringing medical supplies. The number of musicians living in the city being too small to perform the work, musicians serving on the Leningrad front were released from their military duties for the duration of the performance, and retired musicians were pressed into service. The musicians were allowed extra rations to buoy their strength. The hall was filled to capacity and the concert was broadcast on speakers throughout the city. Just before the performance, Soviet commanders bombarded the German lines to ensure their silence — and speakers had been set up so as to HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
ensure that the enemy troops would be able to hear the music.
Over the resistance of lightly armed Jews, the Mir ghetto was liquidated.
The 1st Battle of Savo Island commenced in the darkness as a Japanese force of 7 cruisers and 1 destroyer approached undetected, west of Savo Island in the Solomon Islands, 9 degrees 42 minutes South, 158 degrees 59 minutes East. In an one-hour engagement they sank 4 Allied cruisers and damaged another cruiser and 2 destroyers by torpedo and gunfire, and then retired. The American warships were protecting and escorting US troop transports en route to Guadalcanal. The Allied ships were temporarily withdrawn from the waters around HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
Guadalcanal, leaving the Marines onshore very much on their own.11
United States naval vessels sunk: • Heavy cruisers Astoria (CA-34) (216 died), Quincy (CA-39) (529 died), and Vincennes (CA-44) (332 died), by naval gunfire (4th cruiser sunk was the Australian HMAS Canberra under Captain Frank Getting, on which 85 died; many of Canberra’s survivors were rescued by the American destroyers USS Patterson and USS Blue, but then the Blue would be itself sunk with all hands on August 23d)12 • While escorting troop transports during the Guadalcanal landings, the American destroyer USS Jarvis (DD-393) was hit by an aerial torpedo and a hole 50 feet long opened to its boiler room. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
(After emergency repairs at Lunga Point it would set out for Brisbane, Australia. Limping along at 8 knots, it would be a sitting duck for a swarm of Japanese dive bombers of the 25th Air Flotilla from Rabaul, which would come upon it near Cape Esperance. A hit from one of their torpedoes would split the ship in two and within minutes it would take to the bottom its captain, Lieutenant Commander Graham, and its entire crew of 247.)
In addition the heavy cruiser Chicago (CA-29) was damaged by a torpedo from a Japanese destroyer
11. At a first order of approximation there seems to be a remarkable similarity between fighting at sea and feeding fish.
12. A half-century later, a deep-sea diving team led by Robert R. Ballard and including one of the Canberra’s survivors, Ordinary Seaman Albert Warne, would place a plaque on the battered but upright hull “In Memory Of Our Fallen Comrades.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
• destroyers Ralph Talbot (DD-390) and Patterson (DD-392), by naval gunfireTotal Allied losses
were 1,077 dead and 709 wounded. A number of floaters, covered with blood and oil, struggling in the water, were taken by sharks. Total Japanese losses were 58 dead and 70 wounded. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1943
February 23, Tuesday: 39 Jewish boys were murdered by Germans in Zamosc, Poland by means of phenol injections. ANTISEMITISM
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill rejected a petition for the release of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. WORLD WAR II
February 26, Friday: The first transport of Gypsies to Auschwitz. Führer Adolf Hitler liked these people because he thought of them, despite their swarthiness, as the “original Aryans.” He did in fact mean them no particular harm. They were to be placed in Auschwitz II in a “Gypsy Camp” — until Germany’s wartime exigencies would lead to extermination.
George Bernard Shaw wrote that King George should release Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and “apologize to him for the mental defectiveness of his cabinet.”
Symphony no.5 by Roy Harris was performed for the initial time, in the Symphony Hall of Boston, Massachusetts.
Prayer, 1943 for orchestra by William Schuman was performed for the initial time, in Pittsburgh (the name of this piece would be changed to Prayer in Time of War).
The 14th of 18 patriotic fanfares for brass and percussion commissioned by Eugene Goossens and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Fanfare for the Medical Corps by Anis Fulcihan was performed for the initial time, in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Vladimir Ussachevsky, currently a member of the US Army, got married with a poet, Elizabeth Denison Kray, in Seattle.
Sergei Rakhmaninov arrived home in Los Angeles, after a train ride of 60 hours from New Orleans. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
April 22, Thursday: A federal court in New Delhi, India decided that the rule under which 8,000 Congress Party members (including Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru) had been imprisoned had been invalid.
Allied (Great Britain-United States) forces begin the final assault on the German and Italian defenders in Tunisia.
The Japanese warned that captured American bomber crewmen would receive “One way tickets to hell.”
Japanese aircraft bombed the airfield at Funafuti in the Ellice Islands.
The United States Submarine Grenadier (SS-210) was sunk by enemy air attack and scuttling in the Straits of Malacca. WORLD WAR II
August 9, Monday: German submarine U-664 was sunk by aircraft (VC-1) from escort carrier Card (CVE-11) in the North Atlantic area, 40 degrees 12 minutes North, 37 degrees 29 minutes West.
Hundreds were arrested in a march on the Aga Khan’s villa in Poona in which Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had been imprisoned. They were protesting on the anniversary of his arrest.
Danish prime minister Scavenius refused a German demand that saboteurs be tried in German courts.
American forces captured Cesaro, Sicily. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1944
May 5, Friday: Admiral S. Toyoda became Commander in Chief of Japanese Combined Fleet succeeding Admiral Koga, who had been killed in an airplane crash on March 31st.
After almost two years internment in the Aga Khan’s palace in Poona, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was for medical reasons released unconditionally. This would prove to have been his final imprisonment. During his life the Mahatma has spent a total of 2,338 days in jail.
United States naval vessels sunk: • Destroyer escort Fechteler (DE-157), by submarine torpedo, western Mediterranean area, 36 degrees 7 minutes North, 2 degrees 40 minutes West • PT-247, by coastal defense gun, Solomon Islands area, 6 degrees 38 minutes South, 156 degrees 1 minute East WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1945
September 23, Sunday: China occupied Laos north of the 16th parallel.
The All-India Congress Committee led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru rejected British self-government proposals and demanded independence.
Egypt demanded British withdrawal from their country, and incorporation of Sudan into Egypt. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1946
October 29, day: A train carrying Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was attacked and stoned in Aligarh.
The Vagabonds, a ballet to Mai-Dun and the Concertino pastorale by John Ireland, was performed for the initial time, in Sadler’s Wells Theater, London.
November 6, Wednesday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in Noakhali on a pilgrimage of peace and viewed the results of the recent massacres.
The British National Health Act received royal assent.
The United States broke relations with Albania.
Deux mélodies for voice and piano by Francis Poulenc to words of Apollinaire was performed for the initial time, in Salle Gaveau, Paris, with the composer himself at the keyboard. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1947
August 15, Friday: From this day until September 2d, the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (Rio Treaty). READ THE FULL TEXT
At the stroke of midnight India became an independent nation. (Thoreau Society member R. Viswamurthy has pointed out to us that Henry Thoreau delivered his “Civil Disobedience” lecture on January 26, 1848 and that roughly one century later his nation became a republic — largely as a consequence of the efforts of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who, he alleged without bothering to substantiate the allegation, had been profoundly affected by Thoreau’s famous essay.)
September 1, Monday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi began a fast unto death to protest violence in Calcutta.
Arthur Honegger’s condition was much improved and he seemed out of danger.
Jewish leaders reacted favorably to the plan for Palestine set out by the United Nations. The Arab High Commission in Cairo announced that “any attempt to carry out [the plan] would set Palestine and the Arab world on fire…” ANTISEMITISM
September 4, Thursday: After peace came to Calcutta, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi broke his fast.
The Indian military announced that 100,000 Hindus and Sikhs had been killed in East Punjab, when Muslims refused to allow them to escape from a flood. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1948
January 18, Sunday: Robinson Jeffers’s “Poetry, Gongorism and A Thousand Years” appeared in the New York Times Magazine.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi ended a 5-day fast in New Delhi when Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh leaders pledged a guarantee of communal peace.
January 20, Tuesday: A bomb exploded 25 meters from where Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was addressing a meeting in Delhi.
17 members of the National Peasant Party were convicted of sedition and sentenced to up to ten years by a Bucharest court.
January 30, Friday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was shot down in New Delhi by Nathuram Vinayak Godse, editor of a Hindu extremist newspaper in Poona. Godse was immediately subdued by the surrounding crowd. The United Nations began a three-day period of mourning. THE EVENT AS IT HAPPENED
The Fifth Winter Olympic Games opened in St. Moritz, Switzerland. The Winter Olympic games had not been held since 1936 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
Variations, Chaconne and Finale for orchestra by Norman Dello Joio was performed for the initial time, in Pittsburgh.
The British government announced that it would not allow Jews in Palestine to organize and train for their self- defense. ANTISEMITISM
January 31, Saturday: After a funeral procession through Delhi, witnessed by as many as 1,000,000 people, the mortal remains of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi were cremated by the banks of the Jumna River. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
February 12, Thursday: At the end of a 13-day mourning period in India and Pakistan, the ashes of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi were given to the Ganges in a ceremony at Allahabad.
Robinson Jeffers’s editor at Random House, Saxe Commins, again wrote the poet, when he received the new version of the manuscript that was to become THE DOUBLE AXE AND OTHER POEMS. He pointed out that to alter the line about FDR, “to feed the vanity of a paralytic,” into “to feed the power hunger of a paralyzed man,” was hardly a change at all. He wanted the line changed to “to feed the power hungry.” He also objected to the characterization of President Harry S Truman as “little.”
May 27, Thursday: Narayan Vinayak Godse and eight others were indicted in a New Delhi court for the murder of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
In a furious attack, Arabs captured a third of the remaining territory of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. King Abdullah of Transjordan entered the Old City and was proclaimed “King of Jerusalem.”
Three Interludes for string orchestra by Kenneth Gaburo was performed for the initial time, in Rochester, New York, conducted by Howard Hanson. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
November 3, Wednesday: In a New Delhi court, Narayan Vinayak Godse confessed to the murder of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and asked to be put to death.
The first bathyscaphe, created by Auguste Piccard, made an unmanned first test off Dakar, reaching a depth of 1,371 meters.
Prelude, Fugue, Postlude for organ by Arthur Honegger from his music for Amphion, was performed for the initial time, in Geneva.
The American electorate awakened to learn that contrary to all expectations, they had re-elected President Harry S Truman to a 2d term in office as President of the United States of America. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
December 31, Friday: The Netherlands accepted a United Nations cease-fire proposal for Java. Its military drive through the islands was essentially complete.
GD Searle & Co. marketed dimenhydrinate tablets, later registered as Dramamine®.
Howard Hanson’s Piano Concerto was performed for the initial time, in Boston, the composer himself conducting. On the same program was the premiere of Lukas Foss’ Recordare for orchestra. This work had been begun on the day on which Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had been killed, and was dedicated to his memory. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1949
February 10, Thursday: Nathuram Vinayak Godse and Narayan Battatraya Apte were sentenced to death in a New Delhi court for the murder of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Apte was convicted of leading the conspiracy, Godse of being the hit man. Five other conspirators received sentences of life in prison and one of the accused was acquitted.
The US Army released a 32,000-word report detailing a massive Soviet spy ring in East Asia. Author Agnes Smedley and Gunther Stein were named as members of the ring. Richard Sorge, former press officer for the German embassy in Tokyo, was named as the ringleader.
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller opened in New York.
November 15, Tuesday: Nathuram Vinayak Godse, convicted murderer of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and a co- conspirator, were hanged in Ambala.
The western allies informed the West German government that they would cease the dismantling of German industries for reparations.
The Song of the Forests op.81, an oratorio by Dmitri Shostakovich to words of Dolmatovsky, was performed for the initial time, in Leningrad Philharmonic Bolshoy Hall. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1962
Robert F. Williams’s NEGROES WITH GUNS (New York: Marzani & Munsell; reprinted Wayne State UP, 1998) denigrated the black-on-white civil disobedience of the American civil rights movement by contrasting this with the reality of white-on-black violence which he had been experiencing in his own life trajectory. The Afro-American cannot forget that his enslavement in this country did not pass because of pacifist moral force or noble appeals to the Christian conscience of the slave-holders. Henry David Thoreau is idealized as an apostle of non-violence, the writer who influenced Gandhi, and through Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. But Thoreau was not dogmatic; his eyes were open and he saw clearly. I keep with me a copy of Thoreau’s “A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN”. There are truths that are just as evident in 1962 as they were in 1859 when he wrote: ... It was his [John Brown’s] peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but such will be more shocked by his life than by his death. I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I speak for the slave when I say, that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.... I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail!... We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our henroosts, and maintain slavery. I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharpe’s rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them or the like. I think that for once the Sharpe’ s rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them. The same indignation that is said to have cleared the temple once will clear it again. The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it. No man has appeared in America, as yet, who loved his fellowman so well, and treated him so tenderly. He [John Brown] lived for him. He took up his life and he laid it down for him. What HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
sort of violence is that which is encouraged, not by soldiers, but by peaceable citizens, not so much by laymen as by ministers of the Gospel, not so much by the fighting sects as by the Quakers, and not so much by Quaker men as by Quaker women? This event advertises me that there is such a fact as death; the possibility of a man’s dying. It seems as if no man had ever died in America before; for in order to die you must first have lived. It is in the nature of the American Negro, the same as all other men, to fight and try to destroy those things that block his path to a greater happiness in life. READ SEVERAL CHAPTERS HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1969
Late August: Daniel Ellsberg, a Harvard graduate who had served as a lieutenant in charge of a company in the US Marine Corps and then returned to Harvard to obtain a PhD in economics, had in 1959 joined the RAND corporation’s Economics Department as an analyst, and in 1964 during the Johnson Administration had served in the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara, and then had done a 2-year stint in
Vietnam for the State Department, and then had returned to RAND. He was the first Rand researcher to work directly for the president’s assistant for national security. He had just been reading Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on civil disobedience when he met Randall Keeler, discovering to his amazement that this conscientious objector was actually ready to accept a prison sentence in order to attempt to raise a moral issue to his countrymen. Randy was about to be tried for draft resistance and expected to go to prison (he would in fact serve two years). He changed Daniel Ellsberg’s life by his example. Ellsberg for the first time found himself asking himself what he could do to help end the Vietnam affair if he were willing to go to prison. He would try to arrange to testify before Congress, and in preparation for such testimony, would begin to make himself a personal copy of the Pentagon Papers with which he was working, all 7,000 pages of them. When Ellsberg had been a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam, he had thought of himself as serving the president -- because the Marines tend to think of themselves as a fast reaction force that is at the Commander-in-Chief’s disposal. Reading through these papers as he copied them burned out of him all desire to work for the executive branch, for in these 7,000 pages he saw how five presidents in a row had been operating in an utterly stubborn, selfish, foolish, immoral, and illegal manner year after year for 24 years. He found himself no longer wanting to function as the president’s man. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
And the point was that what Randy Keeler revealed to me was that there were other ways of being conscientious than serving the president. There are other kinds of courage. And I had to ask myself, well, if I was willing to be blown up in Vietnam or captured, as friends of mine were, when I accepted the cause or supported it, should I not be willing to go to prison or risk my freedom? And when I faced that question, it was quickly answered. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1973
Lawrence Buell. LITERARY TRANSCENDENTALISM. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1973 Amidst all the changes that have shaken the modern study of literature, scholarship in Transcendentalism continues to hoe the rows laid out by pioneers in the field. The notions of Transcendentalism formulated in the 19th Century meshed with ideal values that were, in turn, associated with “America”: independence, genteel virtues, liberalism and individualism, democracy. But, in our own time, the discounting of these ideal motives has left Transcendentalist criticism without any grounding purpose, and like the cartoon figure who rushes off a cliff, it has been running in the air for forty years, prevented from falling only because it refuses to look down and discover its situation. ... Transcendentalism does not provide the theory about which the classic American writing organized itself. It does not symbolize the birth of a truly American character, or represent a coherent literary and social movement with lines of influence reaching down to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and modern environmentalism. In this altered light, Transcendentalism is not only a critical invention but an obsolete critical invention, and discarding it leaves us with just that feature that has most troubled and dissatisfied criticism, a collection of texts that have no categorical home. — Carafiol, Peter C. THE AMERICAN IDEAL: LITERARY HISTORY AS A WORLDLY ACTIVITY. NY: Oxford UP, 1991, pages 86, 93. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1976
Kenneth Walter Cameron TRANSCENDENTAL APPRENTICESHIP: NOTES ON YOUNG HENRY THOREAU’S READING: A CONTEXTURE WITH A RESEARCHER’S INDEX (Hartford CT: Transcendental Books).
J.S. Bright, in GANDHIAN THOUGHT INCLUDING A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THOREAU PHILOSOPHY (New Delhi: Panka, 1976, 42 pages), considered Thoreau as having been Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s guru and considered Gandhi as having been the actual reincarnation of Thoreau. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1991
July: A license was issued for the Oman Sea One to fish for crabs in St. Helena’s waters.
Three Russians, Nikita Pokrovsky, Mikhail T. Gusev, and Piotr M. Saveliev, led The Thoreau Society in a non- violence walk from the plaque marking the site where Henry was put in jail for refusing to fund slavery and the war upon Mexico (Massachusetts has long since torn down this Middlesex County prison that used to stand in the center of Concord, replacing it with several much more commodious facilities just down the road), out to Walden Pond, the site of Thoreau’s experiment in freedom.
One of these Russians, Piotr, had just come from leading a non-violence walk in the heart of Russia, a walk “in search of the green stick” which began in Yasnaya Polyana at the grave of Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy, the great Russian apostle of nonviolence.
I would like to support these three in their effort. I would like to provide them with a literary and theoretical underpinning for their fine use of the corpus of our Henry. We need this because there is a real question whether Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. were as nonviolent as Tolstòy. Gandhi explained forthrightly that for him nonviolence was a mere tactic, not a way of life. He said that Russians did not understand the tactic of non-violence, that had it been the Russians in India rather than the British in India, his people would have been forced to resort to violence. The Reverend King likewise.
One may usefully contrast Gandhi with Saul Alinsky on means and ends. Here is Gandhi:
Where there is no desire for fruit, there is no temptation for untruth or himsa. Take an instance of untruth or violence, and it will be found that at its back is the desire to attain the cherished end.
And here is Alinsky:
The man of action views the issues of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms.... He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1993
Publication of a reassuring book entitled THE BOOK YOUR CHURCH DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ, Tim C. Leedom editor, by “The Truth Seeker Company.” Now from time to time we run into “village atheist” types, who define themselves in opposition to the hypocrisy of religion, and from time to time we hear Henry Thoreau disparaged as one of these types who define themselves in opposition, who know everything about everything that is wrong with everybody else. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
So I looked into this new volume with some trepidation, wondering to what use they would be attempting to turn the memory of Thoreau. In scanning through the 400+ glossy pages of this publication, I failed to note any citations, and then at the end I discovered an appendix which attempted to make a list of the “Freethinkers” who are to be honored by these naysayers. And, glory be, Thoreau’s name is not on that rather extensive list! Here are a few of the “Freethinkers,” with the characterizations under which they have been selected out to be thus honored:
Freethinkers
Marlon Brando Movie actor; specializes in morally intense roles
John Burroughs Nature lover and naturalist; biographer and close friend of Walt Whitman
John Caldwell Calhoun American statesman of the early 19th century; favored states’ rights
Charles Darwin English naturalist, author of ORIGIN OF SPECIES
Erasmus Darwin English botanist and physician, grandfather of Charles
Charles Dickens Novelist
Frederick Douglass Abolitionist
Charles W. Eliot President of Harvard for over 40 years
Waldo Emerson American philosopher and author
Edward Everett Politician, minister, Harvard president
Benjamin Franklin American writer, statesman, and inventor HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
Freethinkers
Mahatma Gandhi Nationalist leader, Hindu, organizer of non-violent resistance
William Lloyd Garrison Abolitionist
William Godwin English philosopher
Horace Greeley Founder of the New-York Tribune
Oliver Wendell Holmes American physician and author
Julia Ward Howe Abolitionist and Suffragist
Thomas Jefferson US President, lawyer, statesman, diplomat, philosopher
Immanuel Kant german philosopher, considered by some to be one of the greatest of modern thinkers
John Locke English philosopher
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow American Poet
James Madison President and youngest of the Founding Fathers; helped bring about ratification of the Constitution and passage of the Bill of Rights
Horace Mann American educator
Florence Nightingale English nurse, philanthropist
Thomas Paine Writer and political theorist. The mind behind the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence
Benjamin Pierce Mathematician, astronomer
Jean Jacques Rousseau French publisher and author
Arthur Schopenhauer Philosopher
Percy Bysshe Shelley English romantic poet, wrote THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft
B.F. Skinner Behaviorist, psychologist, signed 1973 Humanist Manifesto
Herbert Spencer Philosopher, psychologist, sociologist
Mark Twain American author, humorist
Catherine Vogel Burned in 1539 for being a Unitarian
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe German poet
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz German philosopher
Alfred Russel Wallace naturalist, devoted life to scientific entomology
Walt Whitman American poet, true inheritor of Emersonian principles
Mary Wollstonecraft Wrote VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN, friend of Thomas Paine, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1995
During her visit to India, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton scheduled an hour in Ahmadabad with the Self- Employed Women’s Association, and as Newsweek would record:
[t]he entire throng began to sing. The song was familiar, but elusive. Slowly, it became clear: they were singing “We Shall Overcome” in the Gujarati dialect. Hillary Clinton later said she found herself thinking about the great circle — from Henry Thoreau, who was read by Gandhi, who in turn inspired Martin Luther King, whose anthem these women were now singing. A precisely perfect thought, of course. But the human reaction that accompanied it was far more memorable: as they sang, tears welled in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s eyes.
There are many who ruminate in the sentimental manner in which Hillary ruminate about such matters. It is exceedingly common to hear armchair influence studies not only from utterly ignorant politicians such as she and from utterly ignorant news magazines such as this one, but also from supposedly well grounded Thoreau scholars, that venture along the sublimely fulsome line “Thoreau influenced Tolstòy –and Gandhi –and King.” To counter this sort of terminal silliness I have developed a series of “complication” studies: SOMEONE ELSE INFLUENCED TOLSTOY SOMEONE ELSE INFLUENCED GANDHI SOMEONE ELSE INFLUENCED M.L.KING
In the final two years of the Clinton administration, policy would shift back to the dual-use biological warfare HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
hypocrisy that had been so typical of the Reagan era. Again, hundreds of millions of dollars were being committed to research, developing every known exotic disease in a weaponized form — but only, of course, for defensive purposes. GERM WARFARE
Finally, the New York Times would be persuaded that it had to break the story that this sentimentalism was a stone fraud, that the administration was in fact violating both the international Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention that the US had entered into on April 10, 1972 and the domestic Biological Weapons Anti- Terrorism Act of 1989 by using genetic engineering to develop a resistant strain of anthrax, and producing this weaponized super-anthrax in quantities and strengths that had no legitimate defensive purpose. (Since this was the strain that would be surreptitiously put in the US mail by a US weapons scientist just after 9/11, that would unfortunately off a number of us, perhaps it should termed not “dual-use” but “triple-use”!) HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
March 20, Monday: Roth Publishing Inc. included Henry Thoreau’s poems “Mist” and “Smoke” in their CD-ROM collection entitled and trademarked as THE WORLD’S BEST POETRY ON CD, along with commentary informing their audience that this poet had led “a solitary, contemplative life” during which he “seldom strayed far” from his “environs” of Concord, Massachusetts. Among other errors, Thoreau had reached his 45th birthday when he died, and the movement of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. for which he was without doubt the sole inspiration is now known as “passive resistance.” To all intents and purposes the commentary appears to have been written by the shade of James Russell Lowell, in that Ralph Waldo Emerson is characterized as “older, renowned,” and in that it is suggested that Thoreau was lucky in his place of birth, in it fortuitously having positioned him “in close contact” with such an inspiration, allowing “the younger man” not only to take care of the Emerson family chores but also to “share” many of this renowned Transcendentalist’s convictions and orientations. However, like Emerson (of course), this poet was “less interested in nature for its own sake than for its symbolic representation of spiritual values”: Low-anchored cloud, Newfoundland air, Fountain-head and source of rivers, Dew-cloth, dream-drapery, And napkin spread by fays; Drifting meadow of the air, Where bloom the daisied banks and violets And in whose fenny labyrinth The bittern booms and heron wades; Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers,-- Bear only perfumes and the scent Of healing herbs to just men’s fields. Light-winged Smoke! Icarian bird, Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight; Lark without song, and messenger of dawn Circling above the hamlets as thy nest; Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts; By night star-veiling, and by day Darkening the light and bloating out the sun; Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth, And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
Henry David Thoreau’s special affection for nature is probably his most celebrated attribute. Delighting in the rural qualities of his birthplace, Concord, Massachusetts, described by him as “the most estimable place in all the world,” he seldom strayed far from its environs. It provided an ideal milieu for one dedicated, as he was, to a solitary, contemplative life aimed at developing the inner man. His place of birth was also propitious in that it was the home of the older, renowned Ralph Waldo Emerson. The two were in close contact; Thoreau at various times even lived in Emerson’s house, where he performed odd jobs. Sharing many of Emerson’s transcendental beliefs and very likely inspired by his essay, “Nature,” Thoreau was regarded as Emerson’s disciple.... [L]ike Emerson, he was basically a mystic, less interested in nature for its own sake than for its symbolic representation of spiritual values.... the ascetic life was well suited to his unmarried status... By age 32, not having married, he was again living at home and supporting himself by being the village handyman. He also busied himself with botanical studies and, of course, writing. He died of HDT WHAT? INDEX
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tuberculosis at age 45... the inspiration for one of the twentieth century’s most important movements, passive resistance, used so effectively by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his fight for civil rights and Mahatma Gandhi in winning India’s independence from Great Britain. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
1997
January/February: Andrews, Joseph L., Jr. “The struggle for Walden.” Humanist 57:1:30-3313 Walden Pond in Lincoln and Concord, Massachusetts —a worldwide symbol of the conservation movement— has become a battleground for often-angry opposing environmental-action groups. Some seek to preserve it as a “sanctuary,” accessible only to walkers, while others desire to maintain its current recreational uses for swimming, fishing, and boating. With over 600,000 visitors from all over the world flocking annually to Walden’s shores to rediscover the beauty of its waters and the inspiration of its forests and meadows, this is a dispute of some urgency. Meanwhile, the surrounding Walden Woods —recently threatened by developers who sought to bulldoze trees to make way for homes, office buildings, and parking lots— has been rescued for now by Don Henley, a Texas-bred, Hollywood-based rock-and-roll musician, whose Walden Woods Project has so far raised over $11 million and purchased 96 critical acres. But serious questions remain regarding some of his organization’s other expenditures. And the long-term future of Henry David Thoreau’s WALDEN is not at all certain.
(MORE, ON FOLLOWING SCREENS)
(Did this author really intend that he considers that the long-term future of Thoreau’s WALDEN is not at all certain — or did he merely mean to repeat that the future of the pond in Walden Woods was not at all certain?)
13. Joseph Lyon Andrews, Jr., is an internist and teacher at Tufts Medical School. His articles have appeared in the Boston Globe and other papers, and he is involved in numerous environmental efforts in the Concord, Massachusetts, area. This article is adapted from a portion of his forthcoming book, CONCORD UNCOVERED. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1998
Gottlieb, Gottlieb, Bowers and Bowers produced a treatise entitled 1,000 YEARS, 1,000 PEOPLE: RANKING THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO SHAPED THE MILLENNIUM (Japan, New York: Kodansha America). Of the 1,000 influential people these authors report from the millennium, 1000AD to 1998AD, they list Henry David Thoreau, “America’s down-to-earth philosopher,” as their 375th most influential. Emerson, by way of contrast, has come in at 504th place. (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi comes in as 2nd most influential person of the millennium, after Gutenberg.) In their list of the 1,000 most influential of the millennium, Ronald Reagan and Pocahontas don’t quite make the cut, ditto for Bill Gates and Lady Godiva. Here’s what they have to say about their #375, Thoreau, has “shaped the millennium”: Most deep thinkers are a day late and a dollar short when it comes to implementing ideas. We like Thoreau because he didn’t just talk about man’s return to nature, he lived it. Thoreau and pal Ralph Waldo Emerson (ranked 504th) laid down the tenets of Transcendentalism, which paid homage to nature and the individual. Emerson was cozy in his Concord, Massachusetts home when Thoreau chopped down some trees, built a cabin on Walden Pond, and wrote about his two-year experiment. He parlayed an overnight jail visit for failing to pay his poll tax into CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, which made him the patron saint of the 1960s antiwar movement. At the time no one paid much attention: one night in prison –commuted when an unknown benefactor paid the tax– hardly seemed fodder for lofty ideals of resistance to an unjust civil authority. Decades later, however, even India’s Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (rated 2nd) and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (rated 56th), found inspiration in Thoreau’s disobedience.
One lemma frequently added to this “influence” ploy has been that although Thoreau did influence all these people, ultimately their agendas failed, because ultimately all agendas of nonviolence always fail.
Gandhiji asked us to remember that there is always a limit to self-indulgence, but none to self-restraint.14 That’s not a description of our situation but is, rather, an exhortation; the fact that it is an exhortation rather than a description is amply demonstrated by the fact that it is something which needs to be said. By way of contrast, here’s a description of our real situation in this real world: every one who exalts himself will be humbled.15 MY LOBSTER-BASKET TALE My main point is how do we who struggle to live principled lives deal with people who are only looking for the flaw in our character in order to justify selling smallpox-tainted blankets to the Menominee, tainted meat to the Cherokee, slavery to the African and yet maintain that they are virtuous because of their relative material/power successes. No matter, our intention to continue living in tender spirits remains. But to move the nation back toward the center of democratic and (forbid) liberal attitudes toward the condition of all our inhabitants. Penn’s experiment failed in about 75 years, Gandhi's in 20 and Martin Luther King in a decade. 14. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi 1975, L:289. 15. Luke 18:14. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI GANDHIJI
However, the new Thoreau Institute’s many critics fault the project on several fronts, including: • Deceit: Millions of dollars raised from the public by the WWP for the advertised purpose of “purchasing forest lands to protect Walden Pond” are actually being used to purchase and endow the mansion and library for the exclusive use of selected scholars. • Cost/Image: The over $10 million that will eventually be spent on the elegant mansion and library seems incongruous in cost and spirit when contrasted with the $28.11 total that Thoreau spent to build his simple cabin by Walden Pond in 1845. • Access: The institute’s Lincoln Mansion will be open exclusively to visiting literary scholars, not to the general public, many of whom donated much of the money used for its purchase and development. The Thoreau Lyceum, which was sold in 1994 to help pay for the Adams mansion, had been open to all interested visitors. Ann McGrath, the lyceum’s long-time curator, stressed education for students, many of whom came by rail from Boston and required only a short walk to visit the lyceum. • Location: The institute is isolated at the end of a dirt road, deep in the Lincoln woods, compared to the lyceum, which was more accessible in the Concord town center. • Actions: The 1,400-member Thoreau Society, composed of out-of-town academics and other Thoreau enthusiasts, has been more concerned with esoteric discussions about the fine points of old books than with the activism required to restore the eroded banks of Walden Pond. What will be the future of Walden? Denise Morissey stresses that the 1993 DEM guidelines call for continued but limited swimming, fishing, picnicking, and hiking at Walden Pond. She feels that “sanctuary” status would be too difficult to enforce, since too many guards and police would be needed to keep recreational visitors away. Present plans call for shore bank restoration and tree-planting, which have begun to require temporary trail closures. Hopefully, the WWP’s land purchases will serve as a buffer between commercial and residential developments and provide environmental protection. Long-range plans call for the possible relocation of nearby Route 1A away from the pond for better safety, to lessen road-chemical runoff, to decrease car noise, and to enhance aesthetics. All of these measures must first be approved and then funded by the Massachusetts legislature. The WWP’s 1995 idea was to turn Walden Pond into an “international shrine” managed by the United Nations. It also wanted to return the woods surrounding the pond to its pre-Thoreauvian state. Many naturalists scoff that the subsequent removal of today’s trees, fish, and wildlife to reestablish an unknown past ecology would be an impossible task. But whatever occurs in the future, the shores of Walden Pond will continue to be trod by hundreds of thousands of feet of visitors from around the world, who come as pilgrims to experience the reality of this international symbol of environmental survival and natural beauty Can Walden survive its admirers and its feuding would-be protectors? In one form or another it must! For in Thoreau’s own words: “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
As the Pleistocene glacier covering northern New England retreated some 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, meltwater and suspended sand and gravel poured downward from the mile-thick glacier to produce an 80-foot-deep deposit. Huge chunks of ice broke off and stuck in the sand and gravel as temperatures warmed. When these chunks melted, they formed depressions filled in with melt-water called kettle holes, one of which was the 100- foot-deep Walden Pond, a body of crystal-clear water with no streams entering or leaving it. From that time until Europeans settled Concord in 1635, there was no appreciable change. Then some of Concords woods were cleared for farming and grazing. Two centuries later, though, Walden Woods still remained — a stand of pine forest used only for cutting fuel wood. Track for the Boston- Fitchburg Railroad was laid adjacent to Walden Pond in 1844, a year prior to Thoreau’s move there. More trees were cut for railroad ties and locomotive fuel by Irish workers who were housed in shanties around the pond. Thoreau was born in Concord in 1817 and returned home after graduating from Harvard in 1837. It was then that he began spending his mornings “sauntering” in Concord’s woods and meadows or floating over its ponds and rivers, and his afternoons recording detailed natural and philosophical observations in his journal, which later became the basis for his books and lectures. He also began a life-long friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, the minister turned American transcendentalist philosopher. Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature” profoundly influenced Thoreau with its revolutionary theme that each individual should seek a personal, fulfilling relationship with the natural world. Concord became the setting of the “New England Renaissance,” where Emerson and Thoreau, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May and Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller, befriended and visited each other, walked together through the woods, and penned literary works of international significance. In 1845, Emerson offered Thoreau the use of his newly purchased wood lot on Walden Pond to build his small cabin and live as a naturalist. Thoreau wanted the solitude to write a book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, in tribute to his lately deceased brother. He also wanted to observe nature directly. So Thoreau began his famous sabbatical, spending most of each day walking, observing, and writing. Yet he was no hermit, frequently hiking along the railroad track to visit his family in the village and renewing numerous visitors with whom he shared chairs in his cabin — “one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.” He planted and harvested a bean patch behind his cabin and sold the beans for money. He also hired out as a surveyor. In September 1847, having completed his experiment in simplicity, he became “a sojourner in civilized life again” and returned to Concord Village. The cabin was sold to Emerson’s gardener and was later moved and used to store grain; its roof was used for a pig sty. Thoreau meanwhile became involved with the issues of his day, speaking out against social injustice and slavery. His 1849 essay, “Civil Disobedience,” following his one-night stay in jail for refusal to pay tax for the Mexican War (which he felt would extend slavery), gained him worldwide fame and inspired later generations of social activists, including Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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In 1866, four years after Thoreau’s death, the Fitchburg Railroad built an excursion park on the shores of Walden Pond — complete with concessions, swings, boats, and halls for dining, dancing, and gathering for church meetings and Fourth of July celebrations. The park attracted more and more city-dwellers and was later expanded to include a baseball diamond and a cinder track for runners and bicyclists. It all lasted until 1902, when the park burned down. After World War I, the automobile brought increasing throngs to Walden — up to 2,000 people a day. This led to the building in 1917 of a bath house and a sand beach. In 1922, the Emerson, Forbes, and Heywood families gave 80 acres of land surrounding Walden Pond to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Their deed restricted activity to “preserving the Walden of Emerson and Thoreau, its shores and nearby woodlands, for the public who wish to enjoy the pond, the woods, and nature, including bathing, boating, fishing, and picnicking,” Management responsibility for the reservation was given to Middlesex County. By 1935, Sunday crowds numbered over 25,000, attesting to its popularity with both local residents and visitors. In 1938, the Town of Concord took over a 40-acre site across from Walden Pond as a town landfill. In 1945, the centennial of Thoreau’s move to Walden, amateur historian Roland Wells Robbins located and excavated the foundation of Thoreau’s chimney and stone floor; later, stone markers were erected at the cabin site near the pond’s north shore. But by 1949, conditions at Walden had gotten so bad with erosion of the shore and deforestation that the Thoreau Society (founded in 1941) demanded that the pond be restored to its natural state. In 1957, the county, in an attempt to enlarge the beach, chopped down 100 trees and gouged out the slope above the beach. The Thoreau Society and Save Walden Committee obtained a court injunction to stop the county’s project. Then in 1960, Judge Ammi Cutter handed down a ruling ordering the county to return Walden to the forested condition that had existed during Thoreau’s time. After Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent signed a bill in 1974 to switch the management of Walden Forest from Middlesex County to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ Department of Environmental Management, Walden was developed as a state recreational park. The DEM removed the ugly concrete bath house and later restricted the number of people using the park at any one time to approximately 1,000 (this was accomplished by limiting the number of parking spaces to 350). In the mid-1980s, two commercial developments were proposed; the Concord Office Park at Brister’s Hill was to have been dominated by a 11147,000- square-foot office budding with a 500-car-capacity parking lot; and a 139- condominium project (Concord Commons II) was to be built at Bear Garden Hill. Although the state-owned land immediately surrounding Walden Pond was protected, the towns of Concord and Lincoln and the Concord Land Trusts — 40 percent of the nearby area known in Thoreau’s day as Walden Woods — was unprotected from future commercial development. Tom Blanding, a Concord literary scholar and Thoreau biographer, then head of the Thoreau County Conservation Alliance, spoke out locally and on national television, calling attention to the proposed development of Walden Woods. His activity resulted m Walden Woods being placed on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of “America’s Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places” in 1991. It also was the cause of Don Henley’s involvement; seeing a CNN interview with Blanding, Henley’s interest in preserving Walden’s natural resources was immediately aroused — and the most recent stage of the Walden saga began. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Today, there are three primary groups locked in conflict over the future of Walden Pond and the best way to preserve the spirit of Thoreau. WALDEN FOREVER WILD, a group founded in 1980, was led by Mary Sherwood, America’s first woman forester — an individual who made it her task to plant trees and shrubs on the pond’s denuded slopes with her own hands. At age 89, she still often slept in a tent, Thoreau-like. Her aim was to make Walden Pond a “historical/educational sanctuary” where recreational activities like swimming are prohibited in order to preserve intact its natural and historical values. She has died, in July 2001. On the other side of the spectrum is Don Henley’s WALDEN WOODS PROJECT, founded in 1990, with offices in Boston. Declaring that “the preservation of historic Walden Woods is going to require a healthy dose of ‘operating’ in the real world,” Henley rallied a host of diverse Hollywood, New York, Washington, and Boston celebrities to the cause, including Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, James Earl Jones, Tom Hanks, Bette Midler, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise, Sting, Whoopie Goldberg, Ted Danson, Kirstie Alley, James Michener, Jimmy Carter, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Senator Ted Kennedy. A 1993 record, The Songs of the Eagles, featuring many Nashville recording stars, netted over $2 million for the project. A star-studded $250-a-plate gala dinner in Boston raised $1.5 million more. A 1993 Labor Day concert drew 48,000 fans and raised another $1.2 million. Henley also enlisted dozens of corporate sponsors —ranging from AT&T and MTV to Hard Rock International— raising a total of $11 million to date. Yet Don Henley has been dismissively called “Henley David Thoreau” by many locals who resent his glitzy entry with his “Hollywood big-bucks people” into their almost sacred Yankee Thoreauvian wilderness. In between these two organizations is the DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT which, according to Denise Morrissey of the Walden Pond State Reservation, aims to preserve a balance between the conservation and historic values of Walden and the active recreational uses of Walden Pond and Walden Woods for swimming, boating, fishing, picnicking, hiking, and crosscountry skiing. Of the 150 state parks managed by the DEM, Walden is the most popular, thronged by swimmers, fishers, boaters, and winter skiers, as well as walkers who wish to recapture the essence of Thoreau. The DEM tries its best to resist today’s pressures of suburbanization and commercialization in order to maintain Walden for present and future generations. In addition to disagreements over strategy, the major focus of controversy is the Walden Woods Project’s purchase in 1994 of the $1.5 million Adams Tudor mansion, a former fox-hunting lodge in Lincoln. Plans call for converting the mansion into the Thoreau Institute, with the collaboration of the scholarly THOREAU SOCIETY which would manage it. According to WWP executive director Kathi Anderson, “The institute will consist of a Thoreau library, archives, and accommodations for visiting scholars. It will also offer seminars on literary and environmental topics and reach out to schools via an electronic media center,” An additional $1.8 million will be spent on a new 5,500-square-foot library addition to the mansion to house an extensive collection of Thoreau’s books and related materials, some donated privately by families of three Thoreau scholars. The addition will also serve as a media center to project Thoreau’s thoughts onto the Internet via the Worldwide Web. The WWP is seeking an additional $6 million to $8 million to endow the Thoreau Institute, thus requiring over $10 million to purchase and sustain it. Groundbreaking ceremonies for the new institute, attended by Senator Edward Kennedy, Don Henley, and other luminaries, was held in September 1995, and construction is currently underway. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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We are traveling so fast, Can the inertia be deflected toward increasing peace? How do we get people to choose integrity?
I think I’ll respond to this idea that the agenda of nonviolence always fails, by recounting my lobster-basket parable. One day I, while I was a Marine infantry officer, I was issued a .45 and eight rounds of ammunition, and handed $80,000 in small bills in a brown paper sack, and told to go pay off some battalion that was arriving from sea duty. So I went down to the piers of San Francisco, locked that paper bag in the trunk of the car, and went touristing and shopping while waiting for the battalion to show up dockside. While there I was watching some lobsters in a wicker basket sitting on the pier, about three or four feet from the drop back into the safety of the brackish waters, and I noticed that the lid was not on the basket and the lobsters were groping around. I also had reason to notice that the guy who was running the lobster pot, the pot of steaming water in which these lobsters were one by one being transformed from dull green beasties to bright red beasties as customers selected them and purchased them, was keeping a careful eye on me. Evidently he was worried that I was going to grab a lobster and run for it, or something. So, partly to satisfy my curiosity and partly to disengage his suspicion, I asked him whether he wasn’t worried that his prize lobsters would heave themselves over the edge of this basket, scuttle over to the edge of the pier, and drop themselves back into the waves.
He said “Just watch them, you’ll see.” And presently I became aware that each time a lobster reached up and got a purchase on the edge of the basket and began to haul himself (or herself) upward on the wicker, another lobster or two would reach up and grab him or her and yank him or her back down into the bottom of the basket. They were keeping each other down and making certain that they would all one by one go into the pot and achieve that bright red coloration.
Well, I think it is like that with humans too. What would the world be like if there were no war and if there were no murder and if there were not any theft and if we just got along with one another perfectly and nobody ever got in anybody else’s way? I’ll tell you what the world would be like as of 2011. THERE WOULDN’T BE ANY HUMANS. We would have already destroyed our environment back in the days of the Roman Empire, or earlier, and extincted our silly selves, and the world would now be clean and beautiful, and empty of “intelligent” life.
It is suggested that Friend Penn’s experiment, Gandhiji’s experiment, and King’s experiment failed. I think not. The test of success is not perpetuation, as all good things must come to an end and be recreated afresh. Penn’s experiment was a success simply because it did come into being, and did not cease to have come into successful being merely because it “failed” to perpetuate itself — and likewise for Gandhi, and likewise for King. HDT WHAT? INDEX
GANDHIJI MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1999
May 3, Monday: A column citing Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” by Alex A. Vardamis, a retired US Army colonel and former director for European affairs at the Army War College, appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle: Stop Bombing, Read Thoreau The nation’s moral credibility is in jeopardy PRESIDENT CLINTON GAVE Monica a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” Too bad she did not reciprocate with another key 19th century text, Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” At this point in America’s protracted aerial war in the Balkans, President Clinton needs to read it. One wonders why this erstwhile admirer of romantic poetry now charts a policy of death and destruction. We are told that Clinton authorizes bombing to save the Kosovars, but surely their fate has worsened since the war began. Does Clinton bomb to improve his image? Or is he convinced by hawks, like Madeleine Albright, Bob Dole and John McCain, that he must win at all costs in order to preserve American military and political credibility? Somebody should warn the president that his, and the nation’s, moral credibility is in jeopardy. In “winning,” Clinton reflects the worst features of the enemy. Historians will link Clinton with this century’s other destroyers of the Balkans: the Austrian kaiser and the German fuehrer. In 1913, Franz Josef warned that when Austria “demands something, the Serb government must obey, and if it does not, then Belgrade will be bombarded and occupied until the will of His Majesty is fulfilled.” The result of that policy, the assassination of the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, triggered World War I. A generation later, in April 1941, Hitler’s Luftwaffe, in “Operation Punishment,” bombed Belgrade continuously for three days and three nights, reducing the city to rubble and killing 17,000 civilians. He never managed to quell Yugoslav resistance. Clinton should emulate neither the kaiser nor the fuehrer, but Thoreau. In his essay, “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau, in opposing America’s war with Mexico, urged citizens to elevate conscience over law, morality over politics, and right over expediency. Thoreau described “a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal ... marching in admirable order against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences.... The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.... In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense.” Thoreau foresaw that the General Wesley Clarks of this world, once unleashed, would blithely drop bombs and fire cruise HDT WHAT? INDEX
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missiles, with little regard for the death, dismemberment and destruction that they cause. Clearly, Clinton cannot rely on the military for ethical council. Do politicians show a keener moral sensibility? Thoreau thought otherwise. He wrote that “most legislators, politicians ... serve the state chiefly with their heads; and as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.” The Albrights, Doles and McCains are not reliable moral agents. They see the world in geopolitical terms. To whom can Clinton turn for moral advice? Thoreau would say he should seek out the “heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers, who serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.” Jimmy Carter comes to mind. So does the pope and Jesse Jackson. The president should consult with the members of Congress who opposed the bombing, as well as with the hawks. In the meantime, as we wait for Clinton to do the right thing, we citizens, too, should follow Thoreau’s advice and listen to the small, still voice of conscience. According to Thoreau, the only way to react to an immoral policy is to oppose it. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. took his advice and, through nonviolent protest, changed the world. The American public should demand, first of all, that the United States stop bombing. It is the policy of an immoral nation. Instead, our government should pursue a massive relief campaign to shelter, feed and clothe the refugees who are the victims of the NATO attacks. A new Marshall Plan would raise the standard of living of the entire area. The price of peace is cheap, compared to the cost of war and the moral disintegration of the Western world. Fresh negotiations, in the form of a neutral, high profile international conference, should be launched. Participants should include not only the western European nations that have already caused two world wars through their meddling in the Balkans, but, as well, the Russians, the Greeks, the Turks and other smaller, but perhaps wiser, powers. Have the conference chaired by true men of conscience, such as Nelson Mandela. Encourage reconciliation. Treat the Serbs and the Albanians like responsible adults. Offer all parties the good offices, but not the interference and threats, of the international community. True leadership shapes, it does not follow, public opinion. As Thoreau asked, “Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?” Clinton should muzzle the bombastic dogs of war and rechart a new course with Henry David Thoreau. In that direction lies moral and presidential greatness. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2002
November: REWRITE During the run up to the November elections, Vietnam veteran and triple amputee Max Cleland is shamelessly depicted as “unpatriotic” for voicing concerns over homeland security legislation. Though polls show Cleland leading Republican candidate Saxby Chambliss,” Chambliss defeats the Georgia senator in a surprising upset. A former worker in Diebold’s Georgia warehouse later contends that the company installed “patches on its machines before the state’s 2002 gubernatorial election that were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials.” During the 2002 midterm elections, e-voting continues to produce disturbing glitch-induced results; Exit polls are scrapped. After the 32 page Homeland Security Bill balloons to nearly 500 pages overnight, and is railroaded through the Senate and Congress, it is signed into law. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) says the bill “expands the federal police state,” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT) says it represents “the most severe weakening of the Freedom of Information Act” in 36 years. Following months of intensive lobbying by Sept 11 family members, an independent commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks is finally formed. Henry Kissinger is initially chosen to head the commission, but is later replaced by Gov. Thomas Kean. “This was not something that had to happen,” Kean later says of the Sept. 11 attacks.
A Reuters news report: WEST CHESTER, PA — Bayard Rustin, chief organizer of the 1963 march on Washington that culminated with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, is one of the most famous figures to emerge from this quaint 203-year- old town near Philadelphia.
But local school officials are not sure the black pacifist credited with introducing Mahatma Gandhi’s techniques of nonviolent protest to the U.S. civil rights movement would make a good role model for high school students at a time when the United States is pursuing its “war on terrorism.” The West Chester Area School Board, which oversees public schools in a predominantly white suburban area 25 miles west of Philadelphia in southeastern Pennsylvania, voted in May to name its third high school after Rustin. The new school is scheduled to house 1,300 students, beginning in 2005. “The process was fair and the choice was appropriate,” said school board Vice President Thomas Wolpert, who described Rustin as a “great leader of the civil rights HDT WHAT? INDEX
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movement.” But some board members later objected, saying they had learned that Rustin was a World War II conscientious objector who spent three years in federal prison rather than serve in the US armed forces or perform alternative civilian service. “It’s a dishonor to all veterans who died in that war,” said June Cardosi, a school board member who is pushing to have the new high school named instead after a landmark farm. Rustin, who died in 1987 at the age of 75, also was a homosexual and belonged to a communist youth organization while a college student in New York City in the 1930s. That, too, has ruffled feathers in the West Chester area, a largely Republican community whose residents recently hosted President Bush and made national headlines by opposing a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments plaque from the local county courthouse. WAR RECORD But the official bone of contention is his war record, which critics say makes him an unacceptable “convicted felon.” School board members have reported receiving complaints about the plan to name the school after Rustin, saying hundreds of residents have signed petitions against the move. Last month, the board asked a special committee to investigate Rustin’s background and make a recommendation within 90 days. “I knew he was black. I knew he was involved in civil rights stuff,” said board member Joseph Green, a Republican Party committeeman who initially voted for Rustin but had second thoughts after hearing about his days in prison. “One of the things a high school has to do in America in the 21st century is distribute selective service registration cards to high school seniors who are boys,” Green said. “And I don’t know if it’s appropriate to have as a role model someone who violated the laws on selective service and was incarcerated for that felonious violation.” The West Chester school board could consider its committee’s recommendation next month, but has not given any timetable for a decision. A documentary about Rustin’s life is due to air on U.S. public television in January. The school board’s decision outraged Rustin admirers including the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Chester County Democratic Committee, gay rights groups and peace activists, who are all now rallying to support his HDT WHAT? INDEX
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name. “You’d think the school board would be honored to have a building named after him,” said West Chester NAACP President Doris Bond, who does not believe board opposition to the Rustin name stems from his days in prison as a war resister. “I believe that’s the safest reason,” said Bond, who suspects the opposition has more to do with Rustin’s race and sexuality. “This is just a prejudiced, small- minded town.” Something all agree on is that Rustin was a civil rights giant, though he was one whose deeds often went unsung because of his sexuality, his communist past and his years in prison. Raised by his grandmother as a Quaker, Rustin received activist training in the 1930s from the American Friends Service Committee, the US Quaker humanitarian organization that would later share the Nobel Peace Prize with its British counterpart for assisting European war refugees. In 1956, he advised Martin Luther King on how to use Gandhi-style nonviolent civil disobedience during a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. The boycott made King a national figure and King made nonviolence the hallmark of his leadership. At the time, Rustin already was a seasoned activist who in 1942 co-founded the Congress on Racial Equality, a group that saw the nonviolent resistance methods of Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau as a vehicle for the U.S. civil rights struggle. Rustin also helped organize resistance to segregation on interstate buses and trains in the South during the 1940s, spending more than three weeks on a chain gang for defying North Carolina’s discriminatory Jim Crow HDT WHAT? INDEX
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laws.
OHNE MICH!
In 1944, Rustin went to prison as a war resister rather than accept the alternative service option provided to Quaker conscientious objectors by the U.S. government. He said his act was in solidarity with unaffiliated war resisters to whom alternative service was not offered. A decade later, he was arrested for being a homosexual. BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT Rustin’s biggest achievement was as coordinator of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which brought 250,000 people to Washington to hear King declare his dream of racial harmony at the defining moment of the civil rights movement. “If you look at the history of social justice movements in the United States, Bayard Rustin is the most prominent figure of all time to come out of West Chester,” said West Chester University history professor William Kashatus. “There’s no greater figure to have come out of West Chester or Chester County or maybe even this part of our state,” added Kashatus, himself a Quaker pacifist. But even among his allies, Rustin often walked a lonely path. He opposed affirmative action, black studies programs and identity politics. Instead, his social- democratic vision was of a broad new alliance of racial minorities, trade unions, liberals and religious groups. He also weathered criticism from some leftists over his steady support for the state of Israel. In later life, Rustin became a monitor of human rights in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Eastern Europe. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“For all of his accomplishments, he touched so many people’s lives in so many different areas that we all can lay claim to him as being a leader for our causes,” said Jerry Dowdall, director of the Chester County Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Alliance. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2005
March: Joseph Kip Kosek’s “Richard Gregg, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Strategy of Nonviolence,” The Journal of American History 91. RICHARD GREGG AND GANDHI
Excerpts are presented below: Shortly after the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955/1956 established Martin Luther King Jr. as the nation’s leading practitioner of nonviolent direct action, an official from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) asked him to name the books that had most influenced his thinking. King chose five texts. Four of them seem unsurprising: Mohandas Gandhi’s autobiography, Louis Fischer’s 1950 biography of the Indian leader, Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience, and Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel classic, CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. The fifth book on the list, however, was Richard Bartlett Gregg’s 1934 THE POWER OF NON- VIOLENCE, a text virtually unknown today among historians of modern America. Even major biographies of King, such as those by Taylor Branch and David Garrow, largely ignore Gregg. Yet he was the first American to develop a substantial theory of nonviolent resistance. Militant nonviolence did not emerge in the United States as a response to racial segregation in the 1950s. Its central characteristics appeared during the interwar period, amid a worldwide crisis of democracy fomented by industrial conflict, economic instability, an increasingly precarious colonial system, and the ascendant threats of fascism and Communism. In this context, Richard Gregg became part of a small radical pacifist vanguard that went beyond mere opposition to international war to insist that the future of democratic societies depended on their members’ absolute renunciation of violence as a means of social change or conflict resolution. As an alternative, members of pacifist organizations such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the War Resisters League (WRL) began to experiment with social and political practices that they came to call nonviolent direct action, nonviolent resistance, militant nonviolence, or simply nonviolence. Then, during World War II, a new generation of pacifists and their allies took the project further, particularly through their work in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). By the time that King read Gregg’s writings in 1956, the method of nonviolence had undergone decades of elaboration, revision, and occasional practical application. The recovery of Richard Bartlett Gregg’s career opens a window on the early trajectory of nonviolent action as an intellectual, theoretical, and political project. ... HDT WHAT? INDEX
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More than any other single figure, Gregg taught American pacifists and social reformers that nonviolence was more than an ethical or religious principle; it was also a self-conscious method of social action with its own logic and strategy. Specifically, he argued that the method, particularly when it involved suffering, became a dramatic performance that would elicit guilt and shame from opponents and sympathy from onlookers. ... The railway shopmen’s strike of 1922 probably did more to shape Richard Bartlett Gregg’s ideas about violence than did the military slaughter of the Great War. A total of 1.6 million workers went on strike that year, including not only railway shopmen but also miners and textile workers. For many Americans, the labor battles that ensued posed a far more immediate threat to their way of life than the bloodshed across the Atlantic Ocean had. Soldiers had not occupied American cities in 1918, as they had in Europe, but federal troops did march through the streets of many industrial communities in the United States during the summer of 1922. In addition, local marshals and company guards patrolled major railroad shops in Chicago, where Gregg worked, and in cities across the nation. Guards occasionally fired on strikers, who fought back by kidnapping and assaulting replacement workers, sabotaging trains, and dynamiting tracks. In this desperate climate, the Harding administration became increasingly intent on ending the conflict, and in September a federal judge issued an injunction against the rail strike as a conspiracy in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Over the next few months, the shopmen reached separate agreements with the railway companies and returned to work. Federal law had given the railroad owners almost total victory. ... Neither Mohandas Gandhi nor Richard Gregg invented the practice of nonviolent resistance. People lacking power have probably employed what the anthropologist James C. Scott has called “weapons of the weak” as long as social inequalities have existed in human societies. In the American context, black slaves in particular used forms of sabotage and subterfuge short of open revolt to assert their autonomy and improve their material conditions. Yet by its nature such “everyday resistance” renounced any attempt at systematic social change. Closer to Gregg’s own theories was the approach of the nonresistant followers of William Lloyd Garrison in the 1830s and 1840s. Those radical pacifists, while promising to “repudiate all human politics, worldly honors, and stations of authority,” placed great faith in the power of public opinion. An 1839 article in one of their journals described the peculiar advantage that nonresistants held over attackers: “The aggressor of a nonresistant will be placed in the wrong; he will be condemned by himself, by byestanders, by the public.” Yet, although Garrison and his associates certainly knew how to deploy public spectacle, they ultimately saw their stance as an HDT WHAT? INDEX
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inner conviction to do right regardless of political consequences. For Garrison, the strategic advantages of nonviolence were incidental to its religious superiority; Gregg’s writing made nonviolent strategy itself a subject of careful analysis and conscious manipulation. Gregg’s innovations in nonviolent action developed alongside, and later within, the new radical pacifism that revitalized and transformed the Garrisonian tradition in the decades after World War I. The devastating effects of the conflict in Europe and the jingoistic and reactionary climate of the home front led a few Americans, most of them left-leaning ministers and reformers, to embrace absolute pacifism. The most important organization for the dissemination of their views in the interwar period was the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which had been founded in 1914. The FOR’s roots in the Social Gospel showed in its nonsectarian Christian orientation and in its wide-ranging attempts to infuse pacifist principles into diverse arenas of social life, such as industry, education, and race relations. The War Resisters League, begun in 1923 as a secular offshoot of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, focused more narrowly on international war but shared its parent’s radicalism. In the 1930s, Gregg would become a member of the WRL and a leader in the FOR. ... He thought of his books as a way to extricate pacifism “from the profitless atmosphere of emotional adjectives and of vague mysticism, futile protests and sentimentalism combined with confused thinking.” For this project, he cultivated a diffident writing style marked by constant hedging; he frequently acknowledged to his readers that he might be “mistaken” or even “wrong.” The reservations were an organic part of his argument, for he believed that a practitioner of nonviolence (like a theorist of it) “recognizes that no matter what his beliefs and convictions are, he may possibly be mistaken or at fault.” In part Gregg borrowed this tone from Gandhi himself, who became both legendary and notorious for his public confessions of uncertainty and his nearly obsessive self-examination. Gregg tried to move pacifists beyond allegiance to moral truisms and toward a more pragmatic politics. ... Earlier religious pacifists (and before the twentieth century, virtually all American pacifism was grounded in religious faith) tended to view their condemnation of violence as an internal conviction. Its effect on others, though sometimes profound, was ultimately irrelevant in comparison with the believer’s own determination to follow the divine will. Gregg, in contrast, said little about the nonviolent resister’s own beliefs, focusing instead on the reactions of both violent attackers and disinterested spectators. By doing so, he helped make nonviolence a technique for social change. “Let us ... try,” Gregg suggested, “to understand first how non-violent resistance works.” In each of the three books, he presented a pair of HDT WHAT? INDEX
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dramatic scenes. First, he asked readers to imagine two men, one who attacks violently and another who defends himself by the same method. Such combatants, he explained, implicitly consent to a common set of moral values, despite their apparent opposition. Both believe in the efficacy and appropriateness of using physical force to settle disputes. Then Gregg changed the scene, portraying a violent attacker who faces a nonviolent resister. In failing to defend himself, the second person intentionally disrupts the attacker’s value system. He employs “a sort of moral jiu-jitsu” that causes his attacker to “lose his moral balance.” This was a psychological game, and Gregg counted on the violent attacker to cave in from sympathy, pity, or sheer bewilderment. He suggested that the nonviolent conversion of an opponent was “analogous to ... religious conversion, though in this case the change is moral rather than religious.” More often, however, he drew on modern psychological models to explain how it happened. Gregg’s use of psychological theories was opportunistic and eclectic; he was equally likely to employ Freudianism, the early behaviorism of John B. Watson, or the theory of emotion formulated by William James and Carl Georg Lange to make his case. The larger point was that scientific authority could validate the methods that Gandhi explained in moral and spiritual terms. Just as modern economics had shown the unlikely rationality of hand spinning, so modern psychology proved the effectiveness of standing defenseless before an enemy’s assault. The nonviolent method, though a sincere expression of principle, was also a public performance intended to persuade an audience. Gregg’s construction of nonviolent action rested on the power of sympathy. “Undoubtedly,” he wrote, “the sight of another person voluntarily undergoing suffering for a belief or ideal moves the assailant and beholders alike and tends to change their hearts and make them all feel kin-ship with the sufferer.” He proposed two reasons for this phenomenon. One was physiological: humans had evolved to react to one another’s pain. “Hence the sight of suffering, in all probability, causes an involuntary sympathetic response in the nervous system of the beholder, especially in the autonomic nervous system,” Gregg wrote. The other reason stemmed from a psychological desire for vicarious experience. Gregg noted that “everyone wants, in his heart, to be strong and brave.” At the sight of a nonviolent resister, “we wonder if we could do so well, and perhaps we even unconsciously identify ourselves with him.” That potential for identification made “beholders” into a potent force in Gregg’s scheme. Spectators played an important role in the victory of the nonviolent resister. Gregg, who was fundamentally optimistic about human nature, believed that a violent attacker would indeed convert, but he argued that third parties could assist the process. “If there are onlookers,” he wrote, “the assailant soon loses still more poise. Instinctively he dramatizes himself before them and becomes more aware of his position.” The “audience,” Gregg thought, became “a sort of mirror,” reflecting back to the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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attacker his egregious violation of moral standards. Gregg believed that mass media had created a global audience, for both nonviolent resisters and their violent opponents. Under modern conditions, he explained, “ruthless deeds tend to become known to the world at large.” He acknowledged the existence of state censorship but maintained that the power of mass media would eventually overcome it. “Newspaper reporters are always keen for scenting a ‘story,’” Gregg opined, “and as soon as they learn of a censorship anywhere they are still more eager.” Whatever its moral import, the scene of defenseless men and women voluntarily succumbing to vicious assaults made a fascinating “story.” Nonviolent resistance “makes wonderful news,” Gregg insisted. “It is so unusual and dramatic.” He even compared the power of the nonviolent resister’s appeals to the persuasive effects of “commercial advertising.” He concluded, with both prescience and unwarranted optimism, that the threat of bad publicity would give the practitioners of nonviolence a decisive advantage over their violent opponents. Gregg’s pragmatic theories led him to the daring argument that “non-violent resistance is perhaps ... more like war than we had imagined.” ... Nonviolent resistance became a kind of war without killing, for Gregg thought that killing was unnecessary to achieve war’s goals. “Though war uses violence,” he explained, “the effect it aims at is psychological. Non-violent resistance also aims at and secures psychological effects, though by different means.” If nonviolent action was a kind of conflict and not a retreat from the world, it needed to draw on the “truths and virtues of militarism.” Following Gandhi, Gregg’s work suggested that nonviolent action had many of the characteristics of war: It relied on courage, loyalty, and other martial qualities; it required attention to strategy; and it depended on moral, emotional, and psychological advantages, not solely physical ones. ... THE POWER OF NON-VIOLENCE garnered enthusiastic reviews in radical pacifist and liberal Protestant circles. It became, in the words of one FOR leader, “the ‘Bible’ of non-violence.” It was the first of Gregg’s books to be published in America, rather than India. The FOR promoted it in its journal FELLOWSHIP, while Gregg himself led study groups across the Northeast and promoted his views during a short stint as director of Pendle Hill, a Quaker school. (“Calm yourself,” he wrote a friend, “because I have not become a Quaker.”) ... King came to understand the boycott, in part, as a dramatic spectacle designed to elicit the sympathy of opponents and onlookers, just as Gregg’s theories had posited. “I tell you,” he warned black Montgomerians in a November 1956 speech, “if we hit back ... we will be shamed before the world.” To prevent such humiliation, the MIA adopted the CORE technique of the sociodrama. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation on HDT WHAT? INDEX
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buses unconstitutional, the prevention of violence between white and black riders remained a daunting task. To smooth the transition, the boycott leaders rehearsed scenarios that they would encounter on the buses. In the churches where MIA meetings were held, King recalled, boycott leaders “lined up chairs in front of the altar to resemble a bus, with a driver’s seat out front.” Then “actors” from the audience came forward to fill the roles of driver and white and black passengers, some pretending to be “hostile” and others “courteous.” These “actors played out a scene of insult or violence,” and a general discussion among the performers and the audience followed. The participants played their parts with the utmost conviction. “Sometimes,” King admitted, “the person playing a white man put so much zeal into his performance that he had to be gently reproved from the sidelines.” In other sessions, an actor playing a black passenger would return insults or blows; “whenever this happened we worked to channel his words and deeds in a nonviolent direction.” The MIA sociodramas brought together the religious and performative elements of nonviolence. In the sacred space of a church, black Montgomerians became “actors” practicing for a real-life show of Christian nonviolence before a world audience. Indeed, the tension in Gregg’s work between the religious principle of nonviolence and its strategic spectacles proved a great resource. Niebuhr had faulted Gregg for refusing to choose between moral idealism and political realism; King too refused to choose. This ambiguity may have made the civil rights movement logically inconsistent, but it also gave that movement a unique potency. The gaps in Gregg’s theories let religious and secular proponents of nonviolence coexist and allowed its moral and strategic elements to reinforce each other. ... Gregg’s relationship to the method of nonviolent direct action was, finally, a paradox. In his wide-ranging studies and interpretations of Gandhi and India, he had aimed to set out the characteristics of a new civilization, not simply to write a handbook for a new political technology. Gregg cared deeply about nonviolent action and racial justice, but his broader goal was to create a countermodernity that would use modern knowledge to foster a more humane, less artificial society. ... Whether he was seeking to mediate industrial disputes during World War I, defending Gandhi’s plans for a decentralized agrarian economy, or farming his way through World War II, Gregg’s life was a long search for spheres of authentic, meaningful work under conditions of modern alienation and regimentation. ... [In a footnote] Civil disobedience against the state, and the anarchist spirit of protest it represented, was also a departure from the Gandhian concept. Civil disobedience as proposed by Thoreau and practiced by anarchists depended on individual acts. Mass action was suspect because participants might not share the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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same conviction or some might feel coerced into action.... In Gandhian protest, civil disobedience could begin with individual acts, but only for the purpose of mobilizing mass protest. Otherwise, civil disobedience was an ego trip, not a moral action. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2006
Wai-chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, explored Henry David Thoreau’s and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s readings of the BHAGAVAD-GITA, and elaborated on the process by which each separately had adapted its war story in accordance with their predilection for nonviolent action, in Princeton UP’s THROUGH OTHER CONTINENTS: AMERICAN LITERATURE ACROSS DEEP TIME.
Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: CAMINHANDO. Coleção Sabor Literário. Introdução e tradução de Roberto Muggiati. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio. 126 pages. TIMELINE OF WALDEN
Richard Tarnass, on page 155 of his COSMOS AND PSYCHE: INTIMATIONS OF A NEW WORLD VIEW, an influence study to end all influence studies, explores the influence on human affairs on earth of the opposition between Uranus and Pluto. He notes that whether Pluto qualifies as a planet or as a planetoid, the philosophy and tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience employed by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others in the ’60s civil rights and anti-war movements in America were in fact inspired above all by the example of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and that in fact it was during the Uranus-Pluto opposition that immediately preceded the conjunction of the 1960s that Gandhi had first developed and employed his civil disobedience philosophy of satyagraha in the struggle for Indian rights in South Africa in 1906 in response to his being thrown off a “whites only” train car. Tarnass notes that in fact it was during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1849 that Henry Thoreau had written and published “his seminal essay ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, which described his brief imprisonment for refusing, on anti-slavery grounds, to pay a tax levied by the U.S. government to support its war against Mexico” (never mind that this poll tax hadn’t actually been levied by the US government and had nothing at all to do with our war upon Mexico). Thoreau’s essay, this author asserts, “directly influenced first Tolstòy, then Gandhi, then King. This lineage of descent in the evolution of civil disobedience –Thoreau, Tolstòy, Gandhi, King– is of course well known. What is surprising –and what should not happen so consistently– is the precise correlation with the Uranus-Pluto cycle, a correlation replicated in so many other archetypally related historical and cultural phenomena.” Tarnass points up the fact that “The great historical dramas of both of these enduring movements for social change and human freedom HDT WHAT? INDEX
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thus appeared to follow a consistent pattern of cyclical peaks that precisely coincided with the periods of the Uranus-Pluto alignments. These in turn appeared to be particular manifestations of a more general cyclical pattern in which a collective impulse of emancipation and radical change was activated and empowered in many areas simultaneously in just these periods. Yet the connections between these eras were often even more specific.” Everything in this Thoreau/Tolstòy/Gandhi/King chain of influence, this author discovers, was being driven by these successive planetary conjunctions between Uranus and Pluto! It wasn’t us doing this, it was the planets doing this to us! First these two planets, or planet and planetoid, had influenced Thoreau to write ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, and then they had influenced Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy to read Thoreau and be influenced by him, and then they had influenced the Mahatma to be influenced by the Russian, and then they had influenced the great American civil rights leader to be influenced by the Mahatma! HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Again and again we hear the litany, that Henry Thoreau “influenced” Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy. –And “influenced” Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. –And “influenced” the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Our scholars vie in the extent to which they can fulsomely exaggerate this and fulsomely compound this. “My conclusions are superior because I can bring myself to be ever so much more fulsome than anyone else!”
Case in point: As you can see in the following footnote from page 230 of his THE PIONEER FARMER AND BACKWOODSMAN, the Canadian historian Edwin Clarence Guillet was quite proud of his relative Henry — although reluctant to brag about being a relative:
The period of the settlement of Upper Canada was too late for the inclusion of religious refugees among its settlers. But a large number of descendants of French Huguenots, driven from France in the sixteen-eighties, came to the United States and Canada, where they have tended to retain an independent and non-conformist attitude. The greatest of them all, of course, is Henry David Thoreau, whose philosophy and example have been so influential in shaping the career of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, British labour leaders, and broader loyalties of every type throughout the world.
Canadian historian Edwin Clarence Guillet can make all the assertions he needs to make, about the influence exerted by his relative Henry David Thoreau, but evidence? He offers none, clearly, because he has none.
In the case of Tolstòy, we can put the issue to the test because of a book edited in this year by Peter Sekirin that consists entirely of “Selected Accounts, 1887-1923” of AMERICANS IN CONVERSATION WITH TOLSTÒY.
Captured in this volume are interviews of the elderly, mature, famous author in Russia with 26 different Americans who have made their individual pilgrimages to seek him out on 26 separate occasions over a period of years: • A visit to Count Tolstòy / George Kennan • Count Tolstòy at home / Isabel Hapgood • With Count Tolstòy / Thomas Stevens • A visit to Tolstòy / James Creelman • How Count Tolstòy writes / Charles Johnston • An interview with Count Tolstòy / Edward Steiner • Home life of Tolstòy / John Holmes HDT WHAT? INDEX
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• A visit to Tolstòy / John Coleman Kenworthy • Russia of to-day: on Tolstòy / Sir Henry Norman • Conversations with Ernest Crosby embodying personal impressions of Count Leo Tolstòy / Ernest Crosby • Walks and talks with Tolstòy / Andrew Dickson White • A recent interview with Tolstòy / Th. Bentzon • Tolstòy today / Edward Steiner; with translations from His diary and letters • My last memory of Tolstòy / Alexandra Nicchia • My last visit to Tolstòy / Aymler Maude • Tolstòy in 1906 / Louise Maude • Tolstòy prophesies the fall of America / Stephen Bonsul • Tolstòy in the twilight / Henry George, Jr. • Tolstòy at home / Kellogg Durland • The last days of Leo Tolstòy / Alexander Kaun • Talks with Tolstòy / Richard Baeza and Alexander Goldenweiser • Three evenings with Count Leo Tolstòy / N. Everling • A vacation with Tolstòy / Theodore von Hafferberg • A day in Tolstòy’s life / Stefan Zweig • How Tolstòy died / General Ivov • What Tolstòy means to America / Virginia Wentz
One would feel that, given 26 different occasions on which Tolstòy might eagerly have communicated to Americans about having been influenced by this particular author of theirs, if Thoreau’s influence on Tolstòy had been all that great, Tolstòy ought to have commented on this great suasion at least a dozen times. However, at no point in any of these 26 interviews does Tolstòy ever remark upon this supposed great influence. Here, for one instance, is what the elderly Russian author had to say to Andrew Dickson White on pages 88-89, and then on pages 97-98, in about the year 1901, about the American writers who had influenced him:16 As to American literature, he said that Turgenev had once told him that there was nothing in it worth reading — nothing new or original; that it was simply a copy of English literature. To this I replied that such criticism seemed to me very shallow; that American literature was, of course, largely a growth out of the parent stock of English literature, and must mainly be judged as such; that to ask in the highest American literature something absolutely different from English literature in general was like looking for oranges upon an apple-tree; that there had come new varieties in this growth, many of them original, and some of them beautiful, but that there was the same sap, the same current running through it all; and I cited the treatment of women in all Anglo-Saxon literature, whether on one side of the Atlantic or the other, from Chaucer to Mark Twain, as compared with the treatment of her by French writers from Rabelais to Zola. To this he answered that in his opinion the strength of American literature arose from the inherent Anglo-Saxon religious sentiment. He expressed a liking for Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whittier, but he seemed to have read at random, not knowing at all some of the best things. He spoke with admiration of Theodore Parker’s writings, and seemed
16. White, Andrew Dickson. “Walks and Talks with Tolstòy.” McClure’s Magazine (New York), Volume 16 (1901): 507-518. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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interested in my reminiscences of him and of his acquaintance with Russian affairs. He also revered and admired the character and work of William Lloyd Garrison. He had read Longfellow somewhat, but was evidently uncertain regarding Lowell — confusing him apparently with some other author. Of contemporary writers he knew some of Howells’s novels, and liked them, but said: “Literature in the United States at present seems to be in the lowest trough of the sea between high waves.” He dwelt on the flippant tone of American newspapers, and told me of an interviewer who came to him in behalf of an American journal, simply to know at what time he went to bed and rose, what he ate, and the like. He thought that people who cared to read such trivialities must be very feeble-minded, but he said that the European press is, on the whole, just as futile. On my attempting to draw from him some statement as to what part of American literature pleased him most, he said that he had read some publications of the New York and Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, and that he knew and liked the writings of Felix Adler. I then asked who in the whole range of American literature he thought the foremost. To this he made an answer which amazed me, as it would have astonished my countrymen. Indeed, did the eternal salvation of all our seventy millions depend upon some one of them guessing the person he named, we should all go to perdition together. That greatest of American writers was — Adin Ballou. Evidently, some of the philanthropic writings of that excellent Massachusetts clergyman and religious activist had jumped with his humor. ... Very rarely during our conversations did I hear him speak with any real enthusiasm regarding any human being; his nearest approach to it was with reference to the writings of the Rev. Adin Ballou, when he declared him the foremost literary character that America had produced.
The name of Thoreau appears only three or four times in this volume. It appears on page 60 in a list of American authors he mentions without much comment merely as those he had read, a list which also includes Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, Parker, and Longfellow, it appears on page 136 when in a conversation with an American, Stephen Bonsul, Tolstòy mentioned a period in American history as having been that of “Emerson and Thoreau,” and it appears on page 148 as part of a conversation with an American journalist, Kellogg Durland, in 1906 or early 1907: “Do you young men in America read Channing, Thoreau, Emerson?” He asked. “Do you read Garrison? All young men of the present day should read the writings of those four great Americans.”
This does not constitute evidence that Thoreau had been more influential than the Reverend William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Friend John Greenleaf Whittier, the Reverent Theodore Parker, Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, or William Lloyd Garrison, in the formation of Tolstoy’s thought.
We learn that Tolstòy had six photographs on display in his study at home, and the six people of whom he was displaying photographs were: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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• Ralph Waldo Emerson • Henry David Thoreau • The Reverend William Ellery Channing •Bryan • Henry George • Ernest Howard Crosby
This does not constitute evidence that Thoreau had been more influential than Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Reverend William Ellery Channing, William Jennings Bryan, Henry George, or Ernest Howard Crosby (1856- 1907, author of CAPTAIN JINKS, HERO and PLAIN TALK IN PSALM AND PARABLE), in the formation of Tolstoy’s thought. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2009
January 14, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau made the front cover of The Nation (you will notice that he parts his hair on the wrong side because artist John Mavroudis is capturing his image from a direct-positive Daguerreotype). 1. Barack Obama 2. Michelle Obama 3. Martin Luther King Jr. 4. Thurgood Marshall 5. Rosa Parks 6. Barbara Jordan 7. Cynthia Wesley 8. Carole Robertson 9. Denise McNair 10. Addie Mae Collins 11. Emmett Till 12. Susan B. Anthony 13. C.T. Vivian 14. James Meredith 15. Homer Plessy 16. Harvey Milk 17. Ida B. Wells 18. Malcolm X 19. Bayard Rustin 20. John Lewis 21. Mahatma Gandhi 22. Abraham Lincoln 23. Frederick Douglass 24. Cesar Chavez 25. Sojourner Truth 26. Nelson Mandela 27. Stephen Biko 28. Oliver Brown (Brown v. Board of Education) 29. Chief Joseph 30. Lyndon Johnson 31. Medgar Evers 32. Rev. James Reeb 33. Fred Shuttleworth 34. W.E.B. Du Bois 35. Ralph Abernathy 36. Viola Gregg Liuzzo 37. Marcus Garvey 38. Andrew Goodman 39. James Chaney 40. Michael Schwerner 41. John Brown HDT WHAT? INDEX
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42. Jackie Robinson 43. Dolores Huerta 44. Mary White Ovington 45. William Lloyd Garrison 46. Wang Dan 47. Stephen Samuel Wise 48. Harriet Tubman 49. Dred Scott 50. Booker T. Washington 51. David Richmond (and) 52. Joseph McNeil (Greensboro Four) 53. Martin Delany 54. The Little Rock Nine 55. William Still 56. Thomas Garrett HDT WHAT? INDEX
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57. Elizabeth Cady Stanton 58. Samuel Burris 59. Thomas Paine 60. Abigail Kelley Foster 61. Jesse Jackson 62. Eugene V. Debs 63. Lucretia Mott 64. Paul Robeson 65. Henry Thoreau 66. Shirley Chisholm
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Projec HDT WHAT? INDEX
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: January 4, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with
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