Counterculture Beacons: Henry David Thoreau and Scott Nearing / Two-Strike Hitters: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Helen Keller / Modern Models: Jane Jacobs, Noam Chomsky, and George Carlin
The following anti-authoritarians who have helped themselves and the anti-authoritarian cause have experienced various degrees of assault by authoritarians but for the most part have not assaulted themselves. These anti-authoritarians would most likely admit that luck is certainly a factor in preventing a tragic life, but they also took advantage of opportunities that came their way.
These anti-authoritarians used their unique talents to the fullest. They also recognized the importance of relationships, specifically having mutually respectful and affectionate ones. None of them were broken by their standard schooling. Some of them were self-taught or educated outside of a standard school; others quit school; and others fought off the ill effects of schooling.
Overwhelming pain is the fuel for self-destructive behavior and violence, so wise reductions of pain—financially, interpersonally, and in one’s physical health—are crucial for surviving and thriving. All of the following anti-authoritarians were committed to enjoying life, though some of their ideas about fun are uncommon ones.
None of the following anti-authoritarians are perfect because no person is perfect. While this group models some admirable characteristics, their lives also include hypocrisies, inconsistencies, and less admirable traits. However, it would be a mistake to dwell only on their imperfections and lose the wisdom and energy that their triumphs provide.
Counterculture Beacons: Henry David Thoreau and Scott Nearing
Henry David Thoreau and Scott Nearing are “off-the-grid” and “back-to-the-land” legends. They provide great lessons for anti-authoritarians who dream of escape from authoritarian society. While I’ve long shed my romanticized image of Thoreau and Nearing, I’ve also discovered that most who knew them had affection and respect for them despite their shortcomings.
Henry David Thoreau
During his lifetime, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was not completely unknown outside of his hometown Concord, Massachusetts, but nowhere near as famous as he would become after his death. Today, Thoreau has worldwide fame for his essay “Civil Disobedience” (originally titled “Resistance to Civil Government”). In that essay, Thoreau challenged the authority of government that forces people to ignore their conscience and then to support unjust institutions.
Thoreau’s refusal to pay a tax was a resistance to supporting the U.S. government’s war with Mexico and the expansion of slavery; and for his tax resistance, he was briefly jailed. Unlike most Americans, including even abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Thoreau supported John Brown when he was captured and later hanged. Thoreau also disobeyed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by participating in the Underground Railroad, assisting runaway slaves on their way to Canada, including providing them with money.
Thoreau is a beacon for countercultural anti-authoritarians for many reasons. To say that he was a naturalist is an understatement. He was in love with nature. He modeled simple living and self-reliance and was an early critic of consumerism. He was an advocate of preserving the wilderness and the environment, and he celebrated recreational canoeing and hiking. For what he modeled and advocated, Thoreau was seen as eccentric by much of his contemporary society.
As a young man, Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) went to Harvard, graduated, taught, and famously exited to the woods for two years. In contrast to Ted Kaczynski’s tragic victim-victimizer existence and isolation, Thoreau’s life was filled with reciprocal support from friends and family members. While Thoreau praised solitude, he nurtured relationships, showed great loyalty, and enjoyed his travel companions. Thoreau had fun—this an important but too often neglected aspect of his life.
Thoreau famously observed, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” Thoreau did not romanticize rural living: “From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.” He saw despair everywhere, “concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work.” Thoreau knew the importance of having a good time. While authoritarians would rather remember Thoreau’s self-denial of material luxuries and his rejection of alcohol, coffee, and almost all beverages except water, Thoreau was not essentially an ascetic any more than the Buddha or Spinoza. All desired the good life, their version of it.
Thoreau biographer Walter Harding, in The Days of Henry Thoreau, tells us that in 1837, there were four roads open to a college graduate such as Thoreau—the ministry, law, medicine, or teaching. Thoreau, at age 20, chose teaching, but it didn’t take him long to get in trouble with authorities, as he was reprimanded for not using corporal punishment to keep his classroom quiet. Thoreau’s way of dramatizing the preposterousness of this demand was to gratuitously whip several surprised students and then immediately resign. This kind of rebellion made sense for the immature Thoreau, but obviously not for his students.
After a short period of working in the Thoreau family pencil-making business (where he added useful innovations), Henry and his brother John opened up their own school in 1838. The Thoreau brothers’ school was noted for its innovations, devoting a considerable part of its program to field trips, including frequent walks in the woods where Henry would excite the children’s interest in botany and animals. Other field trips included farms, boat repairers, and gunsmith shops. Henry purchased surveying instruments and introduced it into the curriculum as a practical way to make math come alive. Surveying not only stimulated his students, but ultimately Henry became proficient enough to have an alternative way to make a living after John’s tragic death in 1842, which ended the Thoreau brothers’ school.
As a young adult, Thoreau became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a well-known public intellectual during this era. Emerson introduced Thoreau to other unconventional and eccentric writers and thinkers in the Concord, Massachusetts, community. Some in this group struggled financially, including Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa May Alcott, and Ellery Channing, who would become perhaps Thoreau’s best friend and often travel companion. Thoreau lived in the Emerson household from 1841 to 1844, serving as a tutor for Emerson’s children and also a handyman and gardener.
Thoreau had a sense of humor, though his brand of humor sometimes rattled friends. Later in Thoreau’s life, when his former jailer Sam Staples bought some land adjacent to Emerson, Staples asked Thoreau to survey it. Thoreau brought Staples and Emerson together to announce that Emerson’s hedge was several feet over on Staples’s property, that Emerson had been stealing land for years, and that he was happy to be able to disclose Emerson’s dishonesty. Then with Emerson completely embarrassed, Thoreau finally let out a laugh, making it clear that he had been pulling Emerson’s leg.
A 26-year-old Thoreau’s embarrassing mistake might interest anti-authoritarians who beat themselves up for imperfect fidelity to nature. Returning to Concord from a trip, Thoreau and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that destroyed 300 acres of Walden Woods. I’ve known many anti-authoritarians who are so ashamed by mistakes far smaller than Thoreau’s that they can move into a depression or into substance abuse and remain there for decades. Thoreau quickly moved on.
In 1845, shortly before turning 28, Thoreau began his legendary experiment on the shore of Walden Pond, living for two years in a small simple home that he built. Thoreau famously tells us in Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Actually, Thoreau was not all that removed from civilization, as his family home was approximately one and a half miles away.
Walden certainly celebrates the joys of solitude and connecting with nature. However, Thoreau does mention visitors, and actually had a regular stream of them. While Thoreau was an individualist and critic of conformity, he does not model social isolation. To raise the roof for his Walden cabin, Thoreau’s crew included Emerson, Alcott, Channing, and other friends, as well as his favorite Concord farmer Edward Hosmer and three of Hosmer’s sons. And Harding reports, “The children of Concord were always happy to go out to Walden Pond and Thoreau was equally happy to have them,” as he would take them on nature walks. One child would later recount, “He could lead one to the ripest berries, the hidden nest, the rarest flowers, but no plant life could be carelessly destroyed, no mother bird lose her eggs.”
While Thoreau mocked material luxuries, he clearly loved the luxury of travel, alone or with companions. In 1839, Henry and his brother John built a boat, and they took a trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to the White Mountains, and Henry would return there with Edward Hoar in 1858.
In 1837, Thoreau first toured Maine. He returned there in 1846 (leaving his cabin on Walden Pond for a while), connecting with his cousin in Bangor and joined by two of his cousin’s friends for a camping trip to Mount Katahdin. In 1853, he came back to the Maine woods, this time joined by a Native American guide Joe Aitteon. And in 1857, with Hoar, Thoreau again journeyed to the Maine woods, hiring Native American guide Joseph Polis. Polis showed Thoreau, who was already a skilled canoe paddler, how to be even better. Thoreau was impressed in many ways by Polis, and he would later write, “The Indian, who can find his way so wonderfully in the woods, possesses so much intelligence which the white man does not,—and it increases my own capacity, as well as faith, to observe it.”
Thoreau’s brief life included several other trips and excursions. In 1843, he stayed with Emerson’s brother in Staten Island. In New York City, he made writing contacts and hung out with Emerson’s transcendental community acquaintances. And in 1856, he returned to the New York City area, hanging out with Bronson Alcott who introduced him to Walt Whitman. Whitman had been criticized by others for publishing a private letter from Emerson praising him, but Thoreau cut slack to Whitman for his self-promotion, and later he called Whitman a “great fellow” and praised his Leaves of Grass. Whitman spoke of other meetings with Thoreau, and it is possible they might have reconnected again in 1858 when Thoreau briefly returned to the New York City area.
Cape Cod was a frequent destination for Thoreau. In 1849, Thoreau and Channing traveled there. Thoreau returned to Cape Cod by himself in 1850, returned with Channing in 1855, then again alone in 1857. Thoreau also traveled to Canada with Channing in 1850. And in 1861, Thoreau along with the son of educator Horace Mann, went to Minnesota. The Minnesota trip was taken in large part to help improve Thoreau’s health, but it failed. Thoreau died from tuberculosis in 1862 at age 44.
For modernists who focus only on Walden and on selective quotes, as did Kathryn Schulz in her 2015 New Yorker article “Pond Scum: Henry David Thoreau’s Moral Myopia,” they may ask as Schulz asked, “Why, given his hypocrisy, sanctimony, and misanthropy, has Thoreau been so cherished?” Schulz calls Thoreau: “self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control,” and depicts him as “adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world.” She describes Walden as the “original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.”
Hypocrisy is certainly there in Walden, as Thoreau was in no way removed from civilization, so close to his mother and sister that they routinely brought him cookies. But in response to Schulz, Jedediah Purdy’s “In Defense of Thoreau” noted that while she was right that Ralph Waldo Emerson did say, “I love Henry, but I cannot like him,” Schulz excluded other Emerson reflections about Thoreau that give us a fuller and kinder picture of him. Emerson also said Thoreau was a man who “threw himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people whom he loved, and whom he delighted to entertain, as only he could, with the varied and endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and river.”
Schulz also accused Thoreau of having “no understanding whatsoever of poverty and consistently romanticized it,” offering as evidence Thoreau’s quote: “Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.” Yet I have known financially struggling farmers who have used that exact Thoreau quote for comfort, preventing them from acting on suicidal thoughts as their bills overwhelm them. Moreover, Purdy points out, “Emerson noted that farmers who hired Thoreau as a surveyor usually started out treating him as an oddity, but ended by admiring him.”
Walden, for Schulz, makes Thoreau appear to be a selfish jerk, but the personal Thoreau, while eccentric, was actually generous with both his funds and time. Thoreau financially helped out his more impoverished friends and gave money to causes. And Purdy reminds us, “Thoreau took a genuine interest in the lives of Native Americans, too, seeking them out for long conversations at a time when this was unusual.”
For modern anti-authoritarians, the life of Henry David Thoreau provides several lessons: making a buck with various skills; living within one’s means; nurturing relationships despite social clumsiness; loyalty to friends; cutting slack to his fellow anti-authoritarians—and having fun.
Scott Nearing
In certain “sustainable-living” circles, Scott Nearing (1883–1983) is as much of a beacon as is Henry David Thoreau. Nearing lived to be 100 years old, the last 50 of those years as a prophet and model—along with his wife Helen—for back-to-land homesteaders who sought escape from Western civilization and longed for a simple and meaningful “good life.”
Like Thoreau, Nearing was also socially awkward. In order to become a nationally known public speaker, Nearing recounted, “It meant conquering bashfulness, overcoming stage fright, reducing self-consciousness to a minimum.” Like Thoreau, Nearing had little regard for ordinary social niceties, as Helen Nearing (1904–1995) recounted about Scott, “He abhorred gossip and small talk, avoiding commonplace trivia . . . he was not an easy or avid conversationalist.” Both Thoreau and Nearing were socially quirky and clumsy and at times obnoxious, yet both elicited admiration and affection from anti-authoritarians who knew them. Like Thoreau, Nearing abstained from alcohol, coffee, and many consumer goods. And both liked to travel, with Nearing traveling even more widely than did Thoreau.
Scott Nearing grew up in a wealthy household. In 1903, at age 20, he decided to make teaching his profession, ultimately acquiring a PhD in economics. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business but became increasingly outspoken about the cruelties of capitalism, including its child labor practices, and he was fired in 1915. His dismissal was seen by many Americans across the political spectrum as a serious breach of academic freedom; it made Scott Nearing a national public figure, a victim of academic authoritarianism. Nearing found another teaching post at the University of Toledo, but after he spoke out against the U.S. government’s entry into World War I, he was fired again in 1917. At that point, his academic career “lay in ruins,” he later recounted, “my experience and competence as a professional teacher were brushed aside.”
A serious young man, Nearing became even more serious, “Beginning with the war of 1917–18,” he recalled, “I deliberately stopped introducing any form of humor or lightness into my talks . . . . I no longer tried to ingratiate myself with audiences or with the organizations sponsoring the lectures.”
Nearing joined the Socialist Party in 1917 and authored several pamphlets, including The Great Madness: A Victory for the American Plutocracy, for which he was indicted by the U.S. government under the Espionage Act. However, Nearing, unlike many others so prosecuted, had greater luck and was not convicted in his 1919 trial. In 1927, Nearing joined the Communist Party, but in 1930 he was expelled from it for contradicting Leninist dogma. Estranged from Left political parties, his academic career destroyed, Nearing had also separated from his first wife.
Marginalized and disillusioned, Nearing later recounted that as long as he continued to speak out, “I would be cut off from the country’s major channels of publicity. No more of my articles would appear in newspapers or magazines nor would my books be reviewed in them. No more books would be published by representative publishers. I would be excluded from the lecture platform. Most important of all to me, the academic field would be closed tight.”
Nearing had little choice but to cut a different path, “I decided to continue as a freelance teacher, to talk and write as opportunity offered. In the meantime, how to live? . . . Many of my friends and associates on the Left who stayed true to the cause, drove trucks for a living, served milk routes, delivered papers, worked as waiters or stevedores, or drove taxies. I chose homesteading as a way of life under United States right wing pressure in the 1930s.”
In 1932, a 49-year-old Nearing, along with his new partner, 29-year-old Helen Knothe (whom he later married) purchased land in rural Vermont. In 1954, Scott and Helen Nearing published Living the Good Life about their then approximately two-decade experiment in homesteading. They proudly reported that they had succeeded in restoring depleted mountain land so as to grow vegetables, fruits, and flowers; had done so organically without chemical fertilizers; created a subsistence homestead; had a small-scale successful business enterprise, a maple sugar “cash crop”; maintained excellent health, with neither needing to see a doctor for two decades; simplified their lives; were able with six months a year “bread labor” to have six months a year of leisure time for research, travel, writing, and speaking; and fed and lodged many people who stayed with them for days, weeks, or longer.
When ski resorts and developers intruded on their Vermont homestead, Scott, at age 69, and Helen decided to start over. They relocated their homesteading to Cape Rosier, Maine, again calling it “Forest Farm,” replacing maple sugar with blueberries as their cash crop. In addition to vegetable growing and other typical homesteading activities, Scott deepened a pond by shoveling out thousands of wheelbarrow loads of mud, built a stone wall around his large garden, and in his early nineties was mixing cement for the Nearings’ new stone house.
With the Nearings’ Good Life books (that would include Continuing the Good Life: Half a Century of Homesteading), they became legends. “The Nearings became counterculture celebrities in the 1970s,” writes historian and philosopher John Faithful Hamer in his article “The Forest Farm Romance.” The Nearing homestead became a sacred place for thousands of young people who would make their pilgrimage there—some just to gawk but others who the Nearings would feed and put to work. Scott once again had his students, and he was in his glory. Many of these young people were so inspired by the Good Life books and by Forest Farm that they embarked on their own homesteading attempts. They reasoned that if Scott could begin homesteading at age 49, start over again in Maine at age 69, and could be making it work for another three decades, then certainly with hard work, they too could also succeed.
However, in their popular Good Life books, the Nearings were not candid about their sources of income. In Scott Nearing’s 1972 autobiography The Making of a Radical, he does tell us that he had an insurance annuity, a minimum monthly social security check, a modest trust fund left by his sister, and another trust fund left to him by a Boston friend which he used to contribute money to his favorite causes. However, many young hopeful homesteaders were ignorant of these realities, and plunged in with only their hard work and enthusiasm.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Nearings began to sell off—quite inexpensively—significant acreage from their large tract to young homesteaders. In Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life, Jean Hay Bright, one of the recipients (along with her then partner Keith), makes clear that she continues to have great respect for what the courageous and hardworking Nearings accomplished, and she maintained her friendship with them until their deaths. However, it troubled Hay Bright that the Nearings were not completely candid with the public about economic realities. Although the Nearings did grow much of their food, worked hard, and were frugal, it was their outside income and other people’s labor that helped make their lives sustainable.
Another land recipient was Eliot Coleman; and his daughter Melissa, as an adult, wrote about her childhood with her homesteading parents living next to the Nearings. Melissa Coleman notes, “Helen was known to have a soft spot for exotics like avocados, bananas, and Florida oranges, which she had shipped to Maine, but as they didn’t support the self-sufficiency stance, these were conveniently not mentioned in their books.”
The Nearings’ reported that they spent only four hours a day on “bread labor” survival, enabling them to spend four hours a day on intellectual pursuits and four hours a day on socializing, and that they traveled six months a year. However, as Stanley Joseph—who also acquired property from the Nearings—tragically discovered, this kind of good life is impossible without additional income. After the end of Joseph’s marriage to his homesteading partner Lynn Karlin, Joseph, alone facing the hard realities of homesteading, committed suicide in 1995.
Self-promotion by anti-authoritarians, so to survive and thrive, is not rare. The Nearings’ self-promotion of self-sufficiency—especially given their ages when they accomplished this—was what provided them with celebrity status. For Scott, given his banishment from his beloved teaching profession, young people’s attention had to be exhilarating; he not only had students again but awe-struck ones. Self-promoting U.S. anti-authoritarians have existed in many walks of life. Not only did the poet Walt Whitman publish Emerson’s personal letter for positive publicity, he anonymously published his own highly flattering review of his poetry collection Leaves of Grass.
Despite Scott Nearing’s less admirable traits, even his greatest detractors would acknowledge that he was stubbornly persistent, hardworking, resilient, and dedicated. Despite the hypocrisies, there are many important lessons to be learned from Nearing’s life, including how he dealt with his anger.
Scott Nearing clearly asserts his anger about the direction of the United States, and one also senses his anger about the ruin of his academic career and the sellout of many U.S. leftists. Nearing did not use that fuel of anger to kill enemies (as Leon Czolgosz and Ted Kaczynski had) but instead as energy to prove his enemies wrong and prove the value of his way of life, and to seize attention and respect from his detractors’ children and grandchildren. However, Scott Nearing was very human, and though he mostly used anger as fuel for his worthy achievements, it leaked out elsewhere in psychologically destructive ways. People could be made to feel inferior by Scott for not living up to his moral standards. Also, there was Scott’s relationship with his son John (from Scott’s first marriage). Scott cut John out of his life because of John’s mainstream political views and lifestyle, not returning John’s letters and not attending John’s funeral.
Scott did maintain his relationship with his other son and many other people, though he had no really close relationships with anyone except Helen. Scott’s best decision was partnering with Helen. As a young woman, Helen had been an aspiring musician and bohemian who was charmed by charismatic older men (prior to Scott, Helen, in her late teens, had been emotionally intimate with the philosopher and self-help guru Jiddu Krishnamurti). Helen was a perfect partner for Scott because Scott needed a woman who would both compliment and complement him. Helen wrote in her memoir that “my life for more than fifty years was Scott-centered. . . . There were times . . . when he had to poke or pull me along toward his own rare intense level of dedication.” It is clear that the Nearings had deep mutual affection, however, as Melissa Coleman observed, though the Nearings were progressive in their teachings, “the Nearings’ marriage was rooted in an earlier era.” Coleman recounts that, “Once, when Helen interrupted Scott during a particularly long ramble, he cut her off by saying, ‘Quiet, woman.’ The younger onlookers were scandalized, but it didn’t faze Helen.”
For anti-authoritarians who long to escape Western civilization, there are many lessons to be learned from Scott Nearing’s life. His self-taught survival skills, self-discipline, and resilience were self-promoted virtues but were virtues that he truly possessed. Not self-promoted was his anger, and though he was far from perfect in how he channeled it, he did use it positively in many ways.
The “good life” that the Nearings promoted is mostly true and genuinely inspiring, but there is also much to be learned from the imperfections of lives. In both my research and my personal experience, I have discovered realities about those who have failed and succeeded in some kind of off-the-grid escape. Without some outside “passive income,” or a spouse with some mainstream job that provides at least a modest income, or some other concession to the moneyed economy, one cannot likely make it—even with twelve hours a day of labor rather than four “bread labor hours.”
Henry David Thoreau and Scott Nearing are deservedly beacons for anti-authoritarians who dream of escape from authoritarian society. And for off-the-grid anti-authoritarians who need to let go of their shame about imperfections, the realities of Thoreau and Nearing’s entire lives are instructive.
Two-Strike Hitters: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Helen Keller
Being an anti-authoritarian in the United States means having one strike against you. Having a second strike against you—as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman had being born slaves, and as Helen Keller had becoming deaf and blind at 19 months of age—makes the margin for error all the more narrow. Douglass, Tubman, and Keller knew that to have any chance at all, they had to use their talents to the fullest and take advantage of every opportunity.
Douglass, Tubman, and Keller have each achieved an almost mythical status, so much so that their flesh-and-bones humanity has been lost. Unfortunately, their lives have been used by authoritarian society to instruct Americans that anyone who perseveres can overcome any obstacle—a message that is untrue and insults their legacies.
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass (approximately 1818–1895) questioned the authority of the slavery system as a young boy, asking, “Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves and others masters?” As he grew up, he challenged and resisted this system. He first psychologically emancipated himself from a slave mentality, then escaped from slavery, then fought for the abolition of slavery, and after its abolition continued to fight for full human rights for African Americans.
Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey) began life as a slave on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, relatively fortunate in that he lived close to non-slave states. As a young child, Douglass was sent from a rural plantation to Baltimore, and he later recounted, “I regard my removal from Col. Lloyd’s plantation as one of the most interesting and fortunate events of my life. . . . [I]t is quite probable that but for the mere circumstance of being thus removed, before the rigors of slavery had fully fastened upon me; before my young spirit had been crushed under the iron control of the slave-driver; I might have continued in slavery until emancipated by the war.”
In Baltimore, the relatively kind wife of his master assisted young Frederick in learning the alphabet. He took full advantage and continued to learn to read from white children around him as well as from the writings that he came into contact with; and even when he was ultimately forbidden to read, he secretly pursued reading and writing. This would make all the difference, as he would discover writings that confirmed his instinct that slavery was wrong.
With his growing knowledge, he became increasingly resistant to his slave status, and ultimately got sent to “rehab,” which consisted of being sent to a farmer who had a reputation of being a “negro-breaker.” The teenage Frederick was regularly whipped and almost psychologically broken. He concluded that if he was broken, he might as well be dead, and he took a risk. He physically fought back against the farmer, and this ended his abuse. Later he recalled that fighting back “revived a sense of my own manhood. I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before; I was a man now. . . . I had reached the point at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, though I still remained a slave in form.” Douglass considered himself lucky that his resistance did not result in him being handed over to authorities and hanged. Psychologically astute, he intuited that the negro-breaker was ashamed of his defeat and did not want it to be known, as such a defeat would affect his reputation as a negro-breaker.
Douglass’s initial attempts at escape failed but he remained resilient. In 1838, his well-thought-out escape was a successful one with the help of Anna Murray, whose parents had been freed before her birth and so she had been born free in Maryland. Anna Murray was five to six years older than Frederick, and she was exceptionally entrepreneurial with her laundry service. The two may have first met when her laundry work took her to the Baltimore docks where Frederick was working. Using her income, Anna was able to financially aid Frederick for his escape. Frederick changed his last name to avoid capture, and Anna followed him to New York City where they wed, eventually having five children together and remaining married for 44 years until her death.
After living for a short period in New York City, Douglass moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts. He joined anti-slavery groups and made alliances with fellow former slaves and white abolitionists, connecting with perhaps the most famous U.S. abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, who encouraged Douglass. At age 23, Douglass began his life as an abolitionist orator, initially as a nervous novice but quickly becoming one of the most powerful speakers in U.S. history.
In 1845, at the age of 27, Douglass published the first version of his autobiography (which he twice revised), and he became something of a celebrity. This publicity made him a marked man for recapture. Not naively believing that his new fame would be an antidote to authoritarian assault, he fled the United States in 1845. In England and Ireland, Douglass was emotionally moved by the relative absence of racial discrimination. He became a popular lecturer and remained overseas for two years, impressing British philanthropists who raised funds to buy his legal freedom so he could return to the United States without fear of recapture.
Douglass was the consummate networker. He recognized the parallels of the women’s rights movement with the slave abolition movement, and in 1848, Douglass attended the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s rights convention in the United States. He connected with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and used his newspaper, the North Star, to push for women’s rights. Douglass would later have political disagreements with Stanton, but they remained friends.
After John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid in 1859, Douglass again evidenced his political astuteness about U.S. “justice.” Even though Douglass had opposed the raid for strategic reasons, he was cynical about being exonerated from involvement in the raid and again fled the United States, first to Canada and then to England. He later recounted, “I knew that if my enemies could not prove me guilty of the offense of being with John Brown, they could prove that I was Frederick Douglass; they could prove that I was in correspondence and conspiracy with Brown against slavery; they could prove that I brought Shields Green, one of the bravest of his soldiers, all the way from Rochester to him at Chambersburg; they could prove that I brought money to aid him, and in what was then the state of the public mind I could not hope to make a jury of Virginia [which Harpers Ferry was then part of] believe I did not go the whole length he went, or that I was not one of his supporters; and I knew that all Virginia, were I once in her clutches, would say ‘Let him be hanged.’” Douglass knew that he would not get a fair shake and that remaining in the United States would only serve to allow authorities to shut him up.
With the beginning of the Civil War, Douglass helped recruit for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Black regiment, and he used his hard-earned political capital to push Abraham Lincoln for greater rights for African Americans. Following the war, Douglass, who had become politically well-connected, received several job offers. He became president of the Freedman’s Saving Bank, Chargé d’Affaires for the Dominican Republic, U.S. marshall for the District of Columbia, recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia, and minister to Haiti. He continued to be widely sought as a speaker, and, with income from his writing and speaking and these job positions, Douglass not only gained financial security but could afford in 1877 to buy a large house in Washington DC (which he expanded).
After Anna Murray Douglass died in 1882, Frederick Douglass in 1884, at age 66, married Helen Pitts, a white suffragist twenty years his junior. Douglass had achieved such stature in both white and black America that despite the great controversy that his second marriage created, he continued to thrive. From 1886 to 1887, Douglass and his second wife took a year-long tour of Europe and the Middle East. At age 77, in 1895, Frederick Douglass died.
Throughout his life, Douglass recognized opportunities and took full advantage of them. As an adolescent, he was psychologically astute, and as a young man, he was resilient in the face of failure. He acquired money-making skills and financial wisdom. He valued physical and mental effort but also fully recognized the importance of relationships. He showed his appreciation for kindness, respected those who respected him, and formed relationships with people who had influence and money.
Douglass was also way ahead of his time in recognizing the power of images to promote both himself and dignity for African Americans. He became enamored by photography, writing extensively about it. And after achieving fame, in order to counter the racist images of African Americans, he became the most photographed person in the United States in the nineteenth century. He was well aware that he was the most famous black man in the United States and of the importance of conveying an image of strength and dignity.
While aggressively promoting full human rights for African Americans, Douglass was in some ways less radical than his mentor abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Their falling out was in part because Garrison had long declared the U.S. Constitution to be pro-slave and thus needed to be abolished, and Douglass came to oppose that view. Douglass favored the annexation of Santo Domingo by the United States and was clearly not a socialist or anarchist. However, Douglass was a triumphant anti-authoritarian who challenged and resisted white domination of himself and of all African Americans.
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman (approximately 1822–1913), like Frederick Douglass, was born into slavery and eventually escaped. Even Douglass was awed by Tubman’s courage. It was daring enough for a slave to attempt escape, but to return to slave territory several times to help other slaves escape was courageous in the extreme. Tubman, unlike Douglass, never had the opportunity to learn how to read and throughout her life she had to deal with the effects of a head injury (caused by a slave owner) that resulted in dizziness, pain, seizures, and sleep difficulties. Tubman’s triumphs so transcend her circumstances that she appears almost as an unreal superwoman character. Thus, few Americans reflect upon the realities of her life.
Tubman (born Araminta “Minty” Ross), like Douglass, started life enslaved on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her severe head injury occurred in early adolescence when she was struck by a heavy metal weight thrown by her master intending to hit another slave. In her early twenties, she married John Tubman, a free black man, and soon after she also changed her first name to Harriet. Despite her husband being free, Harriet remained a slave.
Tubman went up for sale in early 1849, but luckily she had been ill, and there were no buyers. Later that year, despite her husband’s attempts to dissuade her, she escaped with her brothers Ben and Henry, who then forced her to return with them. Shortly after, she escaped again without her brothers. Returning later for her husband, she discovered that he had remarried and had no desire to leave, so she used the trip to help other slaves escape. In Tubman’s abolitionist fundraising, she would tell the story about her husband’s refusal to leave so as to get a laugh and a donation. In 1854, she returned to rescue Ben and Henry, as well as a third brother, Robert, their wives, some of their children, and other slaves, taking them to Canada because of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
The precise number of slave-rescue trips and number of slaves whom she freed is controversial. Based on the claims of Tubman’s initial biographer Sarah Bradford (Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, 1869; Harriet Tubman, Moses of Her People, 1886) monuments honoring Tubman routinely state that she freed more than 300 slaves in 19 trips. What recent biographer Kate Clifford Larson discovered was that Tubman in the late 1850s told audiences that she had rescued 50 to 60 people in eight or nine trips. Larson concludes that Tubman directly helped approximately 70 to 80 slaves escape in 13 trips, and that Tubman had also given instructions to help another approximately 60 slaves escape.
Tubman was extraordinarily brave but not arrogant, as she restricted her rescue trips to the Maryland area that she knew. Larson notes, “Tubman depended on her great intellect, courage and religious faith . . . . She followed rivers that snaked northward, and used the stars and other natural phenomena to guide her. She relied on sympathetic people, black and white, who hid her, told her which way to go and connected her with other people she could trust. She wore disguises. She paid bribes.”
Tubman did not create the Underground Railroad but used the network effectively. Though Tubman couldn’t read, she knew what days of the week that newspapers printed runaway notices, and so she began escape trips on Saturday evening, knowing that the notice wouldn’t be printed until Monday, providing her with a head start. Tubman also carried a revolver for two reasons: protection against slave catchers and their dogs, and to threaten to shoot those who she was rescuing if they wanted to turn back (as this endangered the remainder of the group).
Tubman’s fame, historian Eric Foner notes, spread quickly in abolitionist circles, “By the late 1850s, she had become known as the slaves’ ‘Moses’. . . . Nonetheless, Tubman struggled to raise money for her undertakings. She worked in Philadelphia, New York, and Canada as a laundress, housekeeper, and cook, and solicited funds from abolitionists. On one occasion, she camped out in the anti-slavery office in New York City, asking visitors for donations.”
Harriet Tubman gave direct assistance to John Brown for his 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, as upon Brown’s request, Tubman gathered former slaves who were willing to join his raid. Then in 1860, in Troy, New York, Tubman was involved in the rescue of a fugitive slave, freeing him from the custody of U.S. marshals.
With the advent of the Civil War in 1861, Tubman aided the Union army as a cook, nurse, scout, and spy for Union forces in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Then, in 1863, Tubman became the first woman to plan and lead an armed raid during the Civil War. The raid freed 700 slaves from several plantations along the Combahee River. The raiders, who included 300 black soldiers, also burned several buildings and crops and either captured or destroyed stockpiles of munitions and food. The Wisconsin State Journal printed a story about the raid and acknowledged Tubman’s important role, “A Black She ‘Moses’—Her Wonderful Daring and Sagacity,” and described the raid as “striking terror to the heart of rebellion.”
After the Civil War, Tubman returned to her home in upstate New York. Prior to the war, Tubman had purchased a home and land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, from William Seward, at that time an abolitionist U.S. Senator from New York, who gave Tubman extremely favorable terms. Auburn was a significant abolitionist stronghold, and Seward and his wife were participants in the Underground Railroad. In 1869, Tubman married Nelson Davis, an African American Civil War veteran who was approximately twenty years her junior. She had difficulty getting government compensation for her war contributions, but she did receive financial assistance from the profits of Sarah Bradford’s biography about her.
Tubman’s survival instincts and her physical strength were astonishing, but even she did not win every encounter. In 1873, financially vulnerable, Tubman and her brother were scammed by two con artists, who beat her and robbed her of $2,000 of an investor’s money that she had raised.
Continuing to farm her seven-acre property, she and Davis ran a small brick-making business in the 1880s before he died in 1888. In the 1890s, Tubman became more involved in the women’s suffrage movement. In 1896, she purchased 25 acres near her property, which she ultimately transferred to the AME Zion Church. And in 1908, she opened the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Infirm Negroes—a dream of hers. She died in 1913.
Tubman survived and triumphed because of her intelligence, her relationships, and her almost superhuman physical courage. William Still, a fellow African American abolitionist who would chronicle the Underground Railroad, said that Tubman “seemed wholly devoid of personal fear.”
That her fearlessness came from her religious beliefs is uncontroversial. Tubman spoke about “consulting with God,” and she had complete confidence that God would keep her safe. The abolitionist Thomas Garrett reported that he “never met with any person, of any color, who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul. . . . and her faith in a Supreme Power truly was great.” For Tubman, Larson concludes, “the root of her outbursts, visions, sleeping spells, and voices” lay in her powerful faith. Given her visions and the voices that she heard, it is a good thing that Tubman only had to watch out for slave catchers and not modern psychiatrists.
Many anti-authoritarians see religion as the “opiate of the masses,” locking people into passivity and compelling them to wait for the “pie in the sky when they die.” But for people such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Helen Keller, their religious faith informed and inspired their anti-authoritarian spirit. For people with two strikes against them, logic may tell them to give up, but faith can empower them, energized by a belief that they are chosen by a supreme being to lead their people out of oppression. For Tubman, her faith helped fuel what modern psychiatrists would call hallucinations. Labeling visions or voices as a symptom of illness is an arrogant assumption, as there are many reasons why this phenomenon occurs. One reason is that when human beings experience extreme oppression, such visions and voices can be the only antidotes to psychological powerlessness.
Helen Keller
There is a wide gap between what most Americans are taught about Helen Keller (1880–1968) and the truth of her life. Keller was a member of the Socialist Party, an enthusiastic supporter of her hero Eugene Debs’s presidential candidacy, a leading women’s rights and civil rights activist, a critic of World War I, and one of the founders and board members of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“The mythological Helen Keller that we are familiar with,” notes Keith Rosenthal, “is little more than an apolitical symbol for perseverance and personal triumph.” Rosenthal points out in his article “The Politics of Helen Keller” that one of the most problematic moral messages that Keller’s life is used for is to promote the idea “that the task of becoming a full member of society rests upon one’s individual efforts to overcome a given impairment and has nothing to do with structural oppression or inequality.” That frustrated and enraged the real Helen Keller.
The mythical Keller is a version of the “American Dream” of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, overcoming limitations, and becoming socially and economically successful. This version of Keller has created resentment with many individuals with disabilities who know full well the truth of being disabled in the United States, and Keller also grasped this truth. While Keller enjoyed the attention and influence that her fame provided, she was frustrated by how one part of her was used to advance the American Dream mythology while her life as a socialist who confronted American injustice was quieted and marginalized.
Helen Keller lost both her sight and her hearing due to illness when she was 19 months old. This resulted, as she tells us in her autobiography, in her becoming extremely frustrated and angry. She also describes herself as a domineering (with her playmate Martha) and mischievous child: “One morning I locked my mother up in the pantry. . . . She kept pounding on the door, while I sat outside on the porch steps and laughed with glee as I felt the jar of the pounding. This most naughty prank of mine convinced my parents that I must be taught as soon as possible.” Fortunately, the young deaf-and-blind Helen was not viewed by her parents as also having oppositional defiant disorder or hopelessly in need of institutionalization.
Keller was lucky to have parents with some wherewithal. Helen’s mother had read about the successful education of another deaf-and-blind child, Laura Bridgman, and this put the Keller family on a path to connect with Alexander Graham Bell, who worked with deaf children. Young Helen adored Bell, and Bell recommended they seek help from the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, where Helen connected with Anne Sullivan, a graduate of the institute. In 1887, Sullivan went to Keller’s home in Alabama and began working with Helen, and this began a 49-year relationship between them. Keller recounted in her autobiography, “The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me.” Throughout her life, Keller would connect with other helpful people, who “hitched their wagon” to Helen because of her intelligence, drive, and determination, which made it clear that their assistance would not be a waste of time.
The description of Anne Sullivan as “the miracle worker” was actually first coined by Mark Twain who came to know Helen in 1895 when she was 15. Keller later recounted about Twain, “He treated me not as a freak, but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties.” When Helen was ten, she began speech classes at Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston and then she attended the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City, improving her communication skills including her speaking ability. She then attended the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts, a preparatory school for women. When Twain met her, he was amazed by Helen’s “quickness and intelligence” and he pushed the wealthy Henry H. Rogers to fund Helen’s further education. Rogers, equally impressed, paid for her to attend Radcliffe College, where she was accompanied by Sullivan who assisted Helen with lectures and readings. Keller, at age 24, graduated with honors.
Prior to graduating Radcliffe, Keller had published her first autobiography, The Story of My Life. Already well known, her autobiography propelled her into becoming even a greater celebrity. In her later life, she would be known as an international ambassador for the United States. However, most Americans are unaware of Helen Keller’s radical politics.
In 1909, at age 29, Keller joined the Socialist Party of America. Keller was passionate about social and economic justice. She later recounted, “Step by step my investigation of blindness led me into the industrial world.” She discovered that the leading causes of disability in the United States were an economic system in which profits were prioritized over preventing diseases and workplace accidents. She concluded that “our worst foes are ignorance, poverty, and the unconscious cruelty of our commercial society. These are the causes of blindness; these are the enemies which destroy the sight of children and workmen and undermine the health of mankind.”
Keller was very public about her socialism. She was an enthusiastic proponent of the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World. In the early twentieth century, with her fame, Keller became a leading figure in the U.S. socialist movement, using her platform to publicize and support the major strikes of her era. Predictably, the same newspapers that had celebrated Keller’s triumph over her disabilities then used her disabilities as a way to dismiss her politics and to persuade readers not to take her socialism seriously. Keller later recounted, “So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly . . . but when it comes to a discussion of a burning social or political issue, especially if I happen to be as I so often am, on the unpopular side, the tone changes completely.”
Socialist ideals of equality and social and economic justice fit into Keller’s “disability politics.” While Keller fought for expanded educational and vocational opportunities for people who were deaf, blind, and with other disabilities, she was far more radical. As Rosenthal documents, “She maintained that the larger problem was the existence of a society that did not properly fit all of its members . . . that the issue was not exclusively one of people with disabilities versus people without disabilities, but rather all of the exploited and oppressed (including disabled people) versus a form of society that . . . subjugated the former as a precondition for the wealth and power enjoyed by a dominant fraction of that society.” Keller wanted to build bridges between all oppressed and exploited people.
Helen Keller was human and thus imperfect, as one biographer Kim Nielsen makes clear in The Radical Lives of Helen Keller. Like many of us, our hypocrisies arise out of our need to financially survive, and in Keller’s case, also the need to maintain some political influence. So while Keller originally rejected financial support from Andrew Carnegie, who patronizingly threatened to lay her across his knees and spank her so she would “come to her senses” about socialism, she later accepted a Carnegie pension. In her role as spokesperson and fund raiser for the American Foundation for the Blind, for which she received a salary, she allowed the AFB to control her message so as to ignore her political radicalism. Keller was imperfect elsewhere. Like many other birth control activists, including Margaret Sanger, Keller supported some eugenic ideas though she never went as far as to support forced sterilization. And like Scott Nearing and many American socialists, she remained a supporter of the Soviet Union for several years after it was clear to anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian society.
Harriet Tubman and Helen Keller both saw themselves as chosen by a supreme being to lead people out of oppression. In an interview she gave at age 36, Keller stated, “I feel like Joan of Arc at times. My whole [being] becomes uplifted. I, too, hear the voices that say ‘Come,’ and I will follow, no matter what the cost, no matter what the trials I am placed under.”
Both Frederick Douglass and Helen Keller published memoirs in their twenties that made them “stars” of their respective oppressed groups. And while there were Americans who doubted that a runaway slave or a deaf-blind person could have written such intelligent books, many other Americans were awed by what Douglass and Keller had overcome. Their awesomeness gave them a platform to be spokespeople for their groups but also made it politically difficult to be full human beings; and both rebelled against not only the inferior status of their group but also against one-dimensionality ascribed to them.
To the extent that anti-authoritarians enter the political realm, they find themselves in compromising positions. Frederick Douglass knew that there was not enough political support for women’s voting rights and that if women’s voting rights were included in the proposed 15th Amendment to the Constitution, the amendment wouldn’t pass; and that would mean that male African Americans would continue not having voting rights. And so to the dismay of his allies in the women’s rights movement, Douglass opposed the inclusion of women’s voting rights in this amendment. Similarly, Keller was routinely in the position of being marginalized in her human rights fight for disabled people to the extent that she included her full socialist agenda, and so she compromised herself there.
Anti-authoritarians who choose to enter the realm of political activism will eventually be put in the position of compromising some of their integrity. Of course, anti-authoritarians can refuse to compromise, but they will likely pay a price in terms of personal and political marginalization. Historically, both the compromising and uncompromising political paths have had value in different circumstances.
Modern Models: Jane Jacobs, Noam Chomsky, and George Carlin
Anti-authoritarians Jane Jacobs, Noam Chomsky, and George Carlin challenged illegitimate authority in a straightforward and accessible manner. All three expressed contempt for standard schooling and its assault on self-learning and critical thinking. All three exuded a certainty—without superiority—that communicated: “Just forget about what the authorities with their academic credentials and official badges are telling you. I see this. What do you see?” The truths that Jacobs, Chomsky, and Carlin saw and asserted have been powerful challenges to authoritarian society, but perhaps even more threatening for authoritarians is their modeling of an unbroken human being.
Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) was an astonishingly triumphant anti-authoritarian in several respects. First, lacking any academic credentials in urban planning and without even a college degree, her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities became one of the most influential challenges in U.S. history to policies that were devastating U.S. cities. Second, while viewing herself as primarily a writer, Jacobs ultimately became one of the most successful activists in recent U.S. history, leading and winning fights against one of the most powerful and intimidating authorities in New York City history. And third, while elitist authorities had tried to marginalize her as “just a housewife,” her marriage was a key to her success in several areas. Her partnership with her husband was critical to her professional successes, and after raising three children together, Jane and Robert Jacobs had the wherewithal to save their sons from the violence of the U.S. government.
Jane Jacobs (born Jane Butzner) started life in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her ancestors came from “old Protestant stock” who had arrived in America before the Revolutionary War. Her father, John Butzner, was a highly respected physician who, like Ralph Nader’s father, encouraged his children to think for themselves. When she was nine years old, Jane recalled a teacher telling the class that cities always grow up around waterfalls; and though Scranton had a waterfall, young Jane didn’t think that waterfalls were the critical factor, “Mines were the thing in Scranton. I was very suspicious.” So Jane immediately told her teacher that she was wrong.
Winning battles with teachers, biographer Alice Sparberg Alexiou concludes, “only served to increase her already-healthy self-esteem.” In one incident when Jane was seven years old, a teacher told the class to raise their hands and promise to brush their teeth every day for the rest of their lives; but Jane’s father just the previous day had told her never to promise to do anything for the rest of her life when she was still a child because promises are serious. So Jane not only refused to raise her hand but told her classmates not to do so as well. This enraged Jane’s teacher, who threw her out of the classroom. However, the undaunted Jane exited school and enjoyed herself, wandering along some railroad tracks. Jane was a mischievous child, “a free spirit, clever, hilariously funny and fearless,” recounted a Scranton newspaper columnist who knew her when they were both children.
Alexiou notes, “Jane did just enough work to pass her courses but no more. . . . By the time she got to the third grade, she discovered that she could read anything and thereafter tuned out her teachers. All her life, she would remain a voracious reader.”
Her parents, notes New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, “indulged their daughter’s eccentricities, clearly seeing them as part of her character, her ‘spunk.’” Her upbringing allowed her to believe, Gopnik concludes, “that authority could be laughed away, a powerful notion for a provocateur to take through life.”
When Jacobs graduated high school, her parents told her that they had the money to send her to college but she recalled, “I was so damn glad to get out of school I couldn’t even think of going to college.” Jacobs aspired to be a newspaper reporter, but she took a stenography course so as to support herself and moved to New York City with her sister. With her stenography skills, she supported herself as a secretary and explored New York City, and began loving cities as much as Thoreau loved nature. She discovered Greenwich Village and moved there with her sister.
In 1938, at age 22, Jacobs gave higher education a try. She enrolled at Columbia University School of General Studies as a non-matriculating student, taking whatever course she wanted and received good grades. After two years, she was required to matriculate, but was rejected by Barnard despite her good record at Columbia because of her poor high school grades. Jacobs claimed later that this was a blessing; and she would have, as Alexiou put it, a “lifelong disdain for formal schooling.”
In the 1940s, Jacobs worked as a reporter for the State Department and Overseas Information Agency magazine Amerika. In 1944, she met Robert Jacobs and married him shortly later. In 1947, when their peers were moving out to suburbs, Jane and her architect husband bought an old rundown three-story building in Greenwich Village, and there they had three children together between 1948 and 1955.
In 1956, shortly before turning 40, Jacobs gave a speech that changed her life. The Architectural Forum, for whom she was writing, asked her go to Harvard University to speak at a conference on urban design. She first refused as she hated public speaking. “It was a real ordeal for me,” she later said. But her speech made complex ideas simple, especially about how people use space. She talked about how city planners and architects imposed their ideas of order that were oppressive to people’s freedom to interact. Her impressed audience included influential people, such as Lewis Mumford, architectural critic for the New Yorker, and William Whyte (author of The Organization Man), who at the time was senior editor of Fortune and who facilitated a piece by Jacobs for Fortune in 1958. This ultimately connected Jacobs with Random House editor Jason Epstein, resulting in a book deal for The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which she published in 1961.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities would become and remain one of the most influential books about cities and urban planning in U.S. history. Jacobs began it with this sentence: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” In her first paragraph, using the word attack three times, Jacobs makes clear that she opposed the “principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding.” “I shall mainly be writing about common, ordinary things,” Jacobs proclaimed, about what kind of streets are safe and unsafe, why slums stay slums or regenerate, and “how cities work in real life.” She had contempt for elitist ideologues who don’t observe realities of city life such as the harmful effects of high-rise housing projects and highways that gut cities. She coined terms such as “mixed primary uses” and “eye on the street.”
Jacobs would later say, “It is not easy for uncredentialed people to stand up to the credentialed, even when the so-called expertise is grounded in ignorance and folly.” Many authorities tried and failed to marginalize the book and dismiss Jacobs as merely a “housewife” or an “amateur.” Readers were taken by her commonsense ideas, powerful prose, and her obvious love of cities. The anti-authoritarian Jacobs told us to form our own conclusions, “I hope any reader of this book will constantly and skeptically test what I say.” Her disdain for dogma and ideology coupled with her pragmatism made the book fresh and exciting. Jacobs’s work emerged in an era of anti-authoritarian women writers, most famously Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) and Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963).
Jacobs had become a community activist even before The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but she became more known after that book’s publication. Her primary adversary was Robert Moses, the epitome of an authoritarian. Moses, in terms of construction—roads, bridges, parks, and housing—was the most powerful figure in New York City history. Documented by Robert Caro’s 1974 book The Power Broker, Moses had once been lauded as a reformer and city improver, but Caro notes, “To clear the land for these improvements, he evicted the city’s people, not thousands of them or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, from their homes and tore the homes down. Neighborhoods were obliterated by his edict.” Moses’s political acumen and power was such that no mayor or governor dared oppose him; and even when Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at the height of his popularity as president, attempted to oppose Moses, Caro tells us that Roosevelt “found himself forced to retreat.” But Jane Jacobs stood up to Robert Moses and won.
Prior to her fame as an author, Jacobs had in the late 1950s joined the fight against a Moses project to put a roadway through Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, linking Fifth Avenue with West Broadway. Jacobs and others formed a community group, which was uncommon at the time. Instead of pleading with city bureaucrats and with Moses, they used public pressure to intimidate vulnerable politicians. When Moses realized that he had been defeated, he became livid and transparent, “There is nobody against this—nobody, nobody, nobody, but a bunch of, a bunch of mothers!”
Another Moses project, more potentially devastating, was the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), which if built would have wiped out SoHo, Chinatown, Little Italy, and much of Greenwich Village. Jacobs recounted, “I felt very resistant to getting into another fight. I wanted to work on my work.” But with her new clout, Jacobs knew that she was invaluable to the movement and jumped in, leading another diverse community group that included artists, business owners, homemakers, reform Democrats, right-wing young Americans for Freedom, and anarcho-pacifists. They defeated LOMEX in 1962, but as Jacobs would later say, “The rule of thumb is that you have to kill expressways three times before they die.” This was the case with LOMEX. In its last defeat in 1968, at a public hearing on the project, Jacobs got arrested on several charges including inciting a riot, but luckily she avoided jail.
Not long after that in 1968, Jane and Robert Jacobs took their family and moved out of the United States to Toronto, Canada. The Vietnam War was the major reason. The Jacobs family were anti-war activists. Following one anti-war demonstration at the Pentagon in which soldiers drove back protesters with rifle butts injuring many, though Jane was unhurt, she recalled thinking, “I didn’t feel part of America anymore.” Moreover, Jane and Robert’s sons were draft age and had announced that they would go to jail rather than Vietnam. And so faced with their sons’ likely imprisonment, Robert and Jane, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman before them, sought refuge in Canada. But unlike Douglass and Tubman, the Jacobs family did not return. Jane continued as an activist in Toronto and became one of Canada’s most honored and influential citizens. She died in 2006, shortly before her 90th birthday.
Like Scott Nearing, one of Jane Jacobs’s best decisions was her spouse choice. Throughout their lengthy marriage, Robert complimented and complemented Jane. They discussed all the ideas that went into her books, with Jane noting about The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “I do not know which ideas in this book are mine and which are his.” They also teamed on every civic battle, with Jane relying on Robert’s political savvy. Jane later said, “He usually stayed in the background, and I don’t think people realized how important he was to all the fights in Greenwich Village.” Robert in turn said, “I know that my wife is more eminent than I am. I’m proud of that and I am so proud of her.”
Money always matters, and early on Jane was self-reliant with her stenography skills that kept her financially afloat until she could make it as a writer. But for Jane to have both professional and domestic satisfaction, Robert was invaluable. Alexiou notes, “Robert had a long and productive career as an architect, which is fortunate because Jacobs’s books were not of the sort that makes their writer wealthy.”
Jacobs prided herself as being opposed to dogma, and she accepted the possibility that there could be downsides to her vision. She had championed preserving older buildings, not simply because of their architectural character but because she believed that this would ensure affordable housing. However, rehabbed older buildings such as hers led to gentrification (in the 2000s, her old Greenwich Village home would sell for $3 million), and this resulted in a decline of economic diversity.
Jane Jacobs was no great diplomat, and she was lucky that this didn’t hurt her political activism. For example, the influential Lewis Mumford had been an encouraging support for her, helping Jacobs following her Harvard talk. Jacobs and Mumford agreed on many urban issues—from their mutual antipathy for Robert Moses, to their agreeing on the disaster of high-rise housing projects, urban expressways, and urban renewal destruction. However, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs attacked Mumford in some areas, compelling a counterattack by Mumford in his review of her book. But when it came time to battle Moses and LOMEX at a city hearing, upon her request, Mumford wrote what Jacobs called a “wonderfully effective letter” in opposition. She later recounted, “Nobody could have exerted the influence that he did.”
In addition to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs would author several other books, and at age 88, the anti-authoritarian Jacobs reminded her readers, “I don’t want disciples. I want people with independent minds to read my books.”
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) may well be the most famous and admired modern U.S. anti-authoritarian. Given his political stands, it is remarkable that he has survived and thrived. In the early 1960s, Chomsky challenged and resisted the U.S. government’s war in Vietnam at a time when very few Americans were criticizing the Vietnam War, risking an academic career in linguistics in which he had become highly esteemed for his groundbreaking contributions. Since his entrance on the political public stage, Chomsky has used his platform to challenge illegitimate authorities, including the U.S. government and oppressive regimes around the world. He has voiced a consistent contempt for elite rule—for its atrocities as well as for its subversion of working-class autonomy. Amazingly, in a 2013 Reader’s Digest poll of “The 100 Most Trusted People in America,” Chomsky, a self-described anarchist, was voted #20 (behind #19 Michelle Obama; in front of #24 Jimmy Carter).
Chomsky grew up in Philadelphia. His father, William, fled the Ukraine to the United States, worked in sweatshops, attended Johns Hopkins University, worked as a school principal, and later became one of the world’s foremost Hebrew grammarians and faculty president at Gratz College. Noam’s mother Elsie was also a teacher. Chomsky describes his parents as “normal Roosevelt Democrats,” although some other family members were leftist radicals.
Noam was seen as an exceptionally intelligent child in his community. Bea Tucker, who worked as William Chomsky’s secretary, recalled a conversation with Noam at age seven. Tucker pointed to Compton’s Encyclopedia and asked Noam if he had looked through any of the volumes, and Noam responded. “I’ve only read half of them.” Between age two and twelve, Noam went to Oak Lane, a Deweyite experimental school where children were encouraged to think for themselves and where creativity was more important than grades. All schools, Chomsky believes, could be run like Oak Lane but won’t because no society “based on authoritarian hierarchic institutions would tolerate such a school system for very long.”
At Oak Lane, when he was ten, Noam published an article in the school newspaper about the fall of Barcelona to fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War—an influential event for Chomsky then and throughout his life. Later as a teenager, Noam read Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell’s account of the Spanish Civil War and the briefly successful anarchist society in Spain. Chomsky’s early understanding that people can rise up against oppressive systems and create cooperative organization among themselves became part of the basis for his belief in anarchism as a real possibility.
At age twelve, Noam entered Central High School in Philadelphia, a highly regarded school but one that he hated, “It was the dumbest, most ridiculous place I’ve ever been, it was like falling into a black hole or something. For one thing, it was extremely competitive—because that’s one of the best ways of controlling people. So everybody was ranked, and you always knew exactly where you were. . . . All of this stuff is put into people’s heads in various ways in the schools—that you got to beat down the person next to you, and just look out for yourself.”
Noam remained in school but recalled losing all interest in it. Instead, he self-educated during his adolescence. At age 13, Noam commuted alone by train to New York City to visit relatives. He spent many hours with an uncle who ran a newsstand in Manhattan on 72nd Street, which was a lively “literary political salon” where Noam was exposed to radical politics and Jewish working-class culture.
At age 16, Chomsky began undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, but he soon became discouraged. He recalled, “When I looked at the college catalogue it was really exciting—lots of courses, great things. But it turned out that the college was like an overgrown high school. After about a year I was going to just drop out and it was just by accident that I stayed in.” He recalled later, “The vague ideas I had at the time were to go to Palestine, perhaps to a kibbutz, to try to become involved in efforts at Arab-Jewish cooperation within a socialist framework” (in 1953, he did live for six weeks in a left-leaning kibbutz but was disappointed by racist attitudes there). In 1947 at age 19, he began dating Carol Schatz, whom he would marry, and they would have three children together. Also in 1947, Noam met Zellig Harris, a charismatic linguistic professor, which resulted in Noam remaining in academia—and ultimately becoming a renowned linguist.
His biographer Robert Barsky concludes, “Chomsky’s early life, indeed his whole life, was and has been literally consumed by a desire for understanding and a penchant for political commitment.” Chomsky’s early interests were political, not linguistic. Chomsky recalled, “I had, from childhood, been deeply involved intellectually in radical and dissident politics, but intellectually.” Ultimately, intellectual involvement was not enough. Chomsky tells us, “I’m really a hermit by nature, and would much prefer to be alone working than to be in public.” However, some instinct told him that he needed to transcend his comfort zone and actively engage the world.
One of the earliest influential authorities Chomsky challenged was behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner. Skinner’s 1957 book Verbal Behavior, with its view that language was learned through behavior modification, was for Chomsky patently absurd, denying a fundamental characteristic of human beings—creativity. And in 1971, with many other humanists, Chomsky confronted the totalitarian nature of another popular Skinner book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
While Chomsky was bothered by irrational notions in linguistics, he was enraged by illegitimate authority in the political realm, especially when it came to the Vietnam War. Chomsky recounted, “I knew that I was just too intolerably self-indulgent merely to take a passive role in the struggles that were then going on. And I knew that signing petitions, sending money, and showing up now and then at a meeting was not enough. I thought it was critically necessary to take a more active role, and I was well aware of what that would mean.” For ten years, Chomsky refused paying a portion of his taxes, supported draft resisters, was arrested several times, and was on Richard Nixon’s official enemies list.
Given the potential consequence of his political stand, Noam and Carol Chomsky agreed that it made sense for her to return to school and get a PhD so she could support the family if he was put in prison. He later recounted, “In fact, that is just what would have happened except for two unexpected events: (1) the utter (and rather typical) incompetence of the intelligence services. . . . [and] (2) the Tet Offensive, which convinced American business that the game wasn’t worth the candle and led to the dropping of prosecutions.” Carol Chomsky ultimately secured a position at Harvard’s School of Education, and went on to have a successful academic career. And so with luck and wise choices, the Chomsky family had two excellent incomes and financial security.
Chomsky continued his public attack on authoritarian policies and propaganda. In 1988, Chomsky and co-author Edward Herman published Manufacturing Consent, which describes a “Propaganda Model” of how the media creates a distorted view of reality that maintains the status quo for the ruling class.
Given Chomsky’s many hours on the road speaking about political causes, his many publications, and his extensive work on linguistics, he is mistakenly viewed as leading a life of self-denial. However, he has long realized that to deny his full humanity—his need to have security, fun, and family—and to attempt ethical perfection would be unhelpful. Chomsky is clear: “Look, you’re not going to be effective as a political activist unless you have a satisfying life.” Chomsky tells audiences, “None of us are saints, at least I’m not. I haven’t given up my house, I haven’t given up my car, I don’t live in a hovel, I don’t spend 24 hours a day working for the benefit of the human race, or anything like that. In fact, I don’t even come close . . . . I certainly do devote an awful lot of my energy and activity to things that I just enjoy, like scientific work. I just like it, I do it out of pleasure.”
In a 2003 New Yorker profile of Chomsky, Larissa MacFarquhar notes, “In many ways, he and his wife, Carol, lead a conventional middle-class life. They live in Lexington, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, in a large brown clapboard house . . . . When their children were little, they went on vacations to the Caribbean; they summer on Cape Cod.” MacFarquhar quotes a Chomsky friend: “He likes to be out of doors in the summer, he likes to swim in the lake and go sailing and eat junk food.”
Chomsky models an activist who does not self-flagellate about financial hypocrisies that are virtually impossible to avoid. When employed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky was candid about the reality that even though the U.S. government’s Department of Defense was not funding him directly, because the DOD was funding other MIT departments, such funding allowed MIT to pay him. “As far as the moral issue goes,” Chomsky remarked, “It’s not as if there’s some clean money somewhere. If you’re in a university, you’re on dirty money—you’re on money which is coming from people who are working somewhere, and whose money is being taken away.”
Chomsky also realized that valuing family meant not only financial compromises but even an occasional philosophical one. Chomsky, a non-practicing Jew and not a member of any synagogue, was faced with a dilemma when his oldest daughter wanted to get bat-mitzvahed but was unable to do so because her family did not belong to a synagogue; Chomsky relented and became a member. Carol, prior to her death in 2008, said, “Noam will always stop whatever he’s doing and do something with the family. He is totally devoted. It’s his outlet.”
In the area of electoral politics, Chomsky has recommended voting under certain circumstances for the lesser-of-two-evil candidates, which for some on the radical Left is seen as a violation of integrity, but which he sees as rational and politically astute. However, in one now infamous incident—the so-called Faurisson affair—Chomsky chose not to be politically astute.
Specifically, Robert Faurisson was a professor of French literature who had been suspended from a university in France because of his denials of the Holocaust. Chomsky, at the request of a friend and because of his belief in free speech, signed a petition in 1979 for Faurisson’s free speech rights, and Chomsky also wrote a longer statement about this case (that was used without Chomsky’s permission in a book by Faurisson). By taking this position on Faurisson, Chomsky created a distraction for his views about Israel. Regarding Israel, Chomsky has spoken of having had “a feeling of joy” about the initial creation of Israel as “a place where Holocaust victims could be assimilated”; but he has also expressed that just as the United States should not be a Christian state and just as Pakistan should not be an Islamic state, Israel should not be a Jewish state, and that all its inhabitants should have equal civil rights and political say. For Chomsky’s ideological commitment to free speech in the Faurisson affair, he provided those who wish to discredit him as a “self-hating Jew” with material to manufacture propaganda against him.
As we see with all anti-authoritarians, nobody has perfect wisdom, but Noam Chomsky may come as close to Spinoza-like rationality as possible. Chomsky’s anger over illegitimate authority certainly has leaked out in debates, but for the most part he has not self-sabotaged. Pained enough over illegitimate authorities, he has not added to that pain any self-flagellations about unavoidable hypocrisies; and he has made sure to include joy in his life. He was wise with his choice of a spouse, and together they were smart with respect to money. Importantly, he has been wise to grow out of his hermit-like comfort zone and engage the world—so as to not simply flee the repulsive elite but to also connect with the non-elite.
George Carlin
In ranking George Carlin (1937–2008) as the second best stand-up comic of all time, Rolling Stone called him: “The hippie sage, the MIT-level linguist, the First Amendment activist, the undisputed champion gadfly of stand-up.” Like the actual MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, Carlin was fascinated by language. Like Jane Jacobs, Carlin prided himself on being a writer. Jacobs, Chomsky, and Carlin—all very different personalities with very different career paths—radiated a confidence about challenging and resisting the illegitimate authorities of society.
George Carlin, as Rolling Stone, put it, “was the ultimate thinking man’s comic, demanding that his audiences fight from underneath the mountain of bullshit heaped upon them by clergymen, politicians and advertisers.” Carlin’s career arc was a radical transformation, beginning as a “people pleaser” in the 1960s, then a counterculture hero in the 1970s, and finally in the last two decades of his life, an anti-authoritarian prophet.
In his autobiography Last Words, Carlin tells us, “I was conceived in a damp, sand-flecked room of Curley’s Hotel in Rockaway Beach, New York.” And so while it’s difficult to disagree with Rolling Stone’s #1 best stand-up-comic ranking of the anti-authoritarian Richard Pryor, I’m a little more drawn to Carlin, in part because he was conceived in Rockaway Park, a couple of miles west of where I grew up (a happier Rockaway connection for me than Phil Ochs hanging himself in Far Rockaway, a couple of miles to the east).
Born in Manhattan, George’s parents separated when he was still an infant because, as Carlin put it, his father “drank, he got drunk, he hit people.” Carlin never met his father, who was for a time a successful salesman and after-dinner speaker. George grew up in the ethnically diverse Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside Heights, raised by a single mother who was an executive secretary in the advertising business.
Growing up, George had a great deal of freedom and autonomy. At age seven, he snuck on the subway to visit his mother at work, and went downtown to Central Park, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Wall Street, Chinatown, and the waterfront. By age eleven, he knew he wanted to be an entertainer as he loved the laughter and attention, “Disrupting class made school more bearable . . . but after school—that longed-for part of the day belongs to the kid alone—was what counted for me and the kids of my generation.” He begged his mother to get him a tape recorder to practice his act, and he would make fun of authority figures in the neighborhood. He recounted, “Now we’d be called ‘delinquents,’ ‘troubled,’ ‘alienated,’ or worse; certainly some of the guys from the neighborhood later did time. But there was something innocent about running wild on the streets back then.”
Carlin quit school in the ninth grade, later recounting, “I had great marks. I was a smart kid, but I didn’t care. They weren’t teaching what I wanted. I didn’t give a shit. It’s important in life . . . not to give a shit. It can help you a lot.”
When he was 17, Carlin joined the U.S. Air Force. He later proudly recounted: “So that’s two court-martials, and four more Article 15s after the first one. . . . A grand total of seven major disciplinary offenses. Pretty fucking impressive.” One of his court-martials happened overseas, drunk in his barracks celebrating his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers beating the Yankees in the World Series. His sergeant yelled at him, “Shut up, Carlin!” to which Carlin tells us, “I replied with my standard ‘Go fuck yourself, cocksucker!’” By luck, he eventually received a 3916 discharge, which Carlin recounted, “was like a no-fault divorce.” Gaining an early exit without dishonorable discharge for Carlin meant, “I absolutely beat the game.”
While still in the air force, Carlin began working as a radio disc jockey. In 1959 at age 22, Carlin teamed up with Jack Burns, and in February 1960, they headed to Hollywood, dreaming of performing on the Tonight Show. With good luck and some connections, they were on that show by the end of the year.
“The sixties were my nice years,” Carlin recounted, “my nice suit, my nice collar, my nice tie, my nice haircut—and my nice material.” Though at that time still tame himself, Carlin had enormous respect for the edgier Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, “They were challenging authority. That’s what comedy is supposed to do.” Bruce and Sahl liked Carlin, and they helped him with career connections.
By the end of 1960s, Carlin was disgusted with his “mainstream dream” and “people pleaser job.” He began coming to terms with who he really was: “I got kicked out of three different schools. I got kicked out of the Air Force. I got kicked out of the choir. I got kicked out of the altar boys. I got kicked out of summer camp. I got kicked out of the Boy Scouts. . . . I was a pot smoker when I was 13. We broke the law. . . . I swam against the tide of what is expected and what the establishment wants from us. But I didn’t know that about myself . . . because this dream blinded me.” He began to recognize that he was a rebel who wanted to artistically project ideas.
In the 1970s, a new countercultural Carlin emerged with a beard and long hair. He recorded the album Class Clown with his now famous “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” and in 1972, he got arrested in Milwaukee for performing it. Luckily for Carlin, it was the 1970s, and so unlike Lenny Bruce, the case was dismissed with the judge declaring that Carlin’s language was indecent but that he hadn’t broken the law. However, as the counterculture began to diminish, Carlin lost much of his audience and faced another existential crisis.
In the 1980s, Carlin’s life was a mess, “Throughout the eighties I had outbursts of anger. It kept building up and festering. Anger at myself for getting myself in this tax mess, for being such a cokehead I didn’t have the sense to avoid the tax mess.” Married to Brenda since 1961 and a father since 1963, Carlin also was angry with himself for his failings in his marriage and his parenting. But Carlin used his crisis for ideological and artistic transformation.
“The [1980] election of Ronald Reagan,” Carlin recounted, “might’ve been the beginning of my giving up on my species. Because it was absurd.” The absurdity of the Reagan years, Carlin recalled, helped him to find “an authentic position to speak from.” Carlin started reading Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Hunter S. Thompson, and Gore Vidal, and acknowledged, “I had a left-wing, humanitarian, secular humanist, liberal inclination,” but added, “Liberal orthodoxy was as repugnant to me as conservative orthodoxy.”
Carlin ultimately came to major realizations such as: “Laughter is not the only proof of success. Boy, what a liberating recognition that was! . . . Getting laughs all the time wasn’t my only responsibility. My responsibility was to engage the audience’s mind” [Carlin’s emphasis].
While Noam Chomsky’s quiet voice and unchanging facial expressions gives his anti-authoritarian messages a certain power for some audiences, when Carlin began delivering Chomsky-like messages, he was able to reach a larger audience that needed to be entertained while prodded to think. A few Carlin examples:
“America’s manhood problem was typified by the teenage sexual slang we use about war. In Vietnam we didn’t ‘go all the way.’ We ‘pulled out.’ Very unmanly. When you fuck an entire people you have to keep fucking and fucking them—women and children too—till they’re all dead.”
“I don’t feel about war the way we’re supposed to, the way we’re told to by the United States government. A large part of which is the United States military, whose business is war. So the military is telling us how to feel about war—so they can stay in business. Something is fucked up here.”
“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice! You have owners! They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.”
As with all the anti-authoritarians in this book, Carlin was far from a perfect human being, especially with regard to self-destructive behaviors, most notably with his severe substance abuse. But with some luck, maturation, humility, and eventually moderation and ultimately abstinence, Carlin’s substance abuse did not kill him before he became an anti-authoritarian prophet.
Given the friends Carlin grew up with, the nature of the entertainment industry especially during his formative years, the counterculture drug influence, and the general societal hypocrisy around drugs that made it easy for any anti-authoritarian to disregard drug admonitions, it’s understandable how Carlin almost destroyed himself and his family with his substance abuse. Carlin, even after he stopped abusing drugs, had positive memories about hallucinogenic drugs, “Took some acid and mescaline. Didn’t overdo it. I had a couple of trips that weren’t the best. But I had a lot of great trips. . . . Fuck the drug war. Dropping acid was a profound turning point for me, a seminal experience. I make no apologies for it.”
For Carlin, it took some time to separate drug realities from authoritarian propaganda. For example, with respect to the amphetamine-like Ritalin, Carlin recounted, “I’d always used Ritalin. My Ritalin habit didn’t make me crazy. I used to take half a Ritalin, or at most one and a half (I had a doctor’s prescription for the stuff). That was my speed during my so-called straight years: the groundwork was laid early on for my attraction to cocaine.”
Carlin’s maturation, humility, moderation, and ultimately complete abstinence was a gradual process. He recounted that in 1972, “I was already using enough cocaine that I had to think consciously about not using it to record an album.” Between Carlin’s cocaine abuse and his wife’s alcohol abuse, their marriage became chaotic and violent, and on a 1973 family vacation, they brandished knives at each other, terrifying their ten-year-old daughter Kelly. Carlin started to gradually mature, “My own drug use, post-Brenda-sober, fell off. . . . Pot I still saw as benign.”
As Carlin began caring about being more than just an entertaining comic, and as he became increasingly consumed by being an artist, he realized, “During my drug period, the only thing that was important was getting high—and fulfilling dates when I could. I don’t recall these feelings of pursuing and appreciating artistry, the increasing ability to create. I’m sure the drugs blocked that sort of thing out.” In 2004, Carlin entered rehab. “For a long time—since giving up pot in the late eighties—I’d been addicted to an opiate called wine-and-Vicodin. . . .I couldn’t control it and I needed help. . . . I developed a new appreciation of the AA techniques . . . whatever skepticism I’d had about them. . . . Although I can do without that Higher Power stuff.”
At age 67, Carlin recounted, “I put an end to five decades of substance abuse.” However, after a lengthy history of cardiac problems including three heart attacks in 1978, 1982, and 1991, Carlin died of heart failure at age 71 in 2008.
Carlin knew that in order to engage audiences, he needed to connect with them on an emotional level, and he effectively connected with increasingly cynical U.S. audiences. In his 1997 book Brain Droppings, he wrote: “I frankly don’t give a fuck how it all turns out in this country—or anywhere else, for that matter . . . . My motto: Fuck Hope! . . . I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction.” Ironically, the arc of Carlin’s life provides hope for anti-authoritarians that their lives need not be tragic ones.