On the centenary of Walden’s publication in 1954, Duke University professor Lewis Leary wrote in the Nation magazine that it seemed “almost a miracle” a book as “potentially incendiary” as Thoreau’s could have survived over the previous hundred years. Leary was by no means unusual in expressing surprise at Thoreau’s fame; nor was he unusual, on the eve of the civil rights movement, in casting Thoreau as incendiary. Despite Thoreau’s insistence on distancing himself from all partisan causes in his own day, he had been enjoined in virtually every political movement since, with the possible exception of women’s suffrage. Still, there was something unique in Leary’s tone. At no previous point in history had Thoreau been so universally embraced for his political views, and at no previous point in history had he been embraced so passionately. In the decade after Leary’s pronouncement, Thoreau became a true American icon—not only as the nation’s best-loved poet-naturalist but also as its most notorious civil disobedient. When Leary made his pronouncement in 1954, Thoreau was still relatively unknown outside of academe; by the end of the next decade, he was America’s most widely recognized author. How did that happen?1
The answer lies partly in his malleability. By the time Leary wrote his tribute in 1954, Thoreau had been identified as a poet, a naturalist, a moralist, a political theorist, a philosopher, a literary craftsman, an exemplar of simple living, an advocate of freedom, a friend to the oppressed, and a protector of small animals. And, of course, each of these images could be substantiated in his writing. In 1956 Louis Salomon published an article in College English describing the mistakes his students commonly made in their essays on Walden. To preempt this misreading, he handed them a list of the “commonest delusions about Thoreau.” He was not a hermit, Salomon pointed out, nor was he opposed to government. He was neither antithetical to material comfort nor lazy. He appreciated the benefits of modern commerce and technology, and he was well acquainted with the practical side of life. Salomon offered ample quotes from Walden to justify each of these caveats, but a few months later Wade Thompson published a rebuttal using an equally long list of quotes to prove that Salomon’s students were in fact correct in each of these assertions. Thoreau quite clearly believed that “trade curses everything it handles,” he was “completely opposed to organized society and government,” and he railed against the corrosive influence of material comforts. The difficulty with Salomon’s method, Thompson concluded, was that “no author has ever contradicted himself . . . more frequently and with gayer abandon than Thoreau.” He was “practical or impractical, prophet or blind man, naturalist or supernaturalist, ‘a clammy prig’ or a warm genial companion—depending almost totally on how one chooses to look at him.”2 For the scholar hoping to make sense of Thoreau, these contradictory pronouncements were exasperating, but they help explain why this odd transcendentalist philosopher could become so universally appealing in the 1960s. Each partisan group chose to look at him in its own way, and this multiplicity of claims broadcast his illusive thoughts across the political landscape.
Thoreau scholars overcame this inherent ambiguity by tightening their focus on Thoreau’s literary style. “The academic professionalization of the 1950s,” the literary historian Lawrence Buell writes, was a “harbinger of the more intensively specialized industry of Thoreau textual studies that has followed.” The 1950s thus saw a widening gap between the arcane criticism that marked Thoreau scholarship in the college classroom and the popular perception of the man on the streets. What was surprising, however, was the degree to which scholarship shadowed the popular Thoreau in the decade that followed. Despite the turn to the New Criticism, academics participated in the radicalization of Thoreau, through either positive or negative commentary.3
If the academic Thoreau was increasingly obscure, the popular Thoreau was increasingly vibrant. In part, this was because he was a master at what one biographer called the “brief gnomic sentence” that packed “much thought into little room.” His brilliant stylistic flourishes, terse and often ironic, were as enigmatic as they were inspiring; the same phrase could be appropriated for a commercial advertisement or a political rally. He could enter into the political discourse at almost any point, speaking on behalf of such diverse causes as antimilitarism, nature appreciation, homeopathy, and organic gardening. The nudist journal Sunshine and Health pointed out that he was known to explore the Assabet River wearing nothing but a hat, and the British Vegetarian Messenger quoted his declaration that “it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual improvement to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes left off eating each other.”4 He could inspire any number of causes—or serve as lightning rod for those who opposed them. In either case, his writing propelled him to the forefront of popular political consciousness, for some a champion of social justice and for others an enemy of the state.
This literary legacy was particularly suited to the political culture of the 1960s. When Leary wrote his tribute to Walden in 1954, the nation was entering a complex and contentious era of transition, shifting from Cold War consensus to cultural and political rebellion, and Thoreau’s writing mirrored the complexities of this changing political milieu. He reveled in the paradoxes of his own day and spoke unabashedly on both sides of the great debate over the coming industrial order. This illusiveness, so confusing to critics in his own century, contributed to his popularity in the next, as partisans adapted his various facades to the great political questions of the day. Readers could admire an author fascinated with technology yet willing to question its impact on human freedom, a celibate who reveled in the sensual touch of nature, a pioneering ecological thinker who reigned as America’s greatest nature-poet, a committed abolitionist who denounced all political causes, an enemy of the state who urged the government to take greater responsibility for protecting the environment. Americans in the 1960s, in short, could well appreciate an author who seemed to exemplify the complexity of their own society.5
To be sure, Thoreau’s popular image had been on the rise since World War II. This was evident in his nomination to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at New York University in 1960. A 630-foot-long colonnade designed by architect Stanford White, the Hall of Fame was founded in 1900, and new inductees were added every five years based on selections made by a board of university officials, prominent individuals, and state senators. In the initial ballot in 1900, Thoreau received only three votes of the sixty-one required for election. Emerson, Longfellow, and Irving were among the eleven whose busts were installed in the hall. James Russell Lowell was inducted in 1905, and Thoreau was not among the candidates again until 1920, when he received six votes. His name garnered only thirty-eight votes in 1930, just above Stonewall Jackson and below John Singleton Copley. In 1940 only Stephen Foster was added, with Thoreau and three others close behind.
His candidacy gained support when the Thoreau Society was formed in 1941 in Concord and took on the campaign to install him in the Hall of Fame. Thoreau enthusiasts had been meeting in Concord since the beginning of the century, but the force behind the modern Thoreau Society was the English professor Walter Harding, then teaching in western Massachusetts.6 To a reading group that met occasionally in Concord, Harding proposed an annual pilgrimage to the pond. Nearly two hundred showed up in July 1941 and chose University of North Carolina professor Raymond Adams as its first president. The following year Harding, as secretary-treasurer, issued the first Thoreau Society Bulletin—two mimeographed sheets circulating to around 160 readers.7
The new society worked steadily on the Hall of Fame campaign. Thoreau received thirty-six votes in 1945, thirty-three in 1950, and fifty-four in 1955. With backing from the society and from Ohio investment banker Theodore Bailey, who spent twenty years lobbying for this outcome, Thoreau was elected in 1960 along with Thomas Edison. This saddled the Thoreau Society with the task of raising $10,774 to create a bust and fund an induction ceremony. Recalling that Thoreau built his Walden hut for $28, some argued that the niche should be left empty as a tribute to his doctrine of simplicity. Others complained about the public acclaim: “Never has a man of such implacable privacy become a prophet on such a public scale,” the New York theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote ironically. The Hall of Fame director observed that he had “never before encountered so much uncivil disobedience.” The issue was resolved, and in 1962, on the centenary of Thoreau’s death, the bust was unveiled. In a final irony, the practice of adding inductees to the Hall of Fame was soon after abandoned, and the hall fell into disrepair.8
The centenary of Thoreau’s death also occasioned a major biography written by society founder Walter Harding. As a professor of English at the State University of New York at Geneseo, Harding published around twenty-five books and anthologies on his favorite topic, and chief among these was Days of Henry Thoreau. The book was considered definitive—a tribute to Harding’s “single-minded devotion”—and unlike many earlier biographies, it was written for popular consumption, avoiding ponderous exegesis and focusing, as the title suggests, on Thoreau’s day-to-day experience. Harding’s close rendering revealed the complete man—neither cynic nor idler but rather a hardworking surveyor, lecturer, inventor, writer, and most endearingly a friend to the animals of the forest. Harding humanized his subject without appearing defensive, but as University of Maryland professor Carl Bode pointed out, he looked “somehow . . . smaller in these pages than we thought he was.” Harvard’s Howard Mumford Jones described the biography as somewhat “pedestrian” and novelist Sterling North a “trifle tedious.” Both, however, agreed that what Days lacked in drama, it made up for in factual authority. Days became the standard reference for Thoreau’s life, if not his literary achievement.9
Throughout the century leading up to Leary’s 1954 pronouncement, critics had been confounded by a certain dualism in Thoreau’s legacy. Some saw him as a nature writer, as he seemed to be in Walden, and others a social critic, as reflected in “Civil Disobedience.” In the 1960s it was the latter that gave him visibility. “He was only incidentally a naturalist,” Boston College professor John J. McAleer insisted. “His first commitments were to philosophy and reform.” In “Winter Walk” he emphasized the whiteness of the snow-blanketed woods merely to draw attention to society’s impurities, and in “Autumnal Tints” the brilliant fall colors seemed less important than the fact that farmers failed to notice them. “Just as we settle with him into the joys of Nature he thwacks us with some unpleasant truth about Society.” Writing in the English Journal in 1962, Leo Bressler encouraged teachers to present him not as a “nineteenth century Nature Boy” but as an embodiment of youthful rebellion. Responding to this turn in Thoreau’s image, the New York Times in 1967 offered up a full-page “Baker’s Dozen of Writers Comment on ‘Civil Disobedience,’” with opinions ranging from William F. Buckley Jr. on the Right to Noam Chomsky on the Left.10
The rediscovery of “Civil Disobedience” reflected the changes in political temper in the 1960s. In the 1950s students expressed admiration for Thoreau’s writing but considered his social message outdated, but by the middle of that decade academic life was changing. GI Bill college graduates began joining college and university faculties. Less elite in their background, they were less inclined to support the establishment, and their tenuring coincided with the end of the McCarthy era. This younger faculty reconfigured disciplines like history, sociology, and political science to stress ordinary people, class analysis, and collective protest. They were prepared, as a group, to see Thoreau less as a literary project and more as a source of political inspiration. At the same time, students and young people in general were becoming socially sensitized by memories of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Nuremberg Trials. Postwar prosperity released many from the pressing concerns of job security and at the same time left them disillusioned with the materialist orientation that accompanied this prosperity. John F. Kennedy’s appeal to moral responsibility sent many down the path to protest, but clearly the most important sources of youth rebellion were opposition to the Vietnam War, the rediscovery of poverty in America, the nationalist revolutions in the colonial world, and the surge in black civil rights activism at home. Released from the Cold War fixation on ideological conformity, freed from the illusion of a classless society, and inspired by the moral commitment of black civil rights workers, college-age youth moved into the political arena.11
Protests over Vietnam accelerated with passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, which implied congressional consent for the war, and demonstrations in support of civil rights, free speech, the environment, and women’s rights added to the political turmoil. This popular dissent raised concerns among conservative Americans who feared, as Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas put it, that “widespread mass civil disobedience . . . put severe strains on our constitutional system.” In Fortas’s eyes, young people were sincere in their concern for civil rights, poverty, campus democracy, and the war, but the combined assault on traditional social norms and political procedures produced a whole generation of discontents—hippies, psychedelic drug users, flower children, activists, and militants—whose influence was far more dangerous that the challenge to any specific government policy.12
This changing political mood affected the way both scholars and popularizers looked at Thoreau. Writing in the Emerson Society Quarterly in 1966, Louisiana State University English professor Lewis Simpson denounced the comfortable, banal Thoreauviana featured in words-to-live-by columns and asked how Thoreau might be rescued from such “well-meaning yet essentially corrupting treatment.” The Thoreau Society’s Charles White likewise urged fellow members to rethink their ways of celebrating the man. Nature walks, slide shows, and photography contests were harmless enough, but “Thoreau and what he stood for should not be co-opted into boosterism for the Concord Chamber of Commerce.” The novelist and social activist Truman Nelson announced a new Thoreau—a “great captain of liberty,” inspiring not because of his nature studies but because of his “emblematic actions.” Looking back on the decade in 1976, Northwestern University professor Lyndon Shanley quipped that most people in the 1960s thought Thoreau “spent half of his life in jail, and the other half living at Walden Pond.”13
The Concord jail and Walden Pond were symbolic because they answered a fundamental question that troubled American youth in the 1960s: how to live a moral life as a member of an immoral society. Willard Uphaus faced this dilemma head-on during the McCarthy hearings in the late 1950s when as director of the World Fellowship Center in New Hampshire he refused to turn over the center’s guest list to the committee and was imprisoned. Although he lost his appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court, he felt personally vindicated. “As Americans, Thoreau and I leaned on the same tradition,” he wrote. “I felt . . . that Thoreau would have supported me in my full non-cooperation with what I believed to be bad law, even if it meant prison.”14
This was the dilemma that Thoreau addressed in “Civil Disobedience.” The essay expressed a profound cynicism about society, but it also embodied Thoreau’s faith in the perfectibility of the same society. This apparent contradiction captured the mood of the 1960s protest movement, which despite profound disillusion was founded on a faith that bringing attention to a problem could help resolve it. Other aspects of Thoreau’s commentary—nonconformity, passive resistance, antimaterialism—were inspiring as well. Shirley Cochell, writing in the Senior Scholastic, recommended teaching Thoreau as “the hero of the hippies, the inspiration of the protest marchers, the model of a man who had the courage to stand apart from his society to analyze it.” Max Lerner listed the many forms of social injustice that earned his enmity: “the factory system, the corporations, business enterprise, acquisitiveness, the vandalism of natural resources, the vested commercial and intellectual interests, the cry for expansion, the clannishness and theocratic smugness of New England society, the herd-mindedness of the people, [the] unthinking civic allegiance they paid to an opportunist and imperialist government.” Social discontents indeed had much to choose from.15
As Robert Downs pointed out in his Books That Changed the World, a young Hindu lawyer living in South Africa in 1907 considered the conundrum of living morally in an immoral society, and from Gandhi’s India Thoreau’s call for passive resistance and civil disobedience spread across Asia, Africa, and South America. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. read the essay in college and read it several times again as he considered strategies for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference following the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. King had been disturbed by the fact that the Montgomery protest had been compared to boycott methods used by segregationist White Citizens Councils. “Up to this time I had uncritically accepted that method as our course of action. Now certain doubts began to bother me. . . . A boycott suggests an economic squeeze, leaving one bogged down in a negative. But we were concerned with positive.” King saw a connection between Thoreau’s essay and the marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations that characterized the civil rights movement in the early 1960s: “We were simply saying to the white community, ‘we can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system.’” Like Uphaus, King learned from Thoreau that to accept evil without protest was to cooperate with it, and from this realization he went on to perfect a strategy for asserting moral authority in an immoral society. “It goes without saying,” he wrote in 1962, “that the teachings of Thoreau are alive today, indeed, they are more alive today than ever before.”16
Sensing Thoreau’s popularity, in 1970 the playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, creators of Inherit the Wind and Auntie Mame, launched The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, a two-act “soap box,” as one critic called it, in which the hero reflects on his incarceration and the events that led to it. Following the premier performance at Ohio State University, the campus newspaper commented that the play “lures the spectator’s conscience into the open, then socks it . . . hard enough to draw blood.” Between its premier in 1970 and 1974, it was performed some two thousand times, mostly on American college campuses but also in Australia, England, Holland, Ireland, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, and even the Soviet Union. This led Literary Cavalcade to conclude that Thoreau belonged “more to the 1970s than to the age in which he lived.”17
The play demonstrated just how adaptable Thoreau was in the 1960s. Strident, self-confident, and fully engaged, he became, according to the Chicago Sun-Times theater critic Barry Kritzberg, “a hero of our time,” but only because the “Now Generation” had attached its own meaning to his rather innocuous life. “Henry did his own thing, to be sure,” Kritzberg continued, “but sit-ins, demonstrations, and political meetings were simply not his bag.” In the Midwest Quarterly Charles Clerc complained that “Henry is less a character [in the play] than he is a walking Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of The Good Life by Thoreau.” The secret of the playwrights’ success, Clerc suggested, was casting Thoreau as a youthful rebel and his mentor, Emerson, as a stodgy, older intellectual. “It does not escape notice that Henry is under thirty.”18
The “Now Thoreau,” as the Ohio State Lantern put it, was not always so self-evident. In his American Mind in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Irving Bartlett assured readers that “when loyalty to state collided with loyalty to the higher law, Thoreau knew what his duty was.” In fact, Thoreau never made clear what he meant by duty or, for that matter, how he defined the state. Thoreau scholars Sherman Paul and Lyndon Shanley insisted that he saw government, in the main, as a useful instrument, but Townsend Scudder saw him as a biblical David, “armed and ready to fight . . . [a] government [that] threatens to become a tyrant Goliath.” Like Scudder, Truman Nelson thought in more radical terms. “How Thoreau pours scorn on this liberalism,” he marveled. “I could never understand how writing as full of revolutionary incitements as ‘Civil Disobedience’ can be fed like pap to students without, until recently, causing any noticeable upheavals.”19
In his landmark Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, published in 1968, Stoughton Lynd gave a good deal of thought to Thoreau’s interpretation of higher duty and the state.20 The question of the day, according to Lynd, was “what does Henry Thoreau think?” But again, it was not clear what Henry did think. He was often considered a pacifist, having inspired Mahatma Gandhi, but as Lynd pointed out, he also defended John Brown’s desperate raid on Harpers Ferry. “Why shrink from violence when for once it is employed in a righteous cause?” Thoreau wrote. Was he an anarchist? Thoreau began his essay on civil disobedience with a decidedly anarchical pronouncement: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and . . . it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—‘That government is best which governs not at all.’” But again Lynd qualified, since Thoreau asked a great deal indeed from the same government in the near term. If he was neither pacifist nor anarchist, was he a revolutionary? He was, Lynd concluded, because he pioneered the three elements that defined a truly American form of radicalism: direct action, civil disobedience, and nonviolence. This, Lynd announced, was the “essential quality of the new radicalism” that was sweeping across America—a radicalism unaligned with any particular ideology but beholden to higher law and revolutionary in its focus on specific injustice. Thoreau had become, in short, the perfect New Left protester.21
Inasmuch as Lynd, like Nelson, was a public intellectual, his book helped position Thoreau in popular thought as an American rebel, but Lynd also touched off a heated debate about where he fitted into this radical tradition. Robert Dickens considered Thoreau a prescient critic of the industrial system, but where Lynd saw his individualism as a new form of radicalism, Dickens saw it as “the greatest cop-out of all, because it fails to recognize that man is . . . part of a social/natural environment by necessity.” Nelson, whose radical lineage went back to the 1930s, agreed with Dickens: “If you declare your liberation from all institutions . . . you are really un-free, an aimless wanderer on a darkling plain.” This was Thoreau’s fatal contradiction: “In one vein he wants to . . . help settle the great struggle of his time, by force if necessary, and in the other he proclaims himself an avowed recluse, unable to share a common opinion with anyone.” As an Old Left radical, Nelson saw this as the dilemma of Lynd’s New Left as well.22
Others claimed Thoreau for the anarchist camp. As early as 1931 Eunice Schuster had lumped him with divine-light enthusiasts, antinomians, and Quakers in her study of native anarchism, and Joseph Blau’s 1952 Men and Movements in American Philosophy listed him as a Christian anarchist. During the 1960s several others underscored his anarchist pronouncements. Saul Padover’s popular The Genius of America, published at the beginning of the decade, identified high-profile figures representing various strands in American political philosophy: Adams as America’s aristocrat, Jefferson its democrat, Hamilton its conservative, Madison its republican, and Thoreau its anarchist. Betty Schechter’s 1963 Peaceable Revolution described him likewise as an anarchist because he refused to pay taxes, and novelist and essayist Dachine Rainer declared that true anarchists were so rare in America that she was “reluctant to accept Stoughton Lynd’s removal of Thoreau from their number.”23 Others argued that Thoreau defied all ideological categories. Charles Anderson pointed out that all modern political philosophies, left or right, were judged on their capacity to increase or redistribute material wealth; Thoreau, of course, rejected materialism as a criterion for success.24 Thoreau’s duty remained as illusive as ever, but the impassioned debate over his identity kept him in the public eye.
If political protesters were attuned to “Civil Disobedience,” Walden earned Thoreau equal recognition among cultural dissidents. In the 1960s the multiple controversies tearing at the fabric of American society set in motion a reaction in which young idealists simply divorced themselves, like Thoreau at Walden Pond, from mainstream culture. As one scholar explained, the use of napalm against the people of Vietnam was “enough to make young people opt out,” and the strategy of nuclear deterrence through mutual assured destruction added another surreal element to American foreign policy. These developments deepened the disillusionment brought on by years of seemingly fruitless attempts to end war, poverty, and racism. Young Americans searched for moral footing in a society demoralized by unresponsive politics, uncreative work, and unrewarding consumption. To outsiders, the counterculture revolt seemed inchoate, but ultimately, as another observer pointed out, “there is no form of protest so profound as simply saying ‘No.’”25 The statement had a subtly Thoreauvian ring to it.
There were precedents for the 1960s counterculture. The dissipation of Victorian-age values in the 1890s gave rise to bohemian art and fashion, and the “Lost Generation” emerged out of the moral exhaustion caused by World War I. The Depression and World War II set the scene for the Beat Generation, and the rich literary achievement of this movement provided intellectual grounding for 1960s dropouts. Each of these cultural developments responded in some fashion to the “quiet desperation” Thoreau brought to light in the 1850s, and each included a ritualized nonconformity as outré as Thoreau’s. From bohemian to beatnik, the literature of the counterculture emphasized the moral necessity of abandoning social convention and living completely in the present. “The mad ones,” as Jack Kerouac famously called the beat poets in his novel On the Road, “never yawn or say commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” Works by Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William S. Burroughs, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, and others included numerous references to Thoreau. As the historian Rod Phillips wrote, beat authors “played an important role in this shift in American attitudes toward nature,” and this shift carried the heavy imprint of Henry David Thoreau.26
The higher laws embodied in “Civil Disobedience” were less important to the counterculture, which was predicated on moral relativism. It was Walden, with its emphasis on individualism, withdrawal, and antimaterialism, that became the bible of the hippie movement. Like “Civil Disobedience,” Walden offered guidance to a generation questioning their cooperation with an immoral society, but in this case its message was withdrawal, not confrontation. In a 1969 article titled “Flower Power: A Student’s Guide to Pre-Hippie Transcendentalism,” Paul Wild argued that Thoreau’s retreat to Walden is “not significantly different from the hippie’s dropping out,” and Wild’s article was followed by scores of others comparing Walden to the counterculture. Like hippies, Thoreau sought alternatives to the “stultifying demands of conventional life,” and like hippies, he abandoned society, seeking greater self-consciousness. In his Hippies in Our Midst, Delbert Earisman described him in distinctly counterculture terms: he lived “simply and organically” and followed the “code of the hippies—let each person find his own thing and do it, and don’t try to put your thing on any body else.” The Chicago Tribune’s John McCutcheon quoted Thoreau—“beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”—and in the journal Existentialism and Ethical Humanism, Kenneth Smith argued that “reading Thoreau today is an exercise in ‘blowing your mind.’” Thoreau, Smith wrote, dealt squarely with one of the most pressing dilemmas facing the 1960s generation: “how to live in, but not of, an immoral society”—essentially the same message political dissenters gleaned from his essay on civil disobedience. As Smith’s article suggests, the hippie persona found its way into the academic press.27
In 1962, when Thoreau was inducted into the Hall of Fame, Malvina Hoffman, who sculpted the bust for the hall, unveiled a commemorative medallion showing him as a clean-shaven young man. Five years later Leonard Baskin, another well-known artist, crafted a commemorative stamp for the U.S. Postal Service on the sesquicentennial of Thoreau’s birth. This time the image was fully bearded, expressing a complex personality, “slightly battered by life,” and maybe harboring some “unresolved psychological issues.” Along with the beard, Baskin gave Thoreau long, ruffled hair and a glazed, almost drug-induced expression.28 The stark differences between the medallion and the stamp highlight the change in Thoreau’s image over these few years.
To say the least, the stamp drew attention to Thoreau. The Concord Center Post Office received 1.5 million copies in anticipation of the day-of-issue rush, and in Greenwich Village the East Village Other featured a full-page, front-cover reproduction, pronouncing Thoreau “one of America’s first hippies.” According to the Times, “lower East Side hippies” were lined up outside the Peter Stuyvesant Post Office waiting to buy the stamp.29 Across the country, newspapers ran editorials claiming that Thoreau was “taking a licking” or would have showed a strong “stamp of disapproval.” A less amused Columbus (OH) Dispatch editor grumbled that “such a distinguished American deserves better.” Concord’s Mary Sherwood described the stamp as fitting for a “thug, Bolshevik communist, . . . [or] FBI-Wanted Criminal.” At the annual meeting of the Thoreau Society, Raymond Adams, the group’s president, couched his criticism carefully. “If one looks long and hard enough at it, one can detect a certain basic humanity groping through the smudges. In full color sympathetically done, it might very well be a haunting portrait. But in black-and-white the size of a postage stamp, it is more likely the humanity . . . will be lost and the smudges . . . will remain.” A Postal Service representative reminded critics that Thoreau’s neighbors “often ridiculed him because he . . . was . . . unkempt,” and Baskin himself disparaged those who preferred “an inoffensive . . . innocuous stamp . . . minimizing the real qualities of his character and life.”30
There were other flash points in the cultural struggle over Thoreau’s identity. In a 1976 article in the Thoreau Society Bulletin, Michael Johnson reported that in 1851, Thoreau had been given ether as a painkiller during a tooth extraction, and in his journal he described this “ethereal experience” as a pleasant, dreamy interval “between one life and another.” He not only enjoyed the ether but recommended it to others: “You expand like a seed in the ground. You exist in your roots, like a tree in the winter. If you have an inclination to travel, take the ether; you go beyond the furthest star.” The article, like Baskin’s image, echoed through the counterculture press. Lee Burress imagined him, like Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick, advising friends to “feed your head,” and a Boston Herald editor praised “Henry the Hippie” for his life of joyful bliss. “Some would say he was crazy; we think he was merely turned on.”31 Again conservatives were dismayed at this new turn in Thoreau’s identity. William Bottorff and David Hoch insisted that Thoreau never again mentioned ether, and the San Francisco Examiner’s Guy Wright pointed out that in real life, Thoreau was a square: he avoided alcohol or tobacco, “and so far as anyone knows he died a virgin.”32
The controversy over Henry the Hippie seems petty in the overall legacy of Thoreau criticism, but it highlights the acute public sensitivity to his image in the 1960s. For generations he had been accepted as the incarnation of what it meant to be an American, and the attention given his long hair, beard, and escape to Walden challenged the mainstream values he represented so brilliantly in his writing. With commentary on Thoreau appearing in newspapers across the nation, Joseph Wood Krutch, America’s best-known authority on his work, felt compelled to offer perspective. After touring Haight-Ashbury in 1967, Krutch reported that “hippies in increasing numbers are exercising a human right to come as near as our society permits to freedom from . . . the obligation to be socially useful.” He recalled Thoreau’s fierce sense of commitment and his dedication to society and suggested that those who abandoned these sturdy virtues were polar opposites rather than kindred spirits. Having similarly pronounced judgment on 1960s activists, Krutch concluded that T. S. Eliot might well be wrong: society would end with “both a bang and a whimper—the bang being the violence, private, revolutionary and international, now everywhere so prevalent; the whimper, the hippie’s nervous ‘I love you, so please love me.’”33
Writing in the Emerson Society Quarterly in 1960, Alexander Kern observed that “students have of late . . . shocked some of their professors by claiming that [Thoreau] is better than Emerson.” In part, this was because his “intransigent individualism” resonated with the rebellious spirit of the age, but according to Kern this distressed many in the literary establishment, and the response was “likely to be violent.” To be sure, some scholars reacted simply by downplaying his radicalism. Catholic theologian William Herr suggested that he was far more temperate than radicals assumed. It was true that his allegiance to the state was contingent, but he had no reservations about endorsing specific state functions such as maintaining roads, parks, public forests, ferries, horse troughs, and police and fire companies. His definition of civil disobedience, Herr pointed out, did not include the riots, pickets, boycotts, hunger strikes, freedom rides, marches, sit-ins, and the other media events that defined 1960s protest, and because he had no faith in majority rule, he saw no peculiar desire to sway popular opinion by bringing attention to himself. His night in the Concord jail was simply a “solitary act of an individual concerned about his own moral health.”34
Other scholars, as Kern predicted, reacted more violently. In an article titled “Can Dissenters Really Claim Thoreau?” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt denounced the doctrine of civil disobedience as a threat to the legitimacy of the state, and Stanford University political scientist Heinz Eulau pointed out that after John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, Thoreau abandoned nonviolent protest and excoriated all those who adhered to quietist approaches. The lesson was clear: his individualistic philosophy was “inherently deficient for political purposes” and certainly not a model for modern protest. Lewis Van Dusen denounced him in the American Bar Association Journal: “Civil disobedience is a counsel of despair and defeat, so undemocratic that it could bring about an authoritarian state.” Writers in popular publications echoed these sentiments. In an Atlantic Monthly article, essayist Richard Revere argued that Thoreau’s moral absolutism drove him to violent solutions. “The alienated feel that the evidence is already in, that we have compromised ourselves fatally, and that the role of the individual is either to destroy the society or drop out of it.” Frederick Sanders wrote in the conservative National Review that Thoreau was “concerned solely with preserving the purity of his moral position” and was thus disposed to accept any means of achieving it, including “the most destructive consequences imaginable for himself as well as other people.” He was a “totalist,” an “apocalyptic,” and an “authoritarian.” Absolutists like Thoreau insisted on a morally absolute end, while the state insisted just as adamantly on maintaining order. “Finally, this formula leads to totalitarian dictatorship.”35 Solicitor General Erwin Griswold devoted an entire article in the Christian Science Monitor to the dangers of civil disobedience, urging Thoreau’s followers to consider the doctrine more carefully “if true freedom—not frenetic license—is to endure.”36 Arguments like these showed how polarized the commentary had become. Where scholars such as Leary and Lynd saw him as a champion of freedom, others such as Eulau and Revere cast him as a harbinger of totalitarianism. Thoreau’s essay was clearly at the center of political discourse in the 1960s.
Critics like these raised an issue that threaded through the controversy over Thoreau’s relevance: Was individual conscience an appropriate guide to political behavior in a world that no longer recognized moral absolutes? As several commentators pointed out, Thoreau heeded an inner voice he believed to be divine in origin and universal in scope. Slavery was morally wrong, and Thoreau assumed that all morally upright New Englanders would perceive it that way. Since Thoreau’s time, pragmatist philosophers such as Charles Pearce, William James, and John Dewey had argued for a more relative and mutable concept of truth, and at some level most modern academics accepted their judgments. Was civil disobedience justifiable in a society where the voice of conscience was fragmented and indeterminate? Perhaps, Winfield Scott argued, certain moral values were “applicable to any age,” but still there was reason to doubt that the doctrine of principled individualism could guide an ideologically heterogeneous nation.37
As Alexander Kern suggested, the reaction to Thoreau was indeed violent. But in a sense, it was also predictable. For generations his writing had unsettled conventional thinkers, who responded by highlighting his unorthodox personality as a way of discrediting him. In the twentieth century these critics gained a new tool at the hands of Sigmund Freud. Biographers began using psychoanalysis as early as 1928, when Gorham Munson pointed out that “in the face of the modern deterministic trend of psychology one cannot picture Thoreau as a free moral agent.” Munson balanced this thought against Thoreau’s wisdom and learning and concluded that although he may have been compelled to behave as he did, he took care “to inflect his actions with the logic of experimentation.”38
By the 1930s the craft of biography included an almost obligatory psychological profile. Ludwig Lewisholm’s pretentious and dismissive Expression in America, for instance, described Thoreau as “hopelessly inhibited, probably to the point of psychical impotence.” In his 1939 biography Henry Canby insisted that after his brief romance with Ellen Sewall, Thoreau sublimated his emotional impulses. This fueled his passion for nature, which he vented in lyrical descriptions of trees, ponds, plants, and animals. The response to Canby was mixed. Irwin Edman faulted him for failing to follow through on the “trace of latent sexual inversion,” but F. O. Matthiessen found his “diluted Freudianism” unrewarding, while Clifton Fadiman dismissed it altogether: “It’s true enough that Thoreau could extract more satisfaction from five minutes with a chickadee than most men could from five millennia with Cleopatra. But this hardly proves that he chose the chickadee because he couldn’t cuddle Cleopatra.” Thomas Collins, another reviewer, observed that Canby seemed mindful of the pitfalls in Freudian analysis, but Collins feared that the “careless reader” might come to a conclusion “already . . . too often held: namely, that Thoreau was a freak and a misanthrope.”39
Collins’s fears were not unfounded. During the Cold War, distrust of Thoreau’s political principles combined with the vogue for Freudian psychoanalysis to inspire a great deal of probing into the life behind his life. Conditioned by the McCarthyite turn against nonconformity, the literary scholar Tyrus Hillway affected astonishment that Concord people had tolerated an eccentric like Thoreau in their midst, and the literary critic Stanley Hyman insisted that the Walden experiment was not a social message but rather a psycholiterary event: “The saint withdraws to Walden Pond, which of course is no real pond, but himself in the glory of infancy prior to his initiation into consciousness; and he experiences the thrill of repossessing a disinherited part of himself.”40 The most intensive psychobiography of the time was written by University of Minnesota psychology student David Kalman, whose paper was digested in the Thoreau Society Bulletin in 1948. Kalman argued that Thoreau was tortured by a harsh superego and by feelings of guilt for “not living up to society’s ideals.” His “rapturous lines on nature,” according to Kalman, were an attempt to sublimate his frustrated sex drive, his sense of inferiority, and his latent homosexuality. A decade later New York University PhD student Raymond Gozzi again combed through Thoreau’s journals and found passages that explained not only his nature fixation but also his rigid political doctrines. Like Kalman, Gozzi assumed that Thoreau’s childhood insecurities left him vulnerable to an “unresolved Oedipus complex,” a hypothesis he supported by exhibiting a picture of Thoreau’s father with a “hard set to his mouth and jaw.” This posture—common actually to midcentury portraiture—suggested that Thoreau equated his father with Jehovah. Descriptions of Thoreau’s own military-like bearing convinced Gozzi that he was compulsive, obsessional, and rigid in ethical matters, all a result of his “unconscious libidinal regression to the anal-sadistic, pre-genital level.” John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry was a vicarious release of his “seething unconscious aggression,” and it was significant, Gozzi thought, that Thoreau’s “final illness” began a year to the day after he learned of Brown’s death. From this, Gozzi concluded that Thoreau’s fatal tuberculosis was psychosomatic, representing “the retaliation of his superego for the aggression he had expressed against all his judges.”41
Although the studies by Kalman and Gozzi were never published in full, they found their way into the conservative critique of Thoreau and his politics. The most widely read application of the Kalman-Gozzi approach came in 1956 when the last of Thoreau’s forty-seven journal volumes, covering the years 1840–41, was located in the hands of a private collector and purchased by the Pierpont Morgan Library. The volume was published separately in 1958 as Consciousness in Concord, along with commentary by the Harvard historian Perry Miller.42
Thoreau had never been an easy fit in Miller’s scholarly agenda, which included framing the transcendental movement as a philosophical as opposed to a political event. In an earlier anthology of transcendental thought, Miller culled the political discourses by Orestes Brownson and Theodore Parker because, he insisted, they were irrelevant to American history.43 Thoreau suffered an even worse fate. In his preface to Consciousness in Concord, Miller pointed out that it would be “trite to say that the Journal is in any sense a ‘sublimation’ of inhibited loves or a ‘compensation’ for a ghastly sense of inferiority,” but trite or not, he threw himself into the task of unmasking what he called Thoreau’s “delirium of self-consciousness.”44 Drawing attention to Thoreau’s obsession with particular natural phenomena, Miller concluded that these fixations were sexually charged, and following the lead of Kalman and Gozzi, he built a case for Thoreau’s homoeroticism. He minimized the Ellen Sewall affair and then dismissed it by resorting to circumlocution: “It may at least be posed as a question whether Henry Thoreau . . . had the slightest inclination to offer himself as husband.”45
Miller mined the volume for expressions of an erotic obsession with nature. Again parroting Gozzi, he analyzed Thoreau’s celebration of springtime at the end of Walden—the well-known passage on thawing sand and clay in the railroad cut by Walden Pond. Reducing one of the most compelling spiritual passages in the book to a horribly misapplied Freudian image, Miller described the scene as an “afterbirth of mud and clay . . . filthy because it precedes (and must precede) the flowery spring of youth and music.” In Miller’s telling, the passage was simply an expression of contorted libido, but once again he refused to take responsibility for his insinuations. “The pages by which Henry Thoreau—deliberately, we may be sure!—brings his book . . . to its climax in a slime of sand demand more analysis than they have received. Once more, every reader is on his own. But none can blink the fact that in this return of fertility the scene is predestined to sterility.” Miller went on to describe an incident in which Thoreau and a companion accidentally set fire to the woods. In his journal Thoreau wrote that the fire was contained within a hundred acres, but Miller insisted it threatened the entire town, and because this “master of woodcraft” was too competent to carelessly ignite a forest fire, Miller surmised that it was set deliberately. In a particularly ungraceful turn of phrase, he noted that six years after the fire incident Thoreau was “internally compelled to vomit forth the cancer of his guilt” by writing about it in his journal. With this incident as proof, he dismissed Thoreau’s political essays—inspiration for civil rights leaders around the world—as written by a tortured soul raging against society.46
The introduction to Consciousness in Concord was, to say the least, not Perry Miller at his best. Whether this was simply another example of rendering transcendentalism ideologically harmless, a resurfacing of the old Cambridge-Concord tension, or an expression of concurrence with Harvard’s equally sanctimonious James Russell Lowell, his scholarship was far from dispassionate. Gary Scharnhorst explained the outburst as a rivalry among Harvard critical schools, Miller representing American studies and F. O. Matthiessen the New Criticism. In a broader sense, Miller’s animus fitted a pattern in the Cold War–era Thoreau criticism in being, as the historian Lance Newman put it, “closely related to the anticommunist crusades of the 1950s.” In any case, the reaction to Miller was telling. “To committed disciples of Henry Thoreau this must be dispiriting,” Henry Pochmann wrote in the journal American Literature. “It took nearly a century to lay the ghost that Lowell raised in his critical appraisal of 1865; and now . . . the Thoreauvians may be expected to rise in wrath against Mr. Miller for what they will regard as an unseasonable effort to ‘do in’ their idol all over again.”47
Given Miller’s immense academic stature and the conformist mood in 1958, Thoreau scholars were slow to rise in wrath, but the uneasy stir in academe was noticeable. In a veiled aside, Cornell English professor Stephen Whicher pointed out that Thoreau’s masterful prose stood “in silent reproach” next to Miller’s own recondite and cumbersome wording. Among those with at least one foot outside the halls of the academy—the public intellectuals—reaction was more pointed. Walter Harding, author of The Days of Henry David Thoreau and Thoreau’s most persistent champion, challenged Miller’s dismissal of the Ellen Sewall affair by locating several of Sewall’s grandchildren and poring over letters, diaries, and other documents that proved the romance was genuine and in every respect normal.48 Wayne State University professor Leo Stoller pointed out that the “vague comments about Thoreau’s homosexuality” were lifted from a “footnote reference to a summarized doctoral dissertation by a teacher of literature turned amateur psychoanalyst and to the digest of a psychology student’s term paper that was later disowned by the professor on whose book it is based.”49
Newspaper reviews were mixed. The New York Times considered Consciousness in Concord the best book on Thoreau since Brooks Atkinson’s Cosmic Yankee, and the Berkshire Eagle saw it as “the most important discussion of Thoreau since Emerson’s valedictory essay of 1862.” Others were circumspect. The Boston Herald’s Robert Taylor deemed it thorough but deceptive: “Professor Miller warns the reader that ‘psychologizing by laymen is dangerous’ . . . and thereupon progresses . . . through a psychiatric description of Thoreau’s artistry . . . based on a flimsy set of suppositions.” Closer to home, the Concord Journal censured Miller’s “contempt for Concord” and his “preconceived sense of superiority over Thoreau himself.”50
Miller’s most vigorous critic was Odell Shepard, a Pulitzer Prize–winning emeritus English professor from Trinity College in Connecticut, whose 1927 Heart of Thoreau’s Journals helped define Thoreau as a literary stylist. Incensed by Miller’s misreading of the journal, Shepard published overlapping reviews in the Nation and the Emerson Society Quarterly. As he pointed out, Miller’s introduction was three times as long as the document it introduced, and it was made to seem longer still by “frequent inaccuracies of statement, by assertions unproved and unprovable, by confusions and inconsistencies of thought, by the dragging-in of matters wholly adventitious, and by the use and abuse of violent language in a prose style habitually feeble, fumbling, slovenly and dull.” When the reader finally arrived at the journal itself, the feeling of relief was short-lived; Miller continued his commentary in a “barrage” of 428 footnotes and another 300 textual notes, all of them brimming with intellectual indignation. “Meanwhile . . . [the reader] has an uneasy feeling that this editor does not really know what he is talking about.” The amateurish use of Freudian jargon, Shepard insisted, simply masked Miller’s complete bafflement at Thoreau’s use of metaphor and symbol. At this point, Shepard related, the reader “ceases to take any interest in Professor Miller’s opinions as such, and begins to watch his aberrations from common sense with an amusement often rising to hilarity.” Shepard recommended that the reader take up Consciousness in Concord but ignore the editorial interruptions. “The Commentator has made it a little difficult for us to do that, but not impossible. He may, in time, attempt it himself.”51
Despite its limitations, Miller’s editorializing set the tone for the conservative reaction to Thoreau in the early 1960s. Brooks Atkinson, who admired Thoreau’s literary output, noted the emotional price he paid for his “belligerent renunciations” of society, and the literary critic Quentin Anderson labeled him a “complex and tortured man, who surely invites . . . sympathy.” How, Anderson wondered, could Americans “make a national cult” out of a figure this irrational? In 1962 Stanley Hyman, who earlier described the Walden experiment as a return to the womb, highlighted Thoreau’s admission that he was “a diseased bundle of nerves” and suggested the retreat to the pond was not only a mother fixation but also a desperate attempt at therapy. That same year, incredibly, University of Maryland professor Carl Bode announced that Thoreau’s “unconscious life” had not yet received the attention it deserved. For starters, Bode speculated that an “incipient homosexuality” lay behind Thoreau’s attachment to Emerson and John Brown, and in a bizarre retelling of Gozzi’s psychosomatic interpretation, he insisted that although Thoreau died of tuberculosis, “at the unconscious level [he] . . . ended his life of his own accord. . . . He had to expiate his intolerably increasing load of guilt.” Using Miller-like circumlocution, Princeton University Press director Herbert Bailey insisted once again that the forest fire was Thoreau’s revenge on the town: “Could as good a woodsman as Thoreau have started it accidentally, or was this a Freudian manifestation of his hatred of society?”52
Leon Edel’s Henry D. Thoreau, a short literary biography published in the University of Minnesota writers series, drew together these psychobiographical strands for an end-of-the-decade assessment of the unmasked Thoreau. After a shallow summary of Thoreau’s writing taken largely from F. O. Matthiessen, Edel described the author as a “dependent, insecure, mother-attached” figure hunkered in the woods, where he compensated for his emotional constraints by avoiding women and lavishing his affections on plants and animals. Edel used this framework to describe his own contribution to Thoreau scholarship. In a subsequent article, he proposed to “unscramble the Thoreauvian myth in the light of Walden’s history as a classic, in the light cast by the absence of wilderness and the presence of technology, and in the light of the art of biography, that is, the writing of the lives of men whose creation is self-assertion or aggression—a personal myth cast upon the world.” To those who managed to follow this logic, he posed a question: Why “really did Thoreau go to Walden Pond?” Edel began with the forest fire as an expression of Thoreau’s “inner rage” at society. Obviously not an outdoorsman, Edel insisted that Thoreau must have known that “fires may not be lit out-of-doors.” Edel then claimed that the move to the pond was a ploy to arouse sympathy among those in Concord who ostracized him for setting the woods on fire. Likewise, Thoreau’s famous essay on civil disobedience was a product of hysteria and “hatred of authority.” Responding to Edel in the American Scholar, John Shirigian asked why it was so difficult to believe that Thoreau went to Walden “for the reason he gives.” Did the fact that he borrowed an ax to build the hut invalidate his claim to simplicity and independence? “Why do we insist on this kind of absolutism in the case of Thoreau and no one else?” What, Elaine Cogswell asked, was the point in reducing the “twenty-seven year-old Thoreau to an egocentric, narcissistic, mother-attached fellow securing his freedom at the expense of others?”53
As Shirigian and Cogswell implied, academics like Miller and Edel were heaping on the author of “Civil Disobedience” all the perceived sins of the 1960s radicals, especially those that threatened the decorum of the campus environment. And predictably, when campus politics returned to normal, the tenor of literary assessment did so as well. Mark Moller’s “Thoreau, Womankind, and Sexuality,” published in the Emerson Society Quarterly in 1974, made no mention of sexual repression and instead pointed to “a number of affectionate friendships” among his Concord acquaintances. When Thoreau’s father died he was indeed left in a household of females—sister, mother, aunts, boarders—but this did no more than explain his long absences in the countryside. The journal contained a number of misogynist remarks, Moller pointed out, but Thoreau aimed his criticism not so much at women as at “the assumption that the first business of any . . . woman is to be as pretty and charming as possible . . . in order to attract the admiration of men.”54
That same year saw the appearance of English professor James McIntosh’s Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist: His Shifting Stance toward Nature. The book was sensitive in tone, but given McIntosh’s focus on the conflicted idea of nature in Thoreau’s writing, the rash of psychobiographies was difficult to ignore. McIntosh agreed that sexual feelings ran “like submerged streams through his experience of . . . nature.” Thoreau was “fascinated but troubled by natural, primitive men,” and even by his own body, which he sometimes loved and sometimes loathed. “He relishes the fertile swamps and bogs of Concord extravagantly, but is . . . appalled to find phallic fungi growing there.” Unlike Miller, McIntosh was sympathetic to Thoreau, and he was far more conversant with Thoreau’s life and writing. But his psychoanalytical reductionism stripped away much of the transcendental mystery that so inspired the environmentalists just then emerging as Thoreau’s most enthusiastic believers. McIntosh’s Romantic Naturalist was published in 1974, and from that point on the intense psychoanalysis appeared in Thoreau scholarship only sporadically. The making of Mad Henry had little lasting impact on Thoreau’s academic reputation and probably none on his popular image, but it did once again underscore the degree to which he was embedded—for better or worse—in the discourse of 1960s.55
Late in the 1960s Walden reached a new audience with a somewhat less controversial message, and it was here that Thoreau became truly iconic. America emerged from World War II almost alone among industrial nations with its economy intact, and this, coupled with the release of consumer demand held back by decades of depression and war, brought an era of unprecedented economic prosperity. In response, corporate leaders, union representatives, and federal policymakers negotiated an entente that pegged wages to inflation and used rising levels of consumption to sustain this economic growth. The Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, working with the Eisenhower administration, promoted an aggressive Keynesian countercyclical program that used federal spending on military hardware, highways, public services, education, and housing as a means of checking economic downturns. The idea of using federal funds and private consumption as a foundation for social prosperity gained credence, but at the end of the decade Galbraith reconsidered the idea that consumption was synonymous with personal satisfaction. Searching for a new liberal agenda in an age of unprecedented prosperity, he turned to promoting quality of life. Was material comfort a worthy goal for America? Would it not eventually lead to ennui and social restiveness? “Might not one wish for such a revolt?” In 1958 Galbraith published a powerful critique of modern materialism titled The Affluent Society, in which he proposed a shift in national priorities from accumulation to better living. He questioned the belief, so deeply imbedded in the American psyche, that all social ills could be cured by increasing production.56
Thoreau seemed to anticipate Galbraith’s revelation that the emphasis on material goods was misplaced, and this positioned Walden as a codicil to The Affluent Society. “I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all,” Thoreau wrote, “who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.” A year after The Affluent Society appeared, Joseph Wood Krutch published Human Nature and the Human Condition, addressing Galbraith’s concerns but adding some of the warnings raised by Thoreau in the 1850s. The accelerating rate of production, Krutch wrote, transformed consumerism into an economic compulsion. “We believe that we cannot stop producing too much without finding ourselves soon incapable of producing enough.” This conundrum made plain living in the Thoreauvian mold “a sort of treason—or un-American at the least.”57
If “Civil Disobedience” was a call to social engagement, Walden was the opposite: a call to withdraw from politics to embrace the good life. The book, a newspaper correspondent wrote, “still has much to teach us of peaceful adaptation to a natural environment.” The values that rang through its pages—independence, freedom, purity, simplicity—all depended on abandoning the scramble for acquisition and reuniting with the organic world. This was advice that all 1960s Americans could abide, but as Krutch pointed out, in some respects it was also a sort of treason—a subtle echo of the confrontational themes raised in “Civil Disobedience.”58
Walden offered this vision of simplicity to all manner of readers, but for some, achieving these values required a literal withdrawal to the woods. The back-to-the-land movement, which had captured the American imagination intermittently since the 1890s, resurfaced in the 1970s, as tens of thousands of young enthusiasts turned to farming to reestablish a connection to the land. By 1975 Vermont, the new frontier in small-scale agriculture, was offering Extension Service advice to homesteaders, and Governor Thomas Salmon spoke encouragingly about the coming “revolution in reverse.”59 Here again, Thoreau moved to the forefront of the modern counterculture crusade.
Helen and Scott Nearing, inspirational figures in this resurgent movement, had settled on a Vermont farm in 1932 and moved to the Maine coast in 1954. They credited their success in part to Thoreau, who proved that determined individuals could lead satisfying lives without engaging the commercial economy. They embraced the Walden Pond homesteader’s “tightwad economics [and] his blend of personal optimism and social cynicism,” but unlike Thoreau, who spent only two and a half years at the pond, they dedicated their entire lives to self-sufficient living. They sprinkled Thoreau quotes throughout Living the Good Life and Continuing the Good Life, as Rebecca Gould points out, but their selections “reveal a particular version of Thoreau” that emphasized hard physical labor, simple daily needs, and a vegetarian diet. This, then, was the Thoreau—quietist and removed from society—that back-to-the-landers discovered when they turned the pages of Living the Good Life seeking practical advice.60
But in this particular Thoreau they found not only a justification for simple living but also a subtle critique of capitalism tempered by Scott Nearing’s Marxist background. Read thus, Walden was indeed a sort of treason against consumer culture. The impulse behind the new homesteading movement was complex, but whatever the motives, practitioners embraced the idea of separating from the commercial matrix by living simply. The idea of circumventing the corporate economy with wind and solar power, composting toilets, wood heating and cooking stoves, geodesic domes, compost heaps, and intensive food-growing methods inspired a series of “commune books” such as Mother Earth News, Organic Gardening, The Whole Earth Catalog, and The Foxfire Book, each professing a more organic relation to the land—a “kind of space-age Walden.” Like Walden, these publications celebrated the satisfactions of living a simple life close to nature, but like “Civil Disobedience,” they were vaguely subversive. As the new homesteaders sank roots in rural communities, they fitted into the rural way of life and adopted traditional values such as hard work, neighborhood cooperation, and independence. But they also brought with them a hint of Thoreau’s anarchism. “An ancient system of barter is slowly being revived in step with the restoration of the abandoned houses and neglected wellsheds and fallow fields,” an observer wrote. Like Thoreau’s move to Walden Pond, the homesteaders’ emphasis on simple living was a passive rebuke to America’s commodity-obsessed culture.61
In the late 1960s Americans returned to Walden, seeking their own separate peace with society and nature. The new homesteading movement—those wishing “to live simply but well on the land, outside the economic institutions that dominate the United States”—epitomized a broader readership that, in the wake of the divisive 1960s protests, found a quiet sense of defiance in Thoreau’s classic book. As Mother Earth News editor Victor Croley wrote, Walden underscored the absurdity of “surround[ing] yourself with possessions” in the nuclear age. What use to “build up a fortune, if in the flash of an eyelid everything—including life itself—can be wiped out?” This was by no means a recipe for revolution; nor was it, as Lewis Leary claimed in 1954, “potentially incendiary.” But for new homesteaders and others, it represented a subtle challenge to the capitalist system. “We are bombed around the clock by mass-production, mass-entertainment, mass-suggestion, subtle, insidious, deafening, persistent, all-pervasive,” the Reverend Willard Uphaus explained in a speech before the Thoreau Society; it was time to speak out—or move out. The University of Pennsylvania English professor Leo Bressler praised the book’s call for simplification, but he also found in it an echo of “Civil Disobedience”—a ringing protest against “a government that interferes with man’s moral choice.” Walden was not a simple message of withdrawal but rather a “protest magnified into gesture.”62
The critical tenor in the new homesteading movement, diffuse though it was, brought together the messages in “Civil Disobedience” and Walden, and this powerful combination of ideas helps explain Thoreau’s universal presence in the discourse of the decade. As a prophet of simple living, he gave voice to America’s yearning for nature; as a moralist and political theorist, he resolved the dilemma of living in but not of an unjust society; as a friend to the oppressed, he inspired concern for marginalized people and beleaguered animals; and as the original back-to-the-lander, he exemplified all of these contested cultural currents. Scholars and popularizers were beginning to realize the “important affinities” that united Thoreau’s call to protest and his retreat to nature. Together, they were a “total literary achievement.”63
The emphasis in the 1960s on Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” tells us little about the idea of nature in modern American society, but it does help us understand how, in the next decade, this ambiguous literary figure was so quickly transformed into an icon of environmentalism. In the 1960s the poet-naturalist and the Concord rebel came together as a single powerful iconic figure. “Civil Disobedience” inspired resistance to the tyranny of the state; Walden inspired resistance to the tyranny of things. The former spoke to those troubled by the immorality of a society that endorsed war, racism, sexism, and poverty, and the latter called on them to measure their lives in terms of their own individual freedom and their relation to their natural surroundings. Commenting on yet another new release of Walden in 1961, Philip Booth mused that “in this uneasy time, . . . any new reprint of ‘Walden’ is more than a minor reminder of how much men loose of themselves in conforming to pressures which are, ostensibly, civilized.” Walden challenged readers, he implied, to rediscover themselves, rediscover nature, and rebuild the civilization they lived in—to tilt at windmills and to live their lives joyously and more naturally while doing so.64