The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Henry Thoreau, New England Saint Henry David Thoreau is a sort of American St. Francis—if you can imagine a Unitarian saint. He had the requisite austerity and...
...He had the requisite austerity and the pitiless drive toward perfection...
...In his sacred groves or under the magic moon, he was enchanted, rather, by revelations of a satisfactory human society made up of individuals who had solved their personal problems and therefore could dwell together in untroubled unity...
...It was only the beginning of our industrial capitalism which he saw, but it bred in him such a dislike that he rowed as fast as he could past the mills on the Merrimack in order to avoid contamination...
...And, despite his dislike of the Abolitionists, this individualist found himself helping runaway slaves escape to Canada...
...This Harvard graduate found his greatest satisfaction in studying forestry and doing what he could to encourage the preservation of trees and all sorts of natural resources...
...What had he become if not an instrument to certify ownership in transactions aimed at making money...
...So one thing which was plainly good was to preserve the forest and all of the wilderness ways...
...Obviously, this anarchist was thinking of the welfare state as doing some of the good things which cannot be expected of individuals...
...And since, after meticulous examination of all the available evidence, it reaches conclusions somewhat different from those usually accepted, it deserves to be read...
...But our author comments: "No other occupation for which Thoreau was qualified would have been as adequately symbolic as was surveying of the decision to accept life within an economic order based on profit...
...But for him that is the beginning, not the end...
...The "natural features which make a township handsome," he said, should be preserved for the public and not surrendered to individuals...
...A new book, After Walden, by Leo Stoller (Stanford University, $4), is especially welcome because it deals in detail with Thoreau's attitude toward American business and industry, our whole money-making way of life...
...Along with this there went a certain concession to government...
...We live in an age when almost everyone has found some compromise between his conscience and the excesses of our giant capitalism, and we look back with a tolerant smile on the sensitive youth of 1840...
...Whatever change took place in Thoreau's thought about the anti-slavery movement was, no doubt, largely due to the increasing heat of the struggle between North and South...
...But he said things about our materialistic, gadgety way of life that get under the skin of one generation after another...
...They were simpler, less cruel, less dishonest...
...And, in some way which we find it hard to explain, he is now, more than a century later, putting us in the wrong...
...To satisfy his conscience about either war or slavery, he would have to submit to some sort of cooperation with his fellows...
...Even the wild animals seemed more satisfactory to this highly civilized man than his fellow citizens...
...And cooperation meant some degree of compromise...
...The visions which were revealed to him were not of angels or of any sort of heavenly hosts...
...He lived but a short life, from 1817 to 1862, and wrote comparatively little...
...They might be cruel to one another, but they did not exploit their kind...
...This man never leaves us alone, and consequently we cannot leave him alone...
...He undertakes a painstaking search through all of the books, essays, lectures, letters and fragmentary jottings of this very unsystematic man to discover just what were his theories and attitudes as he went along facing the changing forms of social and industrial life...
...John Brown, the man of violence, became the hero of this man of peace...
...The lives of the American Indians seemed to him more satisfactory than those of 19th-century white men...
...Stoller records the average man's thumbnail sketch of the philosopher, "the man who lived in a hut by Walden Pond and went to jail rather than pay taxes...
...Stoller takes it for granted that Thoreau's adoption of surveying as a way of making a living is proof of at least partial acceptance of the commercial and money-changing way of life...
...Had he lived 20 years longer, he would certainly have hailed with enthusiasm the initiation of our system of national parks...
...It did not take this sensitive and sharp-witted man long to discover that neither living alone nor going to jail would solve the moral problems which faced him...
...Nevertheless, we cannot rid ourselves of the notion that that simple boy 'way back there was partly right...
...In his last paragraph, our author acknowledges that in the end the sensitive and conscientious thinker whose intellectual course he has been tracing found no satisfactory solution for his inward problems...
...From the unhappiness of inward struggle Thoreau found one obvious and very satisfactory way of escape...
...It is true that this profession furnished an excuse for spending endless happy hours in wooded tracts far from town or village...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 50
