Triumph of Spirit
Robertson, Priscilla
Triumph of Spirit Reviewed by Priscilla Robertson IN 1846 Thoreau spent a night in jail for failure to pay his poll tax to a government which, he felt, collaborated in keeping Negroes...
...Although bail was ready and waiting for any member of the group who felt he had had more than he could take, no one availed himself of it even when conditions became almost unbearable...
...More than this, they hoped to capitalize on public conscience, and watched anxiously to learn if the fact that they were hunger-striking was broadcast...
...Triumph of Spirit Reviewed by Priscilla Robertson IN 1846 Thoreau spent a night in jail for failure to pay his poll tax to a government which, he felt, collaborated in keeping Negroes enslaved...
...One imagines Thoreau would have been disgusted...
...To move to Barbara Deming's beautifully written Prison Notes is to measure several kinds of change...
...Miss Deming and her friends were willing to break themselves against it...
...It feels good to be here," said one of the group in a letter, not because she was enjoying it but because of the sharpened human sympathies that arose from being at the bottom of the social pyramid...
...Thoreau boasted happily that he could avoid all contact with the government except for the yearly tax collector's call, and he was glad because he thought the state had no creative function-it did not keep the country free, he said, nor settle the West, nor educate...
...They were will ing to suffer for their cause, but their cause was not yet that of all humanity...
...Today, with yearly legislation on civil rights, housing, and schools, it in effect does all three...
...Emma Goldman and, as late as World War I, Roger Baldwin, still . thought in terms of a state to which one could be purely hostile...
...The whole question of nonviolence is crowded with ambiguities...
...A hundred years ago one might still conceive of government as a trivial nuisance, while today it is an enormous inevitability...
...Yet his ideas about the state, moral commitment, and the individual seem childish compared to his successors...
...Thoreau was lighthearted, indifferent to the effect of his actions on other people, so little committed to moral principle that he let a friend pay his fine, and he left jail after a single night-a night, incidentally, which he hugely relished in his nicely white-washed cell with the "fine fellow" who was his cell mate...
...Miss Deming spent nearly a month in prison in Albany, Georgia, in early 1964 because she and two dozen companions on a "Peace Walk" were not allowed to move down the main business district of Albany...
...Rarely have fame and influence been more cheaply won, since nearly all subsequent practitioners of civil disobedience have paid tribute to the inspiration he gave them...
...The record is astonishingly full, varied, and interesting-beginning with William Penn, who was nonviolent from above, so to speak, while everybody else in the book spoke from below...
...Erik Erikson even wonders whether the Moslem-Hindu massacres following the partition of India and Pakistan may not have a direct psychological connection with the long control by nonviolence of Gandhi...
...The peace walk thus turned into a civil rights walk...
...In contrast to Thoreau's insouciant individualism, the Albany group developed intense collective love, while of course their hope was to waken answering kindness, or at least human respect, from those on the other side of the bars...
...Going to jail costs a lot," she says, "but it give an opportunity to say to these people that their peace is false...
...Staughton Lynd has collected an historical . anthology of American writing about nonviolence, including Thoreau's essay and some of the letters from the Albany jail...
...Our modern demonstrators want not to ignore the state but to reform it...
...A bit later suffragettes entered a fast in protest against being thrown into prison beside prostitutes and drunks...
...To read the evidence in these two books lifts the heart...
...The difference stems largely from different expectations about the state and the community...
...He put no value on suffering in itself and surely would not have understood the notion that it might be redemptive...
...But even if it is not the answer to all the world's problems, it is one of the occasional triumphs of the human spirit...
...In the Albany group a strong effort was made to love the prostitutes as well as the jailers...
...James Meredith is quoted as saying he thinks its role in the civil rights movement is about played out...
...and his emotional tone is entirely different...
Vol. 30 • December 1966 • No. 12
