PROPHET OF THE INDEPENDENT MAN

...Career As A Teacher When he went to Harvard, through the self-sacrifice of his mother and sisters, his individualism asserted itself at once in his refusal to wear the conventional black suit which the University prescribed...

...Thoreau was arrested for failure to pay his poll tax and was imprisoned in the Concord jail...

...it does not settle the West...

...But out of it Thoreau fashioned his essay, Resistance to Civil Government, which became perhaps the most widely read unofficial political document ever written by an American...

...All his life Thoreau was a stubborn nonconformist...

...Thoreau, who was already looking for a site on which to build his highly individual hut, read the book with interest...

...While common pencils were selling for 50 cents a dozen, artists eagerly paid 25 cents for a single fine Thoreau...

...He had little faith in the powers of a government either to ameliorate a people's lot or improve the people themselves...

...This cooperative would then solve all material and social problems by harnessing the winds, the tides, sunlight, water power, and steam to produce everything Americans needed from community cooking to prefabricated houses...

...On July 4,1845, he moved in...

...To prove that he could be a successful teacher, he joined with his brother John to found a private school...

...But resignation of any kind was foreign to Thoreau's hardy spirit...

...It was a pleasant Summer night and Thoreau spent it in conversation with an arsonist...

...But he was still unsatisfied...

...The engineering proposals quickened his practical imagination...

...After the school closed, he decided to live alone and see whether his principles of independence were sound...

...He invented new types of saws for stripping the graphite, labor-saving machinery to increase output, and finally a revolutionary process for reaming holes through solid cedar sticks so that round instead of square leads could be inserted...

...His ingenuity was sharp as ever...

...But in the Spring of 1841 John fell ill and Henry, his experiment having succeeded, grew restless and abruptly discontinued classes...

...When he came home from college in 1837, he was appointed teacher in the Concord public school, and at the end of the first 2 weeks he was sharply criticized by a board member for having failed to flog a single pupil...

...When genteel New Englanders boycotted Whitman as a vulgar, irreligious upstart, Thoreau brandished the poet's Leaves of Grass and stormed, "Not all the sermons that have been preached in this land are equal to it for preaching...

...In his own words he had as many trades as fingers, and already at the age of 27 he was writing essays of rare force in the house he had built for himself on the shore of Walden Pond...

...John Brown came to Concord twice, once in 1857 and once more a few days before the tragedy at Harper's Ferry in 1859...

...John Brown's death spurred him to a furious pitch...

...When electrotyping was invented in 1849 and graphite was needed for the coating of plate surfaces, a Boston printer, finding the Thoreau graphite superior to any other for the purpose, contracted for it at the monopoly price of $10 a pound, and bought as much as 500 pounds a year...

...When he had finished his experiment at Walden, Thoreau came back to the village to embark at once on another...

...He now set out to prove that the same independent man could, given patience and ingenuity, beat the industrialists at their own game...

...he lived almost entirely on what he found growing wild and on vegetables he himself raised...

...Poles apart, the two men were yet drawn irresistibly together by the spirit they possessed in common—the spirit of an emerging American philosophy of freedom and self-reliance...

...the character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished...

...In his Journal he worked out a thedry that tree rings can be used not only to tell the age of a given stump, but as clues to the history of the environment as well...

...It can still stand, 100 years later, as a classic challenge to those who would solve a nation's problems by technology and bureau organization alone...

...It is perhaps as good a definition as we have...

...The next morning, after his release, he went berry picking on a hillside...

...His daily Journal alone came to fill 14 manuscript volumes...

...His first attempt to buy a farm came to nothing...

...Fifty-one years were to pass before scientists completed and published this theory—as something novel...

...Both times Thoreau was fired with admiration for a spirit which instinct told him was like his own...

...The more successful the family became, the more closely they guarded Henry's formulae and devices...

...The crude process then in use consisted of mixing pulverized graphite, mined at nearby Sturbridge, with glue and bayberry wax to form a black paste which could be moulded...

...Thoreau went to Walden precisely as the Wright brothers went to Kittyhawk—to give a theory the most drastic test he could give it, by experiment...

...From it social critics as diverse as Tolstoy, Gandhi, Lenin, Shaw, and Wilson have drawn inspiration...

...Only one other American roused in Thoreau an enthusiasm equal to that he showed for Whitman...

...He learned that...

...Thus he found time for reading, for observation of nature, and for thinking...

...For the most part it was an uneventful 2 years...

...This is the crying sin of the age, this want of faith in the prevalence of a man...

...Thoreau sent to Europe for a shipment of the clay, experimented with it, and derfved a new formula which was such an improvement that sales began to mount at once...

...By Thanksgiving he was back in Concord, with money enough to begin making definite plans for his exile...

...He was in jail only one night, the tax—against his wishes—being paid by an aunt...

...He tinkered with machinery to grind the graphite yet finer and at last hit on the solution, a flotation process that was to remain a priceless secret of the Thoreau family for many years...

...When he was graduated he declined to pay for a diploma...

...Using principles of pedagogy three-quarters of a century in advance of their time, the brothers made a flourishing thing of their school...

...The next morning Thoreau selected 6 boys by lot, caned them thoroughly, and resigned his job...

...He was a skillful carpenter, this Concord youth, an inventor, a surveyor, a naturalist, handyman, and day laborer...

...The whole thing was a simple, almost pastoral episode...

...A length of cedar wood was then split, the 2 halves channeled with square grooves, graphite paste pressed into the grooves to dry, and the whole glued together so that the graphite core was encased in a cedar holder...

...His "house" was one room...

...Etzler's text was blunt and sweeping: "Nothing great can ever be effected by individual enterprise...

...I think I shall wait and see how they treat me first," he explained...

...He who wants help wants everything...

...He was the most concretely practical man in Concord...

...When Walden, the record of his two years at the Pond, was published in 1854, 2,000 copies were promptly sold, largely as a result of 3 columns of excerpt and praise in Greeley's Tribune...

...By the time the Civil War broke out, Thoreau's health had begun to fail, and he was turning again to the outdoors to restore it...

...The review he wrote, one of his earliest published essays, contains the meat of the social theory he spent the rest of his life expounding...

...At Walden Pond he had proved that a man of independent spirit could get along without the machinery of industrial society and make himself a good Hfe with his own 2 hands...

...The democracy which Thoreau talks about is a practical doctrine rooted in "the small, private, but both constant and accumulated force which stands behind every spade in the field...

...The farmer's wife thriftily balked when she found the down payment was to be only $10, all the money Thoreau possessed...

...it does not educate...

...Not that he was against taxes as such, but he felt that this particular levy was an invasion of a man's individuality...

...True, this is the condition of our weakness, but it can never be the means of our recovery...

...Alas...

...What success he did have came largely through the influence of Emerson and Horace Greeley...

...During all these years Thoreau was writing steadily...

...So he went to live with the Emersons for 2 years, earning his keep by doing odd jobs and building up a small bank account by lecturing...

...Government," "Thoreau wrote, "is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone...

...Two years after Walden was published, Thoreau met Walt Whitman...

...When the accounts were finally closed, Thoreau had paid the publisher out of his own pocket nearly $400 and still was forced to find storage space for 706 unsold copies out of an edition of 1,000...

...But his philosophy was too sinewy and individual to be popular amidst the yeasty social optimism of his time, and his career as a professional writer was long a disappointment to him...

...That he, the Concord rebel, should have been influenced by India's Bhagavad-Gita suggests that even 100 years ago the hemispheres were already one world...

...Improvement is possible not by any change in government but only by the improvement of the inherent character of the men and women who live under that government...

...The book, by a Pittsburgh socialist named Etzler, bore the optimistic title: The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery, Its author proposed a vast government cooperative in which all citizens would buy shares at $20 each...

...He had much of the breadth and sympathy of Jefferson and the dry shrewd wit of Franklin, and like both of those earlier Americans, Thoreau had the practical man's disdain for abstractions which have lost touch with workaday facts...

...For what is government...

...We have used up all our inherited freedom...

...Appropriately enough this man, too, was a rebel and a lone fighter...

...But one crisis occurred which was to have world-wide effect...

...It is likely that Greeley's admiration for Thoreau was first aroused by a book review which Thoreau wrote during his stay on Staten Island...

...Let each sheep," Thoreau told the nettled trustees, "keep but his own skin...

...But Horace Greeley worked hard for his protege and gradually Thoreau's reputation began to grow...

...During the 2 years he lived there he developed and tested his philosophy of individualism and self-reliance...

...But the Government "does not keep the country free...

...Thoreau went to work to improve the family product...

...We are rather pleased after all to consider the small, private, but both constant and accumulated force which stands behind every spade in the field...

...There was, to be sure, a rousing expansiveness about the scheme...

...His first book, A Week on the Connecticut and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849 when he was 32, was a failure...

...But the sequel is even more suggestive...

...But there was also, Thoreau thought, an inevitable catch...

...We will not be imposed on," he concluded drily, "by "this vast application of forces...

...His pencils could be better...

...For in 1907 Thoreau's own essays so impressed Mohandas K. Gandhi, that Gandhi himself translated portions of them for the guidance of his followers...

...Once at a pacifist meeting at Ralph Waldo Emerson's home, Thoreau alone among the Concord elite refused to sign a pledge to treat all men as brothers...

...He built his Walden house without help, at a total cost of $28...

...He believed that the United States had the best gov-ernment^yet evolved...

...We believe that most -things will have to be accomplished still by the application called Industry...

...The family was now in comfortable circumstances...

...And when a famous alumnus remarked proudly that the University taught all branches of knowledge, Thoreau added, "Yes, and none of the roots...

...In the Harvard library he found an encyclopaedia article which told how the Fabers mixed a fine Bavarian clay with their graphite to make it smooth...

...And in defiance of his more cautious townsmen, he conducted, almost singlehanded, a dramatic memorial service for John Brown...

...If we would save our lives we must fight for them...

...For more than 30 years black lead pencils had been made in Concord...

...Throughout his college career he went about in green homespun to the scandal of the faculty and students...

...Government And Men Thoreau's whole philosophy can be summed up in his conviction that associations can never make or keep men free unless they are associations of free men to begin with...

...Henry David Thoreau was New England's most rugged prophet of the independent man...

...His Night In Jail But the man who built his lonely house by Walden Pond was neither a hermit nor a dreamer...

...Henry's father, John Thoreau, a small manufacturer of stove polish, had taken over the pencil business in 1823...

...The resulting pencil, while workable, was brittle, gritty, and inferior to the imported German Faber brand...

...By the end of the century Walden had become the inspiration of the British labor movement, and in England it has been called the "bible of the Labour Party...

...To add to his capital he went to Staten Island in May 1843 to tutor Emerson's nephew...

...During that same Winter of 1860 Thoreau developed a theory of the relation of pine to hardwood growths which experts today applaud as an important contribution to forestry...

...This canny independence, heritage of his Scottish and French forebears, must often have dismayed his more decorous townsmen...