Thoreau, American Thinking, and Anti-Racism
“It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be a falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain in their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.”
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Painting by John Lautermilch
Today is Henry David Thoreau’s 203rd birthday. Thoreau is most famous for building a cabin on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land at Walden Pond in Concord, MA and living in relative seclusion for over a year. Six years ago I was fortunate to spend a week in Concord—including Thoreau’s 197th birthday—staying at the Concord Colonial Inn, and participating in the annual gathering of the Thoreau Society. I walked from the town to Walden Pond three times, including one walk that followed Thoreau’s usual path from Emerson’s house along the railroad tracks to the Thoreau cabin site on HDT’s birthday. It was an exceptional week punctuated by many heightened sensory experiences.
While in Concord, I also had the opportunity to visit important sites of the American Revolution. I had toured Revolutionary sites in Boston numerous times, but this was my first visit to the Old North Bridge—where “the shot heard round the world” was fired (Emerson coined that one)—and the sites of the battle of Lexington and Concord, the first battle of the American Revolution.
In Concord, my experiences yielded me an overwhelming feeling of the symmetry and parallelism between the revolutionary birth of American freedom, and the philosophical birth of American letters. The important sites of both are in such close proximity in Concord that they often overlap. The Old Manse, for example, overlooks the Old North Bridge. The Emerson family owned the Old Manse, and from its windows and fields Ralph Waldo’s ancestors watched as the shot heard round the world was fired. Nathaniel Hawthorne later lived in and wrote at the Old Manse—his works written there include my two favorite Hawthorne stories, “The Birth-Mark” and “Rappacinni’s Daughter.” These places of our Revolutionary and philosophical history are so entwined that the experience of them is inseparable.
Thoreau’s Walden was written in Concord and the book is saturated with the ideals that were fought for in Concord and further developed by later American philosophers in the town. Thoreau was a Transcendentalist, along with Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and others in Concord. And Walden is remembered as a classic of American literature and philosophy. When we remember Transcendentalism, we most often think about ecology and spirituality. We recall a distinctive brand of American consciousness that recognizes spirit imbued in the very material of nature. But another distinctive characteristic of Transcendentalism is equality. In this regard, as in others, the Transcendentalists writing and thinking in Concord developed a philosophical system of thought that was anchored in the founding ideals of America.
In his attitude towards enslaved people,* Thoreau took the equality promised in America’s founding documents—and fought for in the town where he lived—seriously. Thoreau was an abolitionist. In private, Thoreau supported revolutionary abolitionist John Brown who led raiding parties in Bleeding Kansas and later attempted to inspire an insurgence among enslaved people at Harper’s Ferry (where he was caught and hanged). Thoreau championed the cause of abolition and often wrote publicly about equality and casting aside prejudice, including the above quote, found in his most famous book, Walden: the same book that is a cornerstone of American literature and philosophy, which we remember for its ecology and spirituality, also affirms the necessity of equality and the foolishness of maintaining inherited prejudice. Equality is an American ideal towards which we continually strive. Thoreau knew this. It is foundational for his worldview and work, which in turn is foundational for American philosophy.
I’m not going to suggest any “if Thoreau were here today” hypotheticals because quite frankly, I dislike those types of arguments. We can’t know what Thoreau’s thoughts on America would be today. But we do know his thoughts, and actions, and the company he kept in his own time. We know that his thinking demonstrated those Revolutionary ideals of equality that not even all the founding fathers—or even Thoreau himself—were ready to embody in their time. Thoreau was an abolitionist, and an anti-racist. Walden—that cornerstone of American philosophy—is an anti-racist book. Happy birthday, Henry. America is still continuing the good work you did in your own time.
*Though Thoreau demonstrates an anti-racist stance in his thought and actions towards abolition and the plight of enslaved African people in America, the same cannot be said for his attitude towards “vanishing” Native Americans. While Thoreau thought he admired Native Americans, his reasons for this admiration are mired in tokenism and extend wholly from his imagined ideal of Indian-ness, and not from consideration for real Indigenous people. Thoreau romanticized Indigenous peoples’ “wildness,” and “spiritual insight” in a corollary to Edward Said’s “orientalism” known as “savagism,” here defined as a romanticization of Native peoples that is so thorough, the romanticizer only considers their own thought-formation, and mistakes it for a consideration of the people themselves. When we address Thoreau’s attitude towards Native peoples, we are addressing his attitude towards his own conception of Indigenous people and not the people as they are. This is a problem. For more, see Joy Harjo’s review of Robert Sayre’s Thoreau and the American Indian
At Walden Pond on HDT’s 197th birthday, 2014. Thoreau cabin site just to right of image
Emerson and American Individualism
“Trust thyself: Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
One cannot help but look around America these days without noticing any number of selfish behavior patterns masquerading under the misnomer of “American Individualism.” Emphasis on the individual is certainly a defining American trait within our culture, and our culture is so diverse and hard to pin down that defining traits stand out all the more. When selfishness masquerades as individualism, it paints the concept of “Self Reliance” as a pejorative, when in truth it need not be. And so, on this Independence Day—in a critical year of our evolution as a culture and as a people—I am drawing my mind back to American Transcendentalist and influential philosopher of American Individualism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, his essay, “Self Reliance,” and the paradoxical concept (stated above) at the heart of his philosophy. I hope that you may join me for a moment in between the hot dogs and fireworks.
When we approach Emerson’s maxim—“Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string”—we immediately notice the seemingly conflicting formulation of his sentence. What Emerson calls for is reliance on one’s self—yes—but not for the betterment of one’s self alone, or simply to exercise one’s freedom for the sake of being free. Instead we are called to trust ourselves because, “[t]he power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.” Emerson’s call for self reliance is a challenge to each of us to maximize our own potential in the hope of creating an empowered society of individuals in which each individual contributes the best that they have to offer as a result of cultivating themselves to their very highest nature. To trust in oneself—to follow one’s own path—becomes, not selfish, but productive, not just for oneself, but for all of American society: “Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
Even more, the very conceptual difficulty of the paradoxical maxim lifts us out of the type of materialistic thinking that claims superficial concerns as the crux of one’s own “individualist” behaviors (e.g. wearing a mask). Emerson’s American Individualism is a call to better oneself pragmatically, psychically, and spiritually. Thinking of Individualism as a justification for a superficial aesthetic choices diminishes the legacy of our American philosophical transcendentalism. To really enact the type of American Individualism that Emerson challenged us all to in 1841, we must put aside our selfishness to become our best selves—rising above superficial concerns about our appearance, because our best selves rarely worry about such trivialities. We grow beyond our own selfishness when we individuate (to borrow a term from later thinker CG Jung) towards our spiritual potential. And when we individuate, we offer our best to the world around us, not just for ourselves, but for the betterment of all mankind. And to me, that goal is another cornerstone of American identity.
If you are an American and you haven’t read “Self-Reliance,” you can access it by following the link below. If you are an American who claims to live by the doctrine of American Individualism and you have not read “Self Reliance,” I highly recommend devoting a few moments of your Independence Day to reading a founding document of the philosophy you claim to believe (I know I know, “Don’t tell me what to do!”). Happy Independence Day! Grab yourself a hot dog.