Civil Disobedience

THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU by Walter Harding. 472 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Henry David Thoreau has been buried in Concord, Mass. for a century. The stubborn, contradictory spirit laid to rest there did not loom large over his own times. He was considered an eccentric loafer, a consecrated crank with queer ideas. Since then Thoreau's ideas have had their seasons. In this excellent biography by a Thoreau scholar who has written and edited 18 earlier books on his chosen subject, Walter Harding argues that Thoreau's spirit is more pervasive now than ever before.

Fishing. Thoreau was the completely unmalleable man--and boy. When his mother asked her son how she should explain his refusal to go to a neighborhood party, the boy replied: "Tell them I don't want to come." On Sunday, when Concord went to church, Thoreau went fishing. "Have you ever yet in preaching," he once asked a clergyman, "been so fortunate as to say anything?"

In a time and in a nation that made its own energy an article of faith, Thoreau stayed contentedly in Concord, doing as little as he could. "It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow," he said, "unless he sweats easier than I do." On the shores of Walden Pond, an easy walk from the Thoreau family home, he built the now world-famous cabin and lived there for two years, two months and two days. What did it prove? Nothing. But that cabin, long since gone, still stands in the hearts of men who dream of the simple, peaceful, unfettered life.

It was while at Walden in 1846 that Thoreau struck another blow for individual freedom, one that, in Harding's judgment, reverberates with more force than ever today. At the time, Thoreau's blow did not count for much. He went to jail for refusing to pay his poll tax--$1.50--his way of protesting against a Government that permitted slavery. But someone, possibly one of Thoreau's aunts, paid off the revenuers, and he was freed after one night behind bars.

The experience produced Thoreau's best-known essay, originally entitled Resistance to Civil Government. It was indifferently received during his lifetime, and it did not get its more familiar name, Civil Disobedience, until after his death. Emerson, Thoreau's mentor and neighbor, found his friend's reaction "mean and skulking and in bad taste" and later wrote in his journal: "The State is a poor cow who does well by you--do not grudge it its hay."

Emerson missed the point. The essay was the strong call of one invincible conscience, and it took the measure of any strong conscience's invincibility. "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly," Thoreau wrote, "the true place for a just man is also a prison. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose."

Minority of One. Thoreau was a minority of one and stayed that way. But that, he felt, was enough: "It matters not how small the beginnings may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever." He could scarcely have envisioned his responsibility, at least in part, for the fact that thousands of dhoti-clad Indians lay down across roads and railroads, that hundreds of U.S. citizens, white and black, would be flung into Alabama jails. He was content to enunciate a principle rather than pursue a practice--he never did go back to the uncomfortable jail cell.

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