AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM - 2

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Henry David Thoreau (picture), writer and naturalist, was born in Concord,
Massachusetts on July 12, 1817 and is best known for Walden, an account of his
experiment in simple living, and for the essay Civil Disobedience (1849). His doctrine of
passive resistance influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Essentially a
philosopher of individualism, Thoreau placed nature above materialism in private life and
ethics above conformity in politics. Raised in genteel poverty, Thoreau graduated from
Harvard in 1837 and returned to Concord, there becoming a close friend of Ralph Waldo
Emerson and other transcendentalists.

With Emerson's encouragement, Thoreau continued with a journal that he had begun in
1834. It was conceived as a literary notebook, but it gradually developed into a work of
art in its own right, serving as a record of the author's thoughts and discoveries about
nature and containing his comments on the culture of his time. Eventually reaching more
than 2 million words, it ran to 14 volumes when published in 1906.

Having worked briefly as a teacher in Concord and as a tutor to the children of Emerson's
brother in New York, Thoreau much preferred the literary career urged on him by
Emerson. He published essays, poems, and reviews in various magazines, including
Emerson's The Dial, whose editorship Thoreau assumed briefly in 1843 when Emerson
was away. Now permanently established in the neighborhood of Concord, Thoreau built a
small cabin in 1845 on Emerson's land near Walden Pond and lived there for 2 years. His
purpose in going to the pond was to simplify his life, reduce his expenses, and devote his
time to writing and observing nature. Out of his experiment came two books, A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), the description of a rowboat excursion he
had taken with his brother in 1839, and Walden (1854). The former was a complete
failure, selling only 219 copies in 4 years; but the latter, received more favorably, laid the
foundation for Thoreau's reputation.

In July 1846, a year after moving into his cabin, Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax as a
protest against American slavery and went to jail. Freed the next morning when an aunt,
over his objections, paid the tax, he wrote Resistance to Civil Government, later better
known as Civil Disobedience. In it he emphasized personal ethics and responsibility,
urging the individual to follow the dictates of conscience in any conflict between it and
the civil law and to violate unjust laws to effect their repeal. Thoreau continued his
protests against slavery by lecturing, by aiding escaped slaves in their flight to freedom in
Canada, and by publicly defending John Brown when he attacked Harpers Ferry in 1859.

Thoreau was not satisfied merely to entertain an opinion and to enjoy it; he was resolved
to live it. For himself and for any individual he claimed the right of revolution against
bad government, and he regarded the authority of good government still an impure one,
defended civil disobedience, and refused to pay taxes after facing and suffering
imprisonment. "Under a government," Thoreau wrote, "which imprisons unjustly, the true
place for a just man is also a prison." The spirit of revolt, the impulse to isolation, the
desire to live alone with thought, nature and God, as well as practical considerations,
caused him to retreat to Walden Pond where he contemplated nature and meditated upon
it. Thoreau was a scholar and poet, an eccentric and a shrewd realist. His Walden, the
work of a great naturalist and an even greater poet of nature, has been translated into
many languages.

"To be a philosopher," says Thoreau, "is not merely to have subtle thought, or even to
found a school but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of
simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust." No serene sage, Thoreau's ferocity
often disturbed his most faithful friends, and estranged from him Emerson with whom he
had been, for a time, closely associated. His temperament committed him to action, his
faith to contemplation. Until 1850, Thoreau was an enthusiast of community life.
Thereafter he became a staunch opponent of popular movements.

The essential life meant to him life in nature. To him, the burden of the civilization of his
age was not cause by mere defects in industrial organization and distribution, but rather
by the domination of industry itself over human interests. Against a cultural evolution
which he condemned as resulting in the neglect of human values, Thoreau was resolved
to live his own time by his own terms. His political beliefs tended to be anarchistic. He
resented governments' martial spirit causing recurrent wars; he distrusted not only
monarchies with their injustice by the few, but also democracies with their injustice by
the many. All acts of government, all laws, he contended, were rules of oppression by
standardization.

These ideas assumed the form of a definite philosophy of life, concisely expressed in his
Civil Disobedience. He long disapproved of slavery, but the precipitating motive for
writing the essay was the Mexican War of 1846. Feeling that the war was a matter of
coercing a weak neighbor by a stronger one, Thoreau refused as a matter of principle to
pay taxes, and landed in jail. Thoreau eventually became well known, especially as the
author of Walden, and while his lecture engagements became numerous, he had to
supplement his earnings by working as a plain surveyor. But he was no longer well. He
died of tuberculosis on May 6, 1862.

In his lifetime often dismissed as an imitator of Emerson, Thoreau has since won a
reputation as one of America's greatest prose stylists; as a naturalist, pioneer ecologist,
and conservationist; as an advocate of the simple life; and as a proponent of democratic
individualism. A visionary humanist, he gave perhaps the best summary of his thought in
Walden's injunction, "Simplify, simplify."

In The Radical Academy

• Books by and about Henry David Thoreau

• Essay: Higher Laws, by Henry David Thoreau
• Essay: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau
 • Essay: The Individual Must Be Recognized as a Higher and Independent Power,
by Henry David Thoreau

Elsewhere On the Internet

• CyberSaunter - Henry David Thoreau

• A Henry David Thoreau Web Page
• Another Henry David Thoreau Web Page

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

The greatest of 19th-century American poets, Walt Whitman (picture) was born in West
Hill, Long Island on May 31, 1819. He abandoned his given name "Walter" when he
published his first book of poetry, Leaves of Grass, in 1855, which must be counted
among the seminal works of American literature. From then on he became "Walt
Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos," a poet who sought a personal
relationship with his readers.

The third of eight children, he was born on a small farm that the family left in 1824 when
they moved to Brooklyn, where his father was an unsuccessful builder, and where Walt
attended public schools. At the age of 11 he began to learn printing, a trade with which he
remained associated for many years as printer, journalist, and newspaper editor. Although
his formal education was limited, he was teaching school in Long Island by the time he
was 17 years of age. In 1838-39 he edited a weekly newspaper, The Long Islander, which
is still in existence.

For the next 10 years Walt drifted from one job to another, often losing newspaper posts
because of his political views. He occasionally taught school, wrote short stories and
poems for magazines, and edited such newspapers as the New York Aurora and Evening
Tatler and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. As a contributor to the New Orleans Crescent, he
made a trip to the South, his first exposure to the vastness of the "States" that he later
extolled in his poetry. There he suffered a severe mental disturbance, as a result of which
his personality underwent a marked change, and he began to spend much time wandering
about, associating and conversing with a great variety of simple people. As an individual,
he became lonesome, keeping company with few men and hardly any women at all. But
as a poet and thinker, he matured and deepened. About 1850 he returned to his family in
Brooklyn and, until the death of his failing father in 1855, assisted him in the building
business.

Paid for, and in part typeset, by Whitman himself, Leaves of Grass (1855), including the
famous "Song of Myself," launched his career as a poet. The book did not win universal
acclaim, however, because his irregular poetry as well as his candid anatomical
references antagonized many early readers. Until the beginning of the Civil War, while
revising and expanding Leaves of Grass, Whitman supported himself by freelance
journalism. During the War Between the States, Whitman came to Washington, D.C., as
a war correspondent and stayed to live in the national capital as a government clerk. In
his spare time he worked on his book of social philosophy, Democratic Vistas (1871), in
which he eloquently expressed his pride in the American past and hope for the American
future.

In 1873 Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke, which left him increasingly incapacitated,
and the death of his mother, whom he adored, was a further painful blow. The remaining
years of his life were spent in Camden, New Jersey, where he died on March 26, 1892.
Robert Green Ingersoll delivered a funeral oration at his grave.

The central point of Whitman's philosophy lay in his faith in the powers of Man. Man is
the source of all potential goodness, beauty and truth; indeed, he and God partake of the
same nature. But to develop his creative inclinations, man needs freedom, freedom open
to all, built on equality, tolerance, and self-respect. Each individual should be given a full
opportunity to use freedom and prepared for it by the public acting in collaboration with
the forces of law. This, in essence, was Whitman's idea of democracy.

The function of poetry was conceived by Whitman as not only enjoying but leading and
teaching mankind, and in many of his poems he attempted to answer philosophical
questions. Whitman also dealt with philosophical problems in his notebooks. In 1847 he
did not believe himself to have become a great philosopher, and in 1860 he wrote, in a
similar mood, that he had not founded a philosophical school. In a way, he even
repudiated philosophy as a bond of thinking, and exclaimed: "I leave all free, I charge
you to leave all free." But he also claimed that the poet of the cosmos "advances through
all interpositions, coverings and turmoils and stratagems to first principles."

In Passage to India he declared that the poet fuses nature and man who were diffused
before. In fact, Whitman was devoted to a philosophy which combined pantheism with a
strong belief in human action, which unites the human soul with cosmic life but stresses
the uniqueness of human personality and human relations. His civil, democratic, human
consciousness was rooted in an all-embracing feeling of cosmic solidarity, and he was
anxious to avoid any attenuation, and not to be deterred by psychic transmigration to the
remotest objects.

There is a tension between Whitman's firmness of conviction and his universal

receptivity for impressions, sensations, ideas and phenomena, between his feelings of
being a missionary of democracy and his mythical imagination. But this same tension
strengthened his poetical power and did not endanger the unity of his character. From
cosmic vagaries he always found the way back to simple truth and common sense.

Having set himself a difficult task -- to create a poetry that would reflect the American
melting pot of races and nationalities, the democratic aspirations of the people, and the
physical vastness of the United States -- to accomplish his goals Whitman replaced
traditional English form and meter with a rhythmic unit based on the meaning and natural
flow of the lines. The subject matter, like the rhythm, was intended to be as free as the
people and included topics usually avoided by the era's poets--commonplace experiences,
labor, sexuality. He remains the nation's great celebrator and affirmer of democracy,
freedom, the self, and the joys of living.

In The Radical Academy

• Books by and about Walt Whitman

• Essay: Literature's Service & Democracy's Need, by Walt Whitman
• Essay: The Purpose of Democracy, by Walt Whitman

Elsewhere On the Internet

• Walt Whitman - Camden's Poet

• Walt Whitman Home Page (Library of Congress)
• "Leaves of Grass," by Walt Whitman

William Torrey Harris (1835-1909)

William Torrey Harris (picture), born on September 10, 1835, was an American
philosopher and educator, known for his innovations in public schools. As superintendent
of schools in St. Louis, Missouri, from 1868 to 1880, he introduced the first American
public kindergarten and subjects such as art, music, and science. He advocated training
teachers in educational philosophy and psychology and promoted the development of the
high school. Harris was an effective U.S. commissioner of education, serving from 1889
to 1906.

When passions ran high at the beginning of the War Between the States, a group met
together in St. Louis and calmly interpreted the events as part of a universal plan, the
working out of an eternal dialectic which Hegel had explained in all his works,
particularly his Philosophy of History. William Torrey Harris was one of the key men of
that philosophical society. Harris's philosophy was Hegelian. He might be termed the
idealist in education in that he organized all phases of it on the principles of a
philosophical pedagogy in which the German idealist Hegel, Kant, Fichte and Goethe
were his principal teachers, apart from Friebel, Pestalozzi and the rest.

When a magazine editor rejected an article he had written, saying it was "the mere dry
husk of Hegelianism," Harris helped found The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the
first regular American philosophy journal. He edited it from 1867 to 1893, introducing
translations of the work of German philosophers and early works of the American
pragmatists. He initiated, with Brokmeyer, the St. Louis Movement in Philosophy which
had far-reaching influence. Together with Amos Bronson Alcott and with the support of
Emerson, he revived New England transcendentalism but gave it a more logical,
metaphysical twist. Lecturing from coast to coast as one of America's most popular
educators, he made his hearers realize the importance of philosophy, of having objectives
in an education for democracy, and of viewing things in their whole.
Far from being a dreamer, he was practical in his activities. He expanded the functions of
the Bureau of Education, represented the United States in graphic exhibits at many an
international exposition, incorporated the first kindergarten into an American school
system, and was responsible for introducing the reindeer into Alaska as a condition for
educating the natives who were thus supplied with an industry and a livelihood which the
whalers and trappers had brought to the verge of extinction. The author of hundreds of
articles, Harris also edited Webster's New International Dictionary and Appleton's
International Education series. He died on November 5, 1909.