Henry David Thoreau was one of America’s most eloquent and incisive philosophers. His derision of unjust laws in his essay on “Civil Disobedience” is still catnip 175 years later. His summons to individuals to march to the beat of their own drum is a message that will continue to resonate as long as drums and dissonance exist. Thoreau vividly debunked the folly of people squandering their lives stockpiling unnecessary possessions.
But in his final years, Thoreau mutated into an apologist for bloodthirsty fanaticism and helped foment the American Civil War. Thoreau’s derision of prosperity and of freedom of contract continue to animate anti-capitalist zealots in our time. When Thoreau presumed he was rising above mere economic considerations, he was paving the road to serfdom.
Thoreau’s best-known work is Walden—his chronicle of living by a Massachusetts pond for a couple years. In the book’s peak piety passage, Thoreau declared, “None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.” But Thoreau’s poverty was a kabuki performance. His cabin was a mere 20 minutes away from his mother’s dinner table, where he often took repast.
In the years before the Civil War, Thoreau was almost alone in howling that affluence was damning America. Thoreau bewailed that people were being “ruined by luxury and heedless expense” and proclaimed that the “only cure… is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.” Thoreau’s definition of “heedless expense” apparently included anyone not living in a ramshackle cabin like his at Walden. In the 1840s, the average house in the United States had about 1000 square feet and was occupied by 5.5 people, according to the Census Bureau. People had no indoor plumbing, refrigerators, central heating, or electricity. Did Thoreau believe that Americans would be loftier souls if those 5.5 people were squeezed into 550 square feet instead of a thousand square feet of living space? “Ruined by luxury” was not the reason why the average life expectancy in Massachusetts in the 1840s was 38 years.
Thoreau whooped up minimalism as the one true liberation. “With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor,” he declared in Walden. Barely 20 miles from his cabin, Boston was being deluged by haggard souls fleeing a famine that killed 10 percent of the population of Ireland. Many new arrivals squeezed into ramshackle tenements, plagued by outbreaks of typhoid, cholera, and tuberculosis. Food was sparse and diets were rarely healthy, helping spur a far higher mortality rate among Irish immigrants than other city residents. Thoreau disdained the Irish for their “coarse” and “brutish” ways. Thoreau scoffed that “often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune.” My ancestors fled Ireland’s infamous potato famine and arrived in America while Thoreau was at Walden.
Thoreau’s Original Sin is his contempt for voluntary exchange among private citizens. Thoreau proclaimed that “trade curses everything it handles.” Thoreau talked as if there was a spiritual calculus that made society poorer every time that two parties made a mutually profitable agreement.
Except, of course, when Thoreau was the one profiting. Thoreau boasted that he grew seven miles of rows of beans at Walden. His memoir would have been more candid if he added a postscript to his jeremiad: “Trade is a great evil and… hey buddy, ya wanna buy some beans?” Thoreau sold his surplus beans and bought rice, pork, molasses, apples, and farming supplies. Do people lose part of their soul when they swap beans for bacon or what?
Thoreau proclaimed that “trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.” Except when you get a really good price for your “messages from heaven.” Thoreau had the best volunteer literary agent in America—New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley—whom Thoreau met when he was briefly tutoring on Staten Island. Greeley arranged to sell one of Thoreau’s essays for $75 in 1849. This was more than double what Thoreau spent to build his house at Walden—$28.12—and more than 8 times as much as Thoreau’s profit from growing beans—$8.71. (The only way that Thoreau showed a profit from those beans was presuming that his own labor was worthless.) That $75 in 1849 would be roughly $2500 in current dollars, excellent pay nowadays for an essay for 99 percent of aspiring writers. Thoreau paused his principles long enough to cash the check. Greeley wanted to sell more such pieces but Thoreau preferred to devote himself to writing books instead of articles.
Thoreau’s disdain for voluntary exchanges is dicey to reconcile with how he survived selling his own talents. He declared in Walden, “For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one.” Thoreau—whose townsmen recognized as a Harvard University graduate—wasn’t hiring himself out to dig ditches. His primary income in his thirties and early forties came from his work as a surveyor that paid double or triple the wage received by unskilled labor. By developing a well-paid talent, Thoreau earned enough working part time to help pay to publish his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).
Thoreau thrived before surveyors were compelled to get prior approval from officialdom. Entry into almost a third of all occupations is now restricted by government licensing. Government regulations have spurred credentialist mania that make it more difficult to thrive without a college degree. Government restrictions and mandates have imposed far more barriers to independent living than most Thoreau fans recognize.
Thoreau—like other Transcendentalists—had a weakness for moral absolutes that could quickly spiral into drivel. Thoreau castigated railroads and declared that “the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.” A day’s wages at that point was 90 cents—which was the same fare for 30 miles rail travel. Thoreau said it would be faster to simply walk that distance rather than do a day’s work and then pay to ride the railroad. Thoreau proclaimed this as “the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as long.”
Thoreau neglected to include the expiration date for his “universal law.” Thoreau’s “rebuttal” of rail travel was practically out of date by the time Walden was printed 8 years after he left the pond. Rail travel had plunged in price by the end of the century, with some routes costing only a penny a mile for non-first-class passengers. At the same time, wages for unskilled laborers in Massachusetts more than tripled during the 1800s.
Thoreau railed against railroads in part because they were binding together broader swaths of humanity than local towns and villages. Thoreau preferred to keep localities relatively isolated and untainted by humanity beyond the county line. Thoreau rhapsodized about growing beans but the farmland in his part of Massachusetts was far less productive than farmland in Ohio and Indiana. Thoreau fretted about the new competition that local farmers faced but ignored how soaring agricultural productivity could greatly reduce the percentage of people toiling on the land to feed themselves and their families.
Thoreau was able to conduct his “experiment in living” because his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson had recently bought a 14-acre patch of land by that pond. Emerson could afford to buy that parcel in part thanks to the profits from his essay “Self-Reliance,” published a few years earlier. Emerson allowed Thoreau to temporarily live on that land in return for clearing some of the briars and trees.
Private land ownership was the prerequisite of Thoreau’s independent living. What would have happened if Thoreau had tried to do the same thing on land owned by the National Park Service (which was not created until 1916)? The authorities might have viewed him as a squatter and burned down his cabin including all his books and manuscripts in progress while he was out fishing.
While Thoreau portrays private possessions as burdens to self-liberation, earlier Americans recognized property as a bulwark of freedom. In the 18th century, property was equated with “liberty because property secured independence. Material goods were valued less for their market worth, as a means of economic development, or as a capital resource, than as a guarantee of individual autonomy,” as law professor John Phillip Reid noted in his classic work, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution. Such autonomy allows people to follow their own values or seek to build their own destiny. Hungarian economist Janos Kornai—a courageous dissident in the Soviet Bloc—observed in 1981: “The further elimination of private ownership is taken, the more consistently can full subjection be imposed.” Perhaps that is why so many environmentalists and leftists nowadays want to destroy private property.
We can appreciate Thoreau’s brilliance while rejecting his follies. It is possible to avoid deifying possessions without glorifying poverty. Seeking to “rise above economics” too often merely unleashes politicians to drag nations to their ruin.
