[July 12th
marks Henry
David Thoreau’s 200th birthday! So this week I’ll AmericanStudy
five texts and contexts for Thoreau, leading up to a weekend post on three ways
we can remember and celebrate this unique and influential American on his 200th.]
Three
lesser-known facts about Thoreau’s seminal essay
“Civil Disobedience” (1849).
1)
Origins in Oratory: Thoreau’s friend and mentor
Ralph Waldo Emerson tends to be more closely associated with lectures and oratory than
the more iconoclastic and antisocial Henry. But Thoreau was of course part of
the same Transcendental
community and circles, and in February 1848
delivered a lecture at the Concord Lyceum entitled “The Rights and Duties
of the Individual in Relation to Government.” As far as I can tell we don’t
have a transcript or written version of that lecture, so it’s impossible to
know how much Thoreau altered or added before publishing his essay the
following year. But just as Emerson’s published lectures (such as “The American
Scholar”) utilize a different structure and style than do his solely written
texts (such as “Nature”), so too would we have to think in any case about how
Thoreau’s oratorical origins for “Civil Disobedience” informed those kinds of
formal elements, as well as the essay’s engagement with audience. To cite one
small example of that latter aspect, Thoreau’s first-paragraph instruction to
“Witness the present Mexican war” as an illustration of the abuse of government
reads far differently if we think about him making such a controversial request
of a live audience.
2)
The Original Title: Even when Thoreau published
the print version of the essay in 1849 (as part of the collected Aesthetic Papers), it was distinct
in a key way from the version that many future audiences have read. The essay’s
1849 title was “Resistance
to Civil Government”; when it was reprinted in a posthumous 1866 collection,
it was retitled “Civil Disobedience” (and in some subsequent reprintings has
been called “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”). It’s my understanding that
the text of the essay has remained unchanged in each case, but of course a
title provides a significant first frame for any piece, and I would argue that
both the distinction between “resistance” and “disobedience” and the different
uses of “civil” (as modifying the government in the initial version and the
disobedience in the latter ones) are titular changes that could guide readers
in divergent ways as they begin Thoreau’s essay. (The resistance-disobedience
distinction would be especially interesting to parse further in 2017, when
resistance has become a focal concept of social and political protests.) And at
the very least, I think we should refer to a text by the author’s intended
title if and when we have a clear sense of that choice, as we certainly do with
this text. So “Resistance to Civil Government” it is!
3)
An International Inspiration: Much has been
made, and rightly so, of the emphasis that both Mohandas
Gandhi and Martin Luther
King Jr. placed on Thoreau’s essay and philosophy as inspirations for their
own acts of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance. But prior to either
of those responses, the Russian novelist and peace activist Leo Tolstoy
highlighted Thoreau as one of his own chief inspirations. In a turn of the 20th
century “Letter to the American People” that frames this
anthology of Tolstoy’s writings on civil disobedience, the author notes
that “thinking over at night, it came to me that, if I had to address the
American people, I would like to thank them for writers who flourished about
the [1850s].” Among other things, this less well-known international connection
helps us recognize the role that Thoreau’s ideas have played in the
anti-war and peace movements, somewhat different causes of course from the
independence and civil rights struggles of Gandhi and King but certainly
another longstanding legacy of Thoreau’s influential essay.
Next Thoreau
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Thoreau responses you’d share?
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