Neck-Beards and The Butter Rebellion

Jamie and I headed for Walden Pond today (Saturday, 6/6/09). It was pretty great to find this place on the map as I was looking for other places. It's located west of the DeCordova Museum and southeast of Concord - North Bridge, where I'm heading next. Walden Pond is most famous for being the site where Henry David Thoreau set up a cabin and lived the natural life, depicted in Walden. The first sentence of his Wikipedia entry reads as follow:

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau; July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862)^[1] was an American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist.

Pretty awesome first sentence. The area is now a state park and seems to get pretty crowded. There are a few swimmers in the lake (looking like they're training) and we ran into quite a few people on the paths. The cabin you see in the pictures is a recreation, located by the parking lot. The cabin site is about 3/4 of a mile from there, with nothing there except stone posts where archeologists say he lived. He was there for two years and, contrary to what I thought, wasn't living in the total wilderness. He was on the edge of town and the family home was 1.5 miles away. In my mind, however, that takes nothing away from his attempt at simple living.

The title of this post comes from the fact that, apparently he sported one and thought that women would be all about it. However, Louisa May Alcott supposedly told Ralph Waldo Emerson that Thoreau's facial hair "will most assuredly deflect amorous advances and preserve the man's virtue in perpetuity." That awesome diss (!) brings up the fact that the Concord area was teeming with authors and thinkers at this time. Besides Emerson, Thoreau and Alcott, there was Nathaniel Hawthorne (also from Salem, MA), Margaret Fuller and Ellery Channing. Just a few miles north of Walden is a house called The Wayside, also called The House of Authors (I went on Monday - closed).

Another part of his legend states that, even though he attended Harvard, he refused to pay the $5 to receive his diploma, saying "let every sheep keep his own skin". The best part of the story is that there was no academic merit to the diploma, since Harvard College offered it to graduates "who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college." Adding to the lore, his maternal grandfather supposedly led the "Butter Rebellion" at Harvard, where students reacted to the bad food. A quick jump over to Wikipedia also talks about the "Bread and Butter Rebellion of 1805" and the "Cabbage Rebellion of 1807". Those proto-Transcendentalists were all about their food!

There's a lot more interesting stuff to know about Thoreau, so I suggest you pick up a book about him. He was one of the first Americans to support Darwin's theory of evolution. He was also a stalwart abolishionist. In fact, the reason he gave for not paying taxes was the Mexican-American War and slavery. The fierce abolishionist John Brown was derided at first for his actions at Harpers Ferry, where he led a raid on a U.S. arsenal to help cause an armed slave rebellion, only to be crushed by a Col. Robert E. Lee. However, because of Thoreau's speech on the matter, Brown came to be accepted as a martyr for the cause. People even started singin about John Brown's body to a tune we know better as 'Battle Hymm of the Republic'.

Maybe most interesting is his influence on later thinkers. Mahatma Gandhi once told a reporter that:

"[Thoreau's] ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all of my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian Independence. Why I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau's essay 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,' written about 80 years ago."

Another civil rights leader said this about Thoreau:

Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.

I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.

It's a long quote, but when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tells you who influenced him - well...I think it says a lot about a man who embraced 'simple living' for two years by a pond.