{"id":14912,"date":"2020-07-11T07:40:43","date_gmt":"2020-07-11T11:40:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=14912"},"modified":"2020-07-11T07:53:34","modified_gmt":"2020-07-11T11:53:34","slug":"losing-thoreau-in-boston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/11\/losing-thoreau-in-boston\/","title":{"rendered":"Losing Thoreau in Boston"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"\"<\/a> Mises Institute, July 11, 2020<\/h4>\n

You Don’t Have to “Cultivate Poverty” to Pursue Truth, Contrary to Thorea<\/a>u<\/h2>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

Henry David Thoreau has inspired generation of Americans to live fuller, freer lives. From his story of spending a night in jail as a tax protestor in \u201cCivil Disobedience\u201d to his chronicle of solitary living in Walden<\/em>, Thoreau reached higher ground by going against the herd.<\/p>\n

I was enthralled when I first read Thoreau when I was eighteen, and his prescriptions for simplicity and frugal living quickly became my lodestars. Thoreau wrote, \u201cThe cost of a thing is the amount of life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.\u201d The fewer things I purchased, the more time I controlled. Thoreau helped me recognize that personal independence depends more on how you live and what you value than on your income. Thoreau also seemed to incarnate the doctrine of self-reliance that his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, preached.<\/p>\n

After I decided to become a writer, my enthusiasm for Thoreau and Emerson helped sway me to move to Boston, where I expected to find endless intellectual stimulation. As a 21-year-old college dropout from the mountains of Virginia who had just sold his first article to a political magazine, I assumed I could easily rack up more sales living in the big city. No such luck: my submissions struck out everywhere.<\/p>\n

But I still had Thoreau\u2019s great admonitions, right? Alas, philosophical gems were not legal tender when rent was due.<\/p>\n

In his final essay, \u201cLife without Principle,\u201d Thoreau gravely warned: \u201cThe ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward\u2026.A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.\u201d<\/p>\n

I took a less dogmatic view on the value of innocence. When the financial wolves howled at my door, I enlisted to serve as a Santa Claus at a Filene\u2019s Department Store. If wearing a gaudy red suit and fake whiskers harmed my character, the damage was hidden by the padded pillow I wore on my belly. Likewise for the giant rabbit costume I wore as part of a Beatrix Potter promotion. Admittedly, that outfit terrified some children but it wasn\u2019t my fault that the rabbit\u2019s bulging, bloodshot eyes and canine grimace made me look like the cottontail from hell. (Maybe the artist who crafted the visage was disgruntled.)<\/p>\n

Thoreau proclaimed, \u201cYou cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business.\u201d I found it easier to \u201cmind my own business\u201d with a few portraits of Andrew Jackson and Alexander Hamilton in my pocket. I worked one day at the Boston freight yards unloading a railcar of Idaho potatoes. I enjoyed heaving fifty-pound boxes onto pallets but couldn\u2019t get regular predawn transit to the rail yards.<\/p>\n

Thoreau utterly disdained labor markets: \u201cTo have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.\u201d I never felt cheated because I made sure I always I got paid. After Boston got walloped by three feet of snow in the Great Blizzard of 1978, I heard that a nearby campus was paying $4 an hour (equivalent to $16 an hour now) for snow shovelers. I hustled through snowdrifts, got the gig, and spent almost two days around the clock excavating the white stuff. I finally caught up on rent plus I could brag about doing \u201cpathbreaking work at the Harvard Business School.\u201d<\/p>\n

I failed to get the one Boston job that my soul craved: carrying a sandwich board down city sidewalks\u2014just like in the 1930s Three Stooges reels. (OK, so I didn\u2019t want to be a surveyor like Thoreau.) The employment agency had already filled that position, but the boss lady cajoled me into taking a typing test. My words-per-minute score assured me plenty of assignments, including a brief stint at WGBH, a public TV station that petulantly refused to credit temp typists in television production credits. But at least I could add \u201cKelly Girl\u201d to my resume.<\/p>\n

In Walden<\/em>, Thoreau proclaimed that \u201ctrade curses everything it handles\u201d and later derided \u201cthe immorality of trade.\u201d Thoreau never appreciated how an economy based on private ownership and voluntary exchange creates vast opportunities for anyone with goods or labor to sell to carve their own space and follow their own values. If I had waited for Bostonians to recognize and reward my intrinsic worth, I would have missed even more meals than I did. But I could find enough folks who appreciated my ability to shovel and to type and to guffaw that I survived Beantown. (It probably helped that I didn\u2019t show employers any of my seditious writings.)<\/p>\n

Perhaps Thoreau was unable to appreciate economic freedom because he believed daily life should be a fervent, hallowed pursuit of truth. Thoreau lamented people who lacked a \u201chigh and earnest purpose\u201d and proclaimed: \u201cOur whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.\u201d Personally, I called a truce when it was time for a beer or bantering with Bostonian women who weren\u2019t too wacky. I had no trouble partitioning my life between what I did to earn a buck and other times spent reading, writing, and rabble-rousing. Regardless of Thoreau\u2019s prescriptions, bowing five times a day to a philosophical mecca wasn\u2019t enough for a happy life. And I learned early in life to prefer cash on the barrelhead over promises of uplift.<\/p>\n

But Thoreau did provide the benchmark for getting the hell out of Massachusetts. In his final essay, Thoreau declared: \u201cThere is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting a living.\u201d I was blundering big time in Boston. I had not found a way to support my literary habit that did not consume far too much of my time. Rent alone routinely required more than a week\u2019s work and everything else seemed to cost more than it should. I moved back south to a college town and set up a typing business that enabled me to earn enough money in a grueling sixteen-hour workday to cover a month\u2019s rent\u2014which was barely half as much. Ironically, the last article I submitted before exiting was accepted and published by the Boston Globe<\/em> after I left town.<\/p>\n

In the final chapter of Walden<\/em>, Thoreau implores readers: \u201cCultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.\u201d I treasured my thoughts but I knew that I\u2019d think better if I wasn\u2019t bare assed. Philosophy is no substitute for protein. Regardless of Thoreau\u2019s adoration of rice, I needed red meat to feed whatever muse I might have. Rather than \u201ccultivating poverty,\u201d I recognized that \u201ccashflow\u201d can be the most important verb for a struggling writer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mises Institute, July 11, 2020 You Don’t Have to “Cultivate Poverty” to Pursue Truth, Contrary to Thoreau by James Bovard Henry David Thoreau has inspired generation of Americans to live fuller, freer lives. From his story of spending a night in jail as a tax protestor in \u201cCivil Disobedience\u201d to his chronicle of solitary living […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14914,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[144,544,2448,186,864,1093,2451,2449,2450,899],"class_list":["post-14912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boston","tag-harvard-business-school","tag-rabbit","tag-santa-claus","tag-self-reliance","tag-thoreau","tag-three-stooges","tag-typing","tag-walden","tag-writing"],"yoast_head":"\nLosing Thoreau in Boston - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Thoreau is a fount of wisdom. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14912"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14916,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14912\/revisions\/14916"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}