Thoreau's Relevance to America Today

One hundred and sixty-four years ago today, on May 6, 1862, Henry David Thoreau succumbed to tuberculosis and died at his family home in Concord, Massachusetts. He was 44.

Thoreau remains relevant today and will continue to be for future generations because of the timeless questions he posed and the solutions he offered for living a meaningful life. “Walden; or Life in the Woods” is the 1854 book he is best known for, but the work most applicable to our times during Donald Trump’s catastrophic presidency is his 1849 essay, “Civil Disobedience.”

Thoreau’s thesis was that citizens had a moral obligation to oppose their government’s unjust and inhumane policies, even if doing so required difficult sacrifices. That’s what nearly 100,000 ordinary Minnesotans did when they braved freezing temperatures in January in Minneapolis and risked their lives to protest the illegal detention and deportation of immigrants and the killings of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by heavily armed ICE agents.

By his example, Thoreau taught us to live by the courage of our convictions. Slavery was the evil of his time. The Civil War began in April 1861, thirteen months before his death. Thoreau was active in the Underground Railroad in Concord, helping enslaved people escape to Canada. “I do not hesitate to say,” wrote Thoreau in Civil Disobedience, “that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectively withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait until they constitute a majority …”

There may not be slavery in America today, but Trump’s reckless and imperial presidency is no less evil to our polarized country. The “No Kings Day” protests against Trump would have pleased Thoreau. In the most recent one held in March this year, an estimated 9 million Americans participated across all 50 U.S. states, making it one of the largest single-day mass demonstrations in American history.

I joined about 10,000 of my compatriots in San Jose, California, where one sign in a sea of signs summed up why we were protesting: “Democracy dies when good people stay silent.” As Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience: “Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect and that will be one step toward obtaining it.” His subliminal message to us was to hope and act but not to hope more than we acted.

Trump is destroying civilizational norms and ruining America with irreversible damage by his predatory “Might is Right” and “Law of the Jungle” policies at home and abroad. He has imposed tariffs as sanctions and punishments on our allies and has threatened to commit war crimes against countries that refuse his rapacious demands. He unleashed a war of choice against Iran that continues to batter the global economy. Ordinary Americans and people around the globe are struggling to meet basic needs amid skyrocketing food and energy prices, with no end in sight. Thoreau’s call to action is as potent now as when he made it almost two centuries ago: “All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”

On July 4, 2026, we will celebrate the 250th anniversary, the semiquincentennial, of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “The American government,” wrote Thoreau in Civil Disobedience, “-what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity?”

Under Trump, America has been hemorrhaging integrity, dignity, decency and empathy at a horrific rate. It is our duty to stop this hemorrhage and restore America’s moral weight. Perhaps the best way to accomplish this is to vote for candidates in the consequential November midterm election at the House, Senate, state, and local levels who put country and Constitution above loyalty to a demagogue.

Thoreau and the Fourth of July

On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a one-roomed cabin that he built with his own hands on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau wanted to "meet myself face to face," away from the intrusions of public opinion, government, religion, education and society. His twenty-six months of living in the woods provided him with materials for his masterpiece, Walden. The book is more bracing today than when it was first published and launched the environmental movement that we seem to take for granted.

But more than a paean to nature, Walden instructed us, by the example of its author, to live a meaningful life. It is this aspect of the book that explains its relevance and timelessness. Walden contains paradoxes and contradictions but precisely because of these, Thoreau's observations also ring so true. "I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men get clothing ... since ... the principal object is ... that the corporations may be enriched." "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind." "The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap and all the monkeys in America do the same." "In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high."

Writing of farmers saddled with debt (magnified several thousand times since then, and not just farmers), Thoreau wrote: "With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair springs to catch comfort and independence, and then, as he turned away got his own leg into it." "And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him." Is there any more powerful, and poignant, summary of the havoc wrought on families throughout America by subprime and exotic mortgages than what Thoreau observed of his neighbors in Concord over a century and a half ago?

Yet Thoreau would also have lauded the progress America has made since Walden. A fierce opponent of slavery, he would have approved where America is today in relation to race. The democratic nominee for the president of the United States today is an African-American with a heritage that spans the globe. And while our materialism and the often toxic popular culture would have saddened him, he would also have taken heart in the green movement begun by grassroots organizations to save the planet from catastrophic climate changes. Yet there is also no doubt that the author of Civil Disobedience would have been outraged by the Bush administration's war of choice in Iraq, illegal detention of both US citizens and foreign nationals, and use of torture and spying on Americans in violation of the Fourth Amendment. A disobedience movement, civil or otherwise, would have been a certainty for Thoreau in such circumstances.

As we celebrate America's 232nd anniversary of independence, we feel the urgent need of a Thoreau who can motivate us to simplify our lives, persuade us not to become the tools of our tools, to recognize that "our inventions are wont to be pretty toys (Internet, iPod, cell phone, take your pick) which distract our attention from serious things. They are but impoved means to an unimproved end." We need a Thoreau to remind us that our greatest skill may lie in wanting but little, that "superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only," that we are "rich only in proportion to the number of things we can afford to leave alone." As we reflect on the challenging words in the Declaration of Independence, we should also set aside some time today to reflect on Thoreau's Walden. We will only be the richer for it.