The Eisenthal Report

Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

Robert D. Richardson, Jr., has written a number of important intellectual biographies, including Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, which was first published more than twenty years ago.

By the 1980s, Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) had become thoroughly woven into the fabric of American culture - so much so that his power and originality had become virtually invisible. His ideas on individual freedom, nonviolent protest, protecting the environment, and maintaining an inner life that makes us more than "Homo Economicus" seemed almost cliched by the 1980s. In some ways, Thoreau and his work had become somewhat like another cultural giant - Ludwig van Beethoven, whose Fifth Symphony seems cliched by the 217th time that it is heard.

Robert Richardson performed in his book the essential service of showing just how original Thoreau's ideas - or at least the syntheses of ideas accomplished by Thoreau - were. Richardson did this by placing Thoreau carefully into his historic context - and by following closely the intellectual journey that Thoreau began when he began keeping a journal at the age of 20 in 1837. That journal contains Thoreau's reactions to his vast and highly varied reading, as well as his observations of nature.

Thoreau was a giant of American culture - in some ways, the patron saint of the American left. It is Thoreau - not Marx or others - who reverberates in current progressive views on freedom, protest, economics, and the ecology. Richardson, who later wrote an important biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, engagingly and skillfully showed how someone in early nineteenth century rural Massachusetts could come to these ideas - and then express them in such a powerful and lasting way.

The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response

The Burning Tigris is harrowing reading.

Peter Balakian, a professor at Colgate University, wrote The Burning Tigris as a work of witness to the Armenian Genocide. Balakian begins by recounting atrocities against the Armenians that were perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in the years before the Genocide itself. Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who ruled from 1876 to 1909, was responsible for the deaths of 200,000 Armenians during the 1890s. British Prime Minister William Gladstone referred to Abdul Hamid as "the great assassin."

Balakian then brings his readers step by step through the horrors of the Genocide itself - very difficult reading. The outrageousness of the crimes of the Genocide itself is matched by that of Ottoman denials and other behavior.

Interspersed with these accounts are recountings of the responses to the Genocide by Americans and other Westerners. The substantial documentation of the Genocide is due in no small part to the efforts of Americans and Germans who were working within the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Germany and the Ottoman Empire were allied during that war - and while the United States and Germany went to war in 1917, the United States and the Ottoman Empire never declared war on each other.

Once the horrors of the Genocide came to light, the West - and particularly the United States - was quick to offer support. The proceeds of the 1916 Harvard-Yale Football game were donated to Armenian relief. Former President Theodore Roosevelt referred to the Genocide as "the greatest crime of the war." He favored declaring war on the Ottoman Empire in large part to combat the Genocide. One reason that the United States did not declare war was that Christian missionaries working within the Ottoman Empire convinced President Woodrow Wilson that they could do more good for the Armenians if the United States did not intervene militarily - a judgement that some of the missionaries later regretted.

Balakian concludes by recounting how historical views of the Genocide have evolved over the past ninety years. Political considerations - particularly, the importance of Turkey as an ally of the United States during the Cold War and after - made official recognition of the Genocide very difficult. Official denials of culpability persist to this day - and have become an important issue here locally in Massachusetts, nationally, and internationally.

Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast is a classic tale of the sea.

First published nearly 170 years ago, it tells the true story of a young man from Boston named Richard Henry Dana, Jr. In 1834, Dana was a 19 year old undergraduate at Harvard College - and he was going blind. His doctors came up with a number of treatments, but one suggested that going to sea might be the only way for Dana to save his sight. And so, in August 1834, Dana set sail from Boston as an ordinary sailor aboard the merchant ship Pilgrim, which was going - by way of Cape Horn - to the then very remote coast of California.

After a five month voyage, in January 1835, the Pilgrim arrived at San Diego, which was at the time a small Mexican village. Dana spent the next 17 months going up and down the California coast, spending time at San Pedro, Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Francisco. For most of this time, Dana was gathering and curing cattle hides - preparing them for the long voyage back to Boston. In the 1830s, cattle hides were California's main export to the rest of the world - how different things would be only a decade and a half later.

In May 1836, Dana set sail on another merchant ship, the Alert, for his return to Boston. After a difficult four month voyage around Cape Horn - the Alert reached Cape Horn in July at depths of the Southern winter - Dana returned to Boston in September 1836. Dana's eyesight was saved.

Dana went on to a distinguished literary and legal career. He was the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts in the 1860s - appointed to the post by President Abraham Lincoln. Dana died of pneumonia in Rome in 1882.

in Two Years Before the Mast, Dana showed himself to be a sensitive observer with an engaging writing style. Dana was not as profound a thinker as his contemporary, Henry David Thoreau, but he sensitively and observantly discusses his shipmates as well as other people and places that he encountered during his during two-year voyage. Dana engages somewhat to excess in what was then the high-tech jargon of the day - there is much discussion of mizzen masts, lee shores, and cross-jacks. Nevertheless, there is much of historical interest - particularly about California in the years before it became part of the United States. This observer found the book quite worthwhile.