CONSCIENCE AND DISOBEDIENCE

By Willard Uphaus

[Source: Uphaus, Willard, “Conscience and Disobedience” in Thoreau in Our Season, edited by John H. Hicks (Amherst: U of Mass Press, 1966) pp. 22-26. Also in “A Centenary Gathering for Henry David Thoreau,” a special section of The Massachusetts Review ed. by John H. Hicks, IV:1 (Autumn 1962), pp. 104-8 (also named Thoreau Society Booklet 17). This essay may have also been distributed by the Church of the Larger Fellowship (Unitarian). A comparison of this text with contemporary newspaper summaries suggests that a version of this essay was initially delivered as the keynote address of the Annual Meeting of the Thoreau Society at the First Parish Church (Unitarian) in Concord, Mass. on July 15, 1961. Note in the first sentence: David Henry Thoreau was Thoreau’s birth name.]

THE LAWN OF MERRIMACK COUNTY JAIL in New Hampshire where I was imprisoned for a year slopes gently down to the bank of the winding Merrimack River where David Henry Thoreau once paddled. Once each week I was permitted under guard to go to a nearby building on a higher level to be treated by an osteopathic physician, and as I returned to my cellblock I surveyed, for a few moments, the beautiful landscape across the valley through which the river flowed. The sight of the river, and Walden, one of my valued jail possessions, made Thoreau an ever-living presence. The principles enunciated in his great essay on “Civil Disobedience” helped sustain me.

The situation in which I found myself was different from that which Thoreau faced, but the basic issues were very much alike. Would I refuse to cooperate with what I believed to be morally wrong and contrary to the historic principles on which our country was founded? Thoreau had great faith in the moral and spiritual power that one honest person can wield. In “Civil Disobedience” he declared, “I know this well, if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten honest men only — ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America.” What applied to abolition of slavery when Thoreau lived, would apply in the present when the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment were in peril.

Like Thoreau I found my conscience coming into conflict with state authority. In 1954, at the height of the McCarthy hysteria, the State Legislature of New Hampshire authorized an inquiry by the Attorney General for the avowed purpose of disclosing activities threatening the overthrow by force and violence of the government of the United States and the State of New Hampshire. As executive director of World Fellowship Center near Conway, I was among those summoned to the inquiry. This Center, which had been in operation since 1941, as a forum-resort, is open to people of all races, faiths, nationalities and political beliefs, and its guests come from all over the United States and other parts of the world. There, through lectures and discussions on world problems, we seek to understand one another’s faiths and cultures and to strengthen one another in working for peace and brotherhood.

At private hearings with the Attorney General before the trial [ 22 23 ] I had answered all questions about myself, including my religious, pacifist and political views, but had refused on the grounds of conscience to turn over to the Attorney General the guest lists for two years. I was aware, through his own admission, that a cross-index was being compiled by the Attorneys-General of 37 states of persons suspected of having “subversive” ideas, and the likelihood was that the names of World Fellowship guests would be added to it, for harassment and inquisition. Some 600 persons were involved. They were people whom I knew to be innocent, and the Attorney General offered no evidence to the contrary.

When I refused at private sessions to submit the lists, I was brought before the Superior Court of Merrimack County on January 5, 1956 and asked again whether I would comply with the Attorney General's demand. When I said “No,” I was held in contempt and ordered jailed until such time as I would “purge” myself by giving the names. It was a life sentence, in effect. I held before the Justice and the people assembled a copy of the Bill of Rights and said,

I have grown up under that, I have for years been nurtured under that. I believe in it. I am a son of American soil and I love my country; and I love this document and I propose to uphold it with the full strength and power of my spirit and intelligence. . . . In the final analysis . . . one must make up his own mind or his own heart and conscience as to what he shall do. For a year and a half the question has been before me, and my answer must be “No, Your Honor.”

I could not help but feel that the Justice, also a churchman, shared my repugnance at the thought of betraying innocent people; for he said after I had completed my statement: “In substance . . . you do not want to turn informer.”

The State Supreme Court upheld the lower court by a 3 to 2 decision. Later the United States Supreme Court sustained the New Hampshire courts by a 5 to 4 ruling, with Chief Justice Warren and Justices Black, Brennan, and Douglas strongly dissenting. Finally, after three years of litigation, I was once more brought before the Superior Court and given another chance to answer the question. My conscience had not changed. The sentence was not indefinite, as before, but limited to one year. I was committed on December 14, 1959.

During the days of confinement I realized how much I had been influenced by our Judeo-Christian and American heritage. Our religious tradition has characteristically despised the informer. The people of ancient Israel had been taught that “he who puts his neighbor to public shame is considered as if he had shed blood.” [ 23

24 ] Professor George Williams, Harvard’s church historian, points out in a paper entitled “Reluctance To Inform” that Christians before Constantine’s conversion, who were often hunted down and killed, “looked upon informing as a most hazardous and odious form of defection.”

This commitment to the right of conscience appeared in the early period of our country. Benjamin Ginsberg in a splendid little book entitled “Rededication to Freedom” reviews the background of our Bill of Rights and defends the indivisibility of freedom. “The American Bill of Rights,” he says, “embodies the modern concept of political liberty—the concept of liberty which centers in the freedom of the moral consciousness from control by the state. . . . The principle of the modern libertarian state is to be found in germ in the enunciation of the Biblical maxim, ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’ ” In other words, the “Judeo-Christian monotheism gave to the individual perspective a sanctuary and a loyalty which transcends the tribe and nation.”

There was considerable discussion of these principles during the days of the formation of the state constitutions. Theophelus Parsons, a young lawyer who helped frame the constitution of Massachusetts said,

We have duties, for the discharge of which we are accountable to our Creator and benefactor, which no human can cancel. What those duties are is determined by right reason, which may be, and is well called an informed conscience. What this conscience dictates as our duty, is so; and that power which assumes control over it, is an usurper; for no consent can be pleaded to justify control, as any consent in this is void.

The framers of the New Hampshire Bill of Rights actually accepted this principle when they adopted Article 4 which reads, “Among the natural rights, some are, in their very nature, unalienable, because no equivalent can be given or received for them. Of this kind are the rights of conscience.” It was New Hampshire's own Daniel Webster who declared, “The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.”

In May, 1960, Dean Erwin N. Griswold of the Harvard Law School said when speaking at the Centennial of The Law School of Northwestern University in Chicago, that “The right to be let alone is the underlying theme of the Bill of Rights. It has continued to be fertile soil for the cultivation of individual freedom.”

As Americans, Thoreau and I leaned on the same tradition. “That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government they will have,” he declared. My own conscience told me that the Attorney [ 24 25 ] General was exercising authority under the law that was leading to the destruction of our civil and religious liberties, the weakening of the Bill of Rights, and bringing harm to innocent people. The state’s anti-subversive law was being used to snoop into men’s thoughts and interfere with their lawful associations. The legislators who passed the law were men who, it seemed to me, were well described by Thoreau as men who do not serve their state “as men mainly, but as mechanics, with their bodies.” They engage in “no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense.”

Thoreau argued that it is sometimes necessary to stand alone. He applied the principle of civil disobedience when he condemned Abolitionists for not at once withdrawing effectually their support, “both in person and property, against the government of Massachusetts.” They were not to wait till “they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them.” “I think,” he said, “it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbor constitutes a majority of one already.”

Again, “A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men can understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience. . . . Must the citizen even for a moment, or in the least degree resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think we should be men first and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate respect for the law, as much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

There was an all-outness about Thoreau. He had contempt for the mere amelioration of wrong. For Thoreau reforms “take too much time and a man’s life will be gone.” “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence,” he insisted. “Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything that was.”

I felt, therefore, that Thoreau would have supported me in my full non-cooperation with what I believed to be bad law, even if it meant prison. This was better than to have given in just once, to have exposed innocent persons to harassment and persecution, and then to have salved my conscience by setting up a committee to work for the repeal of the law. The truth is that the image of the “frail old man,” built up by the newspapers, set forces loose far beyond the expectation of the politicians who sought to humiliate me and, if necessary, put me behind bars. The Emergency Civil Liberties Committee took up the case. The newly founded Re- [ 25 26 ] ligious Freedom Committee informed the clergy of the nation on the issues. Many religious bodies passed strong resolutions. Local defense committees sprang up. Organizations like the Liberal Citizens of Massachusetts entered the fight. Letters by the hundreds were written to the papers, to the Governor of New Hampshire, the Attorney General and the judge who committed me. Many religious journals spoke out. Great American dailies like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Providence Journal editorialized. Guests flocked to World Fellowship with a new loyalty. I was able at the end of the year to emerge victorious, and able to say I had peace in my heart, first because I had stood firm, and second, because I held no hate in my heart against any human being.

The days in prison were for me, above all else, a time for reviewing a treasury of memories and associations, and of evaluating the years that had passed. I knew that conscience was not a miracle. Mine was an American conscience fed from childhood by the moral imperatives of a stern but tender upbringing, and by life on the land where I felt rapport with all living things. I saw more clearly what had been the effect, in my twenties, of teaching high school courses in English Literature when I drank deep of the American tradition embodied in the essayists and poets of early New England. The words of Ralph Waldo Emerson took root and grew in my mind: “The one thing in the world of value is the active soul,—the soul, free, sovereign, active. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed. . . .” Studying and teaching Thoreau, I learned anew the great lesson of the Declaration of Independence that authority must be resisted if its demands violate conscience.

Later, during my four years of graduate study at Yale University Divinity School, I was physically as well as spiritually at home in the environment that had given birth to the heritage that had so taken hold of me.

Finally, at one point, I am not sure whether I understand Thoreau or enter into his experience. I believe with him, with my whole heart, in the power of the one, but I cannot follow, without question, his belief that “there is little virtue in the masses of men.” How can I separate the one from the many? The ones are sometimes the projection of the unspoken hopes and consciences of the many. I cannot think of the one as a leader apart. Is he simply leading, or is he being thrust forward? I cannot speak of my own experience—the long years of legal struggle and the year of imprisonment—without becoming eloquent about the everlasting “we,” knowing that any moral and political victory was won through the sacrifice and prayerful efforts of the many.