Letters, Jul. 21, 1947

Gandhi's New England Ideas

Sir: TIME [June 30] failed to credit Henry D. Thoreau's essay, Civil Disobedience, for the policy of Gandhi. Thoreau, native advocate of the anarchist ideal who practiced it and went to jail, is known to his fellow Americans merely as a "nature writer." His short essay was published and sowed broadcast in the U.S. by fanatical anarchists of the Emma Goldman period without any effect whatever on our affairs. Not until the essay fell into the hands of Gandhi did the seed sprout to shake the British Empire....

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