Love and Literature in Democratic Life: Walt Whitman

Should our democratic aspirations and convictions falter when "people's crudeness, vice, caprices" result in "appalling dangers" to justice?

Walt Whitman asked this question in his 1871 essay "Democratic Vistas." It was the age of Reconstruction in the United States. There was no universal suffrage yet, and in the face of racist backlash after the Civil War, the question was urgent.

His answer was that democracy had to be deepened. It should rest on universal principles such as those enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution -- justice, freedom, the right to the pursuit of happiness. But it should also include a wide diversity of spiritual, moral, cultural, and aesthetic expressions, and it should allow for meaningful connections among many peoples and places, North to South, East to West.

Love would be the main force creating and cultivating democratic relations among such diverse peoples. Love binds and ties people; it makes fraternity possible. In Whitman's words, "adhesiveness or love...fuses, ties, and aggregates, making the races comrades, and fraternizing all."

Love would lead to a new type of religiosity: the democratic, cooperative bond between people. A new ideal, a new democratic vista, appeared in the horizon: "The great word Solidarity has arisen."

The catalyst for this deepening democratic solidarity would be an authentic American literature, a poetry of the people. For him, the genius of American poetic expression lay

in some western idiom, or native Michigan or Tennessee repartee, or stump speech - or in Kentucky, or Georgia, or the Carolinas - or in some slang or local song or allusion of the Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia, or Baltimore mechanic - or up in the Maine woods - or off in the hut of the California miner, or crossing the Rocky Mountain, or along the Pacific railroad - or on the breasts of the young farmers of the north-west, or Canada, or boatmen of the lakes.

The sources for the poetry and music that would deepen loving democratic religiosity were to be found in the lives and struggles of these folk. They were not to be demeaned and cast aside, but rather listened to and engaged. For Whitman, the resulting fraternity would underwrite democracy:

Intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man...seems to promise, when thoroughly develop'd, cultivated and recognized, in manners and literature, the most substantial hope and safety of the future of these States.

Whitman's vision strikes me as relevant today, so long as his nationalism is replaced by a cosmopolitanism such as the one Jane Addams defended thirty-five years later. The democratic, beloved and loving "folk" now should include groups recently threatened or demeaned, such as Latino immigrants, Muslims, African-Americans, and women.

I hope that Bob Dylan, Ol' Moose, and Niall Connolly, among other native or immigrant heirs to Whitman, keep listening to these folk and singing their stories, so we all can lovingly engage each other.