Walt Whitman on Elections in the U.S.A.

TO FOREIGN LANDS

I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle of the New World,

And to define America, her athletic democracy, Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.

 - Walt Whitman, in one of his “Inscriptions” to “Leaves of Grass.”

The recent elections in the United States in which the both candidates of the major parties were highly disliked has resulted in immense uncertainty. No one knows what is going to happen. You could see when the results started coming in on election night that the professional commentators, “journalists,” pundits, media people – with very few exceptions – had absolutely no clue. These professionals made funny jokes with each other as it was happening, witty and self-effacing remarks, but you could see that, underneath all the phony wit, that they were adrift, and unworthy of their paychecks.

One of my correspondents, a Mexican studying at a U.S. university, recently wrote to me asking for my opinion of the elections, and all I could write back to her at the time was that the only thing I can say with certainty that there is deep uncertainty right now.

The place where I go next whenever I need to deepen my own sense and understanding of the U.S. is the writings of Walt Whitman, rather than any contemporary writer, or Alexis de Tocqueville or anyone in between. Whitman “got it” comprehensively and in detail. I feel safe in saying to a student or anyone outside the USA, that if you can grasp what Walt Whitman is saying in Leaves of Grass and in Collected Prose Works, you can understand the US. Both books, incidentally, are available free to download from here at the Gutenberg Project.

Sigmund Freud, for all his sophistication, said in 1909 that "America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake, but a mistake," whereas Whitman really knew the people of the U.S. Whitman was fired from his job at the Department of the Interior in Washington for publishing “Leaves of Grass,” but you have to go through that kind of thing, deeply, in order to understand the essence of the U.S. The killings of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. were very much central to the struggle in which the US has always been engaged as were the struggles to stop the Viet-Nam war and the invasion of Iraq.

So I have found myself reading a lot of Walt Whitman during the last few weeks since the elections and here is the one passage that I would share with you, from his “Democratic Vistas,” written almost 150 years ago, in November 1868:

Once, before the war, (alas! I dare not say how many times the mood has come!) I, too, was fill'd with doubt and gloom. A foreigner, an acute and good man, had impressively said to me, that day—putting in form, indeed, my own observations: "I have travel'd much in the United States, and watch'd their politicians, and listen'd to the speeches of the candidates, and read the journals, and gone into the public houses, and heard the unguarded talk of men. And I have found your vaunted America honeycomb'd from top to toe with infidelism, even to itself and its own programme. I have mark'd the brazen hell-faces of secession and slavery gazing defiantly from all the windows and doorways. I have everywhere found, primarily, thieves and scalliwags arranging the nominations to offices, and sometimes filling the offices themselves. I have found the north just as full of bad stuff as the south. Of the holders of public office in the Nation or the States or their municipalities, I have found that not one in a hundred has been chosen by any spontaneous selection of the outsiders, the people, but all have been nominated and put through by little or large caucuses of the politicians, and have got in by corrupt rings and electioneering, not capacity or desert. I have noticed how the millions of sturdy farmers and mechanics are thus the helpless supple-jacks of comparatively few politicians. And I have noticed more and more, the alarming spectacle of parties usurping the government, and openly and shamelessly wielding it for party purposes."

Sad, serious, deep truths. Yet are there other, still deeper, amply confronting, dominating truths. Over those politicians and great and little rings, and over all their insolence and wiles, and over the powerfulest parties, looms a power, too sluggish maybe, but ever holding decisions and decrees in hand, ready, with stern process, to execute them as soon as plainly needed—and at times, indeed, summarily crushing to atoms the mightiest parties, even in the hour of their pride.

In saner hours far different are the amounts of these things from what, at first sight, they appear. Though it is no doubt important who is elected governor, mayor, or legislator, (and full of dismay when incompetent or vile ones get elected, as they sometimes do,) there are other, quieter contingencies, infinitely more important…

What is more dramatic than the spectacle we have seen repeated, and doubtless long shall see—the popular judgment taking the successful candidates on trial in the offices—standing off, as it were, and observing them and their doings for a while, and always giving, finally, the fit, exactly due reward? I think, after all, the sublimest part of political history, and its culmination, is currently issuing from the American people. I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human-kind, than a well-contested American national election.