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p In the third letter which the First International addressed to the United States (the first letter was sent to Lincoln in late 1864, the second to Johnson shortly after the assassination of 256 the president) there are important considerations relevant to the post-war perspectives of the republic. Unlike the first two letters, this one was written, not by Marx, but by the General Secretary of the International, William R. Cremer. Still Marx was present at the meeting which adopted the letter in September, 1865, and we may assume that it expressed his position as well.

p The letter contains the prophetic warning that now, at the close of the Civil War, if Americans would not ensure the Negroes real freedom and equal rights, the country must expect in the future new bloodshed. In order for the northern victory to be complete, all shackles must be removed "from freedom’s limbs...".  [256•1 

p In his answer to the greetings of the First International on the occasion of his re-election as president, Lincoln had written that the Northerners were glad to have the approval and encouragement of the workingmen of Europe. His successor Johnson, however, would not heed the voice of the representatives of the proletariat.

p The poet was not always right in his judgements of Federal policies in the South after the Civil War (his quarrel with O’Connor is a sad proof of this), but he remained a humanist and a democrat, devoted to the interests of the masses. He was extremely quick to observe many of the unattractive features of the situation which arose in the North after the war. Whitman was the first American writer to realize that the unprecedented expansion of business enterprises in the United States was accompanied by moral degradation and spiritual decline.

p The growing influence of capital in the country after the Union victory was obvious to those capable of looking truth in the face.

p In Whitman’s youth his homeland had been an agrarian country with weak industrial capacity. After the Civil War the United States began to turn into a mighty industrial power. Progress in industry and technology seemed irrepressible and the enterprising grew rich quickly.

p This economic development deluded many Americans into thinking that life would be always “smiling”, that the common man was prospering, and any serious social contradictions could be easily resolved.

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p Walt Whitman was not free of bourgeois illusions either. For a time it seemed to him that if a great art developed in the United States, it would ennoble the heart of every American, and then it would be possible to build a life worthy of man on the basis of the existing social order.

p It was not easy for Whitman to overcome these deep-rooted misconceptions and to give up his fond hopes. He could not fully grasp the bourgeois nature of American democracy. He saw it simply as “democracy”, democracy in general.

p One must bear in mind that for many of the poet’s fellow-countrymen, to doubt the virtues of American democracy was an unpatriotic act akin to betraying the principles of the American revolution.

p And yet the poet, who even before the Civil War had been sceptical about a civilization which encouraged possessive instincts, who had sympathized with the exploited hired workers, was now able to perceive with astounding clarity many of the real vices of the society which so assiduously pursued money.

p The poet was attracted to democracy in the abstract; he did not, I repeat, completely understand that democracy as practised in his native land was bourgeois democracy. But the profound difference between Whitman the democrat and bourgeois liberals who were so influential in the United States, was manifest in the poet’s penetrating perception of the defects of capitalist society, in his indignation against money-grubbers, as well as in the fact that his demands on American democracy were extremely high. No wonder he declares in Democratic Vistas that the "real gist" of the word democracy "still sleeps”.

p It pained the poet to criticize the political principles and institutions which he was used to worshiping, but he was true to his conscience.

p A new stage began in that endless process of overcoming preconceptions, which, in the final analysis, was the content of Whitman’s entire intellectual life. The reality of historical developments in the country forced him more than once to review his old views and attitudes. Together with millions of ordinary Americans he started by overcoming his indifference to slavery. As a result, after long hesitation, he had broken with the Democratic Party, which he had previously regarded as the defender of the common man. At the end of the forties he had 258 seen through the falseness of the positions held by certain leading Free Soilers. During the war the poet became aware of how pitiful were some of Lincoln’s fellow-members of the Republican Party.

p But Whitman had to make more reappraisals than ever on the eve of the seventies when the "money-making serpent”, in his words, "ate up all the other serpents”, and also in the late eighties, a period marking the greatest upsurge of the working class movement in the United States during the whole nineteenth century. At those decisive moments in his country’s history the poet, who was no longer young, showed a remarkable capacity for spiritual growth, incisive perception of society and magnificent courage in defense of his convictions.

p Only two years after the war, Whitman wrote an article for a new journal Galaxy founded in New York. In it he expressed his painful awareness of the spiritual crisis afflicting post-war American society. The article was later incorporated in the book Democratic Vistas (1871).

p In this book Whitman says that the existing social order had allowed a comparatively small number of people whom he characterizes as "a mob of fashionably dress’d speculators and vulgarians" to concentrate the nation’s wealth in their own hands. The dreams of the masses in the United States that their country would become a land of universal equality, prosperity and happiness, had not been realized. To quote Democratic Vistas, it had turned out that "society, in these States, is canker’d, crude, superstitious, and rotten. Political, or lawmade society is, and private, or voluntary society, is also”. In all the undertakings, says Whitman, "the element of the moral conscience, the most important, the verteber to State or man" is "either entirely lacking, or seriously enfeebled or ungrown”.

p The author leaves no doubt as to where the source of the “rot” lies: "The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater.... In business, (the all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain.... I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highlydeceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand 259 religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire.... It is as if we were somehow being endow’d with a vast... body, and then left with little or no soul.”

p The first article was followed by a second, but the journal refused to print the third and final article. Obviously the editors were embarrassed by the sharpness of Whitman’s social criticism.

p The judgements on contemporary life made by the author of Democratic Vistas are truly merciless. He sees the appalling spectacle of hypocrisy dominating the country. "From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable.”

p As he takes a close look at "what is of the only real importance, Personalities,” Whitman queries: "Are there, indeed, men here worthy the name?...Are there perfect women, to match the generous material luxuriance?... Are there crops of fine youths, and majestic old persons?" None of them can be found. He concludes: "... using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of dry and flat Sahara appears....” Writers are full of cynicism and contemptuous irony. In the country which officially made democracy its banner, democratic principles have few real believers.

p In Democratic Vistas a good deal of attention is devoted to American literature, art and poetry. Whitman justly emphasizes the educative role of poetry, the significance of literature as a force for the spiritual enrichment of man. At the same time, however, the poet propounds the naive idea that good literature alone can exert an influence sufficiently strong to destroy all that is bad in society.

p He declares that in order to breathe "the breath recuperative of sane and heroic life" into these "lamentable conditions”, a new literature is needed—"not merely to copy and reflect existing surfaces ... not only to amuse, pass away time, celebrate the beautiful, the refined, the past, or exhibit technical, rhythmic, or grammatical dexterity...” but to handle "the elements and forces with competent power, teaching and training men”.

p Democratic Vistas also expresses the hope that some sort of abstract spirit of comradeship might spring up spontaneously in America, as a result of which the country would be freed of all its shortcomings, and an inspiring principle would be 260 introduced into the American democracy to combat its vulgar aspects.

p Of course, these hopes were Utopian. But Whitman was not simply giving himself over to dreams. While affirming the significance of writers as singers of the spirit of “ comradeship”, he demonstrated in a detailed manner that literary and spiritual life in general in the United States remained gravely underdeveloped.

p To fully appreciate the significance of Whitman’s sceptical post-war comments about contemporary literature (and poetry in particular), let us consider his long preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

p The rise of the people’s movement on the eve of the Civil War had convinced Whitman that American poetry would soon attain unprecedented heights. The citizens of the United States, he said, possess remarkable human virtues and the country’s veins are "full of poetical stuff”, in general, the United States is a land of immense poetic possibilities. It most needs poets, and "will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest”.  [260•1 

p In the middle of the nineteenth century Whitman had good reason to anticipate a flowering of American poetry: on the eve of the Civil War, as we know, the United States really had produced several highly gifted poets.

p In Democratic Vistas, however, Whitman speaks quite differently of poetry in the United States and the general state of American literature and the spiritual life of the country. There are no more exultant prophesies, and notes of bitter disappointment ring out loudly.

p Was the author of Democratic Vistas right in his critical evaluation of contemporary American poetry and literature as a whole?

p In a sense he was quite wrong. At this time Mark Twain was taking his first steps in literature. In the last third of the nineteenth century De Forest, Mark Twain, Crane, Garland, James and Howells were composing works which posterity would duly recognize as classics. But Whitman was aware of the lowering of standards which after the war became apparent in poetry, after the remarkable achievements of previous decades. (It is a startling fact and one that undoubtedly throws 261 light on the state of American literature during the "gilded age" that many outstanding works of American poetry were written at the time by the authors "for themselves alone”, and were not published. This applies above all to that great poetess of the end of the century, Emily Dickinson. Herman Melville also wrote many poems without hope that his contemporaries would ever know them.)

p Although on the eve of the Civil War and during the war such poets as Whittier, Longfellow, Emerson, Bryant and Lowell, inspired by a lofty passion for liberty, had lived through their own "golden age”, their creative powers quickly faded and their inspiration subsided.

p The democratic American literary critic Vernon Parrington was justified in saying that after the war "the abolition leaders laid aside their pens, convinced that the last injustice had been removed from American society".  [261•1  When the black slave had been freed from his shackles, the “tired” conscience of New England rested on its laurels.

p I would go so far as to state that of all the American poets, who before the Civil War produced artistic works of truly high value, Walt Whitman proved to be, if not the only one, then one of the very few, who continued to develop. This was largely because he quickly came to appreciate that the war had by no means eradicated all social injustices in the United States.

p In the first years after the war the poet condemned American writers for their estrangement from the people, in whom, as before, he saw great virtues: "When I pass to and fro, different latitudes, different seasons, beholding the crowds of the great cities...,” wrote Whitman in Democratic Vistas, "when I mix with these interminable swarms of alert, turbulent, good-natured, independent citizens, mechanics, clerks, young persons—at the idea of this mass of men, so fresh and free, so loving and so proud, a singular awe falls upon me. I feel, with dejection and amazement, that among our geniuses and talented writers or speakers, few or none have yet really spoken to this people, created a single image-making work for them, or absorb’d the central spirit and the idiosyncrasies which are theirs—and which, thus, in highest ranges, so far remain entirely uncelebrated, unexpress’d.”

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p And so, "our geniuses”, in the writer’s ironical expression, do not understand the high human qualities of the working people. Hence, according to Democratic Vistas, the weakness of American literature, the inability of most writers to create works addressed to the heart of the average reader and dealing with the most basic problems of life. The poet goes on to say: "... I have not seen a single writer, artist, lecturer, or what not, that has confronted the voiceless but ever erect and active, pervading, underlying will and typic aspiration of the land, in a spirit kindred to itself. Do you call those genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse? I think I hear, echoed as from some mountain-top afar in the West, the scornful laugh of the Genius of these States.”

p It is true that books continued to be published in the United States in vast numbers. "Many will come under this delusion—but my purpose is to dispel it. I say that a nation may hold and circulate rivers and oceans of very readable print, journals, magazines, novels, library-books, ‘poetry’, &c—such as the States to-day possess and circulate—of unquestionable aid and value—hundreds of new volumes annually composed and brought out here, respectable enough, indeed unsurpass’d in smartness and erudition—with further hundreds, or rather millions ... also thrown into the market—and yet, all the while, the said nation, land, strictly speaking, may possess no literature at all.”

p The author of Democratic Vistas continues to develop these ideas with growing heat. He says, for instance: "What is the reason our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local courage, sanity, of our own—the Mississippi, stalwart Western men, real mental and physical facts, Southerners, &c, in the body of our literature? especially the poetic part of it... the grandest events and revolutions, and stormiest passions of history, are crossing to-day with unparallel’d rapidity and magnificence over the stages of our own and all the continents, offering new materials, opening new vistas, with largest needs ... where is the man of letters, where is the book, with any nobler aim than to follow in the old track, repeat what has been said before...?”

Democratic Vistas is dominated not by a nihilistic negation of the achievements of literature in the United States, but by concern for the future of American poetry and prose, and a passionate longing to witness the flowering of artistic life in the 263 country. Whitman concludes his book by expressing his conviction that "the infant genius of American poetic expression ... lies sleeping far away ... in some western idiom ... or stump-speech ... in some slang or local song or allusion of the Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia or Baltimore mechanic ... or off in the hut of the California miner ... or on the breasts of the young farmers.... Rude and coarse nursing-beds, these; but only from such beginnings and stocks, indigenous here, may haply arrive, be grafted, and sprout, in time, flowers of genuine American aroma, and fruits truly and fully our own.” The depth of Whitman’s democratic feelings is expressed clearly enough in these words.