Whitman on the Waterfront

Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Robert and Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Nathan Connolly: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers.

Joanne Freeman: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, and each week, along with our colleague, Brian Balogh, we explore a different aspect of American history.

Ed Ayers: I celebrate myself and what I assume, you shall assume.

Joanne Freeman: That’s a bold statement [inaudible 00:00:45].

Ed Ayers: Kind of audacious, huh? Well, I’m doing that because today marks what would be the great American poet Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday. So on this week’s show, we’re going to explore how the author of Leaves of Grass and “Song of Myself” tried to forge a unified American identity at a time of national crisis and division. We’re going to talk about how Whitman tries to thread differences across sexual identity, race, religion, place, and politics. Let’s say, just to paraphrase the poet himself, this week’s show is going to be large and might just contain multitudes.

Joanne Freeman: We’ll discuss how Brooklyn shaped Walt Whitman, and what exactly he was doing wandering around the waterfront at all hours of the night.

Ed Ayers: Harold Bloom tells us why Whitman’s greatest achievement wasn’t his poetry.

Nathan Connolly: And we’ll uncover the link between Walt Whitman and Barack Obama.

Joanne Freeman: New York has always been the literary capital of America, but in the 1840s, Walt Whitman made the then city of Brooklyn his stamping ground, and pretty much the place where he developed his writing and his identity. Historians at the Brooklyn Historical Society, and cohost of the podcast Flatbush and Main, Zaheer Ali and Julie Golia tell me how Whitman was formed by his experiences growing up in Brooklyn. I started by asking Zaheer what Whitman was doing before he published his epic poem, Leaves of Grass.

Zaheer Ali: He founded a newspaper called the Long Islander, and that lasted for less than a year. And then he had a few more jobs. And then in 1841, had his first writing job as a journalist that he could actually make a living off of, and that was writing for the New World newspaper. So during this period, he’s kind of moving around. He’s trying to find himself. But by the early 1840s, he really has settled into the idea that he could make a living as a writer, as a journalist, and that would lead of course to him becoming the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1846. He’d often take breaks during the day and walk down to Fulton Ferry Landing. And his kind of daily routine, he would write in the morning, take a break, walk down to Fulton Ferry Landing, come back, review the drafts. At the end of the workday, he’d go down to Gray Swimming Bath, again also on the waterfront. So this was, his work was very integrated into his actually kind of physical moving throughout the city.

Joanne Freeman: In 1848, Whitman lost his job at the Brooklyn Eagle, but it’s not exactly clear what happened.

Julie Golia: There are some people who argue that Whitman was just too radical, too egalitarian, too antislavery in a period in which people were really starting to choose sides. But there are other people actually who argue that his problem wasn’t that he was too radical, it was that he wasn’t political enough. In the Eagle, during his tenure there, you really do see him kind of trying to split the baby down the middle a little bit. I mean, this was part of the idea of putting in more cultural content. He wanted to tamp down the sectional politics and actually make this something that was palatable for all, and it actually ended up being kind of divisive for all.

Zaheer Ali: Yeah. And I think even the coverage of the hard news that he did, covering a lot of the experience of workers and labor strikes, this is also a period of increasing nativism. And so his focusing on these plight of immigrants and workers also put him at odds with the growing anti immigrant sentiment at the time.

Julie Golia: And yet, he wouldn’t come down on hard on the side of laborers either.

Zaheer Ali: That’s right.

Julie Golia: There’s this sort of famous labor strike in 1846 at the Atlantic Docks, which was a newly opened warehousing facility, that essentially pitted Irish workers against newly arrived German workers. Whitman writes about the strike with real sympathy for the workers, but at the end of the article comes down very clearly and says that labor unions are a problem. They are bad for the economy, and he wholly sort of denounces them. And so even that is a perfect example of how he’s kind of trying to please both, and ends up pleasing no one.

Joanne Freeman: If in his political views, as expressed in the Brooklyn Eagle, Whitman was pretty much trying to nod to both sides of the political divide, so the man identified today as a great gay pioneer was deliberately ambiguous about his sexuality.

Zaheer Ali: I think Whitman himself, he was interviewed near the time of his death, and refused to admit the sexual connotations, and certainly the homosexual connotations of his poetry, especially Calamus, which was probably the more explicit. But this was not unusual, right? If you follow the work of people like George Chauncey, who talks about the 19th century experiences of men who had sexual relations with other men, you know, there isn’t necessarily a label that they identify with. Many of them had a kind of fluidity to their sexuality that didn’t lock them into a particular identity the way that I think maybe it would in our contemporary way of talking about it. That doesn’t mean that, it’s clear that Whitman’s work was written and it was published at a time, and it was being read, and so there were people who were reading or consuming this material and for whom there was resonance. And so I think the challenge for us as historians is how do we surface that without forcing people into categories that maybe weren’t as solidified as they are or have been now.

Joanne Freeman: Right. And in a sense, I mean, in Whitman’s case, you might say that it’s the lack of category that really gives it meaning, right? That it’s that fluidity that kind of defines him.

Julie Golia: I think he’d love that, because he loved the waterfront, and he wrote about the East River and ferries and that kind of liminal space of the East River between these two cities with passion and eroticism.

Zaheer Ali: He definitely had a thing for transportation.

Julie Golia: Fetish.

Zaheer Ali: He definitely had a thing for movement, almost a fetish. He definitely liked moving from one space to the next, and so that could almost be a perfect kind of embodiment of how he thought about his movement in terms of his sexuality.

Julie Golia: It was not an easy life, right? And it was not a simple life, and there was threat of danger. There was the threat of rejection. But nonetheless, he interwove this experience into the fabric of all aspects of his life.

Zaheer Ali: Yeah. I mean, I think you see that frustration and repression being expressed in his poetry, and certainly the relationship he had with Fred Vaughn bears this out. I think Whitman has kind of ghosted Fred, because he’s like, I’m not hearing from you. But it’s this relationship with Fred that many people credit with the material that comes out in Calamus, and then eventually Fred gets married and invites Whitman to his wedding, is just like, I haven’t invited anyone but I want you there, and Whitman doesn’t go. I think in a subsequent relationship, Whitman writes a note to himself, like remember Fred Vaughn. Just inability to be public about your relationships, but also just inability to be public about your heartbreak.

Joanne Freeman: By night, he strolled along the waterfront looking for sexual partners.

Julie Golia: Whitman, as we’ve talked about, loved the built environment, the landscape of Brooklyn, and he spent a lot of time on his feet. As Zaheer described, both day and night, basically walking around was part of his work process, but he also spent a lot of time in the evenings walking along the waterfront. We know this in part because he kept journals that read a lot like commonplace books, describing where he was, where he walked, from the street, the blocks that he went on, the parts of the waterfront he went to, and also who he met along the way. He described many of the men that he interacted with sometimes in very sort of chaste or cursory terms, and sometimes in terms that were more descriptive, that at least reading briefly between the lines, indicate some kind of romantic or sexual triste.

Joanne Freeman: In his journals, he would record things like, Gus White, 25, at ferry with skeleton boat. Five foot nine, round, well built. David Wilson, night of October 11, ’62. Walking up from [Middaugh 00:09:46], slept with me. Works in a blacksmith shop in navy yard.

Julie Golia: In some ways, if you come to Brooklyn and you walk around in Brooklyn Heights and then down to the waterfront, you’ll be struck at first by a real geographical barrier. Brooklyn Heights is built on a bluff, and the waterfront, the kind of working class, bawdier area of the waterfront is really separate from that. It’s down by the water, right? And so you have this kind of symbolic but really truly experienced boundary between the gentile suburban neighborhood of the Heights and the waterfront, the working waterfront, which would have been teeming night and day, but also would have provided spaces, darkness, you know, lots of tunnels and bridges, and parts of the growing waterfront that would have given people cover to experiment.

Joanne Freeman: Is there a legacy, a broader legacy for his writing and looking at Brooklyn as a queer space in some way? What is that legacy?

Julie Golia: If you look at the long span of cultural or literary history in Brooklyn, I think there would be little argument to the fact that Whitman is really like a forefather of the artistic queer experience here in Brooklyn, and particularly in his kind of relationship to the waterfront, his relationship to the built environment. I can think of so many people who draw on that precedent. Hart Crane in the early 20th century, living not far from where Whitman himself walked day after day, night after night with his lover, and writing about the Brooklyn Bridge with the kind of passion that Walt Whitman himself wrote about the ferry and the East River.

Julie Golia: I think of Carson McCullers and some of the other people who lived in a house called February House in the 1940s, many of which were queer, who drew on Whitman’s sort of veiled homo social style to tell a story that is all about the queer experience, even as a straight person might read it and not even see that queer experience in the book. He set such precedents for people to take, and inspiration, a really complex inspiration from the landscape of Brooklyn to create their own art.

Joanne Freeman: Zaheer Ali and Julie Golia are historians at the Brooklyn Historical Society and cohosts of the podcast Flatbush and Main. If you want to hear more about Whitman’s life in Brooklyn, check out their upcoming episode.