From Whitman to Obama

Nathan Connolly: Walt Whitman had high aspirations for his poetry. He hoped to bring disparate elements of the country together through the power of his written word, but how truly inclusive is the vision he articulates? I spoke to scholar Cristina Beltran and started by asking her how Whitman understood the role of the individual in a democratic society.

Cristina B.: There’s always this way in which he’s trying to think about himself as part and parcel of a larger polity, and he’s also always thinking about how he has inside himself the potential to be those other people. Whitman never uses the language of social construction, but he very much articulates that, that you are shaped by your environment. And you hear that in different works of his, where like in the poem, “This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful,” where he says, “I can see them in Germany and Italy and China and Russia, and it seems that I should become attached to them as I do men in my own land.” So he always is sort of pushing past national boundaries at times in his thinking and thinking about how we became who we are, and how, when you look at somebody who seems dramatically different than yourself, that in fact maybe that would have been your story had circumstances been different, had you been born at that time or in that place or under those circumstances.

Nathan Connolly: And it’s one thing to think about bridging international divides or gaps kind of in the abstract, but Whitman is writing a lot of his work obviously on the doorstep of the Civil War.

Cristina B.: Right.

Nathan Connolly: One of the most divided moments in the history of the country, just in the sense of the violence that is either threatened and of course then realized with the war itself. I’m curious to get your sense of whether Whitman believed that his poetry could in fact unify the nation if it was on the brink of this conflict?

Cristina B.: Yeah, yeah, no. There was a real sense in Whitman that he thought that the thing that might possibly save the nation is poetry, right? And that his own kind of adhesive voice could do this important work of reminding people of their shared humanity. There was a way in which he was trying to sort of create what I describe sometimes as a kind of poetics of equivalence, right? Which is that a lot of his poetry, you see him making these catalogs and these lists, I think of the poem “Starting from Paumanok,” where he says, “The Pennsylvanian, the Virginian, the double Carolinian.”

Cristina B.: And so he’s placing Virginia next to Pennsylvania and trying to kind of create this story of massive juxtaposition, and he does that by naming spaces of conflict but placing them next to each other in this sort of poetic relationship, and I think hoping that maybe in that effort we would see something in ourselves differently. If things are side by side, then perhaps we’ll produce a kind of democratic affection for one another through his poetry.

Cristina B.: And he writes about the Civil War and he has poems, like “The Wound Dresser” and some of those poems. You hear him describing in really intense detail the suffering and sacrifice of soldiers and dead soldiers. But what he doesn’t do is he doesn’t talk about an enemy or a perpetrator. So for example, when you read his wartime poems, there’s almost never a mention of the enemy. Instead, it’s always this sort of story of heroism, sacrifice, the equally brave men who fought and died. And so he doesn’t deny conflict but he neutralizes it.

Nathan Connolly: Now, walk us a little bit through what it must have been for Whitman as a white man in an economy of slavery, in an economy of disenfranchisement. But I’m curious, just given what you’ve laid out here, how we might understand what Whitman’s politics were, specifically on the question of race.

Cristina B.: He was an anti-extentionist. He opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories. But he was more concerned about preventing the spread of slavery than really getting rid of it.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Cristina B.: He denounced the proslavery southern fire eaters, but he also called abolitionists red hot fanatics. They were the angry voiced silly set, he described them. And at the same time, right, so he took that kind of stance at the time and he did not believe that African Americans were capable of exercising the vote, right? So that’s part of his story. At the same time, abolitionists and radical Republicans strongly identified with Whitman because of his celebrations of brotherhood and equality. And there is something really interesting about the way that he’ll talk about the person with the venereal, the [venerealee 00:44:17]. He’ll mention the thief. But there’s also this way in which he often includes blackness alongside things that are kind of either degraded or-

Nathan Connolly: Oh, interesting.

Cristina B.: Problematic. So in “Song of Myself” he’ll say, this is one of the lines he says, “The kept woman, sponger, thief are hereby invited. The heavy lipped slave is invited. The venerealee is invited.” And so later on he says, “Voices of the diseased and despairing, of thieves and dwarves.” So in “Song of the Open Road” he sort of welcomes everyone and he says, “The black with his wooly head, the felon, the diseased, the illiterate person are not denied.”

Nathan Connolly: Wow. Wow.

Cristina B.: So they’re not denied, but-

Nathan Connolly: Right, right, right.

Cristina B.: It’s interesting to think about where they’re incorporated.

Nathan Connolly: Right. And the way he’s marking blackness, right? Heavy lips and wooly hair. It’s for that reason I guess I have to say that I’m really intrigued by the notion that you hear in Whitman a kind of prologue to Barack Obama, who comes of political age after certainly the great cultural awakenings of black power and the civil rights struggle, and even the 1990s. I mean, there’s a lot that’s happening culturally between Whitman’s era and Obama’s era, and yet you still hear something familiar.

Cristina B.: I mean, Obama was always trying to engage our affections for the country by creating a poetic vision of national life. Even his own description of his own personal story was kind of having this Kenyan father and this white Kansas mother, kind of, you know, [foreign language 00:45:47], out of many, one. He himself is the embodiment of that story. So he is continually kind of telling his own story that also engages in a certain kind of elision of difference. When he would lay things together in even his 2004 speech, about we have some gay friends in red states and we worship an awesome God in blue states, you know, there was a kind of poetic way that he allowed us to see ourselves as one. But it also involved not saying a lot of things.

Nathan Connolly: So you propose that the Chicana poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa offers an alternative to Whitman’s democratic vision, and I suppose by extension Obama’s vision. How do you describe her Mestiza poetics?

Cristina B.: I think one of the things that she produces is another kind of form of democratic connectedness, but that challenges dangerous equivalences, because her characterization of borders is she characterizes them as borderlands are always home and not home. She doesn’t have a dream of home as a space of origins and belonging. For Anzaldúa, home is always characterized by strangeness. It’s always discontinuous and unstable. But it’s not simply tragic. It’s also generative of all these possibilities.

Nathan Connolly: So Cristina, give me a sense of the language that Anzaldúa is using to capture this.

Cristina B.: She has a poem called “To Live in the Borderlands Means You.” It begins by her saying, “To live in the borderlands means knowing that the India in you, betrayed for 500 years, is no longer speaking to you. That Mexicanas call you [foreign language 00:47:21], that denying the Anglo inside you is as bad as having denied the Indian or black. [foreign language 00:47:26]. People walk through you. The wind steals your voice. You’re a [foreign language 00:47:32], buoy, scapegoat, forerunner of a new race, half and half, both woman and man, neither, a new gender.”

Cristina B.: And then she goes on to say, “To live in the borderlands means to put chili in the borscht, to eat whole wheat tortillas, speak Tex Mex with a Brooklyn accent, to be stopped by [foreign language 00:47:49] at the border checkpoints.” For her to be Chicana, to be a Mexican American, is to be both Indian and Spanish, right? To be both settler and native. To be both the figure who’s done violence and the figure that’s been victimized by violence, and that you have to sort of sit with the fact that you are part and parcel of all of those stories.

Cristina B.: And I think that… So for me, there was a moment in Obama’s political career when he gave that Philadelphia speech on race after the Reverend Wright scandal, where to me, that was sort of the closest we ever saw Obama get to a kind of Mestiza poetics when he said things like, “I can no more deny Reverend Wright than I can deny my grandmother who loved me but was afraid of black men on the street.” And he sort of forced this encounter to say we love people who are racist. And so those were the moments where you thought, it’s going to be a more grownup encounter with the complexities of racial justice in this country, where there’s not just good guys and bad guys, but we’re actually dealing with the fact that the good guys are the bad guys, and the people who love you are also the people who’ve done enormous violence to you, and they’re part of you.

Nathan Connolly: And I get the impression that you’re drawing a point to not just talk about him as a rhetorician or somebody who can kind of create this mass support, but that Obama actually governed in a Whitman-esque way, that he drew certain equivalences, and that his political moves as a policy maker and as a leader basically in the political scene was also in some ways steeped in this vision of America.

Cristina B.: Yeah. What struck me was that the strategies that proved productive for getting elected were so different than the strategies one needs for governing. I think we still fetishize this language of unity. The question I always have is, who is getting erased in this story? Whose interests are getting alighted? Whose interests are getting pushed down? And often it’s often the same folks, right? It’s queer people. It’s people of color. You know, it’s poor people. It’s usually similar populations. But there is a kind of dream of agreement that we have. And so I think candidates are always called on to emphasize that language. And one of the problems is is that it is aesthetically and affectively emotionally pleasing to hear the language of unity, but then the reality of governing is a space of contestation and agonism.

Nathan Connolly: Well, this is I think one of the biggest questions that every major political organization is trying to figure out, which is what’s the right tone? What’s the right rhetoric? I mean, there are a lot of ways in which people like to highlight the balkanization of American politics now as needing somebody like Whitman to kind of come in and dampen the divides. But just to echo what you’ve said, I mean, it sounds at least that one of the challenges of having this kind of dampening language is that it doesn’t in fact raise the alarms when there are deep inequalities that need to be considered.

Cristina B.: There’s one thing I think that is also interesting here, is that the adhesive quality of Whitman that is the fact that so often he elides conflict, but he does show these connections. I do think that’s actually democratically important in some contexts, right? Like I do think that when you live in a city and you get on the subway and you look around you, you see all these different kinds of bodies on display before you. You see Orthodox Jewish families, you see migrant families, you see young people, old people, queer people, straight people, men and women. And in seeing that, in seeing all those different kinds of bodies on display, you feel this sense of like, this is us. I mean, I think as a New Yorker, you look around different kind of urban spaces, DC or Chicago, you look at that and you say, “This is who we are.”

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Cristina B.: You feel this sense of collectivity that’s not unimportant, that when you go to your bodega and the guy is Lebanese or Korean, and that’s a kind of daily encounter you have with different kinds of people. Those things do create a kind of sense of democratic solidarity, that we are all in this together. But they are fleeting encounters, right? They’re not sustained encounters, right? If that subway were to breakdown, we might all start hating each other pretty quickly. Or if that subway…

Cristina B.: We all have to kind of become a polity together and try to make decisions, right? Then those differences could become problematic, that there’s like a hedge fund manager in there and a homeless guy. All those people are sharing this public space, and that is I think… I think Whitman understood that those kinds of experiences of sharing the city, sharing city life, being on the ferries, being on the bridges, that sharing civic life together is a beautiful and democratic and important element of how we come to feel each other as equally human. It’s important, but it’s deeply insufficient for the harder work of governing and the harder work of trying to create democratic community.

Nathan Connolly: Cristina Beltran is an associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. She’s the author of The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity.

Ed Ayers: When did you first become aware of Whitman, and what did he mean to you when you did become aware of him?

Nathan Connolly: For me it was in college, in the American studies primer. He was a figure placed very much alongside people like Henry David Thoreau and Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson and obviously Edgar Allan Poe, as part of this 19th century world of letters that really did give shape to American studies for the 20th century. And so there was a way in which you encounter work like Leaves of Grass as almost being unimpeachable in terms of its impact and it being a kind of holy text in some ways.

Nathan Connolly: And in particular, I was among a number of students in the late 90s who were really thinking hard about questions of diversity and inclusion and environmentalism, and Walt Whitman could be absolutely one of your go to heroes when you’re coming to your education in that register. And there were a number of students who were themselves poets who really did gravitate toward and actually helped deepen my own appreciation of Whitman as an artist who, to their mind, really helped to launch basically gay poetic art and really recognized him as a gay artist. Whether or not that interpretation holds up overtime is kind of beside the point, but I think it was really critical for a number of us to take a moment and say, you know, there are really important figures of un-normative sexuality who are part of forming our canon as we know it.

Joanne Freeman: What I remember is my emotional reaction to reading Whitman. For the first time I understood that poetry wasn’t a string of lines that were the same length that rhymed. I read Whitman and it touched me in some kind of a way, and I realized that poetry was a lot bigger. It was a lot more embracing than I had understood it to be. So it really kind of fundamentally changed the way I thought about what you could do with poetry and the way you can communicate feelings in prose that way. But there was a second prong to my learning about Whitman, and that actually took place a couple of years later when I was working at the Library of Congress. This is going to sound goofy, but I was an English major in college, so humor me.

Joanne Freeman: We were doing Civil War research and I stumbled across some of Whitman’s Civil War poetry, and I had this sort of strange aha moment, which essentially was, wait a minute, this poet is writing in the middle of a historical moment, and that’s historical evidence, you know. And I know it sounds goofy, but some part of my brain was like, oh heavens, the connection between literature and history, which I just hadn’t felt in that concrete a way before.

Ed Ayers: Well you know, I was in New York not long ago and came in my room, was welcomed by a framed saying, which I was suspicious of its authenticity. It said, “Be curious, not judgmental,” Walt Whitman. And I thought that sounded unpoetic to me. It also sounded a little convenient, so I did some deep research and looked for Walt Whitman sayings online. You can buy very many very attractive Walt Whitman sayings with sunsets and flowers and things, I’m going back to the environmental thing, but that goes back to Nathan’s point, is that he’s seen as the great poet of not judging other people, of embracing everybody. But I don’t know, that seems a little convenient for us, doesn’t it?

Nathan Connolly: Well, I think the fact that you found a quote on the wall in a hotel actually says a lot, which is that we furnish our lives with Walt Whitman and people of his kind. And I do think there is something about the present day relationship with Whitman and his generation of poets that helps to give and kind of ground a sense of depth to an otherwise really in some cases light American existence. I mean, just think about American culture. Whitman is part of this discussion of this great canon. He helped in a lot of ways to deepen otherwise possibly frivolous art forms. I’m thinking specifically of a movie where Whitman’s line that jumps out to me is “Oh captain, my captain.” I know that line because of the final scene-

Joanne Freeman: Dead Poets Society.

Nathan Connolly: Dead Poets Society. The whole point of that movie-

Joanne Freeman: Yes.

Nathan Connolly: Was to capture the depth and the power of poetry through this master teacher that Robin Williams is portraying. And what do they use? They use this Whitman moment as a way to really elevate the drama of the whole affair. [crosstalk 00:57:49]

Ed Ayers: In part by standing on a desk to read it.

Nathan Connolly: Absolutely.

Joanne Freeman: And I love the fact that all three of us have that moment. In a nanosecond we’re like, Dead Poets Society.

Nathan Connolly: Absolutely. Absolutely. And so Whitman’s gravity as a figure is evident in those kinds of moments, and you can almost add a Whitman quote to anything. Put it on a webpage or put it on a hotel wall and it all of a sudden-

Joanne Freeman: Tee shirts.

Nathan Connolly: Tee shirts. The depth factor goes up immeasurably. And so I think it’s worth unpacking that a little bit now.

Joanne Freeman: You know what that makes me think of though, because as soon as you started describing Whitman that way, the first person I thought of was Jefferson [crosstalk 00:58:23] because-

Nathan Connolly: Whoa, that’s weird. I’m sorry.

Joanne Freeman: No, but follow me. Come with me here. I’m going to take it home, I promise. In many ways, when I teach Jefferson, I teach him as the poet of the founding. He put into words what Americans want-

Nathan Connolly: Oh, interesting.

Joanne Freeman: The founding to be, and we hang onto those words. And I’m not even just talking about the Declaration of Independence. But when we read about America through Jefferson, it’s what we want America to be. And in some ways, you could say Whitman is kind of a poet of democracy. It represents what we want in some ways America to be.

Nathan Connolly: So this is really helpful actually because as we’re talking and thinking and just thinking about the 20th century and art, my first impulse was to say, okay, do we have a 20th century poet who can really capture the national sentiment in the way that say Walt Whitman could, or to your point Joanne, which got me thinking along these lines, Jefferson. And the person that came to mind was in fact Martin Luther King, Jr., right? As somebody just from the rhetorical stance, whose words are etched into granite.

Nathan Connolly: Who are the kinds of wordsmiths who get their words etched into granite in national memorials or on the walls of buildings? There’s something about the coming together, the bridging, the universal themes that someone like Walt Whitman helped to consecrate. Obviously Jefferson, to your point, as being the great founder of this kind of language. And King has so many of these quotes, in some cases without a context, to do exactly that kind of work, that it feels in a weird way that Whitman is kind of a halfway point between these two figures who in some ways define these different epochs of American history.

Ed Ayers: That’s really great. And we think about Whitman’s kind of twin in his own period is Abraham Lincoln, who I think is the other person who tries to find what’s redeemable in this country, even in the face of the unredeemable.

Joanne Freeman: In a really distinctive language too.

Ed Ayers: Exactly. And you know, we recognize their language enough perhaps to put it on posters in hotel rooms that sounds like an authentic voice. Lincoln is taking the King James Version of the bible, and so does King, and turning it into an American idiom. What’s interesting about-

Nathan Connolly: Nice, yeah.

Ed Ayers: Whitman, and [inaudible 01:00:40] and about Jefferson as well, they’re speaking in a non Christian way. It’s funny that you might think of as sort of the great… And frankly Lincoln as well is not really speaking in explicitly Christian language as well. And it’s funny when we think about this canon that you were talking about Nathan, that we celebrate people who don’t embody sort of the cultural traditions of the majority population. Somehow they take a distillation of what’s best about the United States and give it back to us in a new language.

Joanne Freeman: And a language that, it’s a, I don’t want to say limited, but a channeled language, right? It includes a very specific vision, and there’s a lot of stuff happening outside of that vision, but the purity of the language kind of holds you there in the center.

Nathan Connolly: Absolutely. Whitman is speaking at a time when obviously a lot of the country is having its citizenship and its democratic rights being taken away at the end of Reconstruction. The 1880s are a really tough period in America for a lot of people. Obviously westward expansion is another one of these extraordinary processes that are growing the country in some ways but deeply antidemocratic in other ways. And I guess when we think about the long history of these great voices, one of the things that is so common through them is that they’re oftentimes speaking over or trying to capture these moments of great contestation and doing it in a way that has you feeling in some ways connected again. There’s a way that they’re trying to cross certain fissures or chasms and bring people together when the news cycle may be telling us to do otherwise.

Joanne Freeman: Just as you’re saying in that sense, by doing that, they’re providing a tool that people can use that language to demand their rights, to get through those moments, to institute change.

Ed Ayers: Yeah. One thing about these voices is that Whitman can be, has been criticized for not really having any sense of sin or evil in his poetry, and yet, it’s hard to think of anybody who embraced suffering more than he did, choosing to go among all those shattered young men in the hospitals of Washington day after day, year after year.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Ed Ayers: He knows about evil. He knows about sin. He knows about loss. And yet, as both of you were saying, he speaks abridging language to get us to the other side of that. He holds up an aspiration that would be America at its best.

Joanne Freeman: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter, @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger. Special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

Nathan Connolly: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Executive Vice President and Provost at the University of Virginia, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 12: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.