Baron Wormser: Vistas

Re-reading Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas in an era when we can no longer take democracy for granted

I don’t doubt that somewhere in the United States some class or reading group, as a way of girding their collective loins for the upcoming election, is reading or rereading Democratic Vistas, an 1871 essay in which Walt Whitman surveyed American democracy’s prospects. His findings were, understandably, mixed. He aimed high but saw much that was very low. This comes as no surprise given the free rein the nation gave to avarice. Like Henry James, Whitman bridled at the ubiquity of business (“this all-defining word”), how it measured every aspect of American life: “Money-making is our magician’s serpent, remaining today sole master of the field.” In a footnote, however, Whitman acknowledged “as cheerfully included in the model and standard of these Vistas, a practical, stirring, worldly, money-making, even materialistic character.” No use pretending. 

   In 2024 one doesn’t have to go far into Whitman’s essay to hit some substantial stumbling blocks, as in: “I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in humankind, than a well-contested American national election.” Whitman favored physical comparisons and one can see him in the 1950s operating a health food store in southern California and recommending aloe vera for whatever ailed a person, but what would he make of the stomach-turning events of recent years? His faith in the common man, the masses (both outmoded terms he used, though elites are still with us) may appear to be unfounded. 

   To be sure, he took for his example the remarkable sacrifices made by the Union soldiers for “the life, the safety of the flag.” (Those are his italics.) And he noted that “general humanity has always, in every department, been full of perverse maleficence and is so yet.” His faith, however, was strong: “For I say at the core of democracy, finally, is the religious element. All the religions, old and new, are there. Nor may the scheme set forth, clothed in resplendent beauty and command, till these, bearing the best, the latest fruit, the spiritual, shall fully appear.” It goes without saying that the belief in theocracy on the part of the current speaker of the House of Representatives was not what Whitman was writing about. Then again, to fundamentalist eyes, Whitman’s sexual orientation would have disqualified him already. In many classrooms, it still disqualifies him. 

   Beyond religion, which Whitman, as a seeker who had no use for organizations, defined loosely, he looked to literature (“the greatest art”) as the keystone of democracy. One understands this in part because he was a poet and writer who believed passionately in the value of writing. In a parenthetical remark he noted: “the reader of my speculations will miss their principal stress unless he allows well for the point that a new Literature, perhaps a new Metaphysics, certainly a new Poetry, are to be, in my opinion, the only sure and worthy supporters and expressions of the American Democracy.” We are one-hundred and fifty years beyond his “speculations.” A great deal of very worthy writing has been seen in that period, to say nothing of some very worthy writing that occurred before 1871. The issue isn’t a lack of literature in the United States. Whitman may not have found this and that writer to his taste, but then he didn’t live to see the very dark clouds that have accompanied modern times. No one can fault American literature for not taking a hard look at the promises of democracy. 

   But have the many books been “worthy supporters and expressions of the American democracy”? If they point out American democracy’s failings are they unworthy? If they veer into allegory; if they probe the Puritan burdens; if they speak to how Native people resisted and endured; if they refuse to brush aside the consequences of racism; if they look at how much life has been sacrificed at the altar of moneyed progress, if they look at how terribly lost a person can become in America, are they unworthy? Since we presumably are in the realm of adulthood, any thoughtful person would say, “No.” But many, steeped in American optimism and the theocratic impulse, have been quick to dismiss the value of literature because it possesses a critical dimension. The dynamism of the society, which Whitman, in his fashion, saluted again and again, more than suffices. “Supporters” of America can be found cheering at sporting events or testifying at mega-churches or giving their all to whatever corporate “teams” they belong to. The notion of literature as somehow quintessential for each American is—given the relentless novelty, distraction, and consumption that define each American day—preposterous. Millions are getting by just fine without that “new Literature.” 

   Indifference is one thing; hostility is another. If the Bible is the only book that matters, the deck has been cleared and nothing more need be said. Literature is not just trouble; it is false and a waste of time. If the Gospel is good news; literature is bad news. If literature is a basis of any meaningful culture, then the inference is that the United States needs no such culture. One reason many support Donald Trump is how open he is about his detestation of culture: no book-loving Obama he. The greatness of the nation resides in its asserting its greatness, not in works of literature that plumb the depths (and scale the heights) of the human spirit. If the greatness got lost, since the nation has to become great “again,” one of the errant paths may have been through the dark woods of literature where too many questions were asked, perspectives offered, and intuitions indulged. It’s hard to say, since innocent Americans seem to have been routinely hoodwinked into surrendering their national greatness. 

   “The literature, songs, esthetics, &c., of a country are of importance principally because they furnish the materials and suggestions of personality, for the women and men of that country, and enforce them in a thousand effective ways,” which is to say that Whitman believed that, after all the political posturing was said and often unhappily done, the measure of democracy was each person or, as he put it, “sooner or later we come down to one single, solitary soul.” The debate over that soul, whether official or unofficial, lies in education. One side believes that an American soul is inherently blessed and that works of literature can only spoil that soul. This side does not speak directly because it doesn’t have to. Its agenda lies in omissions and emphases. Literature is for tests in schools and after the tests have been taken and the grades and scores tallied, it doesn’t matter. Poetry, so dear to Whitman’s heart, need not be required as a course in any high school in the nation. Pride in the nation’s literature might be something for a graduation speech, though only in passing. “Business materialism,” to use Whitman’s phrase, comes first and last. Souls, as the self-help market testifies, must take care of themselves. The desolation that is too often wrought by the hyperbolic wanting that often goes with the pursuit of happiness is somehow beside the point. 

   On the other side are the friends of literature—writers, teachers, and readers. They are many but they form a sort of underground movement in the United States, a submerged force that is abraded by the steady friction of work, of getting and spending, and of, as the society terms it, “functioning.” They speak to and for what Whitman called “mental improvement,” reading serious books as one means of pursuing a serious life. It’s hardly a groundbreaking notion, yet at every turn it finds itself trying to reply to a battery of challenges, to say nothing of jeers. What is literary culture worth? Who is to say what is serious? Why does such improvement matter? Who measures it? Isn’t it effete and impractical? Doesn’t ideology, also known as correct thinking, count for more? The sad truth here is that industrial American democracy, as we have witnessed it since Whitman’s time, does not in the least believe in what he called “personalism,” the savor that goes with having your own sensibility, a savor that literature naturally fosters, an individualism that is not “rugged” but nurtured by as much meaningful culture as it can get its hungry hands on. If, however, the individual who is dealing with whatever set of circumstances is never shown in even a mildly systematic way the culture of poetry or music or cuisine or dance or dozens of other cultural facets then the individual doesn’t know. It goes without saying that looking something up on the Internet is not culture. Not everything is in that little machine. 

   For a reader in 2024, Whitman’s essay is haunting and something like heartbreaking—high hopes that  were unfounded. One can point to Whitman as one more instance of American exceptionalism, much ado about what turns out to be one more instance of power doing whatever power chooses to do while strewing virtuous justifications along the way. Yet giving up on Whitman and democracy seems unwise. Whitman recognized that democracy was taking on something improbable in its attempt to enlarge the human capacity for recognizing the realities of others. He did not believe that people were inherently “sensible and good.” Rather he believed that “good or bad, rights or no rights, the democratic formula is the only safe and preservative one for coming times.” Any turn to authoritarianism is a relinquishing of human possibility.

   Part of what makes the reading of Whitman’s essay such a poignant experience is the tenor of his language—fervent, poetic, eloquent, high-minded, sincere. The notion that we have somehow progressed beyond such language, that we somehow know more is laughable. It seems rather that we have atrophied, that in honest hearts there resides a make-do bleakness and in dishonest ones a low cunning. Given all the human noise, it takes an effort to simply be. Whitman understood that very well and he deserves the last word about the Being that underlies everything: “A fitly born and bred race, growing up in right conditions of out-door as much as in-door harmony, activity and development, would probably, from and in those conditions, find it enough merely to live—and would, in their relations to the sky, air, water, trees, &c., and to the countless common shows, and in the fact of life itself, discover and achieve happiness—with Being suffused night and day by wholesome ecstasy, surpassing all the pleasures that wealth, amusement, and even gratified intellect, erudition, or the sense of art, can give.” The italics, once again, are Whitman’s. As long as any of us is in this world, one that Whitman identified as “Nature,” we can partake of that Being. Amid our vistas, we tend to forget what comes first. 

Copyright 2024 Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser’s many books include History Hotel (CavanKerry, 2023), a collection of poems. He is the former Poet Laureate of the state of Maine.