140
Popular Culture Review
material objects. In fact, to over-emphasize his point that “divine am I inside and
out, and I make holy whatever/1 touch or am touched from;” Whitman claims that
“the scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer/ this head is more than churches
or bibles or creeds (828-831).” Like the ancient stoics or Spinoza, Whitman provides
some comfort in the idea that things are as they should be. However, because
Whitman’s thesis also requires that the “bard” be “commensurate with the people”
he must celebrate the people “for their own sake as his own sake.”^ Here, then, we
have eleven poems that describe Americans in a snap-shot with an eye to placing
them within the proper functioning of the universe. To judge their situation or status
harshly would be to imply a standard outside of the system as it is. Though radical
reform is a “reality,” it can claim no moral high ground vis-a-vis the situation it
seeks to reform. Though conservative reform can envision a bucolic past, it is
intimately a part and product of the holy present. This radical vision forced Whitman
to build a very large ethical tent and, in the end, enclose all elements of America in
the present. To better understand Whitman’s political-moderation-through-radicalvision, it is essential to characterize radical and conservative working-class politics
within the context of America in the fourth and fifth decades of the nineteenth century.
Reform: Conservative and Radical
The growth from an artisan to an industrial economy fostered serious growing
pains in American society. Specifically, it created a potential disconnect between
the formerly mutually dependent distinctions of master and apprentice/journeyman
and replaced them with the seemingly unbridgeable gap between capital and labor.
Coming of age in the New York of the first half of the nineteenth century, Walt
Whitman lived on the forefront of this shift. Conservative and radical reformers
sought to define both the laboring and capitalist classes in this new industrial order.
Defining “conservative” and “radical” in this context is essential to determining
Whitman’s poetic-political place in this new order.
Sean Wilentz’s seminal work Chants Democratic carefully explores the rise
of working class politics between 1788 and 1850. According to Wilentz, working
class reformers approached their plethora of issues (temperance, nativism, land
reform) with a steady eye on the labor theory of value. Accordingly, this theory
postulates that all wealth is derived from labor. Because of the prevalence of Marxist
ideology over the last one hundred years, it is difficult to uncover this theory in
politics that are often evangelical in sentiment. However, in the 1840s and 1850s,
before its co-option by Marxist atheist and universalist ideology, a multi-faceted
discourse on the nature of labor within the American republic could take place.
The rise of an industrial working class in this context raised a number of questions:
1) What is the laborer’s relationship to the “non-producing” class of capital? 2)
What is labor’s place, as a class dependent on capital and without much hope of
elevation without a major shift in labor value, in the Republic? 3) And, once these