Fecund America, today,
Interlink’d, food-yielding lands!
Land of cotton, sugar, rice! land of wheat, fish, beef, pork!
Land of wool and hemp! land of the apple and the grape!
Land of materials—thy incalculable lumber, thy coal, thy gold and silver,
The inexhaustible iron in thy mines—
All thine O sacred Union!
Our farms, inventions, crops, dear Mother, we own it all today indissoluble in thee!

No limit here to land, help, opportunities, products, demands, supplies,
Productiveness, wealth, population—everyone trying to get on—perhaps to get towards the top,
Improvements, material activity, success, results—beyond all measure, all precedent,
Upon scales of extent, variety, vitality, and continuity, rivaling those of nature.
Everything is teeming and busy amid these days of order, ease, prosperity—
Intestinal agitation I call it—
And need never be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground or the orchards drop apples or the bays contain fish or men beget children upon women.

If I could speak to personified America I should say:
As rain falls from the heaven and vapors rise from earth,
So have the precious values fallen upon thee and risen out of thee.
Thou, bathed, choked, swimming in plenty,
Standing secure—power, wealth, extent, vouchsafed to thee,
Thy wealth clothes thee as a swathing-garment,
Thou laughest loud with ache of great possessions,
Thou groan’st with riches, must indeed own the riches of the summer and winter.

But I do not consider it of so much importance, in themselves merely, what amount of wealth you and yours have,
Nor what spread of territory, nor the curious arts and inventions,
Nor the crowded cities and produce-bearing farms.
The goods are worthless alone,
They might demonstrate failure as well as success.

The main question is, What is all this doing for the men, women, children of America?
Do you think goods can succeed and men can fail?
They must succeed or fail together,
They are damned or saved together.

What American humanity is most in danger of is an overwhelming prosperity—
Scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, business, worldliness, materialism.
All times mischoose the objects of their adulation and reward,
But we of the states are the most materialistic and money-making people ever known,
The current that bears us is one broadly and deeply materialistic,
The land, time—speculative, prone to display, to count success in dollars;
The trouble here with us is our devil of a craze for money.

The greatest evil to the land is the strife for gain which of late has marked, and now marks, the American people. Every man is trying to outdo every other man, giving up modesty, giving up honesty, giving up generosity to do it—creating a war, every man against every man, the whole wretched business falsely keyed by money—keyed by money ideals, money politics, money religion, money men, money in everything for every occasion. Life is not lived a success if it be not planted in a background of money, goods—curtains, hangings, tapestries, carpets, elegant china.

Now business does it all, the tie and interchange of all the peoples of the earth—an age tyrannically regulated with reference to the manufacturer, the merchant, the financier, the politician. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain—the seething materialistic and business vortices of the United States, in their present devouring relations, controlling and belittling everything else. This unholy spirit seems to have no bound or check.

What are all these business prospects, these steamships, these fat sub-treasuries, and our profitable trade? The abandonment of such a great being as man to the toss and pallor of years of moneymaking, with all their scorching days and icy nights, and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, is the great fraud upon modern civilization.
If there’s anything that will destroy our American people, it will be the element of fraud. It is the poison, the danger, of our civilization.

It is the feverish anxiety after riches that leads to the establishment of those immense moneyed institutions, which so impudently practice frauds and violations that ought to make the cheek of every truly upright man burn with indignation. Reckless and unprincipled—controlled by persons who make them complete engines of selfishness—these bubbles are kept afloat solely and wholly by the fever for gaining wealth.

It is a robber age—the maxim of the law is, rob or be robbed. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. We are in danger of being the cutest, trickiest, slyest, most cheating people that ever lived.
Those qualities are all getting in our business, politics, literature, manners, and are filtering steadily in our essential character. All the great cities exhibit them—probably New York most of all, characterized by an unparalleled fierceness in money-chasing—a horrible show, strain—disgusting, ruinous, promising nothing.

As in Europe the wealth of today mainly results from, and represents, the rapine, murder, outrages, treachery, hoggishness, of hundreds of years ago, and onward—later, so in America, after the same token. Not yet so bad, perhaps, or at any rate not so palpable—we have not existed long enough—but we seem to be doing our best to make it up.
The depravity of the business classes of our country (forming a vulgar aristocracy, full as bad as anything in the British or European castes)—the enormous greed for worldly wealth, with the trickeries of gaining it, all through society our day—is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater.

Stifled O days! O lands! in every public and private corruption,  
Smother’d in thievery, impotence, shamelessness mountain high, 
The very bottom principle corruption itself,  
Brazen effrontery, scheming, the demonism of greed,  
Rolling like ocean’s waves around and upon you, O my days! my lands!  
They taint our splendid and healthy qualities, 
And had better be understood like a threatening danger, exposed, and well confronted. 

 I don’t know what the unspeakable rush for money will lead to—unmentionable degradation—rottenness. This present mad rush for money—every man robbing from every man, a few people with money here and there, all the rest without anything everywhere—cannot last; a money civilization can never last. God help our liberties when money has finally got all our institutions in its clutch.  

All the questions of progress, strength, tariffs, finance, etc., really evolve themselves more or less directly out of the poverty question. If the United States are to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations, such as we see looming upon us of late years—steadily, if slowly, eating into them like a cancer—then our republican experiment, notwithstanding all its surface-successes, is at heart an unhealthy failure.
The situation is growing worse and worse. It is seen at its damnedest in the big cities, but it is bad no matter where—the depraving influences of riches just as much as poverty.

The immense problem of the relation, adjustment, conflict between labor and its status and pay, on the one side, and the capital of employers on the other side, is looming up over these states like an ominous, limitless, murky cloud, perhaps before long to overshadow all.
Democracy on New World soil, having established itself in politics, now waits for its thorough percolation in the social intercourse of all classes, and especially that between employers and employed persons, capital and labor. This only will breathe into that corpus the breath of life and make it a living, throbbing, talking, acting soul.

In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, endow’d with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, a vast and varied community, prosperous and fat with wealth of money and products and business ventures—plenty of mere intellectuality too—and then left with little or no soul, utterly without the sound, prevailing, moral and aesthetic health-action beyond all the money and mere intellect of the world.

Our country seems to be threatened with a sort of ossification of the spirit. Amid all the advanced grandeurs of these times beyond any other of which we know—amid the universal accessibility of riches and personal comforts—all the days of its life it solves never the simple riddle why it has not a good time.
For I do not believe the people of these days are happy. While wealth and luxury—the aimless spending—are on the increase, happiness and contentment are on the decrease. Among the busier and more laboring kinds of people, the same general absence of happiness prevails.

The American ideal of pleasure, joy, seems set so low—the frivolity—the shallow impress put upon character, personality. The people go questing and wandering anxiously about, as if with the general impression that pleasure is hidden somewhere, and that by searching they may possibly find it—but that it’s very doubtful. Generally, the one who takes the most trouble to obtain pleasure, gets the least.
The public countenance lacks its bloom of love and its freshness of faith—for want of these, it is cadaverous as a corpse. Death is without emergencies here, but life is perpetual emergencies here.

I say of all this tremendous and dominant play of solely materialistic bearings upon current life in the United States, that they must either be confronted and met by at least an equally subtle and tremendous force-infusion for purposes of spiritualization, for the pure conscience, for genuine aesthetics, and for absolute and primal manliness and womanliness—or else our modern civilization, with all its improvements, is in vain, and we are on the road to a destiny, a status, equivalent, in its real world, to that of the fabled damned.

The Greeks are full of the idea that the gods hate this sort of prosperity. When men sit heaped all round with possessions, loot, then the end is near—then look out! 
America has got to clean house some day!

NEXT: AMERICA: BOTH EVIL AND GOOD

The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman. If you want to quote from this site for something you are writing or posting, please read this first (click here).