America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without,
For I see clearly that the combined foreign world could not beat her down;
If we are lost, no victor else has destroy’d us,
It is by ourselves we go down to eternal night.
If thou art balked, O freedom,
From the house of friends comes the death stab.
Our lands, embracing so much—embracing indeed the whole—hold in their breast that flame also, capable of consuming themselves, consuming us all.
Nations sink by stages, first one, and then another. Amid the huge inflammation call’d society, and that other inflammation call’d politics, what is there today of moral power and ethic sanity as antiseptic to them and all? Not a man faces round at the rest with terrible negative voice, refusing all terms to be bought off from his own eyesight, or from the soul that he is, or from the body that he is.
I look ahead seeing for America a bad day—a dark if not stormy day—in which this restriction, this attempt to draw a line against free speech, free printing, free assembly, will become a weapon of menace to our future.
I believe in unveiling,
I say discuss all and expose all,
I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face.
I can conceive of no better service in the United States, henceforth, by democrats of thorough and heartfelt faith, than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities, and infinite corruptions of democracy, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. When doctors can bring a disease to the surface they are satisfied; but if it remain hidden inside, the prospect is very bad.
So tell the American people their faults,
The departments of their character where they are most liable to break down,
Speak to them with unsparing tongue, rude, rasping, taunting, contradictory tones—
What ones are more wanted amid the supple, polish’d, money-worshipping, Jesus-and-Judas-equalizing echoes of current America?
Thee coil’d in evil times my country, with craft and black dismay,
With every meanness, treason thrust upon thee,
Justice seems asleep, and sin raises its unblushing face in bold defiance,
From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable.
Though all the essential elements of the moral nature exist latent in the good average people of the United States, it is certain that a powerful national moral nature has not yet been developed. In any vigor, the element of the moral conscience, the most important, seems to me either entirely lacking, or seriously enfeebled or ungrown. In business, politics, competition, actual life, there seems to be a strange depletion, almost an absence, of the moral nature. To severe eyes, using the moral microscope, a sort of dry and flat Sahara appears.
With unprecedented materialistic advancement, society, in these states, is canker’d, crude, superstitious, and rotten—political, or law-made, society is, and private, or voluntary, society is also. Pride, competition, segregation, vicious wilfulness, the traitor, the wily person in office, the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the fossil-like lethargy, and license beyond example, brood already upon us.
We have everything. We are big, heroic, grand, smart—oh! as for smartness, damned smart! Brilliancy, smartness unsurpassed, too damned smart. There is a danger of over-smartness—repartee, social wish-wash—very misleading, very superficial. I sometimes think that this is the dark and damned spot of our national character—pettiness, prettiness, quibbling, finery.
I think the genius of our continent has complacently gone to sleep, these years,
Satisfied with having produced, in fashionable life, small aims—
Or no aims at all, only to kill time.
We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout,
We are environed with nonsense under the name of respectability—
Petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics.
What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask?
The spectacle is appalling.
Everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, barroom, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity—everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe—everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon’d, muddy complexions, bad blood, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners (considering the advantages enjoy’d,) probably the meanest to be seen in the world.
Go on, my dear Americans, whip your horses to the utmost—excitement! money! politics! You will soon get under such momentum you can’t stop if you would. Only make provision betimes for several thousand lunatic asylums—You are in a fair way to create a nation of lunatics.
American society is settling itself, in utter defiance of American principles. It is settling itself in accordance with European principles. The modes on which it arranges itself involve the idea of caste—involve servants, masters, superiors, inferiors. We are all too prone to wander from ourselves, to affect Europe.
The people, credulous, generous, deferential, allow the American government to be managed in many respects as is only proper under the personnel of a king and hereditary lords; or, more truly, not proper under any decent men anywhere.
One half—oh! three quarters—of the sociology of America consists in keeping genteel. The people are lethargic—let things go—suffer themselves to be milked and thrown away by a class of political scoundrels—they are so patient, so slow—so slow! often so stupid—blind to their own divine descent.
The great masses of the mechanics, and a large portion of the farmers, are unsettled,
Hardly know whom to vote for, or whom to believe, Pervading all classes of society runs the poisonous virus of disbelief,
The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men,
None believes in these states, boldly illustrating them in himself,
The underlying principles of the states are not honestly believ’d in,
Nor is humanity itself believ’d in.
From the age of 21 to 40 I was interested in the political movements of the land, as an observer. The meanest kind of bawling and blowing office-holders, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers; spaniels well-train’d to carry and fetch, infidels, terrorists, creatures of the president, creatures of would-be presidents; spies, bribers, compromisers, scarr’d inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people’s money and harlots’ money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth—from political hearses, and from the coffins inside, and from the shrouds inside of the coffins; from the tumors and abscesses of the land; from the skeletons and skulls and running sores of the great cities—such, I say, form’d, or absolutely control’d the forming of, the entire personnel, the atmosphere, nutriment and chyle, of our municipal, state, and national politics—substantially permeating, handling, deciding, and wielding everything—legislation, nominations, elections, public sentiment, etc.—while the great masses of the people, farmers, mechanics, and traders, were helpless in their grip.
Still now, the official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The government itself rocking with treason, honeycombed with villainy—bribery everywhere—show, show of virtue—all as hollow as a shell.
I know of nothing more treacherous than the position of nearly all the eminent persons in these states toward the spirit of democracy—the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency.
A crowd of attorneys, seekers of contracts, bleeders of the treasury, limber-tongued lawyers, supple secretaries, milliners of diplomats, bullies without courage, angry dyspeptics, supple human hinges—are they this great America? Never were publicly display’d more deform’d, mediocre, snivelling, unreliable, false-hearted men.
No man can look into what we call party politics without seeing what a mockery it is—how little either Democrats or Republicans know about essential truths. These deputies most strange arrive from every quarter, and skip into the seats of mightiest legislation, and take seats of judges and high executive seats—well-dressed, rotten, meagre, nimble, and impotent, full of gab, full always of their thrice-accursed party.
A party may win elections and be defeated anyway; the moral victories are the only victories that count. But they who fabricate the creeds and commands of these parties are all infidels—they have no faith in man. They habitually make common cause just as soon in advocacy of the worst deeds and men as the best, or probably a little sooner for the worst.
Every trustee of the people is a traitor, looking only to his own gain, and to boost up his party; the berths, the presidency included, are bought, sold, electioneered for, prostituted, and filled with prostitutes. That type of man is particularly devilish to me—is not big, ample, inclusive—rather drives away than invites.
Unhappy the country without a party of the opposition—though there are oppositions and oppositions. I do not mean by a party of the opposition such parties as we have today; it is all of the hell-take-the-other-side order and I make nothing worthwhile out of it. How contemptible is the enthusiasm of the average voter—his sad, sickening talk of “my man,” “my man,” “my man.” I tell you these men are all using you, owning no law but their own will, more and more combative, less and less tolerant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood.
Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?
What deepening twilight—scum floating atop of the waters?
Can dew wet the air after such may be elected to Congress and make laws over me?
Profuse acts of American legislation, every year becoming more and more profuse,
Not one atom for the general good, but against it, jobs got up for the service of special classes or persons—
We almost need laws to protect us against laws.
I think there can never again on the festive earth be more bad-disordered persons deliberately taking seat, as of late in these states, at the heads of public tables. Such corpses’ eyes for judges, with pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence.
What a filthy presidentiad! Such a rascal and thief in the presidency. What have you been about, that you have allowed that scum to be floated somehow into the presidency? This poor scum—the shit-ass! God damn him!—eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on the states.
I think him mainly a gas bag, the smallest potato in the heap. As long as he remains in office, the aura of the presidency will give him prominence—be his savior—but after that—oh! what will be his oblivion—utter!
(Though I never knew a president to totally fail; the worst of the lot tried every way they knew how to redeem themselves from their weaknesses.)
Is that the president holding a cabinet council, surrounded by the great Secretaries?
Is nothing but breed upon breed like these to be represented in the presidency?
Are those really congressmen? Are those the great judges?
The varied countless frauds of men and states?
Must we still go on with our affectations and sneaking?
And what will come of it? that is the question.
After our heroism, this!
To guide by feebleness and ashes a proud, fresh, young, heroic nation of millions of live and electric men!
A pretty time for dead corpses to go walking up and down the earth,
With the show of the states themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing.
Where is the real America?
Where are the laboring persons, ploughmen, men with axes, spades, scythes, flails?
Where are the carpenters, masons, machinists, drivers of horses, workmen in factories?
Where is the spirit of the manliness and common sense of these states?
NEXT: AMERICA’S ECONOMIC INJUSTICE
In the Words of Walt Whitman 