America illustrates evil as well as good,
I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is.

Land tolerating all, accepting all, not for the good alone,
I feel thy ominous greatness evil as well as good,
I see thy light lighting, and thy shadow shadowing, as if the entire globe.
Ah Mother, prolific and full in all besides, yet how long barren, barren?
Those things most listened for, certainly those are the things least said.

By the unprecedented opening-up of humanity en-masse in the United States, the last hundred years, under our institutions, not only the good qualities of the race, but just as much the bad ones, are prominently brought forward. 

What a nation likes is part of that nation, and what it dislikes is part of the same nation. What is any nation, after all, but a struggle between conflicting, paradoxical, opposing elements? And they themselves, and their most violent contests, important parts of the one identity, and of its development—efforts for deeper harmony, freer and larger scope, completer homogeneousness and power.
So my nation is all mottled with evil and good, composed of many contradictory parts, like the body—but one and indivisible—a conflict between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity. I dare not shirk any part of America, nor any attribute of America, good or bad.

Our America today is a vast seething mass of materials, human and other, of the richest, best, worst, and plentiest kind—this time and land we swim in, with all their large conflicting fluctuations of despair and hope, ampler, better, worse also, than previously known—eligible to be used to build for good, the nation of the body and the soul—that new moral American continent without which, I see, the physical continent remained incomplete, maybe a carcass, a bloat.

The problem of the future of America is in certain respects as dark as it is vast. Flaunt it as we choose, athwart and over the roads of our progress loom huge uncertainty, and dreadful, threatening gloom. America needs to go on with caution—wise forethought—to be strong, decisive—yet calm, circumspect.

But who shall hold in behemoth? who bridle leviathan, unwieldy and immense? I wonder if the American people are not the most enterprising on the globe, in history—any land, any age? They seem to be in readiness at all times for all emergencies; places of peril they transform instantly to safeties—certainly a wonderful peculiar gift, in which, in whatever else falling short, they undoubtedly excel.

This great, whited sepulchre of Washington is corrupt—has its own peculiar mixture of evil with its own peculiar mixture of good—but the evil is mostly with the upper crust—the people who have reputations.
The average clerks, who after all run the government, are on the square. I have known thousands of them. I found the clerks mainly earnest, mainly honest, anxious to do the right thing—very hard working, very attentive. 
(I might have been more suspicious but for my dislike for one of our liveliest American qualities—suspicion: to suspect this, that, the other, everything—and this leads me to, in the main, take men for what they seem till other things occur.)

America, it may be, is doing very well upon the whole, notwithstanding the antics of the parties and their leaders. It is the dillettants, and all who shirk their duty, who are not doing well—these half-brain’d nominees—the nominee that is chosen and the nominee that has fail’d—and many elected failures and blatherers.

These savage, wolfish parties alarm me. They have been useful, and to some extent remain so. It is not impossible they will rise to the occasion—but it’s not improbable they’ll sink to the bottom and go to the devil! America has outgrown parties; henceforth it is too large, and they too small.

Yet rank as those movements are, I know nothing in these states so grand as the movements of their politics. I entirely accept the movements of American politics. I do not view them in their details—we are too apt to pause with particulars—but in the magnificent copiousness of their aggregate.

The presidency, for example, has a significance, a meaning, broader, higher, than could be imparted to it by any individual. I observe shallow men are put in the greatest offices, even in the presidency; I say this nation makes as great use of shallow presidents as of its brave and just Washington, or its wise Jefferson.
There is no great importance attaching to presidents regarding them simply as individuals put into the chair after a partisan fight. The presidency stands for a profounder fact. Here is the summing up, the essence, of the will of millions of people of all races, colors, origins, inextricably intermixed—for true or false, the sovereign statement of the popular hope. We need to enclose the principle of the presidency in this conception.

It is not only to great heroes and representative men that the world is indebted,
But it is indebted to weak and shameful persons in high places;
The average man in these states remains immortal owner and boss,
Deriving good uses, somehow, out of any sort of servant in office, even the basest,
A nation like ours is not served by the best men only, but sometimes more by those that provoke it, by the combats they arouse.

There in a city, a stormy political meeting, a torch-light procession,
Candidates avowing themselves to the people—
What is more dramatic than the popular judgment taking the successful candidates on trial in the offices,
Observing them and their doings for a while, and always giving, finally, the fit, exactly due reward?
Out of dastards and disgraces, fortunate are the wrongs that call forth stout and angry men,
Then is shown what stuff there is in a nation,
So I excuse a great deal of tyranny, even cruelty, in the government of a nation.

As for you, I advise you to enter more strongly yet into politics. It is the fashion among dillettants and fops (perhaps I myself am not guiltless) to decry the whole formulation of the active politics of America, as beyond redemption, and to be carefully kept away from. See you that you do not fall into this error. It is a credit to men and no disgrace to them to take an eager interest in politics.

Always inform yourself,  always vote,
But go back to first principles,
Disengage yourself from parties,
It behooves you to receive nothing through parties,
Convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators,
But steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them,
It is not this or that party who is going to save America,
It is countless breeds of great individuals, the eternal and only anchor of the states.

An indispensable part of the remedy must consist in the better men who should enter the field of practical politics,
They must begin by making themselves at home with the masses of the people,
Must habituate themselves to direct contact with them, and not be so much afraid,
Must if needs be mix with them in their haunts, even the lowest—
Are the people to be reached? Then go where they are.

In Washington, I go a great deal into the hospitals to see America, her masculine young manhood, this freight of helpless worn and wounded youth, of darlings and true heirs to me, genuine of the soil, prophetic of the future, proofs undeniable to all men’s ken of perfect beauty, tenderness, and pluck.

Shams, etc., will always be the show, like ocean’s scum;
Enough, if waters deep and clear make up the rest,
Underneath all this putridity of presidents and congressmen that has risen to the top, lie pure waters a thousand fathoms deep,
The people ever remain, infinitely more important,
They make the real ocean, whatever the scum may be on its surface.
Amid lack of first-class leaders, we have the average man, man in the mass,
Nobler far than was ever before thought possible—
I wish the people believed in themselves as much as I believe in them!

Through evil and through good, the republic stands,
The really vital things remain safe and certain,
Growing on deep foundations, (indeed, already grown,) indestructible in America,
For centuries yet to stand, immovable from its foundations,
And over all, as by invisible hand, a definite purport and idea,
The dream of ages and ages, long-deferred, now first realized.

NEXT: AMERICA: AN UNFINISHED EXPERIMENT

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).