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Whitman’s formula for individual freedom
12019-07-12T12:22:28+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed9677214111Cohen page 9plain2019-07-12T12:22:28+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141This was in part because Whitman’s formula for individual freedom helped Johnson resist the religious and philosophical norms of his locale, and in part because it allowed him to create a rationale for a racist hierarchy that may have seemed to be one of his few remaining possessions. Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, which ringingly criticizes America’s political failures while implicitly expressing skepticism about Black suffrage, was key to Johnson’s thinking. “I wish you would sometime take up Democratic Vistas (for me) and read (Conscience) Page 62 and then bottom of Page 69,” Johnson asked. In those passages, Whitman argues that the “climax of this loftiest range of modern civilization…is to be its development…of absolute Conscience, moral soundness, Justice." In the passage at the bottom of page 69 is an articulation of the methods for achieving this that sounds distinctly conservative to our ears today: “That which really balances and conserves the social and political world is not so much legislation, police, treaties, and the dread of punishment, as the latent intuitional sense, in humanity, of fairness, manliness, decorum, etc.” (69). Johnson certainly articulated doubts about the morals of his white neighbors, but may have shared with many of them the common prejudicial notion that the Black population lacked the “latent intuitional sense” that Whitman made the foundation of social stability. In any case, in another letter, he concluded something similar. “While you show us that Universal Suffrage is certain to not give us the very worst of characters for rulers,” he wrote the poet, “may not it be inferred that White ascendancy here again will hardly produce any intolerable event?" Johnson’s is certainly not the version of Whitman’s exuberant democratic equality that has often been claimed or wished for by his critics and disciples. But here it is, operating simultaneously with a range of other readings of Whitman’s work that are familiar to us as progressive, liberating, non-violent, or inclusivist; echoes of the gay Brooklyn laborer, not the would-be white supremacist bandit.
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12019-07-11T16:28:05+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141Commentary: Essay and PodcastJoelle Thomas13Cohen 1plain1102021-01-15T17:36:15+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141
12021-02-16T20:07:58+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141IndexJoelle Thomas8Index of all pagesvispath2021-02-16T21:16:42+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141