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From "Song of Myself"

 




“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

"And what I assume you shall assume,

"For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

I was thinking of this passage of "Song of Myself" recently in connection with a 1949 book, THE VITAL CENTER, by political historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

The second world war was a recent memory. The Cold War was a new and dangerous reality. Schlesinger, a Cold War liberal, presented Roosevelt-Truman liberalism, and democracy with a small "d" in general, as a vital center, between the horrors of Stalin on the one side and those of the fascists on the other. He saw the then-recent split in the Democratic Party as symbolic of this. The progressives under Henry Wallace left the Party in 1948 to run their own campaign. The segregationists under Thurmond left the same party for their very different reasons.

Schlesinger was rather hard on both of them, in praise of Truman. Indeed, Schlesinger is harder on the two dissident Dems than he is on Dewey, who barely figures in his account at all. For Schlesinger it was left, right, always amiably splitting up Poland, versus center. And the righteous side was the center, which was Truman.

What does any of this have to do with Whitman? Well: Schlesinger brings Whitman in. He sees Whitman as an enthusiast of democracy. He contrasts Whitman with Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, with his individual isolationism in the woods, represents the sickly refusal of some men of letters to engage in politics, or even communal life, at all. Whitman represented passionate participation in both.

Schlesinger doesn't quote the above passage. But he might have. And it might be used both for and against the reading of Whitman in Schlesinger's book.
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