a fresh heroic nation of live and electric men
Some of Walt Whitman’s genius in cleverly, aptly, subtly describing the political ills of antebellum America…still true, unfortunately, almost exactly, 150 years later:
The sixteenth and seventeenth terms of the American Presidency have shown that the villainy and shallowness of great rulers are just as eligible to These States as to any foreign despotism, kingdom, or empire – there is not a bit of difference.
Whence the delegates of the politicians? Whence the [political] conventions?
Not from sturdy American freemen; not from industrious homes; not from thrifty farms…not from among teachers, poets, savans, learned persons, beloved persons, temperate persons…
Who are [the politicians] personally?
Office-holders, office-seekers, robbers, pimps, exclusives, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men…spaniels well-trained to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the President…spies, blowers, electioneerers, body-snatchers, bawlers, bribers, compromisers…
From The Eighteenth Presidency! (Voice of Walt Whitman to each Young Man in the Nation, North, South, East, West), 1856
