Walt Whitman's America — A Reading Reflection

A reading reflection on

WALT WHITMAN’S AMERICA

by David S. Reynolds

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I find the most interesting books on Audible, either heavily discounted or free. This book is no exception. Only 5 chapters in, it is obviously a deep dive into the United States of Walt Whitman's time. What follows are some interesting facts, some that inspired squirrels that take up much time.

Setting the Scene

Manhattan was sometimes referred to as “Mannahatta” (originally “Manahatin,” the hill island).

There was a fire in 1835 in New York. It went on for three days. The author uses it to discuss the infrastructure of the time and the difficulties with keeping such things under control.

He discusses sanitary conditions; there were regular cholera epidemics.

Whitman’s Early Career

At age eleven in June 1830, Whitman worked as an office boy for lawyers James B. Clarke and Edward Clarke, and by the summer of 1831 he was apprenticed to Samuel E. Clements, editor of the Long Island Patriot. Clements was involved in a scandal involving disinterring Elias Hicks's body to make a bust and was fired in November 1831. Whitman then trained under foreman printer William Hartshorne and later Erastus Worthington. In the summer of 1832, a cholera outbreak causing thirty-five deaths prompted his parents to move to West Hills, Long Island. From the fall of 1832 through May 12, 1835, Whitman worked for Alden Spooner at the Whig weekly Long-Island Star. During this same period, publishing technology evolved rapidly, with stereotyping introduced in 1814, the cylinder press in 1814 and 1847, and the steam press arriving in the 1830s.

The Southold Incident

This part of the book took a dark turn, and it's the kind of thing that sends me chasing squirrels. After his stint as a teacher in Woodbury, Whitman apparently made threats of violence against himself and talked about burning the schoolhouse down. That alone is a lot. Then his whereabouts between November 1840 and March 1841 go murky. He later claimed to have been in Whitestone (“white stone”), but the author turns to other sources to get to what really happened. The documentation tells a different story.

The record points to an incident in Southold during the winter of 1840–1841. According to the allegations, Whitman was publicly denounced by Reverend Ralph Smith in January of 1841. A mob reportedly tarred and feathered him at the home of Dr. Ira Corwin after finding him hiding under straw ticks. He was rescued by the housekeeper, Selina Danes, and it took him over a month to recover. The schoolhouse where he had taught, Locust Grove No. 9, was renamed “the Sodom School,” which is about as loud a signal as a town can send.

Of course I had to have gemini deep dive into the incident.

He called Whitman a sodomite by name, from the pulpit.

He named the family Whitman was boarding with (generally rendered as the George Wells household) and pointed out that there was a young boy in that household who attended the Locust Grove school.

He referred to the Locust Grove No. 9 schoolhouse itself as "a Sodom" — the epithet that stuck and gave the building its later local name, "the Sodom School," which it carried into the early twentieth century.

The evidence for the Southold incident isn't a single smoking-gun document; whether the charge was true, exaggerated, politically motivated, or mythologized after the fact is the part that's still unsettled. On top of that, there is a seven-month gap in Whitman's literary output between November 28, 1840, and June 22, 1841, which lines up suspiciously well with a man lying low and healing. In my opinion, the silence says as much as the testimony does.

His Father

The author talks about his father, a complex individual that comes across as an entrepreneurial spirit. He tried his hand at his own version of flipping property, custom-designed building techniques (hand-laid floors, walls, roofs) which became outmoded by the 1820s shift toward prefabricated parts and specialized contractors. He would buy property, parcel it out, then build dwellings on the lots and sell them. He had little success with the model.

His Family

His family life was complicated. Walt Whitman himself was probably on the spectrum, although the author does not state that conclusion that I remember. 

Mother Louisa Van Velsor is described by Whitman as idealized, though historical records suggest idiosyncratic behavior. Siblings are listed with specific conditions: Jesse (insanity), Hannah (neurosis), Andrew (alcoholism), and Edward (retarded/crippled). With all that going on, it's possible and probable, in my opinion, that he was touched in some way. 

Whitman’s reaction to family instability is described as a turn toward surrogate parenting roles and poetic reinvention of parental figures.

So much more. And it's only five chapters worth.

✦ A note: Claude (an AI assistant by Anthropic) helped with this post by correcting typos and punctuation and by adding visual formatting. All ideas and underlying prose are the author's own.