Walt Whitman: free trader
By Bill Kauffman

Before Walt Whitman, poet, there was Walter Whitman, editor of the New York Aurora and the Brooklyn Eagle and author of vehement, if sometimes prolix, observations on the political scene of the 1830s and 1840s.

 

Whitman was a partisan of the Loco Focos, the radical libertarian wing of the Democratic Party. Setting out his beau ideal in a state, Whitman waxed minimalist:

“The true government is much simpler than is supposed, and abstains from much more. Nine tenths of the laws passed every winter at the Federal Capitol, and all the State Capitols, are not only unneeded laws, but positive nuisances, jobs got up for the service of special classes of persons.”

 

“Legislation,” wrote Whitman, “is always inclined to be too meddlesome

and be perpetually multiplying ordinances and regulations.” No mealymouthed gradualist, Whitman declared: “I recommend the abolition of the entire system of licenses or special permits for any business, no matter what.... Every man and woman has the right, free of any special taxes or license, to engage in any avocation or business whatever.”

 

He was a “free-trader by instinct,” Whitman confessed, and it was on the question of free trade vs. protection that he expended much of his ink and his passion. Tariffs, he believed, were an outstanding example of “the evils of legislatures attempting to meddle with the great laws of trade, which are really involved in the great laws of Nature.”

 

The Loco Focos were no apologists for corporations. Trade was a moral issue to Whitman. As the poet would explain late in life, “I object to the tariff primarily because it is not humanitarian— because it is a damnable imposition upon the masses.”

 

Walt Whitman, the lyrical embracer of all mankind, was seldom on display in Walter Whitman’s sometimes ascerbic newspaper editorials. He dismissed tariff men as “cliques of selfish manufacturers, joined with a few sap head simpletons” who “push ahead measures for their own interest.”

 

Their motive was mere avarice: “They insist that the people should be taxed for their benefit—that their business should be rendered enormously profitable, by levying a general assessment upon all who use imported articles.”

 

What about those Americans not engaged in manufacturing, asked Whitman? “Have we no consumers? Are not four fifths of the people interested in getting things cheaply?”

 

He scoffed at the patriotic patina of the protectionists: “They worship the Almighty Dollar—and to aid themselves therein, they take the name of national prosperity in vain.”

 

Whitman insisted that the tariff was “an insult to the noble American workingman.” America “does not need anything but her own irresistible power of enterprise, ambition, spirit, and real wealth…to aid the United States in ‘whipping the world,’ at manufacturing goods of almost any kind!”

 

If there is little of poetry and much of propaganda in Walter Whitman’s editorializing, he gives us the occasional foretaste of Leaves of Grass. In 1846 he mocked the absurdity of protecting a strong and vascular young man—or nation:

 

“There! see that vigorous, stalwartlimbed young fellow, with his chest like a giant’s, and his face the picture of health: let us go and assist him in his walk, for he will surely fall down. Behold how springy are his limbs; procure him a couple of crutches forthwith. Lo! now he rushes past his fellows with the airy swiftness of a bird: persuade him to be carried on a hand-barrow. Poor youth! he is running over with health; he must therefore be nursed and medicined a bit. See, in his form, what a blending of Apollo

with Hercules: How can it be supposed, therefore, that he can hold his own against any one of those shrivelled meagre companions of his, with their frightful paleness, and their thin gray hairs?”

 

Less than a decade later, Walt Whitman would send sheaves of vigorous, stalwart-limbed young fellows to work in the fields of American poetry.