 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to tonight's special program with Kenneth M. Price about his new book, Whitman in Washington, becoming the National Poet in the Federal City. Before we begin, though, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, January 21st, at 3 p.m., Michael Bue-Leal will discuss his new book, Inventing Equality, Reconstructing the Constitution in the Aftermath of the Civil War. Bue-Leal traces the evolution of the battle for true equality from the Revolution through the late 19th century and explores the ways in which equality and inequality waxed and waned over the decades. And on Wednesday, January 27th at noon, we invite you to tune in for a talk by Deborah Willis on the Black Civil War soldier, a visual history of conflict and citizenship. In this book, Willis analyzes the importance of African-American communities in the Civil War and shows how photography unearths the hidden histories of Black Civil War soldiers. In December 1862, Washington, D.C. was the capital of a nation at war. Enemy territory was just a river's width away and the city was filling up with soldiers and war workers. The great American poet Walt Whitman arrived in the city that month, drawn by news that his brother had been wounded in battle. He stayed in the capital until 1873 and in that time Whitman visited soldiers and dozens of hospitals, wrote letters for them and earned his wages as a clerk for the Army, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. Attorney General's Office. Ken Price recounts this decade of Walt Whitman's life in Whitman and Washington. Some of the documentation of this period comes from nearly 3,000 documents Price discovered in the National Archives 10 years ago. In Ken's words, Whitman and Washington benefits from newly available correspondence, journalism and nearly 3,000 documents I identified in the National Archives as being in the hand of Whitman. These scribal documents from his work as a clerk in the Attorney General's Office allow us to pinpoint to the exact day when he encountered certain issues in the early years of reconstruction. Some documents in his hand concern routine administrative matters while others treat civil rights, war crimes, treason, western expansion, the rise of white vigilanteism and a host of international incidents. This study underscores the significance of the scribal documents and establishes connections between his life in bureaucracy and his poetry of democracy. Since 2008, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, part of the National Archives, has supported the Whitman Archive in its efforts to provide digital access to Whitman's work. By collecting and publishing these documents, the Archive provides a more complete picture of Whitman's life and the influence on his art, allowing us to come to a greater understanding of one of America's greatest writers. Now it's my pleasure to welcome tonight's speakers, Kenneth M. Price, Hillagas University Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has co-directored the Walt Whitman Archive since 1995. He's edited books on literary studies in the digital age. James Weldon Johnson, George Santiana, and 19th century periodical literature. He's best known, however, as a Whitman scholar. Our moderator is Katarina Bernardini, who is a contributing editor at the Walt Whitman Archive and a lecturer in the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her interests include 19th century and early modernist American poetry, comparative literature and translation studies. She has published articles in scholarly periodicals and essay collections, and her book Transnational Modernity and the Italian Reinvention of Walt Whitman, 1870 to 1945, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. Now let's hear from Ken Price and Katarina Bernardini. Thank you for joining us today. Hello, I'm Katarina Bernardini, and I'm here with Professor Ken Price, author of Whitman in Washington, Becoming the National Poet in the Federal City, which was just published by the Oxford University Press, and it's available for $29.95 in hardback. Welcome, Ken. Good to see you. It's always wonderful to see you too, Katarina. Yeah, it's great to be here with you. So, can you tell us more about the idea for how this book came to you? Like, how did it start as a project for you? Well, like many Whitman scholars, I've been fascinated by Whitman's relationship to a variety of cities. He's probably most famously associated with the New York area, Long Island, New York City, but he also spent some formative months in New Orleans, as you know and others know, and then a decade in Washington, D.C., the time period that I focused on, and then at the end of his life, of course, he was in the Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey area. So, those are the four big places for Whitman. And it seemed to me that the Washington decade had been, you know, studied, but in some ways, strangely neglected. It hadn't really been given its due. And I started to gravitate toward that. I did a digital project on Civil War, Washington, that's studied the transformation of the city over the four years of Civil War. And it's fascinating what happened to the city during that time, quadrupled in size, and the racial and ethnic makeup of the city changed profoundly. Washington, of course, was surrounded by a couple of slave states, and so a fugitive of slaves came pouring into the city, and there were many immigrants, and there were prostitutes coming to the city, and there were people coming in to make a buck, and all kinds of things were happening. It was also a place where you can see why Whitman would be fascinated by it, because as is well known, he wrote three anonymous self reviews of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. And in one of them, he said, an American bard at last, that was the first line. So he clearly wanted to be the national poet from the beginning, and so then it occurred to me, well, let's think about Whitman's relationship to the federal city, to the national capital. Another thing that contributed to my wanting to work on Whitman in Washington is that I had the good fortune to discover 3,000 documents in the National Archives. These were documents that Whitman wrote when he was a clerk in the Attorney General's office, a secretary of the day. Mostly we think writing out what other people had already written or spoken to him, but possibly co-authoring them, exactly the intellectual input, how much intellectual input he had in those documents is a bit of a mystery. Anyway, I felt there was a lot there in Washington, D.C., and so that's what gravitated or had me gravitate toward the project. And before this discovery, this big discovery of the scribal documents in 2011, you had already worked on Whitman for some decades. So what surprised you the most, both in positive and negative ways about Whitman's figure and his work, and how it, you know, after you undertook this research? Right. Well, I think one of the things about Whitman is that the popular imagination of Whitman is that he was something of a proto hippie. He was a free spirit. He's been very strongly associated with a Bohemian group that gathered at Faff's Beer Hall in New York City. And when he left New York, originally went to Washington thinking he would just go for a couple of days, but he went to the front looking for his wounded brother, George, found out he was, you know, not significantly wounded and helped other soldiers come back to Washington to get care during the Civil War. And he found that so moving that he spent the next decade in Washington. But I think what surprised me the most was that we had to start suddenly thinking about Whitman as a government employee, as somebody who was a work-a-day guy, which is not, you know, how we think of Whitman. Instead, we think of him as the loafer, the saunterer, or the Bohemian. But how could he, how could we get our mind around the idea of Whitman as a clerk? And interestingly, before becoming a clerk himself, he'd written quite a number of things in newspaper pieces, belittling clerks, thinking of them as fops and thinking of them as subservient and yes men and the like. So it's quite interesting that he became a clerk. You asked about what was the most sort of negative thing that came to me in my thinking about Whitman in Washington and reflection on these 3,000 documents. I think the thing that's been disturbing is to recognize that Whitman was there in the Attorney General's office during reconstruction when the United States had a chance for a second revolution and it could remake the country on more equitable just grounds and it could recognize the rights of all people, regardless of race and ethnicity. And before long and working in the Attorney General's office, the Department of Justice was formed in 1870. He continued in working there. One of the big things the Department of Justice did in its early years was to beat back the Klan. And so Whitman had his hand on more than 30 documents that deal with Klan violence, paramilitary groups in the South. So he contributed to that effort as a secretary, but in his own writings, in his poems, in his prose, in his contributions to journalism, he never speaks of the Klan at all. He doesn't speak about it in comments to horse travel. And so this is disappointing because Whitman, we often think of him as something of a multicultural hero. I mean, he has his limits and he speaks like a person from the 19th century, but he's also the poet who sang of the U.S. as a teaming nation of nations. And he did more than any poet before him to write about all kinds of people in American culture, whether it was the immigrant or whether it was the diseased person or the Native American or African American. And suddenly in mid-career and in his later years, he begins to retreat from that and this growing conservatism and even occasionally seemingly reactionary ways, this lack of positive commentary on emancipation, lack of any condemnation of the Klan, lack of, you know, a sense of abhorrence at this paramilitary insurrection that was threatening the United States. This is a big disappointment. And you, to go back to the idea that it was a clerk and that's a totally new idea as associated with Whitman's figure, you started thinking about the fascinating pairing of clerk and cosmos. And you argued that, that in a way this clerk work seemed to have reshaped a little bit Whitman's boundless vision in terms of at least being able to elaborate his stand and see a writing from the perspective of various persona. So while maybe not explicitly and very disappointingly engaging, very important topics, as the ones you just discussed, at least maybe one positive note could be that he was more able to adopt the perspective of various people because of his work, is that correct? Yeah, the clerk and cosmos pairing that you mentioned is interesting. The idea that Whitman could somehow be both the poet of the cosmos connecting to everything, being grand, being able to sort of reach out beyond his own individual limits. And then the clerk being sort of intrinsically a limited person with a very narrow set of concerns. One of the things that the Washington experience for Whitman did is it forced him to make a new network. The Faff Speer Hall has been thought of as an intellectual network for him in his New York years. He needed to rebuild that in Washington and though he had little good to say about clerks before he got there, what he found was that Washington, DC clerks were a well educated, interesting group of people. Many of them were writers themselves. They had had a background in publishing. His publisher of his third edition, Eldridge was a clerk in Washington, his good friend, William Douglas O'Connor and John Burroughs were clerks, but also powerful writers. So these things were important to him. Also, it gave him steady income and a financial base from which to work. And that enabled him to do his hugely important humanitarian work during the Civil War when he selflessly gave hours and hours, days and days, months and months, years and years in fact of time to wounded soldiers, many of whom credited him with saving their lives through his kindness, small gifts and love that he bestowed during the Civil War as they were trying to recover from wounds and disease and suffering a great deal. That time in the working in the hospitals is one of the ways in which we see Whitman beginning to write and adopt the persona of someone else. He often would write letters for wounded soldiers. Sometimes he would write in his own voice, I'm well Whitman, your son is here, and he would comment on the son in that way. But at other times someone would ask him to write a letter for them. And so then he would inhabit the voice of Albion Hubbard or another wounded soldier. And so this way of throwing your mind and throwing your voice into someone else is there in his important hospital work. It's there on a daily basis as he works as a clerk in the Attorney General's office where he is writing for the Attorney General or for the Assistant Attorney General or for someone else, the Chief Clerk in the office. And then in his poetry, he begins to do more and more of it in the years in the Civil War and afterward. Prayer of Columbus is one good example. But another important poem that I look at that also begins to inhabit the identity and voice of another. And it's a poem that's been long controversial as Ethiopia saluting the colors. Now, one of the things you could say about Whitman in his Civil War poetry drum taps is that when it was first published, even though it seems to us in, certainly in retrospect, and I think to many people at the time, that the war was somehow about slavery. And that is how Lincoln articulated it famously. Whitman tended to put it as a regional conflict north and south, the Union War rather than thinking about it as slavery. And in the first publication of drum taps, there's really very little treatment of race to be found. And yet, you know, if that is a driving factor in the coming of the war and the ongoing effects of the war, it's a strange omission. So, but after the war, he added Ethiopia saluting the color about an aged African-American woman interacting with Union soldiers in the south at the moment when she is suddenly able to come to freedom and start a new life, even though she's like a hundred years old. This is a poem that's left many, many white critics quite uncomfortable for a variety of reasons, but strangely or interestingly, maybe it's a better word for it, many African-American critics have admired it and African-American poets and musicians. And so it is a poem that deserves rethinking. And so I tried to do that by connecting Ethiopia saluting the colors with some of the visual culture of the time, the newspaper depictions of African-Americans and their lives during the conflict and their interactions with Union soldiers. And I think it leads to a new appreciation of the poem and its complexity. And there are ways to see much more value in that poem than many people have seen in the past. One of the things that's important, of course, is that as I see it, Whitman is depicting the woman as seizing freedom herself. She is walking over to the Union lines. She's not waiting for the Union soldiers to liberate her. She is in the act of self-liberation. And that, of course, has been a key revisionary way of looking at emancipation in recent decades by historians. Another topic that I think is crucial in Whitman is the one of sexuality. And he's also been, in a way, accused of some shortcomings, but also some radical advancements in success in that sense. Can you talk about a few examples about which you see Whitman working on sexuality during this particular decade that you worked on? Did something change? Was he more reactionary or not? Or did he continue to advance? Is quite liberating your sexuality. So Whitman, as a person working in government offices, came under attack when he was working for the Department of Interior Bureau of Indian Affairs. James Harlan famously was looking around the offices at a time when he was trying to downsize the government and he came upon Whitman's copy of Leaves of Grass that was annotated. The famous Blue Book saw it, concluded apparently that this was obscene literature and summarily fired Whitman. And of course that led to the defense of Whitman, famously William Douglas O'Connor is the good great poet and probably led to a different persona of Whitman in later years that he sort of lived himself into. And O'Connor and I think Whitman himself were ready to defend what Whitman had done as a writer and as a person and happy to have that debate on sexual grounds because they felt that the culture had been dishonest about just even acknowledging the body and sexuality and its needs and its pleasures, desires. And yet being in a government office also had some constraints for Whitman. I mean he was in a set of circumstances where decorum was expected. And interestingly in the 3,000 documents that we've referred to, you often find Whitman signing off on documents, your obedient servant. Well in all of Whitman's personal correspondence he never once uses that phrase. He's not positioning himself as a servant to anyone. He's a Democrat. He's a proud person as anybody else and he doesn't believe in that kind of lowering of himself even if it's a pseudo-formulaic, polite gesture. He's not going to embody that in his personal correspondence. Yeah, I think during these years he of course had extended romantic relationship with Peter Doyle. In the around 1870 when he was working in government offices in a notebook you can see him recording concern about Doyle and the perturbations that that relationship caused him. And I think it may be that the office setting contributed to that. The history of being fired by Harlan contributed to that. Also just the many powerful forces within the society that still made same-sex love something that wasn't by any means entirely accepted then and remains not entirely accepted in some quarters. So yes, I think there were many ways in which the government office and its circumstances can be related to Whitman's emotional and psychological coming to terms with how he's going to position himself within the society. Yes, and I really appreciate it. Your conclusion in this sense, you concluded that for the book that Whitman is a national poet because even if he regularly strove to rise above the biases of his culture he fundamentally remained not beyond his culture. So in this sense you've seen remaining kind of entangled in some of the biases and cultural ills of this time and culture. And in this sense you also talked more about how Whitman perhaps avoided engaging with the real stakes of the reconstruction period. Can you tell us a little more about that? Well, like many in the North, Whitman became fatigued with the cause of African-Americans. And, you know, famously and regrettably North and South regional reconciliation came at the expense of racial reconciliation. And so the rights of African-Americans were sacrificed. And, you know, violence was quite widespread in the South. Voting rights that had, you know, gradually been gained by African-Americans were eroded. The property that they had gained was taken away from them. And in effect, a second slavery under a different name was instituted in various ways across the South. Whitman's own failure to adequately speak out about this, failure to give articulation to what could have been the early development of a vibrant multiracial democracy is a disappointment. It's a big disappointment. But I think that in our last recent years in the United States, we've seen a resurgence of racial animosity coming from high quarters in the government. And so this is not a moment in which we can afford to avert our eyes to hard truths, painful truths, even when they are about writers who we love and admire or who we think are extraordinary individuals who have achieved great humanitarian goals in Whitman's case in aiding civil war soldiers. That's not enough to give him a pass on a blind spot that is an American blind spot. It is a cultural problem that continues to need to be addressed. And it needs to be addressed with, at the moment, greater and greater urgency. Yes, and the book is really honest. I thought in not being intimidated and showing this very painful passages that he sometimes has in his correspondence, for example, in which it's really painful to read his words about some moments in which, for example, that one, do you remember that one in which he tells his mother about black people marching in Washington, right? That's a particularly heartbreaking way. As somebody that has worked on international reception of Whitman, and as you said, sort of looks it out, he was perceived as a progressive thinker and as an innovator that was very eye-opening in an innovative way. Let me just comment briefly on that. One of the tricky things I felt in writing about Whitman was to strike the right balance there because, you know, you want to recognize that he is a product of the 19th century. You need to grant him that and the context. And yet at the same time, you don't want to be, you know, too forgiving and just sort of ignore the things that do seem like real limitations and real lost opportunities. Absolutely. And you also show that he may have been less cautious in private correspondence, for example. I mean, there's always a, to distinguish his voice as an author and as a historical person. And you argue to go back to the final part of the book and your conclusions that there is much work to be done still about Whitman in general and about specifically this decade that you've worked on for Whitman and Washington. Can you maybe tell us a little more about the evidence of future research that you envision in this sense? Well, I think for Whitman studies, there's a great deal to be learned about Whitman as a journalist in his time in Washington, D.C. He was kind of a founder of war reporting, among other things. And that achievement of his career, I think, is only coming to be understood and appreciated for what it is. And there's quite a lot of Whitman journalism that was contributed anonymously. And some of the work that we're doing at the Whitman archive is now trying to recover more and more of those anonymously contributed pieces. So I think that Whitman in journalism is one of the key areas that's going to be further developed in recent year and the upcoming years. Another thing to say is that Whitman was famous for planting pieces in newspapers often anonymously about himself. And I think that anybody who was to study Washington newspapers would be able to come up with a lot of information about how Whitman was evolving and changing how he wanted to be understood within the culture. But really, let me say that when I closed the book with that comment about there is much work to be done, I was thinking less about Whitman criticism and where scholarship on Whitman was going to go and about where the culture needs to go. And hoping that, well, Whitman said, you either need to destroy him or complete him. And it was in that sense of Whitman's early vision, can we achieve the early vision of Whitman encompassing generous open to a multicultural culture? Or do we need to somehow do battle with the forces that would tear the United States apart on grounds of racial hostility to each other? I mean, it's an irony that during the Civil War, the Confederate flag never made it to the US Capitol, but it recently made it into the US Capitol in an insurrectionary moment. Yes, and so this book is really an invitation to give a lot of reflections about things that are particularly current. And I really appreciated that. I learned a lot. Is there anything else you want to add about how the process of writing this book was revealing for you or anything that you wish you would have done that you didn't have time to do or anything else? Well, honestly, the book was both energized by the conflicts in American culture in recent years, but it also made the writing of the book the more difficult because I felt as if the stakes were higher. The things I was talking about connected to obviously to current events. So it was both a spur to writing and also a, it felt burdensome and difficult and trying to get it right for Whitman to be sufficiently fair to him and generous with his monumentally important accomplishments. And at the same time to not avert my eyes to failings, trying to find the right balance in that was the major challenge. And balance is an important word for Whitman to in general, right? In terms of, yes, how we can be complex and always in a way express a lot of dichotomies in that sense. So I think, I think that's the key word to keep in mind. Well, it's been a pleasure for me to host this and thank you again to Kenneth Price for this conversation about his new book Whitman in Washington becoming the national poet in the federal city just published by Oxford University Press and available in Harback for $29.95. By the way, here it is. I have it with me. Thank you so much, Ken, again. Thank you, Katarina. I enjoyed it.