Word: whitmans
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...incredulous. "Her work contradicted everything that had come before," says Sheldon Danziger, a public-policy professor at the University of Michigan. As experts scratched their head, most politicians salivated. O'Neill had confirmed a "silver bullet" solution to a vexing social problem. Only New Jersey's Republican Governor, Christine Whitman, courageously refused to endorse O'Neill's conclusions, preferring to wait for the results of a larger and more objective investigation...
...mind, of course. The wound may heal better if we not only sift through rubble and the mystery of evil, but also look out at the horizon. A helpful exercise is to study Oklahoma City and the 1990s through the prism of a new book called Walt Whitman's America (Knopf). Here, David S. Reynolds, professor of American Literature and American Studies at New York City's Baruch College, splendidly examines the culture that formed the greatest American poet and the greatest American poem, Leaves of Grass, which was first published in 1855. Although Reynolds does not dwell on them...
Immigration. We are not us anymore. Americans of earlier arrival looked back nostalgically, bitterly, to a virtuous Edenic America, now lost and overrun. Whitman, the bard of democracy, harbored some of the Know-Nothings' nativist bigotries. He referred to a "coarse, unshaven, filthy Irish rabble...
Class Differences. Whitman wrote, "I see an aristocrat/ I see a smoucher grabbing the good dishes exclusively to himself and grinning at the starvation of others as if it were funny,/ I gaze on the greedy hog." By the time of the Civil War, the poorest half of Americans owned just 1% of all assets...
Politics. Corrupt and dispiriting, a procession of mediocre Presidents (Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan), spineless on slavery, men whom Whitman called "our topmost warning and shame...