Democratic Vistas: The Original Edition in Facsimile

The Vistas of Democratic Vistas: An Introduction

TheVistas of DemocraticVistas An Introduction Ed Folsom Whitman’s powerful and evocative title, Democratic Vistas, is much better known than the essay it names.Widely used in American culture over the past century, “democratic vistas” has served as the title for numerous books and countless essays and has become a kind of shorthand phrase for that distinctly American sense that the nation’s egalitarian fulfillment is always just on the horizon, the faith that our founding ideals are not behind us but always still ahead of us, in our perpetually beckoning future. So, when the New York Times wanted a title for its Book Review section focusing on Barack Obama’s inauguration, it embraced Whitman’s title; “Democratic Vistas” once again seemed to sum up the feelings of the nation after it had elected its first African American president. The cover of the January 18, 2009, issue of the Book Review carried the inscription “Democratic Vistas: Inauguration 2009” over an illustration by Richard McGuire showing Obama, from the back, taking the oath of office as he looked out over Washington, D.C., onto a vista stretching across the continent, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the dim distance. McGuire’s illustration puts us in the position of looking over Obama’s shoulder to contemplate the same vast potentiality that the first African American president now gazes on. Like McGuire’s image, Whitman’s essay evokes the sense that national democratic fulfillment would occur in some unrealized future, speaking differently, meaning differently , to succeeding generations of Americans. Therefore, it somehow seemed appropriate, as the nation celebrated xvi t h e v i s ta s o f Democratic Vistas the election of a president whom Whitman never could have imagined, to speak once again Whitman’s memorable title. McGuire’s image is remarkably evocative, in part because Whitman’s essay, while very much concerned with the future of democracy in America, is in fact silent about the issue of race. Amid all its prophecies and condemnations of the United States, among the hopes and fears it expresses, the essay manages to evade the question of racial equality, even though Whitman wrote Democratic Vistas when the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution , guaranteeing civil rights to freed slaves and suffrage to male African Americans, went into effect. At the very time he was conceiving his essay, Whitman was living in Washington , D.C., where African Americans first exercised their right to vote and where the African American population was increasing dramatically in those years during and after the Civil War. We will examine the irony and the importance of Whitman ’s evasion of the subject of race a bit later, but let us begin by examining the ways in which Whitman’s essay is appropriate for those occasions on which we experience the expansion of America’s democratic dream. Whitman always wrote about democracy itself as something that did not yet exist, something that was only now in the process of evolving . Democracy always remained for Whitman an ideal goal, never a realized practice. He saw democracy as an inevitable evolutionary force in human history, and he did all he could to urge the evolution along, but he was under no illusion that a functioning democratic society would come easily or quickly. His efforts in Leaves of Grass had been to try to invent a poetry as open, as nondiscriminatory, and as absorptive as he imagined an ideal democracy would be. He tried, in other words, to construct a democratic voice that would serve as a model for his society—a difficult task since he was well aware that his nation and his world were still filled with t h e v i s ta s o f Democratic Vistas xvii antidemocratic sentiments, laws, customs, and institutions, and he knew that no writer, including himself, could rise above all the biases and blindnesses of his particular historical moment. But he was convinced that the United States in the nineteenth century was in the process of becoming the first culture in human history to experience the beginnings of a true democracy.1 In the dictionaryWhitman used,Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, democracy is defined as “a form of government, in which the supreme power is lodged in the hands of the people collectively, or in which the people exercise the powers of legislation,” and the definition ends...